The Grumlin turned to face the gate, defiantly craning his neck. His little hands were raised over his head as he finished his story. “Ms. Pond took one good look at the gate and got angry. She got even madder when she was told about the black diamond transportation through it. That’s when she called all the Grumlins together. She made the speech that woke them up. They’ve been awake ever since.”
The Grumlin finished signing and turned back around to face us with an expectant look.
“Okay, the little guy’s done talking,” Dilwyn said. “Now’s the time for those questions, Chief.”
“Do they have any idea what’s on the other side of this gate?” David asked.
The Grumlin hesitated before signing his answer back to Dilwyn. “Here’s his exact quote, near as I can tell: ‘a place that isn't worth risking our lives for. In other words, if they talk about what's on the other side, then it means certain death for their people.’”
Well, that didn’t sound too ominous. Not. “Have any more black diamonds come through here since Millicent died?”
The Grumlin firmly shook his head while he signed his response. “Naught…in fact, the trafficking stopped altogether before she died. The theory that the rock people believe is that Ms. Pond is the one that made it all stop. Life only got better after she made her speech here.”
“Was there any humans involved in the mining? Who authorized it? Any more than just the tidbit on the 'tall-haired' woman?” David asked. "There's no mention that the Cathedral Administration were the ones sanctioning this. No mention of Gideon Shields. It seems it's a private operation. Is there a name?" David was pacing.
Dilwyn looked doubtful about whether he could get the question right. Still, after he had slowly tapped the query, the Grumlin signed back an answer. Dilwyn didn’t seem to get it and tapped out something in response. Must have been the equivalent of “say that again” because the Grumlin gave him the same series of clicks and shush's the second time.
“He says that all us humans look kind of alike to them,” Dilwyn said. “But he did say you should…seek out the tall-haired Hydra.”
“Hydra?” I asked dubiously. What would an underground race like this know about a legendary sea monster with Marge Simpson hair like that?
“I told you that there were some limits to what I understand,” Dilwyn said back.
“And you’ve been doing fine, Dilwyn,” David said, putting a comradely hand on his shoulder. “Can you get our host to tell us a bit about this ‘Hydra’?”
“No promises,” Dilwyn said while he tapped out the message.
The Grumlin looked up at the cave ceiling to think about the question. Then he finally gestured out his answer. “Little guy did notice some things about this one. She was the first to go through the portal here. She never had a kind word for any of the rock people. Just demands. She really hated on Ms. Pond, which made them little fellows hate her in turn.”
“So this ‘Hydra’ was a ‘her’?” David asked.
“No mistaking that much, I promise you.”
“Was there anything physical that made her stand out?” I asked. “I know that may be asking too much but…”
“Can’t hurt to ask,” Dilwyn said as he relayed my question.
The Grumlin looked up at the ceiling again, actually putting some thought into the question. Finally, he looked back down and gave a response. “She wasn’t like any of the regular women they saw. She was taller than most…had ‘turned-down lips’—you know, a frown—on her face all the time…and, again with the hair. Tall hair.”
The expression on David’s face told me exactly who he was thinking that description fit. “Don’t say it.”
It can't be Portia Fearwyn. It just can't. Tall hair? Maybe they're describing her witch's hat?
“Okay, I won’t,” David said with a grin. “At least, not while we’re here." He turned to Dilwyn. "Can you tell our host thank you for his time? I think we’ve got everything we need for right now.”
“One of the first phrases I learned,” Dilwyn said with his own smile, tapping out his appreciation. The Grumlin signed back a message that made Dilwyn hold up his hand.
“The little guy would really appreciate it if you could do something about this portal. He’s still not saying what’s on the other end of it but I guess that it can’t be anything good.”
“Tell him that’s something I’ll definitely make a priority once I get back to Glessie,” David promised.
After Dilwyn had tapped out David's sentiment, the Grumlin bowed so low that his head touched the floor, his tiny arms extending fully to his sides.
“That was his way of saying ‘thank you so much,'” Dilwyn said. “I do believe that you’ve just made a new friend.”
“Well, Grandma Chimera always said that you could never have too many good ones,” I noted. “Let’s get you back to the outside so you can go home.”
“Yeah, about that,” Dilwyn said as we started walking the tunnel that led to the falls. “How hard is this going to be?”
“Depends,” David said. “How do you feel about cliff diving?”
Chapter Sixteen
Maybe it was because my clothes were still soaked from the jump into the pool back on Cathedral, but the Gorthlands felt muggier than usual. The whole flight over, I felt the water clinging to my skin worse than it had during that disastrous flight back from my first vacation to the bucolic Isle. I would have liked to have changed at the house, but David insisted on making a trip to Gaunt Manor right after we dropped off Dilwyn at his farm. By this point, I had concluded that this little jaunt had better net us something useful. I was risking catching a cold as it was.
I was a little concerned about my police chief friend. He looked very pale when Dilwyn, he and I pulled ourselves from the pool.
I asked him about it, but he just said he felt queer with the weird energies in that place.
"You felt it, right, Hat?" He pulled a hand through his wet mane. "It was worse this time around than it was on our first visit."
I only looked at my friend. Sure, there were some Fae vibrations in there. At least it felt like fairy business. But, I certainly wasn't so adversely affected by the magical currents as my dear friend was. He really didn't look well.
He offered me a practiced smile, and hopped on his broom, waving for me to do the same. Dilwyn rode shotgun with David. I heard them joking and laughing ahead of me. Which, I must admit, made me feel relieved. It seemed David was back to his normal jovial self.
My first words after we touched down outside the front door were: “So what exactly is our story when Mrs. Fearwyn demands to know why we’re here?”
“The usual,” David admitted. “We think she was involved in the murder we’re currently investigating. Only difference is that, this time, we have eyewitness testimony that puts her at the scene.”
I eyed the front door nervously. “Even for one of your ‘Portia is guilty’ crusades, that’s pretty thin. So what was her motive?”
“Actually, I don’t think that she had one,” David admitted with a shrug. “But the esteemed Governor Shields did.”
“So you think that this was a contract killing?” David’s reasoning was getting harder and harder to follow.
“More like that Portia was part of this operation once the gate was found. We already know that she was importing a good many dangerous herbs in huge quantities. Maybe that ties in with the black diamonds being shipped through the portal. I'm thinking she used that very same gateway for the conveyance of her baleful goods. Some kind of arrangement with Shields, or whatever.” I was disheartened to hear my usually very lucid friend grasping, so desperately, at straws. I kept quiet for a moment.
David knocked on the front door. I frowned. “There’s another problem with this theory. If you’ve already got a magic portal to somewhere that you’re giving the diamonds a one-way ticket to, why would you need an airstrip on Glessie? Kinda takes Shields' guilt and/or complicity down a notch, no
?”
“You’re doing a pretty good impersonation of Shields’ lawyer here,” the chief said as he knocked again.
“But I’d think that your involvement with Gideon’s right-hand woman would make you at least give him the benefit of the doubt here. There's no motive, David. Gideon clearly wants the runway proposal to go ahead. What use would he have for that if he knew he had a portal that could ship the goods much more efficiently? It just doesn't make any sense." I trailed off. "I still think Ravena is our best suspect right now.”
David’s face broke out in a couple of weird tics, “You know, you’re right. That’s why Ravena hired Portia to kill Millicent.”
“Huh?” I asked, stepping back as David knocked the door for the third time in a row. “But, just a moment ago, you were spelling out your reasons for why Gideon was guilty—“
“And he does look guilty,” David said while his head flicked in another series of peculiar stutters. “More guilty than Ravena does, in fact, now that I think about it.”
I was getting alarmed at the zigzag of this conversation. “David, what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” David said, banging the door with the knocker one more time. “We’re just reasoning things out like we usually do.”
“But you keep going back and forth on why Gideon is guilty,” I pointed out. “Why is that?”
“Because there is no way Shields could have done it,” David said without missing a beat, even as he suddenly staggered from some spasm that went right through him. “That leaves Ravena, and she most definitely had Portia helping her out.”
Even if you didn’t notice the complete flip-flop in reasoning, that made even less sense than the Portia-working-for-Gideon theory. Ravena was a smart enough scientist to do this kind of murder without any extra help. I thought I detected a pattern in David’s words. “Then Gideon isn’t guilty?”
“Yes, Gideon is definitely, absolutely, positively guiltteeeeeeeeee—“
A seizure suddenly overtook David as he collapsed on the front stoop of Gaunt Manor. I stifled my shock long enough to put the olive stick between his teeth. Then I knocked on the front door with a vengeance. “Help! Ms. Fearwyn! I need your help!”
My cries echoed across the swamp as I pulled back the knocker a second time. But Portia opened the door with her usual acid countenance. One glance down at David and her expression flipped from annoyed to concerned.
“Help me get him in, Seraphim,” she calmly ordered. I grabbed under his arms while she took his feet.
Between the two of us, we got David inside. He was still seizing from whatever had been scrambling his brains outside Portia's door. But the olive stick was holding firm, which meant his tongue was out of danger. We laid him out on the dusty dining room table that was big enough and broad enough to support his frame. She gave him a field medic’s examination of his vitals. She took in a deep breath when she checked over his pupils.
“Do you have any peppermint or eucalyptus oil in your bag?” she asked, noting the trusty tote at my side.
“Definitely eucalyptus,” I told her, digging through the bag’s contents to find the mentholated oil.
She nodded and walked to the kitchen. A few seconds later, she came back with a stoppered vial full of some sort of white salt. Popping the stopper off, she carefully but quickly poured in the eucalyptus oil to join the white solids. Replacing the stopper, she shook it up and said some words that I recognized as an incantation. Although I'd be unable to repeat them if questioned. The mixture inside began to steam and turned an angry red, then a cobalt blue, then a forest green. She pulled out the stopper and stuck it under David’s nose.
Inhaling the stuff made him spit out the stick and start coughing compulsively. He nearly rolled off the table until I caught him. The cough kept up for a few more minutes until finally, his body came to merciful homeostasis.
“Had it been up to me, CPI Trew, I would have let you land on my floor,” Portia said with disdain, putting the stopper back in place in her mixture.
David’s eyes looked a little frightened this time. “I had…I had another seizure, didn’t I?”
“Right on my front door, no less,” Portia added as I helped David to his feet. “I do wish you would have had the decency to shake out your demons elsewhere."
Recalling Onyx’s perceptive interrogation from earlier, I asked, “What is the last clear thing you remember before now?”
David took a few moments to think it through. “We had just dropped Dilwyn off at his farm…”
“Right.”
“Then we flew here; we landed just outside the manor…”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then…” David’s expression stiffened. “We were talking about why I thought that—“
He clammed up when he looked over at Portia.
“Oh, do stop being so reticent,” Portia declared. “It’s not as if this is the first time you’ve accused me of murder, Para Inspector.”
“No, that’s not it,” David said, shaking his head. “I kept thinking you were involved in Millicent Pond’s death—“
“Shocking.” Portia's beady eyes hardened.
“But I kept going back and forth on who you were working for. It was like I was a kid playing with a light switch, flipping it off and on.”
I went back to our last conversation. My eyes widened as I realized something. “Every time I used…Governor Shields’ first name was when that change of mind happened.”
“Which is why I employed Psyche’s Purge,” Portia said, holding up the tube. “You were exhibiting all the signs of mind control programming that went completely and utterly awry.”
“Convenient that you’d be the one to save me at the last minute,” David said, some of his strength and suspicion returning. “My memory’s still a little fuzzy, but I do remember knocking and knocking without so much as ‘get lost.' from you. You have to admit, that's pretty unusual behavior for you. What were you waiting for?”
Portia harrumphed at this accusation. “Not that I have to explain myself to you, Chief Trew. But, if you must know, I was in a section of the manor where knocking alone wouldn’t have been enough to alert me to your presence. Perhaps you should be thankful that Hattie also used her voice or you could be much worse than dead now.”
“But isn’t that a little careless, Ms. Fearwyn?” I cut in, hoping to steer this conversation in a useful direction. “Company a lot less friendly than us could have taken advantage of—“
Portia gave a strangled groan and lifted her hand. “In your own way, Hattie, you can be every bit as dense as him." She flicked her head to CPI Trew. "If I show the both of you where I was, will you let the matter drop?”
“I'll think about it,” David said.
Portia then gestured at us to follow her. A minute later, we were in front of a familiar set of steel doors, down in the old witch's basement. I remembered these doors from the time we found Portia tied up down here in the Amber Crystal investigation. I also knew, from previous experience, that this was as far as we were going to get.
David tapped the doors. “So these are soundproofed to the point where you can’t hear a knock at the front door, but you CAN hear someone’s cries for help?”
Portia folded her arms and glowered at him. “You still have yet to tell me what I am supposed to have done this time, CPI Trew.”
“We have an eyewitness who saw you in the vicinity of Millicent’s murder scene.”
“We think someone might have seen you there,” I added, ignoring David’s angry glance at me. “The Rock Grumlin gave a general description that—“
Portia sneered. “A Rock Grumlin? Those dumb midgets who are the backbone of Cathedral’s second major industry after tourism, and who are used as slaves by Cathedral's own administration?”
“Well…like I said, it’s unclear. But—“
“But the way he talked about this person,” David stepped in, getting a little closer to Portia than seemed safe.
“Tall hair, never a kind word for them, frowning all the time…you sound a lot like the woman they called the Hydra.”
Portia then did something that left me in utter shock. She burst out laughing. When I say “laugh," I mean that she all but guffawed in that reedy voice of hers. The high notes of that laughter echoed across the manor’s empty rooms like the world’s meanest poltergeist getting the better of a hated victim. David took a step back. He wasn’t sure how to react to this any more than I was.
A whooshing sound interrupted our little gathering. And, from the steel doors stepped someone I hadn’t expected to see. Even though I’d saved his life not so long ago, we’d never actually met face to face. But I’d seen enough pictures of his salt-and-pepper hair, his hawkish face and perpetually bemused expression to recognize Aurel Nugget when I saw him. Portia’s laughter subsided as she spotted her guest shutting the steel doors behind him, from a glowing console on the wall.
“And to think that people consider the lead into gold process a minor miracle,” Aurel said in a rich baritone, noting Portia's laughing. “Are your new guests traveling comedians by chance, Portia?”
A derisive smile strayed onto Portia’s lips. “Any comedy that Chief Para Inspector Trew imparts, Aurel, is strictly by accident.”
“Ahh, so sorry to not recognize you at first glance, sir,” Aurel said, offering his hand to David.
While they shook, the alchemist's eyes fell upon me. “And that would make you, unless I am grievously mistaken, Ms. Hattie Jenkins of the Angel Apothecary, correct?”
I felt a little flustered. “I’m surprised that you even know about me.”
“On the contrary, dear lady,” Aurel said, giving my hand a courtly kiss. “I made a point of knowing who it was that saved me from my own foolish mistakes. Someone who has saved my life, no less."
That part was sadly no exaggeration. During a recent outbreak of Strands abuse, Aurel had used himself as a guinea pig to find a cure. It didn’t go so well. The only reason he was even standing in front of me now was because I’d hit upon the cure in the course of solving the murder I was investigating with David at the time.
The Black Diamond Curse (Hattie Jenkins & The Infiniti Chronicles Book 4) Page 17
