Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery (18 page)

“You were nineteen, ma,” Nick said.
“Annika’s twenty seven. And she’s just here on a short trip. It’s
different.” Not to mention that he was supposed to be investigating
her, not providing a shoulder to cry on.

“Just do it,” his mother snapped. And hung
up on him.

Nick scowled at the phone.
Great
.
Three for three. Three phone calls, three people who’d hung up in
his ear.

Growling, he went back to dissecting
Annika’s luggage while he kept an ear out for her footsteps on the
stairs.

Visby had several libraries with books to borrow and children’s
departments offering puppet shows on Wednesday mornings.

It also had a branch of the country
archives; one of only about a half dozen spread throughout the
kingdom of Sweden. The most requested research material, the
librarian told Annika, was the census records of the population of
Gotland starting in the 1600s until the process became computerized
in 1991.

“My father was born on Gotland sixty two
years ago. Would his information be here?”

“Certainly.” The librarian asked for date of
birth and name, and pulled out the appropriate birth record. Annika
held it reverently between two fingers. There it was. Baby boy,
born in Martebo on the 14
^th
of July, son of Margareta
and Björn Magnusson. The name Carl was filled in in a different
hand and a different color pen later.

Annika handed it back across the counter.
“What about the parents? Do you have any information about
them?”

The librarian dug some more and came up with
more information. Both of Annika’s grandparents were native
Gotlanders. Björn had died early, while his son Carl was still just
a boy, but Margareta had lived to see her son grow up and—yes—leave
Gotland. She’d still been alive when Astrid was born, although by
the time Andy had made his appearance and Annika came along,
Margareta had passed on too. Annika spent a few minutes digging
further back in the family, through a few generations of ancestors,
but was unable to find anyone she was related to that might still
be alive. It seemed the line had died out with her father and now
her.

While she leafed through papers, the
librarian turned to Curt, who was prowling the lobby behind Annika.
“Can I help you, sir? Are your relatives also from around
here?”

Curt came up to stand beside Annika at the
counter, close enough that his arm brushed hers. She took a
half-step to the side to give him more room. “They are. But I don’t
need to look them up. My mother told me all about them.”

“What was your mother’s name?” The
librarian’s fingers were poised over the files.

Curt hesitated, but eventually he said,
“When she died, her last name was Gardiner. But she was born a
Bergman. Caroline.”

“Lots of Bergmans around here. I don’t
recall anyone with that name, however...”

“It doesn’t matter,” Curt said. “And anyway,
she’s dead now too.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?” The
librarian busied herself by putting the papers away in their
respective places.

“Cancer,” Curt said.

That had to be tough, Annika thought. At
least when her father died, it had been quick and unexpected. No
time to worry, nor to mourn. But to sit by and watch a loved one
die by degrees every day, had to be incredibly hard. And Curt had
clearly been close to his mother. She could hear it in his voice
when he spoke of her.

She reached out and patted Curt’s arm, and
got a glance and a faint smile in return.

“We’d like to see the newspaper archives,”
Annika added. You have those here too, right?”

“Certainly.” The librarian nodded. “Down the
hall, last door on the left. Someone there can help you.”

“Thank you.” Annika headed down the hall
with Curt on her heels, wishing she’d started the day wearing
something other than these skimpy shorts. Many houses and buildings
on Gotland—and in Sweden in general—were without air conditioning.
The climate in Scandinavia was freezing in the winter and rarely
went beyond comfortably warm in the summer. But the library was
temperature controlled because of the collections, and the
artificial chill hit her legs like a blast from a refrigerator. She
also felt underdressed. The shorts had been fine for outside, where
everyone else was also dressed casually. But in here, so much like
where she worked at the Brooklyn College Library, she felt almost
indecent. Not to mention the smears of red-brown on her blue
shorts. At some point she must have brushed up against Gustav’s
body, or perhaps she had inadvertently wiped her hands against her
hips.

But at least Curt was in no better shape.
More decent, yes—his corduroys covered him from waist to floor—but
they weren’t as clean as they could be. They were spotted as well
as stained along the bottoms from dragging the ground when he
walked. He looked like someone who had lost some weight recently,
someone who couldn’t be bothered to update his wardrobe with
clothes that fit better. Probably another effect of his mother’s
death. Maybe she’d fed him as well as done his laundry. The poor
guy was learning to cope on his own. Annika turned her head to give
him another smile, but he was too busy leering at her legs to
notice. She turned back again, her cheeks pink.

Another librarian manned the newspaper
archives, and was happy to help Annika figure out what she wanted
to look for, and help her get it.

Tiny Martebo didn’t have its own newspaper,
but Annika figured she’d start with any news involving the small
community. Her father had grown up there, her grandparents had
lived there, and—according to Chief Steen—the house they’d shared
had burned down, possibly as a result of arson, after her father
left Gotland. It seemed reasonable that it would have rated a
mention in the paper when it happened.

She began with the time her father had left
Gotland some thirty five years ago, and worked her way forward in
time. And hit pay dirt about three years later. In newspaper time,
not in time it took to dig up the article. That only took fifteen
or twenty minutes, during which Curt prowled the room behind her
and stopped occasionally to peer over her shoulder at the
information scrolling by.

“You can leave,” Annika said, more than
once, but he always told her he’d wait for her.

“We can have dinner when you’re
finished.”

Sure. Whatever. She went back to her search.
And found what she was looking for when a headline screamed
Brand i Martebo
, accompanied by a photograph of a blazing
fire.

Annika turned to Curt. “Do you read
Swedish?”

He nodded. “Sure. Don’t you?”

“My father never taught me. Can you
translate this? Not word for word, just let me know what it
says.”

“Sure.” He put a hand on her shoulder to
lean in, close enough that she could feel his breath brush her
cheek on his way past. She suspected he snuck a peek down into her
neckline too, but she wasn’t about to turn her head to find out. It
wasn’t worth making a fuss over, anyway. There wasn’t much to see
down there.

He scanned the text. It wasn’t a long
article. “It says an empty house outside Martebo burned to the
ground in the early hours of Sunday morning. The owner had died a
few weeks earlier, and the house was sitting empty while the police
tried to find her next of kin for him to decide what to do with the
place. And then it burned down.”

That sounded like what Chief Steen had told
her. The next of kin the police had been looking for must have been
her father. She wondered if they’d ever found him. If so, he hadn’t
said anything about it. Of course, she hadn’t been alive yet when
her grandmother passed away. But she couldn’t recall her father
ever even mentioning his mother. It was as if he’d sprung into
being fully formed. “Does it say anything about what happened?”

Had it been electrical failure? Lightning
strike? Or carelessness on someone’s part?

Curt shook his head. “Just that the fire
department is investigating.”

That didn’t sound like a lightning strike,
anyway. If there had been thunder and lightning that night, surely
someone would have come to the conclusion that it was to blame for
the fire.

“Maybe there’s another article.” She went
back to scrolling, in the other direction now, after sending the
article to the printer for a hardcopy. Curt resumed pacing.

The next mention was a week or so later, and
again, Annika had to ask Curt to translate.

“It says that the cause of the fire has been
determined to be arson,” he said after scanning the article. “See
that word right there?” He turned his head to look at her, his face
a bit too close for comfort, and stabbed a finger at the screen.
“It means arson.”

Annika tried it out.
Mordbrand
. Even
the taste of it on the tongue was a little unpalatable. Not as nice
to say as
Herregud
. She looked back at the screen. “Does it
say why?”

Curt shook his head and eased back a
little.

“That’s strange, isn’t it? I mean, for
someone to torch the place, you’d think they’d have to have had a
reason.”

Curt shrugged. “Maybe it was kids. The place
was sitting empty. Maybe they were hanging out, smoking and
drinking, and it was an accident. Or maybe they did it on purpose,
to hide that they’d been there. The article says that the neighbors
had noticed lights for a few nights before the fire, but they just
chalked it up to the usual paranormal activity.”

“Paranormal activity?” Annika said.

Curt grinned. “Haven’t you heard of the
Martebo lights?”

Annika shook her head.

“I’m surprised your dad didn’t tell you
about them.” He propped his hip against the computer table, to be
able to look down at her.

“He wasn’t really the type to tell stories,”
Annika said and scooted her chair back a couple of inches.

Curt nodded. “Sure. Well, people have been
seeing lights for a hundred years or more. Unexplained lights, with
no one around to cause them. So there’s been talk about alien
spaceships and all sorts of things.”

“I don’t believe in aliens,” Annika
said.

Curt smiled. “Well, have you changed your
mind about the ghosts? Because they say that’s what causes the
lights. The ghost of a man named Knut Stare.”

Annika fought back the chill that threatened
to creep down her spine. “Who was Knut Stare?”

“He was a man who lived in Martebo in the
1700s. Just him and his son.” Curt dropped his voice into a
half-whisper, for effect. “One night, soldiers came knocking on his
door. They wanted food and drink, and they made Knut drink with
them. He fell asleep, and when he woke up, the soldiers were gone.
And they had taken his son with them. Knut never found him again,
although he never stopped looking. They say he still does.”

“That’s horrible.”

Curt grinned. “We could rent a car if you
wanted. Drive up there. See what we can see. It’s not long until
dark.”

“This is Sweden,” Annika pointed out. “It
never gets completely dark this time of year. And besides, I plan
to go to Martebo tomorrow morning. There’s a bus.”

“You won’t be able to see the lights in the
daytime.”

“I’m not going for the lights,” Annika said.
“I’m going to see where the house stood and the village where my
father grew up and my grandmother’s grave, if it’s there.”

“Fine,” Curt said. “The bus is probably
cheaper anyway.”

Probably. Annika hadn’t intended it as an
invitation, but if he wanted to visit Martebo at the same time she
did, she didn’t suppose she could stop him. And it wasn’t like this
morning, when she’d wanted to talk to Gustav alone. Having company
might actually be nice. She’d prefer it if it was Nick, but that
particular ship seemed to have sailed. He hadn’t even bothered to
wait for her at the police station earlier.

Before the thought, and the accompanying
feelings of inferiority, could take root, she refocused her
attention on the screen. She had no time to moon over Nick Costa.
The collections would probably close soon, and she still had a lot
of research she wanted to do before then.

For the next hour, she looked for references
to her father. There weren’t many. It seemed Carl Magnusson hadn’t
been the kind of boy who excelled in sports or academics, or who
made news in any other way. He was mentioned once in a caption of a
photograph taken in connection with
Medeltidsveckan
, the
medieval festival that took place in Visby in August every year,
but that was much later. Best as she could figure, he had been
around thirty at the time, and had dressed up in medieval garb to
be part of the festivities. He was in a group with a few other
men—one a jester, several knights—and was smiling at the camera. It
wasn’t a look she had seen often growing up, and she just sat and
stared at it for a moment, dumbstruck.

He’d been a handsome man when he was young.
Astrid and Andy had both inherited his looks. She wondered if Andy
had any idea how much he looked like his old man, right down to the
smile. But hopefully her brother, with enough determination to move
all the way to Costa Rica and make a go of his surfing business,
wouldn’t end up a lonely drunk in a dive in Brooklyn, shot for the
money in his pocket.

She shook off the sadness and looked at the
picture again. The jester looked familiar too, but it took her a
moment to place the features. Then she realized: it was Gustav,
just as young as her father, with a silly grin on his face and
bells on his cap, hamming for the camera. The third man also looked
like someone she might have seen at some point, but she couldn’t
place him; she just knew there was something familiar there.
Although really, with the costumes and headgear, it was surprising
she recognized anyone at all.