by D. N. Hoxa
We continued to walk to the right, and the ogre couple took us to a narrow pathway that went through a hole in the tree trunk of a giant tree. It was like a miniature tunnel, and the inside of the trunk was engraved in all kinds of small symbols.
Symbols very similar to the ones we’d found in Collins’s notebook. It no longer surprised me that what he’d written there was in some sort of ogre language. On the other side of the tree tunnel, we could no longer see the lake or the patios or the ogres. This side was completely empty, and there were a lot more houses in three straight lines, half hidden by big trees. It occurred to me that it was warmer in there, too. And the trees here were greener. The grass also. I could finally breathe a little easier. My muscles ached as I relaxed.
We kept on walking, passing houses with leafy roofs that seemed to be empty, until we reached a stone head smack in the middle of them. It was over twenty feet tall, round, and with three faces carved around it, all of them ogre. Around it was water, about three feet wide, and it gave you the impression that it was circling around itself. It was probably just a trick of the light slipping through the leaves overhead.
It was fascinating, all of it. Like a completely different world, detached from our own. No wonder ogres didn’t leave their communities. It was incredibly peaceful in there, with the sound of birds singing and leaves rustling in your ears, and the smell of the lake didn’t make it all the way here. It was quiet but also full of life. The kind of place one would go to, to completely relax body and mind.
Our destination was three houses away from the head with the three faces. The house was no different than the rest—I’d counted seventeen so far, which was much more than I expected. There were more ogres here than I’d realized.
The wooden door with round edges was open, and the ogre couple walked in without waiting for us. The inside of the house was bigger than I’d imagined. There was a lot of space, and it seemed everything was thrown together in it. Maybe ogres didn’t believe in walls because to the right, next to the side window, was a huge bed, perfectly made with clean white sheets, a dresser across from it, and on the left were some sort of seats made out of wood, with big green cushions on top of them, and against the wall behind. The wooden walls made everything look darker, but they did have electricity. The overhead light was bright yellow, and the strange kitchen across from the door had a microwave in it. There was only one door, just as big as the entrance, at the end of the furniture, and I guessed it was the bathroom. Good thing they’d at least separated that from their living space.
“Hello,” Dumont said when they finally stopped in front of us. “We didn’t get a chance to properly introduce ourselves. I’m Detective Dumont, and this is Ruby Monroe and Logan Haines.”
“My name is Herman Tales, and this is my wife Margaret. Please, make yourselves comfortable,” the man said, waving at the green cushions for us to sit, and we did.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” Dumont said. “We have some questions regarding Lee Collins, and we found his phone records show that he’s called two numbers registered to the ogres. I’m guessing that was you?”
Herman sat down across from us on a cushion, and the wood beneath him squeaked in protest. Margaret stayed on her feet.
“He’s our godson,” she said, a hand to her chest.
“We practically raised him,” said Herman.
Dumont took out his phone, and I saw him open the Notes app before he started typing.
“We have information that Mr. Collins left the apartment he rented on the fourteenth of last month. His credit card shows records of regular withdrawals until two weeks ago. His cellphone was turned off at the same time, too.”
Both the ogres nodded their heads. It was so sad to see them so…sad.
“We believe he’s alive,” I said before I could help myself. “He’s just been kidnapped, and we’re very confident that we’re going to find him soon.” It just felt like an obligation to try and give them some hope. Because there was hope. I had hope for Nana, too, and it’s what kept me going.
Margaret put a hand on Herman’s shoulder, and he covered it in his. They both smiled a bit.
“Right, but it’s very important that we find him as soon as possible. So, if you could tell us a little more about Mr. Collins, what he did for a living, how many times you saw each other, anything he was involved in recently that could have resulted in his kidnapping.”
Herman shook his head. “Lee is a good man, Detective. He grew up both in here and out there in the world, and he never cut ties with either. He mostly worked for us, he was our face when trading fish with magians and humans, as we prefer not to do business in person,” he said.
“And he came to visit us at least once a week. He’s a good boy. A very good boy,” Margaret said.
I didn’t need any more convincing.
“Lee is straightforward. Tried to get jobs out there, but it never worked out. He never mixed well with his father’s kind,” Herman said, wrinkling his round nose. “But he never causes trouble. He’s a very quiet man and mostly keeps to himself.”
That much we’d already discovered from his landlord.
“I need you to think hard about anyone who might have been angry at Mr. Collins for any reason, maybe in your fishing business? Someone Mr. Collins would consider an enemy or someone who had something to gain from his disappearance,” Dumont said. “Really, anything you can tell us would help us a great deal. We really need to find him soon.”
Margaret and Herman looked at each other. Like the kind of look you exchange when you know something only the other person knows.
They absolutely knew something, and my stomach tied in a thousand knots when I realized that.
“There were others,” I said, ignoring Dumont’s request to let him do the talking. “Other people have been kidnapped, and we believe they were all kidnapped by the same guy who took Lee.” Margaret and Herman weren’t even surprised. I took out Sasha’s picture from my pocket. “This is how we found out about Lee.” I offered Herman the picture and he took it. “It’s Lee’s Enclave. It was given to me by one of the others in that picture, and that’s how we even found out that he was gone.”
Herman gave me the picture back, snarling. “He didn’t need that Enclave. We kept telling him he was better off here, but he wanted to be part of your world, too.”
“Tell us what happened, Mr. Tales,” Dumont said. “Why didn’t you want Mr. Collins to join the Enclave?”
“Because it was wrong,” the ogre said, shaking his head, the whites of his eyes suddenly turning red with anger. “Because he didn’t belong there. Humans, magians, you’re all the same. Working against nature, the very thing that keeps you alive. Nothing ever ends well with you, and now look at what happened.”
“Honey, please calm down,” Margaret said, sitting down next to her husband. “They’re going to find Lee.”
“Yes, we will.” I sounded a lot surer than I felt. “And the sooner we do that, the better the chances that he’s okay. That’s why we need you to tell us what you know. Anything that can help us.”
Margaret nodded. “He was twenty years old when the Enclave master wanted to send them all over the world to study old magic practices and to learn more about individual uses of magic, which was illegal. They had no approval from the Magian Ministry to do so, but their master took them anyway. At least that’s what Lee told us.” I elbowed Dumont on the arm because he wasn’t typing this on the phone. He ignored me, of course. “Eventually, they went to Egypt.”
I swallowed hard. This already didn’t sound good.
“They found spells and took samples back here to the Enclave to study them, and some of the students, including Lee, decided to test them out. To use them.” She spoke and I could already picture it. Young magians with Egyptian runes on their hands and probably a lot of free time to explore them. Margaret took in a deep breath and continued. “An accident happened, and some of them almost died. Lee was badly injured
, and we had to keep him here for two weeks to heal him completely. His friends were hurt, too. So they agreed to never use the runes again.”
Ha! Nothing, my ass. I couldn’t wait to look into Christopher Ford’s face when I told him about all the lies he told us. Or the truths he didn’t. I knew it all along. He could have saved us all this trouble if he’d just been honest, for fuck’s sake.
“And do you know who his friends were, Ms. Margaret?” asked Dumont, but she shook her head.
“I’m afraid I don’t remember.”
“What happened next?” I asked, as impatient as a little girl. But the story was everything I hadn’t even hoped to find here, and I couldn’t wait to hear the end of it.
“As far as he told us, one of his friends never really gave up on the runes. He continued to use them in secret and tried to get Lee and others to use them again, too. But they refused. It was the same man who’d funded all the trips for the research.”
Whoa…you thinking what I’m thinking?
Jonah Davis! The only student in Ford’s Enclave with enough money to fund trips for all those people.
“He’s dead now, and Lee felt so guilty when he died. He said that his friend had tried to reach out to all the other students, but they’d all refused to help him. Lee felt like he should have done something more to help him, but he couldn’t. Everyone makes up their own minds. It wasn’t his fault,” Margaret said.
Pieces were slowly falling into place. I had no doubt in my mind that Jonah Davis had been the guy still using the Egyptian runes.
“But he still felt guilty when another one of his friends died.” Margaret looked up at Dumont with tears in her eyes. “And he didn’t think they were accidents.”
“Why didn’t he think they were accidents?” Dumont asked. He was just as enthralled in the story as I was.
“Because they’d been threatened. I don’t know by whom, but they’d both been threatened prior to their deaths.”
It wasn’t an accident.
Thomas Murphy didn’t have a cause of death written down in his death certificate.
And my father’s death had certainly not been an accident.
I suddenly felt dizzy.
“What can you tell me about these?” Dumont continued, pulling out the folded folder from his pocket. He handed it over to them, and they looked inside for just a second. “We found them in Mr. Collins’ belongings.”
But Herman shook his head. “Lee didn’t make these,” he said and looked at Dumont. “I did.”
A long pause followed as we processed the information. Probably feeling awkward, Margaret offered us tea, but we refused. I couldn’t imagine drinking anything right now. I just wanted Herman to start talking already. I wiped my sweaty palms against my jeans and never looked away from the ogres.
“We’ve suspected that the magic blasts weren’t random since the beginning. The second blast happened in Oregon, very near an ogre community, and they witnessed strange activities afterward—waves of controlled magic, the kind that is shaped through runes,” Herman said. A shiver washed down my back. What he said couldn’t be true. Countless experts had agreed on the blasts: they were random, caused by nature basically dumping loads of magic in one place, all at once.
But why would an ogre lie about something like this? What did he have to gain?
“We’ve been keeping track of the blasts ever since, visiting sites whenever possible, and they all have the same signature, the same kind of magic, almost exactly like the same spell being used over and over again, sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, depending on the level of magic of the things and beings in that location.”
“If I understand correctly, you’re saying that the magic blasts were premeditated. That they were done on purpose,” Dumont said. That was exactly what Herman was saying.
“They were premeditated,” he said without a flinch. I don’t know why I was so tempted to believe him.
“These blasts aren’t acts of a conscious being. It’s magic. It has no rhyme, no pattern, no cause,” Dumont insisted, but Herman shook his head.
“It does have a pattern.” He raised the folder for us to see. “We tried warning the MM, hoping to get them to look into this from a different perspective, but we weren’t heard. That’s why I was told to give these to Lee so he could try to convince the Ministry.”
Because Lee wasn’t an ogre. Well, he was, but he didn’t look like an ogre. And I thought I had problems.
“Let me guess, the MM didn’t listen to him, either,” I said. It wasn’t even a hard guess.
“They didn’t,” Herman said. “But there is a pattern.” He offered the folder back to Dumont. “I can’t explain it to you because I don’t know how, but there is a pattern, and it’s important to find it.”
“Then I will look into it,” Dumont said, putting the folder away. But it didn’t sound like he meant it. Then he pulled out Lee’s notebook from his jacket and opened it to the first page where we’d used a pencil to make out the words Lee had written on the torn page. “We also found this in Mr. Collins’s belongings.”
Margaret took one look at it, and jumped to her feet. She almost ran to the other side of the house, to the dresser, and opened one of the five doors to reveal ten small drawers. She opened the bottom one and pulled out a piece of paper.
When she brought it back, we saw the same letters from Collin’s notebook written in blue ink.
“He sent this to us when he left.” The symbols were identical to the ones we were able to come up with.
“Is this ogre language?” I asked. I was pretty sure this wasn’t mentioned during our lessons at the Enclave, but then again, I tended to zone out in class pretty often, when I wasn’t making plans to do something I wasn’t supposed to with Avery.
“A variation,” Margaret said. “Each ogre family has its own language—like a dialect from the old language, which is called ogri. We each make our own symbols with unique meanings, and Lee knew our family’s ogri very well.”
“So what does this say? And when did you receive this?” asked Dumont.
“It says, I’m being watched and need to disappear for a while. I will contact you when I can.”
Lee Collins had definitely known what was happening here, damn it. If I’d just gotten to him in time…
“He sent it to us a month ago,” Herman said. “And he called many times to tell us he was alive after it. Until two weeks ago.”
“Did he ever mention anything about being followed or watched before?” I asked halfheartedly, but the ogres shook their heads.
“This was the first time,” Margaret said. “I’m afraid we don’t know anything more that could help you.”
“Please, think about it. It’s very important that we find him. Do you have any idea where he might have gone? Maybe he had some place he liked to go to, to get away?”
What the fuck? I turned to Dumont. “Lee Collins was kidnapped,” I reminded him. What the hell was up with him?
“We don’t know that,” said Dumont through gritted teeth. “If he knew he was being followed and disappeared on his own, there might be a small chance that he wasn’t caught and is just staying in hiding. We have to look at this from all angles.”
Fine. That made sense.
“Lee has never tried to get away before, not from us. I hope he’s hiding, but I don’t think so. He would have contacted us to let us know he was okay,” Herman said.
Dumont seemed really upset. Maybe he was still pissed off at Gavin Oso.
“You’ve offered us more than enough.” I nudged Dumont again. He didn’t need to give these people a hard time. They’d basically saved our lives and might have even solved the case for us, too. We just needed some time to put the pieces together and see what else we could connect to the story they told us.
“Right.” Dumont pulled out a business card from his wallet. “If you remember anything else, please give me a call, no matter the time. A property out of the city, maybe the name o
f a friend where Collins could be—anything.”
Herman took the card and nodded. “We will.”
“You will find him, right?” Margaret asked, her voice breaking.
“We will. We absolutely will,” I said before Dumont could speak. I don’t know why I felt personally responsible and was taking all of this so personal, but I was going to keep my word or die trying.
“We will do our best,” Dumont said in a reproachful tone as he looked at me and stood up. We all followed suit. “Thank you for your time.”
It felt wrong to leave now, knowing how desperate these ogres were, but the sooner we got back to the office, the sooner we could think straight.
Before I walked out the door, Margaret grabbed my arm, making me jump, and put a piece of crumpled paper in my hand. “This is my number. Please call me when you know something. Please.”
I wrapped my fingers around the piece of paper tightly. “I will,” I promised.
21
We argued the entire way back.
Tell me, do you think I was being unreasonable to ask to speak to Christopher Ford again? Screw who he was, and screw the laws that people like him made—he had to tell us what he knew. Otherwise too many people were going to die, if they hadn’t already.
Detective Dumont didn’t want to hear it.
I looked at the back of his head and wished it would explode. Figuratively. He was so stubborn it was ridiculous!
“It’s ridiculous!”
There. Someone who agreed with me.
Except the person who said that didn’t.
Remember Howard Stannel, the guy who’d attended our meeting with Christopher Ford earlier without ever uttering a single word in all the time he’d been there?
Turns out he was Dumont’s captain, and he wasn’t happy about anything we had to tell him.
“I just need to know if these have been checked,” Dumont said, pointing at the pieces of newspaper we’d gotten from Lee Collins’ landlord. As soon as we’d gotten back from the meeting with the ogres, Dumont wanted to go speak to his captain about the magic blasts. As if that couldn’t wait a bit longer. My time was running out already.
