He looked up at the porch of the house over his head, snarled a curse. Enid wasn’t sure if he was directing his anger at her, or the house. Didn’t really matter. He hefted the ax in both hands, as if ready to strike again, but instead growled at the post one last time and marched up the hill to meet her. A shock rattled her—the way he held the ax was the way you’d hold it as a weapon. Was he really going to attack them? Teeg held his staff at the ready, waiting.
Enid tried to gauge his intentions. “What’re you doing?”
He stopped, looked at the ax in his hands as if surprised to find it there. Glared back at the investigators, and for a moment Enid believed that yes, the man really did hate them.
Finally, he let the ax hang in one hand and heaved a sigh, caught a breath. “This must look pretty crazy.”
“I don’t know,” Enid said. “I’m waiting for you to tell me what this is about. Then I’ll decide if it’s crazy.”
Shrugging, he looked back at the ruin, sweeping his arm as if to encompass it. “If I can’t save it, there’s no sense keeping it. Might as well bring the whole thing down. That’s what everyone wants.”
“Some things take care of themselves,” Teeg said.
“And everything dies. I get it. I just . . . I hate seeing it there. If we can’t fix it, it’s just . . . useless.”
Enid said, “I’m not an engineer”—that was Sam, and she thought he would know exactly what to say here, what would put this in the right light for Erik—“but there’s got to be a way to get what you can from it. Salvage. Not so violent, yeah?”
“My dad would be so disappointed. I couldn’t save it. I should have been able to save it.”
Enid glanced back to the beach and the ruins there, the sections of pipes that had washed down and been half-buried in sand, fallen walls and shadows of tall buildings, reduced to scaffolding. The wrecks of another world. Erik didn’t want this house to be just another wreck, Enid guessed.
“You can’t always save it all,” Enid said, sure she was explaining something he already knew. “You can’t sacrifice the rest of what you have to save a scrap.”
He wiped the back of his hand across his face. “It just . . . I mean . . .” He screwed up his face like he might cry. Sweat, not tears, streamed down his face, but he turned away. “We do everything right. We do our part, and look what happens. And then that body washes up. Somebody knows what happened—Last House, yeah? They see those outsiders all the time, and they’ve been hiding from the rest of us for years! Who knows what all they’re hiding? You know about Neeve, right? What she did?”
“That was a long time ago,” Enid said patiently, not liking where this was going and hoping to stifle it. “No one’s ever made a complaint about them since.”
But Erik wanted to point his anger somewhere, and if he couldn’t chop down his house, he’d find another target. He straightened, set his mouth in a line. “I’m telling you, they know what happened to that girl.”
“Oh?” Enid asked. Was this bluster, or was there more, and could she draw it out?
Seemingly taken aback, he tried to explain, but there was little to explain. “I told you, we see them sometimes, coming down to scavenge—”
“You see them? Wild folk in general? Or would you recognize them? Do you see the same ones?” Had he been lying about recognizing the young woman?
“I don’t know, I didn’t pay much attention!”
“Really?”
“I watch them just to make sure they don’t get too close. You can’t trust them, they might come through, take anything—”
“And how do you make sure they don’t get too close?”
Erik looked at the ax in his hand. The blade, with a good solid chop just like the ones he’d made on those supporting logs, could have made that wound. She’d assumed a slicing knife had done it. Maybe not.
“Tell me, Erik—did any of the outside folk ever get too close? You ever have to do more than threaten?”
He shook his head. “No . . . really, no! I couldn’t ever. I couldn’t.” He took a breath. Tried again. “All I’m saying is those people never would come here at all if Last House folk didn’t deal with them.”
That was another question, wasn’t it? Did the folk of Last House invite outsiders to trade with them, or had the outsiders come looking for it? And did it matter?
Erik was pointedly holding the ax at his side now, its head resting on the ground. As nonthreatening as he could be without just dropping it. Pushed hard enough, though, she was pretty sure he could use that ax on someone.
“All right,” she said in a neutral tone. “There’s still plenty of questions to ask. Thanks for your help.” They started off, but Enid looked back to add, “And get some help to take down the house for salvage. Don’t let it fall on you.”
“Yeah. Okay,” he said, and reached down to scratch Bear’s ears.
Enid and Teeg headed back down the road. A couple of the folk at Pine Grove paused in their chores to watch them pass.
“Do you believe him?” Teeg asked. “If we’re looking for a murder weapon, someone strong enough to actually kill—he fits.”
Erik had known investigators were coming. Was already feeling upset because of the house, what everyone was saying about it. He was already angry when the body turned up.
“I don’t know,” Enid said. “I wouldn’t have thought so. But people do strange things when they’re angry. We might want to do some defense practice with that staff, if we’re spending more time here.”
“How long do you think we’re going to be here?” She didn’t know, and Teeg scowled at her silence. “We’ve got to get our report in about the house. You know, what we were sent here to do.”
“Yeah. Just seems a little pointless right now.”
They arrived at the bridge when Enid spotted another group coming down the road, a hundred yards or so behind. She shaded her eyes, made out two men and a woman. Her hair was braided, a kerchief over it. Neeve.
“They coming to look at the body?” Teeg asked.
“I hope so.”
“Kellan’s not with them.”
“I doubt he has any desire to look at it again,” Enid stated.
They waited until the Last House folk caught up to them.
“Hola,” Enid said. “Thanks for coming down.”
“If you think it’ll help,” Mart said. He stood a little in front of the others, a leader. Or a protector.
“I do. She’s up this way.”
They started across the bridge.
“Kellan didn’t come with you?” Teeg asked.
“Figured he’d already seen it,” Mart explained. “I have to tell you, if he didn’t recognize her, the rest of us aren’t likely to. We all see the wild folk when they come downhill. If she wasn’t one of those . . .”
Enid looked over at him. “Even so—we just need to be sure.”
Chapter Eight • the estuary
///////////////////////////////////////
Folk of the Wild
As they came up to Bonavista, Juni watched from the porch of the main cottage. Neeve didn’t so much as glance over. They skirted around to the work house.
A couple of the household folk were out back, turning over reeds, drying them. They paused, looked up at the visitors. Stared. All of them had machetes hanging at their belts. Enid wondered, did the outsider folk carry machetes too? If she asked, what would Mart tell her?
She’d worried that they wouldn’t be able to find a killer here. But if she tilted her perspective just a little, everyone looked like a killer.
“Ready for this?” Enid asked. “She was in the water for a time, so keep that in mind.”
She went under the building first, knelt by the body, carefully folded back the canvas, like the wrapping on some dreadful gift. The hair was tangled, framing an ashen, swollen face. Enid debated about whether to expose the wound, and then decided yes, they needed to see everything.
Stepping back, she br
ushed her hands on her trousers and gestured to present the body. Watched their reactions closely.
Mart made a noise, a grunt of shock or sympathy. What anyone might do, seeing such a thing. Telman simply stared. He and Mart were both older, gruff. Like nothing ever surprised them. But this shook them.
Neeve’s expression didn’t change for a long moment, until she put a hand to her mouth and turned away, as if the reality of the image took a long time to sink in, and when it did, it horrified her.
Mart finally shook his head. “Who would do such a thing?”
“That’s what I hope to find out,” Enid answered. “Have you seen her before? Do you recognize her?”
Enid expected denials. The same head shakes. They were so isolated in their household, of course they wouldn’t know anything.
And then, barely loud enough to hear, Neeve said, “Yes, I know her.”
From just outside the work house, Teeg leaned in, eager. “You do? How?”
Telman, standing with Neeve now as if ready to hold her up, glanced back. Mart pursed his lips. None of them showed surprise—only resignation. Might the group have discussed denying this, insisting they’d never seen her? Then what would Enid have done? But it was out now.
“You all know her,” Enid said, nodding at the body. “You all recognize her. Even Kellan? Did he lie to us this whole time?”
“He was scared,” Mart said. “He didn’t say anything because he was scared.”
“He lied!” Teeg countered.
Neeve had folded in on herself, eyes shut tight, as if holding in tears. Telman put his arm around her shoulders, and Mart moved to stand between the investigators and his folk. Protecting them. Enid must have been glaring harder than she thought.
“I’m not angry,” she said, trying to make it sound so. “But you really need to tell us what you know, and you need to be honest. How do you know her? Where is she from? We’re only trying to learn what happened to her.”
Neeve said, “You know there are folk living up the river. Up in the wild.”
Enid nodded. “Yeah. There’s more people living out past the roads than some folk realize.”
Neeve nodded. “A few of them come down the river to trade sometimes. They bring food, beef, and leather—they hunt feral cattle. And some deer. Bring some pretty good salvage. Still lots of unpicked ruins up north. She’s . . . she’s one of them. She came down a couple of times a year, with some of the others.”
“You traded the cloth with them, then? What she’s wearing?”
“Traded the finished clothes. They don’t do a lot of weaving, I guess.” Her hands clutched at each other; she kept looking back at the body, her face puckering with unshed tears.
That answered that question, and more easily than Enid had expected. “No, a lot of those folk are nomadic. They don’t have big looms.”
“Neither do we. We trade with Everlast for cloth. But I sew.”
Enid smiled kindly. “Everyone’s got something to trade, that’s what makes it all work. Do you have any idea how she might have ended up in your marsh with her throat cut?”
Mart swore under his breath. Unhappy with her bluntness, maybe.
This required bluntness.
“No,” Neeve said softly. “She was a quiet girl. Her name was Ella.”
The body had a name now, and that felt like a small victory.
“Everyone around here knows you trade with outside folk,” Teeg said. “Did you try to hide it from them? Keep it a secret?”
Enid thought she knew where he was going with this and waited for the answer.
Neeve’s hand closed on her collar. “Well, no. I mean, we didn’t keep it secret, but we didn’t . . . it isn’t like they came to the market in Everlast, yeah? They needed things; it felt like helping them to trade. No one much comes up to our end of the road.”
“But you had extra to trade with?” Teeg continued. “Surplus?”
Surplus—that was a whole other accusation in itself. If Last House had tried to hide this, what else might they be hiding? Then again, maybe they’d just been keeping to themselves.
“A few things a couple of times a year doesn’t usually affect quotas,” Enid said. It wasn’t like Last House was growing crops that would feed the entire settlement.
“Exactly,” Mart said. “It’s just odds and ends mostly. Kellan’s salvage and the like. There’s no quota on salvage.”
“Are . . . are you going to find out who did this?” Neeve asked.
“We’ll try,” Enid said. “Any information you have—anything you can tell us that might help—even if you don’t think it’s important, I need to hear it.”
“It was probably one of them that killed her, wasn’t it?” Mart said. “One of the other wild folk. Must have killed her and the body washed down from one of their camps. It couldn’t have happened here.”
That would be easy to assume . . . and it would absolve Enid and Teeg of any official need to discover what happened. “I don’t know,” Enid said.
“She wanted to come to the Coast Road,” Neeve said. “At least, she talked about it sometimes. She and I did. I tried . . . I knew she’d be safer here.” Her gaze turned to Enid, to the uniform, but only for a moment. “I thought she was just about to decide to come live with us. We invited her, and . . .” She shrugged and finally looked away, eyes shut.
It wasn’t unheard of. Especially after a year of bad storms or drought, when food wasn’t as easy to come by. If someone came stumbling into a town asking for help, people were supposed to help, no matter what. The young woman, Ella, had already established a relationship with Last House folk. Wouldn’t have been out of the question to take that a step further. Rare, but not impossible.
“This invitation, it was recent?” Enid asked.
“Just this year, yeah,” Neeve said.
Enid’s brow furrowed. “Might someone have been angry at her over it? One of the other folk from upriver—might one of them have wanted to stop her from joining your household?”
The folk of Last House exchanged serious looks. Another unspoken conference between them, and there was a story here Enid very much wanted to know.
Mart said, “Don’t know. We only ever saw the three or four who came down to trade. They seemed . . . they seemed like family. So I wouldn’t have thought they would hurt her. But who knows? Who knows with them?”
“When are you due to see them again? What season do they usually come to trade?”
Neeve said, “They were just here a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t expecting to see them for a few months. Unless . . . unless Ella decided to stay. We told her to come visit any time, that we would work it all out. I’m . . . I’m sorry.” Hand over her mouth, she retreated.
Enid watched her a moment, standing in the open, catching her breath. Was never easy, seeing something like this happen to someone you knew. Someone you liked. “Right. If you think of anything else, if anyone stops by looking for Ella—come tell us, yeah?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mart said. “You’re going to need that pyre soon, I think.” The smell was becoming evident.
“I think we should.”
“We can do it today,” he said.
“Thank you,” Enid said.
The body lay in the shade of the building. Full of silence, full of questions. Enid covered her up again just as gently as she’d uncovered her.
They all came out from under the house, bent over in the shadow and emerging into the glaring light of day.
Juni was waiting there. Not too close, just enough to see. To hear what they said. To pass judgment.
Seeing Juni and Neeve almost side by side, their similarities were eerie. They were the same height, they had the same faces, the same build—were both stout, middle-aged women who rounded their shoulders and crossed their arms, hunching in. But their differences were also stark. Made from the same mold, but used so differently. Neeve looked older; her hair was grayer and the lines around her mouth and eyes cut deeper.
Juni’s clothing was haphazard: a tunic and trousers thrown together, wrinkled and splashed with whatever she’d been working on. She was a busy woman who spent time outside, who expected to get dirty. Neeve wore a dress and apron, faded, but neat and carefully mended. Neeve did a lot of handwork—Enid remembered the sewing baskets throughout her house.
The two women didn’t look at each other and seemed determined to keep the others—like a wall—standing between them. An old, old bitterness.
“Come on,” Mart murmured, and led them away, back to the road leading uphill. He folded an arm around Neeve’s shoulder, and she huddled between him and Telman. A close-knit group that looked out for one another. That should have been a good thing.
“Well,” Juni declared, once the group had moved on. “Did they recognize her?”
“Yes,” Enid said. “Her name was Ella.”
“Did one of them do it?”
Enid almost laughed at her. “You were out here listening to everything they said—did you hear a confession?”
She frowned. “I thought you’d have been able to tell. You can’t trust any of them. Kellan said he didn’t know her at first.”
“Juni, I’m very grateful for your hospitality, but please let us do the investigating.”
“Right, yes. I’m sorry. I’ve got some biscuits up at the house if you’re ready for breakfast.”
“Sounds lovely. We’ll take some with us, if that’s all right. We have some walking around to do.”
Not long after, eating biscuits on the way, Enid and Teeg walked toward the bridge. The sun was high now, a perfect time to examine the riverbanks.
“So Kellan lied,” Teeg said.
“He did.”
“He had to know we’d find him out.”
“I don’t imagine he was thinking very clearly at the time.”
“Ella,” he said, trying out the name. “You think one of them from upriver would really join a household and get an implant and everything?”
“It happens sometimes,” Enid said. “Not as much as it used to, thirty or forty years ago. Things have settled down since then. But it happens. She wore Coast Road clothes. Maybe other things about the place looked good to her too.”