by Guy Antibes
“She won’t,” Harrison said. “There are rooms available, I suppose?”
The woman, dressed in a white cap and a white apron, nodded. “Take your pick. We are still recovering from the Shovel Vale rebellion, as we call it in these parts. Aren’t you the traveling healer?” she said to Harrison.
“I am. We were delayed a bit by all the action to the east. Have you run into any rebel deserters?”
The woman shook her head. “The royal army bottled them up very nicely. I was filled up for a few months. First, there was the gold rush. That petered out in a hurry, and most of the men stayed to work for ‘Shovel Vale.’ That’s what they called their employer. I don’t think they ever found out who was behind it all.”
“The Mount Vannon constabulary is still working on that,” Harrison said. “We came from there via Shovel Vale. Both of us fought in the Mount Vannon militia.”
“There are plenty from Kennel who would have joined you, but we were distracted, and all of us are still suffering from putting up with the Shovel Vale gang. Come on in. We don’t have to talk out here. I’ll have a boy feed your horses and that big dog of yours while you are signing in. I suppose you both want baths?”
Sam frowned, but Harrison grinned. “Most definitely.”
After bathing and giving Emmy some kitchen scraps in the stable, Harrison and Sam sat down in the empty common room. The innkeeper and her husband joined them.
“I suppose it will take a while for your business to improve,” Sam said.
The husband shook his head. “Not really. Kennel has a market of its own. People still need to buy and sell. Things will pick up soon. Market day is tomorrow. Then your horses and dog will have some friends to spend the night.”
“Speaking of market,” Harrison said. “Do you know of a merchant couple? The man went by the first name of Dantell. We ran across the pair in Oak Basin.”
“A bit older than me?” the innkeeper said. “We know them well. They live in Kennel, but no one wants to buy from them since their prices are so high. They were doing real well among the gold miners, but when the men joined the Shovel Vale gang, their business dropped. They are not well-respected in Kennel, although Dantell manages to bring goods that have even tempted me.”
The husband leaned over the table. “My wife likes shiny things,” he said. That comment earned him a hearty slap on the shoulder.
The innkeeper snorted. “They haven’t been to any markets for an unusually long time. Do you think they got caught up in the rebellion?”
Harrison shook his head. “They tried to steal Sam’s dog.” Sam nodded and let Harrison continue. “It appears they tried to steal other things, too. I imagine they are currently spending their days in the Oak Basin jail.”
The husband snorted. “Serves them right.”
“How are the villagers?” Harrison asked.
“The village healer will know better than I,” the innkeeper said. Her husband nodded.
“Teressi still lives in the same cottage?” the healer asked.
The couple looked at each other. “She died just after the gold rush started. Ophie Kenson took her place. She came from a village south of Mount Vannon. If you are interested in knowing, she wasn’t a supporter of the Shovel Vale gang.”
“I didn’t know about the old healer’s death,” Harrison said. “Was she murdered?”
“Ask Ophie,” the innkeeper said. She stood and straightened her apron. “We are still stocked for a full house. What would you like to eat? The common room will soon be filling with villagers, thanks to you, and I mean that in a very good way,” the woman said smiling.
~
“We will spend a day or two here,” Harrison said, as they walked through the dirt streets of Kennel. “That assumes Ophie Kenson will accept my help. Some healers can be a bit jealous of their position. If I can’t work with her this year, I’ll work with her next. She is living in the old healer’s clinic.”
Sam nodded, looking at the village through his gold-tinted spectacles. He didn’t see anything special made out of pollen. They arrived at the white door of the healer. Harrison stepped in. Sam tied Emmy’s leash to a hitching post and followed the healer inside.
Two women sat on chairs in the tiny lobby. A boy pushed the curtain separating the examination room from the lobby and left the room, limping from a bandaged knee. A young woman saw Harrison and Sam and looked alarmed.
“Harrison Dimple? You weren’t supposed to come here,” she said.
Sam heard an older voice behind the face. He tore off his spectacles and saw a middle-aged woman. Harrison looked at Sam.
“She’s wearing a disguise,” Sam whispered into Harrison’s ear.
Ophie took a step back. “What did he say?”
Harrison smiled. “He said we need to talk to you, right now.” The healer turned to the two women. “You’ll be seen soon enough. Just wait for a bit.” He stepped quickly to grab Ophie’s arm as she was retreating through the curtain and escorted her into the examination room. Sam entered the room to see Ophie struggling to escape. Harrison easily held her.
“Calm down. I know you are wearing a disguise, but that doesn’t mean you’ll come to any harm. The rebellion is over. All I want to do is talk.”
The woman gave Harrison a venomous look, but she yanked her arm from his and sat down on a chair, folding her arms. “What if I don’t want to talk?”
“Then you’ll be tied up to wait for a constable to come up from Mount Vannon. I’m sure the constable in town departed when the trouble at Shovel Vale ended. I’m a little surprised you are still here,” Harrison said.
She put out her lower lip in what looked like a pout to Sam. “I didn’t want to leave. The people here need me. I refused to go to Shovel Vale. Any fool could see they would fail against the royal army.”
“Who are they?” Harrison said.
“I’m not sure,” Ophie said. “A man I know, who perished at Shovel Vale, contacted me. I made a few mistakes in my time, and when he offered to put me here in Kennel, I took it. I may not be as good as Terresi, but I thought I had found a place I could stay.”
“Your disguise is probably ready to disintegrate,” Harrison said.
“Is that what the boy said?”
Harrison nodded. “The spectacles make him see pollen better than you or I. He could tell you wore a disguise.” He looked at the woman and at Sam. “Do you want to stay here?”
Ophie looked up at Harrison with wet eyes. “I would.”
“Tell me how you were involved in the local retired miners before I make a decision.”
“I made the potion. Men brought in the herbs. I knew it was a poison, and men died because of it, but now I’ve been treating the miners since the supply dried up.”
“Did you make any with neural pollen?”
“The stuff from sheep?” she asked.
Harrison nodded.
“No. They told me they might have me do that, but that wasn’t much before the army came to Shovel Vale. They didn’t tell me why they used it other than to say it made the miners calm.”
“Do you know why the miners were drugged?”
“The head people were trying to get them to sell shares in an old mine. I guess the mine wasn’t as old as most people thought,” Ophie said. She looked more relaxed at this point.
“How many of your miners died?”
“None.” Ophie said. “I made sure of that. I had them use smaller doses than those who gave them desired them to ingest.”
Harrison looked at the curtain. “You need to see those two women. I will observe. The boy will look around your living quarters. If you have any hope to survive this, act as if nothing had happened.” The healer looked at Sam. “See what you can find in her living space. Don’t be bashful to poke about.”
Sam nodded. He didn’t like searching, but he guessed snoops often had to do disagreeable things when investigating. He opened the door in the back of the examination room and heard Harrison�
�s ‘charm’ voice.
“Ladies, today is your lucky day!” Harrison said as Sam closed the door and looked around the woman’s main room.
He rummaged around, looking under cushions, ruffling through baskets, and looking through her pantry and kitchen shelves. He walked into her bedroom and took a breath. She had clothes strewn about. Sam folded them into neat piles as he searched the room.
He found a small basket covered with a pollen cloth, but that didn’t keep Sam from seeing a pollen bag of herbs. It had to be the podica-mendica combination. He examined the mixture and didn’t see any neural pollen. The woman must be telling the truth.
A few minutes later he completed his search. He walked into an awkward moment in the examination room.
“Sorry!” Sam quickly retreated out the back door and sat on a rough bench in front of the clinic, petting Emmy. He looked up at retreating patients until the lobby was empty. He went back in.
“Find anything?” Harrison asked.
“A pouch of mendica-podica without any neural pollen,” Sam said.
Ophie sighed. “You were thorough.”
Sam just nodded.
“Ophie is coming with us. I need her elsewhere. I’ve got another healer coming from Mount Vannon,” Harrison said.
The woman sighed. “You do. I will leave for a week and come back without my disguise. It won’t take me long to get back to caring for my patients,” she said.
“A pardon?” Sam said looking at Harrison.
“Probation. You will remove her disguise when we leave, so I will know what the real Ophie looks like. We will spend tomorrow making sure everyone is taken care of before we leave.” Harrison put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. “She knows her stuff, Sam. It would be a waste to find someone else for the village of Kennel.”
~
Harrison checked Ophie’s bags before they dropped her off. “You are to get to the road about a mile or two south of Kennel and then head back to the village.”
Ophie looked nervous, especially since Sam had removed her disguise. Harrison had told her that it wouldn’t have lasted more than a week. She looked relieved more than anything once she left them, waving as she disappeared from view as they headed to Hapless Corners.
“She really didn’t know anything?” Sam asked.
Harrison shook his head. “I’ll make sure the new Chief Constable at Mount Vannon knows she is at Kennel, but the village needs a healer and it was plain she knew the patients and had already gained their trust. I already told her that I would recommend her, and she accepted that. Didn’t the miners that we visited look better than the ones in the other villages? It showed she cared. Even the regular healers didn’t look after the retired miners as well as she did. You have to give people a chance if they show they are sincerely ready to change. I hope she makes it.”
Sam looked at the trees as they rolled past them. “What about her troubles?”
“Ah. Everyone runs into a bad patch. She did, and started taking money from her patients. No one noticed at first, and then she was caught and locked up for a few months. She couldn’t get a healer’s position for miles around. That’s when the Shovel Vale folks asked her to take Teressi’s place. I verified that Ophie landed in Kennel two weeks after the old healer’s death. Everything checked out. If it hadn’t, we would be heading directly back to Mount Vannon with Ophie bound to the wagon.”
“I didn’t think you could do such a thing.”
Harrison chuckled. “I did it, anyway. No one is going to do a thing.”
Not long after, they stopped at a clearing.
“You get an afternoon of knife practice,” Harrison said.
~
Hapless Corners seemed an apt description of the little village. It was so small and inconsequential that the healer hadn’t been intimidated, and the three retired miners had ended up selling their shares and moving away, leaving a row of five empty cottages. The place looked forlorn, but Harrison didn’t seem to care. They spent a day with the elderly man who cared for the physical well-being of the villagers.
Sam spent his time wandering around the woods playing with Emmy, who ended up returning to Sam with a rabbit in her mouth. She dropped it at Sam’s feet, but he tossed it a few paces away, and Emmy took that as permission to make an impromptu meal of her catch.
~
At their last village, Bowerville, Harrison instructed Sam to collect herbs since he wasn’t needed at the healer’s clinic. The village wasn’t as untouched as Hapless Corners, but not as burdened with gang members as Kennel.
There were more retired miners living in the village, but Harrison had found out from some villagers that all had died long before the battle of Shovel Vale. The healer had done less for the old men than Ophie had done in Kennel.
Sam traipsed through the woods, carrying cotton bags nearly full of various herbs he had found. He stopped when he saw tiny sprouts of alm’s wort growing from a larger harvested patch. The gang had been to the village early on, he thought. He called Emmy, who had disappeared chasing some varmint in the underbrush.
She returned with burrs all over her coat, which Sam had to pick out before he walked back into the village to find Harrison working on a young man’s nasty broken leg. “Alm’s wort,” Sam said.
“Wait a bit,” Harrison said.
The other healer set the leg while Harrison pulled on the break. The youth with the broken leg was out cold, but Sam winced for him as the pair went to work. After Harrison created the cast out of pollen, he took a deep breath and led Sam out of the examination room.
“Now, what is this about alm’s wort?”
“I found a large patch of the stuff. It might have been cultivated. I harvested a few sprouts, but that was all that was there,” Sam said.
“So you think the gang went this far west to collect poisonous herbs?”
Sam nodded. “Maybe we can ask a few questions while we are here.”
“We aren’t monitoring the gang anymore,” Harrison said. “No one is left in the three villages, except for Ophie.”
Sam pressed his lips together. “We don’t have to interview the entire village, but you can talk to the healer to see if anyone knows anything specific. Ophie didn’t know anything, but we have to try one more time. It’s our last chance.”
“I can do that, along with you. You do the asking,” Harrison said.
Sam followed Harrison into the examination room. The young man wasn’t awake yet.
“Did anyone come here to cultivate herbs in the woods to the south?” Sam asked.
“Three men came through here a few weeks before the battle of Shovel Vale, harvesting herbs. I didn’t like the looks of them, although they dressed better than the thugs who were still infesting Bowerville, so after they left, I followed their tracks into the woods. I thought they would have stripped the herbs from around here, but they only took a few kinds.”
Sam looked at Harrison. “What were the herbs?” Sam asked.
“Podica, mendica, and alm’s wort. Not a pleasant combination,” the healer said. He made a face. “Some healers will use that as a painkiller, but there are much better alternatives out in the woods. I am sad to hear the alm’s wort is gone, but it grows back.”
“Do you know where they came from or where they were going?” Harrison asked.
The healer shook his head. “You might ask Rassy. She runs the inn.”
“We will do that. What do we have next?”
The village healer shook his head. “I think you are done this trip. You’ve been a big help. My old miners died off months ago, but the rest of the village is healthy. It leaves me with less to do, but that is a good thing,” he said.
“Good for you. What exactly happened to the miners? How many did you have?”
“We had a miner’s row at the north end of the village, but they died out about eight months ago. Some disease I’ve never seen.”
“Sores all over their bodies? Disoriented?”
&nbs
p; “That’s right. I called it a happy sickness. I thought it was contagious, so I didn’t broadcast the fact. We burned the old miner cottages down when the last one died.”
“You saw podica-mendica given in high doses,” Harrison said. “I saw the same thing all through the mountain villages. The drug was administered through the ex-gold miners who infested your village. They used it to get the retired miners to sell their shares in an old mine. Do you remember anyone who came through here just before the miners died?”
The village healer shook his head. “I don’t, but anyone who stays in Bowerville stays at the inn.”
“Another thing to ask Rassy?” Sam asked.
The man nodded. “She keeps a ledger of those who stay, even if it is just for a night.”
Sam waited with Emmy outside while Harrison and the healer talked for a bit. He emerged from the healer’s cottage, and they both walked to the inn.
Sam found Rassy scrubbing the stair treads.
“Can we ask you a few questions?” Sam said.
“If you help me, I can answer your questions sooner,” she said.
Shortly after, Harrison and Sam worked with Rassy on her stairs and quickly finished the task. She took them to her busy little office.
“Questions?” she asked.
“We,” Sam looked at Harrison and back at Rassy, “are interested in strangers who stayed at your inn two or three weeks ago. They said they were herb gatherers.”
Rassy left the office and came back with a thick ledger. She flipped a few pages.
“Here they are. They took two rooms. They weren’t the typical rebel thugs. I thought it odd for them to be here when the Shovel Vale rebellion hadn’t ended. The person who paid was Shieldson Hall. They stayed three days and left.”
“Do you remember anything about them, like where they were from?”
“A town, I think, not a village. They talked about the food at a restaurant. There are no restaurants in Bowerville or in most other villages. Oak Basin is nearly a town, and it has restaurants. I can’t remember anything else, other than I wouldn’t want to pass by them on a dark night. I didn’t like them spending time in my establishment,” she said.
