Nordic Nights (The Alix Thorssen Mysteries)

by Lise McClendon

  “Doesn’t this heap have any heat?” Maggie said, wrapping her blanket coat tight around her knees. She knew very well the Saab Sister didn’t have any heat, except when she felt like it, which wasn’t tonight. My pac boots were cozy, though; Maggie was wearing light hiking boots that offered little insulation.

  “Okay, here’s the story,” she began. “After the fire and taking you to the emergency room last night, I couldn’t sleep. There were still quite a few people roaming around downtown, so I decided to walk over to get a cup of coffee at that new place. You know the one.”

  “The one where all the ski instructors hang out?”

  Maggie laughed. “Yeah, but they were gone. I got a decaf latte, to go, and drank about half of it inside. Nobody interesting showed up, so I decided to walk home drinking the rest. I cut through the square to look at the ice sculptures, especially that naughty one.”

  “Wait, I took care of that, Maggie.” I pulled the Saab into a space in the parking lot between a Jeep and an RV. “I’m tired of hearing about Merle’s phallus, really.”

  “Well, you have to hear about it one more time,” Maggie said, slamming her door as she got out. “Because this is the funny part, and now I feel better because I’m telling it I walked up to that big cock and thought to myself, I wonder what it tastes like. So I took a big drink of that latte and stuck out my tongue and gave it a big ol’ lick.”

  I opened the main door to the hospital for Maggie and waved her through. “So? What did it taste like?”

  She chuckled. “My tongue stuck.”

  “To Merle’s phallus?”

  She was trying to hold down her laughter and nod. “There I was, in all my glory, with”—she leaned close to me and whispered—”my tongue stuck on the world’s largest dick!”

  I tried not to laugh as I asked the admitting clerk for Mom’s room number. As we walked down the hallway, I grabbed Maggie’s arm to keep her from falling over with laughter.

  “So what did you do?” I asked, reading numbers next to doors.

  “Only thing I could do. Poured the rest of my latte over my tongue. That did the trick. But there is an ugly brown stain on the side of that—what’s the nice word you use?”

  “Phallus.”

  “Yeah, that phallus has a latte stain.”

  The light was dimmed in Una’s room. I realized I didn’t have flowers or even a card. Guilt washed over me. The windowsills and tables were barren of gifts. No balloons, no green plants, no tacky ceramics. I turned quickly to Maggie as we stood in the doorway and whispered, “Would you go buy some flowers? I’ll pay. The gift shop may still be open.” I shooed her off and eased into the room. The television was on without the sound.

  “Mom?” My voice was just above a whisper but seemed way too loud. “Mom, it’s Alix.”

  Her right hand gripped the remote control. Her thumb twitched on it as her eyes fluttered open. It took her a minute to realize I was in the room. She smiled, switched off the television, and turned on the overhead lights, all with just her thumb.

  “Wow, you’ve mastered the gadgets already,” I said, sitting on the edge of the upholstered chair next to her bed. The room was hospital basic, soothing creams, greens, and beiges. Una punched another button and raised the head of her bed. She smiled proudly as it stopped.

  “You betcha.” Her voice was strong but sleepy. My father always said, You betcha. The sound of the old phrase caused a little flare-up under my sternum. I asked her about the pain, her ankle, her wrist. She assured me the doctors were taking good care of her, that I needn’t worry, that everything was fine.

  “I’m calling Erik. He’ll want to talk to you,” I said, standing to get the phone.

  “No, no, no,” she protested. “It’s late. We don’t need to worry him.”

  “He’ll be mad if I don’t call him about this,” I said. He would also be mad if I made him speak to Una when neither one of them was ready. I sat back down in the chair. Mom sighed. “What happened? Do you remember?”

  She closed her eyes. I thought she had fallen asleep, but she began talking, eyes shut. “I went to check on the boat. Things were really a mess, and I wanted to clean it up, make it look as best as it could for Hank. It was all I could do for him. I just kept thinking that.” She swallowed hard, blinked up at the ceiling once, then shut her eyes again.

  “It took a long time, three, four hours. I got hungry, so I walked down the street to that little restaurant that serves tacos. When I got back, I opened the garage doors. They’re heavy, you know, much heavier than new metal ones.” The old garage doors opened in the middle, swinging to either side, and were made of wood. “I pushed one open, then the other. Then I stood for a second to catch my breath. The garage was dark. Then there was a truck. A pickup with its lights on. It came at me, and all I had time to do was jump a little to one side.”

  I rolled my eyes, privately. “Did the police ask you about all this?”

  “Uh-huh, they just left.” She seemed to sink a little into the pillows and sheets, shrinking in fatigue.

  “I can get the rest from them. That is, if you’re tired?”

  She sighed, breathing lightly, and opened her eyes. “I’m fine, dear. How’s your hand?”

  “It’s okay. The doctor who saw you in the ER put a new bandage on it for me.”

  “That was nice, wasn’t it? Everyone is so nice here.” She gave a light smile. No complaints, no bother, no fuss.

  “Did you recognize the driver of the truck?”

  “I didn’t see him. The police wanted to know about the pickup truck too, and I told them it was blue or green, that’s all I remember.”

  “Why would somebody be in the garage? Was the boat damaged some more?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She clamped her lips together in a way I had seen before. I let the pause grow while I observed her now-alert eyes, darting to the corners of the room

  “Mom?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  Another sigh. “I’m just worried about the boat. I hope the police locked up the garage again. My purse is in there. And—”

  “And what?”

  “Some of Hank’s things.” She turned to me abruptly. “Would you go over and fetch our things? I know you’re busy, but if you wouldn’t mind?”

  “Of course, Mom. Your purse and what else?”

  “Hank had a box of things under the seat of the pickup. Nothing expensive, but it needs to be locked up. You’ll find it there, wrapped up and in a cardboard box.”

  Maggie knocked on the door and stepped inside with a vase full of red roses. Una was all smiles. Maggie kissed her cheek, signed her cast, and set up the roses where she could see them right under the TV set. After a few minutes of cheerful banter that both buoyed and fatigued Una, from the look on her face, Maggie and I slipped out. Call her, Mom asked, when we found her purse. As we left, Una dimmed the lights and flicked the television back on to Homicide.

  “She seems okay, don’t you think?” Maggie said, striding more easily down the carpeted hallway in her light boots than I was in heavy ones. Her blanket coat flapped around her ankles.

  “She sure enjoyed seeing you,” I said.

  Maggie smiled, her spirits recovered, it seemed, from the degradation of a dateless Saturday night. Nothing like a Good Samaritan whirl to give you a shine. We stepped into the freezing night, ducking our ears into collars. In the car I said, “Want to check out the scene of the crime? She wants me to pick up some stuff at the garage.”

  “No time like the present.” Maggie checked her watch. “We could still go out to the Stagecoach and catch that band.”

  I debated. My fatigue had blurred into a low-grade overall ache, the kind that enjoys being dulled by beer and smoky pool halls. Yet I knew I should keep my mind clear for the Hex, the Family Problem I swung the Saab around the corner near the town square, up toward Kelly Street and the garage. The still, white y
ards with rusting wire fences and piles of firewood heaped in front lawns yawned and settled down both sides of the street. Maggie sighed. “Oh, come on, quit being so—so—”

  “Norwegian?”

  “So serious, that’s what I meant. You’re not going to save the world this one fine night, Miss Joan of Arc. And it is one fine, fine night.”

  “Fine and frozen solid. And we’re going to be if we don’t get inside soon.”

  “I bet it’s plenty warm at the Stagecoach.” I hazarded a look at her eager face with the flashing black eyes and cupid lips. “It won’t take long at the garage, I guess.”

  “Yee-haaaaw!” Maggie hollered, slapping her thigh silently with a mittened hand.

  The garage I had found for Hank to store and work on his boat sat far back from the street past a tiny, vacant cottage that was rumored to house a family of raccoons. The cottage and garage were owned by a lawyer friend of mine who was sitting on the property until he had enough money to tear down the mess and start over. In the meantime the garage gave him a little income. It was huge, probably built in the forties for grain trucks, and looked more like a barn with its faded tomato siding and peeling white trim The doors were fifteen feet high and eight feet wide each; no wonder Una had such a time opening them. As she had suspected, the garage’s padlock dangled, unengaged. Una hadn’t locked up before trotting down the street for a taco, so the cops hadn’t bothered either. Maybe there hadn’t been any cops on the scene at all. That would be typical for Charlie Frye’s team.

  I slipped the padlock in my pocket Maggie and I each took a door; they groaned open. We stood in the dark doorway, blinking.

  “Where’s the light?” Maggie asked. I tried to remember, patting down the side walls for a switch. Then it came to me that you had to walk all the way to the back of the building, to a workbench. I stumbled forward, arms out, straining to spot masts and prows and oars protruding from the blackness. I found the side of the boat and patted it blindly toward the other end. A minute later I found the switch. Fluorescents, a bank of three hanging from the high roof, buzzed and flickered.

  “Oh, jeez, this is depressing,” Maggie said, surveying the damage. The boat was singed, blackened all across the gunwales and the top. Not a single oar remained intact; the stubs that were left were half burned. The gilded prow had blistered and blackened. The mast was still upright; Artie had taken a chance that it would fit through the garage door.

  The boom with charred bits of silk sat on the dirt floor of the garage next to the trailer. Ready for the junk pile. I bent down and felt the burned boom. It was completely black, with long striations where the fire had penetrated beneath the surface. Structurally unsound, I guessed. Too bad; it was an exceptionally straight and sturdy piece of pine, lodgepole maybe. Not what the Vikings would have used. Something stronger, harder, like ash or maple or even oak, to withstand the rigors of the high seas.

  I stood up and sighed. “Let’s get out of here. Una said her purse was around here somewhere. Can you look for it? It’s brown vinyl, lots of pouches.”

  Maggie spun around, checking the workbench, the boat, as I opened the door of the pickup. Under the seat—Hank’s things. Tools, I figured. Tools Una couldn’t remember the name of, so she called them “things.” In a cardboard box.

  The bench seat of the old Ford pickup had been a pale green once. Strips of vinyl curled up around the dented seating areas, left and right. More left, on the driver’s side, naturally. Hank had owned this truck since it was new, Una told me once. And it hadn’t been new for some time.

  The mats looked freshly swept I stuck my hand under the driver’s side of the seat, felt only springs. Slamming the door, I stepped around the other side, repeated the hand sweep. Nothing. I stuck my head inside, down where the mud smell was strong, and looked under the seat. On the passenger’s side there were candy wrappers, pennies, a mitten, a french fry. On the driver’s side—nothing. Just a clean place where something like a cardboard box had once sat.

  I closed the door. Curious. I scanned the pickup’s bed, hauled myself up on the bumper of the truck to look inside the boat.

  “I found it. Appears to be all here. There’s thirty-two dollars in her wallet,” Maggie said below me.

  “Good.” I jumped down. “I can’t find the box she wanted. She said it was under the seat, but it’s not.”

  We both looked every place in the truck and garage we could find for the next five minutes. The garage was mostly empty. A few cupboards below the workbench constituted storage. A mousetrap, a rusty coffee can, and a stiff paintbrush rested together there peacefully, gathering dust. The glove compartment of the pickup held insurance cards, scraper, and registration.

  “Do you think we should look in the hull of the boat? Would Hank have stashed it in there?” I wondered aloud.

  “Yuck. That boat is filthy now with all that charred stuff. I am not getting up there and mucking around.” Maggie looked at me hard. “You’re not, are you?”

  “No. Not tonight. Not for a bunch of tools that probably aren’t worth much anyway.” We hit the lights, jammed the padlock back on the doors, and took off on snow-packed streets in the dead of night for beer, secondhand smoke, and loud music.

  Once, when i first moved to Jackson, I made the typical flatlander’s mistake (although technically I am from Montana and not a true flatlander) and agreed to ski down Teton Pass. The precipitous drop of the mountainside from the pass to the valley floor, some twenty-five hundred feet, draws the adventurous and the foolhardy in spades. The top of the mountain pass accesses numerous routes to the east and west, back to Wilson on the east, or to Idaho on the west, either way high mountain powder, waist-deep and untracked if you’re early and lucky. You can go up, around, or down: of course, eventually you have to go down. My small group included some experienced backcountry skiers, of which I was not one. I knew how to cross-country ski but had never delighted in the pleasure of going fifty miles an hour straight down the mountain on a couple of wobbly boards that aimed for every crevasse and snow bank and tree on the whole damn hillside.

  All of this would be irrelevant if I hadn’t made a big mistake. Another big mistake, besides actually agreeing to this exercise in humiliation. That was, I wore jeans. No long underwear, no plastic or Gore-Tex or even rip-stop nylon. Just jeans and a pullover anorak and a turtleneck. Maybe long socks. By the time I reached the Stagecoach Bar in Wilson, my teeth were chattering and I was dripping, sloppy, a ridiculously sopping excuse for an outdoorswoman.

  Thus it was that every time I walked into the Stagecoach Bar, I felt that same clammy mortification I felt that Sunday afternoon long ago. Even without a soggy rear end and a trail of melted snow, even without a towel wrapped around my waist courtesy of the bartender (he also gave me a plastic bag for my jeans). Some moments are indelible.

  Just like that day, all eyes of the male persuasion turned toward me and Maggie as we emerged from the clean air into the blue haze of the Stagecoach. We maneuvered around the pool tables, blinked into the blue gloom for a table, and ended up joining a lonely cowboy at a four-top. The band either hadn’t started yet or was taking a break. Two electric guitars and a saxophone were propped on stands along with a drum set on the low, black-painted plywood box they called a stage.

  We ordered beers. Maggie asked the cowboy about the band. He shrugged, noncommittal, looked away. A gleam sparkled in Maggie’s eye; she liked nothing if not a challenge. As she rearranged her chair, threw off her coat to showcase her goods, and dabbed her puckered lips daintily, I excused myself to call Una.

  The pay phone was by the toilets. I never understood this. Was relieving yourself somehow related to the telephone?

  “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  Una purred a little. I had wakened her.

  “I’m sorry, I just wanted to tell you we found your purse. The money’s still in it. Seems okay.”

  “That’s good, honey.” Her voice was watery, muffled.

  “No si
gn of that box, though.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The box under the seat—it wasn’t there.”

  “Under the pickup seat, the driver’s side? You looked?”

  “Several times. Sorry. I’ll go back and look again tomorrow if you want.” She sounded awake now, even anxious. “Was it something valuable?”

  “Oh, Alix,” she whispered. “Hank will be so angry. Was it gone, really?”

  “Mom? What was in the box?”

  A commotion began across the bar, next to the pool tables. The bartender straightened up, pushed back his long hair like he was going on a date. The Stagecoach’s owner came rushing from the back room. A charge of electricity went through the languid beer slackers.

  “Mom? Are you there?”

  “Yes, I’m here.” She sighed long and hard. “I need to talk to you about that box. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to, that Hank would forget about it, send it away somewhere. But now…”

  “So talk to me.” The noise level rose with hearty laughter and a chorus of whispers.

  “Not now,” she said finally. “I’m so tired, and they’ve given me some pain medication. My head feels like a balloon ready to fly away. I can’t think about this right now.”

  We agreed I would come by first thing in the morning, and we’d talk then. What could possibly be in the box? I wondered, my head down, plowing out through the bar again. Apparently not tools. Hank hadn’t lied to me and really stolen that set of runes from Isa Mardoll, had he? Something else? A gun? People do keep guns under the seats of their pickups, either that or in the gun rack. But Hank? Even if he didn’t have a permit or used it in a— Ish, that could be sticky. If he used it in the murder. But, wait, Glasius had been stabbed with a—

  Oooof.

  “Excuse me.” Running into the man had interrupted my thoughts. There was a crowd of people through the pool tables, stopping play completely. Three or four guys held cues in their hands, annoyed.

  “No problem. Are you all right?” the man said, turning toward me. He smiled, a handsome guy with a lot of wrinkles, very tan. Black leather jacket, nice. His voice sounded familiar. I gave him a polite smile, edged around some New York types with pale skin and red lipstick and pointy shoes. Then around a very short man with a tiny ponytail hanging over his turtleneck. When I got to my seat, Maggie was bright red herself.