The Unquiet past

by Kelley Armstrong

  “That’s what you meant when you said I look like a vagrant?”

  “Yes. Your hair is too long, but you don’t look like a hippie, which is always another excuse for the lack of showering.”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “If I had to pick—”

  “Please do.” He crossed his arms.

  “I’d say runaway, not vagrant. You don’t look eighteen, and even if you were, you’re too well educated to be a vagrant. Despite the accent, your English is perfect.”

  “That’s not education. That’s growing up with an English mother.”

  “Which would not explain your level of diction.”

  His face screwed up. “My what?”

  Tess sighed and returned to the chair. “If you wish to pretend you’re a tough kid from the wrong side of the tracks, go ahead. I can see the advantages of the ruse if you’re living on the streets. But take my advice. Use smaller words.”

  “You think you’re clever, don’t you?”

  “Not particularly. Better than average perhaps.”

  He shook his head.

  Before he could speak, she continued. “I’m not interested in the specifics of your situation.”

  “Really? Could have fooled me.”

  “Have I asked you a single question? No. I simply offered you a job. I do have questions about this house, though, which you may or may not be able to answer. If you cannot, I’ll ask for your help obtaining them in town, as your French is significantly better than mine. I’ll pay you five dollars for a day’s work.”

  He stared at her.

  “It’s a lot, I know,” she said.

  “I wasn’t thinking that. I was wondering if you’re as crazy as you seem.”

  She tried not to flinch. “Probably. But I have money. So in this case, crazy is to your advantage.”

  He pushed up from the floor, walked to the fireplace and picked up his knife. Then he took three slow, deliberate steps toward her. “And if I’d prefer the money without the work?”

  “I don’t have it on me.”

  He seemed to bristle at that. “Because you expected me to steal it?”

  Tess sighed. “You threaten to take my money at knife-point and then get offended at my suggestion that you’re a thief. More advice? If you’re going to affect a persona, you have to stick to it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Liar. As I said, your story is none of my concern. I hid my money as a general precaution because I don’t know you. All I have is this.” She took the five from her pocket. “You could steal it, but you said last night that you don’t steal money. You earn it. I’m offering you the chance to earn it.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I’ve heard that. So…” She waggled the five. “A fair day’s wages.”

  That familiar narrowing of his eyes. “Half now.”

  She ripped the bill and handed him half. “So, where do we get breakfast?”

  Ten

  BREAKFAST COST TESS a dollar, as the boy reasoned she should cover his as well, and she didn’t feel like arguing. She did argue, though, when he tried to send her to town for it.

  “You don’t need to speak French to buy a baguette and jam,” he said. “Point and hand them the money.”

  “My French is fine.” She paused and then opted for honesty. “Passable anyway. I just…I can’t go to town alone. Last night…” She paused. “I can’t. If I’m buying your meal—and paying your wages—you can do it.”

  She squirmed under his cool stare, more gray than blue. An uncomfortable stare, almost painful, as if he was digging answers from her brain with the tip of his knife.

  “All right,” he said finally. “But give me another couple of dollars for lunch. I’m not going down there twice.”

  He grumbled but put his hand out and took the money.

  Over breakfast—baguettes and jam and Cokes—Tess told the boy her story. The pertinent part, that is. That she’d grown up in an orphanage and knew nothing of her parents or her background. That the Home had burned down a few days ago. That she’d been given this address as the key to her past. The boy listened intently at first. Then he frowned. By the time she finished, his eyes had gone steel gray.

  “Who set you up to this?” he said, barely unhinging his jaw enough to get the words out, which only made his accent thicker and he had to repeat himself before she understood.

  “Set me up to…?”

  “Someone sent you here with this…story.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “Out!” His voice boomed through the empty house as he waved at the broken window. When she didn’t move, he threw the partial five-dollar bill at her. “Get out!”

  “No.”

  He took a step toward her. His face flushed dark, jaw tight, eyes cold. The switchblade stayed in his pocket, and he made no move to take it out. Which meant he was serious. He only pulled the knife for show.

  Tess crossed her arms. “I’m here to find out where I come from, and I’m staying whether you help me or not.” She looked up at him. “Whether you let me or not.”

  “Did you forget I have a weapon?”

  “No, but I came all this way to get whatever answers this house has. It’s my birthright.”

  He snorted at that.

  She straightened. “It is. It’s the only thing I have—”

  “You gave me some advice? Let me give you some. If you want to tell a sob story, tears help.”

  “It’s not a—”

  “It’s a lie.”

  “My matron gave me the box, which she’s had since I arrived as a baby—”

  “Then she’s lying.”

  “She would not.”

  “One of you is.”

  Tess got to her feet. The boy eased back a half step, as if she might fly at him. She only gave him a look as cold as his own. “I’m searching this house for clues. If you want the other half of that five, you’ll help me. Otherwise, don’t get in my way.”

  Tess sat on the floor, surrounded by piles of books. She’d taken every one off the shelves—fourteen in total—and sorted them into piles by subject. Five were medical texts. Three were on mental illness. Two were biographies of people she’d never heard of. Four more were random classics—for entertainment, it seemed.

  The whole time she carted down and sorted books, the boy sat on a chair and watched. Now, as she flipped through one of the biographies, he said, “You’re serious about this.”

  She decided the question did not require an answer and kept reading. The book was, apparently, about a psychiatrist who’d worked for the Germans during the war.

  “I think someone’s lying to you,” he said.

  “Every girl in the Home got a clue about their past,” she said, not looking up from her book. “Something that was left with them when they arrived. Mine had a phone number—which is out of service—and this address.”

  She made it through three pages before he continued, “I don’t know how or why, but you’ve been set up. This is about me.”

  “Everything is, I’m sure.” She closed the book, keeping her finger in it as a marker. “I’m quite certain I haven’t been sent here for the sole purpose of annoying you. No one is that important. Not even you.”

  He scowled.

  “Sorry.” She resumed reading. “C’est la vie.”

  “Is it possible that—”

  “No,” she said.

  “I didn’t finish—”

  “You don’t need to. I’m trying to read. If you’re not going to help…” She flicked her fingers. “Go away.”

  “Excuse me? This is my—”

  “Your house?” She lifted her brows at him. “It’s your temporary—and illegal—lodging, which I will return to its original condition when I leave. Except for the hole in the floor, of course.”

  “Are you always like this?”

  She turned the page. “Like what?”

  “Weird.”
/>
  She tried not to stiffen. “Yes. I am. And you’re defensive, paranoid and, at this moment, irritating. We all have our faults.”

  Five pages of silence, but she could sense him standing there.

  “There’s nothing in the books,” he said finally.

  She glanced up at him.

  “I’ve looked at them,” he said. “I was curious about this place. They’re textbooks—mostly medicine and psychiatry. What matters isn’t the contents but the context. Why they’re here. What this place was.”

  “Was?”

  “I think…” He considered and then picked up the ripped five-dollar bill. “I’ll show you.”

  “Do you have a name?” Tess asked as the boy led her up a flight of stairs.

  “No.”

  “Let me rephrase that. What’s your name, so I have something to call you?”

  “Why? There’s no one else here. If you’re talking, obviously it’s to me, right?”

  Not necessarily, she thought but let the subject drop. They’d taken a quick tour of the ground floor. He hadn’t wanted to bother—growing impatient when she insisted—and she’d quickly seen why. It looked like the ground level of any large house, with a library, several sitting rooms, a dining area and a kitchen. The bathroom, she’d noted with some dismay, was nonfunctioning, which meant she’d have to continue using the forest.

  “Are you on the run?” she asked as they reached the top of the steps.

  “What?”

  “You thought someone sent me after you. You’re exceedingly paranoid. That suggests you’re in hiding.”

  He scowled over his shoulder at her. “Or on the run from the law?”

  She paused. “I hadn’t considered that.”

  “Yes, you have.” He gave her a hard look. “Don’t play dumb. Just say it.”

  “Say what?”

  He turned, blocking her path down the hall. “You thought I was a vagrant.”

  “Because you’re dirty.”

  “Right. And when I went into town this morning, the boulanger watched me like I was about to stuff that baguette under my shirt and race off. Then, when I did pay, he checked the bill to make sure it was real. Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re dirty.”

  He crossed his arms and scowled at her.

  “What? You are. You don’t smell yet, but I suspect if you don’t bathe by tomorrow—”

  “Don’t be obtuse. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “All right. I do think it’s because you’re dirty, but it might also be because you’re a teenage boy. You—”

  “Where did you say you’re from?”

  “Hope, Ontario.”

  He grunted and shook his head. “Not many people like me in Hope, I take it?”

  “Oh, you mean…I was going to say Métis, but not everyone of French and Native Canadian mixed ancestry is Métis, and that’s probably rude.” She paused. “Is it rude? Not to presume, but to ask?”

  “No.” He headed down the hall. “It’s not rude. Just don’t expect me to answer.”

  She continued after him. “The only reason I thought that at all is because I had a history teacher who was fascinated by Métis culture and history. Especially Louis Riel. I think she might have had a crush on him.” She quickened her pace to keep up. “I could call you Louis, if you won’t give me a name.”

  “That would be rude.”

  “No ruder than not giving me a name to use.”

  “This is the second floor, as you doubtless guessed. Six rooms.”

  “Bedrooms, yes. I can see. Fascinating.”

  “You see two bedrooms, which we just passed. Two more are offices. The last two are empty.”

  “Empty?”

  “Empty. Vide." He said a third word -- one she couldn't catch -- and them, "if you need another language, you’re out of luck. Those are the only three I know.”

  “What’s the third one?”

  He pushed open a door and waved inside. “As I said.”

  She peered in. “It’s empty.”

  He muttered something under his breath. Tess was sure it wasn’t a compliment. When he’d said the room was empty, though, she’d expected he just meant it didn’t contain anything of significance. But this room didn’t simply lack furniture. The floor and walls were bare boards. The ceiling had been left intact, but the fixtures were missing.

  “That’s weird,” she said.

  “Then we agree on something.”

  He walked to another door and pushed it open to reveal the same thing.

  “So only two people lived here?” she said. “Well, up to four, if it was two couples or a couple and kids, but the house is big enough for twenty.”

  “It is.”

  He opened a door at the end of the hall. Stairs extended into darkness. He went first, his flashlight on. It didn’t get much brighter at the top. Dirt caked two dormer windows. The walk-up attic had been converted into a third level. Narrow doors lined a narrow hall. Tess walked to one and—

  “Locked,” she said and started for the next.

  “They’re all like that,” the boy called after her. “I broke open the one at the end.”

  He stayed at the top of the stairs as she continued on. She pushed the half-open door. If the house looked like something out of a gothic novel, this was a room where the manor lord had kept his mad wife. Smaller than a jail cell, with a metal cot and nothing else. No dresser, no window, no closet. Presumably there had been a mattress on the cot, but even with that Tess couldn’t imagine it was comfortable.

  She walked to the door.

  “It locks from the outside,” she called.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’d need a key to open it from the hall, but there’s no way of locking it or unlocking it from inside the room. It’s like—”

  She stopped as a loud click sounded. She stepped into the hall to see him opening a door farther down. “I thought you said—”

  Her flashlight glinted off a long, thin piece of metal in his hand. A lockpick? She’d seen them in mystery magazines. So he’d gotten his back up when she suggested he might steal something, but he carried lockpicks?

  When she stepped into the hall, he pocketed the pick fast and leaned out of the room. “Got this one open. I wanted to see if it was the same. It is.”

  She headed down and peeked in. “Exactly the same.”

  “So presumably, we don’t need to open the others. This is what we have. Eight locked bedrooms.”

  “Cells,” she said.

  He grunted and didn’t reply, just headed down the stairs, leaving her to hurry after him. When they got to the bottom, she examined the attic door.

  “It has a lock,” he said, still walking. “From the outside only.”

  She followed him down the stairs to the main level and through to the kitchen. He stood in the middle of it and pointed at a floor-to-ceiling cabinet.

  “The basement,” he said.

  He watched her, a little smugly, waiting for her to ask what he meant. She walked to the cabinet, poked her fingers behind it and felt a doorframe.

  “It was hidden like this when you found it?”

  He covered any disappointment that she’d figured it out. “I discovered it last night, after you fell through. Before that, I figured there wasn’t a basement. But that wasn’t just a little crawlspace you fell into. So I hunted and found this.”

  She wedged her fingers in behind and wiggled the cabinet.

  “It’s nailed in place,” he said.

  “You didn’t get it free?”

  “Yes, I went out at midnight, stole a pry bar and half killed myself moving the cabinet, only to put it back afterward.”

  “So that’s a no?”

  “If you want it moved, I will help. The key word there is help.”

  “All right. So we need a pry bar?”

  “Or some kind of tool. I’m not an expert. There’s a hardware store in town.”

  “Let’s go then.”<
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  Eleven

  “I THOUGHT YOU didn’t want to go to town,” the boy said as they returned to the house’s library.

  “Not alone,” Tess said. “I’ll go with you, but you’ll need to do most of the talking. My French is not as good as I thought it was.”

  “It won’t get better if you don’t use it.”

  She nodded. “If we could switch to French sometimes, that will help. Thank you.”

  A flicker of dismay said this was not what he’d meant, which she knew very well. A low threshold for annoyance, mixed with an equally low quota of patience, meant he’d hardly be the person to help her improve her language skills. But he’d opened the door and she’d sneaked in, and now he was trapped. He might be surly, bordering on rude, but he seemed unable to cross the line and actually be rude.

  “It’s important to learn French,” she said. “My teacher says it might become an official language in Canada someday. That’s what the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism is discussing. She says—”

  “I know the politics,” he said. “Better than you, I’m sure. If you want to practice on me…” He sounded pained. “Go ahead. Just…I’m not a teacher, and I don’t have time to play one. Back to the town visits. I’m not sure having me talk to the locals will help.”

  “Are they all like the boulanger?” she asked.

  He hesitated as he reached for a knapsack hidden under his blanket. “No,” he allowed. “But it’s a small town. French, Catholic and white. They’re…standoffish. Part of it’s how they’d treat anyone from outside, including you. Part of it’s because they don’t know how to treat someone who’s Métis.”

  “So you are?”

  A grunt as he pulled a comb from his bag. “Cree Métis. Both sides.” He turned to hand her his comb, but she was already brushing her hair.

  “That must be nice,” she said. “Knowing exactly where you come from.”

  An odd look crossed his face, then he gave a brusque “Yes” and shoved the comb back into his pack.

  “Do you have a washcloth in there?” She motioned to his bag. “That might help you with the locals.”