The group of them walked down the second path. Enid and Tomas pulled a little ahead, and she asked him in a low voice, “Thoughts?”

“They might just need an outsider to come in and make the decision for them,” he said. “I feel like we’re breaking up an argument between children.”

“Yeah.”

The shed was old, rickety, with wide cracks between shrunken gray boards. A place to keep rain off and little more. From the outside, nothing looked amiss. This time, she didn’t need to tell the committee to wait outside. They held back. Lee had his hands clasped tightly together.

Enid unlatched and pulled open both sides of the double door, and Tomas followed her inside.

Exactly what she expected to see here. A table with a couple of vises attached to it sat along one wall, which was hung with hooks holding up tools, everything from hammers to wrenches to saws and snips. Surely he must have been friends with the town’s blacksmith, to have such a set of tools. A hutch under the table was filled with pieces of lumber; a second held scrap metal. With the front of the shed open, she could see the house and path from here, and also into the trees behind the homestead.

The floor was dirt. An irregular dark spot by the wall proved to be blood. The color stood out, brown and baked. There seemed to have been a lot, and it soaked into the dirt before drying into crust. Flies congregated, buzzing away when Enid approached, stepping carefully.

“Well, this is it,” she said, sighing.

“And the wall,” Tomas said, pointing.

There it was, the killing blow: a two-by-four framing the wall. The perfect match for the shape of the dent in Sero’s skull. A smear of blood marred the color, and strands of Sero’s dark hair were imbedded in the splinters. He’d hit the post, hard. Must have fallen straight into it. An investigation never got easier than this.

If he’d been just a couple of inches on either side, he would have hit the planking instead of the post, and the force of the blow would have been distributed—or the planking, old boards only lightly nailed into place and not driven in the ground, would have split. He’d have had a bad headache, maybe even a concussion, but he’d have lived, likely. Of all the terrible luck.

Enid looked around the rest of the workshop, carefully taking in every inch, putting together the rest of the story of what had happened to the man. What had he been working on? Had he slipped? Taken a bad step?

The floor was clean of debris—Sero kept a good shop here, sawdust and scrap swept away. The dirt was scuffed and marred, signs of feet dancing, tripping. Multiple feet. More than one person here. She knelt to study the impressions more closely, then stepped back to get a better idea of the whole picture. There, someone had come in through the door, discovered the body. There, those straight lines, and where the dirt looked like it had been pressed down—they’d set down the stretcher to put the body on it. There must have been quite a few people in and out here, dealing with the aftermath. A clear picture of what Sero had been doing, where he’d been standing, had been erased.

“We’ll have to talk to whoever found the body, find out what they saw,” Enid said, sighing. “Four days gone, memories aren’t going to be too sharp.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Tomas said.

She went over every inch of the place, studying tools that might have bits of hair and blood on them, anything on the walls that might tell her what happened, and made notes of what she saw. Observations, not conclusions. The bench had a couple of pieces of metal, some files, and shavings spread out on it. This must have been what Sero was working on before he died, filing down some parts, doing some kind of hand tooling. A bolt, a plate with a sleeve—hinges, he was repairing hinges. Maybe for a gate on one of those fences he’d built. Otherwise the place was neat. He kept it organized, tools all in their right places. She mentally measured the space between the bench, the marks his feet might have made while standing there, and the spot on the wall that had likely caved in his skull. Compared that to the height of the body. He would have had to take a couple of steps back first.

The basic physics of the scenario didn’t seem quite right. Why would he have needed to step back? What had he been doing, really?

When they finished inside, she walked out and around, searching the exterior walls and ground, just to be thorough. The path from the shed to the house was well traveled. Likely, whoever had found the body had come that way, as well as those who’d carried out the body—and anyone else who’d come to look.

r /> Which was why she didn’t expect to find footprints around the back of the shed, disappearing into the grasses of the meadow that ran along the tree line. The scuffed tracks of someone running—not up the path like everyone else, but around the back and away. Enid didn’t think there’d been rain the last few days. No way to tell how old they were.

“Tomas?” she called, nodded to the ground when he came up beside her. She measured the foot marks against her hands and made a note her in book.

“A witness?” he said.

“Yeah, maybe.” She wondered how in the world she was going to find the person who had made the tracks. Or how she could get the person—their prime witness—to just come forward.

She straightened, looking across the back of the shed, the meadow, the trees, trying to imagine the scene. Sero fell against the post. Someone had come across the body—or maybe even seen him fall—then ran.

Then she saw the blood on the wall, a brownish streak smeared on the wood, dried like ink, as if their runner had stumbled and put out a hand for balance. A runner with bloody hands.

CHAPTER FOUR • HAVEN

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Five Years After the Worst Storm

Enid was sweeping out the front room of the clinic while her mother, the on-duty medic, came in from outside, eyes bright with gossip.

“What is it?” Enid asked, pausing, resting the broom against her shoulder.

“Franie’s moving to Bronson with that guy he hooked up with. They got the okay to start a papermaking workshop.”

Tags: Carrie Vaughn The Bannerless Saga Science Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net