“Sir, at the risk of being rude, please, let me stop you. Georgie didn’t do it. Please send him back to school.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Duniway,” said Prake--and he seemed genuinely sorry. “But how could you know this? Sheriff Runnels is fairly convinced, and the evidence against my son is strong. Do you have evidence against anyone else?”
“No,” she said after a pause--at least none she might share, she added to herself. “Not firm evidence, no. But if I can convince Sheriff Runnels that it’s so, would you believe him?”
“Oh, certainly! I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to convince me, though, as easily as him?”
Annabelle shook her head. “I’m afraid it’s a delicate thing. I wouldn’t wish to say anything to anyone else right now. But please, please do believe, Mr Prake, that your son did not do this. Please, send him back to school.”
Mayor Prake studied her face, his own a sea of hope, shame, and disbelief. “Well, his mother and I will consider it, Miss Duniway. As you might imagine, this has been a source of great chagrin for our family.”
“And all of it unnecessary, I assure you. Good day, Mr Mayor,” she smiled.
“Good day, Miss Duniway,” he replied, his eyes on her back the whole way back to the Hopewell.
Once in her rooms, Misi scratched at the window. “I heard all that,” he said, leaping from the sill to the rug, and from there to the back of the settee. “Aren’t you coming a bit close to giving us away?”
“I might not have any choice, kitty,” she said as she took off her hat. She walked into her bedroom, put the hat back in its box, and the hatpins in their tray on her dresser. “There was a murder last night.”
“I know,” the reluctant cat replied.
“What have you heard, Misi? Tell me,” she said, coming back into the room and joining him on the settee. “C’mere.”
“Oh, Annie, don’t scratch behind my ears, I can never resist--ah. Oh. Ah, that’s the spot.”
“Tell me or I’ll stop, Misi.”
“Oh, all right, all right! I’d have to tell you anyway.” He paused, and cleaned his whiskers while he composed his thoughts. “I should have told you before,” he said, “but I didn’t want to squeal on one of my own...Oh, dammit, I knew you’d stop if I said!”
Annabelle gaped at him. “Are you telling me Mamzelle is killing people--that she killed that man?”
“A greenhorn every full moon,” said Misi, “so, probably.”
“You should have told me immediately!” she cried, shaking him by the scruff until he squeaked. “What else did she say I should know about?”
“Nothing very serious!”
“Misi, I order you to tell me everything!”
The cat cringed, then poured out the rest of the story: the plot to kill one another’s masters, how he’d finagled his way out of it, the full moon killings, and Mamzelle’s hinting at a wolfman in the vicinity. “That’s all, I swear by the Dark One’s Wings!”
“Two werethings in one place would be unusual,” mused Annabelle. “But this isn’t any place, this is an enormous hermetauxite deposit.” She rubbed her temples. “I cannot believe Bonham would let a demon run around without a strict prohibition on the killing of humans. He’s either a fool, or...Misi, the next time you see her, prowl around, see if you can get any hints about the tainted ore from her. We may have another suspect.”
Episode 18: Servitude
Mamzelle had a time of it under Charity’s orders the next day.
She scrubbed the floors, beat all the rugs, bathed Charity’s disgusting little pug dog, shined the copper weathervane atop the gingerbread-encrusted turret, mucked out the stables, and blacked every boot in the house as well as the stoves--all in her best silk dress, now tattered and stained. Blacking smudges covered her face, not all of them self-inflicted, and shoeprints stood out on her dress where the occasional kick had landed.
“Too bad about the dress. It was so flattering on you, too. I bet you never affront me again!” smirked Charity as the housekeeper fidgeted behind her.
“Oh, no, madame, I wouldn’t dream of eet!” said Mamzelle, face downcast. Her eyes reflected a dangerous ruby in the wooden floor she’d polished to a perfect finish; neither human noticed.
“It’s five minutes till seven, just enough time for you to walk down Main Street like that before my time over you ends, and before it gets too much darker. I don’t want you washing your face, straightening your hair or arranging your dress. Let them all laugh at you. Now, get out, you slut!” said Charity. Mamzelle inclined her head, and sauntered out of the room as if she’d been eating tea and cakes in the parlor. Charity aimed one last kick, and missed.
“You should be careful with demon servants!” hissed the housekeeper as soon as Mamzelle was out of sight.
“Mrs Walters, my treatment of that hell-spawned bitch of my husband’s is none of your business!”
“But you never know when they’ll find a loophole and then you’re in a fix!”
“Shut up, Mother!” said Charity, stomping up the stairs.
Mamzelle, meanwhile, did as she was told, and no one laughed. She ambled down the middle of Main Street, bold as brass, past L. Luther Lockson and Anatole Prake, standing in general conversation by the shuttered office of the assayer. “That woman’s smile turns men into moths, a-circling round her flame,” said the newspaperman.
“You have a way with a phrase, sir,” said Anatole.
“Thankee, Mr Mayor.”
Once inside the Palace, Mamzelle waved a hand; all smudges vanished, and her hair tumbled down from its ratted confines and rearranged itself. She examined her dress in the long mirror behind the bar. Jed’s favorite, all to tatters. So expensive, too, as if she cared; anything Jed liked, she didn’t.
Howard the bartender barged across her view, rag and glass in hand. He raised a shaggy brow and said, “What happened to you?”
“Madame Bonham. Is ‘e here?” she asked.
“Upstairs with Hepsy.”
“Good. ‘E won’t bother me for a while, peut-être.” She turned away to the stairs.
“Hey, you need anything? You look like you could use a drink or five,” Howard called.
“Eau de vie. A bottle, it will suffice. Send it up.”
Howard whistled low, but lumbered off to the cellar.
Mamzelle walked up the wide staircase, the ruined gown’s hem trailing along the rich red carpet, the lustrous, dark wood banister smooth under her hand. At the end of one long dark-paneled hall leading to the front of the house was her door; she opened it, expecting a visitor, and found him. “‘Allo, kitty.”
“I noticed you left a window cracked, and took it as an invitation,” said Misi, stretching and flexing his paws on the velvet upholstery of her settee.
“Oh, eet was.” She rustled behind a screen, and sailed the filthy red dress over its top.
“What happened to you? You look like you’ve been through a war!”
“Nothing of consequence. ‘Ave you found a loophole yet to kill Bonham?”
“Not yet,” he answered.
Black paws appeared under the screen, creeping to one side. “I can see your sneaking feet, chèri,” she said. “Eef you want to see me as the Dark One made me, ask.”
“Oh, I’d never presume,” said the cat; the paws slinked away.
She stripped off her corset, camisole and drawers. “I do wish we could change. Human forms are very limiting.”
“Try being a cat.”
“Eh bien, I think not,” she said, coming round the screen in fresh underthings and a negligee. “Though it would mean less of this. Clothing. Bah.”
“It becomes you. Say, speaking of past conversations, you said something about a wolfman before. Were you serious?”
“‘Ave you not sniffed out the werecreature yet?” she said, joining him on the settee.
“I wasn’t looking for one.”
Such an awkward demon to show his owner’s mind. “Why do
you care?” she said.
“Just...curious.”
“What is it the humans say? ‘Curiosity keeled the cat.’ But no, I do not threaten. Your master, ‘e wishes to know, ehn? ‘E is frightened?”
“Werecritters can’t do anything to us, but humans are frightened of them--they have every reason to be.”
“I should think you’d welcome an accident to befall him. I would to make an arrrangement with a sympathetic wolfman be very pleased.”
“Hm,” said Misi. “Well, be that as it may. I guess I’ll go sniffing then. Though I tell you--sniffing around here, whew!”
“You do not like my scent, petit chat?” she laughed.
“Oh no, doll, I like it a lot!” he said, butting her hand with his head. “Could you...? Oh, thank you. You always get the perfect spot behind the ears. No, I mean that weird hermetauxite. You’ve been here a while. You have to at least have smelled it!”
“Oh, I’ve tasted eet! Ptui! It is to spit!” she scowled.
“I’ve never been near any deposit with ore like that. Wonder why the ore from here is so bad? And how come all of it isn’t--it’s all out of the same veins pretty much, isn’t it? Is it one particular mine, or all of ‘em? Just so I can avoid it!”
“No, no, petit, it doesn’t come out of the ground like that. Someone, ‘e twists it.”
“Someone twists it?! Who’d do something like that? Who’d have the knowledge?”
“Eh, I know not. Eet started not long after I came here. No new pollution since six months ago, I think. Just the same stench I already know.”
“I already know to avoid the assayer’s and the ethergraph office--why the ethergraph office? So strange!”
“I know not.”
“Anywhere else I should avoid? That stuff is nasty.”
“‘Ere and there, it pops up. Those places are the worst.” A loud voice outside her door, and she dumped the cat to the carpet. “Leave, quickly. Trouble of the worst for us both if ‘e finds you ‘ere.”
The cat nodded, and was out the window before the door opened and Jed strolled in. “I am feelin’ fine, Mamzelle, thanks for asking! That Hepsy can bounce like a rubber ball! Bourbon? Don’t mind if I do!” he boomed, helping himself to the decanter on the side table. “Just thought I’d stop by, have some dinner, pass the time. How was your social call at the big house? Have a good time?”
“Your wife, she thinks she put me out, but she is nothing,” said Mamzelle. “Though I am desolée. Madame ‘as ruined my best dress red of silk, the one you liked so much.”
“What? Goddammit, that thing cost me five hundred dollars!” He barreled into his favorite chair, the bourbon sloshing out of his glass onto its tufted leather. “Wipe that up! And go get me dinner!”
She swiped the arm of the chair with the hem of her negligee, making him cuss even more, then meandered out the door, down the stairs to the kitchen. “Chen! He wants his dinner,” she called in Mandarin.
“Okie dokie, Missy. Chen make up plate zip-zip.” The Chinese man drooped toward the stove.
Mamzelle paused at the door. She still hated humans, but Chen was a soft spot. He was kind to her; whenever he slaughtered a pig, he made sure she got the heart before it cooled, and though he treasured it himself for black pudding, he always had a big mug of its steaming blood for her as well. “You look out of spirits, Chen.”
“It is nothing, Miss,” he answered in Chinese. “The full moon always makes me wistful. I am glad tonight is its last night. It reminds me of sitting in the gardens of my father, drinking tea and admiring the moon’s reflection in the carp pond.” He stepped to the kitchen door; a cool breeze blew back the straggling hair from his queue as he stared up into the night sky. “Nothing is as it was. My family is disgraced, my brothers dead or in exile, as am I. A poem I recall, by honored poet Bai Juyi:
We look together at the bright moon, and then the tears should fall,
This night, our wish for home can make five places one.”
Mamzelle sighed with him, long and melancholy. “Some day, you will rejoin them.” she said.
“No, Missy, Chen no can go home, never,” he said, and turned to his pots.
Some day, she thought as she returned to her room, she would send Chen to join his brothers in death, for she still intended him to be among the slaughtered when she won her freedom. Everyone in town would be, even the Sheriff. But she would kill Chen first, and make his death quick and merciful. It was the least she could do for such a poetic soul.
Episode 19: A History Lesson
Annabelle was waiting for Misi when he slipped back in the window. He stretched out into his humanoid form and told her the story. “Remind me never to get crosswise with Charity Bonham,” he said. “She’s a bad customer.”
“She’s up to no good, I’m sure,” said Annabelle, “but I doubt she has much to do with the business at hand. What did you find out?” Misi quickly gave her the gist of his conversation with Mamzelle. “We know who the werecritter is--Deputy Runnels. There’s only the one, then,” she said. More importantly, we’ve got a timeline for the tainted ore. The contamination started almost two years ago, and stopped six months ago. Now we just have to figure out the correspondence. We need to find out what happened two years ago that might’ve stopped six months ago.”
“Who would know? Who’s been here that long?” said Misi.
“I think I’ll make a social call tomorrow on Mr Lockson.”
“The newspaper guy? What for? That newspaper wasn’t here two years ago--this place was a widening in the mud then.”
“Yes, and now it’s a sprawling in the mud, but a sprawl with two newspapers. You can’t report on the present without knowing the past. The town’s history is Lockson’s business. The other paper is Bonham’s creature, and I don’t want him hearing what we’re up to on any account. Since tomorrow’s Saturday, I believe I’ll stop by the newspaper office on some pretext or other and pick Mr Lockson’s ample cranium.”
In point of fact, L. Luther Lockson was possessed of an abnormally large head. Were you to enquire at the local haberdasher, you’d discover that it was upwards of a size seven and seven-eighths, depending on the hat. That’s in the neighborhood of twenty-five inches. Don’t ask me about centimeters. That’s un-American. I like to hang onto a few remnants of national pride.
Oh yes, it’s me. It’s always been me. You kids, you never pay attention.
But I digress.
L. Luther Lockson, as I was saying, had a big noggin. Purple prose stuffed the brain inside, but he wasn’t a bad newspaperman. He knew his town inside-out, and did his unsuccessful best to stay out of politics; he itched to leave his stamp on the town, but wanted to hold onto his paper. The Voice of the Gulch considered itself independent, though the town, and certainly Jed Bonham, considered him in the pocket of Mayor Prake; certainly the Voice’s editorial page agreed with the Mayor and boosted his ideas.
But while Jed out-and-out paid Rowland Barnes, the publisher of the Independent Mountaineer, no one supported Lockson but himself. Had Bonham wished to starve Lockson out, he could have persuaded the local business owners that advertising with the Voice was bad for their health, or he could have just sent goons to smash the presses. But as long as Lockson didn’t make too many waves, Bonham left him alone, if frustrated.
It was with some surprise that he received the schoolteacher in his office this Saturday. “Why, Miss Duniway! What can a simple newspaperman do for an erudite lady like yourself? Classified ad, perhaps? No, no, I shouldn’t think so. Why, Miss Duniway, it is a stroke of good fortune, a miracle not far removed from that of the Prophet of the Method and His Delivery of the Good Woman of Persia from the Fiery Furnaces of Indecency, that you have sojourned to our offices today. Yes, Miss Duniway, let me assure you that I have longed this month to approach you for the purpose of acquainting my audience with the details of your life, one of education and perspicacity I am sure, a
saga that would be a most edifying one for our readers.”
“Come again?” said Annabelle.
“I’d like to interview you,” said Lockson.
“Oh!” she said, appearing flustered. “I can easily be found, Mr Lockson, at the Hopewell--no miracles needed. Actually, I came here to interview you myself, Mr Lockson.”
“Interview a simple newspaperman like myself? Why, Miss Duniway, I am surprised and gratified you would think anything I have to impart to your students would be of any utility whatsoever. Perhaps I might convey my advice on clarity in writing? As a newspaperman, I am in constant employment of whatever writing talent the Method has seen fit to bestow upon me, but while raw talent is of great use, practice, technique and study are of far more use. I would be happy to speak to your students.”
“In point of fact, sir,” said Miss Duniway, “I was hoping you might tell me a little about the history of the town, though it be short. I think my students would like to know.”
“Oh,” said the deflated Lockson.
“I cannot imagine anyone knowing more about Scryer’s Gulch than you, you see.”
“Oh!” he said, puffing back up again. “Well, my dear Miss Duniway, that is correctness in itself, I assure you! You have heard the saying, perhaps, that journalism is the first draft of history? I take this charge with the utmost sincerity, ma’am. I have only been in business here for six months, and yet I have made the town’s abbreviated history my passion, my vocation, as it were. With what facets of our town’s past may I make you acquainted?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What would you like to know?” he said. “And, please, please sit down. May I offer you coffee?”
As Miss Duniway perched on the office chair and sipped the execrable coffee that had been sitting on the Voice’s woodstove this past five hours, Lockson filled her ears with a not-at-all abbreviated version of the main events of the town’s past. Had he been paying attention, Lockson would have sensed a fit of the fidgets coming over his listener, until he got through the geologic formation of the area, the history, or rather the non-history, of the Natives of these parts, and the first year of the hermetauxite strike and white settlement, to the events of two years past. “We knew we were prospering as a metropolis when the New Valley Printing Ethergraph Company saw fit to send Mr Prake the younger to town with Mr Morton to open the town’s first ethergraph office two years ago.”
Scryer's Gulch Page 10
