Enid set the dishes next to the sink and pump. “Already washed, thanks.”
“Oh, you didn’t have to do that, it’s no trouble,” Juni said, rushing over, domestic and attentive. If Enid didn’t know better, she might think the woman didn’t trust her definition of clean. She recognized the type.
Enid leaned against the counter and looked over the gathering. A woman stitching a shirt, a couple of men, maybe ten years younger than Jess, whittling and catching the shavings in a bucket at their feet. Seemed to be pieces of driftwood, like what Kellan collected. Jess sat in a chair, sharpening machetes with a handheld whetstone. The scraping noise had been innocuous, like the background calls of birds, until Enid focused on it. Then it grated loudly, making her teeth ache.
“I’m so relieved that we were able to take care of that poor girl’s body. Feels like closure,” Juni said, fidgeting with the bowls, stacking them one way, reversing them, then finally setting them with their fellows on a shelf over the counter. “I suppose you’ll be off soon, then?”
Juni sounded a little more hopeful than she should have. Enid was amused. “I have a few more rocks I’d like to turn over.”
There was a hitch in the metallic scraping. Stitching and whittling paused. Everyone listened close.
Juni said, “I didn’t think . . . that is, it seems like it would be very hard to know what happened.”
“Oh yes,” Enid said. “I’d still like to talk to her people. Neeve’s had the most contact with Ella’s folk but doesn’t seem able to get them a message. If I wait, maybe one will come looking for Ella.” Another one besides Hawk . . .
Jess muttered, “That woman won’t help you at all.”
“And yet,” Enid said, “I’m still looking for a possible murder weapon. Like those, for example.” She nodded at Jess and the handful of blades sitting on the floor by his chair. “Everyone around here uses those, yeah? To cut back vegetation or harvest reeds and things? Like you all were doing the other day when we got here.”
Jess said, “You don’t think any of us did it? We couldn’t have.”
“You saw the body,” Enid said. “You saw the wound. You tell me—you think one of those machetes could have done it?”
Silence answered her, because they had to admit that yes, a blade as long as a forearm could very well have killed the woman.
“Why would we? We didn’t even know her,” Juni said, her voice almost a whisper.
“Maybe someone thought she was sneaking around, that she was a danger somehow, taking something that wasn’t hers. Erik thinks folk from upriver have been coming down here more than anyone knows. Taking things. If one of you saw one of them, got angry—well then, who knows.” She shrugged. “That’s one of the things I have to figure out—why someone would hurt her, when she seemed so harmless. Usually folk hurt each other when they get angry, and if I ask enough questions I might find out why someone was angry at her.”
“It wasn’t us,” Jess said starkly. “I can tell you, it wasn’t us.”
“I’m not accusing. Just thinking out loud. Sorry. I’ll leave you to it—”
Juni said, “It’s Last House. It must be someone at Last House. They knew her, if anyone had cause to be angry—”
“Juni—let it go,” Jess said.
“Yes, right, sorry.” Juni finally finished with the dishes and stepped away from the counter.
Enid smiled thinly. “Sorry to disturb you all this evening. Thank you again for the meal.”
Back at the work house, Teeg was sitting on the steps of the porch, notebook in his lap, writing by the light of the overhead solar lamp. Enid slowed her approach, watching, wondering at her instant suspicion of him. What, exactly, was he writing? Shouldn’t matter, should it?
“Making notes?” Enid asked.
He glanced up. “Starting our report. The one on Semperfi, at least. Might as well. And I suppose we’ll have to say something about the murder, however it works out.”
Sighing, she joined him. Night had fallen, and tiny bugs swarmed, attracted by the light. The gulls were gone, but the frogs at the river seemed even louder. The air was still sticky.
“I still think Last House folk know more than they’re telling,” Teeg threw out.
“All right. Doesn’t mean they’re all murderers.”
“Not all. Just Kellan.”
“Teeg, stop—”
His gaze flared again. He was so sure. “There’s something not right there.” He tapped his pencil on the page, like he wanted to drill a hole in it.
Teeg wasn’t wrong. Kellan was so jumpy, and all of them so wary . . . was it just the usual anxiety at seeing brown uniforms show up at their door, or something more? Then again, just because someone acted guilty didn’t mean they were. At least, not about that.
Teeg added, “I just don’t know how to get at them.”
“We need more evidence,” Enid said. “A better lever to pry with. We need to talk to Hawk again.”
“And how’re you going to do that?”
That was a good question, and she didn’t know the answer. Well, maybe she did. She just wasn’t sure it was a good idea. “I’ll go talk to him.”
“You’ll go talk to him,” Teeg answered flatly.
“They’ve got to have a settlement or camp or something not too far away. He didn’t have a pack or travel supplies with him. I’ll follow his trail and go find him.”
“That’s crazy, Enid.”
“Or we wait. He came down to harass Last House once, maybe he’ll do it again. We wait for him.”
“You really want to wait around for that? I’d have thought you’d be ready to go home, no matter what.”
“Not until we ask a few more questions,” she said.
“The longer we stay here, the less happy folk’ll be about it,” Teeg said. “I haven’t been doing this that long, but I’ve learned that much about the job.”
This used to come so naturally with her last partner, the wise and unflappable Tomas. They would toss ideas back and forth, and she never felt that she was being silly, or that the ideas were outrageous. Teeg, though—he was judging her.
“Really,” Teeg said, offhand. “You have to wonder why anyone would live that far out of the way, and care so little about what goes on in the rest of place.”
That was the wrong answer. That was the quick answer, the suspicious answer.
“And yet,” Enid said, “they pull their weight, don’t they? How much of the driftwood that Kellan finds is worked into bowls and spoons and furniture for the rest of the settlement? How much mending does Neeve do for the lot? And they tend the pyres for everyone, don’t they?”
Teeg turned back to his journal, frowning.
She tested her next thought, the next obvious step on this case. “We should go upriver to find Hawk. Anyone else from their folk, if we can. Get their side of it.”
He set down the pencil and glared at her. “That guy won’t talk to us. And if one of them did it—” He was scowling as his words broke off.
“If one of them did it, then what?” Enid pressed him.
“Then it’s not our business, is it? It’s not like they’ll take our judgment.”
That was a philosophical question that could occupy a room full of investigators for hours. Strictly speaking, no. If an outsider killed one of their own, it was none of the investigators’ business. But Enid wanted the answer. She wanted to know, even if she couldn’t do anything about it once she did. If she believed Kellan didn’t do it, then she needed to know who did, and why.
“There’s a settlement of them somewhere upriver. We go there, ask a few questions. It’ll take some effort but we can do it.”
Teeg drew back. “Seriously?”
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s too far. It’s not our job.”
“Scared?” she said, grinning, aware she was prodding him and not caring.
“It’s not necessary,” he said.
As they talked,
Enid made plans. They’d need at least a couple of days’ worth of food. The weather wasn’t likely to turn bad, but they should bring an oiled tarp or something just in case. Staff and tranquilizers, of course.
She said, “If we leave first thing in the morning we can make good time, maybe even find Hawk and his folk before nightfall. Come back the next day.”
Teeg said, “Wouldn’t you rather go back home? Aren’t your people waiting for you? Your baby might be on the way right now.”
She promised Olive she’d be back as soon as she could. There’d be no shame in leaving all this, no shame at all. No one would judge her.
“It’ll only be a couple more days,” she said. “We can do this.”
“I won’t go, Enid. I won’t.” His mouth twisted in horror. She might as well have asked him to slit his wrists. He was scared. Nothing she could say would convince him.
“Then I’ll go alone,” she said.
Investigators worked in pairs for situations just like this one. So they could tell each other when they were off base. So they could check on each other. Suggest, gently, when the other might be wrong. What now, then? Was she wrong?
“But you can’t,” he said, with the certainty of a child who didn’t know any better.
She smiled wryly. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to have a sense of adventure,” he answered.
“Oh no, you have to have a sense of adventure to put on that uniform.” You had to have a spine to wear the brown uniform that made you an outsider, that made people afraid of you. Maybe Enid had too much of a spine, was what Teeg was saying.
“What happens if you go and don’t come back? What am I supposed to tell regional then?”
“Tell them it’s my fault,” she said. “I thought it was a good risk, and I was wrong. It’s not on you.”
“But it will be! I’ll be the only investigator in history to lose a partner!”
“No, you won’t,” she said softly, thinking of Tomas dying in her arms last year. Teeg looked away; he knew the story.
“You can’t go, Enid.”
She stopped arguing. Teeg went back to writing. She wondered how much he could possibly have to say about the Semperfi house. “Maybe if I sleep on it, I’ll come up with another idea. Good night, then.”
“Good night,” Teeg said, not looking up from his work.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
Enid went to bed without drawing any interesting conclusions, then restlessly tossed and turned on the thin blankets and hard wood. Missed Sam’s arms around her. Thought of everyone back home, her folk at Serenity, wondering what was happening there. Would be very easy, to just drop it all and go back home where she belonged.
But she would always, always wonder. She wasn’t finished following this thread.
The sound of water moving, both in the river and on the coast, were unfamiliar and made Enid feel like something was sneaking up on her. Maybe something with a knife.
What had Ella been doing, the moment before she was killed? Had she known what was about to happen or had it been a shock? Had she trusted the person who did it, or had it been a stranger?
In some books about crime and investigations in the old world, from before the Fall—the handful that had survived—experts stated that murders were usually committed by folk who knew the victim. Rarely were they random. The reason might be simple and unsatisfying—long-simmering anger and a burst of temper. But there had to be a reason for this.
There had to be.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
Enid lay awake on her bedroll and heard Teeg come in and settle into sleep.
Before dawn, she got up—very quietly—and put together a pack of supplies. Enough for a day or two of travel, bread and beef jerky, dried fruit, a blanket. Her own knife. She’d find a staff of her own once she got to the woods; she wouldn’t ask Teeg to give up his. She took some tranquilizer patches out of Teeg’s pack.
When the sun rose, she was on the road, walking up the hill, and beyond.
Chapter Fifteen • the WILD
///////////////////////////////////////
The Last Bit of Path
Serenity’s banner, when it came, came quietly—almost anticlimactically. No fanfare, no grand announcement. In fact, Enid had been mostly drunk at the time.
Haven’s committee met in conjunction with the big midsummer market, and the whole town turned the event into a party, with music and booze and folk traveling in from households twenty miles around. People ate too much and didn’t even feel bad about it.
Olive was dancing in a crowd to a fiddle and drums, Sam and Berol were off finding food, and Enid was on the ground, on a blanket, back propped against a tree. She’d lost track of how much cider she’d drunk. People kept refilling her mug, and she kept not stopping them. Things had gotten loud, and rather than try to find out what was taking Sam so long, she stayed put so he could find her.
When one of the town’s teenagers stumbled to the ground next to her and tugged on her sleeve, she thought there must be a mistake. She couldn’t make out the words.
“I’m saying you’ve got to come, Enid, committee wants to see you!” the kid said breathlessly.
“Now?”
“Yes, now!”
“But I haven’t done anything wrong,” she mumbled back, and he rolled his eyes at her.
So she’d clung to the bark of the tree and managed to haul herself to her feet. Left her mug nestled in the roots, not really trusting that it would still be there when she got back. But she didn’t think it would be entirely proper to appear before the committee with a mug of booze in hand.
Buzzed, not paying attention, she still managed to arrive directly at the committee house. The way there was so familiar, after all. Could be a dozen reasons the committee wanted to see her in the middle of a big meeting like this. Probably it was investigator business. Someone had a question about an old case, or maybe a new one had come up.
Enid still wasn’t entirely sensible when she stood blinking at the three committee members across the desk, and they smiled happily back at her like she should be pleased.
Finally, she realized they were holding out a square of green-and-red cloth. She might have wished to be less tipsy at such a profound moment. Then again, maybe it was for the best that she wasn’t able to speak.
“Congratulations, Enid. It’s well deserved; Serenity house does good work,” said Otto, the committee chair, a medic who’d run Haven’s clinic for a decade now. He was normally serious, but now he positively grinned, and Enid just gaped at him—and she never gaped. She always knew exactly what to say.
“You might go tell the rest of your house now, hmm?” came the gentle suggestion from Clare, the town’s gray-haired matriarch.
“Yes. Thanks, thank you,” Enid finally stammered. She might have bowed a few times on her way out; she couldn’t really remember.
And then she stood in the clearing in front of the clinic for a long time, staring at the cloth in her hands, rubbing it between her fingers. The texture was rough, tightly woven with a kind of rustic handspun yarn. Of course they wouldn’t use good soft fiber on something that wouldn’t be worn. The tactile reality of the cloth fascinated her. The green was dark, like the forest. The red was like bricks.
Word got out. Someone spotted her there with the banner, staring at it as if under some kind of spell, and there was shouting, and Olive, Berol, and Sam managed to find her soon enough, and all of them together began screaming and laughing. Enid clutched the cloth while they hugged her, and all four of them clung to one another, beaming, while happily accepting congratulations from everyone else at the market festival.
They’d had no hint that they were about to receive a banner. Something like that ought to come with some kind of warning, a chance to prepare, Enid thought later. She had the vague thought that she hadn’t handled the announcement very wel
l. When she said this out loud, Sam laughed at her, insisting that there was no way she could prepare for everything.
Back at home an hour or so later, the four of them kept drinking. A celebration, just for them, with a bottle of brandy Berol coaxed out of someone back at the market. They collapsed in front of their fireplace, which was unlit in the middle of summer, but still served as the cottage’s focal point.
Sam took a swig straight from the bottle, handed it to Enid, who took a long drink, and then passed it to Olive. “We have to get as much drinking in as we can now, since Olive won’t be drinking for a while,” Enid said, her usual cheerfulness turned brilliant.
“What?” Olive blinked back at her, startled, gripping the neck of the bottle.
“If you’re going to be pregnant, you shouldn’t drink. Not like this, at least,” Enid said happily.
“She’s right,” Berol said, taking the bottle from Olive in turn. “You have to take care of yourself.”
“But . . . we haven’t talked about it. I assumed . . . I mean . . . I thought we would talk about it, that we’d decide if Enid or I would be the one . . .”
“You want it, though, right?” Enid said. “You really want to be a mom, yeah?”
And Olive started crying, right there, hand over her mouth and eyes squinched up. Berol set the bottle aside and folded her in his arms, chuckling quietly while comforting her. Drunk, Sam buried his face in Enid’s lap to hide his laughter, and Enid kissed his shoulder out of sheer good feeling.
“You mean you all just decided, without even talking . . .” Olive sputtered, when she was able to catch her breath.
“It just seems obvious,” Enid said.