Old World Murder - Kathleen Ernst [97]
“Want some bread?” one of the German interpreters asked. She was hacking at an ash-blackened, crusty round loaf with a knife that obviously needed sharpening. “It’s from the Schultz bakeoven, so just break off the bottom crust. And—” she lowered her voice—“I popped it in Tupperware to keep warm.”
Chloe accepted a piece of the fragrant rye bread and some fresh-churned butter, then retreated to the inn’s front steps. The bread was amazingly good, heavy and seasoned with sorghum and a hint of caraway. European bread. She felt a pang of loss, but let it pass. She didn’t have time to mope over alpine picnics shared with Markus.
A few interpreters nearby were telling My Worst School Tour Ever stories. Delores, the Norwegian area lead, waved her hand for attention. “Did you guys have that group from Grimes today?” she asked. “I was showing them how to card wool, and one kid grabbed a carding comb and brained one of the other kids with it. For a minute I thought we were about to have an all-out brawl right there in the stabbur. The teacher said that if the stabbur was such a good storage place, maybe she could store her seventh-graders there for the rest of the day …”
Chloe’s mouth turned up in the hint of a smile, remembering her own days in the trenches. Then her smile abruptly disappeared. She sat up straight. Could it really be so simple? Could it?
Probably not. Almost surely not.
But it was worth a try.
She jumped to her feet and trotted back to her car. It was only four-thirty. She had time to check this out before meeting Roelke.
She drove through the open site-access gate, past the Village, through Finn-Dane, on toward the Norwegian area. She took the shortest route, driving backward on the site loop. She tried to drive slowly, wary of any farm or maintenance vehicle that might roar around one of the blind curves.
She managed to reach the Norwegian area without catastrophe, and accelerated down the long driveway toward the Kvaale farm. She was almost at the end when she suddenly braked hard. The interpreters would scream if she left modern tire tracks in the farmyard. And rightly so. She parked in the drive.
The farmstead was quiet, all buildings locked up tight. Chloe loped past the house and summer kitchen. The log stabbur sat ahead of her, weathered silver and perched a foot off the ground. The design discouraged rodents and mold. It was a good place to store things. A safe place. The traditional place.
The door to the stabbur’s main room, where Chloe had first met Delores, was locked. The upper floor extended out over the lower room, accessed by steps leading up from the porch. Chloe charged up the steps—
Her left foot hit something hard in a place where nothing but air should be. She fell down three steps, landing on her butt and cracking one elbow against the wall. “Ow!” she yelped. She struggled back to her feet, rubbing her elbow, then flexing it cautiously. Painful, but not out of service.
She approached the steps warily this time, and saw the pane of clear Plexiglas used to keep visitors from climbing to the second story. Chloe wrestled it from its brackets, tossed it aside, and stampeded back up the stairs to the loft.
A sprawling, fluffy mountain of fleeces covered the floor. Some tied into tight bales, some sprawled loose. Some white, some gray, some brownish-black. Some clean, some with tips still clotted with dried manure.
Geez Louise. No wonder Delores had told Cindy not to worry about wasting wool as she practiced spinning.
Chloe began pawing among the heavy fleeces. Soon panting, she heaved one aside, then another. Her hands grew greasy with lanolin. Nothing … nothing there … nothing against the side wall.
And then she saw it. In one of the back corners, not covered with wool but screened by it, sat a rosemaled ale bowl.
“Holy Mother of God,” Chloe breathed. She waded to the corner, wiping her hands furiously on her shirt. Then she gently eased the bowl from the floor. It was smaller than most but carefully carved, with two cow heads—complete with horns—serving