Beating Heart Cadavers (11 page)

Ch. 14

“Have I given you an impossible task, Breiner?”

Ratsel didn't look up from his desk as he asked the question, throwing the Spöke off guard. He continued to flip through his papers, signing every third one or so, and his pen made such a screeching noise as it dug through to the metal desk beneath it that Breiner could hardly concentrate on anything at all.

“Well?”

Ratsel looked up when there was no response, his dark eyebrows furrowed and knotting together over his thin, crooked nose. Breiner clasped his hands behind his back, wondering how fifteen years of dedicated service could be annihilated with one angered look.

“I'm not sure that I know what you mean, High Officer.”

“You were sent to the Ambassador's estate to retrieve Andor Sawyer's notebook. Yet, as of right now, I've yet to see it.” Ratsel put his pen down and folded his hands together. “Do you know why I sent you, Breiner, and not someone else?”

“Because I'm trained in unearthing things, High Officer.”

“Trained, but evidently not specialized in it,” Ratsel returned, “or we wouldn't be having this conversation.”

Breiner stood up straighter.

“High Officer, if I may –” he began, but Ratsel cut him off.

“No, you may not, Breiner. You've had plenty of opportunity to find it – your captain told me you went back for the fourth time yesterday morning.”

“I – I did, sir, but the issue is that –”

“Do you know why it's so important that we find that notebook, Breiner?” Ratsel asked, giving the Spöke an inquisitive look that didn't even begin to hide his aggravation.

“I – of course, sir. It contains the cure for the Mare-folk.”

“We've been searching for it for ten years now,” Ratsel confirmed, his tone still impatient. “Andor Sawyer had a …
select
team of individuals who determined a way to stop the metal hearts from beating. It was a highly secretive operation – as I'm sure you can image – as the Spöken were still fairly new then, and we weren't sure how much government lenience we would have. Sawyer was due to present the findings to our former High Officer Vanth, but before he could ...”

“He disappeared.”

“He was murdered, Breiner. Let's not pretend otherwise.”

Breiner shifted slightly.

“I've always found it rather … difficult … to believe myself, sir,” he said.

“Have you?”

“It's only – the rumors are that it was Sawyer's daughter who did it, and I ...” He cleared his throat and straightened. “I don't believe that a twenty-year-old girl could kill a fully-trained Spöke.”

“You don't?” Ratsel raised his eyebrows slightly. His dark eyes pooled over the other man in complete disregard for his opinion. “Do you have children, Breiner?”

“I do, sir.”

“Any daughters?”

“One.”

“How old is she?”

“Fourteen, sir.”

“Fourteen,” Ratsel mused, frowning as he formed a picture of what she might look like in his head. “She's fourteen years old, and you're telling me that you've never gotten a reaction out of her strong enough that might make you believe she's capable of murdering you if you're not more careful with your words?”

Breiner blinked.

“I – no, sir. I've not.”

“I see,” Ratsel said. “Well, perhaps you don't spend enough time at home.”

He looked back at his papers, signed another few, and then carried on.

“It's no secret what happened to Andor, Breiner. His daughter has done everything to confirm that she killed him except for stating it outright. The issue is what happened to the notebook that was in his possession when he died.”

“So you think she killed him to get the notebook, sir?”

“No, I think she killed him because she's a lunatic. That's the problem when you adopt children, Breiner: you never know whose genetics you're bound to receive, and it's not as if you can give them back once you realize that they aren't what you wanted. But why the girl did it doesn't really concern me anymore: I just want that notebook.”

“I've searched the house four times, High Officer. It's not there –”

“It
is
there, you just haven't found it,” Ratsel snapped. “Caine Sr. said that it was in his possession. It's somewhere in the house.”

“But can we be positive, sir?” Breiner asked. “For all we know, the ambassador was confused when he said that, or the message was relayed wrong –”

“Our information is correct, Breiner, so either go back to the house and find it, or I'll appoint someone who can.”

“How can we be certain that the notebook wasn't destroyed?” Breiner said quickly. “Maybe Sawyer's daughter dumped it when she got rid of the body, or burned it, or --”

“It's impossible.” Ratsel had folded his hands again. The fingers were so white that they looked like a piled of bones tightly interwoven on the desk in front of him. “The notebook isn't made of paper: it's made of metal. Hilitum, to be exact. You can't simply put a match to it and watch it disappear.”

Breiner dropped his gaze and fell silent for a moment.

“I apologize, sir. I didn't know.”

“If you apologize to me, it should only be because you can't find the notebook,” Ratsel said. “And if that day comes, Breiner, I can assure you that you'll lose more than your job for all the wasted time you've caused me.”

“But High Officer –” Breiner started, his voice beginning to betray his panic. “I've combed the house top to bottom. I left nothing unturned. The notebook – it's just not there.”

“Get out, Breiner. I'll find it myself before I'll listen to you make any more excuses.”

“Caine must have gotten rid of it,” Breiner said hastily. “It's the only thing that makes sense –”

“If Matthew had found it and hidden it somewhere else, then he wouldn't be firmly objecting to having us search the estate. He knows it's there as well as I do, only he doesn't want us to find it.”

“But can you be certain, sir? Because I've been thinking about it, and I realized that Caine must have known we were searching his house regardless of his wishes, so he took it to another location.”

“Caine is hardly so observant that he'd notice if the doormat was sitting slightly more askew than it was when he left home, Breiner. He doesn't know that we've been there.”

“Well – of course – he shouldn't have, High Officer,” Breiner said quickly, seemingly trying to lessen Ratsel's anger before he found himself in need of another job. “Only, the first time that I went to search the estate, someone was home – so he might have made the connection and hidden it.”

Ratsel's frown grew deeper.

“What do you mean, someone was home?” he said. “Caine was with me that day. We were going over the Hilitum Bill. I'm sure of it.”

“Yes, I know he was, sir – but his wife was there.”

Ratsel was silent for so long that Breiner wondered if he was waiting for a better explanation as to why he couldn't get Mrs. Caine out of the way and search the house regardless. Yet as Ratsel continued to stare at him, it was clear that there was something else wrong that Breiner simply wasn't privy to.

“His … what?” the Spöke asked quietly.

“His wife,” Breiner answered, though his voice betrayed his uneasiness. “She found me in the house and asked if I needed something – so I made an excuse and left immediately. She didn't look suspicious, I don't think.”

Ratsel's eyes continued to bore into Breiner's form.

“Breiner, you did not meet Caine's wife in the house.”

“No, I did, High Officer – but I got out as quickly as I could, and I doubt that she could place who I was. I think I might have just woken her up – she was still in her robe –”

“Breiner,” Ratsel repeated, his voice very heavy now, “you
did not
meet
Caine's wife in the house. I'm positive.”

“But, I … I did, sir –” Breiner started, but Ratsel shook his head and cut him off.

“You did not, Breiner. Now, considering this information, the question you should be answering is: who
did
you meet that day, and did she recognize you?”

“Did she recognize me …? I … I doubt it, sir. She seemed very ...”

“Very?”

“Uninterested. She – well – I suppose it could have been just a maid, or a housekeeper or something –”

Ratsel looked far from appeased.

“Go back to the house and bring me the notebook,” he said, retrieving his pen and returning to his paperwork. “I don't care if you have to rip up the floorboards beneath Caine's bed as he sleeps. Just bring it to me.”

“I – of course, sir.”

“And send me up Jasper Sawyer while you're at it. Give him a description of who you saw first and see if he can confirm for me whom it might be.”

“I'll do that right away, sir,” Breiner said, nodding and taking a step backwards. As he reached the door, however, he paused for a moment more and looked around at the High Officer. “But … if I may, sir – how can you be positive that it wasn't Caine's wife I met in the house?”

An indifferent expression had settled on Ratsel's face, and he didn't even bother to look up from his paperwork as he answered.

“Because,” he said, “Marijould Caine is dead. I attended her funeral six months ago.”

Ch. 15

They probably shouldn't have buried him in the backyard.

Caine considered the fact with languid thoughtfulness as he crossed the stone-marked grass on his way through the graveyard. They probably shouldn't have buried him
anywhere
, really, or needed to do so in the first place, but none of that mattered now. Caine's only concern was how the discovery of Andor Sawyer's remains on his property would implement him in the crime, regardless of whether or not Fields continued to shoulder the brunt of the blame. After all, Fields could cross the border into the Wastelands again in order to avoid punishment, but Caine would be in Oneris forever.

Turning to approach the plot where his wife was laid, Caine wiped at his brow as the sun finally made its impression on him after the long walk there. He was both unaware of what he had gotten himself into by taking the job as ambassador and at a loss for how to proceed. He had known upon taking the position that something was amiss, but his desire to get Simon home – Mari's final request to him before she had died – had overrode his better sense. And now he was stuck in something that he didn't know well enough to get out of, and there was no one left to tell him what to do anymore.

Caine's face twitched as he reached the headstone, and he unwillingly bent down so that he was level with the words written across the smooth marble. The only words that he could make out through his blurred vision were
Marijould Caine
and
died
. Died, he repeated to himself, still unused to the way it tasted on his tongue. He hated when people said it that way, as though his wife had simply stopped existing when her coffin had been lowered into the ground. Her presence still haunted his thoughts, and her belongings were still scattered around his house. He couldn't just get rid of them, after all. He couldn't just get rid of her.

Because she wouldn't have had to die at all, Caine knew, if she had just received a heart transplant in time. Caine used to sit in his accounting office and stare across his ledgers at the people filing in and out of the bank, fantasizing about them stepping into oncoming traffic or slipping on the pavement and bleeding out through their heads before being rushed to the hospital to donate their hearts to his wife. But her place on the waiting list had been pushed because she hadn't been born Onerian, and after years of waiting and suffering through the heartache of having Simon taken away, her heart had finally given out.

Caine had thought that his father would consent to help him get Mari's name moved up on the list, but when he had not, Caine had positively begged him to. No matter how angry Caine was at Fields for her suggestion of how to keep Mari alive, he could at least resign himself to the fact that she had been trying to help. His father had simply pushed the matter aside. He had pushed his daughter-in-law aside, rather. And Caine knew why now, at least: he had been planning to leave his title to Caine, and it wouldn't have been proper for the new ambassador to have a non-Onerian wife.

Caine pushed himself back to his feet, swaying slightly even though the air was quite still, and turned to leave the cemetery. Caine Sr. hadn't come to the funeral, and nor had Fields. People that Caine hardly knew had shown up – even Ratsel, who at that point had only known him from his childhood, had stayed through the burial with him – but his father and closest friend hadn't seen reason to come. Caine had had to stand there alone, watching the shiny black box sink deeper and deeper into the earth before dirt was piled on top of it, and the knowledge that he would never see Mari again was muddled by the fact that, though she had left him, she wasn't the one who had abandoned him.

“What should I do, what should I do?” he murmured under his breath, shoving his hands into his uniform pockets as he walked more briskly. He felt farthest away from his wife in the graveyard, he found, solely because it was far more difficult to imagine her withering away to bones beneath the earth than it was to picture her waiting for him at their home. If he focused enough on the distant horizon, though, then sometimes he could still bring her image back to the forefront of his mind as he had grown accustomed to doing, as she would appear to walk in step next to him.

“Or what should I have done?” he said, backtracking in the case that the first question was too difficult to imagine her response to. Something shifted beside him, and he imagined that he could see the outline of her form gliding beside him.

“I do not think you should have taken this job, Matthieu,” she said. “You are good with numbers and calculations. You are not so good with people and words.”

“Ratsel said he could help us get Simon back,” he told her, moving his head in her direction but not daring to lift his eyes to where she ought to have stood.

“And has he?”

Caine chewed his tongue.

“He will,” he replied. “He has to. There's no one left to help us anymore.”

“Maybe you are forgetting someone, Matthieu. You are not all alone just yet.”

Caine paused outside the cemetery and looked around. Mari was nowhere in sight, though he was positive that he could hear her voice echoing on the cast-iron fence. It wasn't until he had settled into a spot on the train that he realized who she had been referring to, though, and he quickly got off at the stop right outside the University of East Oneris.

He reached the History Department and pulled open the door, then ascended the steps to the second floor and wrapped around the bend in the direction of Mason's office. He cracked his knuckles against the door, but no one answered. Knocking several times more, he waited patiently for a response that wouldn't come.

“It can't still be class hours,” he said to himself. He went back downstairs and entered the secretary's office.

“Excuse me, could you tell me where Professor Mason is?”

“Doctor Mason isn't in today,” the woman replied.

“Not at all?”

The secretary shook her head dismissively, but upon noticing Caine's uniform, she suddenly changed her approach.

“I could call his home phone for you, Mr. Ambassador, if you'd like to wait.”

She indicated to the seats outside the office, and Caine gave a numb nod in reply. His head was aching and a tiredness had sunken into his bones, and all that he wanted to do was lie down upon the linoleum and wait for everything to pass him by.

He took a seat in one of the chairs and leaned his head back against the wall. He owed a great deal to Mason, he realized. He had truly only befriended Caine because he had taken a liking to Fields, and back then, one didn't come without the other. Yet Mason had always treated Caine as his own person – separate from Fields and his father and his title – and though Caine would always consider Fields his first and only friend, Mason had been a constant in his life when Fields had been erratic, and he had been there when everyone else had shied away.

After Mari had taken ill, Mason used to come to hospital when Caine was at work to keep Mari company. He was kinder than Caine was, and not so afraid of her impending death that it rendered him incapable of speaking to her as had happened to Caine. His bedside manner in those times was the reminder that he had been a doctor before becoming a professor, and yet Caine hardly thought that it was something he had learned in school. He was a good friend, he knew: a good person. Caine wasn't certain that he could say the same for himself.

“Mr. Caine? I have him on the line for you.”

Caine turned back at the secretary's voice and reached over to take the phone from her, pulling it outside the office so that he could hold the conversation in private.

“Hello?”

“Professor – hi. It's Matt.”
Matt
, he thought to himself, rubbing the name against the roof of his mouth with his tongue as he spoke it. Perhaps it was the lingering taste of the graveyard air, but he suddenly saw his wife's aversion to the name. It did sound like something vulgar: an invitation to be stepped on. “I – ah – hope this isn't a bad time.”

It undoubtedly was, for Mason had surely skipped work that day because he had had something planned other than catering to Caine's need for advice, but Caine didn't know what else to say.

“No, it's never a bad time. Is everything … alright?”

Caine shook his head. He was aware that he was heat-struck from walking to the university in the hot sun, and his mind was reeling with so many problems that he didn't know where to begin. Despite his initial worry about what Ratsel was after in his house, a separate concern had overtaken him, and it was the type of fear that only his wife had ever been able to ease; and despite how he so often simply imagined what she would say to him in times when he needed her, he knew that no amount of reiterating his own assumptions in her voice would ever bring her closer to him again.

“Matt? Are you still there?”

Caine righted the phone on his ear, having been unaware that he had let it slip to his shoulder.

“No. Yes – I mean, I'm here,” he said.

“Are you …? Was there a specific reason that you called? You sound … upset.”

“No, I – I actually had a … a sort of medical question for you.”

Mason paused.

“I'm not sure how much help I could be with that,” he said. “I'm not that type of doctor.”

“You're not that type of doctor anymore, you mean,” Caine said, “but you could still know … I mean, you'd still be able to tell me if I … if I was losing my mind?”

“What makes you think you might be?”

Caine shifted.

“It's just … when I wake up in the morning, and before I go to sleep, I … I sometimes think – or imagine, really – that Mari's still here. With me,” he said, feeling foolish now that he said it aloud and wishing that he could suck the breath with the words on it back in again. “And I know that she's not. I know it all the time, but I still think – somehow, simultaneously – that she's alive.”

He could almost hear Mason frowning, but when he spoke his voice was soft rather than pitying.

“It's not strange to think that, Matt. To wish for it, even. We all wish that it hadn't happened.”

“But when I see her, I speak to her as though she's there,” Caine told him. “I pretend she's there, and that she's speaking to me or giving me advice, even though I know that she's not – and even though I know that it doesn't make sense.”

“But you know that it's in your imagination, and you know that it's what you're dreaming reality would be, not what it actually is. And things – no matter how strange – tend to make sense to us when we're dreaming.”

Mason paused and waited, seemingly trying to decipher Caine's reaction by his silence alone. After another moment or so, though, he went on.

“Was there something else on your mind, Matt? Or someone else, maybe?”

Caine ran his hand along his beard, scratching at the skin underneath. He was aware that Mason was referring to Fields, but he had no patience to speak about her in the moment. He couldn't divulge what they had argued about, and though he liked to think it was simply because he missed Mari too much to get into the subject, he was beginning to recognize that the aversion had more to do with guilt than any other of the myriad of reasons he had created. But it was weighing heavily on him even so, along with the remorse he felt about what had happened to Simon, and he knew that if he didn't get something off of his chest, the rib cage would shatter and splinter inwards to stab at his still-beating heart.

“Yes, there's – there's someone,” he said, deciding on an answer at last. “Andor Sawyer.”

“You mean Ladeline's father?” Mason asked, not bothering to hide his surprise. “Why are you thinking of him?”

Caine took a few breaths, unsure if he would be able to answer. The room was far too warm, and the university buildings were too close together to allow any breezes in through the windows.

“You don't know how he died, do you, Matt?” Mason asked. “You weren't – I – don't tell me you were there, were you?”

“I was.”

“But then ...” Mason seemed to have lost track of his thoughts and was rushing to catch up to them again. He fumbled with the phone before speaking again. “But Ladeline … she really did it?”

Caine let out his breath.

“No, Lad didn't kill him,” he said. “I did.”