Chapter 18
The wind whips across the fortress ramparts, carrying salt spray and the threat of rain.
Suomenlinna can’t seem to decide whether it’s a military stronghold or a picnic ground, so it’s committed to both, and I respect that in an island.
Sienna Caldwell stands at the stone wall overlooking the Baltic.
Her frizzy auburn hair escapes its ponytail in wild spirals, and she’s hugging her arms tight, bracing against a wind that seems to have personal business with her.
Behind us, the Velvet Vikings are scattered across the fortress, taking countless selfies with dramatic poses, and their laughter drifts along on the breeze.
Magnus hovers nearby, uncharacteristically quiet, watching Sienna with an expression I can’t read. And that’s saying something, considering the man usually broadcasts his feelings at Viking volume, which is to say loud and inappropriate.
I approach carefully, not wanting to startle her. “Beautiful view.”
She jumps anyway and spins around, her eyes wide behind her round glasses. “Trixie! Oh my goodness, you scared me.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.” Although in my defense, I announced myself with a compliment to the view, which is the gentlest ambush known to womankind.
“No, it’s fine. I just...” She trails off and turns back to the ocean. “I needed a minute. Away from the group. Is that terrible?”
“Not even a little bit. Leading fifty women through an artillery fortress sounds exhausting.”
“You have no idea.” She gives a hollow laugh. “I keep waiting for someone else to step up and take charge, but everyone keeps looking at me like I’m supposed to know what I’m doing.”
“You seem to be managing fine.”
“I’m faking it,” she admits, adjusting her glasses. “Astrid made this look easy. She’d just decide something, and everyone would fall in line. But when I try to do it, people argue or ignore me or wander off to take selfies with cannons.”
“She watches the water the way widows watch a horizon,” Magnus observes, drifting closer. “Searching for answers, or searching for a way out. In my experience, women who search the sea that hard eventually find me. And then they stop searching.”
Terrific. Now I’ve got a ghost running a commentary on a grief spiral while nominating himself as the cure, and I can’t even shush him without looking unhinged.
I lean against the fortress wall beside Sienna. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How are you really doing? With Astrid’s death?”
Her shoulders sag. “I don’t know. Some days I’m fine.
Some days I can barely get out of bed. Today I’m somewhere in between.
” She goes quiet for a moment. “I keep thinking about how she died. Frightened and suffering. And I was standing right there, Trixie. Twenty feet away with a drink in my hand, and I couldn’t do a thing. ”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“Maybe. But I should’ve paid more attention. Should’ve noticed if someone was upset with her. Should’ve...” She stops and shakes her head. “I don’t know. Done something.”
“Astrid had a lot of people upset with her,” I say carefully. “From what I’ve heard.” From what I’ve heard is doing heavy lifting there, seeing as I’ve spent this entire cruise collecting grievances against the woman the way other tourists collect magnets.
“She did.” Sienna’s voice is barely audible over the wind. “She had very high standards. Very specific ideas about how things should be. Not everyone appreciated that.”
Word for word what she told Marina and me back in Gothenburg. Either the woman rehearses her grief, or somebody handed her a script and she’s sticking to it.
“Did you appreciate it? Her high standards?”
She looks at me, and the rawness in her expression nearly knocks me back a step.
“Sometimes.” She shrugs. “Sometimes I thought she was brilliant and inspiring. Sometimes I thought she was cruel and controlling. I think both things can be true about the same person.”
“That’s very wise.”
“Or very confused.” She turns back to the ocean.
“My daughter’s in a dark place right now.
She has been for a while. And I keep thinking about how Astrid would’ve handled it.
Tough love and firm boundaries and zero tolerance for excuses.
But I can’t do that. I can’t just cut her off. She’s my daughter.”
My heart aches for her, and no amount of sea air is going to fix it. “A dark place? Dark how?” I ask gently.
“Just... struggling. With life. With choices.” Sienna’s voice cracks. “I wish I could do more to help her. But I don’t know how. And I’m raising her three kids while she figures things out, and some days I wonder if I’m helping or enabling or just making everything worse.”
Three kids.
This woman is herding fifty book club members through a fortress and running a three-child household on a broken heart, and I had the nerve to feel overwhelmed by the buffet line this morning.
“You’re doing what you can,” I offer. “That’s all anyone can do.”
“Is it enough, though?”
“I don’t know. But it’s something. And sometimes something is all we’ve got.”
She wipes at her eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dump all this on you.”
“Don’t apologize. We all need to talk sometimes.” Besides, suspects who spill their hearts out on fortress walls happen to be my favorite to have a conversation with. I keep that part to myself.
“She’s broken,” Magnus says quietly. “Not guilty. Just broken. I know the difference.”
He would. By his own correction, the man wasn’t smitten with Astrid Storm—he was devoted. Devoted men learn everything there is to know about broken. Usually from the inside.
Sienna takes a shaky breath. “Astrid knew about my daughter. About the struggles. She was going to...” She stops. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter now.”
It matters. Things that truly don’t matter never get never-minded that fast.
And there’s something else. Back in Gothenburg, this woman swore she was never in Astrid’s inner circle.
Yet somehow Astrid knew the most private heartbreak of her life.
Astrid didn’t strike me as a woman who collected the secrets of casual acquaintances.
She struck me as a woman who collected leverage.
“What was she going to do?” I press.
“Nothing. Forget I said anything.” She straightens and adjusts her jacket, and for a second I think I’ve lost her. Then her hands go still on the zipper, and whatever’s been holding her together decides it’s off the clock.
She sighs hard. “She was going to tell everyone.” The words come out flat and worn, the voice of a woman who has run out of prettier versions.
“At the costume gala. In front of the whole club. About my daughter. About my family.” She swallows hard.
“I won’t tell you what it is. I’m sorry, I know how that sounds.
But it’s not mine alone, and my grandkids don’t deserve to have it aired out on a fortress wall to someone, even a kind someone. ”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I tell her, and I mean it, even as the question sits there anyway, patient as a cat.
“Astrid found out. I still don’t know how.
She sat me down over tea, very civilized, cream and sugar and blackmail, and told me I could leave the club quietly or she’d share my family’s situation with the membership.
Her word. Situation.” Sienna laughs, and there’s not a drop of warmth in it.
“So I did something I’m not proud of. I went digging for something on her. ”
The wind gusts hard enough to make us both grab the wall, and she keeps going anyway. Once a dam breaks, the water doesn’t ask permission.
“Let’s just say life has taught me more than I ever wanted to know about how embezzlement cases work.
How they get built. Where the court records live.
What the paperwork looks like when money walks out of a company sideways.
” Something crosses her face, there and gone, a door easing shut. “Don’t ask me how I know.”
I tuck that away in the growing pile of things Sienna Caldwell isn’t telling me.
She leans in. “It took me three weeks of late nights after the grandkids went to bed. Because twenty years ago, somebody buried this thing deep.”
“Buried what?” My pulse has picked up to a jog.
“Astrid’s husband’s company lost two hundred thousand dollars over the course of a decade.
His business partner was convicted for it.
He’s still sitting in a cell to this day, swearing he never took a dime.
” She turns to face me, and her eyes have gone hard behind those owl glasses.
“And he didn’t. I followed the money, Trixie.
Hotel receipts. Restaurants. A little rental cottage paid in cash, two towns over from where Astrid lived.
She was having an affair with that partner the entire time.
She took the money from her own husband’s company to fund it, and when he finally noticed the hole in the books, she aimed him straight at the man she’d been meeting at that cottage. ”
I can’t manage a word. The seagulls fill in for me.
“The partner went to prison. Her husband dropped dead of a heart attack six months later. And Astrid inherited every penny and spent ten years playing the devoted widow.” Sienna’s chin trembles.
“That woman stole, framed her own lover, buried her husband, and then had the gall to threaten my family over our shame. Ours.”
Beside me, Magnus has gone very still. Every ounce of swagger has drained right out of him, and what’s left looks smaller than seven feet has any business looking.
“I did her taxes,” he says, hollow as the wind. “Back then. Before the book club, before any of it. The numbers never added up, little one. I told myself I was reading them wrong.” He stares out at the water. “A man in love can talk himself out of arithmetic.”
And there it is. The sort that—, interrupted by my husband and a levitation stunt days ago, and now the sentence finally has its ending.
I wish it didn’t.
“Who else knows?” I ask Sienna. “What you found.”