The Wild Dead

  Then Kellan pointed out to the shore. “There. Look.”

  Someone was walking far out on the marsh, toward the tide line, which was creeping in with the high tide, filling the flats with water. A line of footprints sunk in mud showed the route she’d taken, straight out.

  “Where’s she going?” Jess said wonderingly.

  Away, away from everything. Enid let out a groan, “No, no . . . Teeg! Come on!” She ran. Probably shouldn’t have; she was still woozy, but she did it anyway.

  Juni didn’t get to walk away from this.

  Teeg followed her down the path, past the bridge, and out to the marsh. Enid was vaguely aware of Estuary folk following farther behind, as if they’d needed a moment to figure out what was happening. The dog was barking its head off.

  The trek was hard. Even this late in the day, the sun beat down fiercely. The mud sucked at Enid’s steps. But she kept on because she had no choice. Not if she wanted to see this through.

  Juni kept walking, all the way to where waves battered, devouring mud, seaweed, trash. By the time Enid and Teeg reached her, Juni was knee-deep, waves lapping around her, soaking her trousers.

  “Juni, get back here!” Enid commanded, as if her authority still held sway at the edge of the world.

  The woman slogged on, pushing through water, incoming waves shoving her back. She swayed, about to fall over. Then she stopped, rooted, and let the water flow around her. Her arms hung at her sides, fingers trailing in the wet, her face tipped up to the sky.

  The waves swept up and over Enid’s boots. Still, Juni stayed planted.

  Enid cursed and waded after her. Teeg followed only when she was already far out, as if he couldn’t decide whether plunging into the ocean to pursue a murderer was part of the job.

  The water was cold, smelling of brine and rot, and Enid was thoroughly sick of it all. Part of her wished Kellan hadn’t seen Juni on the shoreline. That the woman had walked into the ocean and just kept going. She would have just vanished, and that was a mystery Enid might actually have walked away from.

  But no. Enid chastised herself for being cruel. She was supposed to be better than that.

  “Juni, come on, get out of there,” Enid said.

  “No. I don’t have to go, I don’t have to do what you say.” Her voice was oddly calm.

  Enid grabbed the woman’s arm, hooked her own arm under Juni’s shoulder in a bind, and hauled backward. Her own bruised shoulder twinged, and she winced. Teeg arrived and took up the other side; Enid didn’t have to ask him to.

  Juni screamed.

  Screeched and thrashed, kicking water, soaking them all. If she used words, they were buried in the noise of outrage and sobbing. Grimly, Enid locked Juni in a hold and dragged. Between the two of them, they got her back to the sand, all of them thoroughly drenched. Enid thought they might need to use tranqs on Juni. But once out of the water, she stilled. Went limp in fact, a dead weight dropping to the ground. Finally exhausted, Enid couldn’t keep hold of the woman and sank to the beach with her. Both of them sat there, wet sand plastered over them. Teeg, baffled, stood watch. Jess and Erik came running up. Bear trotted up as well, but skittered back from the water, wouldn’t come any closer. The most sensible one of the bunch.

  Juni was crying now, wasn’t in any state to answer questions, but Enid had a lot of them. She stared out at the sea, catching her breath, putting her thoughts back in order.

  Jess demanded, “What’s this about? Why’s she carrying on? What did you do to her?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Enid sighed. “It’s all her.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said, lost.

  “Juni of Bonavista,” Enid said, all patience and sentiment gone. “Did you kill the outsider woman Ella?”

  Slumped in the sand, face red and eyes swollen, she nodded and managed to croak out, “Yes.”

  Well, that was that. The party accompanying them had no response and just stared.

  “Let’s get her back home. I’ll explain it all,” Enid said. Still not able to rest. Wouldn’t rest till she was back at Serenity with her family.

  Nothing for it but to keep slogging.

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////

  Juni wouldn’t look at anyone, not even Jess, no matter how much he hovered over her with hot drinks, dry towels, and deep concern. She wept, then finally quieted. She didn’t seem to have any energy left for crying, for denials. She’d wrung herself out.

  Enid didn’t have a chance to change clothes, so her trousers, dried and crusted with brine and mud, chafed, making her feel even more hot and sticky. She imagined she stank as well. None of the households around here had a good shower. They mostly washed in the river. Didn’t matter, since she didn’t want to let the folk of Bonavista out of her sight, just in case they planned some great revolt. She had to stay right here until it was all finished.

  Teeg leaned on his staff, standing watch. Seemed to be happy to have a solid, well-defined role to play. Not the floundering around and arguing they’d been doing for the past week. On the way back from the shore he’d kept looking at Enid, considering. Silently demanding she explain herself. She didn’t, because she wanted to do it all only once. And then go home, at last.

  The meeting, the great reveal Enid had planned, moved to the front steps of Bonavista. The observers hemmed Juni in, so maybe this arrangement was better. Let Juni feel trapped. This time when Enid surveyed the circle, taking count, everyone she needed was here.

  Only thing left was to begin. Even though everyone already knew—the word had spread instantly.

  Enid said, “I’m sure you’ve heard. But I want to lay it all out clear, so there’s no question. Most of you know a body turned up here six days ago, washed down the river. Most of you had a chance to look at that young woman and the wound that killed her. Ella wasn’t from here, but some of you knew her. The folk at Last House, yeah? Did some trading? Nothing wrong with that. It’s allowed, as long as you have the extra without breaking your quotas. Salvage doesn’t break quotas. And they do make very nice leather in the hills. I saw it.

  “Should have been nothing wrong with it, but Ella was killed anyway, and I’ve been trying to figure out not just who did it, but why. But no one much likes to talk about so awful a thing. So here we are.” Enid paced, looked at each of them. They were all uneasy. Waiting, wanting to be anywhere but here. Unhappy at what such a crime said about their community.

  Enid approached the folk of Last House, and she stopped. Kellan cringed. Neeve touched his shoulder. She had on a neutral expression, but she must have known what Enid was about to say. What Enid had discovered, upriver. She’d been through an investigation before, when she cut out her implant.

  Enid continued. “Ella and some of the others started trading with the settlement here. Maybe Ella liked it here. Maybe there was another reason, but she visited more and more. Neeve asked Ella to join Last House. Is that right?”

  “We would have taken her in, if she wanted. I thought . . . I thought she wanted it.” Neeve’s voice was soft, but she always spoke softly. She revealed no emotion.

  “Kellan, you didn’t want Ella to join Last House.”

  “I didn’t hurt her,” he said sullenly.

  Mart stepped in, put a steadying hand on the man’s shoulder. “We know that, Kellan.”

  Enid nodded, gestured for Mart to move back. “I found the knife you were looking for. She left it back in the wild folks’ camp before she came here. Before she was killed. It was another blade that killed her. And Kellan, you didn’t want her here. Why?”

  The question didn’t seem to surprise him, or confuse him. He just hated it. He hunched over, hands pulled tight to his chest, and wouldn’t look at anyone. Every time Enid and Teeg had questioned him, he hadn’t wanted to talk. This time it didn’t look like a conscious decision; the words were stopped up. He couldn’t get them out.

  Enid said, “Kellan, you’re not in trouble, but I need your h
elp. I’m trying to make things clear.” Not for him, not for her—for everyone else. Everyone needed to hear this. “Please tell me. I think I already know.”

  “Because,” Kellan said, and his mouth twisted up, his face wrenched in what might have been physical pain. “Because, because if she stayed here, folk would see what she was. They would see.”

  “See what?” Erik asked, baffled.

  Enid held up a finger, a request for quiet, no more disruptions. No one spoke, but the question hung there. The question at the center of it all. “I know, Kellan. I know you were protecting Neeve. This whole time you were keeping her secret. I know. It’s all right.”

  Neeve stepped beside Mart, displacing him, putting her hand where his had been on Kellan’s shoulder while the man trembled with suppressed tears. Her expression remained cold.

  Next, Enid turned to Juni of Bonavista. Took a breath, and asked the thing she wasn’t sure of, that she needed most to know.

  “And that’s my last question. The one thing I haven’t been able to figure out. Juni, how did you know that Ella was Neeve’s daughter?”

  There were gasps. Cries. Even more so than when Juni revealed herself as the murderer. Enid made note of the reactions, who was most shocked, and who wasn’t shocked at all. Juni—she wasn’t surprised. She set her frown. Determined, unrepentant, she sat on the steps, her gaze blank, impassively bearing the scrutiny.

  Mart stood open-mouthed. “What is this? What does that mean, what are you saying?” So, he hadn’t known. All this time, only Kellan had known, and he’d kept the secret. She wondered how he’d found out. If he’d covered for Neeve back then, or if she’d confided in him—he was solitary, he wasn’t likely to talk. A good person to tell secrets to. But she’d put him in a bind, if she’d told him and no one else.

  “Juni, please answer.” Enid spoke calmly, even gently. Nothing to get excited about, no reason to be angry. She was satisfied to see Teeg with his hand resting on the pouch of tranquilizers, just in case. Juni glanced over Enid’s shoulder at him; maybe she was remembering this whole process from the last time.

  She said, “I heard them. Kellan arguing with the girl, telling her to leave. Driving her off. I was down in the river channel; they’d not have seen me from up on the ridge. But I was there.”

  Enid remembered the spot upriver where the voices from Last House carried. Pure chance that she’d been there.

  “You heard them argue. This would have been maybe ten days ago. Then what?”

  “I climbed up to see. Wanted to see what she looked like. Kellan was gone by then, he drove her off. And she ran straight into me.”

  Enid could picture it: Juni would have followed that path along the water, the one that twisted around and climbed out of the channel when the river narrowed and met the forest. Ella likely would have been running for the trees there. They would have been surprised to see each other.

  “She . . . she looked like Neeve when Neeve was young. Not just like, but close enough.” Juni chuckled. “Looked like both of us. Like my daughter would have. If I’d ever had a chance to have a girl.” She sounded wistful, lost in the moment.

  “And Ella might have thought she was looking at Neeve. Might have thought she knew you,” Enid observed. The young woman would have been surprised if she didn’t know Neeve had a twin sister. Might even have tried to talk to her, not understanding the danger. “You’re pretty good with a machete, aren’t you, Juni?” Enid said. Still calm, careful.

  The air fell still, aching with the implication. No one breathed.

  “I am,” she whispered.

  “You’d been cutting reeds, so you had it right there in your hand. You were angry because you realized what must have happened all those years ago, what Neeve must have gotten away with—”

  “She spent all that time away . . .” Juni murmured.

  “Yes.”

  “That girl. The moment I saw her, that young face, that long hair, just like Neeve’s . . . She smiled at me like she knew me, and she was about to say something, and I couldn’t . . . couldn’t stand it. If she spoke, that would make her real. I didn’t want her to be real. She should never have been born.”

  Worst of it was, she was right. Ella shouldn’t have existed. But she did. “We’re not dealing with should-haves, here,” said Enid. “Ella was a living, breathing person. And you’re a murderer.”

  Juni let out a forlorn, stifled sob. She knew very well what she was. “She didn’t belong. Neeve should be punished, not me.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Enid saw that Neeve was crying silently.

  Enid had worried over this moment: When Neeve found out what had happened to her daughter, heard the story herself, what would she do? Attack? Scream, start a fight, insist on blood? Enid was ready to step between them. Hoped Teeg was ready too, and wondered if maybe she should have warned him ahead of time after all.

  But the woman simply stood, quietly mourning. Now Kellan had his arm around her. They comforted each other. Mart, though, had turned away. He’d had no idea, and now he had a problem to grapple with.

  Enid had already decided: she wasn’t going to lay judgment on Neeve for bearing a bannerless child. Whatever it was she’d gotten away with, or thought she’d gotten away with, was blown away like dust.

  Besides, the looks the folk around Neeve were giving her now, the attitudes they’d throw at her for the rest of her life—well, that was likely punishment enough. Let the woman live with what she’d done.

  Juni was another matter. There was a space around her. Even Jess had pulled away, probably unconsciously. This happened often with such cases, as if folk hoped to distance themselves from the crime, as if what Juni had become might be contagious.

  There had to be consequences. Lots of investigators talked about making the guilty serve as examples, establishing deterrents. Determining which actions the community deemed out of bounds. Those were all useful conversations to have. But from some primal, gut emotion, Enid felt that people who’d committed such an act should have their life changed for it. They shouldn’t get to go back, as if nothing had happened.

  If any of her colleagues called this impulse revenge, Enid wouldn’t argue.

  The Coast Road communities didn’t practice executions, though Enid had an urge to drop Juni in a very deep hole and walk away. Instead, she thought of the next worst thing.

  “I’m going to send you away, Juni. I’ve got a place in mind, nothing at all like this. I’m pretty sure you won’t like it. But that’s the point, isn’t it?”

  “You . . . you can’t. I won’t go, I can’t go into the wild, how will I live?”

  “This isn’t in the wild. Though Ella’s folk seem to do perfectly well. No, you’ll still be Coast Road. Just on the other end of it. And if you don’t go, you doom your whole household to dissolution. You already know what that feels like.”

  She looked up at Enid in stark horror, eyes red, mouth open. “Jess?” she said, turning to look for him. But he’d walked away, was already on the other side of the house. She had no allies.

  “You can’t do this.” Her voice was high, taut.

  “I think I can.”

  The silence stretched on, and on. Neeve finally shifted. Stepped forward, toward Juni. Enid almost reached out, but the Last House woman stopped. Studied the murderer for a moment, then shook her head.

  They were almost a mirror of each other. Neeve had always looked older, had lived a rougher life. But the last hour had aged Juni. They looked more alike than not. What did each of them see in that mirror, that none of the rest of them would ever know?

  “I’ve always hated you,” Neeve said to Juni. Then turned and walked away. The rest of her household followed her. The other heads of household left, to spread the story of what had happened.

  Juni covered her face with her hands.

  Erik was the last of the others to leave, and he sidled up to Enid, looking at his feet the whole time. “I’m sorry.”

  S
he tilted her head. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I brought this down on all of us. If I’d just let the house go, if I hadn’t called an investigation—none of this would have happened.”

  “You’d have found Ella’s body, called it just one of those things, and never thought about it again, is that it?”

  He looked out at the shoreline, the lapping water, that convenient distraction. They never even would have asked the questions.

  He asked, “Are we going to be okay? I mean, all of us along the marsh here. After all this. Are we ever going to be okay?”

  “May take a little work. But most of you, yeah.”

  They’d need to look out for one another. But that was supposed to be the whole point, wasn’t it? Looking out for one another. His nod was slow, hesitating. Like he wasn’t convinced. Nice guy, but Enid was glad to see him go. She wanted to be alone. No—she wanted to be with her own people.

  “One other thing, Erik—there’s a young man from the camp upriver named Hawk. He’s taken Ella’s passing hard. He might come down here looking for some kind of revenge. Just . . . keep an eye out.”

  “So they really did care for her. Her people, I mean.”

  “Did you doubt it?”

  He scuffed his feet and decided this was the moment to walk on.

  Enid had to have one more conversation. Not for the case or the report, but for herself. She had to jog to catch up with the folk of Last House, already past the bridge.

  “Neeve!” she called. At this, the men of the house closed ranks around the woman.

  “Leave us alone, just leave us alone!” Kellan cried out, pressing hands to his skull and squeezing his eyes shut.

  Frustrated and losing patience, Enid halted. She was being selfish. She should just leave them alone. But she needed to ask one last question. “I just need to speak with Neeve a moment. This isn’t about the case; that’s done. There’s no more trouble. I spoke to the folk up in the hills about you, Neeve.”