Bitter Gold Hearts (13 page)

When he returned, he stood beside me instead of fac­ing me. “Pretty little gal.”

“She was. We had a young one coming, too.”

“Looked like. Wadlow! Come here.”

One of the older farmers came to us. He planted his scythe and leaned. He looked even more laconic than the first one.

“You sold that swayback mare to that smart-ass city boy what day?”

The second farmer considered the sky as though he might find the answer written there. “Five days ago to­day. About noon.” He eyed me like he was suspicious I might want the money back.

I knew what I wanted to know but had to play the game out. “He say where he was headed?”

Wadlow looked to my companion, who told him, “You tell him what he wants to know.”

“Said he was going into the city. Said his horse got stole. Didn’t say much of nothing else.”

“Hope you took him good. Was he wearing shoes?” It was an off-the-wall question but about the only thing left I had to ask. Except, “Was he alone?”

Wadlow said, “Didn’t have no shoes. Boots. Pretty rich-boy boots. Wouldn’t last a week out here. He was by his lonesome.”

“That’s that, then,” I said. The older farmer asked, “That tell you what you need?”

“I reckon I know where to look now.” And that was true. “Much obliged.” I checked the sky. “Thank you, then.” I turned to go.

“Luck to you. She was a pretty little thing.”

My shoulders tightened and I shuddered in a sudden wash of emotion. I raised a hand and marched on. I had a man’s work to do. Those farmers understood better than anybody I knew, except maybe Saucer head Tharpe. By the time I settled on the buggy seat, the skirmishers were on the move again and the women and children were back to work. Maybe they would find the time to talk about me over supper.

__XXI__

It was late when I entered the city but a sliver of light still remained. I had a brainstorm. It was a long shot but it might stir something. I had Amiranda’s body propped up beside me. The witch’s spells were holding their own and the light helped with the illusion. Maybe somebody who knew she could not be alive would see her and think she was. To that end I made a few cautious forays into the outskirts of Ogre Town, then went up and circled Lettie Faren’s place because a lot of the Bruno types from the Hill came there to waste their wages. The wages of sin is that you get cheated out of them. Then I headed home, going around to the back so no one would see me take the body inside. Dean was there despite the hour. He helped with the door and gawked. “What’s the matter with her, Mr. Garrett?”

I wasn’t in one of my better humors. “She’s dead. That’s what’s the matter with her. Murdered.”

He stammered, apologized, stammered some more, so I apologized back and added, “I don’t know why. Maybe because she was pregnant. Maybe because she knew too much. Let’s take her in to his nibs. He might be able to sort it out.”

The Dead Man isn’t always as hard and insensitive as he pretends. He read my mood and saved the usual act.
That is the one who spent the night.
It was the first he admitted knowing about that.

“The same. Let me tell it while I’m in the mood.”

He let me run through it up to the moment I carried her in there. Dean ran me mug after mug and hovered solicitously in between. I knew I was doing a good job reporting and had done a good one poking around be­cause he didn’t interrupt once and his only questions afterward were about the mammoth. Purely personal curiosity.

Let me mull it, Garrett. You go get drunk. Watch out for him, Dean.

“Watch out for me? Why?”

You are working yourself up toward a quixotic gesture. You are Unreasonable and irrational when you fall into such moods. I caution you to restraint. The information you have gathered is mainly circumstantial and there is not enough to point an accusing finger accurately. Tomorrow I will suggest some courses that may, possibly, produce evidence more concrete.

“More concrete? It’s plenty hard enough for me.”

You expect to tackle the favorite and only son of the Stormwarden Raver Styx on the basis of a pair of shoes and a horse? When you know there is a high probability that she would shield him even if he were caught cutting the hearts out of babies in the public streets? Further, you may have chosen the wrong villain to be the target of your wrath.

“Who else?”

That is what you will have to discover. It is true, I believe, that there is a reasonable probability that the young daPena and the dead woman were involved in a contrived kidnapping. But that is not a certainty. One simple fact could explain away all the evidence you have adduced as indicting the younger Karl.

“Here you go playing games with my mind again. How are you going to explain everything away?”

Two hundred thousand marks gold. A payoff of that magnitude could waken charity in the heart of a beast as foul as an ogre, perhaps. Perhaps they saw no need to plunder their hostage of pocket money. D
amn him. He could be right. The problem with this thing was that there were too many answers instead of not enough. “I don’t believe it,” I insisted.

Take this and reflect upon it in your cups, then. What became of the gold?

“Huh?”

Insofar as you know, the gold was turned over. Cor­rect? By the woman Amber’s direct statement, and by implication from others, all the young people wanted out of the Stormwarden’s household. But the younger daPena returned. Would he have done so if it had been he who
h
ad received the gold? Or would he have run? You may have to attack it through the money after all. Or, possibly, through the entertaining girl Donni Pell, who looks like the candidate for the connection with the ogre community.

This time I said it aloud. “Damn you.”

He let me have a dose of the mental noise that passes as his chuckle.
Come back in the morning, Garrett. I will suggest an approach.

I started to go, but there was the thing that used to be Amiranda staring at me with empty eyes. “What about this?”

Leave it. We will commune.

“What’s this? Are you a necromancer as well as a mental prodigy? Have you been hiding some of your lights under a bushel?”

No. I expressed myself figuratively only. Co away, Gar­rett. Even my boundless tolerance has its limits, and you are pressing them.
I went off and got myself rather sloppily wrapped around a few gallons of beer. Faithful to his orders, old Dean hung around and shoveled the pieces into my bed when it was time. Damn the Dead Man, anyhow. Why did he have to complicate things?

__XXII__

Old dean knew how to get me going on the morn­ing after. He bullied me into eating a good break­fast. When he thought I was slackening, he started bang­ing pots and pans until I yielded to the lesser evil and resumed eating. A good big breakfast with plenty of apple juice and sweets really knocks the edge off my hangover, but food always looks and smells so ghastly I just can’t believe it will do any good. Once I’d stoked up to Dean’s satisfaction, he pre­sented me with a huge steaming mug of a smoky-flavored herb tea that had come to us courtesy of Morley Dotes sometime back. It had a mildly analgesic nature. “His nibs is ready anytime you are, Mr. Garrett. You may take the mug along with you.”

He was going to trust me carrying something out of the kitchen myself? I gave him a look that he interpreted correctly. He grumbled, “That room was creepy enough with one corpse in it. He can clean up after himself if he’s going to keep the other one in there with him.”

I rose. From the kitchen doorway I said, “Maybe they’ll get married.” Feeble, but it wasn’t my best time of day. Dean gave me a black look and reached for the biggest pot he could find.

The Dead Man was trying to sleep when I stepped into his room. He was long overdue for one of his three-week naps, but now wasn’t the time. “Wake it up, Old Bones. You’re supposed to have some suggestions for me this morning.”

He had several, but none of the first few was fit to record. I observed, “I take it you’re sure enough of your Glory Mooncalled theory that you can indulge in a little smug snoozing.”

The latest from the Cantard contains nothing contradictory.

“You going to break down and tell me?”

Not yet.

“What about the suggested approach you promised me last night?”

/
would have thought that you would have seen the best chance already. You had the night to reflect on next moves.

“I took the night off. Give.”

You are allowing yourself to become dependent upon my genius. You should be exercising your own, Garrett.

“We human types are bone lazy. Come on. Pay the rent.”

Get the younger Karl. Bring him to me. He appears to be the weakest link in the chain of circumstance. If there is a tumor of guilt in him, I will open him up and expose it. One glimpse of that poor child there should be shock enough to leave him pliable.

“That’s all I have to do, eh? Just go drag him out of that fort he calls home and bully him into coming here where you can work him over.”

/
cannot do your legwork for you, Garrett.

“Bah!” He was getting a sarky tone on him, Old Bones was. Maybe he’d stub a toe on his Glory Mooncalled theory and get dragged down from the heights of conceit. Oh, how he loves to strut.

There was a foreign object just inside the front door. “Dean!”

He came at a run. “Yes, Mr. Garrett?”

“What the hell is this?”

Actually, I knew what
this
was. It was my old pal Bruno frozen in midstride two steps inside the front door and leaning against the wall. His expression was one of terror and one hand grasped the air before him. Dean had used that to hang up the sweater and knit cap he wears when he comes in early mornings. That showed me a side of him I hadn’t suspected.

“He came to the door while you were out in the country. When I answered he just busted in past me. His nibs must have heard the uproar.”

Better than a watchdog. “And nobody bothered to tell me.”

“You had things on your mind.”

“How’d he get against the wall?”

“I pushed him out of the way. I have to get in and out to do the marketing.”

I stepped over in front of Bruno. “What am I going to do with you? You just keep coming back. Maybe drop you in the river to see how fast you swim? I’ll have to think about it, because you’re getting to be a nuisance.” I turned to Dean. “Maybe we ought to get a chain so things like this don’t happen.”

Dean admitted, “His nibs could have been asleep.”

The problem of Bruno’s ego slipped my mind as I trudged up the Hill. I had a bigger problem. How the devil could I get to Junior, let alone pry him out? Consid­ering the attitudes of some up there, I might not get close to the Stormwarden’s place. The hired guards might be waiting for me.

They weren’t. Not obviously. I tramped around the daPena place three times, hoping maybe Amber would spot me before Eenie, Meenie, Meinie and Moe started closing in and I had to show the Hill the flash of depart­ing heels. It didn’t work. I had to go. I decided to take a long walk. Sometimes getting the blood moving van­quishes the gloomier humors and the brain will come up with a thought.

The best I could manage in three hours of marching was the notion of sending Junior a letter saying I knew where the gold was and if he would come down to my place we could talk it over. The trouble with that was it might take a lot of time I didn’t have. He might dither a couple of days. Or he might not be able to slip his leash. Or the letter might not get to him at all, with highly unpredictable results. And Amiranda’s body wasn’t going to keep forever. F or want of something more constructive to do, I went around to Saucer head’s place to see how he was mend­ing. A girlfriend I didn’t know said he was keeping just fine and I should get the hell away before I got my eyes clawed out. She was no bigger than a minute but she had her back up and looked like she would give it a damned good shot.

So much for Saucer head. Maybe something had fallen into Morley’s lap. Besides somebody’s wife or an egg­plant steak dinner. Morley wasn’t anxious to accept visitors that early in t he day but he was awake so I was allowed to go upstairs. He greeted me with a scowl and no banter.

I said, “You look like a guy who isn’t getting enough fiber in his diet. What’s the matter? Was there a crop failure in the okra forests?”

He grumbled something that sounded like, “Goddim fraggle jigginitz.”

“Would you want your virgin daughters to hear lan­guage like that?”

“Snacken schtereograk!”

Aha! He was cussing, all right, but in one of the Low Elvish dialects. I’ve learned that when he goes to grum­bling in Elvish he’s usually having money troubles. “Been playing the water spiders again, have we?”

“Garrett, are you a curse upon my house?” He actu­ally used a dwarfish idiom equally capable of being trans­lated as “mother-in-law.” But I’m such a nice fellow nobody would ever accuse me of mother-in-lawing. “You’re the reverse blackbird, you know that? The backward harbinger. Every time I have some bad luck, I have some more because you turn up right afterward. I can count on it.”

“You don’t want me hanging around, stop betting on the bugs. There’s a simple cause-and-effect relationship there — very much like the one between betting on the bugs and losing your boots.”

He repeated his curse-upon-the-house remark. “What do you want, Garrett?”

“I want to know if you’ve heard any news I might find useful.”

“No. Ogre Town is as quiet as a crypt. Those guys came from somewhere else. And they took the gold with them when they went back. There hasn’t been a whiff of gold around town. If there was a hint of a pile that size, you know the hard boys would be as busy as maggots. Saucer head is doing all right.”

“I know. I found out the hard way. He’s got some little she-devil standing gate guard. I thought I was going to get gutted before I got out of there. Who the hell is she?”

He gave me the first flash of teeth of the visit. “His sister, maybe?”