Heritage of Darkness (16 page)

Yep, Chloe thought, the curse of polite Norwegians is thriving.

“Besides, switching to carving was the best thing that could

have happened for my wife,” Tom was saying. “Her friend Lavinia

Carmichael quit painting too, and the two of them had a fine time

taking carving classes together.”

127

Ah, Chloe thought. Maybe a single incident had shoved both

women from painting to carving.

“Adelle stayed clear of Petra after that. Not like Howard, who—

well.” Tom cleared his throat. “I need to get back to Adelle.”

“Of course,” Chloe murmured, although she really,
really

would have liked to know what Tom had been about to say. Did

Tom know more than Violet did about the rumored dalliance

between Howard and Petra? Or was there something else alto-

gether?

“Please do come on Thursday night, if you can,” Tom said.

Chloe impulsively hugged him good-bye before stepping into

the night. The porch lamp went dark as she crossed the lawn.

She paused on the front sidewalk, wondering where Roelke

was. Holed up at the PD talking shop? She sighed. This was not

how she imagined the week would unfold.

Which was not good. She and Roelke were in a holding pattern

that she didn’t know how to break. When she’d met Roelke the

previous May, her personal life had pretty much been a sucking

quagmire for quite a while. Then she’d almost made a disastrous

decision about an old lover. That had gnawed at what little self

confidence she had left, romance-wise.

When she’d finally agreed to go out with Roelke, she’d wanted

to take things slowly. Roelke’s patience had given her a chance to take a deep breath; to spend time thinking about the future instead of fixating on the past. His patience had given her time to discover that he liked peanut butter and honey sandwiches better than PB

& J, and that his favorite color was brown. It had given her time to notice that he looked sexier in jeans than his uniform, and that he liked to cradle her cheeks in his palms when he kissed her, and that 128

they could both nap on his sofa if she lay on her side with her head on his shoulder.

All good. Still, maybe it was time to discover a few
more
things about Roelke McKenna.

But that clearly ain’t gonna happen in Decorah, Chloe thought.

Not when they were each boarding with chaperones, in separate

houses, on opposite sides of the river.

The snow had stopped. The sky was clearing and the tempera-

ture was dropping. A sharp wind nipped at her earlobes with icy

teeth. Chloe hunched her shoulders, bent her head, and walked

away.

129

fourteen

Roelke’s meeting with Chief Moyer and Buzzelli was short

and sweet. Roelke repeated what Hoff had revealed to Chloe.

“Yeah, we pretty much knew all that already,” Buzzelli said.

“Just sharing what I hear, as promised,” Roelke said cheerfully.

Seriously, though, meeting with the chief and Buzzelli wasn’t proving as satisfying as he’d hoped.

“And we appreciate it,” Moyer said. “Check in tomorrow?”

“Will do,” Roelke said, and left them to it.

By the time Roelke got back to the farm, his face burned with

cold. His toes did too, despite the shearling liners in his Sorels.

He’d wear an extra pair of wool socks when he left the house the

next morning. He hadn’t expected to do so much walking, but he

prided himself on being prepared for any contingency.

He found Emil in the living room. “Did the ladies get to their

classrooms without trouble?” Roelke asked.

“Oh,
ja
,” Emil said absently. “There were plenty of students up there, and a policeman was inside when we got there, too.”

130

Roelke dropped into a chair. “Good.”

Emil held up a board with an air of supreme satisfaction. “Isn’t

this a fine piece of wood?”

“It is,” Roelke agreed, although one plank looked pretty much

like any other to him. “Where do you get your carving wood,

Emil?”

Emil looked baffled. “In the forest!”

“No, I meant …” Roelke let his question trail away. Surely this

little old man didn’t—no. Surely not.

Emil set his wood aside and stood. “Put your boots on.”

Sixty seconds later, Roelke followed his host outside. “Where

are we going?”

“To the woods.”

This did not strike Roelke as logical. It was dark. A wind stung

his cheeks and whipped the fresh snow into little cyclones, and he hadn’t thawed out from his walk yet. But Emil was already trek-king up the driveway.

The steep forested bluff overlooking the Upper Iowa River was

a dark mass against the sky. Emil led him silently across the

deserted road. Then he started trudging through the snow that

had drifted high on what appeared to be a service lane. “This is my land,” he said, gesturing vaguely at both the fence-lined pasture on their right and the woods on their left.

“Um … OK. But—”

“You got the makings of a good carver,” Emil said over his

shoulder. “But you got a lot to learn.”

That was enough to shut Roelke up. He wanted to learn, he

really did. Besides, he wasn’t as practiced at walking uphill in knee-deep snow as Emil, and needed to concentrate on that. If he fell on 131

his ass and rolled down the hill, Emil might give up on him alto-

gether.

The lane ended when they reached the far edge of the pasture.

Without a backward glance, Emil pushed on into the woods.

Roelke followed doggedly, dodging low branches, getting snow

dumped down his collar. Moonlight filtered through the trees and

reflected off snow, filling the forest with faint blue-gray light.

Emil stopped walking abruptly. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

“You got to understand your wood,” he said. “You got to under-

stand the tree it came from. You got to understand the forest where that tree grew. You got to
respect
that forest. You don’t just march into the woods and attack any old tree with an ax. You following

me?”

Roelke hesitated.

“Look,” Emil said. “I don’t know how you do your job. But you

don’t look at just the victim after a crime, right? A victim like that Petra Lekstrom?”

“Well, no,” Roelke allowed.

“You got to know the community, right? And the place she had

in it? There are lots of people in Decorah, but Petra Lekstrom had her own place in this town. Right?”

“Right.”

“Same thing with a forest. With each tree in a forest. This—”

he patted a nearby tree—“is not just an oak tree. How much sun it

gets, how high it is on the hill, what kind of trees and plants grow nearby, what kind of soil there is—everything affects the wood,

the grain, the color, the way it feels in your hand. The good carvers, they understand this. They choose a tree for each project

knowing this.”

132

“Well … hunh.” Roelke stood still. He was starting to catch on.

“In the old country, carvers mostly used pine and birch. Here,

they had to switch to walnut and maple. I like to carve basswood.

Do you understand the difference between all those trees? Do you

have a favorite kind of tree?”

“No,” Roelke admitted humbly. He vaguely understood the dif-

ference between softwoods and hardwoods, but that was about it.

“Like I said, you got a lot to learn.” Emil patted the tree trunk

one last time, as if saying farewell to a friend. Then he began

marching back out of the woods. Roelke followed, trying to decide

if this little foray had been intended to inspire him or put him in his place.

“I can teach you,” Emil added over his shoulder.

Good, Roelke wanted to say, but one foot slipped and he got

distracted by the effort to stay upright. Once stable, he decided to believe that Emil was trying to inspire him. They waded down the

slope together, footsteps crunching, the farmhouse lights glowing

softly below.

“So,” Emil said as they reached his driveway. “Is Marit’s daugh-

ter your girlfriend?”

OK, Roelke thought. This man does not believe in verbal turn

signals, ever. “Yeah.”

“You got trouble there.”

Roelke bristled. “What do you mean?”

“She’s Norwegian. You’re not.”

The bristling subsided. Roelke had been afraid that Emil was

about to make some unwanted but insightful observation that

spelled doom for his relationship with Chloe, but
that
pronouncement was not news. “So?”

133

“What kind of name is McKenna?”

“Irish.”

“You should find a good Irish girl.”

They’d reached the front porch. Roelke paused to kick snow

from his boots. “I’m part German, too.”

“Or a German girl, then.”

“Emil, come on,” Roelke said mildly. “That may have been true

a century ago, but now? Are you really worried about mixing

bloodlines or something?”

“I’m not talking about mixing bloodlines. I’m talking about

two people who can
understand
each other—where they come

from, what they know, who they are. I don’t see how two people

can make a go of it if they don’t know all the answers to those

questions.” Emil climbed the steps, opened the door, and disap-

peared inside.

Which was good, because Roelke had no idea what to say.

He stood on the step for a moment, staring back at the dark

wooded hill. When it came to carving, Emil was a master. When it

came to romance, Roelke didn’t know if Emil was a wise soul or a

crazy coot. But the old man’s pronouncement flicked a sensitive

nerve. Chloe had once said much the same thing:
We’re very different people, we have nothing in common, blah-blah-blah
.

Suddenly, Roelke felt profoundly sad. He’d wanted a relation-

ship with Chloe since the day he met her. Was that foolishness,

obvious to everyone but him?

Teeth clenched, he followed Emil inside. Enough with the dat-

ing stuff. It was time for a cup of hot tea and a session with the index cards he’d been using to collect his thoughts about Lekstrom’s murder. He wasn’t officially on the case, and he knew only 134

a fraction of what the local officers and DCI agents knew. But he

was a pretty good cop, with pretty good instincts. Maybe, just

maybe, he’d find some new angle, some new detail, that would

make a difference.



Chloe stayed vigilant as she walked back to Sigrid’s house, but the streets were deserted. Again, the Christmas lights she passed

seemed like a frail and futile attempt to ward away the darkness.

Too much sadness at the Rimestad house, Chloe thought. And al-

though Adelle and Tom had good memories of
julebukkers
, their tales brought back the terror her dad’s friends had bestowed on

her six-year-old self, way back when.

Sigrid and Violet had set electric candles on the windowsills. A

wreath and
God
Jul
sign decorated the front door. Three straw goats in graduated sizes waited on the porch. “Nicer than bloody

skulls, anyway,” Chloe muttered, and let herself inside.

Light spilled from a door behind the dining room. Chloe fol-

lowed it to a small studio. Design sketches and practice samples

were pinned to one cork-covered wall. Shelves held a variety of

rosemaled woodenware—some bare, some backgrounded only,

some painted, some varnished. Violet sat at a table littered with

tubes of paint, brush holders, and the various other clutter that

filled the workshops and drained the wallets of rosemalers every-

where.

Chloe waited until Violet paused before lightly knocking on

the doorframe. “Hey, Violet. Just wanted to let you know I’m

back.”

135

Violet swiveled in her chair. “Oh, hi. Did you have a nice eve-

ning?”

Chloe couldn’t help noticing that Violet wore the clothes she’d

come home from work in—plaid wool skirt, white blouse, pink

cardigan—and they showed not the slightest streak of wayward

paint. If Chloe hadn’t worn one of her mother’s aprons in class,

she’d have ruined everything she owned.

“Chloe?”

“Sorry. My evening was quite pleasant.” She gestured to a row

of clear glass balls Violet had rosemaled and left to dry. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”

“I need to quit for the night anyway.”

Chloe took a closer look at the ornaments. “Those are gor-

geous, by the way. Are they for one of the folk art trees at Vesterheim?”

“These are just for gifts.” Violet contemplated her handiwork.

“Only Gold Medalists were invited to contribute to the rosemaling

tree.”

Ouch, Chloe thought.

Violet began tidying up. “How did your interview go?”

“I enjoyed meeting the Rimestads. I didn’t realize that Adelle

had stopped painting, though.”

“I think Adelle and Lavinia quit rosemaling at the same time,”

Violet said.

“Tom said his wife was driven out by Petra.”

Violet reached for a jar of murky liquid. “Of the Sixty-Sevens

who eventually chose to enter the annual Exhibition, Petra was the last to earn her Gold Medal.” She began swishing a brush in the

turpentine. “My mom, your mom—they got there with mostly

136

blue ribbons, each worth three points. Petra limped along … a

white ribbon one year, another three or four years later. And let me tell you, Petra wanted a medal
real
bad. It’s not hard to imagine that she’d say or do something to cut down on the competition.”