The Viking Witch Cozy Mysteries Books 1-3

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

It took longer than I thought it would at the realtor's office.

Then I stopped by the diner where I had been waiting tables since I was sixteen to pick up my last paycheck. I guess I had always known that was going to take longer than I had planned for. There were cards and cake and so many happy yet tearful hugs.

By the time Mjolner and I hit the road, it was already long past lunchtime. And despite the bellyful of cake, I stopped at Tobies when I was passing through Hinckley to grab a turkey sandwich on a toasted cranberry English muffin. Because stopping at Tobies when you're heading up north is not optional.

At least the Volkswagen wasn't making any funny noises beyond the rattle that was always there. I have no idea what is rattling or where, but I know I don't hear it when I turn up the radio. The Volkswagen had been my parents' car when they were first married, and they had driven it to Seattle and back more than once, but that had been decades ago. Lately, it was a rare day that it went as far as Minneapolis and mostly never ventured more than a few blocks from our house in St. Paul.

It groaned a bit as we climbed the last hill before reaching Duluth, and I did start to worry that it couldn't handle it.

But then we were over the top, and there was Duluth spread out before us. And beyond Duluth, nothing but Lake Superior for as far as the eye could see.

It looked cold. It pretty much always looks cold. Even now, with the setting sun lighting it up in bands of silver and gold, it radiated a warning. Don't fall into me. I'll suck the breath from your lungs before your head even goes under. I will pull you down to my coldest depths, where the light never, ever reaches.

So yeah, not exactly a friendly place. But I kind of loved it.

I hit Duluth's evening rush hour traffic, and the map on my phone kept recalculating my travel time every time I stopped at a traffic light or waited behind someone who needed to make a left. But once I was north of the city the road ahead opened up and the drive was more pleasant. To the left of me were trees, all in the full riot of autumn color. Back home, only a few maples had started turning, but just a few hours' drive north, and everything was scarlet and crimson and gold.

To my right, I could nearly always see the lake. Sometimes there were trees between me and it, but usually, I had a clear view. My mind that had been in a turmoil since saying good-bye to all my friends at the diner quieted again, even when the sun slipped behind the hills, and the waters were once more that forbidding steely gray.

I think I had gone out on it once as a kid. It must've been on a fishing vessel of some kind, but when I tried to bring up the memory, it kept getting twisted up with a drawing I had once done of Vikings on a ship. I've always loved to draw, and I loved to draw pictures that told epic stories, but I didn't remember having such a hard time telling fact from fiction. Even as a kid, I wasn't that imaginative.

Maybe I could've sorted out just what I did remember, but the phone kept interrupting my thoughts, making corrections to the projected arrival time. I glanced down at its screen, but the route in green hadn't changed. Runde was on the shore of Lake Superior, and everything in Minnesota on the shore of Lake Superior was on highway 61. It was impossible to get lost, really. And yet even as I looked at it the time changed again, from twenty minutes to forty-five.

Was there some inexplicable snarl of traffic up ahead in Grand Marais or something?

Was I even going as far north as Grand Marais?

I actually didn't know. When I had put my grandmother's address in the search field back at the diner it had laid out a long green line that stretched from where I was in St. Paul to a spot somewhere north of Duluth, and I had looked no closer since that was clearly the right direction.

I could back out of the directions and zoom out on the map to see where I was going, but I really hated doing that stuff when I was driving. The car wasn't the only thing that was only used to driving a few blocks away from home. Since my mother and I shared the car, I had walked or taken the bus half the time I needed to go somewhere. The highway had been less nerve-wracking than I had feared, but I could feel myself getting tired, my brain starting to fatigue from the monotonous yet not automatic activity of driving.

Yep, definitely not the time to start messing about with my phone.

But how far north was Runde? I tried to remember the ride up to it, or back from it, when I was a kid, but came up with nothing. Had I been there more than once? I thought I had. But I wasn't even sure if my parents had dropped me off or my grandmother had picked me up or what.

Then I saw something in front of me: lots of signage and some flags then a line of cars with the brake lights glowing red. I quickly hit the left turn signal and pulled off in a parking lot for some kind of tourist shop and general store wrapped into one.

I turned off the engine and then looked at Mjolner, who was still sitting in the passenger seat on top of all of my old art projects, gazing fixedly ahead through the windshield.

"That was the border," I told him. "I really don't think this place is in Canada."

Mjolner ignored me.

I took my phone out of its dashboard holder and realized the navigation had stopped. Great. How long had I been driving with no guidance? Had I bumped it when I was trying to look at it earlier? I went back to the search field and put the address in again, but this time it couldn't even tell me where this place was. It kept changing its mind, the map zooming in and out as the location dot changed position.

I had never seen it do this before.

Finally, I backed out of that app and scrolled through my contacts until I found my grandmother's name. I hesitated with my thumb hovering over the call button. I was pretty sure this number was hers. It had been written in blue ink in my mother's tattered old address book, but it's not like it would've changed. My grandmother hadn't moved, ever.

Unless she had gotten a cellphone? But I didn't think so. When she had tried to reach me, she had called the landline. And I know I had sent her my cellphone number months ago when my mother first started taking a turn for the worse, so we could be in touch when the end came.

But she hadn't given me a new number when she'd mailed the letter. This was all I had to try. I pushed the call button and crossed my fingers.

It rang more than seven times before it was picked up. Or maybe knocked over; at first, all I could hear was the sound of a room full of people all talking and laughing and occasionally roaring in good cheer. If this was a landline, my grandmother had taken to hosting epic parties since the summer I had spent with her.

"Hello?" I said when no one closer to the phone spoke. "Is anyone there?"

"Yeah," someone said. A man, older by the sound of it. Even with that one word, I could tell he was a northern local and definitely not from the Twin Cities. It was a very unhurried syllable.

"I'm looking for my grandmother?" I said, speaking louder since it seemed he might have a hard time hearing me over the cacophony around him.

"Who?"

"Mormor," I said, then winced. "I mean, Nora. Nora Torfa."

"Oh, yeah," he said, then dropped the phone with a clatter that had me holding my own phone a little further away from my ear.

Several minutes passed. I could still hear the sounds of a party, but one voice emerged from the general din. My grandmother, shouting orders it sounded like, but I couldn't make out the words. The phone receiver was picked up with another loud rattle of noise, but no one spoke into it. I was starting to worry that I was about to be hung up on when I heard the sound of a door closing, and the party sounds were finally muffled.

"Ingrid?" my grandmother said.

"Mormor," I said. "Are you having a party?"

"What?" she asked.

"Never mind," I said.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Um," I said, looking around. "Grand Portage?"

"Why are you in Grand Portage?" she asked.

"Because if I go any further north, I'll need a passport," I said.

"Why are you trying to get into Canada?"

"I'm not," I said. "I'm trying to get to you, but I think my phone is going crazy."

"Well, of course, your phone is going crazy," she said. I took a deep breath. This technophobic thing was going to be hard to work around.

"Look, I didn't even see any road signs," I said, although that might have been because I had been spending so much time looking at the lake and trying to remember things. But I didn't say that part out loud.

"Of course you didn't, letting your phone lead you around by the nose," she said. "I told you already; you have to use the map I sent you. Don't you still have it?"

"Yes, I still have it," I said, looking around the packed interior of the car. "Somewhere in here with me."

"Just follow the map, and you'll be fine," she said. "I have to get back out there, but I'll expect to see you within the hour. Follow the map. Then come find me in the meeting hall."

Then I was just holding my phone, listening to a very rudely loud dial tone. I tapped the hang-up button.

"Mjolner, do you know where I stuck mormor's letter?" I asked. Mjolner was washing his ears, but he paused in the motion to flick a paw against the glove compartment. I opened it up. The letter in its envelope was there resting on top of the remains of my mother's meager cassette collection.

Surely that was just a coincidence, his little paw flick. Although with Mjolner, it was a little hard to tell. I mean, I had given up doubting that he could walk through walls. "Thanks," I said.

He gave me a little mew, took one last swipe over his left ear, then slipped down off the seat to get back inside the transport crate jammed in front of the passenger seat. Not that that was even possible; the crate door was closed and pressed tightly against the front of the seat. But, like I said, he could get in or out of anything by some kind of feline teleportation.

Still, his wanting to be inside of something was weird. I mean, besides a room I went into and shut the door. Especially not his crate; he hated that thing.

I started the car and put the phone back in its holder, although I left the screen off. I looked at my grandmother's map, and for a moment, I was transfixed.

Neither of my parents could draw more than stick figures, and I had thought my skills an anomaly, but clearly I had gotten them from my grandmother. The edge of the lake was shaded so that it looked like it came up out of the page in 3D, the waves so close to moving before my eyes. The trees were identifiably autumn trees, a neat trick to pull off when all you're working with is black ink. And I should know; that's my preferred medium as well.

The road was clearly marked, and a few buildings were clustered around a crossroad. A restaurant on one corner, a gas station on the other, some undefined boxy building across from them, but nothing but tufts of grass on the fourth.

No roads were labeled, but I was sure I would spot the crossroad if I kept my eyes open and not on the lake this time.

Then I looked out the windshield and saw that not only was it full dark now, there was also so much fog blowing in it looked like I had decided to park on a Gothic horror movie set. One where the crew had gone to town with the dry ice.

This was going to get tricky.

I pulled out of the parking lot and started going back south. The lake was on my left now, but I couldn't see it through the fog. The hills of trees on my right were just as obscured. There was nothing but the road ahead of me, the stripes on the pavement reflecting my headlights back to me, the hypnotic swirls of cloudy fog parting to let my Volkswagen through.

Then I passed through a little town, not the one on my grandmother's map, but it heartened me all the same. I had seen the buildings through the wisps of fog, enough to know they weren't the buildings I was looking for. So this mission wasn't impossible.

But as minutes started becoming ever larger fractions of an hour, my heart sank again. I was driving more slowly south than I had going north, but still. I was going to end up back in Duluth, knowing I had missed Runde again. At that point, I would just have to dip into my savings and get a hotel room. There was no way I was going to try driving this road again. The fog was definitely getting thicker, and my mind was edging past exhaustion.

I glanced down at the seat beside me where the letter was resting. I had left it open, but it had tipped away from me, and I could no longer see the map. But there had been other landmarks sketched out on it. I should at least be able to tell if it was south of Grand Marais or north of the Splitrock Lighthouse or something. Some clue if I had gone too far.

I reached over to tip it back my way. I swear I only glanced away for a second, but in that second, everything changed.

I mean, like, the entire world. The fog had pulled me out of my normal time, or pulled something from the past into my time, or something.

Anyway, he was there, right in front of my car, larger than life. I don't think I even got a proper look at him before I pulled hard on the wheel to swerve out of the way.

My brain wouldn't make sense of it. I had only one thought. Or more of a question.

Was that really the Norse god Thor standing in the middle of Highway 61, his long red-gold hair and beard streaming wildly in a sudden wind, with a sword and an ax hanging from his belt, thrusting a spear out at me like a cross guard giving me a firm warning to give his wards the right of way?

Or was it just some random red-haired Viking?

Because seeing the Norse god Thor in the flesh in that moment somehow felt way crazier than just seeing a Viking not of the football-playing kind.

But that question was just a flash of thought. The instant I tried to swerve, my only thought was that the fog had made the road slicker than it looked, and even the slow speed I had been driving through the fog was far too fast to dodge around this spear-wielding warrior in time.

I jerked at the wheel, felt the tires hydroplaning over the pavement, and my back end started fishtailing. I went sideways for a moment, a long sickening moment where I feared I was going to start rolling end over end. From the widening of his eyes, I think the Viking thought so too, in that brief moment when I skidded past him.

Then I caught a glimpse of something else: a woman's body sprawled across the highway's centerline. She looked like a rag doll dropped to the ground, her long blonde hair fanning out all around her face, covering it from view.

Then I straightened the car back out and tried braking again. I saw the tree, far too late. I watched in slow motion as the front end of the trusty old Volkswagen crunching up like an accordion. There wasn't much front end to smash before everything reached me inside the car.

But then everything just went black.