Death & the Viking's Daughter

by Loretta Ross

“So what are you going to do?”

  Randy grinned. “I got this box and this helium balloon and I made this banner.” He pulled a long, white, tissue paper banner out of the box and held it up. He’d written on it with a bright blue marker: Death and Wren are engaged!

  “I thought I’d tie the banner to the balloon, so that when she opens the box the balloon comes out and the banner unfurls right in front of her face. And I filled the bottom of the box with lemon drops. I was just going to take the box to where she works and leave it on her desk with no note or card.”

  “Clever. But you think it’s too mean?”

  “Maybe? I don’t know. If she just gets mad, then it would be funny. But what if I make her cry? I mean, I do hate Madeline. But if I deliberately make someone cry, I’d have to hate myself too. And she works in an office, so I’d be humiliating her in public. Plus she’d have to go through her whole work day dealing with it. It would be too mean. I shouldn’t do it. I really want to do it, but I shouldn’t.”

  Edgar sat back, laced his fingers together over his stomach, and thought about it.

  “She’s going to find out eventually anyway,” he pointed out mildly.

  “Yeah. She is.”

  “And she might very well find out in public. If you don’t tell her, you don’t know when or how she’ll hear.”

  “Death will probably call and break it to her gently. That would be the kind thing to do. And Wren has too much class to go poke Madeline in the nose with her engagement ring.”

  “You think?”

  Randy sighed deeply. “Yeah. And that’s probably for the best. But it doesn’t feel fair to me, dang it! Madeline gloated over me when she suckered my brother into marrying her. Then she treated him bad. Then she celebrated when she thought I died. I want revenge, damn it.”

  “So maybe you could strike a happy medium,” Edgar suggested.

  “Like what?”

  “Well …” The older man’s voice was thoughtful. “How she reacts to the news isn’t really your responsibility. So if she cries or if she gets mad or even if she’s indifferent, that’s not because of you. So you can pass the news on without being mean. But the mean part would be to do it in public. If you want to tell her, and even if you want to gloat a little, that’s fine. But I would do it so she finds the box when she’s in private. Could you leave it on her car, or maybe on her doorstep?”

  “I could do that. You think that would be okay?”

  “I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

  Randy jumped up and leaned over the desk to offer Edgar his hand. “Mr. Morgan, I like the way you think.”

  Edgar shook Randy’s hand and returned an amused grin. “I think you’d better call me Pop,” he said. “All Wren’s friends have always called me Pop.”

  fourteen

  “Olivia Trenton is a seventeen-year-old high school junior earning money for college by working part-time for the cleaning firm that contracts with Eiler Labs. She was the one who left the envelopes with the instructions and cash in the lab techs’ lockers. They threw away the notes and envelopes, and there’s no security camera in the locker rooms, but she came forward when the police went there to ask about it.”

  Chase Warner kept his voice down. He, Frank Appelbaum, and Death were sitting in the back row of the museum’s auditorium, watching dress rehearsals for a series of Christmas-themed one-act plays from the late 1800s.

  “Where did she get the envelopes?”

  “A ‘well-dressed old guy,’ in her words, gave them to her and asked her to deliver them. He told her it was a small amount of money the two men had won on a sports pool. She couldn’t describe him beyond being well-dressed and old.”

  “That figures. And I’m going to assume police have checked the pizzeria where the painting was removed from the van and there are no security cameras that cover the parking lot?”

  “You’re psychic.”

  One of the performers launched into a musical number and Death waited out the song before he spoke again.

  “I’ve been talking to some of my sources,” he said, wondering how Doris would feel about being labeled a “source.” “Someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to acquire a painting that doesn’t have a lot of monetary value and couldn’t be openly sold even if it did. It’s most likely the person responsible wanted it for other reasons.” He looked at Appelbaum. “Is there anyone in your family who may have coveted the picture and, perhaps, resented the museum having it?”

  Appelbaum shrugged. “I’ve wondered that myself, to be honest. I can’t imagine who it would be. If my daughter wanted it, she knows that all she’d have to do is ask. Besides her and my wife, I have no close relatives. I mean, I have a huge extended family, but all of them are second cousins or more distant. I don’t even know any of them. They’re just names on a family tree that one of our cousins compiles and sends out every year.”

  “Your cousin does that?”

  “Second cousin twice removed or something like that. I don’t really understand all the terminology, to be honest. His name is Martin Aldrin and he lives in Minnesota. He’s a genealogist. Grandma Mimi—the subject of the Ring Portrait? She came here from Prussia with her two sisters in the 1890s. All three women married and Mimi’s sisters both had huge families. Martin has tracked all of their descendants, or at least as many as he can, and he maintains contact with an enormous number of them. He’s forever sending out updates on what this or that distant relative is doing.”

  “You say he sends them out,” Death said. “You mean that he sends them to everyone, or just that he sends them to you?”

  “Oh, no. Everyone. He has an email list and I think he does something on Facebook, though I’m not really on Facebook, in spite of my daughter’s best efforts to get me there.”

  “Mr. Appelbaum, is there any way I could get a copy of that family tree?”

  “Sure. I’ll send it to you as soon as I get home. You think one of my relatives stole my great-great-grandma?”

  “At the moment, that’s the only theory I have.”

  “How would you ever figure out which one?”

  “I don’t know. But three times in the past two years there have been other odd, not particularly valuable collectibles that were found to have been replaced with copies. I want to see if I can find anything the four items have in common.”

  “What were the other three?” Warner asked.

  “A collection of seventeenth-century coins from Prussia, a reconstructed thirteenth-century clay pot from a peat bog in Belgium, and a thing called a death crown or angel crown. It was basically a tangle of feathers, in a feather pillow, in the shape of a nest or a crown.”

  “Well,” Appelbaum said, “Mimi was from Prussia, like the coins, and Belgium wasn’t that far away. I have no idea about the death crown, though. I’ve never even heard of such a thing.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Wren Morgan said.

  “That can be dangerous,” Randy said. “What have you been thinking about?”

  “Ingrid Larsen and Bob and the bloody dress the kids found in the boathouse.”

  “You think they’re connected?”

  “I’m wondering if they might be.”

  With Death up in the city working on his forged painting case, Wren had conscripted Randy to join her on a metaphorical fishing trip.

  “So where are we going?”

  Wren was driving them in her truck. With the yacht club auction nearly ready and no other sales on the books until Saturday, the Keystones had given their employees three days off. Wren’s parents were visiting family in a neighboring town, but she’d begged off and recruited Randy to go play detective with her.

  She’d turned off the main highway and they were following a small county blacktop that wound across the landscape like a black snake. It rolled down out of a cut between two low
hills and struck out across

  a long, low bridge. They crossed above a wide, shallow valley with a stream running through it. Dead brown vegetation climbed both sides of the valley, but the floor was a wasteland of cracked mud dotted with stagnant pools of water and blackened tree trunks.

  “This is the upper end of the Thibeaux arm of the lake,” Wren said. “Normally it’s all water under here. We just really need rain right now.”

  “Okay, but …?”

  “Keep an eye out for J Highway. It should be on your side of the road.”

  “J?”

  “J. It’s the other end of the road that the yacht club is on. It used to go all the way through until it got cut off by the lake.”

  “You want to go see where they found Bob?”

  “Couldn’t hurt.”

  “No, couldn’t hurt,” Randy agreed. “And hey! The sheriff said they never found all of Bob. Maybe we can turn up a stray vertebra or something.”

  Wren glared at him. “I know you think you’re funny, but you’re not.”

  “I am funny. I’m also adorable.”

  The day was cold and overcast. They crossed a second bridge, this one over a deeper and more robust section of the lake, and a mist rolled up off the water. The sky was gray and the road was gray and the still surface of the lake mirrored the silver clouds. In town, people were rushing around to prepare for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but out here in the middle of nowhere it was peaceful and depressing.

  Randy spied a sign for J Highway. “Here it is, coming up. Slow down.”

  Wren did, and made the turn. A faded sign advertised a church. They passed it half a mile later, and when it was behind them the surface of the road deteriorated much the way the road in front of the Sandburg house did once it had passed the driveway.

  “There must not be anyone living out here,” Wren observed. “Nobody’s maintaining the road.”

  “Man, what is it with all these miles and miles of empty countryside?” Randy asked. He was a city boy. “How can there be nothing out here? And if there’s nothing here, why is there a road going to it?”

  “Well, obviously there was something here once,” Wren said. “I looked at this on a map last night. The lake comes up on both sides of us. This road followed a ridge when there were farms and little towns and things here, and now, with the water up, it’s on kind of a peninsula. Just the road and a couple hundred feet of woods on both sides. The houses that used to be along here were all bought up before the dam was built. This is all Corps of Engineers’ land now.” She slowed down.

  “How are you going to find where they found Bob, after all these years?”

  “I stopped by the courthouse this morning. They have aerial photos from every year for decades. There’s a photo on the sheriff department’s website with a mark where they found the body, so I compared that to photos since then and found some landmarks that haven’t changed. The first thing we’re looking for is an overgrown driveway on the left side of the road, just past the fallen remains of an old house.”

  “Right. That’d be the house Salvy mentioned when we went in to see Bob’s reconstructed head. They think that he might have been squatting there before he died.”

  “Well, he’s unlikely to have been squatting there after he died,” Wren joked.

  “No, since he died he’s been squatting at your house. Or what will be your house.”

  “Ha ha,” Wren said, but her attention was distracted. Rising above the road, on a slight embankment, was the remains of what must have once been someone’s home.

  It was white, or had been. Now it was mostly bare gray wood. The porch still stood, propped up on a foundation made of odd chunks of red sandstone mortared together with yellow cement. It had gingerbread trim and a waist-high railing, and half of a broken porch swing dangled from a single rusty chain. The steps leading up from the road sagged drunkenly. The house behind it had begun to collapse.

  To the left of the porch, an entire bay window had fallen into the yard, leaving a gaping wound in the wall. The roof on the right half of the building drooped nearly to the ground, and when Wren drove past the house and turned into its rutted, overgrown driveway, they could see that the entire back half of the building had collapsed into the basement.

  “That’s kind of depressing,” Wren said. “It kind of makes me sad.”

  “Don’t be sad,” Randy said. “It’s not like this is going to be the last house you see. Like it probably was for Bob.” He paused. “I’m not helping any right now, am I?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice, no.”

  They got out and met in front of the truck.

  “I trust you’re not planning to search the house?” Randy said.

  “Do you think we should?”

  “No!”

  Wren tipped her head to the side to regard him. “You seem awfully certain of that.”

  “I work search and rescue with the fire department,” Randy reminded her. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve had to rescue people who thought it was a good idea to go poking around an old building like that?”

  “Point taken. Anyway, they searched the house back in ’85. If there was anything to find, they’d have found it then.”

  “They searched everything in ’85.”

  “True.”

  “So what exactly are we doing out here?”

  “I just wanted to see for myself. I wanted to see where everything is and how it all relates. There was a dead body around here that got here some time before the autumn of ’85. And over at the yacht club, a mysterious girl in a Viking costume appeared in ’78. And a blood-soaked Viking costume …” She trailed off.

  “What?” Randy asked.

  “We don’t have any idea when the costume was hidden in the boathouse. We ought to be able to at least come up with brackets. Sam or Roy went out and unlocked the boathouse when we first started working on the yacht club … We should ask them if there was any sign of it being broken into.”

  “If we assume it wasn’t broken into, and the costume was hidden while the yacht club was in business, our window is from the early ’70s to the early ’80s,” Randy said.

  “Right. Close enough. Now, according to the aerial photos I looked at, the lake hadn’t completely covered the road yet in ’78. It had drowned it at the lowest points and I doubt you could drive across it, but you could probably cross it on foot if you didn’t mind getting wet.”

  “So what’s your theory? Or do you have a theory?”

  Wren grimaced. “ ‘Theory’ is an awfully strong word,” she hedged. “Come on. I want to look at something.”

  She led the way away from the house and off to their right, in the same direction they’d been going but at a forty-five degree angle away from the road. The weeds through here were shoulder-high and the field was dotted with sumac. That alone retained its foliage, though even its blazing red leaves seemed dulled by the dark afternoon. A hundred yards or so away from the house they came to a small ravine cutting across their path. At the bottom, a small stream trickled and gurgled by.

  “There’s a path here,” Randy said, surprised.

  “It’s a game trail, I think,” Wren said. “Deer and other animals tend to follow the same patterns between grazing lands and water sources and over time they beat down a trail in places where there’s not a lot of room to walk. They found Bob right here, at the bottom of this trail.”

  For a long moment the two paused side-by-side and gazed down into the hollow. Under the trees the hay-like weeds were less prevalent. Lower-profile vegetation had died away into tangled black webs around the trunks of old oaks and elms and maples. Here and there, a lone yellow stalk poked out of the deep leaf mould.

  “I don’t see any vertebrae,” Randy said after a minute.

  Wren elbowed him gently in the sternum and slipped down i
nto the gully, stepping lightly until she’d walked the length of a fallen body. Randy followed her. The creek was narrow here, no more than two or three feet across at its widest, and only a few inches deep, and they found a place where they could step across.

  “What now?” Randy said. “You don’t want to look for more dead guy bits?”

  “No, I don’t want to look for dead guy bits. I was thinking about what Bob was doing here. I don’t mean here in general, like in the woods, but here specifically. If he was hunting or fishing, they should have found something on or near the body to suggest it. Coyotes aren’t likely to carry off a gun or a fishing pole. But there wasn’t anything. So I thought maybe he was going somewhere.”

  “The yacht club?” Randy asked.

  “There wasn’t anything else out here.”

  “The yacht club wasn’t still here in ’85,” Randy pointed out. “Or rather, the building was, but it was closed and locked up. And the Vikings hadn’t bought their land yet.”

  “So if he was headed for the yacht club or coming from the yacht club, he must have died before it went out of business.”

  They climbed the opposite side of the gully, following the same game trail as it cut between a pair of mature elms. The path was steep, though short, and they had to use branches and small saplings to pull themselves up. The trees ended after just a few feet and they came out on the bank of the lake.

  On their right, the road curved in and disappeared under the water. It emerged half a mile away and to their left. They could see, through the mist and the trees, the weathered structures of the Viking village.

  “The yacht club and the village are on a cove, remember?” Wren said. “The club is through the trees, pretty much due north of here.”

  “We need to find out when exactly it closed,” Randy said. “And if we could get a list of members, maybe we could show them the picture of Bob. If he hung around the club, maybe some of them know him.”

  “Well, we’ll have a chance this weekend,” Wren told him. “Mr. Larsen said that Bender and his son are probably going to be at the village for the Vikings’ harvest celebration. We can go over and ask them about it then.”