The Winter Place (13 page)

“What for?” Jaana said, duly skeptical.

“I saw something over at one of the white tents. A souvenir. I'd like to get it for Mrs. Ridgeland. Just, you know, to thank her for everything.”

Axel knew, of course, that this was utter crap. Jaana seemed plenty suspicious as well, but even she wasn't quite cold enough to call Tess on it. Otso hooted “Of course!” and handed over a small wad of euros. Tess slipped out of her chair and said she'd be right back. She even did an excellent job of hiding her annoyance when Axel announced that he was coming too.

“Don't be long,” Jaana called after them. “We have packing to do this afternoon!”

Tess fast-walked away from the tented café, with
Axel right on her heels. “Where are you going?” he said under his breath.

“Not a word.” She turned to glance back at Otso, shrugging off his wave. “He's not so bad, but she's awful.”

Axel didn't think that Jaana was awful, exactly, but he didn't waste any breath sticking up for her. His grandma had yet to prove that she deserved even a small portion of the loyalty that Axel had invested in his sister. Tess moved quickly through the market. The tarp awnings up ahead changed from orange to white, where Kauppatori turned from a fish and vegetable market into a souvenir bazaar packed with tourists. There was plenty that Axel would have liked to take a closer look at—reindeer pelts, rune-scrawled knives and wooden drinking cups, candelabra made of antlers. One guy was even selling dulled battle-axes and Viking armor. Children's sizes were available.

“Nope,” Tess said, reading his expression. “They can still see us from here.” She turned a sharp right, heading for a low seawall that ran along the rear edge of Kauppatori. The water was thick with frothy wavelets, harbor taxis and ferries shuttling hither and yon, gulls bobbing atop their perpendicular wakes.

“What are you doing?” Axel said.

Tess answered him by fishing an unfamiliar
and painfully old-fashioned cell phone out of her pocket. Axel could only guess that it belonged to Otso, or Jaana, and that Tess had swiped it as they ate. He didn't have to ask whom she meant to call.

Tess dialed, and there was a long pause. Finally, she said: “Grandpa?” The connection must have been bad, or maybe she'd woken Grandpa Paul up, because she had to repeat it a few times. “Stay put,” she mouthed to Axel before backing away from the stalls, crossing to the very edge of the water, where the sound of small waves churning against the seawall offered some privacy. Still, Axel had no trouble hearing her end of the conversation. Tess was trying to convince Paul to let them come back to America, to live with him. Axel found this sort of odd. It's not that he didn't want it to happen, but Tess must have known how terribly unlikely it was. Axel had only a tenuous grip on real-world probabilities, and even he knew it. If keeping them had been too high a hurdle, how would Grandpa Paul ever manage to bring them back?

He scanned the market as his sister talked, inching back toward the stall that was selling the Viking gear. Tourists clustered here and there, bundled up against the gentle autumn chill in ski pants and draped frock coats, puffy down jackets and layered scarves. One guy wore a long Western-style duster, patched here and there with floral-print fabric. He
was perusing the iced catch spread out over the fishmonger's table, and even though Axel couldn't see his face, there was something familiar about him. The guy was a monster—the tallest person in a crowd of tall people. His body language indicated haggling, or giggling, or some other kind of jumpy vibrato commiseration with the fishmonger. Finally the slim giant settled on a fish, a lock-jawed salmon ugly as sin, and dropped the whole thing into his knapsack without so much as wrapping it in butcher paper. Then he adjusted his hat with his mangled left hand and turned to leave. There was no question that Axel had seen this man before. Just once—an ocean away, a lifetime ago, last week.

It was the Keeper.

Axel stood there for a moment, utterly dumbfounded. The old man was already at the far end of the market, headed in the direction of the esplanade and disappearing fast. Axel turned to call his sister, but she was still by the water, pleading with Grandpa Paul, and she paid him no mind. The Keeper was disappearing fast, and Axel made a decision. He rushed along the line of stalls, darting around shoppers with their plastic totes of peas and berries, careful to stay clear of the tented café where Jaana and Otso were waiting. The Keeper had reached the edge of Kauppatori, where a bicycle lane and a set of tram tracks hemmed the market
in from the rest of the city. He paused there briefly, while a column of spandex-clad riders whizzed past. The Keeper had slung his still-open knapsack over his right shoulder, and the salmon's bulldog skull peeked out, jellied eyes staring back in Axel's direction. In his mangled hand the Keeper held the same gnarly, driftwood-looking walking stick that he'd used on the night of Sam's death. His gum boots had been washed, and the lily of the valley in the band of his fedora had been replaced with a few sprigs of starflower.

Axel had mostly closed the distance when the last bike ticked past, but the Keeper turned a sharp left, heading quickly up the water's edge. There were a few boats here, tied off in wet little paddocks demarcated by scum-lined concrete breakers. Teenagers sat with their legs dangling over the water, sharing headphones and plastic bottles of fizzy cider, puffing conspicuously on blunt cigarettes. Up ahead was a low building, made of multicolored bricks, set against the water—it looked like an old customs house. The Keeper disappeared inside, and Axel followed. The building had been redone as a covered arcade filled with amber-lit food stalls, but the Keeper strode past without even a glance, banging through a set of saloon-style doors at the far end. Axel lost sight of him as the doors swung closed, so he picked up the pace. A second later he was through the doors
as well, standing outside again in a big parking lot, completely alone.

Axel ventured a few steps into the lot. There were some parked cars, though none of them big enough to conceal somebody so tall and spider-gangly. He turned to peer around both sides of the narrow customs house, in case the Keeper had realized he was being followed and doubled back. But he wasn't there. Beyond the lot was a small city park, but it was too distant for the Keeper to have reached, even if he'd gone at a flat sprint the moment those saloon-style doors swung shut behind him. It was as though the man had simply disappeared.

Here is where things started to get weird. More weird than was usual, even for Axel. A haze of exhaustion came over him, sick and sudden. There was a bench set up against the wall of the customs house, and it was all Axel could do to take the six or seven steps required to get himself to it. He sat there, feeling faint as he gazed out into the park. It seemed unusually lush for this time of year and this far north. Way too lush—bizarrely tropical, in fact. The trees were heavy with broad leaves, draped in webs of woody vines, gem set with orchids. There were animals in there, moving among the trees. Not waddling geese, or dogs on leashes, or sad little ponies hauling kids around a track.
Elephants.
Live ones, wandering beneath the forested canopy, pulling down branches with their trunks to browse on new growth. This seemed not at all strange to people—joggers bounced along the park perimeter without so much as a glance at the preposterous goings-on inside. Then, right before Axel's eyes, the trees began to shiver and shrink. Suddenly the park was grassy, dotted with buffalo. A moment later the trees were back—or no, not trees. Cacti. It was a high desert, snow dusting the spiny, rounded heads of the cacti, terrified owls peeking out from holes in their desiccated trunks. Then it was nothing but a city park again, leafless and bare, as was appropriate for Finland in the fall.

“Moi,”
someone said. “Hello again.” The Keeper was seated beside Axel on the bench, as though he'd been there all along. His knapsack rested between his knees, the salmon bearing its scraggly underbite up at them with dead pride. “Tell me, do you prefer English or Finnish?”

Axel just gaped at him. He was thinking two things: the first was that he really hoped he wasn't imagining this, because if that were the case, then it'd be as big a red flag as had ever flown atop his sanity. The second was that he sort of hoped he
was
imagining it. Because if this were actually happening, then it represented a much graver red flag. This was a massive point against a world that
was supposed to make at least a little sense.

“All right, then,” the Keeper said. “I prefer Finnish, so Finnish it is. But remember that you didn't vote, so you don't get to complain.” He reached into the open knapsack and pulled out a long, elfin pipe, slick with rubbed-off salmon scales. He tapped the pipe bowl against the underside of the bench, producing a musical clonk and discharging a knot of ashes onto the cobbles below. Then, plucking some tobacco from inside his duster, he began the work of stuffing the bowl. “So,” he said, glancing diagonally across the water, back at Kauppatori. “Looks like you made it a whole four minutes before giving up. Bravo.” With the pipe stuffed, he produced a box of wooden matches. His lips puckered awfully as he puffed. “I don't mean that,” he said. “I'm being sarcastic. You did terribly.”

“You're the man we saw at my house.” The obviousness of this statement was enough to make Axel wince, but it was all he could think to say. The Keeper made no answer, sucking busily on his pipe, like he was still waiting for their conversation to begin. Axel could feel the exhaustion ebbing out of him and other things ebbing in. “How did you know that I was following you?” he said. The shape of Finnish words felt oddly natural in Axel's mouth.

The Keeper uncorked the pipe from his face and
pointed the delicate stem back at the market. “I was following you before you were following me. A waste of time, I'm afraid. Because clearly”—he scowled at the distance between Kauppatori and their bench—“you're not nearly up to the task.”

Axel was savvy enough to know when he was being baited—it happened plenty at school. He was supposed to ask:
Up to what task?
And boy did he ever want to. But hallucination or no, it was probably a bad idea to play into this creeper's hands. “Where was I supposed to go?” he said. “You disappeared.”

“Further proof.” The Keeper blew a smoke ring so thick it looked like a doughnut. “You think you get to
see
what you're looking for? You think anybody does?” He gestured dismissively at the harbor market with his busted hand. “Best run off to Grammy and Grampy.”

Axel reached down and touched the zipper tag of the Keeper's knapsack. It sure felt real. The man smiled ever so slightly, like a fisherman who's sensed the first tug on his line.

“How did you get here?”

“Straight to the point.” The Keeper let his smile blossom. “We hoofed it, I'm afraid.” He began scratching at his temple with the spent end of his match, leaving an ashy rune on his pink skin.

“I mean here, as in Finland,” Axel said.

“Do you not know what ‘hoofed it' means?” The old man seemed patently delighted by how impossible an answer he was giving. “We
walked
. Flights are so expensive these days, and of course, a brown bear does present certain complications.”

“The bear is here, too?” Axel asked.

“Not exactly,” the Keeper said. “But close enough. The old girl is resting up.”

“So . . . were you working at the faire, then? Are you two on tour?”

The Keeper's thin lips collapsed, his smile imploding. “Of course we don't work for the faire,” he said. “But if you insist on being dim about it, then sure, I suppose you could say we're on a tour. Or, no—call it a hunt. ‘Hunt' is a far more appropriate word.”

“Okay, then,” Axel said, figuring he might as well take the bait. “What are you hunting?”

“The same thing you are,” the Keeper said. “Sam Fortune.”

The sound of his father's name would have been enough to knock the wind out of Axel, if he hadn't already been holding his breath. “How do you know that name?” he said.

“I had hoped this would be obvious,” the Keeper said, grinning once again because he knew it so wasn't obvious. “I learned it from the bear.”

There wasn't much Axel could think to say to
this, and they both fell silent. The tobacco ember crackled in the Keeper's pipe, and out in the harbor one of the cruise ships sounded its tremendous horn. Axel wondered how much time had passed since he'd slipped away from Tess. She'd probably finished talking to Grandpa Paul by now and noticed that he was missing.

“She doesn't want to stay here,” the Keeper said, as though he'd read Axel's mind. “She's still trying to charm your old drunk of a grandfather. Trying to shame him into letting you both go back to America to live with him. It's never going to happen. Paul Fortune is a building on fire.” Whatever that meant, the Keeper fell silent for a moment to drive it home. “The Kivis want to take you up north, to a place called Talvijärvi. This
must
happen.”

How the old man knew about Jaana and Otso's planned trip to the summer place, or Grandpa Paul's problems, it was impossible to say. It was no more bizarre, certainly, than him muttering the name of Axel's dead father. Or the fact that, just some minutes ago, Axel had been watching wild elephants foraging in the jungles of downtown Helsinki.

“She's up in Talvijärvi right now,” the Keeper went on, “in the woods, by the lake. She's waiting for you.” Axel opened his mouth to ask whom he meant, but he felt like he had a pretty good guess.
The bear was waiting for him in Talvijärvi.

The Keeper flicked his match into the harbor, braced his mangled hand on the head of his walking stick, and stood. He scooped up the knapsack and slung it over his shoulder again. For a moment he seemed about to walk away. But then he turned back to Axel, all his playfulness suddenly drained. “Your sister isn't the only one who is trying to stop you,” the Keeper said. “
It's
still out there—you can't think that you've lost it. Only a matter of time before it follows you here.”