Close to the Heel (18 page)

My toe digs deep into a little hole.

My other foot dangles uselessly.

Then it catches too.

Now, slowly, ease yourself up. That's it. Push. You can do it. Forget how tired you are. Forget how sore you are. Push.

I push.

My head comes up above the top of the chasm. I dig in with my hands and push again to get one foot over the edge. I flop onto the snow at the top and pull up my other leg. I crawl away from the edge of the abyss.

Only then do I look down.

I freeze.

There is nothing down there.

Nothing as far as I can see.

I scramble back from the edge on my hands and knees. Then I crawl, still on my hands and knees, around the edge of the abyss. Only then do I stand. My legs shake. My hands shake. Jeez! I pick my way down the remainder of the slope. It takes forever, but now I know the truth of the old saying: “Haste makes waste.” It almost made waste of me.

The sun is going down again by the time I'm off the snow—off, I think, the glacier.

I keep going. It isn't easy. There's no snow, but it's cold, especially as the sun sinks, and the terrain is uneven. I'm on volcanic rock now. A lot of it is covered with lichen, which makes it look pillowy soft, but I find out the first time I trip and thrust out a hand to steady myself that there's nothing soft about it. I cut my hand open—but I don't feel a thing. I'm numb, and that scares me more than anything else.

When it's too dark and I'm stumbling too much, I feel gingerly around for someplace to rest. I hunker down into a little ball again to preserve as much warmth as I can.

I wake to a sunnier, warmer day, haul myself to my feet and set off again. I keep an eye out overhead for an airplane or a helicopter that might be passing. I don't see one all day.

I don't see anything all day.

The sun sets again.

And I see a light in the distance.

A couple of lights.

They look like lights from the windows of a house.

I keep walking. I don't care how many times I fall or even that I feel something warm and sticky on my right knee. I keep going. Go toward the light, Rennie. Go toward the light.

SEVENTEEN

The house turns out to be directly across from a restaurant and right beside a couple of gas pumps in the absolute middle of nowhere. I'm not kidding. A man answers my hammering. He looks around for my car, probably wondering why he didn't hear it drive up. When he doesn't see one, he looks baffled. He says something I didn't understand.

“I don't speak Icelandic,” I say.

His eyes widen.

“You're American.”

Whatever. I feel like I'm going to collapse in a heap at his feet.

“I got lost,” I tell him. “I—”

“Come in.” He stands aside to let me pass.

His house is as neat as any I've seen in Iceland. It's cozy too. A woman comes out of a back room to see what's going on. There are a couple of young guys there too. They're taller than the man, but they look just like him.

I start to tell them what happened. A version of it, anyway—the “getting lost” part. They take me into the kitchen, sit me down and wrap me in blankets.

I ask for water and get it. The woman makes tea and I wrap my hands around the mug and enjoy every second of the heat. She also brings me a plate of lamb stew. I wolf it down and immediately feel sick. Too much too fast, I guess. I tell them I'm fine. The man doesn't believe me on the last point. He questions me about how long I've been gone, and I figure out it's been four days. I sit there for a while, wrapped in blankets in the warmth of the house, and I start to nod off. By then I've lost track of time. I'm dimly aware of the man saying something. He is talking to one of his sons. Then he tells me to come with him.

He takes me upstairs to a bathroom. One of his sons appears with a bundle of clean clothes. The man wants me to shower. He says before I get dressed, he wants to look at me. He wants to make sure I'm okay.

I shower. I wrap myself in a towel. I let the guy look at me. At my feet in particular. He says everything checks out. He sounds surprised when he says it.

“I must call someone.” The way he says it, it sounds like he can't decide who that someone should be.

“Um, where am I exactly?” I ask.

He tells me, but it means nothing to me.

“I'll show you,” he says. “After you get dressed.”

I put on his son's clothes—they fit pretty well—and go back downstairs. The man has a map spread out on the kitchen table. He points to where his house was.

I stare at the map. I'm at least a 160 kilometers from where I started. I think again about the noise I remember and decide it must have been a helicopter. Einar has a helicopter for his business. He flies it himself.

“How can I get to Reykholt?” I ask.

“Reykholt? You came from Reykholt?”

I nod. “Is there a bus or something?”

“I should call someone,” the man says again. “You have parents here? Relatives?”

“No one who would miss me.” For all I know, it's true. “I just need to get to Reykholt.”

“Oli will drive you in the morning.”

Oli is one of his sons.

I say I'd appreciate it.

The woman makes me some tea. Then she shows me where I can sleep. I burrow under the thick eiderdown on the bed and fall fast asleep.

It's late—nine thirty—by the time I get up. The woman is in the kitchen. She makes me a hearty breakfast with plenty of hot coffee. While I eat, I notice a computer in the next room.

“Can I use it?” I ask the man. “I'd like to email my dad back home.”

The man is so happy that I want to contact someone that he practically drags me to the computer. I log into my email account—and see that I have a message from Geir. He says he's located five of the six notebooks that Gudrun kept about her big investigative piece on Baldur and the Russians. He has no idea what happened to the sixth. It's possible it was lost. Either that or the police forgot to return it. He's also attached scans of pages that contain notations in French. I open the attachment.

I start to read through the twenty or so pages of the scan, but there's nothing helpful.

I glance at the man, who's watching me from the doorway to the kitchen.

I skim the last page.

Something catches my eye.

I read it more carefully.

“It is okay if I print one page?” I ask.

The man nods.

I print the page, read it again as I pull it from the printer, and then fold it and stuff it into my pocket. I log out of my email account and off the computer, making a note to thank Geir later.

The woman has washed and dried my clothes. They smell fresh and lemony. I go and change into them. When I get back to the kitchen, Oli is waiting for me. I thank the man and the woman and follow Oli to an
SUV
. We take off.

Oli has the radio on and he's humming along to a rock station. I'm thinking about that last page of Geir's email. Part of me doesn't want to believe what I read. If I'm interpreting it right, Brynja will be hurt—maybe badly.

When I see a sign that says we're 50 kilometers from Borgarnes, I tell Oli I need to make a phone call. He offers me his cell phone.

“I don't have the number,” I say. “I need a phone book.”

He pulls over at the next restaurant–gas station we come to. He goes inside. I see him speaking to a woman behind the counter who hands him something. He comes back to the car and hands it to me—a phone book. He gives me that and his cell phone and says he's going to get a coffee, do I want one? I tell him I'm fine, thanks. When he goes back inside, I look up the number for the Reykholt police. I punch it into the phone and when someone answers, I ask for the only person I can think of who will believe me and maybe help me. I ask for Karl.

“Karl here,” says a voice with a familiar Yankee accent.

“It's Rennie.”

“Rennie? Where are you, son?”

I tell him.

“How the devil did you get there?” he asks. “Tryggvi has a search party out around Askja looking for you. That's where Einar figured you went. He said you were impatient to get there and didn't want to wait for him.”

I bet he did.

“He tried to kill me,” I say.

“What? Who?” He couldn't have sounded more surprised if I'd just told him I'd just escaped from the clutches of a troll.

“Einar. He knows I was nowhere near Askja. And Karl?” I hesitate. “I think Tryggvi's in on it.”

“Look, Rennie, I don't know—”

“The last I remember, I was in a turf shed at Einar's. Then I woke up a hundred and sixty kilometers away. Einar must have dumped me there with his helicopter—”

“Now hold on. I've known Einar for a lifetime of summers. He's a good man. And Tryggvi—he's a pain in the butt, but he's a cop. Cops don't do stuff like that.”

Sure they do. But I don't want to get Karl's back up. I need him.

“If Einar's such a great guy, why did he try to kill me? Why did he dump me in the middle of nowhere to freeze to death?”

“I don't know that he did,” Karl says.

“I do. He knows where Baldur is too.” Unless I'm wrong about what I saw, Baldur didn't leave the country at all. Quite the opposite. He was up to his eyeballs—well, his eye sockets—in it. “Meet me and I'll show you.”

There's a long pause, then: “Where are you? I'll come and get you.”

“I'm on my way back to Reykholt. I can be there in fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most.”

“Okay. Okay. How are you traveling?”

“I hitched a ride.”

“You know where that gas station is, just before the cut-off to Einar's place?”

I do.

“About a kilometer before that, there's a lookout. Tourists stop there. Get your guy to drop you there. I'll meet you there.”

“Bring a pick and shovel,” I say.

I get out of the truck and go into the restaurant where I find Oli sipping coffee and flirting with the young woman behind the counter. I wave to him, and he reluctantly slides off his stool.

Oli drops me off at the side of the road and waves as he executes a U-turn and heads for home.

I cross the road to a sign that points to the lookout. I follow a twisting path down a slope that ends in a secluded patch of lichen-covered land with a magnificent view of a waterfall. The fall is spectacular—high, multi-leveled, all foam and crystal water against black rock under a bright blue cloud-studded sky. I can see why the place is a favorite for tourists, but there are none around. I pull out the page I printed and read it again. If this doesn't prove that Einar was involved, I don't know what will.

Karl shows up five minutes later.

“Here.” I thrust the paper at him.

He squints at it. “What language is this?”

“French.”

He hands the page back to me.

“My Icelandic is good. Spanish I can manage—street Spanish. But French?” He shakes his head. “Never had a call for it. What is that?”

“It's a page from Gudrun's notebook.”

He raises an eyebrow. “I'd be remiss in my duty if I didn't ask where you got that.”

“I got it from someone who worked with Gudrun at the paper. Apparently she wrote her notes in French when she didn't want anyone to see what she was up to. As far as I can tell, no one at the paper speaks French.” I point to a sentence halfway down the page. “She says here that she has to confront E—she means Einar—with something she found out but that she's afraid how he will react. So worried that she wonders if she should go straight to the police instead.”

Karl frowns. “What are you thinking, Rennie?”

“That Einar knew something. Why else would she use that word—
confront
?” That would explain why he hadn't wanted Gudrun digging into that story. “He was the only one besides Baldur who knew what she was working on, so either she told him or Baldur did. On another page, it mentions that she thinks Baldur had a partner here in Iceland, someone with inside information about police investigations. Sounds like a cop to me. Baldur and Tryggvi used to be friends—good friends. Gudrun must have found out that Tryggvi was in on it with Baldur. She may have suspected that Einar knew something about it and was keeping quiet. She wasn't sure what to do—talk to Einar or go straight to the cops.”