The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

“And that was the right thing to do,” Enid said, to reassure him. “Okay. I’ll probably have some more questions for you later on. In the meantime, you know where we can get a stretcher?”

“No . . . no, I don’t think so.”

“Can you do something for me, Kellan?”

The tears had broken; he was crying now, and might not even be listening, much less able to do what she asked. Enid pressed on, speaking gently. “Go up to Bonavista or Pine Grove and see if they have a sturdy sheet or a big length of canvas we can use. Can you do that for me? Everyone’s still waiting up on the road; someone should be able to help.”

A glance told her that yes, the whole gathering who’d spent the previous fifteen minutes arguing about a broken house was still standing in a clump. They’d moved closer to the marsh, to watch the commotion, but no one else had ventured onto the mud. Help would have to be fetched.

“Kellan?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll go.” He trotted up the way, back to the road, each step squishing as he went.

Enid returned to Teeg and the body. “You want me to go for the stretcher instead?” he asked.

“I think Kellan can handle it. He needs a job to get his mind off this. Meanwhile, you and I can keep those birds away.” The gulls had backed off at their approach, but dozens of them now circled, waiting for their chance at the body.

Enid studied the mud again. The depressions from their footprints formed a series of tiny puddles. All were recent, belonging to her, Teeg, and Kellan—arriving, circling, and leaving again. This meant the woman hadn’t walked here recently, hadn’t been killed here in the past day or so—and in the meantime the flowing water of the tide had erased any earlier history.

The way the wound in her neck was scoured clean, along with the bloated look of her face and hands, suggested she’d been dead for a couple of days at least. That she was lying here at all meant she’d died after the storm; it would have washed her away, and they never would have found her. That gave them a window to start with, at least. Too big to be really useful, but it was something.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” Teeg asked.

“Done what?”

“A murder investigation. I read the report from that case in Pasadan last year.”

“Yes,” she said, sighing inwardly. She had done this before.

“So you know what you’re doing.” He said this hopefully. Needing her to know what she was doing.

She shook her head. “This is nothing like that case.” The Pasadan case had essentially been an accident, the result of bad temper and bad feeling—it hadn’t been obvious or clear-cut and required some real sleuthing to tease out the situation. This . . . this, on the other hand, signified a great deal of intent, which meant someone in the area was a deliberate murderer.

Teeg said, “You think that Kellan guy might have had something to do with this? You spot that machete on his belt? That could have done this.”

“Like maybe he’s in shock from having done the thing? So . . . what, he sees a strange woman wandering up the river and he decides to swing a blade at her? And then call for help? Why would he do that?”

“Sometimes people just go crazy, I guess. If he spends a lot of time out here by himself—”

She shook her head. “You’re making assumptions. No one goes off like that without some warning. Some other evidence of instability.”

“All the crud he runs into, scavenging in this mess—lead, mercury, whatever else—that’d be enough to make anyone unstable, don’t you think?”

“It’s too early to talk about such things,” she said. “Don’t invent a sol

ution.”

Kneeling by the body again, Enid studied it in more detail. If the woman had been attacked, she might have tried to fend off the weapon. But there was nothing on her hands or arms: no cuts or bruises other than those that arose from blood pooling after death. Enid pointed out the details to Teeg. The one straight wound and nothing else; this suggested she’d been attacked suddenly. This hadn’t been a fight but a single blow, finished as quickly as it had begun.

Lifting the woman’s hands, Enid studied the fingernails, and yes, there were bits of blood caked there—dark brown flecks that hadn’t washed away. “She had enough time to put her hands to the wound, to try to stanch the blood. Not much more than that, probably. But where did it happen?”

“And did she wash down from upriver, or was she dumped by whoever did this?”

Enid smiled up at Teeg. “See? You know how to do this. It’s like any other investigation: you ask the right questions until you learn what happened. Here, look at this.”

She pulled apart strands of the woman’s hair, brushed fingers over a section of the kerchief. Debris had caught on the fibers. Pine needles stuck in knitted loops; dried leaves and even a few twigs tangled in hair. Bits of forest.

“What’s all that?” Teeg asked, leaning in. He tugged a couple of pine needles from the kerchief and spun them between his fingers.