Jackaby (7 page)

The tirade paused as Swift awkwardly negotiated the small step up to the doorway, batting Marlowe’s hand away as the inspector instinctively reached to help. I realized, with a little guilty relief, that Jackaby would have more time than I had feared. The commissioner had three unpleasant flights ahead of him.

With that thought, I left the warmth of the gathering throng behind to wind my way back up the frosty cobbled streets toward Augur Lane.

B
y the time I found my way back to 926 Augur Lane, the sun was directly overhead and the snow had slunk back to hide in the shadiest corners of the streets. I stepped with greater confidence toward the building I would be calling my workplace.

The front door was even brighter red in the full midday light, and I was happy to find it unlocked, as before. Inside, the faint sulfurous stink had all but faded away, and the open windows had replaced it with crisp, fresh air. I hung my hat and coat on the rack, noting that my suitcase was still just where I had left it, and looked around the room for the second time. Sharing a wall with the doorway was a battered wooden bench, which could easily have been salvaged from a doctor’s waiting room, but had about it a certain quality that suggested it might have been stolen from a church, instead. At the opposite wall sat the unoccupied desk, stacked with papers and overstuffed folders. To my right was the row of books and artifacts, including the terrarium, which my eyes now carefully avoided.

Toward the back of the room on the left wall stood a doorway flanked by two framed paintings. One painting featured a mounted knight driving a lance through a lizard the size of a small dog, an image I recognized as Saint George slaying the dragon. The other depicted a tumultuous sea in which a wooden ship was being towed through the waves by an enormous golden orange fish. Although painted in entirely different styles with nearly opposite color schemes, the two pictures seemed to belong together, held in unity, like the house itself, by some stronger force than aesthetic logic.

I crossed toward the door, but paused as I passed the desk. In a little valley of usable desktop, between the stacks of jumbled paperwork, lay an uncapped fountain pen. I took the two-step detour to scoop it up, not wanting it to dry out, and my eyes passed over the document on which it rested. The page was dated several months prior, written in tidy cursive, and read as follows:

Mr. Jackaby is quite certain that the whole affair will culminate in some unholy ritual this evening. He has been, as usual, unforthcoming about the details of the case. The only link I have discerned between the incidents is the coincidental involvement of Father Grafton and a few members of his parish. My suggestion that we direct our inquiries toward the church was not met with enthusiasm.

When I pressed the matter, Mr. Jackaby informed me that my services will not be necessary in his current line of investigation, and insisted that, since I am so curious about it, I should go and ask my own “silly little questions” without him. I must admit to some nervousness, given the heinous nature of the case, but I suppose Mr. Jackaby would not send me on alone if he sensed any danger.

I shall be sure to record the results of my first independent investigation as soon as I return.

The author had not, in fact, recorded anything further at all. I found a few more pages in the same handwriting, but all of them from earlier dates. I brushed the nib of the pen with my finger, and a few flakes of long-dry ink crumbled off. I capped the pen and returned it to the desk, trying very hard not to read the whole thing as ominous. There were enough voices in my life telling me I couldn’t
this,
or shouldn’t
that,
or that I wasn’t up to the task—the last thing I intended to do was start agreeing with them.

I shook the nervous thoughts from my mind and returned my attention to the door. With a push, it opened onto a hallway that zigged and zagged until it came to four doorways, two on either side, and a spiral staircase at the far end. I peeked into the first door.

Rows of books reached to the ceiling and lined the walls of a beautiful library. Central bookshelves had been arranged to allow light to pour down the aisles from alcove window seats, and the space felt warm and comfortable. I could have spent hours curled up on a soft chair in that room, but slipped back into the hallway to investigate the others.

The adjacent room was an office. It was well lit, but a mess of files and books. As I leaned in, the eerie sensation of being watched came tingling up my spine. Spinning around, I found the hallway as barren as ever. I pulled the office door closed, beginning to feel a bit like a trespasser. I considered leaving the other rooms alone altogether, but when I saw the last door was already open a crack, my curiosity got the better of me.

The door yielded to my gentle nudge, then struck something hard and would open no farther. I poked my head in the gap. It was a laboratory. Along the walls and windowsills, beakers and test tubes filled with myriad colors were nestled in complicated brass fixtures. Sunlight shone through them to paint the walls in calico spots. The carpet comprised more stains than original patterns, and was singed in quite a few places. The room smelled oddly sweet and acrid—like bananas and burnt hair.

I couldn’t shake the creepy feeling that I was not alone, though the sole inhabitant of the laboratory appeared to be a battered, armless mannequin, propped up on one side of the room. I craned my head to see around the door and found myself suddenly attacked, two massive rows of gleaming white teeth gaping over my face. I pulled back sharply, my shriek cut short as I bounced the back of my head off the door frame and then rapped my forehead on the door before retreating successfully into the hallway.

I breathed heavily, staring at the gap, waiting for the creature to appear. Nothing happened. Still rubbing the back of my head, I peeked in again to find the seven-foot skeleton of an alligator, suspended on cables from the ceiling. I had let Mr. Jackaby’s talk of the supernatural infiltrate my imagination. The bony beast above me was no more dangerous than the ones in the natural history museum back home.

I pulled the laboratory’s door shut with a squeak and turned to the spiral staircase. Willing myself to calm down and breathe evenly, I climbed the steps up to a poorly lit hallway on the second floor.

Feeling even more like a prowler in the semidarkness, I tried the first door on my right, hoping for a little light from the windows. I found, instead, precarious towers of treasures, trash, and bric-a-brac. A mounted stag’s head had been propped up against an expensive, newfangled phonograph, an assortment of silk neckties draped over the bell. Chess sets toppled into tea sets, and tea sets into toolboxes. A bed was nearly hidden beneath the bulk of the collection. Some light, at least, petered past the towering clutter, so I left the door open as I crossed to the room opposite.

This door opened to a bedroom that must have been the same size, but it felt easily twice as large because it was immaculately tidy. The bed had fresh linens and was topped with a plush comforter. Curtains with lace edging hung closed at the window, and as I crossed the floor to open them, I was startled by a sharp gasp. I turned to look for its source, my eyes straining to make out anything in the darkness. I threw back the curtains and whipped around. I was alone in the room, but the tingling in my spine was back, and rapidly creeping up my neck. My heart pounded.

“Hello?” I squeaked. “Is someone there?”

Across the hallway, one of the piles shifted. A silver saucer slid away from its service and to the floorboards with a clang. It rolled past the doorway and just out of view down the hall, where it revolved to a ringing stop.

There had been no gasp, just the sound of shifting clutter. I stepped into the hallway to retrieve the dish. The bedroom door slammed shut at my heels, and I spun. The light beneath the door vanished, exactly as though the curtains beyond had been pulled quickly shut, and I was caught by an icy chill.

In my rush to return to the well-lit office on ground level, I discovered that it is exceedingly difficult to bound both rapidly and gracefully down a spiral staircase while wearing a dress. As a result, my return to the first floor was executed in a thoroughly undignified somersault. My shoulder aching and my hair a tangled mess, I found my feet at last, and retreated to the safety of the office.

I took the seat behind the desk and waited for the tingles to leave my spine and my pulse to return to normal. A dusty chalkboard stood against the wall. I tried to make out any words, but they had been smeared to obscurity, if they had ever been legible at all. Several notes had been circled and connected in a sort of web, but all that remained now were the ghosts of the lines.

Ghosts.

I glanced up at the ceiling. Directly above me sat the impeccably tidy room with its polished floors and neatly tucked bed. And something else.

I shook my head. It wasn’t that I did not believe in ghosts; it was that I believed in them in the same noncommittal way that I believed in giant squids or lucky coins or Belgium. They were things that probably existed, but I had never had any occasion to really care one way or another. I had never given ghosts much thought—except, perhaps, as a frightened child gazing into shadows at bedtime.

Jackaby, I was rapidly discovering, had a way of opening that corner of my brain. It was a quiet little corner in which I had lived when I was younger. It was a corner in which anything was possible, where magic was not an improbable daydream, but an obvious fact—if still only just out of reach. In those days I had known there must be monsters in the world, but I would happily accept them, knowing that, by the same logic, there must also be wizards and wands and flying carpets. I had never really closed that part of my mind, just slowly stopped visiting it as I grew older. I had left it unlocked like the jumbled treasure room upstairs, waiting for someone to come poking about.

Where was Jackaby? Surely he should have returned by now. I thought about Swift and all those steps, but even the hobbling commissioner must have reached the room after such a wait. I found the mason jar, which Jackaby—or one of his previous assistants—had indiscreetly labeled
BAIL MONEY
in bold letters, and pulled it off the shelf. Stuffed in wads and rolls, there must have been over two hundred dollars in the thing! I gawped at the sum. How much should I bring? I had never bailed anyone out of jail before. I wouldn’t feel safe walking down the street with half a year’s wages in my pockets.

Fortunately, before I had to make a decision, I heard the lobby door bang shut. I tucked the jar back on the shelf and zigzagged quickly down the crooked hallway. Jackaby had just hung his hat beside mine on the rack when I poked my head into the lobby.

“Oh, hello, Miss Rook. Had a chance to look around a bit?”

“Just a bit,” I hedged.

“Good, good.” He hung up the scarf, which dangled nearly to the floor, but kept his bulky coat on for the time being. “While you’ve been relaxing, I have descried invaluable evidentiary information that may prove essential to our investigation.”

“What?”

“I found something. Come with me.”

J
ackaby filled me in on the details of his return to room 301 as we walked back down the crooked hallway. He had been able to successfully slip in and out without detection, and had uncovered a few papers of interest.

Arthur Bragg had produced reams of scribbled notes, most kept in his own shorthand. Amid the papers on his desk were details of recent political debates and annotated minutes from city hall meetings. He had notes from interviews with Mayor Spade and with Commissioner Swift. Both men, as best Jackaby could tell from his quick glance at Bragg’s shorthand, were discussing the upcoming mayoral election.

“Sounds like Detective Cane was right,” I said. “Bragg must have been Commissioner Swift’s connection at the newspaper.”

“So it would seem.”

“I see why Swift was so angry about it being right under his nose! It wasn’t just a murder in his city—he let his personal newsman get killed before his free publicity even hit the stands.”

“Yes, well, it seems Mr. Bragg had been looking into something else as well.”

Jackaby reached the end of the hallway and gave the door to his laboratory a shove. It squeaked open, and he pushed past whatever had been blocking it, sending several ripe red apples rolling across the carpet.

“Oh, blast, it’s overflowing again,” he muttered, ducking absently under the skeletal alligator as he plowed in. “Mind your step. Help yourself to an apple if you like.”

I remained in the doorway. A heavy black cauldron sat on the other side of the door, teeming with fresh fruit. I hadn’t had a proper meal since yesterday, but something about the room’s lingering smell of burnt hair and unknown chemicals quashed my appetite.

Jackaby crossed the room and pulled off his coat, draping it casually over the mannequin. From its pockets, he pulled out a few of the vials I had seen earlier and nestled them into waiting slots on the big metal rack. He continued, selectively removing items, like the slim vials I had seen him peering through, and replacing them with new ones. New artifacts found their way into the myriad pockets as he darted about, among them a Chinese coin, a set of rosary beads, and a little vial with something that rattled inside it. I gave up following his movements as he restocked.

Without the coat, the man looked even lankier. He seemed to be built entirely of angles, from his long legs to his hard cheekbones. He wore a simple, clean white shirt with no necktie, and a pair of plain brown suspenders. His wild hair looked coal black in the dim light of the room, and atop his gaunt frame it gave him the figure of a spent match.

“What else was Bragg onto?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet. But I believe the answer may lie in this.” He produced a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. “I found it concealed beneath the leather blotter on his desk. Tell me what you make of it.” I opened it and turned it around.

“It’s a map,” I said.

“Brilliant. Already making yourself an invaluable asset to the organization.”

I went on. “It’s not a proper, printed map. It looks like Bragg traced it, but it’s got a good bit of detail. The coastline looks all squiggly in the right places. There’s us in the center.” I pointed to the spot where Bragg had marked New Fiddleham. “And it looks like it goes out fifty miles or so above and below us. It’s too distant for street details, but he seems to have blocked out the nearby cities and county lines.”

All across the simple chart, the late Arthur Bragg had inscribed a dozen
X
s in red ink. They were scattered on all sides of the city, some clustered in twos or threes, others far off on their own. In fine script he had written
C.Wd.
beside most of them, and
N.Wd.
beside a few. Each was marked with a date. The dates went back as far as three months prior, and as recently as just one week past. “What do you suppose these notes mean?” I asked.

“That is what I intend to find out.” Jackaby, apparently satisfied with the restocking of his pockets, left the coat on the mannequin and crossed into the hallway. I stepped aside as he passed, and followed him into his office.

He pulled a dusty rag off the chalkboard’s frame and gave an ineffectual couple of swipes across the surface. Having rearranged the chalky film to his satisfaction, he plucked a white stump from the tray and poised to write. “We’ll start with the dates,” he said. “Read them off to me. Start with the earliest.”

I read the earliest date aloud, October twenty-third, and scanned the numbers for the next oldest, and the next. I glanced up after four or five. “What’s that you’re drawing?” I asked.

Jackaby scowled. “Recording the dates. Keep going.”

“Is that an elven language or something?”

He stood back from the chalkboard and stared at it blankly. “No.”

“Are those pictograms? What’s that bit you just finished? The one that looks like a goose tugging at a bit of string?”

“That’s a seven.”

“Oh.” We both looked at the board. I tilted my head. “Oh right—I see. I think.”

Jackaby handed me the chalk and plucked the paper from my hands. We traded positions without further comment and recommenced. Shortly, with Jackaby reading off numbers and locations while I wrote, we had produced a list of twelve dates. On average they were five or six days apart. Beyond that, no discernible pattern existed. Jackaby moved on to the abbreviations.

“
C
and
N
,” he thought aloud. “The
Wd
. is consistent, whatever it means. What could
C
and
N
signify?”

“
Central
and
Northern
?” I suggested. “It is a map.”

“Possible, but they’re certainly not accurate, if that’s the case. Look, there are two marks around Glanville, south of us, and the southernmost of those is an
N
. What else could they be?”

“Let’s see, Bragg was covering the election, and he interviewed the current mayor.
C
for
Current,
perhaps, and
N
for what?
New?
Maybe he was taking a poll?”

“That’s good—only most of these marks are out of our district. In fact, all of them are. Look. We’ve got three up in Brahannasburg, four in Crowley, two each in Glanville and Gadston, with one more out in Gad’s Valley. That’s at least four separate jurisdictions with their own . . .” Jackaby froze. He stared at the map in his hands.

“What?” I asked. “Have you worked something out?”

Jackaby’s eyes were dancing back and forth, chasing thoughts. “What? No, nothing. Maybe nothing. Possibly nothing. Just a hunch. I’ll need to pop out to send a telegram or two. You’re welcome to stay and settle in if you like.”

My eyes flashed to the ceiling as Jackaby folded the map and headed into the hall. “Before you go,” I ventured, “tell me, have you got anyone else staying in the building? Lodgers or tenants of some sort?”

“Oh, ah, hmm.” Jackaby stumbled toward a response. “Yes, yes, I suppose I do, indeed,” he called out from across the hall.

“That’s fine, then. Anything I should know about them?”

“Which one?”

“ ‘Which one’? How many people have you got living here?”

Jackaby popped his head back through the doorway. His mouth opened as if to speak, and shut again, his lips pursed in concentration. “Well,” he managed at last, “that depends on your definition of
people
. . . and also of
living.
” He pulled on his baggy, brown coat. “It’s complicated. Fetch you a meat pie while I’m out?”

I gave earnest consideration to my definitions of
people,
and
living,
and found the prospect of remaining on the property less and less appealing. “Wouldn’t it really be best if I accompany you on your errands?” I said. “For . . . learning purposes?”

“Suit yourself, Miss Rook.”

My employer was on his way with no further discussion, and I hurried after.