The Viking Witch Mysteries: Books 4-6

Chapter 12

CHAPTER TWELVE

I turned to Thorbjorn. "Let's break this down," I said. "You really think Roarr is a suspect?"

"Everyone is a suspect," he said.

"You know, that's never actually true," I said. "There are always people you can rule out straight away. No opportunity, no motive, no means."

"Roarr hasn't been ruled out by any of those," Thorbjorn said. "In fact, if we're talking about who would be capable of throwing Nefja over the wall and down into that well, that really narrows our list of suspects by a lot. And Roarr would still be on that list."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Assuming it wasn't an accident, assuming that she was pushed into that well, it would take someone of some strength to accomplish it," he said. "You saw it took my brother, father, and I working together to get her back out of it."

I remembered the stone wall of the well. It was about four feet high. Taller than my waist, not so tall as my armpits. Nefja was a little taller than me, but not much.

"How could it have been an accident, then?" I asked.

"If she saw something and was reaching in," he said. "That's the only way. She didn't trip and fall in there, that's for sure. On the other hand, throwing her in there would've been a lot of work. Even if there was more than one person attacking her and they could work quickly, she would still have screamed more."

"It didn't sound like she screamed until she fell into the well," I said. "It was short."

"If Roarr had been with her, she would've been calm. She would've trusted him. Right up until the minute he pushed her in. Assuming it was him, of course," he said. Then he got up from the table to gather empty coffee cups and carry them to the sink.

"I can do that later," I said. "I want to talk to you now."

He sighed, looking out my kitchen window to the eastern sky. "I know you do, but I have to go take care of some things first."

"What kinds of things?" I asked.

"Thor things," he said in a tone clearly meant to encourage me to drop it.

"You can't be serious," I said. I was getting too close to knowing how Nefja felt with Roarr running out the back door to avoid her, and I didn't like it.

"Ingrid, you know I have responsibilities," he said. "I've been here long enough. My brothers are waiting for me, and it's getting late."

"So I'm on my own with this investigation now?" I asked.

He sighed then laughed, a strange combination. "Look," he said. "First of all, you being on your own has never stopped you solving things before, so don't look at me like that. Second of all, if you say Roarr should not be on our list of suspects, I respect that. I know your eyes are open to what he's done and who he is, and if you trust him, then I should trust him too."

"Should?" I repeated.

"I'm working on it," he said. "But right now I really do need to go."

"We haven't talked to Loke yet," I said.

"That conversation would likely go better without me there," he said. He turned towards the front door and I trailed along behind him.

"That's likely true," I admitted. "But this Báfurr fellow?" He stopped in the middle of buttoning up his heavy wool coat.

"I should be there for that conversation," he said. "But I don't know when I'll be free." He resumed buttoning his coat up to his neck, but I could see the gears in his mind were still turning. "If you need to speak to him before I'm back, take Loke with you. And Roarr. Yes, take both."

"It would be like that time I went to talk to Raggi in Aldís' mead hall, wouldn't it?" I guessed. "Don't these guys ever go home where I can talk to them one on one?"

"If you make it an official action of the council, my brothers and I could summon him there to be questioned," he said.

"Is that a good idea?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "Those types already don't like you because of where you grew up. But they don't particularly like the council either. Too friendly with outsiders for their tastes."

"I thought that was just my grandmother they didn't like," I said.

"We trade a lot with the outside world, and they don't approve," Thorbjorn said. "I mean, just what we've had this morning, coffee and cinnamon don't grow here."

"The council lets that stuff in?" I asked. He nodded. "And they, these isolationists as Roarr called them, don't like it?"

"It's all or nothing with them," he said. "They're a tough sort. Difficult to deal with. But the last time we had trolls roaming too close to town, they were indispensable. It's worth tolerating their extreme views."

"Is it?" I asked.

"You're new here," he reminded me.

"You're right," I said. "I have a lot to learn, a lot to see and absorb. But at the end of all that, I don't think I'm going to be any more okay with extremists telling me I don't belong."

"Of course not," he said with a little smile. "I'll see you as soon as I can."

"Yeah," I said. "Stay safe. If you're doing anything dangerous. Which you probably are."

His little smile grew into a wide grin, but then he was gone.

I was still standing in my front hall trying to figure out what to do next when a knock on the door startled me out of my thoughts. I opened the door to see Nilda and Kara.

"Thorbjorn left?" Kara asked, looking back over her shoulder.

"We saw him on the street," Nilda said with a conspiratorial gleam to her eye.

"Yeah, he had a thing. Do you guys want to come in?" I asked.

"We come bearing a message from Loke," Nilda said, extending a folded sheet of paper towards me. I stepped back out of the way to look at the note while the sisters got out of their coats and boots.

"He can't come up here? Really?" I said, scanning over the note's few lines a second time.

"He's not faking," Nilda said, her face grave. "He's been sneaking out at night, but during the day he's been at his sister's side constantly."

"Is she sick?" I asked, turning the note over as if there might be some writing on the other side that I had missed. There wasn't.

"She's on the mend for now," Kara said. "I think he might be exercising an abundance of caution, not leaving her alone."

"But sneaking out at night is okay?" I asked. "What if she takes a turn while he's gone?"

Kara shrugged. "Do you know how to get there?" she asked.

"More or less," I said. "He's pointed it out to me from here. It's down in the valley surrounded by trees."

"Just follow the south road past the cow pastures until you get to the huge ramshackle house that looks like a stiff wind would blow it over," Nilda said. "Kara and I will stay here and answer the door for you. Did Roarr get here already? We went to his place first, and we'd clearly woken him up."

"Yes, he was here," I said. "Thanks."

"I suppose it's too soon to know who did it?" Kara asked.

"Definitely too soon," I said. "And I'm not sure Loke will be much help. But he did help Sigvin get Nefja home last night. Perhaps he saw something that Sigvin didn't."

I zipped up my parka and snugged my wool hat low over my eyes before pulling on my mittens. Even with all that, the first breath of air that entered my lungs when I stepped outside burned. It was like I could feel the air sacs in my lungs shriveling up to escape that cold.

My boots crunched over snow and ice as I opened then closed my garden gate and turned to follow the road due south.

And saw Mjolner sitting quietly in the middle of the road as if waiting for me. As usual, the cold seemed to bother him not at all. That had to be weird for a cat. He turned and led the way down the road, and I followed, thrusting my mittened hands into my parka pockets.

Whatever my cat thought, it was really cold.

We reached the public gardens, but Mjolner kept on going, leaving the end of the road behind to follow one of the garden paths past the greenhouses. Then the cobblestoned path became a track through the snow. The roads in town were all carefully shoveled clear of snow, but this path was little more than a pair of vehicle wheel tracks in the snow, mostly obliterated by bootprints.

Mjolner walked lightly over the top of the snow, but I kept breaking through the crusty upper layer to the softer, wetter lower layers that clung to my boots. It was slow going.

But aside from the aching cold, it was actually a really lovely day for a walk. The sun was raising ever higher in a bright blue sky, reflecting off the snow on the ground and the frost on the trees like someone had covered the world in glitter.

I knew the fields around me were for dairy cows, but at first they seemed empty. It was only when I reached the bottom of that largest hill that I reached the first of the farmhouses. Then I saw the cows, clustered close to their barns in warmth-conserving huddles close to their feeding troughs.

I could hardly blame them. But they didn't look particularly miserable, just mildly curious, chewing their cud as they watched me trudge by.

Then the road crossed another road at a sharp angle. Now I was facing two roads that were both heading more or less directly south. If it weren't for Mjolner following the left-hand road as if the other didn't even exist to him, I don't know what I would've done. Wandered around for hours in the cold, maybe.

We crossed a few more hills, more low and rolling than the one that Villmark stood atop of, with its semi-panoramic view of Lake Superior. Here there was no sign of the lake, just snow-covered hill after snow-covered hill, dotted with the occasional cows.

Then Mjolner took another turn, up a path of sparse bootprints but no sign of wagon wheels on the snow. We were heading due west now, into a sort of hollow nestled between two taller ranges of hills. And before us was a house, a very Gothic-looking house by Minnesotan standards, let alone the more minimalist/modernist look favored by the people of Villmark. Tall trees flanked it on all sides, overshadowing it even now when they had no leaves to speak of.

It looked even more lonely and remote than it had from my great room window.

And yet on either side of that narrow path were hills covered with the fattest cows I had seen yet. But the fences all led away from this place, not towards it. Those cows belonged to someone else.

One of the cows made a moo sound, and I looked to see it standing right at the edge of the fence, watching me with big brown eyes. It had a little white patch, maybe paler hair or maybe a scar where hair couldn't grow, right above its eye.

And it was in the shape of Fe.

I blinked hard, but when I looked again, it was still there. Then I looked past it at a group of three cows a little distance away. They all had Fe marks on them as well. Every cow I looked at, the same thing.

Well, Haraldr had warned me about this. I just hadn't expected it to be so obvious. Cows were not the deeper meaning of Fe, after all, but the most direct one.

Mjolner was waiting for me at the front door, and I climbed the steps up onto the porch and raised a hand to knock.

But my hand hovered there, unmoving, as my eyes picked out a pattern in the wood of the door. Was that Fe upside-down?

I gave myself a little shake. After not seeing anything all day yesterday despite my many efforts, it was a little annoying I couldn't stop seeing things now. The house I was standing in front of was the very definition of something that had once been a sign of wealth but was now falling into worthlessness. I didn't need magic senses to perceive that.

I took a deep cleansing breath and then knocked on the door.