by C. L. Polk
“Blast it.”
We searched, but there was no E.M. on the sign-in sheets, or in any of the files on the desk.
“It’s as if he—or she—walked in, signed out corpses, and then walked out again,” Mr. Hunter said, long fingers sorting through forms.
“Every doctor has access to the morgue. I have an idea.” I reached for the telephone and lifted the speaker to my ear.
“Operator.”
“Hello, Miles Singer again,” I said. “I’m looking through a duty log and I’m trying to read an illegible entry by someone with the initials E.M. Can you tell me of any doctors with those initials?”
“Well, there’s Dr. Matheson,” the operator said, and sniffed.
“Sniffy! Is that you?” I asked.
“Afternoon, Doc. I got my promotion,” he said. “No more mopping for me.”
“Good man, Sniffy. Congratulations. Anyone besides Mathy?”
“I could look up nurses. Could it be a nurse?”
“I believe it’s a doctor. Anyone else?”
“Who has any business writing in duty logs? None besides her,” Sniffy said. “Shall I ring her? She might be in her office.”
“I’ll find her myself. Thank you, Sniffy.”
“Who is Mathy?” he asked after I hung up.
“My boss, Eleanor Matheson.”
He winced. “No one else with those initials, I take it?”
“No one. But it couldn’t be her.”
“What makes you so certain?”
“The form specifically ordered the body be held. She wouldn’t make a mistake like that.” I pawed through paper, trying to make sense of this disaster.
Mr. Hunter sat on the corner of the desk. “Is your opinion born of sentiment or evidence?”
“The sign-out time was ten past eleven. She would have been getting ready to leave for the luncheon then.”
“Did you see her at ten past eleven?”
“No,” I admitted. “I was updating patient files. Then I had to meet up at the front for the ride to the hotel.”
“How many of you met there?”
“Two dozen.” I scratched my jaw. Prickles of beard stubble grazed my fingertips.
“And you don’t recall seeing her.”
I closed my eyes and thought back. She hadn’t been among those shuffling around for a carriage seat. “I didn’t see any of the department heads. They must have traveled separately from us.”
“When do you remember seeing her?”
“At the luncheon,” I said. “She was already there when I came in. So she didn’t have enough time.”
“When did you arrive?”
“Ten past twelve.”
He borrowed a pad of paper, making notes. “So you can’t account for her whereabouts at ten past eleven. She could have come down here, initialed all the bodies for release, then gone to the hotel in a private coach.”
“But why would she?”
“I’ve no idea,” Mr. Hunter said. “Nor am I saying she did.”
“Hey!” A woman dressed in the sturdy gray cotton coat of hospital clerks stood in the doorway, her eyes wide with outrage. “What are you doing in here, mucking with my papers?”
We had invaded her domain, pawed through her records, and did the gods knew what to her filing system, but you never let a clerk see you falter. I turned, my posture square to hers.
“You’re Slater, I presume? You’re late.”
“I am not.” She thrust her chin out. “I start at five. It’s not five yet.”
Mr. Hunter picked up the duty log and paged through it. “The morgue was empty when we arrived.”
“So you thought you’d go flinging my papers about, because there was no one to stop you?” She marched in and took the duty log from his hands. “These are confidential. Where’s Riggins?”
“Riggins left a note in the log saying they had to fetch their children,” I said.
“I’ll report her,” she said. “I’ve had all the headache I can stand. Now what are you two doing in here?”
“I’m Dr. Singer from General Medicine,” I said. “I will write in this log that I arrived here at twenty past four and found the morgue empty, if you’ll answer a few questions.”
“It’s a deal.” She thrust the book at me and turned an expectant gaze on Mr. Hunter. “You’re not a doctor, are you.”
He handed me his silver pen. “Mr. Tristan Hunter.”
She knew a fine coat when she saw one, and slid one foot back to bend her knee in deference. “Sorry for barking at you, sir.”
“No apology needed,” he said. “I was here to lay hands on a body, and it’s already gone.” How elegantly he skated past the truth.
Slater reached for the sign-in sheet. “Whose?”
“Nick Elliot.”
“Oh, he was a mess when he got here,” she said. “Begging your pardon, but he died of a flux. Terrible.”
I stopped writing to flip back a page in the log. “You were the attendant on duty when he came in. What’s your first name?”
“Louisa. It was an awful job, cleaning him up. You say he’s gone? His belongings too?”
Hope flared in my chest. “We haven’t checked.”
Slater opened the lower right-hand drawer. “All I could save were his keys—you wouldn’t want the clothes he died in, sir. You really wouldn’t.”
I could have used those clothes. “They’re gone?”
“Incinerated,” Slater said. “Didn’t think you’d need ’em.”
“Blast.”
Slater ducked her head. “Will you write me up? I didn’t know; the form didn’t say to keep the clothes.”
“Who brought the body last night? Was it a nurse, about this tall, Black, with her hair in lots of braids and in a knot?”
She waved the description away. “Everyone knows Nurse Robin. She didn’t come down. Orderlies brought him.”
Robin wasn’t stationed on Urgent Care. She’d probably had to go back to Surgical Recovery. I wished she had come down, though.
“May I see the sign-in form? It wasn’t on the desk.”
“I filed it,” Slater said. “I do my filing, unlike some people I could mention.”
Mr. Hunter produced a second pen and wrote down another note, borrowing the same scratchpad he had before.
Slater brought me the file, opened to Nick Elliot’s sign-in form. “Here. See? It said ‘hold body for examination.’ Nothing about the clothes or effects. It should have said. I wouldn’t have burned them if it had.”
“So it does. But the body wasn’t held.”
“That’s not on me,” Slater said. “Riggins never checked the form. Did you need the clothes? I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“The keys will suffice, Miss Slater,” Mr. Hunter said. He didn’t have a right to them, but I held my tongue with a little disquiet.
“There’s paperwork for ’em.” Slater sat down at the desk. She pulled a green form from a desk drawer and turned it toward him. “Sign here. I’ll fill out the rest and send the finished form to Dr. Singer. You can deliver it to Mr. Hunter, can’t you, Doctor?”
“I can.” This was a festival of rule-breaking. “Let me write this bit in the log. Who is J.R., by the way?”
“Julia Riggins,” Slater said.
“I’ll want to talk to her tomorrow.”
Slater smirked. “Wish I could see that.”
I wrote a quick note detailing my arrival at twenty past four to an empty morgue. Mr. Hunter accepted a ring of keys with a smile. Slater blushed, dropping her chin so she could look up at him with big eyes. I stepped out to fetch my medical bag.
He came out after me. “There’s a lot of stairs to climb.”
“Eager to leave?”
“We have a trail to follow.” He threw a companionable arm around my shoulders. “Let’s get on it.”
* * *
Mr. Hunter sidled past my desk and shook the keys on their ring to make them jingle in celebration. �
�I hate picking locks,” he said. “This is wonderful.”
“What are you going to do with those?” I asked. I’d helped him … not steal them, precisely, but he didn’t have them through honest means.
“Investigate Nick Elliot’s home,” he said, inspecting each one.
“You can’t do that,” I said. “It’s a job for the police.”
“Have you heard from them?” He tossed the keys in the air and caught them, the brass and iron barrels clinking together. He leaned against my bookcases, disturbing the skeletal hand I kept in a glass dome next to Bones of the Body.
“Not yet. I’ll have to ring them.”
He took the folding chair. I snapped the telephone on, and waited for Sniffy to answer.
“Operator.”
“Sniffy, put me through to the Pickton Street Police Station.”
“Right away, Doctor. Did you find Mathy?”
She couldn’t have done it. It didn’t make sense. “I expect she’s gone by now.”
I waited ten minutes before I finally spoke to someone in uniform. By the time I finished explaining to Police Sergeant Couchman I couldn’t believe my ears.
“We can’t investigate without an examination to determine cause of death,” he said.
“I treated him last night,” I said. “He told me he’d been poisoned.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor. Without the body, we can’t examine. If we can’t examine, we can’t determine.”
“This man died horribly. Are you telling me you won’t do anything?”
Mr. Hunter gave me a shrug and a sympathetic look.
“We can open a file,” Couchman said. “But getting evidence without a body—it would have to be airtight.”
“I can’t believe this.” It was everything I could do not to raise my voice. “You’re telling me if I hide the body well enough, or if I dispose of it, I’ll get away with murder?”
“I don’t advise you try it,” Sergeant Couchman said.
“That’s absurd.”
“We hang murderers,” Sergeant Coachman said. “Would you want to convict without the strongest possible evidence?”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “What would it take to convince you Nick’s death was a murder?”
“Evidence,” Couchman repeated. I was getting on his nerves. I didn’t care. “We usually start from the results of a doctor’s investigation into—”
“Cause of death.” My bruised elbow landed on the desk. I longed to know who’d torn away Nick’s chance at justice. “Can’t you try to find evidence?”
Couchman tried to soften his tone into sympathy. “I know this is hard to accept, but we have to follow the law. Without evidence there was a murder, we can’t go on. We’ve tied up the line long enough. I’m sorry, Doctor.”
He rang off. I slammed the receiver back in its cradle. Bad luck. I rested my forehead against the heels of my hands and tried to breathe.
“The police aren’t coming, I take it?”
“They won’t do anything,” I said. “The body’s gone. The clothes are burned. There’s no evidence.”
“There might still be something to find.” He shook the ring of keys.
“You propose breaking and entering.”
He waved the criminal notion away. “Investigation.”
“I’m no investigator.”
“Doctors investigate all the time,” Mr. Hunter said. “You gather the evidence of illness and diagnose. You can do this.”
Realization lifted my head from my hands. “I can.”
He grinned. “That’s the spirit.”
Infected with his approval, I smiled back. “No, I mean I officially can. Environmental inspection. It’s part of diagnosis. Where’s the form?” I opened the stiff drawer on the left and sorted through the spare copies of obscure hospital forms I hoarded, just in case.
“Do you have a form for everything?”
“The tyranny of paper.” I found a copy and put it on my desk blotter. My tortoiseshell pen sat nearby. “Half my day is filling out forms.”
“I’m surprised they don’t have a form for when you go to the lavatory.”
“Not so loud, they might hear you.”
He smirked, head canted in an attempt to read what I was doing. “So you fill out the form and then we can go to Nick’s apartment?”
“I fill out the form, twice. I send the original to my boss—”
“Your boss who is the only person in the hospital with the initials E.M. who has the authority to release bodies to have them destroyed? You need her approval?”
I set my pen on a felt pad. “You think she wouldn’t approve it? It wasn’t her handwriting.”
“I don’t know if she would or if she wouldn’t. But will you chance it?”
“It’s the rules,” I said. “I’m sure it wasn’t her. She’ll stamp all the copies. We keep the originals and file the rest. Then I’m authorized to do the environmental inspection.”
“Today?”
“She’s probably already gone,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
“We can’t wait until tomorrow. If she says no—”
“Mr. Hunter.” I picked up the pen and wiped the nib clean. “What are you suggesting?”
“Fill the forms out, send them to your boss. Come with me tonight. If she says no, we’ll not lose the information we’ll gain going tonight. If she says yes, we’re fine.”
“I’m sure she’ll say yes.”
He huffed and looked at the ceiling. “Pretend two possibilities exist and you aren’t sure of the outcome. What do you do?”
I grimaced. “You are a bad influence, Mr. Hunter.”
He grinned. “Thank you. I try.”
I checked boxes and wrote terse answers in the spaces provided until two copies lay on my desk, the ink drying on each. “I’ll leave these until morning.”
“This is where you will find me a useful individual,” he said. “I know a thing or two about ferreting out the truth.”
“You know a thing or two about bending it, too.” I nodded to the keys he spun around on his finger.
He tossed the keys in the air and caught them again. “People lie, Doctor. They fib. They omit. They smooth matters over with the easy thing to say. You know this.”
How easily he talked of laying the truth aside, as if it were a tie in a color that didn’t suit. “Have you lied to me?”
He took a moment to think about it. “Not that I recall.”
I set my pen down. That’s what a liar would say, isn’t it? “You’re smooth. You ask questions like you have a right to the answers, and I go along with what you want, without knowing why you want it.”
Mr. Hunter put the keys on the desk where I could take them away. “Only you can decide if I’m trustworthy, but I’d like you to think so. What can I do?”
“Tell me where you’re from.”
He glanced away, shoulders rising. “A long way from here.”
“Another country?”
He looked back at me. “Yes.”
“Which one? The Republic of Edara?” By his coloring, he could be Edaran, but they had closed their borders nearly two hundred years ago. There weren’t many Edarans anywhere in Aeland.
He shifted in his seat. “Interesting you assumed Edara.”
“So it’s true?”
He winced and shook his head. Not Edara, then. Laneeri nobles wore their hair long. My heart kicked at the idea of him being a spy, and my enemy. He couldn’t be.
I liked him.
“Mr. Hunter, where are you from?”
He glanced away, fingers covering his mouth. “I don’t think you’d believe me.”
“Is it so unbelievable? Why does your face waver when I touch you?” I pressed on.
He blinked and raised his head. “You can see the veil?”
He was using magic to mask himself without even testing his limits. “I’m asking the questions. Is it power? Like your light?”
“It’s the same,” he admi
tted. “The face you see … resembles mine.”
“So you disguise yourself. With the power, which should be impossible to do for long.” I fought to breathe against the heaviness in my chest. I wanted to go back and forget I’d said anything about the truth or lying, but I had to go on. “Why?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “My natural appearance attracts a great deal of attention. I need to blend in.”
“And you’re not a gentleman.”
He combed the escaped lock of hair back into his queue. “The truth is, I’m not a gentleman. But you are.”
I shut my mouth. When things decide to fall apart, they crumble on all sides.
He crossed one leg over the other. “People bow to me. They curtsy, touch their hats, show me deference. You never do. You’re perfectly polite to everyone, including your equals.”
“This isn’t about me,” I said. “I was asking you.”
“I told you I’ve seen wealthy witches here. In the box seats at the cinema, at concerts. In dining rooms and fine hotels. I kept my distance from them.”
“Mages. We’re mages.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Have you—seen them in pairs?”
He nodded. “Where one walks enslaved to the other? It’s vile. It’s perverse to take a bond and use it for—” He shuddered.
“They don’t do bindings where you’re from?”
“They don’t,” he said.
That hurt my chest. He came from someplace I could be free. “Do you have to hide your magic?”
“No. You’d be well-respected there,” he said. “Healing is a vital talent.”
“But you won’t tell me where you’re from.” I didn’t know this man. The face I saw was a mask, constructed from the power. He was no Aelander. I needed the truth even if I had to take it.
I seized his hand. He yanked at it, but I held fast. “I want—”
I pushed past the ordinary, nondescript, too-regular aura as if it were a layer of skin, and my words died in my throat.
Mr. Hunter had told the truth. His mask did resemble his true face, but it was a blunted, crude thing compared to the truth of him. He was finer, more ethereal …
Eternally beautiful.
“Amaranthine,” I whispered.
“Starred One,” he answered, his expression resigned. “Hail, and well met.”
