Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery (10 page)

She liked to read about them,
certainly. The idea that the soul could linger after the body was
gone was fascinating. The reality of it, perhaps not quite so
appealing. Not that she’d ever experienced anything even remotely
supernatural. As susceptible as she was to a good story, she seemed
to lack the sensitivity to actual paranormal phenomena, if they
existed. Too much of a bookworm, maybe. Too scholarly. Too much in
her head to be observant of things outside. Especially things on a
different plane. Paying attention to the one they all lived on was
hard enough.

“That’s not an answer,” Curt
said.

Annika shrugged. “This is an eerie
place. The whole town is eerie. The age of it, and the history. All
the bloodshed. If that poor woman really was walled up here, that’s
creepy enough. I don’t need ghosts to make it creepier.”

“But if you were walled up alive,”
Curt said, seemingly unwilling to let the subject go, “wouldn’t you
come back and haunt the place?”

Honestly? Probably not. She was
more likely to want to haunt the people who did the walling up, to
be honest. And they were long gone. What would be the point of
haunting a piece of ground some seven hundred years later? Just to
scare random tourists?

She looked around, at the bulk of
the tower and the length of the wall, disappearing into the
distance. “It’s impressive. Especially when you realize they did
all this without any of the tools we have today.”

The walls were several meters
tall, not to mention thick, and the towers—there were twenty
seven—were all between fifteen and twenty feet high. And the people
of Gotland had done all this many hundreds of years ago. Not as
impressive as the immense blocks used to build the far more immense
pyramids of Giza, perhaps, but there had been a whole lot of work
involved in stacking this wall, and this tower, stone by stone, as
well.

And of course the legend was
intriguing. It had all the hallmarks of a bestselling novel. The
small-town girl, the visiting monarch, the torrid affair. And then
the attack and betrayal and judgment. If this had been a book, the
girl would have been a witch, who would have gone on to curse her
faithless lover from her dark prison, causing everything he touched
from that day forward to wither and die. Maybe that was why
Valdemar IV had had only one child, and that one a daughter.

Annika suppressed another shiver
at her own imagination. If she could write, she’d totally write the
book. And probably make millions.

“Cold?” Curt said and put an arm
around her shoulders. It felt different than when Nick had done the
same thing last night. She’d wanted to snuggle into Nick’s warmth.
Curt’s arm felt heavy.

“A little.” She resisted the urge
to shrug it off. He meant well.

“Are you ready to go back?”

She supposed she was. It was
getting colder now that the sun had set, and she wasn’t wearing a
jacket. Curt wasn’t either. Nick would have been, and would
probably have offered it to her.

Stop thinking about him. He isn’t
here. You probably won’t ever see him again.

Somehow, that knowledge didn’t
help at all.

Curt walked her all the way back
to the door to the hotel, and stopped there to grin down at her.
“Want me to come up? Make sure there are no ghosties and ghoulies
under the bed? This place is old too, you know. I’m sure it’s seen
its share of death and destruction.”

“That’s not necessary.” Annika was
pleased to hear that her voice was steady. Good Lord, it was almost
like he was trying to make her afraid, wasn’t it? “I like my room.
It’s cozy. And I’m sure it’s not haunted. If it had been, I’m sure
I would have heard of it.”

“I could stay the night. Make sure
you don’t get cold.” He winked.

Annika smiled. Primly. “I don’t
think we’ve known each other quite long enough for that. Do
you?”

Curt shrugged. “I like you.”

“I like you too. Just...”

Just not enough
to sleep with you the same day I met you
.

Curt nodded. “Will I see you
tomorrow?”

“I don’t see why not. It’s a small
town.”

He looked like she’d kicked him.
“Don’t you want company when you go talk to old
what’s-his-name?”

Gustav. And no, she didn’t. Curt
couldn’t even be bothered to remember the man’s name. Why would she
want him to accompany her? And besides, she wanted to talk to
Gustav on her own. Her relationship with her dad, and her dad’s
life in Brooklyn, were private. She’d share the information with
Gustav, since he’d been a friend of her father’s, but she wouldn’t
share it with Curt. She didn’t know him well enough.

You shared it
with Nick
, her subconscious reminded
her.

That was
different
. He’d acted like he was
interested.

But didn’t Curt also act like he
was interested? It wasn’t his fault she compared him to Nick and he
fell short.

She gave him a smile. “How about I
get in touch with you in the morning?” After she got back, but he
didn’t need to know that.

He smiled back. “Sure. You know
where to find me.”

She did. At the Clarion or Best
Western or whatever.

“Good night.” She hesitated for a
second before going up on her tippy-toes to kiss his cheek. At the
last second, he turned his head so she found his lips instead.

Annika froze. And stood there for
a second with her lips, stiff now, against Curt’s. Since it wasn’t
what she’d intended to do, the whole thing was awkward.

“Good night,” Curt said. If the
less than successful kiss bothered him, he didn’t show it.

Maybe he doesn’t
know the difference
.

She shook off the thought. It
wasn’t like she was any authority on kisses herself, after all.

Curt watched her walk inside the
hotel and close the front door behind her, and then he continued
down the street toward the harbor, whistling. Annika listened to
the song fade into the distance before she turned away from the
door and surveyed the hotel lobby.

It was empty. The desk was empty,
too. This was a family hotel—in the U.S. they’d probably call it a
bed and breakfast—and the family went home and to bed in the
evening. The front door stayed open until ten; after that, it was
the guests’ responsibility to let themselves in and make sure the
door was locked behind them when they did.

It was well before that now, but
obviously the family had already gone to their own quarters for the
night. Annika made sure the door was latched before heading
upstairs to her own room.

The stairs were narrow and dark,
and so was the upstairs hallway. She unlocked the door and pushed
it open, only to be hit with a powerful moment of déjà-vu as soon
as she stepped across the threshold.

On the face of it, this room
looked nothing like last night’s room. Her lodgings at the Lady
Hamilton Hotel had been large and airy with tall ceilings and
elegant Gustavian furnishings, while her room here in Visby was on
the small side and tucked away under the eaves: safe, cozy and
peasant-like. But at the moment, they had one thing in common. Just
like in her room in Stockholm, someone had been here while she was
out. But this someone hadn’t been as careful not to leave any
traces of his—or her—presence.

Everything Annika
possessed—everything she had brought with her to Gotland—was dumped
in a pile on the floor. Shorts, underwear, her beautiful silk dress
and scarf. Drawers and cabinet doors hung open, the blankets and
sheets were ripped off the bed and were trailing onto the floor,
and the mattress was askew, as if someone had either lifted it, to
peer underneath, or had pushed it in anger.

There was definitely anger
involved. Annika could feel the residue of it, humming in the
air.
Maybe you’re more sensitive
than you’re giving yourself credit for
.

Or maybe it was just that she
could see it, in the emotion that had caused the intruder to slash
the mattress and the pillows with something sharp. Stuffing was
everywhere, in clumps on the floor and spilling out of the mattress
in a tangle, like intestines from a mutilated body: a victim of
Valdemar Atterdag’s attack in 1861.

Heart beating uncomfortably fast,
almost like it was trying to knock a hole in her chest, Annika
backed out of the room, slowly, before spinning on her heel in the
hallway and scrambling down the stairs.

The lobby was still empty
when she got downstairs, and it took running to the back of the
hotel, to the door marked
Privat
, and hammering on it, before she
found someone who could help.

“
Ja
?” The woman who opened the door,
slim and strong in her forties, with blonde hair cropped short, was
the same who had checked Annika in this afternoon.

“Someone’s been in my room!”

“
Förlåt?
”

“My room.” Annika took a deep
breath and did her best to annunciate clearly. The woman had spoken
good English, but of course it wasn’t her native language, and with
the way Annika’s voice squeaked and she was tripping over her
words, it was no wonder her hostess found it hard to understand. “I
just came back from dinner, and someone’s been in my room while I
was out.”

“Your room? Who?”

“Please.” Annika resisted the urge
to grab the woman by the arm and pull her upstairs, forcibly. “Just
come and look.”

The owner glanced over her
shoulder—Annika could hear the sound of a TV from the other room;
maybe the woman had company back there—but then she stepped out and
pulled the door shut behind her.

They walked up the stairs in
silence, up to the second floor hallway, where Annika’s door still
gaped open. The owner gestured to it. “You found it like this when
you came back?”

Annika shook her head. “I had to
open it. I left it this way when I ran downstairs just now. But it
was locked while I was out.”

The woman tilted her head. “How do
you know someone was there?”

“I’ll show you.” Annika walked to
the open door and peered in. Everything was still in disarray.
“Look.” She pointed.

The woman came up next to
her and looked inside the room. And paled. “
Herregud!
”

Exactly. Annika had no idea what
the word meant, but it sounded good. In fact, it sounded so good
she might start using it herself. She tried it out a couple of
times under her breath while the hotel owner made her careful way
into the room and looked around.

Eventually she turned back to
Annika. “Who did this?”

“I have no idea. I came back from
dinner and found it this way.” The only person she knew in Visby
was Curt, and he’d been with her the whole time.

“You locked the room when you went
out?”

She was pretty sure she had.
They’d given her a key. Although there wasn’t anything in the room
worth stealing, really. What she’d brought of Swedish money was in
her purse, along with her wallet. Her plane ticket and passport
were still where she’d left them, on the bedside table. They looked
disturbed—the ticket was beside the passport instead of inside it,
as if someone had picked up the passport and flipped the pages to
check her personal information or departure date—but they were both
still there. She could see the navy blue passport book and the
long, narrow ticket from where she was standing. She didn’t carry
any jewelry, not other than the chandelier earrings she’d bought in
Stockholm yesterday, and they weren’t real. And she had already
lost her eReader at Arlanda airport, along with her father’s ashes.
There wasn’t much else she owned that anyone might want.

The hotel owner shook her head
back and forth, clucking. “You can’t spend the night here.”

No, she couldn’t. She’d been a
little bothered by the fact that someone had been in her room in
Stockholm, but whoever it was had been unobtrusive enough that
she’d been able to tell herself it might just have been hotel
staff, making sure everything was all right. She’d slept all right
last night. But this... this felt like a violation. This made her
worry that whoever had been here would come back sometime in the
middle of the night, and would kill her in her sleep.

“I have a full house,” the hotel
owner said. “I have no other room to offer you. But I can call my
friend Lena and ask if she has any rooms available. She has a place
like this, but near the north gate.”

“That would be great,” Annika said
gratefully. She could go to the Clarion or Best Western, she
supposed, but she’d rather stay in one of the old inns. And since
she was going out the north gate tomorrow morning anyway, staying
close to it would be very convenient. “Thank you.”

“You go ahead and pack your things
while I go downstairs and call Lena.”

Annika nodded and turned toward
the door. And swallowed and squared her shoulders before plunging
back into the room.

Packing up her few belongings
didn’t take long, and when she came down the stairs with her
shopping bag stuffed full of clothes, with her passport and ticket
safely tucked away in her purse once more, the hotel owner met her
in the lobby. “Lena has a room you can have. This is her address.”
She gave Annika a piece of paper ripped off a hotel notepad, with
an address written on it. There was even a hastily scrawled map on
the back, with arrows and instructions for how to get to Lena’s
place.

Annika peered at it. The
directions didn’t seem difficult, and Visby—the part of it inside
the city walls—was small enough that it shouldn’t be more than a
few minutes walk from here to there. “Thank you.”

“It’s the least I can do.” The
hotel owner gave her a big smile. “I hope this hasn’t turned you
off Gotland. We have a great town here, and I hope you’ll have a
wonderful time visiting.”