Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery (7 page)

She could have headed back to the airport
and used her return ticked to the States, she supposed. Without her
father’s ashes, there was no real purpose to her trip. But she’d
taken the time off from work, her colleagues didn’t expect her back
for a week, and she would probably never be in Sweden again; she
might as well enjoy her time here. And by now she was curious. Her
father had never talked about growing up on Gotland. He hadn’t
spoken Swedish, hadn’t communicated with anyone from home for as
long as she’d known him. This was a chance to learn a little more
about who he’d been—about who she was—and it would be stupid to let
it pass.

Yet she didn’t want to do the expected. Nick
knew she had a connecting ticket to Gotland. He’d helped her change
it so she could stay in Stockholm a few days. He’d helped her find
the Lady Hamilton Hotel, too.

And he had friends who carried guns. Maybe
she hadn’t been as far off as she’d imagined with that James Bond
fantasy. After all, a guy like Nick needed a reason to ask a girl
like her to dinner, and she knew it wasn’t because he’d been bowled
over by her beauty.

She looked OK today. Different. Today, a
handsome stranger might actually be intrigued enough to ask her on
a date. But not yesterday. Not in her librarian-clothes with her
scabby knees. No, there had to have been something else. Maybe his
job had been to keep her out of her room so whoever had gone in and
searched it knew he wouldn’t be interrupted.

That made a lot of sense.

But what were they looking for?

Not her father’s ashes, obviously. They
already had those—along with her eReader. And she didn’t have
anything else that would interest anyone. She was a librarian from
Brooklyn, not some sort of Mata Hari.

So maybe they’d mistaken her for someone
else?

Although that wouldn’t explain why someone
had searched her room. Once Nick had rescued her from the baggage
carousel, they’d known who she was. And they’d done it anyway.

Unless someone else had done it.

Unless she was paranoid and had imagined the
whole thing.

Shaking her head, she resolved to put the
whole thing behind her. She was on her way. Another hour and a
half, and she’d be on the ferry. Three hours after that she’d be in
Visby. The rest of it didn’t matter. She was going to her father’s
childhood home.
Focus on that, Annika
. Forget Stockholm. And
forget Nick. He was never real to begin with.

And somehow, that was a lot more
disappointing than it should be.

But on the ferry she met Curt, and suddenly things started looking
up.

He’d been on the bus too, and after she’d
resolved to stop thinking about Nick, she’d noticed him. He’d sat
across the aisle from her, with his nose buried in a book, which
immediately made him endearing. And although he didn’t have Nick’s
knock’em-dead sex appeal and sophisticated James Bond good looks,
he wasn’t a bad-looking guy in his own right. Tall and lanky,
dressed in corduroys and a button-down shirt, and he was traveling
light, with just a backpack. Although not as light as she was, with
her shopping bag.

He smiled at her when the bus stopped, as
they came face to face while they both attempted to exit their
seats at the same time. And on the ferry, they ended up sharing a
table at the restaurant.

Yes, there was a restaurant. There were
several. By then it was lunchtime, and Annika’s stomach was
complaining loudly about missing breakfast. She bought herself a
prawn sandwich and found a table by the window, where she could
look out and see the Baltic Sea pass by as the ferry—which looked
and felt more like a cruise ship; or at least like she imagined a
cruise ship might look and feel—cut across the smooth surface of
the water. And that’s what she was doing when a voice said, “May I
join you?”

Annika looked up and met a pair of hazel
eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, above a tentative smile.

For a second, a mouthful of prawns
threatened to go down the wrong way. It was the second time in two
days a man had sought out her company, unbidden. Definitely a new
record.

She swallowed and nodded. “Please.”

He put his tray, with his own sandwich—roast
beef—on the table. “I’m Curt.”

Annika cleared her throat. “Annika
Holst.”

“American. Good. I thought you were.” He
grinned at her across the table.

“My father was Swedish.”

“My mother was, too.” He moved his attention
down to the sandwich, head tilted to one side. He had light brown
hair, a bit too long, and a hank of it fell across his forehead and
into his eyes.

“I’d use a knife and fork,” Annika said,
having done that with her own sandwich.

Curt tossed his head to flick the hair out
of his eyes and pushed his sleeves back. “I guess I’d better. Not
the kind of sandwich you can pick up.”

Not at all. The Scandinavians ate their
sandwiches open-faced, and mounded with prawns—or in Curt’s case,
roast beef. But they were delicious. Annika went back to hers, and
let Curt attack his own. Once he’d reduced it to crumbs, he leaned
back on his chair and smiled at her again. “How about you let me
take you to dinner in Visby tonight?”

She blinked. “You just finished lunch.”

“I believe in planning ahead,” Curt said.
“And I figure I’d better ask now, before someone else beats me to
it.”

Nobody else was likely to beat him to it,
but it might be nice to have something to look forward to. And if
she knew someone else in Visby, she might not feel so alone once
she got there.

“That would be lovely. Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” Curt said and brushed the
hair out of his face.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Fredrik said, as Nick focused on unclenching
his fists before his nails could dig holes in his palms. “She
wasn’t kidnapped. And she didn’t check out of her room. She’s
probably just out shopping or something.”

Maybe. But when Nick had come to Fredrik’s
office, only to learn that Annika apparently had walked out of the
hotel this morning, and now no one knew where she was, he’d gone a
little ballistic. “I should have stayed last night.”

“We talked about this,” Fredrik said,
leaning back in his desk chair and fixing Nick with a steely look.
“You couldn’t have spent the night sleeping across her doorway. She
would have noticed you. And she didn’t leave through the front
door, so even if you’d spent the night in a chair in the lobby, you
wouldn’t have seen her go.”

No, he wouldn’t. She’d walked out through
the back door and across the loading dock just after eleven this
morning. A check of the hotel security cameras had proved it.

“Best we can figure,” Fredrik said, “is that
she went shopping. She was carrying her purse and a shopping bag.
Maybe she’s gone back to return something she bought
yesterday.”

She’d better not be returning the blue
dress. Only an idiot would return something that made her look so
good.

Nick cleared the growl from his voice. “Has
anyone checked with the store to see if she’s been there?”

“I didn’t think it was important,” Fredrik
said, “but I’ll call and check, if you want. You were the one who
followed her around yesterday. Do you remember the name of the
place?”

Vividly. She’d stood in front of it for
twenty minutes before she worked up the courage to go inside. He’d
had plenty of time to memorize the name above the door.
“Epiphany.”

And that was about what he’d had when he saw
her in the blue dress later. The realization that underneath the
sedate librarian was a beautiful woman he wouldn’t mind getting to
know better. After this was over and she wasn’t a suspect in a
crime and it wasn’t his job to dog her footsteps, of course.

While Nick thought, Fredrik looked up
Epiphany’s number and dialed. After a minute on the phone, he hung
up and turned back to Nick. “She hasn’t been there yet. Guess she’s
got something else she’s doing first.”

“Like what?”

Fredrik shrugged. “Who knows? Her father’s
Swedish. Maybe she has family here. Or friends.”

“No family,” Nick said. “We looked. And no
friends either, that we’ve been able to find.”

Not even a college roommate, since she’d
lived at home while she attended Pratt.

“She’s a librarian,” Fredrik said, as if
he’d read Nick’s mind. “Maybe she went to the library.”

Maybe. “She talked about tracing her family,
and learning more about her dad. Said he never talked about his
past.”

“If I had his past,” Fredrik said, “I
wouldn’t talk about it either.”

No kidding.

The idea of Annika digging into her father’s
youth didn’t thrill him, since he knew what she’d find. Although
the possibility that she was doing genealogical research was a
whole lot easier to deal with than his fear that someone had
snatched her and was sticking lighted matches between those pretty
toes right now, trying to get her to tell them where the silver
was.

He got to his feet. “I’m gonna go look for
her.”

“Sure,” Fredrik said.

“Unless there’s something else you need from
me?”

Fredrik shook his head. “We’re just waiting.
The background checks on the other passengers are still going on,
but nothing’s popped yet. And until we get the bag back, there’s
nothing much we can do.”

“Other than keep an eye on Annika.”

Fredrik shrugged. “What are you gonna do?
Walk around Stockholm hoping to see her?”

“If I have to.”

“Good luck with that,” Fredrik said. “Let me
know if you find her.”

Nick said he would, on his way toward the
door. “Call me if the bag comes in. Or if you get any hits on the
background checks.”

“Will do. Be careful out there.”

Nick reached for the doorknob. “I’m not
worried about me.”

“I am,” Fredrik said, but by then Nick was
outside in the hallway and didn’t want to take the time to go back
inside and ask what the hell Fredrik meant.

Visby was incredibly beautiful, like nothing Annika had ever seen
before. Medieval, like Gamla Stan, it was a cluster of red roofs
and many-windowed buildings in yellow, orange, blush and white, and
surrounding it all was
Ringmuren
, the city wall; more than
two miles of 12
^th
century stonework enclosing the city
and the many old church ruins.

“3.4 kilometers long,” Curt said, pointing
to it. “At one point it had twenty nine towers. Twenty seven are
left.”

He was standing next to her at the front of
the ferry, watching Visby Harbor coming closer. Annika nodded. “I
know.” She’d done her research too, after all. Once a librarian,
always a librarian, in every part of her life.

He grinned. “So do you also know about the
Maiden’s Tower?”

It sounded vaguely familiar, but didn’t ring
any immediate bells. “I guess I didn’t get that far. I didn’t have
a lot of time to prepare for this trip.”

Carl Magnusson Holst had only been in his
early sixties. He probably hadn’t expected to die so soon, either.
Annika was honestly surprised he’d thought about his afterlife at
all, even if it was just a scrawled note on a scrap of paper in his
wallet.
When I die I want to be cremated. Ashes to ashes and
dust to dust, in the place I was born. Bury me standing, under the
stone.

Curt’s face sobered. “I’m sorry. Guess it’s
different for everyone.”

It was. They had a lot in common, as it
turned out. Curt had lost a parent recently too. His Swedish
mother. This trip was Curt’s way of holding on to her memory, by
visiting all the places she’d told him about. He hadn’t said so,
but Annika had read between the lines.

“You’ve never been here before?” she had
asked, and Curt had shaken his head.

“She never went back. I don’t know why.”

“My father didn’t either. I went to Denmark
with my mother as a child, to see that part of the family, but even
when we were so close, my father never went back to Sweden.”

“Must be something in the water,” Curt said,
and that had been the end of that particular conversation.

“So tell me about the Maiden’s Tower,”
Annika said now, as the ferry glided slowly in to port at the Visby
Harbor and the sun shone on the red roofs and warm hues of the
town.

Curt went into lecturing mode. “It goes back
to the battle of Visby in 1361. You know about that?”

What did he think, she was stupid? “Valdemar
IV of Denmark sent an army against Visby in July of 1361. They
killed thousand of farmers and peasants, many of them minors and
elderly. Archaeological excavations have found five mass graves
outside the city, with more than two thousand bodies. Many were
buried in their armor, because there were so many of them that the
Danes didn’t have time to strip them all before they started
decomposing.”

Medieval history was her mother’s specialty.
And Valdemar had been Danish. She’d grown up hearing about him, and
about his daughter Margaret, who united the Scandinavian
kingdoms.

Curt nodded. “Following the battle, the
inhabitants of Visby paid Valdemar large sums of money so he
wouldn’t sack the city. It’s called the Visby Ransom.”

“And the maiden was part of that?” A gift to
the king so he wouldn’t pillage and burn the town? What a horrible
fate!

Curt chuckled. “Oh, no. Legend has it that
Valdemar visited Visby in 1360, disguised as a merchant, to get the
lay of the land. He became involved with a young lady in town, the
daughter of a local goldsmith. She gave him information that helped
him plan the attack. He promised to take her with him when he left,
but he didn’t. When the townspeople realized what she’d done, they
walled her up in the Maiden’s Tower.”

“Alive?”

Curt nodded.

That was even worse than being handed over
to the conquering king as a prize. Annika shivered in spite of the
warm sun on her back. “That’s awful.”