The Puffin of Death (22 page)

A scowl. “Are they here to look for that yellow hoopoe or to kill someone else?”

“Just the hoopoe. It returned and they were able to get off some great shots. Of the camera kind, I mean. Of the bird.”

“They are your countrymen, Teddy, so you must play nice with them, but it would be wise for Bryndis to stay far away.” He placed a protective arm around her shoulders, smearing her windbreaker with fake blood. From the adoring look she gave him, she didn't mind.

“I plan to avoid them, too,” I said, miffed that he'd shown no concern for my safety.

“Then you are smart.”

A whistle pierced the air, followed by a shout. “Places, y'all! Places! Berserkers A, C, and F, change wardrobes!”

With that, part of the rag-tag army of spear-throwers and ax-swingers slogged back into the marsh, while others headed for a big motor home parked near the catering trucks. Ragnar gave Bryndis a quick peck on the cheek. “I am F, so I go to die now as a Visigoth and then as a ninja.”

We spent the rest of the morning watching Ragnar die.

He died quite well in his Visigoth garb of helmet, tunic, and pleather trousers, but I preferred his death throes as a ninja. Clad from head to toe in body-hiding black, he upped his physicality, flopping and thrashing long after he sank into the marsh. His screams and groans as he twitched into death added a fine texture to his performance. I could have watched the handsome hunk die all day, but when Nicolas Cage, the film's star berserker, arrived on set for his close-ups, the director let the extras break for lunch. As soon as Ragnar changed back into street clothes—leaving on his screen makeup, including fake blood—we clambered into Bryndis' Volvo and drove up the hill to Hótel Brattholt.

I had forgotten about the presence of the Geronimos until we entered the hotel's crowded dining room. There they sat, at a long table near the big picture window, looking oddly normal compared to the blood-spattered film extras enjoying an early lunch. After a quick glance around, I realized their table had the only unoccupied seats in the room.

“Perhaps we should eat somewhere else,” Bryndis said. “There is another hotel a few miles east of here. Or we could go back to the catering trucks, where for once the food is better than it needs to be.”

Ragnar shook his head. “If this is all right with Teddy, it is all right with me. It is of no consequence to me that because of the actions of one of those people, I spent many unhappy hours being questioned by the police.”

“So should we stay or leave?” Bryndis asked. “It is up to you, Teddy.”

“We didn't have much in the way of breakfast this morning, so my vote is to stay. I don't think anyone else will get murdered in a room filled with this many people.”

“Famous last words,” Bryndis muttered.

For himself, Ragnar put a good, if bloody, face on the situation and strode toward the Geronimos' table, shouting out greetings. With the exception of Lucinda, they all professed joy at our arrival. Elizabeth and Adele might have even been sincere.

“May we see the pictures you two took of the hoopoe?” asked Perry Walsh as I sat down, across from him, while Bryndis and Ragnar took the two seats at the other end.

I handed over my iPhone, saying, “These won't be as good as the ones Bryndis took with her Lumix, but at least I got the whole bird in the frame.” I was a notoriously bad photographer, once having cut off the head of a rare white rhinoceros in a once-in-a-lifetime shot.

My pictures were amateurish, but Perry and his wife politely oohed and ahhed, then passed the phone along so the others could see. The praise sounded more sincere when Bryndis' Lumix passed around the table. While they were mooning over her pictures, I took my chance.

“How are you feeling?” I asked Ben Talley, who was sitting next to me.

After Wednesday's booze-a-thon, his skin still bore a green tinge and his facial scars appeared more obvious.

“How does it look like I'm feeling?” He stared down at his plate. He had hardly touched his fish.

“Not so great. But better.”

He gave me a guilty look. “I must apologize for my behavior, and I hope you didn't take anything I said seriously. Not that I can remember much about it, just you coming over with flowers. They're nice by the way.”

“Dawn was a lovely woman.”

A dark chuckle. “Oh, yeah. Lovely.” Then, as if he realized how ugly he'd sounded, he cleared his throat and said, “As I'm sure you know, none of us can leave the country until the police have finished their investigation. After that, I'm taking her back to California. Her parents have a family plot in Holy Cross Cemetery.”

“That's in San Francisco?”

“Colma. It's not too far, so they can visit as often as they wish.”

“Was she an only child?” The minute the question slipped out of my mouth, I knew I'd made a mistake. As a supposedly old school friend of Dawn's, I should already know the answer. Ben gave no sign of noticing my blunder, but Elizabeth frowned and gave me a sideways glance. She'd noticed.

“Dawn had three brothers and two sisters,” Ben said, obviously not as astute as the writer. “I spoke to them on the phone. They're devastated, of course.”

“Of course. Ah, speaking of the investigation, does Inspector Haraldsson know you're in Vik?”

His mouth tightened. “I didn't bother to tell him. That damned cop's stopped by the hotel every day since it happened, sometimes more than once. God only knows what I told him the other day because I sure can't remember. He'll stroke out when he finds out I left the hotel, but Elizabeth insisted I get out of there for at least today.”

Elizabeth had been right. As ashen as Ben looked right now, he looked a hundred percent better than he had the last time I'd seen him.

The busy hum in the restaurant continued around us as more tourists and film extras arrived, and every now and then I could hear snatches of conversation. The people at the table next to ours had taken pictures, too, and more cameras were being passed around. It all seemed so normal. The Geronimos, after their first initial shock at seeing me, were chatting like normal people, too. I wondered how long that would last.

Keeping my voice low, I said, “You know, Ben, I meant to ask you something the last time I saw you, but you were, ah, kind of under the weather, so I'll ask now. That night in Stykkishólmur when Dawn turned up missing, you didn't raise the alarm for four hours. Why wait so long?”

He didn't appear offended by the question. Maybe he'd given up caring about anything, even my curiosity. “Want the truth? Well, here it is. I didn't ‘raise the alarm,' as you so subtly put it, right away because I thought Dawn was with someone else. If I'd panicked and called in the National Guard, or whatever it is they have in this damn country, to search for her, it could have been embarrassing for everyone, especially her. As it turns out, I was wrong. My wife wasn't with anyone. She was dead. However crappy our marriage was, she didn't deserve that. But it doesn't matter now, does it? She's gone and it's all over except for the burying.”

“Teddy!” Bryndis called, over the ongoing chatter at our table. “The waitress has asked you twice for your order.”

I looked up to see the waitress, little more than a teenager, standing next to me with a notepad and pen. She bore a strong resemblance to Ulfur, the hotelier. His daughter? Come to think of it, where was Ulfur, anyway? Last time I was here, he'd been tending bar.

“Uh, I'll just have the fish and chips.” I hadn't even looked at the menu.

With a nod, she moved on to the next table.

By then, Ben Talley had turned away from me and was talking to Lucinda Greaves, who for once, was treating him with kindness. No matter. I had already learned what I needed, that Ben suspected Dawn had moved on from Simon Parr to someone else. I could think of only one viable candidate.

Tab Cooper.

Chapter Twenty-two

Young and handsome, Tab Cooper could have served as a temporary distraction for Dawn until she found herself a wealthy man. But weighing against my theory was the fact that right now Tab was sitting so close to Judy Malone he was almost in her lap. Had he, too, moved on or had he been playing one woman against the other? The way some people arrange their so-called love lives these days, I shouldn't have felt shocked by the idea, but I did. If my theory was correct, I wondered if Judy had known about him and Dawn. More to the point, had Ben? If I could figure it out, he could, too.

Then I realized I'd forgotten another candidate for Dawn's sexual favors.

Oddi. The Geronimos' tour guide.

With his wrestler's bulk and graying hair, Oddi Pálsson might not have been anyone's idea of a Nordic god, but there was no denying his attractiveness to women. His experience as a tour guide lent him a somewhat slick, yet charming, persona but any woman who paid attention could also detect the rugged alpha male hidden under the slick veneer. On more than one occasion I'd seen Dawn and Judy sneaking looks at him. Even Lucinda and Enid had done the same. Just because a woman was north of fifty didn't mean she was dead blow the waist. And for a woman like Dawn, who in her modeling heyday had been every man's fantasy, only to wind up discarded by a birdwatcher…

Then again, Simon Parr wasn't just a birder. He was a
multi-millionaire
birder who, after years of living in his more successful wife's shadow, had finally come into his own. Dawn loved money, which explained her initial pursuit of her husband, then of Simon. After Simon kicked her to the curb, she might have consoled herself with the more experienced Oddi. I'd once read an article in
Psychology Today
about crimes of passion. The article claimed that when confronted with infidelity, a worldly man would kill his rival, but a less-worldly man would kill his wife. Yet this killer had opted for both.

Which begged the question: did I really believe Benjamin Talley had it in him to murder two people?

“Good God, Teddy, what is going through your head?” Bryndis' voice cut into my thoughts. “You look like you're chewing nails.”

“Just thinking.”

“About what, the end of the world?”

In a way I was, since the world
had
ended for Simon and Dawn.

The waitress arrived with my fish and chips, and I set to eating. As I'd hoped, it was delicious. In Iceland, you couldn't get bad seafood.

My gloom further vanished when the Walshes found a close-up of the hoopoe on Bryndis' camera and praised it loudly. From there, the conversation turned to other “vagrants,” birds found in unusual places. Lucinda said she'd heard of a rock partridge nesting near a woodpile in Ireland. Perry told of a sandhill crane hanging out in a Shetland Islands farmyard, stealing corn from the pigs. But I was most riveted by Adele's account of a puffin spotted last year on the Spanish coast.

“The birder who saw the puffin said it had a white stripe across its head,” Adele said. “He uploaded a picture on the Net and it looked just like the one we saw on the cliff this morning. The same one, you think?”

“If you believe a puffin would range that far south, you'll believe anything,” Lucinda said. Her reservoir of sympathy for Ben run dry, she had returned to her old cranky self.

“Are you accusing that birder of faking his picture? Why would he?”

“Adele, I'm saying you're gullible, which is not an advantageous trait for any good birder.”

“I am not gullible!”

Lucinda's laugh had spikes in it. “You believed Simon when he said he was leaving Elizabeth for you, when any fool knows he would never…”

She didn't finish the sentence because Elizabeth slammed down her water glass. “You know, Lucinda, I've had just about enough of your mouth.”

As the other Geronimos held their collective breaths, the author threw her napkin across her plate and stood up. To everyone's relief, she headed not toward Lucinda (With a fish knife? With a fork?) but toward the ladies' room.

There was a mass exhale as she vanished down the hall.

Lucinda's mouth kept moving. “…leave his meal ticket. Say what you will about Simon, the man wasn't stupid.”

Now it was Adele's turn to rush away from the table. Unlike Elizabeth, she headed outside. Looking through the restaurant's window, I could see her shoulders heaving as she wept.

It was more than I could take. After neatly folding my napkin and placing it on my plate, I followed in Elizabeth's footsteps. If there had been two of me, I'd have gone to comfort Adele, too.

When I reached the ladies' room, I heard Elizabeth blowing her nose in a stall.

“Lucinda's an ass,” I called. “Don't let her get to you.”

A sniff. “Easy for you to say.” A honk, then a few more sniffs. “I told Simon he was making a mistake, inviting her along. She's a good birder, but all she's ever done is make trouble.”

“What do you mean, ‘make trouble'?”

“Don't tell me you haven't noticed.” Elizabeth emerged from the stall blotting her eyes with toilet paper. Mascara ran down her cheeks, making her look like a sad clown. “Lucinda's a genius at setting people against each other. If we went back there right now, I can guarantee you we'd see everyone arguing, some defending me, others defending her, while she just sits there and gloats.”

“She must lead a miserable life.”

“Don't kid yourself. She gets her jollies by feeding off other people's misery. Look at Judy, for instance. Still single, still living at home with Mommy. Every time she tries to leave, Lucinda finds a way to squelch the poor girl's plans.” She leaned over the sink and began to wash her ravaged face.

“Judy owns a yoga studio, doesn't she? She could leave any time she wanted.”

Elizabeth's face looked better, but not by much. Now that she'd washed off her makeup, she looked older, and for a woman pushing sixty, that wasn't good. “Judy has never summoned the strength to cut the apron strings. Besides, the studio's in her mother's name. She's the one who fronted the money.”

“Lucinda practices yoga?”

“With that mean-mouthed hostility? Of course she doesn't practice yoga! She financed the studio simply to have a financial hold over her darling daughter.”

“But Judy didn't have to let that happen.”

“You're wrong there. The girl's never been strong. She was a sickly child, in and out of the hospital, and wound up being dependent on her mother for everything. I doubt that will ever change.”

“Where's the father?”

“He split a long time ago. Either that, or Lucinda murdered him and buried the body.” Elizabeth vented a bitter laugh, then winced as she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. “Don't ever get old, Teddy. Marry that cute boyfriend of yours right away.”

At first I was taken aback by her comment. How did Elizabeth know Joe was cute? When I thought about it, the answer was obvious. She was a writer, and if there's anything a writer knows how to do, it's research. But it gave me the willies to know someone had been researching
me.

“Joe and I haven't fixed a date yet. Look, Elizabeth, now that you've pulled yourself together, why don't we rejoin the others? You'll feel better when you get some food inside you, and that salad of yours looked delicious.”

She forced a smile. “Good idea. Why should I give Lucinda the satisfaction of thinking she's ruined my entire day?”

When we got back to the table, we found the birders sitting in strained silence. Even Bryndis looked fraught. The only person who acted unconcerned was Ragnar, who was speaking Icelandic to someone over his iPhone.

After killing the call, he said to Bryndis, “I must return to the set. The cinematographer insists the battle scene be reshot right away. Something about the lighting being more ominous now.”

“We will go with you,” Bryndis said. It was obvious she wanted to get away from the birders, and I couldn't blame her.

I wondered what other nastiness had gone down while I'd been in the ladies' room with Elizabeth. Lucinda wore a faint smile, but the others looked like they'd just witnessed a head-on collision. Considering the woman's all-around obnoxiousness, I, like Elizabeth, questioned Simon Parr's good sense in inviting her along on the trip. But Judy might have refused to come without her mother, and from everything I'd heard, he liked Judy. More than liked.

***

“That Lucinda, what an awful woman,” Bryndis muttered, when we arrived at the
Berserker!
parking lot a few minutes later. Neither she nor Ragnar had said anything since we left the hotel.

“No argument there.” I wasn't feeling especially chatty, either.

“Lucinda is not awful, just frightened,” Ragnar piped up from the backseat, surprising us both.

“Really! What's she scared of?”

“That Judy will find love and leave her alone forever.” With that, he exited the car and headed toward the wardrobe trailer.

Out of the mouths of babes. Or berserkers.

The silent drive from the hotel had given me time to think, enough so that the suspicion that had been bubbling under the surface for the last few days had grown into a certainty.

Why hadn't I seen it earlier? Well, the answer was easy—too many suspects, too many victims, too many reasons to kill. Smoke and fog and misdirection. Last night, while reading the notes I'd typed in at Gullfoss, I'd come up with a theory, but it wasn't until I'd gone over a few more pages that it stopped being a mere theory. I knew who had killed Simon Parr. And Dawn, too.

“Bryndis, when we get back to Reykjavik, I want you to drop me off at the police station. I need to talk to Inspector Haraldsson. I can walk back to the apartment when I'm finished. It's only a few blocks.”

“Ah, so you have finally realized how good-looking he is!”

“Not exactly.”

“And he is crazy about you.”

“I'm crazy about someone else.”

“Then why do you wish to see him? Thor is a very busy man, but I know he would make time for love.”

I sighed. Bryndis might like to act the rough, tough Valkyrie, but at heart she was a soppy romantic. Same with Ragnar. Those two belonged together.

“I'll tell you why when I'm finished talking to Inspector Haraldsson. For now, let's watch the filming. Maybe we'll get lucky and see another battle.” Where the blood won't be real.

As we walked along the beach toward the film set, I noticed the sky had darkened with fat black clouds, and the North Atlantic surf crashed onto the sand rather than rolled. The cinematographer had been right: the lighting couldn't be better for a battle to the death.

Within minutes, Ragnar emerged from the wardrobe trailer, in his berserker loincloth. With a merry wave, he strode toward the set carrying his shield and sword. As we watched, he made it halfway across the marsh, then fell down. No death cries, no twitches, no convulsion, just the same face-plant that seemed to be inflicting other cast members.

Then a camera and a light rig toppled to the ground.

Then Bryndis.

Then me.

The air itself roared louder than the cries of a hundred dying men, but over the roar I could hear shouts and laughter from falling berserkers.

“Earthquake!” someone shouted.

A native Californian, I knew an earthquake when I felt it, so I didn't try to get up, just lay there as the ground rocked and rolled beneath me. After the first startling seconds, I'd relaxed. There was nothing to fear. Earthquakes could be scary, but experiencing one on a level beach felt much less frightening than enduring one in a crowded city. At Vik there were no skyscrapers or freeways to collapse, just a harmless series of bumps to ride out. Heck, I felt right at home.

“Thor strikes the ground with his mighty hammer!” Bryndis called, grinning.

There was no fear in her voice. As she'd once told me, Iceland averaged several earthquakes per week, and its inhabitants accepted them as a fixture of life. The quakes seldom caused any damage. Most were mere tremors, so minor they were hardly noticed. But this one felt like a California-sized whopper.

The roar in the air grew louder, then more specific. Curious, I shifted around to face the direction of the increased noise and saw something that made my sense of invulnerability vanish. Beyond the green hills of Vik, a thick column of smoke rose from glacier-capped Katla.

The volcano was erupting.