Chapter 14

It had snowed all night. They say that no two snowflakes are alike but they sure looked the same lying in heaps and banks around her house. Jonas had wanted to stay, but his 11th graders were up for some tough tests. “Can I take your sjekte? I left mine in town yesterday.” Of course. She wasn’t going anywhere.

After Jonas had left, Gerd snuggled deeper down in the quilts and went back to sleep. When she woke up an hour later it was still dark. She remembered strange, disturbing dreams. Someone had been fighting. She could still recall the two men from her dream: one tall and dark, the other shorter and blond. They had worn strange clothes that looked like fur. A woman was shouting for them to stop but they paid her no heed. Gerd knew the woman wasn’t her because at times she was inside the woman and at times an observer, and when she was an observer, the woman was tall and red-haired. The woman was desperate. She threw herself at the two combatants just as the shorter one pulled a dagger from under his cloak and stabbed the taller man. The woman screamed as if her heart had been torn beating from her body. Gerd had woken up covered in sweat and fear.

It took several minutes for Gerd to regain her senses. Her left hand was hanging over the edge of the bed and it was being licked. “Oh, Nurket, you are the best dog,” she thought, and smiled at the golden puppy. From downstairs, Bamse meowed his pitiful “get me breakfast” howl.

At long last, the spirit was reunited with the body. She hobbled over to her closet, wondering why the inside of her skull felt like cotton wool.

In her kitchen she found that the coffee maker had been made ready and pushed the button. Only then did she turn to the furious cat and bent down to pet him. Bamse would have none of that and almost hissed at her. She found his favorite can of cat food and emptied sardines in aspic into his bowl. There was a note on the kitchen counter.

I took your sjekte. Will be done around 3pm today and I’ll bring it back.

Don’t go anywhere.

It wasn’t signed. With the first cup of coffee ready, Gerd carelessly slathered some butter on a slice of bread and added some red dye # 1 Danish salami and a slice of home-made pickled cucumber. Right now she wasn’t worried about early death from nitrates and nitrites. She brought the cup and the open-face sandwich to the living room windows. The view was white. Snow was falling still and she could hardly see the ocean. “I really should have checked the nets,” she thought and was secretly glad that she didn’t have a boat to do just that. Let the salmon swim a few hours more.

Tah tah tah ta! Something was playing the victory signal from the war. A new introduction to the marine forecast? No, it was her cell phone, blast the thing.

“Hei, this is Gerd.”

“Well, you sound like little miss sunshine this morning.” The voice was Jutta’s.

“Oh, get lost, girlfriend. What do you want?” Gerd nearly growled.

“Nice greeting when all I wanted to do was thank you.”

“Thank me for what?”

“I can hear you are still on your first cup of coffee. No such luck over here. I have two wild children climbing all over me wanting to see your dog that I told them about. Svein is running around diaperless shouting ‘doggie, doggie’ while Henriette is applying her artistic skills to drawing pictures of Cujo. Can we come over?”

Come over? “Jutta, there’s a frigging snowstorm going on,” said Gerd, more tersely than intended.

“We don’t mind. How can you live on an island if you’re going to be dictated to by the weather? We have snow suits and we know the way. Please?”

The desperation in Jutta’s voice was evident. Kids are fun in small doses all right, but 24/7? Gerd relented.

“Of course. Bring them over. Jonas took my sjekte to town this morning anyway so I’m stranded. What did you want to thank me for?”

“Oh, for your nice words at Einar’s funeral.” Jutta’s lowered her voice. “Did you see how the Gundersens left? I’m concerned about her. Those teenagers look way too submissive for my liking.”

“I know what you mean,” Gerd replied. “I’ll tell you what I saw at their house when there are no kids around, OK? See you soon.” Gerd rung off.

What could she make that kids would like? Boller, that was the thing. Gerd knew she had yeast, sugar, and flour. Maybe there were some raisins in the cupboard. She went into the kitchen, poured herself more coffee, and started pulling out ingredients.

Hveteboller a la Ljoset

½ kg flour

3 ¾ dcl milk

60 grams yeast

125 grams sugar

½ teaspoon cardamom

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

120 grams butter

50 grams raisins

She set the milk to heat on the front burner and melted the butter in the miniature pan she kept just for that purpose. When the milk was skin temperature, she poured it into her big mixing bowl and added the yeast and sugar. Stirred a while; the yeast needed to dissolve completely. She added the cardamom to the mix and then the melted, cooled butter. The yeast seemed to enjoy the butter and sugar and started multiplying right away. Now the flour and the cream of tartar. Gerd stirred the dough until her arm tired and the dough had an elastic quality. She’d add the raisins to half the batch later – some kids didn’t like raisins. She put the bowl into her downstairs bedroom in the bed and bunched the quilt around it to warm it up. Then she put a kitchen towel over the bowl and a pillow on top of that again. Give it about half an hour and the humble ingredients would make a delicious sweet bun dough. Gerd felt like a shower and went into her non-humble bathroom to luxuriate in hot city water.

Half an hour later, the dough was ready. She floured her hands and pulled the sticky mess out of the bowl. Not too much kneading, not too little, that was the secret. She cut the dough in half and mixed the raisins into one half. Kneaded some more and rolled out the sweet buns. Then she set the two cookie sheets to rise a little more covered by cotton towels and went upstairs to check on her weavings.

The coat fabric for Tonje Hjerte was just about done. She still hadn’t told Tonje, probably time to do so today so the budding designer could start planning her signature wrap patterns. It was the other loom that interested Gerd right now. Her warp had been set up with fine linen threads. It had taken days to get it just right; linen was not an easy thread to work with. She had lots of sand colors left over from last summer: mushroom, grey-pink, ecru, tan. She wanted some spark in the fabric, but what? Blue, that was it. Blue, green, purple.

She went to her box freezer in the shed and pulled out frozen blueberries and blackberries. Pine needles were easy to gather even in the midst of winter. She dug out three big dying bowls from the shed and prepared two salt fixatives and one vinegar fixative in the bowls. They would have to rest a few hours before she could put the undyed linen yarn in, but that was all right. The bolle dough should be just about done now, anyway.

Gerd has just put the bloated forms of the boller with their egg wash glaze into the oven when Jutta appeared trailing a two-year old and a five-year old. Nurket looked at these strange creatures, but as the superior dog he was (he thought so), he didn’t bark but only wagged his tail. The little humans fell all over him.

Jutta looked a bit harried. Gerd smiled. “Kids getting the best of you?”

Jutta smiled wanly. “Well, you know, Anne Grete is in a major funk over the disaster of her marriage. It was a bad idea to start with, it really was. Did you know she got A+ in math all through high school? She should have done something with that, but all she wanted to do was get pregnant. And looked what ensued,” Jutta grinned at her grandchildren.

The timer beeped. Gerd went into the kitchen to get the hot sweet buns out of the oven. The kids had smelled the heavenly aromas and were clustering around.

“Just hang on a second while they cool, OK?”

When the buns were nearly cool enough to eat, Gerd heaped them on a plate and carried them to the living room table. She poured big glasses of milk for all four of them.

“Honey, you’re the best.” Jutta was in bolle heaven. Svein and Henriette said nothing, as their mouths were filled with pastry. Silence descended. Outside, it was still snowing.

Jutta looked out the living room windows. “Looks like winter finally arrived, don’t you think?”

After an hour or two playing with Nurket until he couldn’t take any more and took refuge under the sofa, Jutta, Svein, and Henriette took their leave. Svein’s diaper was sagging disastrously, but Gerd wasn’t about to point it out. Jutta noticed as well but said nothing. They kissed goodbye.

Finally alone, Gerd went back to her dye bowls. It looked like the fixatives had set well. As she had done so many times before, Gerd thought she had made the perfect decision when she had installed the industrial size stove and oven in her little kitchen. On that stove, she could boil 3 20-liter pots of yarn simultaneously. She set the three pots to simmer and added the yarn to the fixatives: vinegar solutions for the berries and salt for the pine needles.

An hour later, all three lots were done, and she rinsed her yarn out thoroughly. The three pots were re-filled with blueberries, blackberries, and pine needles. She set the dye lots to simmer while the yarn was drying from its first bath.

Jonas called her cell. “How’s it going out there?”

“Not bad. The snow storm looks like it’s settling in, though. Maybe you want to wait it out?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty bad. But how will you do without a boat?”

“Well, I should go out to the nets, but in this weather I think I’ll just let the salmon live. I have food enough to last me to Ragnarok, don’t worry about that.”

“OK, honey. If it lets up later, I’ll come out. I love you,” he added as an afterthought.

“Love you, too.” Gerd was preoccupied with ideas of blue, purple, and green. She hung up.

When the dyes had simmered for an hour, Gerd carefully added the fixated yarn to the three pots. 1/3 third went into the blueberry pot, 1/3 into the blackberry solution, and the final 1/3 to the mix of February pine needles. Could be an hour, could be more. She knew the pine mix would need the longest and the blackberry the least, but she also wanted a really deep purple against the other skeins of sand and cream. All one needed now was patience.

Sometime in the middle of it all, she thought to check her rakørret marinating patiently on her porch bench by the wall. Perfect. It was probably minus one or minus two out and the snow was coming down like a flood. One winter when Gerd had been a child at Voksenlia in Oslo, there had been so much snow that the kids had jumped off the roof into the white fluff and her father had dug a tunnel from their front door to the road. Maybe she would have to dig a tunnel to the shed.

The light was waning. All of a sudden, Nurket started growling by the front door. What?

Gerd was blinded by the inside lights when she opened her kitchen door. Nurket flashed past her into the snowstorm. She could see nothing; where had he gone? “Nurket!”

She heard some frantic barking that might be coming from the shed. She could barely make it out in the driving snow. The wind had driven snowbanks all along the west side of her house and between the house and the shed, but she could fight her way along the shed-wall. “Nurket!”

He was growling in lee of the wind at her big barn doors on the north side of the shed. What on earth?

The door latch was undone. That was weird. Had she forgotten to latch it? She never forgot; it was routine just as mooring your boat was routine or brushing your teeth. She tore open the big doors.

Something grabbed her as Nurket went ballistic. Something evil, foul-smelling, big. The huge something had his hands around her throat. Nurket sank his milk teeth into the nearest part of this enemy, who screamed in pain. The thing kicked at the dog, hard. Nurket yelped and whined. The thing dragged Gerd out and slammed the doors closed on the injured dog. While holding Gerd in a death grip around the throat, he pushed a rock against the door with his foot to shut the dog inside. Gerd saw his arm and bit, hard.

He hit her hard with his other hand. Not a slap, a punch. She felt her teeth loosen. He pushed her up the stone stairs to her kitchen door, yanked her stumbling inside, and shut it.

In the light she was able to get a glimpse or her assailant. The blond ambulance driver, the guy who said he was a police detective. Harald Jeltzen’s son and Gunnar Katte Jeltzen’s grandson, Dag Eigil.

Eigil dragged Gerd over to the dining table and shoved her down on a chair. He had some rope in his hand, the hemp rope from her shed door, Gerd recognized. He hogtied her to the chair. “Where is it?”

Gerd’s fighting spirit kicked in. “Where is what, asshole?”

Dag Eigil pulled out a knife and held it to her throat. “Don’t play with me, girl,” he said, almost sorrowfully. “It’s over for you. All we want is justice. You have evidence we want. Where is it?”

Gerd could only shake her head. “What evidence? Evidence of what?”

Logic enraged him. He dragged the knife lightly along her throat. Gerd could feel the warm, sticky blood running into her T-shirt. “Give me the box!”

Gerd started laughing. Not very smart under the circumstances. “What box, idiot? If you mean the letters Frank Åge Samuelsen sent Einar Iversen and the photographs of your grandfather with his cronies, I gave them back to the library. What use are they to me?”

He went berserk. Slapped her several times and yelled incoherent curses. She kept laughing at him until he stuffed his handkerchief in her mouth and tied it shut with his scarf. Gerd gagged.

Right then her cell rang. They both heard Jonas leaving a message: he was coming out but he’d be a little late because of some extra work at school. Jonas called again 10 minutes later. “Gerd, are you there? I’m trying to get hold of you. Don’t tell me you went out without your cell again.”

Dag Eigil’s pupils filled his entire corneas. He was clearly mad as a hatter. Gerd couldn’t move against the ropes and the gag. He shook the phone in front of her face. “Talk to him.”

As she thought “just exactly how am I going to call him?” Jonas called again. The madman held up the phone. “If you say one wrong thing, I’ll slit your throat.”

“Finally you answer,” Jonas said.

Gerd still had the gag in her mouth. She shook her head at Dag Eigil, who roughly yanked it out. He held the phone to her ear and the knife to her throat.

“Ayúdame,” Gerd said softly into the phone. “Está aquí y está loco.” To Dag Eigil, these were nonsense syllables. To Jonas, who had learned Spanish in Guatemala, it said everything. His woman was in mortal danger.

“Llego,” he said, and cut the connection.

The crazy man was battering around in her house. He tore open drawers and pulled books off shelves. The box that held his grandfather’s secrets was not to be found. Gerd had moved it to Jutta’s house two days ago.

Minutes passed. They heard no sound but the howling of the wind until there were steps on Gerd’s stone stairs. They both listened. The steps approached and then receded. “What the fuck?” said Dag Eigil and once again pulled the fuses from Gerd’s fuse box. The house instantly became a tomb. His knife found Gerd’s cheek and made a gentle scratch. “Just so you remember me, girl.”

All was silent. Even the wind had died down. Gerd and Dag Eigil waited for the end.

When Jonas had approached the house and was about to tear down the door, he had heard soft whining from the shed. He kicked away the rock that was holding the door closed and found Nurket, bleeding and unable to get to his feet. Jonas carried the little dog outside.

“He’s dangerous, dude. He has mom captive. We cannot endanger her,” Jonas said to the dog, who appeared to agree. “We have to lure him out.”

Jonas went back into the shed. What can I possibly use to make him come out? On the east wall, way in the corner, he spied Gerd’s emergency flares. She should have those in her boat, of course, but she didn’t. Matches – anywhere? By feeling along the rafters Jonas found one box with maybe three matches left.

He brought the matches outside along with the flares. Nurket was lying in the snow with his leg at an odd angle, watching him. Let’s roll.

With one swipe of the match, Jonas lit all 10 of the emergency flares. They went up like New Year’s Eve, lighting the entire ground a blinding white and signaling SOS to everyone within miles.

The crazy man tore open the kitchen door and threw himself on Jonas. Much bigger than him, he smothered Jonas in snow. Jonas was blanking out when his assailant yelped. He flailed out with his arms and lost his grip on Jonas. The 4-month old puppy had bitten him on the neck and was hanging on like an eel. Jonas finally got a handhold, found a rock beneath the snow and knocked the intruder senseless. He ran up the stairs: “Gerd!”

The house was dark and silent. Jonas stumbled over Gerd still tied to the dining room chair, the gag nearly strangling her. He yanked it out and fumbled with the hideous ropes. His mind finally caught one strand of logic; he pulled his Swiss Army knife from his pocket and severed the ropes. “Gerd!”

“Fuse box,” she mumbled. She was alive!

Jonas went to the fuse box and threw the switch. As he did so, he saw the knocked-out man in the snow beginning to move. He ran back, got the ropes from Gerd and brought the longest lengths outside. Tied the man with his hands behind his back and his feet secured to improvised rope handcuffs so he looked like a backwards comma in the snow. Ran back in.

Gerd was coming to her senses, still hunched over on the chair. “Where is Nurket? Call 911.”

With shaking fingers, Jonas did. His story wasn’t quite coherent, but the dispatcher understood. “We’re sending a police launch right away. Lyholmen, you said?” He did. Lyholmen, west side of the island, Gerd Ljoset.

Jonas went outside. The man was getting buried in the snow and Jonas made no move to save him. A black nose peeked out of a blanket of white. He lifted up the little puppy, scraped off the snow, and carried him inside. He laid him down on a rug in the living room and grabbed some towels to cover him. Jonas rubbed him softly. He thought the puppy was dead. Tears ran down his face. “You saved her, little hero. You saved her.” Gerd hobbled over and fell to her knees next to Jonas and the cold dog. She nearly fainted when a little tongue stuck out and tentatively licked her hand.

They heard the police boat sirens. Even in the snowstorm, their GPS’s had shown them the way. Never again would he damn technology, thought Jonas. Like any tool, it could be used for good and for evil. He grabbed a flashlight and stepped over the now moaning figure in the snow to meet them.

He ran into the three officers as they were seeking their way past the Viking Graves. No time for introductions, “Come with me.”

At the house, the three observed the man trussed like a chicken in the snow. It was two women and a man, Jonas now saw. They recognized the struggling captive. Strangely, they didn’t make a move to carry him inside or to incriminate Jonas for violence against a sworn officer. One of the female officers, a short, stout woman, shook her head sadly, looking at him. “I always knew there was something wrong with him,” she said. The other two were silent.

They followed Jonas into the house. Gerd began to explain what had happened when they noticed the cut across her throat still seeping blood and the line down her cheek. “We’ll get the story later,” decided the older woman who was clearly in charge. “You need a hospital. Now.”

“Not without Nurket,” Gerd mumbled, uncooperative.

“What?”

“My dog. He’s a hero. He saved me.”

The dog in question was trying to wag his tail under the piles of towels. Jonas said, “This asshole had hit me and I was blacking out when Nurket here jumped him. He was injured, couldn’t stand on his hind leg, but he jumped the bastard like a bull mastiff for all he weighs no more than 6 kilos. Nurket saved both of us.”

The male officer understood. Gently, he scooped up dog and towels. They all moved outside, Gerd leaning on Jonas and the officer carrying Nurket like a baby. Dag Eigil in the snow was coming around and had started cursing.

“Do you have a sled?” The older officer asked Gerd.

“In the shed.”

The two women officers opened the shed door and pulled out the sled. The man was clearly not going to give up the canine baby he carried in his arms. They brought the sled outside and, with Jonas’ help, loaded Dag Eigil into it. He flailed and swore, but they paid no attention.

Had anyone seen them, they would have made a curious procession down the path in the snow. Two strong women pulling a sled with a wailing and heaving man trussed like an Easter ham. A young man in a uniform cradling a puppy to his chest. And Jonas, bloodied in his fight and completely unaware, supporting Gerd as she resolutely put one foot in front of the other. Eons later, they made it to the police launch and got everyone on board, including Dag Eigil who was unceremoniously dumped in the hold.

There was no need for sirens. The police boat, with its bad-ass engines, pulled rapidly away from the dock. Gerd, Jonas, and the young officer huddled in lee of the wind and driving snow, petting Nurket and telling him what a great dog he was. He licked every hand that came within licking distance.

In Vika, two ambulances were waiting, one for the humans and one for Nurket. He accepted his fate calmly as he was gently transferred to a doggie stretcher and loaded into the back of the veterinary ambulance. The humans went in the other one. Dag Eigil was still tied up and shouting curses; one of the orderlies assessed the situation and gave the struggling man a shot of Demerol. He konked out right away.

At the hospital, Gerd was checked in by a surprisingly competent ER team. Jonas objected. He wasn’t about to let her out of his sight. They let him come; ER not being subjected to the rules that governed everyone else. Within minutes, Gerd had a plastic bracelet around her wrist and was whisked away to the Intensive Care Unit. Jonas followed. The last he recalled was the nice male nurse bringing in an army cot and some blankets. Jonas collapsed on the cot, looking at his woman in the high hospital bed with needles hooked to plastic bags inserted into both arms.