Close to the Heel Read online

  NORAH MCCLINTOCK

  CLOSE

  TO THE

  HEEL

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2012 Norah McClintock

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McClintock, Norah

  Close to the heel [electronic resource] / Norah McClintock.

  (Seven (the series))

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-55469-951-3 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-55469-952-0 (EPUB)

  I. Title. II. Series: Seven the series (Online)

  PS8575.C62C56 2012 jC813’.54 C2012-902624-7

  First published in the United States, 2012

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012938309

  Summary: At the request of his late grandfather, Rennie goes to Iceland to right an old wrong, and gets drawn into investigating a murder.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover photography by Getty Images

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO Box 5626, Stn. B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4 ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO Box 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  15 14 13 12 • 4 3 2 1

  To Jens with thanks for a new waterfall

  (or two, or three) and a new folktale every day.

  The door hath swung too near the heel;

  But better sore feet than serve the Deil.

  —FROM “THE BLACK SCHOOL”

  AN ICELANDIC FOLKTALE

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  I’m going to die. It’s as simple as that.

  The thought makes my heart feel hollow, but what can I do?

  I drag one foot up out of the snow. Snow! It’s only October. I will it to move forward and feel it sink again into the whiteness. I pray that it will find solid ground and not a bottomless crevice.

  My foot touches down on something hard. I know that not because I feel it land—I don’t—but because I’m lifting my left leg, which I could only do if my right foot were firmly planted. I force myself to plod on.

  I have no idea where I am, except that it’s somewhere in the interior. At least, I think it is.

  I have no idea how long I’ve been here.

  I have no idea what direction I’m going in or what direction I should be going in.

  I have no idea how far I’ve gone or how far I need to go.

  The only thing I’m sure of is that I’m not going to make it.

  I know my feet are down there at the ends of my legs, but I can’t feel them. I can’t see them either. I can’t see anything except white, and I don’t know if the white I see is snow or snow blindness. My eyes are burning. They’re also watering, and that makes me afraid they will freeze solid in my head. I’ve stopped shivering, but I can’t decide if that’s good or bad. At first when the shivering stopped, I ached all over. I know what that’s from—muscle fatigue from so much violent trembling or pain from the cold. Either way, it scares me because all I can think of is the amount of energy I’m expending. It takes a while before I realize I’m not cold anymore. Maybe the snow is insulating me. Or maybe—this is the part I don’t want to think about—maybe you stop shivering when your body temperature falls below a certain point.

  I’m going to die.

  So why don’t I surrender? Why don’t I stop slogging through snow that’s up to my knees, making each step feel like the equivalent of ten? Why don’t I sit down and just let it happen? Or, even better, lie down and give in to it? The snow is soft. It’s thick too. If I lie on it, it will feel like a feather mattress or at least like what I imagine a feather mattress would feel like. I could stretch out and relax myself into the next world, assuming there is a next world. It wouldn’t hurt. That’s what they say anyway. They say when you freeze to death, you just lie down and go to sleep, and the next thing you know (except you don’t really know, because how can you?), you’re gone. You’ve slipped away. Passed over. Ventured to the land from which no one has ever returned. What Shakespeare called the undiscovered territory. (Thank you, Mr. Banks; you always said that knowledge of Shakespeare provides a person with a wealth of images to draw on later in life.)

  I drag my foot up again and coax it to take another step. Come on, leg. Don’t fail me now. Don’t let it end this way, in the middle of nowhere where I’ll never be found.

  I think that’s what keeps me moving—the thought of never being found. That and the fact that I’ve never been known to back down, let alone surrender.

  And the fact that the one thing I do know is why I’m here.

  I take another step.

  I think about the Major and everything he’s tried to pound into my head for the last seventeen years. If there’s one thing the Major hates, it’s a quitter. He says no one was born composing symphonies (except maybe Mozart). Everyone has to start somewhere. You have to walk before you can run. Every journey starts with the first step.

  And continues with the next and then the next.

  You have to stick to it. They didn’t put a man on the moon by giving up after the first rocket fizzled. Wars aren’t won by armies who are prepared to surrender after the first defeat.

  I pick up my foot again. I still can’t feel it, by which I mean I can’t tell if I’m actually wiggling my toes or if I just think I’m wiggling toes that are way past being able to wiggle no matter what orders the brain sends down the line. But I do know that someone must have tied a couple of cement bricks to each of my ankles, because I can barely lift my feet. After a couple more steps, I sink to my knees. I’m done. My goose is baked, as the Major would say. I can think of another way to put it, but the Major has this thing about four-letter words. He says anyone who uses them is displaying the pathetic state of his vocabulary. If he hears one, he sends me to the dictionary to find five alternatives. If he were a drill sergeant, the army would be a whole different place.

  The wind sweeps snow over me as I try to breathe rhythmically, a trick I was taught to keep me calm. It’s not long before I’m up to my thighs in snow, and it’s funny how it makes me feel warm.

  I crouch down until I’m sitting on my heels. I tell myself that it’s just for a few minutes, that all I need to do is catch my breath. It feels good to be resting. It feels so good.

  My head jerks up, and I realize I’ve been asleep.

  I panic.

  I try to scramble to my feet and end up facedown in the snow instead.

  I panic again. It’s something I’m getting good at.

  I push myself up to a squatting position, which sounds like it should be easy to do but isn
’t. From there I try to stand up. I fall again. Blackness envelopes me—the blackness of terror. I really am going to die. If I don’t get up and get moving, it really will be over.

  Another thing the Major likes to say: You can’t win if you don’t play.

  You can’t get anywhere if you don’t take at least one step, Rennie, I tell myself.

  I manage to stand. I sway against the wind and the snow. I feel dizzy. I’m going to fall again.

  And then something kicks in. It’s not a survival instinct, not really. No, instead it’s what I’ve been told is my worst quality and my principal character defect: the need to get even. I may not know where I am or how I got here or, more importantly, how I’m going to get out of here. But I remind myself that I do know why I’m here.

  I take a step.

  I know why I’m here and I know what I’m supposed to do here. I’m supposed to disappear. I’m supposed to vanish without a trace, leaving anyone who knows me to shake their head and say, “He did it again. Rennie’s been a screwup ever since, well, ever since forever, so it’s no surprise that he screwed up again. What do you expect from a kid like that?”

  Except that that’s not what happened.

  I didn’t screw up this time. No, for once it was someone else. Someone who wants me out of the way.

  I take another step. It isn’t any easier, but I don’t even think about stopping or resting. Another Major-ism: You can rest when you’re dead.

  I’m not taking the fall for this. I am not going gentle into this miserable night (another nod to Mr. Banks and his second idol, Dylan Thomas). Not me. Not Rennie Charbonneau.

  No, I want to get even.

  I want revenge.

  TWO

  One thing I know about myself, thanks to a summer of wilderness “fun” (read: forcible confinement in a privately run boot camp for screwups like me) is that I’m fueled by rage. A “counselor” actually said that to me. We, meaning me, Jimi (real first name), Boot (real last name), Capone (real first name—I am not kidding) and Worm (first syllable of real last name that, if you ask me, truly captures the essence of the guy), were sitting around the old Coleman stove with the counselor, Gerard—not Gerry—a wannabe shrink who was working at the camp to pay off student loans before heading back to school. We were supposedly on a canoe trip, but so far we had carried the stupid things more than we had paddled them. In fact, we had spent most of the day on an uphill portage, with the promise—in a couple of days’ time—of the most “spectacular” stretch of river we had ever seen.

  Jimi, Boot, Capone, Gerard and I were all about the same height, give or take. Worm, on the other hand, was a good head and a half shorter than me. Guess who I got paired with?

  So there we were, climbing uphill pretty much all day, which is tough enough with a canoe on your head, and tougher still when it decides to rain—all day. It’s even worse when a certain vertically challenged Worm is your partner. We tried it with him in front. My thinking was that since he was uphill and I was downhill, our height difference would more or less cancel itself out. But it turned out that Worm had trouble sticking to the trail. He kept veering off in one direction or another, claiming to be looking for the best footing. I can just imagine what he would have been like in a car. He’d be zooming down the sidewalk or swerving onto people’s lawns, convinced that they were faster than the road. After an hour of that, I decided to take the lead. But you try being the tall guy going uphill with a canoe on your head. It felt like all the weight was on me. Plus, Worm complained the whole time that he was doing all the work until I was ready to strangle him or, more constructively, switch it up and let him take the lead again. Which meant going off the trail again. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  I set down the front of the canoe and let him stagger dangerously close to a patch of poison ivy. It would serve him right if he stepped in it. When he whined at me to help him, I told him to help himself because I was through. He dropped the canoe, putting a great big dent into one side of it, which was going to make it a bear to paddle when—or should I say, if—we ever saw water again. We were so far behind everyone else that no one even noticed. I told him what a loser he was. I gave him a hard time for being short (not his fault, I know), stupid (probably not his fault) and irritating (definitely his fault). Result: he took a swing at me. Not a good idea. Not only am I taller, but I am also smarter and I know a thing or three about combat.

  When we finally reached the top of the hill we had been climbing—all day—Gerard and the other three guys were like cartoon characters come to life. First, they all gave themselves whiplash from the double take they did, in almost perfect unison. Second, their eyes all sproinged out of their heads. Then third, they all started to laugh, even Gerard, although he caught himself pretty fast and switched to a stern look. I guess I can’t blame him, because there was Worm with a sleeping bag duct-taped to his head to make him more or less the same height as me, his hands duct-taped to the crossbars of the canoe so he wouldn’t be tempted to put it down again and duct tape over his mouth so he couldn’t complain.

  Anyway, it was that night, while we were putting up our tents and getting ready to cook our chow, that Gerard said, “Rennie, if they could fuel cars with what you’re fueled with, we wouldn’t have an energy crisis.” Turns out he wasn’t supposed to share that kind of opinion with me. Turns out he’s supposed to leave the analysis to the real shrinks who swanned into camp once every two weeks to update their assessments of the “funsters” (read: inmates).

  The way they—the shrinks—talked about it, being fueled by rage was a bad thing. But, if you ask me (and they did), the most important stuff I ever accomplished happened when I was good and angry. Like when Mr. Dickhead—er, Dickson—my grade-nine math teacher, picked on me every day, making me go up to the board and do math problems even though he knew I would get them wrong. One day—there’s always that one day—I’d had enough. The whole class had had enough. No one thought it was funny anymore except, I guess, Mr. Dickhead. I decided to get even.

  I grabbed Randall Schtirr that Friday after school, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and holed up with him all weekend. When Monday morning math class rolled around, I slumped at my desk, as usual. I got called on, as usual. I slouched my way to the chalkboard, as usual. Mr. Dickhead stood there, back to me, arms crossed over his chest, smug expression on his face (also as usual, although I didn’t know that until later) until he heard me put down the chalk. He turned. He looked at the chalkboard. The expression on his face was what they call in those credit-card commercials “priceless.” I know because Randall captured the whole thing on his phone. You can check it out on the web if you’re interested.

  Everyone in the whole class laughed when they saw that look on his face, like he was staring at an equation written by the guy in the movie about the crazy math genius. Then he got mad and—get this—accused me of cheating. Even kids who didn’t particularly like me got their backs up at that.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Search me.” He wasn’t going to find any crib notes on me. The whole thing was in my head. For a change, I’d done my homework—with a lot of help from Randall.

  He searched me anyway. Made me turn out my pockets right there in front of the class. Made me roll up my sleeves to prove I didn’t have anything written on my arms. Made me hitch up my shirt to check my belly. Was ready, I’m sure of it, to make me drop my pants, except that when I bared my stomach, Megan Lindover said, “I don’t think you’re allowed to do that, sir.”

  Mr. Dickhead exploded and sent me to the office for “cheating and being a general pain in the a**.” Randall trotted behind me, which, I think, confused Mr. Dickhead.

  Mr. Ashton, the principal, freaked when he saw the video on Randall’s phone. I think he was imagining what the Major would say when he saw it. He put Mr. Dickhead on suspension—paid, of course. Then other kids started to complain to their parents about Mr. Dickhead. The parents went to the principal. Mr. Dickhead go
t fired. I was, briefly, a hero at school.

  So, you see, anger isn’t so bad.

  Neither is revenge.

  It works for me. All I have to do now is get out of here alive.

  By now you’re probably wondering: How did he get there in the first place? And where, exactly, is here?

  Last question first. “Here” is Iceland, a small island just east of Greenland. When I say small, I mean 103,000 square kilometers—or about the size of the state of Kentucky. A grand total of 313,000 people live here, most of whom (200,000) live in or around the capital, Reykjavik, which is in the extreme southwest of the island. Everyone else is scattered around the edges of the island on farms or in tiny villages. It’s the kind of place where, in the winter, it’s dark all day except for maybe three hours. No wonder people here have all these crazy stories about trolls and invisible people living in rocks—and believe me, there’s a lot of rock in Iceland, thanks to all the volcanoes, which have a habit of erupting and causing widespread devastation, not to mention vast lava fields. Yeah, it’s quite the place.

  So what am I doing here?

  It all started ten days ago—exactly three weeks after I got back from my summer in Northern Ontario, a fun time away from my current fun home at Canadian Forces Base Borden.

  THREE

  Part of me wanted to run faster, but it was just a small part. The rest of me wanted not to run at all. I mean, why rush into the arms of grief if you don’t have to, especially if the person on grief-distribution duty is a certain Major André Charbonneau, ex-soldier, ex-cop, currently employed by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service, the armed forces equivalent of a major crimes unit of a large police force. One tough guy—that’s my dad, the Major.

  And what had I done to deserve grief, you might ask? My current crime was tardiness. Yeah, you heard it right. I was running a little late, which, for anyone in the armed forces, is a major crime. Unless I missed my guess—and I hardly ever do when it comes to my dad—the Major was standing at attention on the front walk of the crappy little house we’d been assigned for this posting, his head swiveling from side to side like he was watching a tennis match, scanning the environs for Yours Truly while steam blew out of his ears.