The Wild Dead

by Carrie Vaughn

  “No, no. I don’t know her,” Juni said, her hand lingering at her own throat.

  “No one knows her?” Enid asked.

  No one did. At least, they didn’t say they did.

  Enid studied those gathered, took note of who was here, which households they came from. Wondered if she’d be able to get all of them down here to look before the body got too decayed to keep. At the same time, though, she wondered if it even mattered: if this group, the ones who most paid attention and who were always at the front when there was something to see, if they didn’t know who the girl was, would anyone?

  Enid was starting to think that this might be as far as they were going to get at this stage of the investigation. She and Teeg might have to go to Everlast and the surrounding villages to learn where this woman came from. The next question, then. How had this happened? Answering that would mean tracking down the weapon that had inflicted such a wound . . . and finding the person who had wielded it.

  “Who would do such a thing?” Jess asked softly.

  “Good question,” Enid said. “Any ideas on that? Anyone around here with a bad temper?”

  “What? No!” he said, shocked. But then he seemed to consider for a moment. He shook his head. “I can’t imagine a temper bad as that,” he said.

  Of them all, only Juni hadn’t turned away from the body. She asked, wavering, “What are you going to do?”

  “Find who did this. We may have to stay at Bonavista a few days. We’ll get supplies and credits up here to compensate.”

  “It’s no trouble. But . . . how? How can you possibly find out what happened?”

  Teeg spoke up. “Enid’s done this before. Solved a murder last year in a town called Pasadan. She’s a little bit famous for it.”

  “Really?” Erik said.

  “Did it in just a day, as I understand it,” he said, sounding like he was bragging. Or maybe he was reassuring himself.

  Enid sighed. “Took three days. With help. And it was a completely different situation.” For one thing, they knew who the victim was right from the start in that case. And that death hadn’t been so . . . messy.

  “But if anyone can do it, you can,” Teeg offered.

  “We might not learn what happened, but we’ll try,” she said. It’s what investigators did, after all. “Thanks all of you for your help, for taking a look. Teeg and I will be here if you think of anything—any detail at all, no matter what, you come and tell us. Yeah?”

  Happy for the dismissal, the crowd dispersed. Even Juni backed away, frowning at the body. An interruption in the normal way of the world.

  That left Enid and Teeg alone, with whoever this woman had been.

  “No one recognizes her,” he said bleakly.

  “Makes it hard,” she said.

  Ridiculously hard. The woman could be from anywhere, washed up on this stretch of coast. Might be their only play would be to make as good a description as they could, then send messages around, asking, Was anyone missing? Were there any runaways?

  And along with that, anyone who’d been acting guilty? Anyone with a bloody knife tucked away?

  It might not be anyone on the Coast Road who killed her, of course. Who wielded the blade that made that awful wound. If the woman had fled from somewhere, even if she’d just been exploring, she might have run into something—someone—she wasn’t prepared to handle. Something in the wild that didn’t, on principle, like anything from the Coast Road.

  “So, we take her to Everlast?” Teeg asked. “No one around here seems to know anything about her—”

  “We haven’t talked to everyone yet. We still have more questions.”

  “Like what? Is one magic question going to reveal all?”

  “It might,” Enid said, quirking a smile at him. “I want to look her over one more time, now that we’re out of the mud.”

  Enid studied the body again, every inch of skin, pushing aside the tunic and skirt. Looking at every stitch of clothing. Enid took out her notebook, started a catalog, adding every detail. A whole life reduced to a list. She took the kerchief off the body, folded it up. Knitted with a ribbed pattern, distinctive—anyone who knew the dead woman ought to recognize it. They could send it to surrounding communities. The shoes were soft leather, folded over and stitched with sinew; the heel on the right was more worn than the left. Whoever made the garments wouldn’t likely have been so helpful as to embroider a name or household inside the collar. But Enid recorded what she could: brown linen overtunic, finely woven gray-blue skirt, and white shirt. No pockets, no lumps or bulges that might be a pouch, a bag, a necklace. No piece of metal or scrap of writing. She found nothing. If the young woman had had anything else on her, any jewelry or a pouch, they’d been washed away.

  Enid was replacing the tunic, straightening the sleeves again, when she felt down the body’s arms. Felt again, missing something that should have been there. Looked at the skin along the upper arm, where an implant was usually placed. Most medics inserted it in the left arm, but Enid checked both, just in case. Felt, squeezing the skin and muscle, searching for the characteristic lump. Enid had one herself. Every girl got one at puberty. She paused, her mouth open, wondering. She rolled up the sleeve to double-check, searching for the scar, the place where the tiny incision would have been . . . and wasn’t. The skin was unblemished.

  “What is it?” Teeg asked.

  “She doesn’t have an implant,” Enid said. “Never had one.”

  Which meant she wasn’t from any household on the Coast Road.

  She came from the wild.

  Chapter Four • the estuary

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

  Bonavista

  This case was supposed to be easy. Enid would be gone only a couple of weeks. Her family—Sam, Olive, Berol, and the soon-to-be-born baby of Serenity household—were waiting for her. She promised them she’d be home in time.

  Two years after earning its banner, a year after Olive’s miscarriage, Serenity was finally having its baby. Enid wanted to be there, to hold Olive’s hand and hear the baby’s first cry. To hug Sam and be part of what they’d all worked so hard for.

  But her name had come up on the roster, and she’d promised to mentor Teeg, so here she was, a hundred miles from Serenity. Enid was happy enough to do her job and earn her keep. Someone had to do the hard work, she was fond of saying. Often as a mantra to herself, reminding her that the job usually went faster when she complained less. But given the circumstances, she couldn’t help but complain . . . at least to herself. The problem of Semperfi’s house had sounded simple. Wouldn’t take long at all.

  The morning she left—a whole week ago, she had to count back—Enid had knelt beside Olive, pressed her face to her huge belly, felt a tiny little something pushing back. “That’s her foot,” Olive said.

  “How can you tell?” Enid asked wonderingly.

  “Because her hands are beating my ribs,” she said, shifting position, turning her grimace into a laugh.

  “How do you know it’s a she?” Everyone had an opinion, and everyone said they had tricks to guess, based on the phase of the moon or the shape of the belly or what a woman had been eating or a hundred other omens that made no sense. People asked Enid if she wanted a girl or a boy, and, baffled, she’d reply that she wanted a baby.

  Olive shrugged. “I don’t, I guess. I just want to call her something.”

  “Wait for me,” Enid had said to that belly, hands spread over its roundness.

  “Don’t take too long,” Olive said back to her. “I want you here for this.”

  The whole household had seen Enid off at the door, but Sam had walked with her all the way to the Coast Road. She took hold of his arm—taking in the solidity of him, the comfort, tucking it into her memory—and he kissed the crown of her head.

  “How long you think this’ll take?” he asked.

  “Probably too long,” she said. “A week just to get out there. Probably two weeks, there and ba
ck, plus investigation time. I wish I’d passed on the case. Told them I couldn’t spend that much time away—”

  He grinned, amused. “Can’t do that if you’re going to be the world’s best investigator.”

  “That’s not it—”

  He laughed then, because he knew her well.

  “It should be an easy case,” she said. “I’ll be back in no time at all. And I’ll get to call in favors for making the trek that far out.” She was trying to put a good light on it.

  “Well. I’d tell you to hurry but I know you will. So—do good work, yeah?”

  “Love you,” she said.

  “I know, love. What happens happens. One way or another we’ll all be here when you get back.”

  “Yeah.”

  A hundred miles away, Enid’s family waited. And now she had a murder to deal with.

  “She has to be Coast Road,” Teeg argued. “Those clothes are Coast Road–woven. Good quality. She couldn’t have come from the wild.”

  Enid sat on the front steps of Bonavista’s work house. Pylons raised it up five or six feet from the mud. Evidence of the recent storm remained, vegetation and debris clinging to the wood and stone. After everyone who’d wanted a look had gotten one, they’d settled the canvas-wrapped body on the ground under the building. Flies had already gathered. Teeg paced nearby, pausing to look down the road, as if someone might arrive to rescue them. The murderer, come to spontaneously confess and save the investigators some trouble. Teeg made Enid feel older than she was. Surely she shouldn’t be feeling like such a curmudgeon.

  “Apparently she did. Or . . . or I don’t know what.” The lack of an implant, the telling clothes—this opened a whole new set of possibilities, a whole new set of questions. Enid hardly knew where to start. Getting from what she knew to what she wanted to know seemed an impossible distance.

  Teeg said, “If she isn’t from the Coast Road, then this isn’t our case to solve.”

  Enid looked sharply at him. “She washed up on our shore, didn’t she? What if it was one of ours that did this?”

  “You really think that’s possible?” Teeg said with such a tone of skepticism, it was clear he didn’t believe it.

  “Where people are concerned? Almost anything is possible. She was found here, wasn’t she? And you wondered about Kellan’s machete.”

  “I was guessing. But if she came from the wild—well, anything could have happened. It’s hopeless.”

  They’d be entirely justified in giving up, wouldn’t they? But they hadn’t even started yet. One thing at a time. One job at a time.

  Teeg was right: these were Coast Road–woven clothes. Find out who made them, find out who was trading with folk in the wild, and they’d start to get an idea where the girl came from.

  Enid said, “Records say the road ends here, but you go up the river valley, and who knows what all’s up there. Maybe not towns, but there’s folk living there.”

  “You serious?”

  “I am,” she said. “Remember what Erik said—he wasn’t surprised to see a squatter in his house. He’s seen wild folk around. She’s one of theirs. Maybe she was the one hiding out at Semperfi.”

  “Then where did she get Coast Road clothes?”

  “That’s just one of the questions we can ask. Meantime, we send messages. Get the word out to way stations. If someone’s missing her—if someone’s looking for her—we want to know. And we want to talk to them. She might be from the wild, but that doesn’t mean no one’s looking for her.” Before the woman died she’d been healthy, well fed, well cared for. Must’ve had a family somewhere.

  “Might she have been robbed?” Teeg asked. He was learning to think dark.

  “You mean, did someone kill her and take whatever she was carrying?” Enid asked. “Would help if we knew what that might have been. Of if someone around here has something valuable they didn’t a week ago.”

  “We can’t exactly ransack everyone’s place looking for something that might not belong.”

  “No, we can’t. But we can talk.”

  “But how do you know if anyone’s lying, really? Is it instinct? Can you just tell?”

  “You never really know,” she said, sounding more tired than she meant to. “That’s why you ask a lot of questions, and you ask them over and over again, until someone slips up. And you look for hard evidence.” Evidence didn’t lie. Cultivated land exceeding quota, a smear of blood on a wall. A body washed up in a river. This was too big. She wanted to go home. “There’s a few hours of daylight left. We should get started.”

  “Where do we even start?”

  “We start right here,” she said, nodding over at Bonavista’s main cottage, close to the road, waiting to greet visitors. The first Estuary people Enid and Teeg had met were Juni and Jess, the heads of the household. They’d been bright and welcoming, offering water and rice bread, inviting them into the shade. And telling them all about Semperfi and how awful the house was and how sorry they were that Erik had caused all this trouble. It had been awkward but understandable.

  She had absolutely no idea what to expect from these next interviews.

  After the excitement of discovering the body, most members of the house, except Jess and Juni, had returned to the open plot of land behind the buildings, back to work that had to be finished by nightfall. One of the household’s main activities was collecting reeds from up the river. They’d been carrying back their harvest when Enid and Teeg arrived earlier in the day, great wrapped bundles balanced on their backs. Now they were spreading the reeds out to dry, separating stalks, turning them. They wove baskets and mats with them, traded them down to the next village for what they didn’t grow or make here.

  And in a sheath on their belt, each one carried a machete—a stout, foot-long sharpened blade. They used the machetes to harvest the reeds, cut away underbrush, any job too big for a knife. Totally normal, a ubiquitous tool. Everyone around here probably had one. And every single one of them could have made the cut that killed the young woman.

  Juni and Jess were sitting on the front porch of the main cottage, waiting. They must have known the investigators would start with them.

  Juni immediately stood. “Can I get you anything? Some water? It’s been such a long day, please tell me if you need anything.”

  “Water would be fine, thanks,” Enid said. The small woman seemed grateful for the task and bustled inside. Enid could hear dishes clattering and water flowing from a pump.

  Enid asked, “You’re sure you didn’t recognize the young woman?”

  Jess shook his head. “No. Not at all. How did she get here? How did this happen?”

  Teeg started to say something, but Enid simply said, “We’re looking into that.”

  The door opened, Juni emerged, two mugs in each hand; Jess caught the door, held it for her while she distributed water. “You’ll talk to everyone, I suppose?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” She and Teeg accepted their mugs. Enid drank almost all of hers. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was. Easy to miss, in the exhausting heat. Too exhausted to remember to drink, even.

  Teeg asked, “Juni, you didn’t recognize the body?”

  “No, I never saw her. I don’t suppose she had anything that might tell you where she’s from—”

  “As a matter of fact, we think she might be from outside the Coast Road,” Enid said. “Maybe from a settlement upriver.”

  “Then what was she doing here?” Jess asked, astonished. “Those people never come down this far—”

  “Erik says they do,” Enid said. “That he’s seen them, maybe coming down to the shore to scavenge.”

  The pair glanced at each other, a worried look passing between them, and Enid waited for the explanation.

  “Maybe,” Juni said, uncertain. “Sometimes. Not that often.”

  “Not this far,” Jess added.

  “What do you mean?” Enid prompted.

  Jess sighed. “They trade with Last House,” he said fin
ally. “Not much, just a few times a year.”

  Enid regarded them with interest and waited for more. There was usually more, in a conversation like this.

  “I wish they wouldn’t,” Juni said. “It isn’t right.”

  It wasn’t much of a thread, but it was something. “Oh?” Enid prompted noncommittally, hoping she sounded curious and not like an interrogator. Kellan was Last House, and he’d said he didn’t know the victim.

  Juni continued. “It encourages those folk to come too close. Causes trouble. Look what happened.”

  Jess grunted in agreement. The work out back had fallen quiet, and the rest of the household’s folk had drifted to the front, lurking not-so-unobtrusively by the corner of the house, listening in: four men and women in their twenties who’d joined up over the past ten years or so, and Jess and Juni’s teenage kid, Tom. Enid debated—should she ask them to move off, talk to each one separately, or get this all over at once? See if they supported one another or argued.

  “You think it’s been a problem?” Enid prodded gently. “Folk from outside coming into the settlement? Has anyone made trouble?” She was thinking of the squatter in the Semperfi house. If the young woman had been causing what someone perceived as trouble, there might be a motive there. No one had said anything, but then they’d all been focused on the house at Semperfi.

  “Not as such,” Jess said, though his gaze went distant, like he was thinking about it.

  “Not that we know of,” Juni corrected. “What you need to do is talk to Last House. They could be hiding a whole tribe of refugees out there, breaking quotas . . . who knows what else. And the rest of us would never know. You want to know what’s wrong around here, ask them.” She studied the sky a moment, and sighed. “I’m sorry. We’re not usually this out of sorts.”

  “It’s been a hard day,” Enid said.

  Jess added, “If anyone knows that girl, it’ll be someone from Last House.”

  “Kellan said he didn’t know her,” Teeg said. “You’re saying he might be lying?”

  Enid would not have put it so strongly, but she waited for their response with interest.