In Valhalla's Shadows Read online

  The yachters were people in their fifties with money, who seldom had kids with them and didn’t pay any attention to what went on down the beach. In any case, they could hardly complain about the beer bottles. There were a lot of mornings when a flotilla of wine bottles floated in the harbour.

  She was dead, dead, dead. There was nothing he could do to help. He didn’t want to be involved; he had come here to avoid situations like this. But then he thought of his daughter, Myrna, and how it could be her. But it couldn’t be her: this girl was small boned, fragile; Myrna took after him, solidly built. She was attractive but muscular from running, weightlifting, playing hockey, kick-boxing. A broken rib hadn’t stopped the kick-boxing. She was proud of her bruises. “Black and blue,” she bragged. “It’s the colour scheme for a goth.”

  The girl in the mud was someone’s daughter, but he’d had enough of this, too much of this, and he shut his eyes and thought if no one found her body until the sun rose, it would make no difference. He was trying to decide what to do when he realized that a person was standing in the shadows, watching him.

   Chapter 2

  A Fallen Angel

  “Who’s there?” Tom asked.

  “Me. Albert,” a high reedy voice replied. “What are you doing? Is everything all right?” He was standing at the end of a sailboat that was up on blocks. Tom wouldn’t have known anyone was there except that Albert had moved.

  “Oh, shit,” Tom said under his breath; it could have been anyone but Albert Scutter. He’d stopped and met him just to say hello, nice to meet you, but he’d seen him drinking a cup of coffee and it had been painful to watch. Albert was a nervous wreck of a man, stoop shouldered, thin as a slat, hands that never stopped trembling. He went out every morning around dawn for his constitutional, thrashing his way around the village three times. He wore an old, battered panama hat, light corduroy pants and a short-sleeved dress shirt without a tie. Although he’d been in Canada a good part of his life, he still had his London accent. He had a habit of taking a deep breath and pursing his lips when he disapproved of something.

  The sky was rapidly growing pink and yellow, while the ground was still thick with shadow. The darkness, heavier than light, seemed to be draining from the sky and pooling on the ground before sinking into the earth. Tom stood up and went to where Albert was peering from behind the bow of the boat.

  “There’s a girl lying on the ground,” Tom said.

  “One of those drunk kids passed out,” Albert said disapprovingly. “Nowadays—” he started.

  “She’s dead,” Tom said, cutting him off. He wasn’t interested in hearing a speech about how depraved the younger generation was.

  Albert stopped what he was going to say and took a sharp breath; his tremor increased so that his whole body shook. He opened and closed his mouth twice before he managed to say, “Who?”

  “I don’t know. A young girl. Long dark hair, jeans, a white shirt.”

  “What were you doing there?” He was gripping the bow of the boat with both hands.

  “We’ll need to call the police. Do you want to look and see if you recognize her?”

  “No.” Albert’s different parts shook at different speeds and in different directions. He looked like he might fly apart. “Those hippies. It’ll be one of them. Them and their commune. They’re a bad lot.” His voice had risen so high that it reminded Tom of the whistle of a steam kettle.

  Sometimes, in the early morning, day fishermen would turn up, but since there were none this morning, Tom thought the road must have turned into a quagmire. The last sixty miles was swamp and muskeg that had no bottom and, in spite of endless loads of crushed rock being dumped on it, constantly threatened to disintegrate. Heavy rain returned the road to the swamp. If a car went down to its axles, it would require a tractor to pull it out. Mud holes would mean that the uniforms might be slow arriving.

  A woman from the village appeared, pulling a wagon with a gasoline can and a box of nets on it. She was large, big boned, wearing overalls with a plaid shirt underneath, rubber boots, a cap that said, Hoger’s Nets. Her grey hair was tied back, caught at the nape of her neck. She had the wagon handle in her left hand and a cane in her right.

  “What’s up?” she asked Albert. ”You’re usually making your second circuit by now.”

  Albert was rattling against the side of the boat. Tom thought he was using it to keep from falling down.

  “There’s been an accident,” Tom said. From where they were standing, the dark outline of the body was just visible. “It’s a girl. She’s dead. We need some stakes and rope to keep people away.”

  She stared at him, unspeaking, looked toward the vague outline of the body, back at him, nodded once, then turned on her heel and disappeared behind one of the boats.

  The horizon was turning blood red, and although the sun was barely above the edge of the lake, it had the look of a polished copper sphere that threatened the kind of heat that would soon turn the leaves of the trees limp and dry up the water underfoot. People from the boats at the docks were starting to appear, stretch, shout to neighbours. The doors of the rental units beside the café were being opened and shut noisily as the renters went to use the bathrooms and showers. The smell of onions cooking at White’s drifted from the café.

  A couple of boaters had noticed something was amiss and wandered over. By now, the body was obvious, the arm outflung, the leg akimbo. The face, where it was clear of mud and hair, shining in the morning light. Tom explained the situation once again, and after gawking from where they stood, the boaters hurried back to the dock. It was obvious from the waving of their arms and their pointing that they were telling everyone who was awake that there was a body on the beach, and those people, in turn, were ducking into the cabins of boats and signalling the late risers to come onto the dock to hear the news.

  For the next little while it was going to be a matter of crowd control, Tom thought. He’d been good at crowd control. That was when he was still a cop, before his accident, before his career had come to a halt and his marriage fallen apart, before days that disappeared in yelling matches and recriminations, and before Sally finally said enough with his black moods. He’d rented an illegal basement suite in a house that had been divided into six apartments. It had a toilet that plugged up for no particular reason. It had a fridge that never kept the milk from going sour for more than three days. It made his depression worse. He had too many books for the suite. There was no proper closet, just a beat-up cabinet painted white and a broom handle hung from two wires for his clothes. There was a four-drawer dresser that didn’t match the cabinet. It was the ugliest dresser he had ever seen, white with raised curlicues painted gold. It was, he guessed, supposed to look French. He stored most of his belongings in a rental locker.

  The woman in the overalls came back with a bundle of slats and a tangle of yellow rope. She handed them to Tom and they started to jam the sticks into the clay five feet from the body, but their work drew a crowd that formed a ragged crescent. The clay made a sucking sound as Tom pulled his boots free.

  “Here,” Overalls said, grabbing Albert’s arm. “You take these. I’ll be right back.”

  Albert followed Tom, but he refused to look at the body, kept his head turned away, gazing off into the distance. Anyone watching him would have thought there was something of great importance happening where the spruce trees were reluctantly giving up their morning shadows and light was revealing everything that had been shrouded in darkness. People were coming up and looking and leaving, bending their heads together, whispering. Mothers were shooing kids back to the boats or making them keep to the path to the café. The sun was merciless. It allowed nothing to be hidden, the ruts, the water that now gleamed like dark glass, the one foot, naked on top of the rut in which the body half lay.

  There was hardly a sound. The spectators stood around, uncertain, like they were waiting for a miracle, for the body to rise up, declare it was all a joke and walk away laughi
ng. Death could be like that. Especially when there were no signs of violence, no gunshot wounds, no severed limbs, no blood, just a body lying on the ground, the only indication of death the awkwardness of the limbs. There was a camera flash, then another.

  The woman in the overalls came back with a blue tarp she’d pulled off a pile of boxes near the shed where the fishermen cleaned and iced their fish. Tom would have told her not to disturb the site, in case a crime has been committed, but he, too, was offended by the people snapping pictures, so he said nothing.

  She stood for a moment in the not yet closed gap in the rope, then leaned over to get a better look. “It looks like Ben’s kid,” she said, and the shock in her voice seemed to hollow out the words, make them crumble before they had gone any distance. She leaned closer to get a better look, then pulled back and spread the tarp over the body.

  Ben Finlayson, he thought, with a sudden twinge. Ben in his plaid shirt and wide red suspenders. He drove a beat-up Dodge box truck. He was fat, not sloppy fat but huge around the waist, with big shoulders and arms like hams. He was not a talker. He mostly stuck to facts, saying things like “This here’s the key to the front door. This one’s the key to the back door. You give me a grocery list for my run and I buy at Superstore.” A couple of times he’d stayed to talk about where Tom could get lumber cheap from a local mill, that sort of thing. He said his truck was clean. He swept it out and washed it after every trip.

  “It was an accident,” Albert said sharply, nearly shouting, to nobody in particular, his voice high, on the verge of breaking. Tom was waiting for Overalls to back up now that she’d covered the body. Albert had a fierce grip on the remaining slats. He had them pressed tightly to his narrow chest. “Some people’s kids get drunk. That’s all. They’re not brought up right. This is a good community.”

  “This isn’t a show,” the woman said to the spectators. “Go on. Go about your business.” Her voice was harsh, angry. She waved her arms at the crowd standing there. The line broke up and people walked away, muttering to each other and looking back over their shoulders.

  Tom finished setting up the sticks and rope. The blue tarp didn’t cover the body’s left foot, and lying there, naked, it seemed obscene. Tom pulled the tarp over the foot.

  He turned to Albert, who was still talking about how safe the town was. He lived by a schedule. After his constitutional, he milked and fed his five goats, had tea and a muffin with jam, worked in his garden until noon, had lunch, walked up to the store to see if any mail had come, bought a Mars bar summer and winter, walked back to his house, finished his chores, and then began carving.

  “You’re free to go,” the woman in overalls said to Albert, before Tom had a chance to say anything, dismissing him as a teacher might a pupil from detention. Albert’s Adam’s apple jerked up and down, his body vibrated faster. He shoved the remaining slats at her, turned and fled.

  Just then Horst and Karla White appeared on the porch of their emporium. “Store” didn’t describe it adequately because it was also the post office, a café, an ice cream shop, and it had the six one-room shacks the owners rented out to sports fishermen or tourists. The shacks didn’t have toilets, but attached to one end of the emporium were two rooms with multiple toilets and showers. Normally, if there was an incident of any kind, Karla was quick to push her way into it, making certain that her clients paying for space at the dock, or renting a cabin, or hiring a guide were taken care of. Now, she hung back, staying on the front porch, one arm resting on a wooden pillar. Her husband had come out pulling his oxygen tank in a bundle buggy. Horst was shorter than Karla, bald and bad-tempered, heavy-set. His head was moving from side to side like he was smelling the air. He took in the situation, the sticks and rope, the tarp, the people bunched together all looking at the same thing, and he jerked his oxygen tank down the steps and started toward where the blue tarp lay like a stain on the ground. He couldn’t manage more than a slow walk, stopping when the wheels stuck in the soft ground, jerking the buggy free. Karla called him back, and when he didn’t listen to her, she followed him. She was dressed like a Hollywood cowgirl. Tom had never seen her in anything but Western-style blouses and skirts and cowboy boots. She also kept getting stuck in the mud and had to stop, catch the top of a boot and pull on it to get it loose.

  Tom could hear Horst cursing as he once again jerked the buggy free. Karla caught up to him and grabbed his arm to stop him from coming any closer. They didn’t join the knot of people who had gathered to one side.

  “Ben’s kid,” Overalls half shouted to Karla. Horst couldn’t hear her and had to ask his wife what had been said, and she turned her head sharply and repeated the information. He raised himself to his full height to get a better look at what was under the tarp. He would have started forward again, but his wife tightened her grip on his arm.

  “What happened?” Karla demanded. She still had a firm grip on her husband’s arm.

  Overalls raised both arms halfway with her hands out and shrugged. “Ben’s overnight in the city,” she said.

  A few locals had gathered but stayed back a ways and separate from the summer visitors. Tom recognized some of them, not by name but from having seen them around the village, mostly in the store. Tom realized that they were looking at him. Even though no one said so, it was obvious that they expected him to do something.

  Overalls went over to the group of locals. They gathered around her, asking questions for which she had no answers except for the name of the girl hidden from the rising sun by the tarp. The sun, though it was barely above the horizon, was already driving away the last vestiges of cool air created by the storm of the previous night.

  From the time he’d moved into the Ford place in mid-May, word had gotten around that Tom was an ex-cop. God knows what rumours went with it. No one had been rude, but no one had gone out of their way to be friendly, either. Most bachelors moving in merited an apple pie or an invitation to supper. He hadn’t had either. He’d been posted to towns like that. Everyone had something they’d just as soon not have the local police know. Usually domestic stuff, a drinking problem, kids doing petty crimes, minor drug dealing, moose meat in the freezer out of season. And if a local got to be known as a friend of the cops, people stopped talking freely around them, too.

  He shifted off his game leg. The surgeons did what they could after he was cut out of his car, but now his left leg was slightly shorter than his right. It didn’t show much unless he got tired and then his foot dragged a bit, or if he had to stand in one place too long.

  Some of the waitresses had crowded onto the porch. Karla turned and shouted, “Go back inside. You’ve got work to do.” Their pale inquisitive faces had clustered just beyond the door. “Back, back,” she repeated, more harshly now. They hesitated, looking at each other, looking at Karla, looking at the blue tarp, then fled inside. “The Mounties will be here shortly,” Karla said to no one in particular, and her voice was high and sharp. “Accidents happen.”

  Normally, Karla was noisy, shouting out to people with exaggerated greetings. She had bangles on both arms and large earrings. She was always performing, always onstage, even if you were just buying a litre of milk, but now she stood in the morning light, her makeup harsh, her Western outfit out of place, her shoulders slumped. She stood in one place, but her body twisted back and forth as if she wanted to turn around and flee but couldn’t get her feet loose from the mud. Her cowboy boots, Tom thought, were going to be a mess. White and tan, intricately decorated, they weren’t made for wading in the mud.

  She let go of her husband’s arm, said something to him that Tom could not hear and walked away. Her husband jerked his bundle buggy loose and reluctantly followed her, his bald head shining and his fringe of white hair reflecting little points of light.

  “What’s that about?”

  “Bad for business. She takes bad for business things personally.”

  Studying the woman facing him, he thought she must be in her late seventies. H
er skin was heavily wrinkled, wind and sun burned.

  “What’re you staring at?” she demanded.

  He took two steps toward her and stuck out his hand. “Tom Parsons,” he said.

  She studied his hand for a moment before reaching out and shaking it. Her grip was firm and her hand rough. “Sarah O’Hara,” she replied.

  Her fingers were stained dark brown. They didn’t worry about smoking rules here. People smoked wherever they felt like it, and Tom thought that if a bylaws officer came out to investigate, he would end up being tossed off the dock.

  Her red wagon waited with its dull red gasoline can and box of nets. The black handle sat tilted back, pointing at nothing. She leaned on her cane, and Tom noticed it was made from diamond willow. From top to bottom there were the light and dark diamond patterns that gave it its name. She saw him looking at the cane and said, “Bad hip. I’m waiting for a replacement.” Her cane had sunk into the mud.

  “I’ve got a couple of nets to lift. After I get back and get my catch cleaned and iced, if you want a cup of tea, you’re welcome to drop by. Karla will have called the cops, but twenty people probably beat her to it.” She pointed to her house, which was on the other side of the harbour. “The red roof. That’s mine. Sort of exciting,” she added sarcastically, “being able to call and say somebody’s dead.”

  She was right. He remembered those calls, not the calls of the family or friends in pain but of strangers wanting to be part of the action, part of something they could tell their friends about over a drink.

  “An hour?” he asked.

  “Two. Lift the nets, bring in the fish, clean it, ice it, pack it, clean me up. Takes time.”