by Various Orca
“What are you doing here?” she hissed at me.
“As soon as he knew you were here, he made me leave. I have to go with you and Karl and see the sights. I’ve already seen all the sights. I’ve seen them to death.”
Gee, I really hated to be the one to break the news to her, but I said, “Karl would have showed up anyway. Your dad called your uncle and asked him to bring stuff for your grandfather. He had to go to work, so Karl’s pinch-hitting for him.” She frowned, and I had to explain what I meant. “Your dad probably would have got your uncle to drive you back. No offense, but he doesn’t seem like a guy with a high tolerance for people disobeying his orders.” And I should know. I lived with the Major.
The look she gave me said, If it was legal, I’d kill you. Or at least punch you good and hard someplace good and sensitive.
Karl got back behind the wheel.
“Okay,” he said jovially. “Who wants a hot dog?”
Guess who did. And who didn’t.
FOURTEEN
I’ll say one thing for Karl—he loved his grandfather’s country. After we hit the hot dog stand that Bill Clinton made famous, and had a pretty good hot dog, he took us to Hallgrims Church in the middle of Reykjavik, despite a lot of sighs of disgust and eye-rolling from Brynja. You can see the place from just about anywhere in the city. I’d been wondering what the heck it was. The place took forty years to build—and I’m not talking about medieval construction. It was started in 1945. And it’s weird-looking, kind of like a volcano that’s morphing into a spaceship. But it wasn’t so much the church that Karl was pumped about. It was the view from the steeple. From nearly 250 feet above the ground you could see the whole of Reykjavik, and the ocean and countryside beyond—while you froze to death from the wind that whistled through the open windows.
From there we went to Thingvellir, where the original settlers met every year for the oldest continuously running parliament in the world. I was expecting some big spectacular buildings, but there were none. The old-timers met in summer and the whole thing was held outdoors. We also went to Geysir, where the word geyser comes from. Geysir, which he pronounced GAY-seer, used to shoot boiling hot water 30 feet in the air regularly for hundred and hundreds of years. It doesn’t anymore. Talk about a letdown. But right near it there’s another geyser that spouts every five minutes. It’s actually pretty cool. As advertised, we also hit Gullfoss—Golden Waterfall. It’s no Niagara Falls, but it’s all right.
By the time we’d done all that, it was getting late. Karl drove Brynja and me back to the house. Einar’s car was in the driveway, and he came to the door to greet us and to ask Karl if he wanted to stay for dinner. Karl said thanks but, believe it or not, he had a date. I don’t know why that was supposed to be hard to believe—he was a nice enough guy and I guess he wasn’t all that bad-looking.
Einar called us into the kitchen and got Brynja to set the table. He’d made chicken and rice with a side of canned peas. It was okay. Actually, since all I’d had to eat all day was a hot dog, it was better than okay. I polished off two helpings.
Einar leaned back in his chair and got down to business.
“I know we were supposed to leave tomorrow,” he said. “But we won’t have the test results until Monday.”
Aw, man! I could see where this was going.
“It’s okay,” I said. “If you can just recommend someone else who can take me…”
“I was hoping you would wait so that I can do it. It would mean a lot to Sigurdur.”
“I know but…I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me. It’s been great. But I was kind of hoping to get this done sooner rather than later.” Not to mention I didn’t think I could handle four or five more days with Brynja. “I could even go by myself if you point me in the right direction.” I figured in a country as treeless as this, how hard could it be? No matter where you were, you could see for miles in any direction.
“It wouldn’t be safe for you to go alone. The roads are bad, there’s not much around and the weather is unpredictable. You need a guide and a proper vehicle. You also need to take precautions.”
Really? He hadn’t been out in the middle of absolutely nowhere with Worm. If I could survive that, I could survive anything.
“If I get another guide, it’ll be one less thing for you to worry about.”
“Let him go with someone else, Dad,” Brynja said. “We need to look after Afi.”
Einar nodded reluctantly. “I’ll make some calls tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”
I was so grateful that I insisted on cleaning up the kitchen. I did a great job too. It would have passed any white-glove test the Major threw at me. I had just finished when my cell phone rang. It was Geir.
“I found something,” he said, “but I don’t know if it’s what you were looking for.”
I glanced at Brynja, who had stationed herself at her father’s computer, and walked out of the room. The living room was empty, so I took the call there.
“There was a woman who was found frozen to death in the interior, near Askja.”
Askja. That was near where I was supposed to take the journal.
“When?” I asked. I heard paper rustling.
“She was found in 1944.”
1944? That was too late.
“But,” Geir said, “she had been missing for two years.”
“Since 1942. Does it say what happened?”
“No. Only that she was found. That was near where your grandfather’s plane crashed, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” It was also near where he had woken up and found Sigurdur taking care of him. It was where he had seen a red scarf that Sigurdur said he must have imagined.
“She may have been lost,” Geir said, “although I can’t imagine what she would have been doing out there in the first place. It seems more likely that she just decided to walk out into the storm…”
“What do you mean? Why would anyone do that?”
“I mean that she may have walked out with no intention of coming back.”
Oh.
“Did you find out anything else?” I asked.
“Her name—Kerstin Torsdottir. Age twenty-three. She was reported missing by a friend in Reykjavik, where she was living at the time. The friend is deceased—I checked. But here’s something. Before she moved to Reykjavik, she worked for a doctor near Borgarnes.”
Near Borgarnes? Maybe he was still alive. Or…?
“Do you have his name?”
“Well, this is where it gets funny.”
“Funny?”
“His name is Sigurdur.”
“Sigurdur?”
“Gudrun’s grandfather. I don’t remember Gudrun ever mentioning Kerstin, but then I can’t see why she would. It was all a long time before she was born.”
Kerstin used to work for Sigurdur. Kerstin was out in the blizzard after my grandfather’s plane crashed. Sigurdur denied any knowledge of her to my grandfather, but had had a strong reaction to the sketches in my grandfather’s journal. Sigurdur had the weight of a secret on his mind, something that he had been about to show me, something that he had been trying to point out to me…
“I don’t know if that helps you at all, Rennie.” Geir said. “But it’s all I could find.”
“It’s great, thanks,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
“It was nothing.” There was a pause. “But there is something you can do for me.”
“Name it.”
“When you asked me about Gudrun, it brought back a lot of memories. I went into storage and looked through her notebooks—the ones the police returned when they closed the case. I didn’t delve into it then. I guess I didn’t want to think about her ending her life like that. But I was wondering… you said you read French.”
“My father is from Quebec—he’s Francophone.”
“If I get the pages to you that are in French, can you tell me what they say?”
“Probably.”
We arranged that he would email scans of the pages to me. I promised to get back to him as soon as I could.
I dropped my phone back in my pocket, turned around—and got the start of a lifetime. Brynja was standing in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest, staring at me.
“What were you saying about my afi?” she asked.
“Nothing. Jeez, do you always eavesdrop on people?”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping. Just the opposite. I was trying not to eavesdrop.”
“By standing there listening to me?”
“I was going to my room. I saw you were on the phone and I didn’t want to disturb you, so I was waiting for you to finish.”
“And while you waited, you listened in?”
“I heard you say my grandfather’s name. Who were you talking to? What did they say about him?”
“Nothing. And anyway, it’s none of your business.”
“So you were talking about him?”
I did something then that surprised even me. Something I never in a million years thought I would do. I fixed her with the same steely look that I had seen in the Major’s eyes a million times and I said the same words I had heard the Major say a million times and in the exact same tone of voice.
I said, “I’m not discussing this with you. It doesn’t concern you.”
It worked on her the same as it always worked on me.
She glowered at me. She opened her mouth to argue but then said, “Fine. I’m out of here,” which is pretty much what I always said. The lines of communication had been broken. She yelled something to her father, who appeared almost instantly at the top of the stairs.
“When will you be back?” he said in English—I think for my benefit.
“Tomorrow evening. Johanna and I planned this ages ago, before you even knew he was coming.” She shot another killer look my way.
Einar came downstairs and said something to her in Icelandic. She kissed his cheek, grabbed a massive purse that was stuffed almost to bursting and marched out of the house. A moment later I heard a car engine. Headlights streamed through the living-room window for a few seconds before arcing away.
“She’s spending the night with some girlfriends,” Einar said to me. “You don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” I said. Talk about an understatement!
“I’ve had a long day. I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.
“Sure. Is it okay if I read down here or watch some TV or something?”
“No problem. There’s satellite.”
He disappeared up the stairs.
I planned to watch TV until I got sleepy enough to turn in. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what I planned to do. But Geir’s revelation kept turning over and over in my head. Why had Sigurdur seemed so uncomfortable when my grandfather asked him about the woman he had seen out in the interior? Why didn’t Sigurdur want me to show the journal to Brynja and her father? What had he wanted to show me (or my grandfather) desperately enough that he’d dragged his tired and sick body out of bed to do it? What had he been pointing at? What was out there?
I watched half a movie—don’t ask me what it was because I can’t remember. My eyes were staring at the screen, but they weren’t really looking at it. They were replaying the interior of that turf hut. There had to be something in there. It was the only thing he could have been pointing at.
I notched the volume down. There was no sound upstairs.
I waited another ten minutes. And another ten. Then another ten.
I left the TV on and tiptoed upstairs. The door to Einar’s bedroom was closed, and there was no light showing under the door. I crept down to my room and pulled my nearly empty duffel bag out from under the bed. I felt around inside until I found what I was looking for and then I crept back out into the hall, pausing at the top of the stairs to take another look at Einar’s door. It was still closed. There was still no light showing. I was pretty sure he was asleep.
But I waited another twenty minutes, just in case.
With the TV still on, I slipped on my jacket, tiptoed outside and closed the front door softly behind me. I didn’t think Einar would get up. But if he did, if he had to use the bathroom or something, he would hear the TV and assume I was still watching it. I was betting he wouldn’t check on me. He didn’t seem the type.
I stumbled down the front steps. Being out here was like being out in ranch country. When it was dark, it was dark. There was no ambient light—no streetlights, no electronic billboards, no office lights left on in big office towers. Nothing.
Still, I waited until I was well away from the house before I turned on the small but powerful flashlight that the Major had insisted I pack, “just in case.” I kept it pointed downward so I could see the way with an absolute minimum of light.
When I reached the turf hut, I held the flashlight between my teeth and I tugged on the door. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. Then I began to search. There had to be something in here. I went to the eating bowls first and opened them one by one, looking for…well, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.
I searched behind the farm implements. I ran my fingers carefully over the beams. All I got for my trouble was a splinter. I stood in the middle of the little shed and shone my light over every inch of it, turning bit by bit until I had examined the whole beam-and-turf ceiling and every nook and cranny of the rough rocky walls.
Nothing.
This was ridiculous. Maybe I hadn’t found anything because there was nothing to find. Maybe there was no secret either. The old man had called me David. He’d been delusional. Maybe whatever he wanted to show me was just that too—a delusion. I swung around to leave when my flashlight fell on something I hadn’t noticed before. It was on the back wall of the hut, which was made of stone. From the outside, the hut looked like a long hill. When I’d first come in, I’d been surprised by how small it was and thought that maybe whoever had built the shed had dug only so far back into the hill. But my flashlight showed that there were tiny spaces between the rocks that made up the back of the hut. I had to duck down to get a closer look. I shone the flashlight through one of the little gaps. I was thinking it was probably just stones piled up in front of earth to make a strong wall.
But it wasn’t.
I had no idea what was behind the rocks, but whatever it was, it’s wasn’t just dirt. I shone my light over the surface of all the rocks until I found a gap that was a little bigger than the others. I knelt down, put the head of the flashlight up close and pressed my face against the rock to try to see what was on the other side.
That was when I heard something behind me. A sort of swishing sound. It’s also when I remembered the first time I had opened the wooden door to get into the shed.
Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw a man’s boot. Einar.
I started to turn around. My mind clicked through possible explanations I could offer for what I was doing: I couldn’t sleep, I have a keen interest in Icelandic history, I always wanted to examine the inside of a turf shed…No way. The truth looked like it was going to be my best option. Then the beam of my flashlight bounced off something on the other side of the wall. What was that? I was torn between wanting to take a second look and wanting to straighten up and start talking, fast.
The decision was made for me.
The last thing I remembered was something big and hard coming right at me—and making contact, I guess, because after that, it was lights-out.
FIFTEEN
I vaguely remember being picked up. I remember loud noise, like an engine. A helicopter engine? It’s the only way I figure I could have woken up in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah, I definitely want to get even.
Also, I don’t want to die, not like this, not out in the middle of nowhere.
I stumble through the snow until I’m exhausted. I have to rest, but I’m afraid that if I do, that will be the end of me.
My knees buckle.
I peer around. My eye
s hurt, but I can’t tell if that’s because of the snow and the cold or if something happened to them when I was hit. I can’t see any place to take shelter. Everywhere I look, all I see is snow. Endless stretches of it. It’s like the North Pole out here, or, at least, what I imagine the North Pole looks like. The only things missing are polar bears and Inuit. Polar bears I can live without, but I’d be pretty glad to see an Inuit hunter right about now, someone who would know how to handle himself in a blizzard. He’d probably whip out a knife and start cutting snow blocks to make an igloo—assuming his grandfather had showed him how. Me? I don’t have a clue.
Not a clue.
But maybe there is something I can do.
I pull the sleeves of my sweatshirt down over my hands and start digging in the snow. I keep going until I’ve made a nice deep hole. I crawl into it. The wind whistles over my head, but at least it isn’t whistling all over me. I can’t say I’m exactly warm because I’m not. Not even close. But at least I’m out of the wind. I huddle in that position, my arms wrapped around my knees, my head and chest down over my arms, making myself into the smallest people-sicle I can. Somehow, even though I know it’s about the most dangerous thing I can do, I fall asleep.
I don’t know how long I sleep. All I know is that the wind has died down when I wake up. It’s still snowing, and my feet are numb. That scares me more than I’ve ever been scared in my life. What if they’re frozen solid? What if I end up with frostbite? What if they have to cut my feet off? I try to wriggle my toes, but I can’t tell if they’re moving.
I feel sick deep inside and the feeling grows and mutates, like an alien pathogen, a feeling of terror, despair, hopelessness, a feeling like I want to cry, and then I do. I feel the tears sting my cheeks, probably giving them frostbite too. Where am I? How did I end up here? Why didn’t I just keep my nose out of things? I’ve practically made a career out of that the past couple of years: telling people I don’t care, acting like I really and truly don’t care, not wanting to care because what’s the point if it can all vanish, just like that. Like my mom. Like this.
