The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)
The morning she left—a whole week ago, she had to count back—Enid had knelt beside Olive, pressed her face to her huge belly, felt a tiny little something pushing back. “That’s her foot,” Olive said.
“How can you tell?” Enid asked wonderingly.
“Because her hands are beating my ribs,” she said, shifting position, turning her grimace into a laugh.
“How do you know it’s a she?” Everyone had an opinion, and everyone said they had tricks to guess, based on the phase of the moon or the shape of the belly or what a woman had been eating or a hundred other omens that made no sense. People asked Enid if she wanted a girl or a boy, and, baffled, she’d reply that she wanted a baby.
Olive shrugged. “I don’t, I guess. I just want to call her something.”
“Wait for me,” Enid had said to that belly, hands spread over its roundness.
“Don’t take too long,” Olive said back to her. “I want you here for this.”
The whole household had seen Enid off at the door, but Sam had walked with her all the way to the Coast Road. She took hold of his arm—taking in the solidity of him, the comfort, tucking it into her memory—and he kissed the crown of her head.
“How long you think this’ll take?” he asked.
“Probably too long,” she said. “A week just to get out there. Probably two weeks, there and ba
ck, plus investigation time. I wish I’d passed on the case. Told them I couldn’t spend that much time away—”
He grinned, amused. “Can’t do that if you’re going to be the world’s best investigator.”
“That’s not it—”
He laughed then, because he knew her well.
“It should be an easy case,” she said. “I’ll be back in no time at all. And I’ll get to call in favors for making the trek that far out.” She was trying to put a good light on it.
“Well. I’d tell you to hurry but I know you will. So—do good work, yeah?”
“Love you,” she said.
“I know, love. What happens happens. One way or another we’ll all be here when you get back.”
“Yeah.”
A hundred miles away, Enid’s family waited. And now she had a murder to deal with.
“She has to be Coast Road,” Teeg argued. “Those clothes are Coast Road–woven. Good quality. She couldn’t have come from the wild.”
Enid sat on the front steps of Bonavista’s work house. Pylons raised it up five or six feet from the mud. Evidence of the recent storm remained, vegetation and debris clinging to the wood and stone. After everyone who’d wanted a look had gotten one, they’d settled the canvas-wrapped body on the ground under the building. Flies had already gathered. Teeg paced nearby, pausing to look down the road, as if someone might arrive to rescue them. The murderer, come to spontaneously confess and save the investigators some trouble. Teeg made Enid feel older than she was. Surely she shouldn’t be feeling like such a curmudgeon.
“Apparently she did. Or . . . or I don’t know what.” The lack of an implant, the telling clothes—this opened a whole new set of possibilities, a whole new set of questions. Enid hardly knew where to start. Getting from what she knew to what she wanted to know seemed an impossible distance.
Teeg said, “If she isn’t from the Coast Road, then this isn’t our case to solve.”
Enid looked sharply at him. “She washed up on our shore, didn’t she? What if it was one of ours that did this?”
“You really think that’s possible?” Teeg said with such a tone of skepticism, it was clear he didn’t believe it.
“Where people are concerned? Almost anything is possible. She was found here, wasn’t she? And you wondered about Kellan’s machete.”
“I was guessing. But if she came from the wild—well, anything could have happened. It’s hopeless.”
They’d be entirely justified in giving up, wouldn’t they? But they hadn’t even started yet. One thing at a time. One job at a time.
Teeg was right: these were Coast Road–woven clothes. Find out who made them, find out who was trading with folk in the wild, and they’d start to get an idea where the girl came from.