Heritage of Darkness (34 page)

Then the car accelerated on toward town. Roelke watched the

taillights disappear with stunned disbelief and rising fury.

But there was no time for that now. He was dangling in the

snowy dark above the Upper Iowa River, hugging an iron post

which dug painfully into his arm. His muscles were already start-

ing to twitch. He had to get back on the bridge.

Roelke tried bringing one leg up and over, but he needed more

momentum to make contact. OK, Plan B. He allowed himself one

deep inhale and exhale before he deliberately began to swing. Back and forth, back and forth, each movement shooting arrows of pain

through his arms. Finally he flung himself sideways and up, quiv-

ering with effort, right leg straining to reach over solid iron.

He didn’t make it. His legs dropped again with a wrench that

shot a groan through gritted teeth. He was still dangling.

Damn, he thought. This is bad. He was aware of the trembling

pain in his arms; the ache in his left hand straining to stay locked on the elbow through leather glove and slick nylon sleeve.

He looked down but saw only whirling of snow. How far was

the drop? Twenty, maybe twenty-five feet? How deep was the

water? How thick was the ice? He tried to remember what he’d

seen in daylight. His brain felt like slush.

Plan C is to hang on, he told himself. Someone will come. Any

minute.

God, his arms ached. Shouldn’t
somebody
be driving home

right about now? Why wasn’t anyone coming?

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He tried to prepare for Plan D, a drop to the river. It was actu-

ally a pretty piss-poor plan. The fall could kill him outright, and if he broke through the ice, the river might instantly sweep him

under. He tried to think of some strategy to minimize the impact.

Cannonball, he decided. Going in butt-first might keep bones

from snapping, might disperse water and ice most efficiently.

Roelke thought about Chloe. Her Christmas gift was in his

pocket. If he froze to death or drowned, and the cops went through his things, would she understand that he’d made it for her?
Why
he’d made it for her?

No, no,
no
, he ordered himself. Don’t think about that. Just hang on. And he did, for an eternity that might have lasted

moments or hours.

Then his right arm spasmed. His left hand slipped, tried to re-

grab the right elbow, skidded down the snow-slick sleeve instead.

Both arms gave way.

I’m sorry, Chloe, he thought, and felt himself plummet.



Chloe reported the mean
julebukker
to the nice young officer as calmly as possible. And since the artifact bowl she’d borrowed for Mom was on the third floor of a now-deserted building that had

been hit by an arsonist, she succumbed to the willies and asked

him to accompany her inside. His earnest assurances that she was

not being silly convinced her that he did think just that. She let him walk her inside the Education Center anyway, and then all the

way to the collections storage building around the corner, before

she thanked him effusively and sent him on his way.

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She locked herself inside and turned on every light in the place.

Then she carefully returned the bowl to its home, and removed the

note she’d left explaining its absence.

Well, she thought, that task took all of six minutes. Maybe she

should have asked the officer to wait for her. She still had time to kill before meeting Roelke. She had no wish to go back to Sigrid’s house and risk running into Violet. She
really
had no wish to go back to the revelers celebrating the season pagan style in the Open Air Division.

But there was something here that still bugged her. She

retrieved the painted calendar stick from its shelf, brought it back to the worktable, and sat staring at it. “There is nothing to see,” she mumbled, but the piece exuded
something
unpleasant, bad ju-ju left from either the carver or someone else who’d once owned the

stick. Some long-gone farmer?

Well … maybe not so long-gone. Although the black paint was

scuffed, it didn’t show signs of age. Which made the fact that the stick had no accession number even harder to understand. She’d

glimpsed enough of Vesterheim’s artifacts to know that the

museum kept scrupulous track of its treasures. A new item that

hadn’t yet been cataloged would have been kept in a separate loca-

tion.

So … this odd artifact must not be an accessioned piece.

“I don’t know why Vesterheim would even want to accession a

piece sloppily coated in black paint,” she muttered. There might be delicate carving underneath, but it was impossible to tell. The calendar stick reminded her of the stunning cupboard she’d shown

Roelke in the Norwegian House—the one with religious paintings

once covered with black paint that hid the creator’s Christian-

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themed artistry until some savvy curator-type had discovered the

secret.

Chloe had grown very weary of all things evil, spooky, and

dark. Without giving herself time to think she got up, found a

clean cloth, and filled a plastic basin with warm water. Then she

sat back down, wet the cloth, and began to rub the stick.

The paint came off more easily than she’d expected. She

worked cautiously at first, on the off-chance some delicate masterwork might be hiding beneath the top coat, but there was no sign

of other pigment. Soon most of the paint had been removed from

both sides. She put the stick on a towel and studied it again.

“What on earth
is
this?” she demanded. The carved symbols

didn’t align with her understanding of seasonal events as usually

depicted. She assumed the traditional carved mitten indicated the

Winter side of the stick. She found a sled and a leafless tree, which seemed appropriate. A small bonfire had been etched beside it,

reminding her uncomfortably of her arson misadventure and the

scorched
budstikker
, but this fire probably represented the winter solstice … except she found another one nearby, which blew that

theory. One unfamiliar symbol appeared to be a ladder. Fruit pick-

ing time? The Winter side included a few stick figures to represent saints, each noted with a single letter and a cross.

She turned the
primstav
over to the Summer side. No bonfire here. Few symbols at all, actually, and only two stick figures with letter and cross. Shouldn’t there be more saints’ days than that?

Chloe didn’t know enough about such holy days to connect mar-

tyrs with particular dates and initials, but she’d thought there were more.

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There was a dragon head carved at one end of the stick. Some

might consider that an odd choice for a piece adorned with reli-

gious symbols, but Chloe wasn’t surprised at the juxtaposition of

Christianity and paganism. As Edwina had said, their ancestors

hadn’t been willing to leave centuries of superstition and tradition behind just on a minister’s say-so. “Hedging their bets,” Chloe

murmured.

She sucked in her lower lip. The phrase had popped out unbid-

den, but it reminded her of something her mother had said earlier

that day.
You were hedging your bets, Chloe
.
I think it was a lot easier
to
not
ask for help. Then you could declare yourself a rosemaling
disaster, with complete permission to never try again.

“Yeah, yeah.” Chloe rubbed her forehead. Something about

that phrase still poked at her. Where else had she heard it recently?

She closed her eyes, trying to remember. Hadn’t Mom also used

the phrase last Sunday? Yes, in that awful conversation about Nor-

wegian romance she’d had in the car with Roelke.
My husband

used to tease that he’d hedged his bets by carving several at once, but
I know the mangle he made to propose to me was his one and only
…

A new idea flashed into Chloe’s brain, so horrific that it took

her breath away. She flipped the calendar stick over again and

squinted at a couple of the symbols she hadn’t been able to iden-

tify.

Then she stumbled to her feet so fast that her stool fell over.

“
Shit
,” she breathed, backing away from the stick as if some devil’s hand might snatch it and beat her senseless.



292

Roelke knew an instant of freefall, wind racing past his cheeks,

arms circling. He remembered his plan just in time to bring up his knees, pull in his arms, form himself into the human cannonball

he’d perfected long-ago during lazy summer days on Wisconsin

lakes.

His feet and butt hit first. The snow-covered ice gave way with

a sharp crack. He plunged on through.

The shock of aching cold almost paralyzed him but the river,

thank God, was only waist deep here. He floundered toward shore,

breaking ice as he went. The current pulled at legs gone numb.

The ice broke sulkily, demanding that he use his weight to fracture the surface. It was painfully slow going.

Stay on your feet! he ordered himself. He stumbled on toward

shore, broke more ice, went down and gulped frigid water. He

came up choking, shivering, and disoriented in the whirling snow.

His bone marrow had frozen. His brain had frozen. The wind

shrieked with spiteful glee, and the night was dark and formless.

293

thirty-one

Chloe wanted to talk to Roelke about the calendar stick. That

was a bit problematic since she had no idea where he’d gone. I can at least try Emil’s number, she thought. She dug out the appropriate scrap of paper, found a phone on the curator’s desk, dialed, listened to it ring and ring and ring. After slamming the receiver

back to its cradle she considered her options.

She didn’t know if she was onto something important or com-

pletely crackers. She
did
know that with this new idea banging about her brain, patiently waiting for Roelke to reappear at eight o’clock was not an option.

Chloe had Mom’s car keys. Mom would be at Vesterheim until

after the evening concert. “All righty, then,” Chloe announced. “We have a plan.” Leaving the mess on the worktable—she’d confront

whatever trouble she might be in later—she locked up the storage

building, bundled up tight, and headed into the night.

Ten minutes later, after turning the defroster to full blast and

scraping two inches of snow and a foundation of ice from the

294

windshield, Chloe drove from the parking lot. She stopped first at the police station, hoping Roelke was talking crime with the local cops. But the station was dark, and no one answered her knock.

Any officers on duty tonight were—not surprisingly—out and

about.

On to Emil’s, then. Chloe got back into the car and made a left

turn. Visibility wasn’t great, and the road conditions weren’t either.

You’re being kinda stupid, she told herself, when the wheels briefly lost traction and spun on wet snow. What do you hope to gain by

driving to Emil’s place?

Well, the other side of her brain countered, maybe Roelke just

got back from his mysterious errand. Or maybe he’s been there all

along, and just didn’t
want
to answer Emil’s phone.

Besides … where else are you going to look for him?

Chloe had to backtrack when she missed the turn that led to

the river, but in short order she approached the bridge. When her

headlights glanced over a snow-filmed caution sign, she was pretty sure of the hidden warning. “Danger,” she muttered, “bridge surface may freeze before road.” She stopped, straining to see beyond slapping wiper blades and swirling snow. She did not want to get

partway across and then have to back off again, so she made sure

that no one else had started over the single-lane span before creeping forward.

Still-visible skid marks showed where somebody had spun out.

“Geez,” she whispered, and gently braked to a halt. Whoever had

lost control had
really
lost control. Tires moving sideways had carved large wedges in the snow. It looked as if the vehicle had hit the iron railing, too.

295

She was so focused on driving that she’d left the bridge before a

cold finger flicked uneasily against her backbone and a stray image belatedly blipped in her consciousness. She eased onto the shoulder—hoping like crazy that she’d be able to pull out again without getting stuck—and parked the car.

When she got out the wind hit with such force that she had to

squint against the driving snow. She trudged back along the bridge railing. Without the aid of her headlights she couldn’t find the

thing that had snagged her attention. She began kicking through

the snow in the area where the worst skid tracks were.

After a few minutes her boot hit something solid. When she

picked it up her blood turned to snowmelt. She’d found a flash-

light. A yellow flashlight. Roelke’s yellow flashlight, she was sure of it.

Chloe flicked on the light and played it over the bridge.

“Roelke?” Nothing. She leaned over the railing and pointed the

beam toward the river. The shaft of light showed driving snow but

faded into blackness before reaching the water below.
“Roelke!”

Still no answer. He couldn’t have gone over the railing … could he?

The road was empty in both directions. With a sinking sense of

loneliness, Chloe struggled to decide what to do. The wind