My Soul to Take: A Novel of Iceland Page 2

  No sooner had Thora sat down than Bragi, her partner in the small legal practice, put his head around the door. He was an older man and specialized in divorce; Thora couldn't face handling those cases. Her own divorce had been quite enough for her. Bragi, on the other hand, was in his element and was particularly adept at untangling the most convoluted disputes and getting warring couples to talk without killing each other.

  "Well, how did the letterbox go? Do you see it as a test case before the Supreme Court?"

  Thora smiled. "No, they're going to think things over, but we must remember to send them the bill by courier. I wouldn't bet on them getting much mail delivered in the future."

  "I hope they get divorced," said Bragi, rubbing his hands. "That would be a battle and a half." He took out a Post-it note and handed it to Thora. "This man phoned while the letterboxers were with you. He asked you to call when you were free."

  Thora looked at the note and sighed when she saw the name: Jonas Juliusson. "Oh, great," she said, looking up at Bragi. "What did he want?"

  Just over a year before, Thora had helped a wealthy middle-aged businessman draw up a contract for his investment in some land and two farmhouses on the Snaefellsnes peninsula. Jonas had made a quick fortune outside Iceland by acquiring half-bankrupt radio stations that he turned around and sold at a huge profit. Thora was not sure whether he had always been odd or whether having money had turned him eccentric. Right now he was into New Age philosophy and planned to build an enormous holistic-center-cum-spa-hotel where people would pay to have their physical and spiritual ills cured using alternative therapies. Thora shook her head as she thought about him.

  "Some hidden structural defect in the building, I understand," Bragi replied. "He's unhappy with the property." He smiled. "Give him a call; he wouldn't speak to me. He claims your Venus is ascendant in Cancer, which makes you a good lawyer." Bragi shrugged. "Maybe a strong astral chart is just as good a qualification as a law degree. What do I know?"

  "What a fruitcake," said Thora, reaching for the telephone.

  Jonas had kicked off their professional relationship by drawing up her astral chart, which turned out favorably. That was why he hired her. Thora suspected that the larger law firms had refused to provide Jonas with information about their lawyers' exact time of birth and he had been forced to approach a smaller one; there could scarcely be any other explanation for a man of his wealth choosing to deal with a company with only four employees. She dialed the number that Bragi had scribbled down and pulled a face while she waited for him to answer.

  "Hello," said a soft male voice. "Jonas speaking."

  "Hello, Jonas. This is Thora Gudmundsdottir at Central Lawyers. You left a message asking me to call."

  "Yes, that's right. Thank you for calling back." He sighed heavily.

  "My colleague Bragi mentioned a hidden structural defect in the property. What is it exactly?" asked Thora. She glanced over at Bragi, who nodded.

  "It's awful, I'm telling you. The building is flawed and I'm certain the sellers knew about it and didn't tell me. I think it will spoil all my plans out here."

  "What kind of flaw are we talking about?" Thora asked, surprised. The property had been examined by approved surveyors and she had read through their report herself. Nothing unexpected had come up. The acreage of the property was as the sellers had stated, it carried all the rights named in the sale description, and the two farmhouses that were included with the land were so old that a complete renovation was the only option.

  "It involves one of the old farmhouses where I had the hotel built, Kirkjustett, you remember?"

  "Yes, I remember it," replied Thora, adding, "You know that in the case of real estate, a hidden defect must affect the value by at least ten percent of the purchase price in order for the right to compensation to be established. I can't imagine anything on that scale in such an old building, even one so large. Also, a hidden defect must be precisely that— hidden. The assessors' report clearly stated that the buildings needed to be completely renovated."

  "This defect makes the farmhouse effectively useless for my purposes," Jonas said firmly. "And there's no doubt that it's 'hidden'—the assessors could never have noticed it."

  "What is this defect, then?" Thora asked, her curiosity piqued. She imagined perhaps a hot spring appearing in the middle of the floor, as was said to have happened in Hveragerdi some years before, but she couldn't recall there being any geothermal activity in that area.

  "I know you're not particularly inclined toward spiritual matters," said Jonas levelly. "You're bound to be surprised when I tell you what's going on here, but I beg you to believe what I say." He paused for a moment before coming out with it: "The house is haunted."

  Thora closed her eyes. Haunted. Right. "Well, well," she said, twirling her index finger against her temple to signal to Bragi that Jonas's "defect" was just crazy talk. Bragi moved closer in the hope of eavesdropping.

  "I knew you'd be skeptical," Jonas grumbled. "But it's true, and common knowledge among the locals here. The sellers knew but kept quiet about it while the sale went through. I call that fraudulent, especially when they knew of my plans for the farmhouse and the land. I have exceptionally sensitive people here, customers and staff alike. They

  feel bad."

  Thora interrupted him. "Can you describe this 'haunting' for me, please?"

  "There's just a horrible atmosphere in the house. Also, things go missing, strange noises are heard in the middle of the night, and people have seen a child appear out of nowhere."

  "So?" Thora asked. That was nothing special. In her household, things always went missing, particularly the car keys, there were noises day and night, and children appeared out of nowhere all the time.

  "There's no child here, Thora. Nowhere in the vicinity either." He paused. "The child is not of this world. I saw her behind me when I was looking in the mirror, and words can't describe how... unalive she is."

  A shiver ran down Thora's spine. The tone of Jonas's voice left no doubt that he believed this himself and was convinced he'd seen something unnatural, however incredible it might seem to her. "What do you want me to do?" she asked. "Do you want to discuss it with the sellers and try to negotiate a discount? Isn't that the point? One thing I do know—I can't exorcise ghosts for you, or improve the atmosphere in the house."

  "Come up here for the weekend," Jonas said suddenly. "I want to show you some stuff that's been found here and see what you make of it. The best suite in the hotel is vacant, and you can give yourself a treat at the same time. Have a hotstone massage, whatever you want. You can recharge your batteries, and of course I'll pay you handsomely for it."

  Thora could do with recharging, though she felt he was contradicting himself by promising relaxation in one breath and claiming the place was haunted in the next. At that moment her life was moving in ever-decreasing circles, mostly centered around the expected grand-child her son had fathered before the age of sixteen and her strained relations with her ex-husband, who insisted that the child had been conceived because Thora was an unfit mother. Their son's hormones were a minor factor, in his view; it was all her fault. This opinion was shared by the parents of the little mother-to-be, who was fifteen years old. Thora sighed. It would take pretty powerful stones to massage away all the cares from her poor soul.

  "What do you want me to look at? Can't you just send it to my office?"

  Jonas laughed coldly. "No, not really. It's boxes of old books, drawings, pictures, and all kinds of junk."

  "So why do you think this old stuff is relevant to the so-called hidden defect in the property?" she asked skeptically. "And why don't you just look at it yourself?"

  "I can't. I tried, but it gives me the creeps. I can't go near it. You're much more down-to-earth; you could probably go through it all without feeling anything."

  Thora couldn't argue with that. Ghosts, ghouls, and fairies had not bothered her much until now. The real world gave her enough trouble
without needing to cross the borders into fantasy. "Give me a little while to think about it, Jonas. All I can promise is to try and make arrangements to come and visit. I'll call you tomorrow afternoon. Is that

  okay?"

  "Oh, yes. You can call. I'll be in all day." Jonas hesitated before continuing. "You asked why I thought this old stuff was relevant."

  "Yes?" said Thora.

  Again Jonas paused before speaking. "I found a photograph in the box I started going through."

  "And?"

  "It's a picture of the girl I saw in the mirror."

  Chapter 2

  Thursday, 8 june 2006

  THORA FETCHED THE file containing the documents regarding the property on Snaefellsnes. She couldn't glean much from reading through them; in any case, she found nothing to suggest Jonas's peculiar "hidden defect." It had been a relatively straightforward transaction, apart from Jonas's many stipulations over dates, such as insisting on signing the deeds on a Saturday. Thora had gone along with it, asking no questions in case she prompted a lecture on celestial configurations. On Saturday, luck comes your way, she remembered, from the old proverb. Nothing else about the sale was out of the ordinary. It involved the land and everything on it, including chattels and resources. The sellers were a brother and sister in their fifties, Borkur Thordarson and Elin Thordardottir. They were acting under power of attorney for their mother, who had inherited the land from her own father long before. They had made a lot of money on the deal, and Thora had been green with envy at the time.

  She smiled to herself as she wondered how to assess the haunting in order to devalue the property by ten percent, but her smile vanished when she visualized herself trying to persuade the sellers to pay compensation for the damage and citing ghosts as the reason. The brother had mainly handled the transaction on his mother's behalf, and Thora had only met his sister once, when the deeds were signed. She had never met their mother, who according to Borkur was extremely old and bedridden, but the son struck her as pushy and overconfident. His sister, Elin, on the other hand, had been silent and withdrawn. At the time, Thora had the impression that she was not as keen as her brother to sell the property. Recalling all this, she doubted that he would take a claim for compensation lying down. She put the documents to one side and crossed her fingers, hoping Jonas would change his mind. If not, it would take every ounce of her persuasive powers to get him to back down.

  She turned to her other pending cases, but the few that had come in were pretty uninspiring. Unfortunately business was slow. With a groan she cursed her own financial stupidity. At the end of the previous year, she had worked on a case for a wealthy German who had paid her handsomely, and if she had had an iota of common sense, she would have used the money to pay off some of her debts. Instead she had put it toward a trailer and an SUV. She didn't know what had come over her. Even worse, she had taken out a loan to help pay for them, plunging herself further into debt. She vaguely recalled having a vision of touring the countryside in the summer sun, a typical modern family on holiday—a divorced mother with her two children, and in her case a daughter of six and a son of sixteen who was himself soon to become a father. The grandchild had not yet been written into this rose-tinted dream, because Thora would probably only see it every other week-end. Hopefully that would not be the same weekend that her own children were spending with their father. It would make an interesting sociological study, she thought: a weekend father who was still so young that he spent every other weekend with his own weekend father.

  When Thora had finished going through work stuff, she went on the Internet and on a whim searched for information about the land on Snaefellsnes or the old farmsteads situated on the grounds. She Googled the names of the farms that occurred in the deeds of sale, Kirkjustett and Kreppa, but found nothing. With a shrug, she gave up. She decided to check her e-mail and noted, a little wearily, that there was a message from Matthew. She had got to know the German while investigating the case that ultimately earned her the trailer and the SUV, along with the accompanying debts. In fact, she had done more than get to know him—she had got to know him "intimately," as her grandmother would say—and now he wanted to visit her to renew their "intimate" acquaintance. Matthew was inquiring about the best time for him to take a short break in Iceland. Thora was dying for him to come over, but was well aware that the best time would be around 2020, when her daughter turned twenty. She wasn't sure Matthew could wait that long. She closed the message, deciding to wait until the morning before replying.

  She stood up, tidied her desk, and sighed. She wondered if her main problem was the desire for a better life, free from debt and untimely grandchildren, but realized that it was much simpler than that. She was depressed purely because she now had to walk past Bella on her way out. Bella, the secretary from hell, whom she and Bragi had been tricked into taking on as part of the lease agreement when they opened their office. Thora steeled herself and hurried away.

  "I'm off, then," she said as she walked past the reception desk. She wondered fleetingly if it might be possible to raise the desk higher, to show less of the unattractive young woman behind it, then with a pang of guilt flashed the secretary an unconvincing smile. "See you tomorrow!"

  Bella raised a heavy eyebrow and squinted at Thora. She added a scowl to complete her look of displeasure. "Are you still here? Huh."

  "Huh? What do you mean, huh?" replied Thora, confused. "Where else am I supposed to be? You saw me come in after lunch and you haven't seen me leave. I don't make a habit of jumping out of the window."

  "Pity," Thora thought she heard Bella mutter, but she couldn't be sure. In a much louder voice the girl said, "Your ex phoned about something, but I said you weren't in. He wouldn't leave a message."

  Thora was pleased, because Hannes's telephone calls were seldom a source of joy. She certainly did not want to give Bella the chance to gloat about the negative aspects of her life. She decided to let it go, long resigned to the futility of arguing with this creature, so she smiled again at Bella and took her coat from the cloakroom. She was poised to escape, standing by the door with her hand on the handle, when the girl cleared her throat to indicate that there was something else.

  "Oh, yes, and the leasing company phoned. You're behind on your installments on the trailer."

  Thora did not even turn back, just strolled calmly into the corridor and closed the door behind her. At that moment she would gladly have accepted the massage that Jonas had promised her, with or without hot stones.

  Chapter 2

  BIRNA LOOKED AROUND HER AND TOOK A DEEP BREATH. SHE PEERED through the thin fog hovering above the water and watched a pair of seagulls plunging to compete for food. Neither bird won and they rose back up with a great fluttering of wings. Then they vanished into the denser bank of fog that hung a little farther out. It was low tide and wet seaweed lay spread across the rocky expanse. This was an unusual beach: no sand, only boulders of all shapes and sizes, their surface smoothed by the passage of a million tides. The position of the beach was unique, as well: a small cove surrounded by high cliffs of columnar basalt, which could have been custom-designed by the Creator as a high-rise dwelling for seabirds. Every ledge was occupied, with a corresponding volume of noise. Birna walked over to where the cliffs formed another cove, leading on from the one she was in now. The tide flowed in through a stone arch, and the cove was completely enclosed by cliffs. It could only be seen through the narrow gap between the high walls of rock, but the squawking of the birds inside nonetheless resounded along the whole of the beach.

  Birna stopped. The fog had suddenly thickened, reducing her visibility to just a few meters. She inhaled deeply again, this time through her nose, savoring the scent of the sea. If she could, she would sleep out here in the open, wreathed in fog. She had absolutely no desire to go back to the hotel. It should not have been that way. She had loved that building and swelled with childlike pride every time she saw it, even while it was still under construction, th
e barest bones of what it would become. She had even liked the hole that had been dug for the foundation. The site of the hotel had somehow captured her imagination the first time she visited. The land overlooked the open sea on the southern shore of Snaefellsnes. In this it was like most other farms in the district, although slightly more remote; the farmhouse only came into view when one had walked almost right up to it. It had been built on a grassy patch in a rough field of lava that reached almost to the water's edge. The dramatic scenery inspired her. So did the old house. She had been commissioned to design a gigantic annex, which must not overwhelm or smother the main house. This had caused her a lot of worry— modesty was often the greatest challenge; grandeur, that was a piece of cake.

  The sensations that the project aroused were unfamiliar to her. Much as she loved architecture, the other buildings she had designed had not made her feel this way, but she knew exactly why. This hotel was far and away her most successful project. From the moment she began sketching the first draft at her studio in Reykjavik, she had realized that she was on the right track. The building was so much better than all her previous efforts. She realized that she would make a name for herself at last. She would become sought after.

  She had often wondered why this project had seized her imagination so immediately and why the outcome had been such a success. There was nothing remarkable about the old house or the land, although the house was unusually grand for its age. It had also been exceptionally well maintained, considering no one had lived in it for about fifty years. She soon realized that someone had looked after the house over the years, perhaps intending to use it as a holiday home or to get away from the city, but those plans had never materialized. Inside the building, there was nothing to indicate that the twenty-first century had begun. A thick layer of dust had covered everything, but mousetraps here and there showed that someone had made sure that the interior and furnishings escaped unnecessary damage. The first time Birna went there, she had found it difficult to look at the tiny skeletons in some of the traps, but otherwise the house had impressed her, inside and out.