A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark

by Harry Connolly

  “But it has something to do with what they dug up by the river, and that chain. Whatever they are.”

  “Oh, I know what those are. Haven’t I explained?”

  “You told me not to ask.”

  “Oops. All right. Remember what I told you about Puget Sound, dear?”

  “That it has a...” Albert could barely say the word aloud. “... Dragon in it.”

  “Correct. You know, dragons are powerful, but they aren’t immortal. What could be, in this universe of dying stars and—“

  “Oh my God,” Albert blurted out. “Did Evelyn dig up a dragon’s egg?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “And the chain was to lift it out, right?”

  “No, dear. The chain was to lock it up. A dragon can sense its egg, and, even when the magic in it has been shrunk down by making it real, that egg is a very, very powerful token. The chain locks the magic away, which also hides it.”

  “Do you think she’s going to use it to cast a spell or something?”

  “That would be the traditional use.”

  “Why? I mean, what would she use it for?”

  “Even when it’s made real, a dragon’s egg contains a shocking amount of magical potential. Evelyn could bring someone back to life, she could create a doorway directly into the afterlife, she could do all sorts of things, but the most common thing—the one almost all of these people want, is youth and long life.”

  “Oh. Like Spire has.”

  “No, dear. Spire is cursed. Evelyn would still be able learn and grow, but she’d also be young and beautiful. She’d add approximately two hundred years to her life, barring violence or accident. It’s a prize that too many people long for, I’m afraid.”

  “I assume the mother dragon would be a little bit upset.”

  “They’re very protective of their young. In the past, when an egg was destroyed, the dragon swam away, never to return. We’d have to wait for a new egg to form and hatch, which might take decades.”

  “What happens if it leaves?”

  “There are many dragons in the world. They help us maintain our sense of wonder, mystery, and most important of all, our humility. Without dragons, human beings lose control of themselves. They grow wild, proud, and violent, and the most terrible things begin to seem logical and necessary.”

  “That’s why Evelyn’s looking for that sheet of paper,” Albert said. “Because the egg is locked away and without the paper—that key—she can’t get at the magic inside it. And the dragon doesn’t even realize it’s been stolen yet.”

  “I believe she entrusted the key to Aloysius; probably because she doesn’t trust the gunmen she’s hired. But Aloysius must have done something to alarm her—I can’t imagine what—and she ordered her gunmen to collect the key and kill him. Or maybe she planned to betray him all along. But they didn’t simply shoot him. They arranged his murder to look like a vampire attack. Because of me.”

  “Because Evelyn knows what you do.”

  “She thinks she does, I’m sure. There are some people in town who believe they have a handle on me, but most of them are just silly. Aloysius, for instance. He knew enough about me to seem useful to Evelyn—how to deal with ghosts or werewolves, for instance, even if his methods were hackneyed and low-rent. He also believed in magic; when Evelyn approached him about her plan, I’m sure she imagined she was getting something of an expert. And when she killed him, she knew I would be paying attention, so she tried to divert me.”

  “Thank you for not being fooled.”

  “Thank her for thinking me a fool. By God, even other grown women underestimate old women. I intend to make her regret the error.”

  Hours later, after sleeping for much of their flight, they stepped off the plane in Portland at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  Kevin Fletcher met them at the gate, and he’d brought Marley’s Jeep Cherokee, and all their things from the hotel, as requested. “I love that car!” he told them. “I wish I could have one of my own, but it stands out too much for my line of work.”

  “It must be hard to have to go through life without standing out from the crowd when that’s what you naturally do.”

  Kevin laughed. “Oh, sweetie, you’re my new favorite person. And that’s not a professional thing to say, but I work for myself so whatevs.”

  “I’m told you found Stan Grabbleton?”

  “Easy. But I had to tell him I was working against you, because he doesn’t like you at all.”

  “Oh, that’s just because he hasn’t met us yet.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Calm Before the Party

  It was four in the afternoon when they found Stan Grabbleton in a nightclub called Falcon. There was a dance floor and multi-colored lights, but of course it was too early for darkness and loud music. Stan sat alone at the end of the bar, sipping a cup of coffee and chatting with the bartender, a bodybuilder with a shaved head and handlebar mustache.

  He wasn’t pleased to see Kevin walk in with Marley and Albert. “Oh God, this is just perfect. What a fantastic day this is turning out to be.”

  “Sorry, buddy,” Kevin said. “This is my job.”

  “Lying to people is your job? Well, good for you. I hope that brings you a lifetime of happiness.”

  Stan had a strange, simpering way of speaking that turned his deadpan tone to intense sarcasm. Marley couldn’t help but like him. “Oh, don’t be so hard on him, Stan. I’m the one who needed to speak with you.”

  “Didn’t you get my message? I don’t want to talk to you. At all. I’m not interested in being your fall guy.”

  “Stop being dramatic, Stan. You didn’t kill my nephew. You might have gone through his desk, but I know you didn’t kill him.”

  “You know it? Sure you do. Sure. I have no alibi for the time he was killed, and at least ten people know I hated his guts.” He turned to Albert. “I’m sorry for speaking ill of the dead, and I know he was your family, but he really was an awful, awful person and I despised him like...” He couldn’t find the words to carry the full force of his feeling, and shuddered instead.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Albert said. “He was my brother.”

  “Then you have my sympathy, not because he’s gone, but because you knew him.”

  Marley tried to keep her voice light and reasonable. “But Stan, it’s true. I know who killed him and I’m hoping you can explain why.”

  “Hmm. I wonder why I don’t believe you. Oh! I remember now! It’s because you just walked in with Mr. Lying Is My Job.”

  The bartender leaned across the bar. “Stan, are these folks bothering you?”

  “It’s all right, I guess. Thanks, Ed. If I don’t talk to them now they’ll just bother me later, am I right?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Marley said.

  “Then let’s tear the Band-aid off all at once.”

  “I understand,” Marley said, sitting beside him. Albert stood close to her.

  Kevin leaned against the bar. “Do you folks want me to sit in on your conversation as a witness or something?”

  Stan turned to him. “No.”

  “Excellent!” Kevin moved toward the other end of the bar.

  The bartender nodded at Albert. “What can I get you, sweetheart?”

  Albert didn’t think this was the time to admit he was only twenty years old. “I’m driving.”

  “And you, ma’am?”

  “Oh, do you have a white wine spritzer?”

  The bartender gave her an Are you serious? look and set one in front of her. Then he moved to the far end of the bar to take Kevin’s order.

  Stan looked Marley and Albert over as though they were a large pill he was expected to swallow. “How awful is this conversation going to be?” he asked.

  “Not too awful,” Marley answered. “Why did you hate Aloysius?”

  “Because he was Aloysius,” Stan answered. “Because of how he acted and who was. Because of every word that came out of
his mouth, every expression on his face, every molecule in his entire body. Everything.”

  “You must have loved going into the office.”

  “The office was hell. Your nephew made sure of it. He thought it was funny.”

  Albert sat beside Marley. “He was a bully?”

  “Exactly,” Stan answered. “And this is why I didn’t want to talk to you, because you’re going to think I hated him enough to do something to him, but I didn’t. If I had, I certainly wouldn’t have let the police arrest that poor girl. Bad enough that she dated him, but to have to go to prison for it—although I’m not sure which would be worse.”

  “Was he physically abusive?” Marley asked.

  “That was the one thing he didn’t do, although he sometimes talked about slapping me or pulling my hair, as though we were little girls. What he did was insult me every chance he got, with little digs about my weight, my medications, or my boyfriend. He did this in front of clients, too, mine and his. He used to make these awful sexual comments, as though I would do anything for him. And if I told him to shut up, he’d say things like ‘Going to throw a punch at me, Stan?’ ”

  “He did this in front of your clients?”

  “Yes! And he stole from me. Nothing huge, mind you. Nothing I could file charges against him without seeming like a lunatic, but he’d take things off my desk and put them in his office. He thought it was funny that I’d have to come in and search through all his stuff.”

  “Oh, Stan, honestly, I had no idea he was like this.”

  “Very few people did. Your nephew was always trying to get control over people. With women, he wanted them in his bed. With most men, he tried to get them to like him. With me... I don’t know if it’s because I’m gay, or fat, or the way I talk, but he reverted to a teenage bully every time he saw me. But I couldn’t break my lease and move to a new office.”

  “Times are tough,” Marley said, but Stan didn’t need much prompting at all.

  “Not for me. I’m doing pretty well, and I’ll be damned if I was going to be the one to move out of that office. I know your nephew was struggling—Inez is too self-centered to help me kick him out because he acted like a psychopath, but she would if he couldn’t pay his bills. But me? I’m a good lawyer. I don’t have time in my schedule for all the people who want to hire me. There are three reasons why I don’t have a fancy suit and a huge office.” He held up his hand and counted them on his chubby fingers. “First: I refuse to ever work for anyone else, ever again. I’m my own boss. Second: for most of my professional life, my health insurance has sucked. This is the first year ever that I haven’t had to pay a fortune just to cover my medications. Third: I do pro-bono work for anyone your nephew tried to sue.”

  Marley perked up. “So you’re the one giving legal advice to the Educatorium people?”

  Stan rolled his eyes. “Those people! They’re idiots. But Aloysius was such a sloppy lawyer—okay, hold on, let’s back up. Before Evelyn Thomas became his only client, he also handled contracts for this landlord down in Kent. The guy was a real creep. They were perfect for each other.

  “He was working on these evictions—God, I don’t even want to go into how shady these things were. The landlord sometimes shut off the electricity to the units on weeknights to mess with people’s alarm clocks. Really disgusting stuff. And your nephew couldn’t help but brag about it to Sherilynne. He actually laughed. So what I did was call the tenants and offer to go over the papers they were being served, pro bono.

  “These people couldn’t afford a lawyer of their own. One little old lady met me in a wheelchair with the arm pads held on with duct tape, for God’s sake. And the papers they were being served lied to them about their rights and threatened rent increases if the tenants didn’t go along with everything.

  “So I went over everything, explained all the places where they were in violation, and sent the tenants off to court to talk to the judge.”

  “You didn’t go to court with them?”

  “With the way Aloysius was treating me? I honestly didn’t have the nerve. But it didn’t matter. Those tenants skated to a victory, and their landlord was hit with hefty fines. Do you know how rare that is in this state? Well, that one, since we’re in Oregon now. And that wasn’t even the first time. See, that’s why I didn’t have to kill him. I wouldn’t bother. I was already ruining him.”

  “And then,” Marley said, “he apologized to you.”

  Stan leaned back and crossed his arms, then uncrossed them to take a sip of his coffee. For all his talk of being framed for murder, this was the subject he was truly reluctant to broach. “He wasn’t even supposed to be in the office. He never came in on Sundays; that was a day Sherilynne and I could work in peace. But there he was, and just as I was about to shut the door in his face, he said he was sorry.”

  “What exactly did he say, dear?”

  “I’m not sure I can remember the exact words because I was so flabbergasted that I nearly fell over onto the floor. Honestly, you could have knocked me down with a hard look. The gist of it was that he realized he had been an absolute monster to me, but that it was all going to stop.”

  “What did you think about that?”

  “That it was too good to be true! I honestly didn’t believe him at first, because I figured it was some new kind of gotcha. I told him, ‘I still hate you, but if it means you’ll never speak to me again, then hooray.’ ”

  Marley watched him closely. “You didn’t believe him at first? What changed your mind?”

  “Well, it wasn’t all his talk about how sorry it was. All right. See, here’s the thing. He looked like someone had... he looked as though he hated himself. I mean, skin-crawling, goose-bump revulsion.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Believe me when I tell you: I know self-loathing, and your nephew had it. It was all over his face. At one point, he looked at me and said, I understand who I am.”

  Marley jumped in her seat. Stan looked at her quizzically as she turned away from him and took a long drink from her spritzer.

  Albert leaned close to her. “Aunt Marley? Are you all right?”

  “Oh, Albert. If there was ever any single thing that proved I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s this. I wanted to save your brother, but I might have gotten him killed. Tell me, Stan, had Aloysius stolen anything from you recently?”

  “Yes! Last Friday. I had gotten in the habit of leaving decoy keys in my desk, but somehow he figured it out and got his hands on my real ones. I searched his desk Friday night and Saturday, but it wasn’t in any of the usual places.”

  “Could you have simply lost them?”

  “He admitted he’d taken them on that Sunday morning as part of his big apology. He promised to return them the next day...”

  Marley glanced up the bar at the bartender. Kevin was telling him a story about a previous case, gesturing wildly, and making him laugh. Two other men had wandered in and were edging close to the conversation. Marley took the key chain she’d found in Aloysius’s bedroom and held it up. “Is this your key chain?”

  “Yes!” He reached for it, but she snatched them away and dropped them back into her purse. Stan leaned toward her, his eyes wide with disbelief. “Are you mad? Those are my keys.”

  “Oh Stan, wake up. Aloysius had his throat cut four nights ago, then I was shot at and had my home burned down. Yesterday, someone tried to run me over, and I’m sure you heard about the incident near Pier 70?”

  “The car bomb?”

  “That was me, too. Even worse, one of the Educatorium people was shot last night, along with a very dear friend of mine.”

  “You’re saying all that is because of my keys?”

  “Not directly. What do these keys open?”

  “Lots of things: the office building and my personal office, my file cabinet, my car, my apartment, my storage unit, my gun safe, the padlock on my front gate, and my suitcase lock.”

  Marley narrowed her eyes. “Storage
unit?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Not Much of a Party After All

  Marley tried to convince Stan to let her and Albert go to the storage unit without him, but he wasn’t having any of it. Whatever trusting instinct he might have been born with had been extinguished by years of sharing office space with Aloysius, and no matter what Marley said, he couldn’t believe that a little old lady would deliberately go to a place she honestly believed to be dangerous. He refused to tell them where the unit was, but he was willing to take them to it to see if Aloysius had stashed anything there.

  Kevin followed them out of the bar. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. “I got the bartender’s number! I love my job.”

  Stan was genuinely surprised by that, and they started talking about bartenders and the best ways to chat them up. Marley interrupted, asking if Kevin would ride back to Seattle with Stan so she and Albert could talk privately.

  “Sure,” Stan said. “Also, having him in my car makes it less likely I’ll change my mind and ditch you in traffic.”

  Marley smiled. He was sharp. “That, too.”

  But Stan refused to start the trip immediately. It was five o’clock, he explained, and traffic would be “horrendous.” All four of them went to a local restaurant, where they sat and chatted amiably for nearly two hours. It was very like an impromptu dinner party, and Marley enjoyed herself very much, encouraging Stan and Kevin to tell stories about their work.

  Eventually, they prodded Albert to tell how he’d lost the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He was reluctant, but they’d already shared so much that he felt it would be unfair to hold back.

  “It was last fall,” he said. “We were driving through Arghandab Valley—that’s in Kandahar—passing an apricot orchard on one side of the road. They aren’t large trees; from the back of my M-ATV, I could have stood up and looked over the tops of them. Most of them, anyway. And the smell of all those ripening apricots was amazing. The other side of the road was just open field with wrecked irrigation ditches.

  “We came upon some farmers by the side of the road. Their truck had broken down and little kids were running around, maybe four or five of them. They were just trying to get home.