In Valhalla's Shadows

W.D. Valgardson

Description

Ever since the accident, ex-cop Tom Parsons’s life has been crumbling around him: his marriage and career have fallen apart, his grown children barely speak to him, and he can’t escape the dark thoughts plaguing his mind. Leaving the urban misery of Winnipeg, he tries to remake himself in the small lakeside town of Valhalla, with its picturesque winter landscape and promise as a “fisherman’s paradise.” As the locals make it clear that newcomers, especially ex-RCMP, are less than entirely welcome, he throws himself into repairing his run-down cabin.

But Tom has barely settled in the town when he finds the body of a fifteen-year-old Indigenous girl on the beach, not far from his home. The police write off Angel’s death as just another case of teenagers partying too hard. But the death haunts Tom, and he can’t leave the case closed—something just doesn’t add up. He begins visiting the locals, a mix of Icelandic eccentrics, drug dealers and other odd sorts you’d expect to find in an isolated town, seeking out Angel’s story. With the entitled tourists with their yachts and the mysterious Odin group living up the lake, Valhalla is much more than it originally seemed. And as Tom peels off the layers, he hopes to expose the dark rot underneath.

W.D. Valgardson’s expert manipulation of metaphor and imagery brings a mythic scale to the murder mystery at the heart of In Valhalla’s Shadows. He shapes a portrait of small-town living with frank depictions of post-traumatic stress, RCMP conduct, systemic racism and the real-life tragedies that are too often left unsolved.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Crime
• Cultural heritage
• Literature

Informations

• Publié par: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
• Date de parution: 08 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781771621977
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

In Valhalla's Shadows
In Valhalla's Shadows
W.D. Valgardson
Copyright © 2018 W. D. Valgardson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca , 1-800-893-5777 , [e-mail] .

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC , V 0 N 2 H 0
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Edited by Pam Robertson
Front jacket design by Anna Comfort O'Keeffe
Text design by Shed Simas / Onça Design

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $ 153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Valgardson, W. D., author
In Valhalla's shadows / W.D. Valgardson.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77162-196-0 (hardcover).– ISBN 978-1-77162-197-7 ( HTML )
I. Title.
PS 8593. A 53 I 58 2018 C 813'.54 C 2018-901900- X
C 2018-901901-8
My thanks to Nina for all her help.
Chapter 1 Valhalla
When Tom nearly tripped over her, the false dawn was just starting. The east side of the lake had lightened with nautical twilight, but there was no sign of the sun. Pools of darkness obscured everything, including the person lying on the ground.
It , he thought, it, he, she, someone, a person, a person was lying there, where no one should be. But on weekends there were often bonfires like a string of small stars on the curve of beach to the north and people partied all night long. If he walked out at night and stood on the water’s edge, he could see the dark shapes of people moving in and out of the light cast by the fires, and when they threw a log onto the coals, he could see the shower of sparks rise into the darkness.
He’d slipped out of the house, threaded through the spruce trees at the edge of his property, crossed the road to the harbour area and was heading north across the gravelled space between the government dock on the south and a reef on the north. He was being careful not to stumble over boat trailers or fish boxes that were left scattered about. He’d only moved to Valhalla six weeks ago, but he knew where the commercial fishermen piled their plastic tubs and stored their blue gasoline barrels close to an aluminum-sided shed.
Because of seasonal high water, the store and the six adjacent one-room rental cabins centred on the harbour area were built well back from the lake. The area was low-lying and a strong northeast wind often flooded the ground. The store and cabins were set on concrete blocks, and even the houses farther back were raised so that storm-driven water went beneath them without doing any damage. People just sloshed around in the yards wearing rubber boots for a day or two until the northeast wind fell and the water receded. In place of basements, everyone had a shed. Many of them were in disrepair.
That there’d been high water recently could be seen in the remains of a sandbagged wall at one side of the store. The property just to the south that Tom had bought was opposite the store but on higher ground than the surrounding area. In spite of that, the foundation of his house had settled at one corner, and he was going to have to lift the house and straighten it.
When he realized someone was lying on the ground he was annoyed. Stupid kids , he thought. Drinking and drugs and passing out before they made it home. He’d had enough of stupid kids. He was tempted to leave the kid lying there to sleep off whatever he’d taken, but he knew he couldn’t. He didn’t want to roll him over onto his back. If he vomited, he’d choke. However, he could put him on his side.
Tom put down his rucksack, tackle box and rod, opened the box and took out his penlight. The white shirt was too large and so were the blue jeans, and he thought for a moment that it was a young boy but was shocked when he realized it was a girl. When he pulled her onto her side, one leg stayed in the water-filled rut and the other lay on top of the mud. Her feet were bare. No socks, no shoes, no service popped into his mind. It was a sign on the window of the store behind him. Little feet, little hands, a kid, he thought, maybe early high school.
Her long black hair was plastered to the side of her face by the mud. He felt her hand and it was cold and there was no pulse, and he wished that he hadn’t been driven out of the house by nightmares. Although he’d brought his fishing tackle, he’d planned to just sit and wait for the sun to come up, for the surface of the lake to turn from slate to silver to pale blue and to listen to the faint lap of the water at the edge of the shore.
He’d seen them dead before, too many of them, in wrecked cars mostly, thrown from motorcycles, stupid tricks gone wrong, kids with their arms or heads out of car windows hitting a sign, diving into shallow water, drinking, drinking, drinking, dealing, stabbed or shot or overdosed, always immortal until the moment they weren’t.
He kneeled in the mud and leaned close to her and smelled whisky. He leaned so his nose was nearly touching her and there was no mistaking the smell. He then leaned over the water in the rut and smelled it; it, too, smelled faintly of whisky.
I don’t want this , he thought. I’ve had too much of it , and he wondered if he could slip back to his bed and go to sleep and pretend it had never happened. The dead are dead , he thought, you can’t resurrect them, not unless you’re God. And he thought about picking up his minnow net, his rod, his tackle box, his father’s World War II rucksack that was an affection, an affectation; his father had brought it home from the war, and when he died it was one of the few things of his that Tom had kept, along with his chess set, his fly-fishing equipment and his music. It was out of date, not nearly as light or efficient as anything he could buy at Walmart, but it suited him.
His father had taken it on every fishing trip. Tom couldn’t imagine going fishing without it, without a thermos of coffee with cream and sugar and an egg salad sandwich to eat as he watched the sun rise. He’d moved here for that, for silence, for casting his line over the still surface of the lake, for getting away from all the noise in his head, from all the memories. Away from the grow ops, the meth labs, from young studs shooting each other to save face and territory, from drunken family brawls, from battered wives.
He glanced over the lake at the eastern horizon. Nautical twilight, the best time of day, soon civil twilight, then dawn. There was a thin crimson line that might have been drawn with one stroke of a brush but no sign of the sun. The masts of the sailboats at the dock stood up sharp and threatening like lances against the lightening sky. The powerboats and yachts, though, anchored farther out in the harbour, were still obscured by darkness.
He turned the girl fully onto her back and used the flashlight beam to probe the rut where she’d been lying face down. The sides of the rut had been forced upward and then eroded by the rain. It had maybe four inches of water in it. Not much, but you didn’t need much to drown.
She couldn’t, Tom thought, have been lying here for long. The ruts were from the sports fishermen pulling up their boats the previous evening. Normally, fishermen, and even the sailboaters, lingered on the water, then crowded in as the light began to fade, but there had been a storm warning, high winds and rain. Everyone had come back early. No one wanted to be caught on the lake during an electrical storm, with squalls that could turn a boat upside down in an instant, then disappear as suddenly as they came. But most dangerous of all were the reefs. The locals knew where every reef was, those that rose above the water, those that lurked beneath the surface. Numerous visiting anglers had wrecked a propeller or holed their craft. The reefs that rose above the surface of the water were hazardous but, unless the sports fishermen were too busy partying, could be seen and avoided. Those that lay just below the surface were the ones that brought visiting anglers and sailboaters to grief. There’d been some discussion of putting markers on the submerged reefs, but nothing had come of it. There was a small but steady business rescuing anglers and repairing their boats.
The rain hadn’t come before dark. Off to the north, lightning had woven in and out of a thunderhead, and then there had been bolt lightning. Lying on the couch reading a biography of Churchill, he could hear distant thunder. Normally, he would have waited expectantly for the storm to roll over him, but he’d been so tired that he fell asleep with the book on his chest.
She could, he thought, have passed out in the rut before the rain came. She’d have been in no danger. She’d have slept off whatever mix she’d taken, gotten up and gone home. She’d have been thirsty, with a headache, a sick stomach, maybe puke a few times, but she’d get over it. Unless, of course, she’d taken something laced with fentanyl.
The rain had been hard, a Manitoba summer downpour. A peal of thunder had wakene