Odin's Murder (7 page)

At the door, I pause, reach in my pocket and run a finger down the sharp blade of the letter opener, fingers flat along the surface, testing the danger of the edge. A slip and I would bleed, and my concentration cools the last of my ire.  

*

                 “Before we start I thought maybe we should introduce ourselves a little better.” Memory stands at the end of the table, a tiny smile on her lips. I narrow my eyes enough for her to notice. She’s digging for information on me. Good luck with that. “I’ll go first. I’m eighteen. I still haven’t decided where I’m going in the fall, but I got accepted to SCAD and Parsons. We’re from Raleigh. Our parents both teach at Duke. I have three tattoos, four piercings and you all already know that I’m a visual eidetic.”

Faye mouths the odd word, and the tall girl taps her temple. I wonder if Memory is a nickname, but I don’t ask.

She points to her brother. “You’re next.”

“You told them everything. What else do I have to say?”

“You could tell them your favorite color or book or something.”

“Green. And I don’t have a favorite book.” He shakes his head. “That’s like asking what your favorite molecule is. I’ll be studying linguistics at Harvard.”

“I’ll go,” the small chick, Faye says. “I’m home schooled, except not really in my home. I take classes wherever my father is teaching at the moment. His work means we travel constantly, but right now we’re in Charlotte, working on an exhibit of the latest Tollund bog find, and his current wife decided I needed to spend time with people my own age, so they shipped me here for socialization purposes. Apparently, I lack the knowledge of ‘appropriate norms and behaviors’ of my peers.”

Julian coughs, his water bottle midway in the air.

Faye looks around the table. “I assume they mean people like you.” She smiles when I raise an eyebrow. No one at this table is exactly normal society. “What about you?”

“Nothing much to tell. Nineteen. Wilmington.” Just the basics.

“Oh, so you’re near the beach.”

Her grin is contagious, and she of all people might consider a detention center yard surrounded by a chain link fence and barbed-wire ‘ocean-side.’ “Yeah, we had some sand.”

“Anything else?” Memory prods. I rest my elbows on the table, and shake my head. “Well,” she says. “That was enlightening, or
not,
but I guess we should get started.”

Faye jumps in again. “Last night I did a little research. Not only can we use the standard crow-raven folklore, but there might be an interesting tie-in with the history of the school.”

“How does the school have anything to do with crows?” Julian asks. “That seems a little old world for a college with a conservative Christian background.”

“From what I’ve read this folklore precedes the Moravians. Before they settled here there was an established tribe of Native Americans in this area who had some crow legends in their mythos. And apparently, there was a sacred spring somewhere here on campus, where they held coming of age and transformation rituals. And when the settlers came, the natives did not take kindly to the desecration of their holy ground, so a church was built to keep it as a sanctified location, to pacify them.”

“The well,” I blurt, forgetting my rule of non-contribution. Every eye in the room shifts toward me. “The well. Under the chapel. Danielle said it’s been there for ages and has some kind of historic value and crap.”

Memory rolls her eyes.

“She’s right,” Faye says, flipping through a thick library book on the table. “There is a bit about a well in here.”

“What about it?” Julian tries to take the book from her but she holds tight.

“Not a lot. It just mentions that mythology of the area includes stories about a well on campus grounds.”

“The chapel is really old.” I pull out my camera, thumb over the display to the images from last night. “It’s much older than anything else on campus.”

I show it to Faye, and Julian leans over the table to see.

“That arched door is pretty unusual in American architecture,” she says. “Can you email that to me?”

“Not from the camera,” I say.

“Show it to Mems, she can draw it,” Julian says, gesturing from the camera to his sister.

She glances at the picture of Danielle, framed by the low doorway, and her face settles into a hard smile. “Nice architecture.” Memory is snide, which makes me itchy, sitting three feet away, and I’m pissed, because it’s a good shot, the girl out of focus, almost blurred by the shadows, the old entrance behind her dark and ominous. “I thought so,” I say, keeping my voice mild, hardening my belly muscles as the rage flares up redder than her lipstick.

“Very revealing,” she says, but there’s very little of Danielle actually showing in this picture, and I think she’s trying to say something about me, and I grind my teeth. I shove my hand in my pocket, looking for something sharp to test my temper, but I’ve put the blade in my backpack, and I’m left empty-handed and edgy. “Any more?”

“Cut it out,” Julian elbows his sister away from the camera as I shake my head, because there
are
more, but they reveal more of Danielle, not the architecture.

“I’ve seen similar things,” Faye says. I don’t really pay attention to her, until the tiny hand not holding the book reaches for mine under the table, and she presses something small and hard into my palm. Metal? It’s smooth, and round, flat on one side, with grooves in it, and I rub my thumb over it, and my irritation fades into my curiosity. I stow it in my pocket until I can examine it later. “Usually in tribal ritual and some animism, which includes the transformation of human to bird—crows, or ravens specifically,” the odd girl continues.

“Like witchcraft?” Julian asks her.

Faye flips a couple pages. “It’s unclear, but it seems early inhabitants of this area may have used the well for human sacrifice. If a person was a true shaman they could transform into one of these birds, which gave them the ability to cross over into different worlds, and have visions, and even communicate with the dead.”

“If they weren’t a true shaman, then they died at the bottom? Like the witch trials where they tied girls to chairs and if she drowns then ‘Oops! She wasn’t a witch after all?’” Julian is eyeing her book like it is candy he’s been denied.

Faye shrugs.

“So is this what we want to focus on? This well? These legends?” Memory asks, looking from Faye to her brother.

“Why not?” I ask, forcing her to include me. “We could at least tie it in. Give it a local angle. The scholarship is sponsored by the school, right? They’d like that.”

“We’ll have to break it up. I need to do some research—you can help me with the on-line searches,” Julian points to his sister. “We have to find out when it was built, and by whom. Make sure it’s even historically accurate. Faye, you would need to check out the history of the symbols. What the crows and the sacrifices mean. And Ethan, I suppose you could document all of this, if we can prove any of it.”

“No problem,” I say. I think about the chapel and the photos I took the night before. “See if you can find old photos or paintings of the chapel.” I don’t look directly at Memory, but she nods, not quite looking at me either.

“And Faye, maybe you could check out the chapel. Look for more details that might tie in to what we’re looking at.” Julian says, falling into the leader role of the group. I let him.

“Sure,” she says, and then looks at me. “Would you come with me? This afternoon. After lunch?”

I blink, and nod once.

“Shouldn’t he take Danielle?” Memory asks, walking away from our table. Her brother huffs, gets up to follow her. I trace the indented line in the stone in my pocket, and smile at her retreating form, because yeah, it’s nice, back arched in the little shoes with the heels that slap against the bottom of her feet as she walks away.

“So, what is this?” I ask Faye, holding up the smooth grey rock. There’s a symbol on it, a line with a slant off the top.

“Laf,” she says, not looking up from her book. “The rune used to calm stormy seas.”

*

My t-shirt is drenched in sweat by the time Faye and I walk across campus to the chapel. She’s wrapped up in a sweater and a bunch of skirts and manages to look like she’s cold, but I make like a shot arrow to the trees that shade the older area of campus.

Unlike Memory, with her long legs and rolling stride, Faye hops from spot to spot, peering at whatever catches her interest. When there’s a lull in her chattering, I look up. She’s pointing to a rusted weather vane lying by the side of a tumbledown rock wall. I realize she wants me to take a picture, and I grab my camera, but then I have to scrub the sweat off my face with my shirt before I look through the viewfinder.

“This heat doesn’t get to you?” I ask her.

“You’d think it would, especially since my dad is from Iceland and my mother was Finnish, but I was born in Cairo, and grew up mostly in hot climates so this place seems a bit chilly, to be honest. I’m surprised that you’re uncomfortable, being from the area. Most people are acclimated to the temperature they were born in. The natives here ran around in breech cloths. Would you be more comfortable in something like that?” She looks me up and down, head tilted to the side. “It would have to be rather large, wouldn’t it?” She makes a vague motion to my shorts. “I’m assuming you are equipped proportionally to your bone structure. Most men are, I’ve heard.” She’s stone-faced serious, and my sides hurt with the effort to keep from laughing. I don’t know how to answer her, so I don’t, but she’s already distracted by something she finds in the grass.

“This is it,” I tell her, peeling off my backpack and dropping it at the doorway of the old church. She pulls out her notebook and a pencil and starts scribbling. I look between the building and Faye. I have no idea what she’s seeing, and her writing looks like nothing more than bird scratchings on the paper. I hang my camera strap over my neck and say, “Let me know if you see anything in particular you want me to shoot.”

“You’ve got a good eye. Just go for whatever interests you. The doors are fascinating, though the Romanesque arch seems out of place here.” She’s picking tiny flowers that grow between some stones.

“The what?”

“The rounded door. It’s a very early architectural style.” She peers up, hops on her tiptoes. “Is something up there?”

“Only a bird nest.” I reach in and work it free, a bundle of sticks and gray down, one pale blue shard of eggshell stuck to the side. Faye is delighted, and takes it from me like it’s a treasure. I snap a shot of her holding the nest, and then the door itself, because the old hinges are cool, and I pop another with a flash, just to be sure I get all the detail. “So where do you think the well is?” I ask.

“The library book suggested under the building, which is odd, unless that was an intentional move by the builders to hide it, which I suppose is entirely possible if the natives were really were tossing people down there to see if they had shape-shifting powers. I wonder if there’s a cellar of some kind?”

“Could be.” I walk around the building, looking for a way in.

“That’s strange,” she says, hands on her hips. “It’s built like a Greek cross, but it’s a round church, like an octagon, only it’s irregular. Look at the doors.”

I look. They’re wood, with old, white, ceramic knobs, a rusted bolt in the center. I jiggle one. “It’s locked.” They’re decrepit though, so ancient I could probably just snap the doorknob off with my hands.

“There are five of them,” she says frowning. “In most architecture like this—and what it’s doing here and now I have no idea, honestly--it’s practically Visigothic or pre-Kalmar Viking, but never mind that. There should be four doors. I’ve never seen one like this.”

The door to the left has a staggered set of steps that lead down to a covered doorway, with narrow vent windows on the side. I point over her shoulder. “There’s your basement.”

She flits over to it, tugs at the rusted handle. “Should we break in?”

“Uh, no. Probably not. Let’s just report this back to the group and see what everyone else thinks.”

Her bottom lip puffs out, and I laugh at this tiny homespun girl committing larceny. I snag a shot of her scowl. A bird in the tree above her squawks at the flash that I’ve forgotten to turn off, and a few more rise into the sun, cawing in sympathy.

“I’ve always wanted to be the first one at an archaeological site. Like my father, at the Öland excavation. He was only twenty-two, and it launched his career.” She wraps the sweater around the nest.

We walk back to the dorms. Faye splits off the path to go to her own building, and I’m about to enter my room when Jeremy appears at my door. “Don’t forget, cafeteria at 6:30. Once you’re finished there, pick an activity until curfew.”

I nod, fighting my irritation. I’d gotten used to the lack of wardens around this place.
    I push open the door. Julian is reading at the desk.

“How’d it go?” he asks.

“Fine. I took a bunch of photos and Faye made a thousand notes about something. Possibly about a breech cloth,” I say, shrugging at Julian’s confused expression. “I don’t even know. We’ll have it ready for the group tomorrow.”

Julian closes the book and opens his mouth to speak, but says nothing. His eyes drop back to the page. I start to gather my things for a shower, even though I’ll be trapped in steaming dishwater for half the evening, but before I leave the room, Julian looks up again.

“What?” I prompt him to spit it out, not in the mood to explain my hallway conversation with Jeremy.

“What was she like?”

I frown. “Who?”

“Faye.” He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Never mind.”

“Oh.” I lean against the door. “She’s alright. A little weird, sometimes I can’t even understand what she’s saying, but she’s funny as hell. Why?”

He shifts on the bed, looks down at his book. “Just checking. You know, to make sure everything is going smoothly. For the project and everything.”

I nod, opening the door and stepping out into the hall, making no effort to understand what’s on this kid’s mind. Hard time prepared me for many things, but playing research assistant to a flock of nerds wasn’t one of them.