Nordic Nights (The Alix Thorssen Mysteries)

by Lise McClendon

  Across the street was a low, brick bank, then a small bridge abutment, a scattering of trees, and a snow-covered picnic table. I didn’t want to go to the right, that was the direction of the van and the bodyguards. So with a deep breath I steered us down the buried curb, out across slick tire tracks and knobby snowmobile treads, onto the opposite sidewalk. The marquee lights of a small theater on the next block blazed yellow across the snow. A theater would be open at night.

  “Stop, please,” Una sputtered as we reached the bank’s darkened drive-through lane. I took my arm off her but kept the other on her elbow, steadying. “I have to get my breath.”

  The streetlight above us made a pool of pink light. A green Chevy truck went by, rattling with chains. “Is it bad?” I asked, seeing her rub her ankle.

  “I think I twisted it again,” she said. “It’s swelling up so that—”

  The white van turned the corner behind us, still pulling the trailer. “Mom, run, come on!” I put my arm around her shoulder again, yanked her to her feet. She stumbled, almost falling on her face on the slick pavement as her heavy cast slammed against my ribs. “Shit, Mom, come on.”

  The low bridge abutment was on our right, a stone wall two feet above the sidewalk I looked into the trees for something to shield us. A boulder, a sign, anything. But the trees were bare of leaves, and young, too small to hide behind.

  “Stop!” The voice of the heavy bodyguard cut through my frantic thoughts. They were behind us, going slow, toying with us.

  “Go down the bank under the bridge,” I whispered. “Slide down. Hurry.” The bank beside the bridge was steep, leading to what was in the summer a small creek but now was just a low snowy place. Fat Lloyd wouldn’t go down there. “Hide under the bridge.” I pulled her off the sidewalk pushed her down on her fanny. “Go. Go!”

  The headlights swung across my legs as I let go of her, saw her slide into the shadows. I looked back. The van was easing up on the curb now, first one tire, then the next Lloyd was hanging his hairy arm out the passenger-side window, gun in his hand.

  I turned toward them and spread my hands. I even smiled. “Don’t shoot,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  The skinny bodyguard behind the wheel gave a harsh chuckle as he brought the van to a halt. Isa sat behind him, in the shadows, orchestrating this comic opera. I sucked in a breath, my senses keen. The van’s exhaust hung like stringy, acid fog in the cold air. Voices from the direction of the theater drifted down the street. I didn’t dare look to see if Mom had gotten down and out of sight. The skinny bodyguard stayed where he was, arms crossed. Was Bjarne in the van?

  Lloyd pulled in his arm to pull the latch on the door, and I ran into the street, through the beams of the headlights, across the front of the van. Away from Una, was my thought. A car came barreling down from the direction of the theater, music blaring. A wailing horn and obscenities cut the air as it grazed me, sending me skidding and struggling for my balance. I stumbled up the curb. The bridge wall on the other side of the street was covered with a foot of snow, shaded by a huge spruce. I stepped up on the stone abutment, gauging the distance below me. Fifteen feet? Twenty? So much snow, I thought.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Lloyd bellowed behind me. I looked back, saw him raising his gun again, and jumped.

  The sound was so loud I thought it was gunshots, hundreds of them converging on me from all directions. I expected a soft landing and struggling through deep snow. I was confused. The darkness murky and thick with a blue glow. Then the cold hit me.

  Water. Cold, cold water. I stretched my legs down, unbelieving. There was no bottom. My mind wrapped around this new reality. Water, a lake, ice. I felt the sharp edges of the ice against my arms for a second, then I went down, under it. My eyes refused to open against the freezing sheet plastering my face, my lips, my ears. My feet bicycled. The current was weak but flowing, especially at the bottom. I paddled against it, holding on to the icy break.

  Then my hands tore against the roof of ice. I opened my eyes; it was so dark, a ghostly midnight blue. Already I was losing feeling. My hands and feet were numb. I tore away more at the ice above me with dull paws of fingers. My down jacket was still full of air pockets, bubbles escaping. Pearly strings of silver, leaving me here. Once I got a good enough grip to come up and take a breath full of snow, then the ice broke again.

  My heavy clothes dragged me down, under. The jeans, wool sweater, pac boots, all imprisoning me. I couldn’t think, I was just reacting, clawing, my lungs on fire. Confusing … Water, so friendly usually. Water, clean and clear. I loved water, rain, rivers, mist…. My thoughts drifted. I stuck my hand up through the hole as far as I could, thinking I should feel snow, or air, but feeling nothing, as the hand was gone. The arm was going. My shoulder ached, then stopped aching.

  I was thinking about Houdini under the ice. Wasn’t this one of his tricks? I thought about his chains and straitjackets. My clothes felt like that, heavy, leaden with water, my pac boots like weights. I kicked them off. I managed another gulp of air. I was still alive, wasn’t I?

  With that, I sank under more, the current dragging my feet downstream. My hand was still above, holding me at the hole. Would someone see it? No, no, my mind said. No one will see it. You must save yourself. Your wits and weapons, the warrior’s tools. But how? No weapons. Wits in jeopardy. I was filled with despair. It filled my lungs, my head, my eyes, my mouth. Despair clung to my ribs, filled up my legs with sand. I closed my eyes and let the despair pull me down, down.

  This was a new realm, a place past life, a place where there was rest. Rollie! I would see my father Rollie here. Gone these twenty years, would he recognize me? Sadness suffused me. My father doesn’t know me. Then the sadness, the despair, all drifted away.

  In the darkness was cold, and release.

  Chapter 20

  The warmth seeketh who hath wandered long and is numb about the knees.

  I woke up coughing, my lungs strafed with firecrackers, and shivering. I blinked and opened my eyes. And coughed again. I lay on my side, under a mountain of blankets, in a bed with railings. Hospital bed. My body convulsed, shaking.

  I took a painful breath. Christ, what had happened? What was this on my face? Oxygen? I pulled off the plastic mask and tried to sit up. The blankets were too heavy.

  “So there’s our ice miracle,” a calm, pleasant voice said. A nurse appeared around the end of the bed, smiling. “How are you feeling?” She patiently put the oxygen mask back on me.

  “Like I died,” I said in the hollow mask.

  She was short and round, with dark hair and kind eyes. Her eyebrows went up. “No wonder. You were under the ice for several minutes longer than you should have been. Let me look at your eyes now.”

  I let the nurse examine me, exhausted by the effort of trying to sit up. The ice. It came flooding back and hit me smack in the forehead. I must have groaned, because she asked if I wanted anything. I said aspirin and something hot. She returned in a few minutes, put the bed up and the rolling tray over my lap.

  “Tea is perfect. Lots of hot liquids.” She opened the teapot and poured hot water into the white china cup. “Your mother is here. I’ll send her in.”

  I was wearing a hospital gown, but somebody had found long johns and put them on me too. In hospital green, lovely. My hair felt damp, stuck to my cheek. I pulled my arms out from under the blankets and wrapped my hands around the teacup. Una came in, still limping but at least walking.

  “So, you are made of hardy Norwegian stock,” she said, trying to smile.

  I peered at her over the tea’s steam. Her coat hung over her good arm, and a new ankle brace was fit over her foot. “Did you pull me out?”

  “Good heavens, no!” She settled on the edge of the chair. “This is a nice little clinic, isn’t it? Only three hospital beds, but still, it’s perfectly adequate and the people are very nice.” She wrung her hands a couple times. I popped in the aspirin and washed them down with tea.

/>   “Are you going to tell me what happened?” I asked.

  Una didn’t look at me but seemed to be waiting for my cue to continue. “I was hiding over there, under the bridge, like you said. I didn’t come up. I heard the gunshot, and I thought, oh!” She cleared her throat. “I didn’t want to think it. I just huddled down. I heard the sirens, the police. Finally when I saw the ambulance I came out, but they already had you inside. It was hard climbing up again.”

  “So who got me out?”

  “A man on a snowmobile. That’s all they told me. Some man who saw you jump in.”

  “A Good Samaritan,” I said. Una nodded. “Did they find Bjarne?”

  She shook her head. “You shouldn’t have jumped in there, Alix. How many times have I told you never to jump into something you don’t know what’s down there? You could have broken your neck, or drowned.”

  I felt the ire stiffen my back. Did she think this was necessary, customary parental behavior? I tried not to compose responses like, I could have gotten shot instead. I calmed myself with tea. Finally I said, “You know, I felt like I died under the water.” Una looked at me with horror. “I didn’t see angels or anything. No lighted tunnel. I didn’t want to die. But still, it felt kind of good. Like sleep.” My voice fell to a whisper. “I thought about Dad, and I was happy. When he was under the water in Flathead Lake …” My thought trailed off, undefined. I rubbed my cheeks with warm fingers.

  Una swallowed and stared at me. “No angels?” she said at last.

  I shook my head. “You didn’t get hurt?”

  “No, just the ankle. They said you would be okay, to watch your throat and lungs for a while. “She fiddled with her coat hem. “I gave a statement to the deputy.”

  “Did you tell them about Bjarne?”

  She nodded. “They got away. That woman. In the van.”

  I set down my tea. “What time is it?”

  “Um, midnight or just.” Una shook herself a little. “Maggie’s coming—I called her. She should be here soon. The doctor said you should stay longer, but I knew you’d want to get home. I told him you’d see your doctor tomorrow in Jackson.”

  “Good. I have to get back.” A niggling gnawed at the edges of my consciousness. I had to get back to the gallery, to Artie. What was I forgetting? The cold seemed to have made sludge of my brain.

  The nurse brought us both more hot water and tea bags. Una and I drank in silence. Near drowning, how strange it was. I looked at my hands around the china cup, swollen with the freeze and thaw, red, sensitive. The burn on my palm seemed so fresh, but healed and new. Had I ever looked at my hands, my fingernails still purple, my fingers? Had I ever really been alive before? The miracle of movement, of feeling. For a moment it flooded over me. The miracle of thought, of tears.

  I took a stinging breath and shut my eyes. I could see the black water, the force sucking me down. Was that the force that makes all that lives die? Was that God? Why would God want me to die? I wondered. No, the force was a natural balancing. My own life moving forward created a wake through time, a vacuum behind me. When I ceased moving forward, I was pulled into the wake. But what was it? Just a void, a black hole? Heaven? Hell? A pathway to another life, if I’ve been good? I sat back and sighed. People had been asking themselves these questions for thousands of years. Now I knew why. Death had a curiously seductive quality, a temptress to whose sins you know you will someday succumb.

  The nurse, kind soul, brought us both pieces of apple pie that someone in the clinic had made. This was the first food we’d had since noon, and when she saw how fast we ate, she brought us two more. Satiated on sugar and tea, Una began to talk.

  “Why did you have to say to Bjarne that I was a crippled old woman?” She pursed her lips. “You could have gone all day and all night without saying that.”

  “It was just talk, Mom,” I said, leaning back on my pillows. “Something to get him to feel sorry for us.”

  “Well, I don’t want people feeling sorry for me.”

  “So you didn’t want to get out of that trailer?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Una pouted. “I should call Hank. He’ll be so worried. I didn’t see him today, or yesterday. There he is in that horrible place. And his Viking Vindicator gone! He will be so upset.” She stared into her cup for a minute, muttering more homilies about poor Hank, as if reminding herself of his troubles relieved her own fears. “I wish you hadn’t exchanged me for that stone. Now we’ll never get it back, and Hank will never forgive me for losing it.”

  I could only stare at her, disbelieving.

  “You were always doing this when you were a girl. Doing first, doing whatever you thought the right thing was, and not thinking about the consequences,” Una rattled on. “Morality, justice, was always so black and white for you. There wasn’t another way to do it, just Alix’s way. And if somebody got crushed in the process, well, they stood in the way of justice, and that was their own fault.”

  Stunned, hurt, I squinted at her through the greenish fluorescent light. “Justice had nothing to do with this. Okay, maybe taking back the stone, that was justice. Hank would have said so,” I said, my throat hurting now. “I don’t know what the right thing is, but what I feel here, Mom.” I pounded my chest with my fist as Bjarne had. “My heart told me that I could never forgive myself if something happened to you. I couldn’t lose another parent, especially by something I screwed up. I couldn’t—wouldn’t let that happen.”

  Her face was still twisted with indignation. “You take too many chances, Alix. I’ve always told you that.”

  “Mom, look at me. I love you. I would take any chance necessary to make sure you were safe.”

  My mother looked at me, hard, sucked her teeth for a moment. Then her eyes began to fill, and she cried a little. In a shaky, quiet voice she told me she loved me. I guess I was right. For some people it takes the scare of losing somebody before they can say what they really feel. It was true even of me. That shouldn’t have surprised me.

  I was, after all, my mother’s child.

  Just west of Teton Pass, still in the land of russets— Idaho—I realized Maggie Barlow owned a cellular phone. She had it tucked under the seat, the coiled cord plugged into her dash lighter. The glow of the sun, even alpenglow, had long since disappeared from the western slopes of the Tetons. They were dark hulks in the night, shadows against the starless sky. It was past two, close to three am. I peered upward, remembering that I’d once seen the northern lights along here, far from city lights. A pulsating pink shower, streaks across the purple night—but not tonight. Clouds covered most of the heavens, obscuring everything but random vapor clinging to the peaks.

  Una had let me tell Maggie most of the story. It was too painful for her, I think, the helplessness of being kidnapped, the humiliation of it all. I knew how she felt; there wasn’t much to recommend being pulled like a human ice cube out of a frozen river. I also realized what her admission to me had cost her. It was no small thing to be rescued by your baby daughter, and then to have to admit gratitude. On top of that, not to be able to say you could reciprocate when the time came. I didn’t blame her for not saving me, I never would have expected it. The indignities of age were bad enough. If you were a Norwegian, used to doing it all, it was devastating.

  “Does your phone work over here?” I asked, after Maggie had dispensed most of her questions.

  “Oh, yeah. The transmitter is up on a mountain somewhere.” She reached down by her feet and handed up the cell phone. “Mountain climbers take them up the Grand all the time. Standard equipment these days.”

  “Do you mind if I call directory assistance?”

  Maggie waved me onward. I asked for Danny Bartholomew’s home number, hung up, then dialed again. He answered on the fourth ring.

  “Christ, Alix, where have you been? I called your apartment all day, and I’ve been over to the gallery twice. Artie didn’t have any idea where you were. What happened? You were supposed to call me when you go
t home with the stone. I can’t sit on this story forever, you know.”

  I held the phone away from my ear so Maggie could hear his harangue. “Well, Danno, it didn’t happen just the way we planned. I’ll tell you about the whole thing tomorrow. But now—”

  “You’ve got it, don’t you?” he demanded. “I had to deal with those goons at the museum. They thought you had it. Do you?”

  “Not exactly. No, that’s not accurate. I definitely do not have it, nor do I ever want to see it again.”

  “What happened to it?”

  I sighed. “I’ll tell you later, I promise. But I’ve got one more little favor to ask you.” He muttered and cursed; I knew he didn’t want to do me any more favors. “You will get the scoop, I promise you, Danny. Just one more thing.”

  He exhaled loudly. “Do I have a choice?”

  I smiled at Maggie. I felt so alive just then—my mind was back, my fingers were back. “Good. When does the paper hit the streets?”

  “Four in the afternoon. Why?”

  “I want you to print your article about Isa Mardoll. You can say whatever you want about the stone, that Leif Eriksson’s blood is scoured into it, for all I care. Check it out with some scientists. Tell it the way she told it even. But here’s the twist. I know this is stretching things. But I want you to say that Isa Mardoll checked back into the Wort Hotel—as she awaits the national media—or while she’s waiting for more scientific documentation. Unconfirmed reports, something like that.”

  I could hear him scribbling; reporters must really carry those little spiral notebooks in their pockets all die time, even in their pajamas. He stopped. “Is this true?”

  “You mean is she at the Wort? Let’s just say it’s possible.”

  “It’s possible she’s on the space shuttle docking up with the Russians too. Is this total bullshit or what?”