Page 2 of The Last Viking

Mike’s eyes widened with surprise at her unaccustomed playfulness, but he came back real quick. “How about if it’s a male figurehead and another kind of…endowment? Then, would it be okay?”

“Not even if it was Mel Gibson in a kilt.”

They exchanged warm smiles, and Meredith was glad she’d relaxed her standard formality with Mike. It felt good, for a change, to act…well, normal.

“Besides, we have more important concerns right now,” she noted. “Spring break is about over, and we still haven’t found a competent carpenter to head the project. Now that the temperate weather is here, I’d like to resume building.”

With a nod of agreement, the young man slid into a chair in front of her desk, bracing one ankle on a knee. “I worked with your grandfather for over a year on the ‘Trondheim Longboat Venture,’ but he was the master builder. When he died last fall, everything just came to a screeching halt.”

A screeching halt? Yes, Meredith knew that better than anyone. Gramps had been the light of her life, her lodestone in a world that had become increasingly lonely and alien after her bitter divorce three years before. What would she do without his sage advice and unconditional love?

“I’d be perfectly willing to take over,” Mike continued, “but I just don’t have the talent to oversee all these students. I can sand wood and do grunt work with the best of them, but that’s about it.”

“I know, and I appreciate all the help you’ve given me so far.” Brushing a strand of flyaway hair behind her ear, she unconsciously tucked it into the loose knot at the nape of her neck, thinking over their mutual problem. “It’s too bad we got so few responses to the ads we placed in the Bangor newspapers, and none of them qualified. Maybe one of the archaeological periodicals my brother recommended will bring some interested soul out of the woodwork.”

“Hey, expert carpenters want a hell of a lot more money than we can afford with nonprofit funding.”

“Someone will show up,” she asserted. Even if I have to pay top dollar out of my own trust fund. Anything to make Gramps’s dream come true. “In the meantime, we can start the students on menial tasks.”

“Like hand-sanding, right? With sand, the way the primitive shipbuilders did it, right?” Mike grumbled. Sanding was an endless, tedious task everyone hated.

“Right.” She smiled and pushed her glasses up her nose. “And see what the woodworking shop can do in terms of an animal prow. I don’t care if it’s an elephant. Just no obscene body parts.”

“If you insist,” Mike muttered as he walked out of her office. “An elephant? Geez, who ever heard of a Republican longship? Talk about anachronisms!”

Darkness blanketed the countryside by the time Meredith had finished working for the day and was driving up the long lane to the cottage recently bequeathed to her. The one-bedroom A-frame, built with her grandfather’s own hands on a desolate cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, held so many memories for Meredith. As children, she and her older brother Jared and her younger sister Jillian had been shipped off to Maine each summer while their parents, engrossed in significant work as noted professors of medieval studies at Princeton University, went off to lecture, or on one research expedition or another to museums and archaeological digs.

Gram had been alive then, too, and the smells of Gramps’s woodcarving and Gram’s fresh-baked bread and home-cooked meals filled the house. Meredith wasn’t even sure if her own mother knew how to cook, so preoccupied had she always been with her career. Not that culinary arts were an essential motherly skill. A live-in housekeeper had taken care of those domestic tasks.

Contemplating the house now as she got closer, Meredith realized how small it was, and how simple. Funny, she’d never noticed before. But then, now that she thought about it, while Gramps and Gram had slept in the upstairs loft, she and her brother and sister had bedded down in sleeping bags on the living room floor, or outdoors in warm weather next to the pool. They’d never minded.

So much love! That was what she remembered most…the love Gram and Gramps had clearly shown for each other, and toward their beloved grandchildren.

Now, all that was gone.

Fighting the tightness in her throat, Meredith gave a cursory glance to the half-completed longship, highlighted momentarily in her headlights. Gramps had decided to build the project on the vacant lot next to his house, rather than on the Oxley College campus, which was too far inland. Besides, Gramps had told her in his letters that his students loved to come up to the remote spot, often combining their work with picnics, or climbing down the treacherous cliffside for a quick dip in the ocean.

She retrieved her briefcase and a small bag of groceries from the back seat and approached the dark house. There was something so sad about an empty house at the end of the day. That was the only thing she missed about her marriage to Jeffrey.

Usually, he’d gotten home early from Columbia where they’d both been professors. In the early years—the happier days—he’d already started dinner by the time she got home. Violin sonatas by Vivaldi had been playing on the stereo. And a glass of chilled Chenin Blanc and a warm smile had greeted her as she opened the door. Sometimes, he’d even welcomed her in other ways.

Well, those days were gone forever. And good riddance!

As she opened the door to the cottage, she did get a greeting, though. And a big surprise.

No sooner did she step into the entryway than a rough arm wrapped around her waist from behind, lifting her off the floor, and a knife was pressed against the side of her neck. The grocery bag fell with a thud, ripping, and her briefcase snapped open, spilling its contents.

“Let me go!” she shrieked, kicking out with her sensible loafers—which she desperately wished were hiking boots—against a bare shinbone. Her flailing arms hit a thigh, and it was nude, too. And hairy. Oh, no, the guy must be naked. Please, God, not rape! Frightened and outraged, she screamed as loud and as long as she could, clawing at the brute’s arms.

Her attacker didn’t release his hold on her one iota, just muttered an incoherent breathy expletive against her exposed neck, followed by a single guttural command that sounded something like, “Kyrr!”

The only light in the pitch-black house came from the reflection of a roaring blaze in the fireplace in the living room up ahead, and a full moon partially visible through the French doors leading to an ocean-view patio.

A fire? Her assailant had taken the time to build a cozy fire? She groaned, concluding that he must, indeed, be a rapist and that he planned a lengthy assault. She also recalled in a flash of terror that this was Friday night. A whole weekend stretched ahead of her in which no one would notice her absence or come searching for her.

Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Where’s my Mace? To her chagrin, Meredith saw the can rolling toward the kitchen, along with three oranges, her favorite Parker pen, and a handful of change from her wallet. Be calm. Remember your self-defense classes. Take time. Think before acting.

Think? Hah! She was a clueless amoeba on the brain chain right now. A screaming clueless amoeba.