by John Shirley
“He could have tossed the thing off the cliff.”
“Maybe not without being seen. Maybe time was that short.”
I shook my head. “Diogenes might know more than he’s said.”
Brummigen chuckled darkly. “He always does!”
“So why does he get a pass?”
“Because we trust him. And because—he lets us discover things for ourselves. Seems to be a rule he works by.”
Fiona frowned, and looked off into the fog. “Someone’s chosen Garden Rest. They’ll be here soon. Was only thirteen or so when they died. Killed themselves . . .”
“You’d better be ready to greet them, then,” Brummigen said. “If you see Touie, send her home. Walk her there if you can.”
“I surely will.” She started to walk off, then paused, and turned to look at me. “Not promising anything for that tobacco.”
“Never thought you were.”
“But even without it, I might let you take me for a drink at the major’s bar. I’m starting to feel like coming back into town for a visit.”
“Sounds good,” I said. Her gaze seemed to come together with mine, a soft impact, then she walked off into the fog to meet the newcomer.
“Do women get jealous here, in the afterworld?” I asked, when she was gone. I was thinking of Jocelyn. And feeling a sort of throb after seeing Fiona . . .
Brummigen grunted. “It depends. The afterworld brings some wisdom to a lot of people. And some detachment, or, what does Diogenes call it, a weakening of the bonds of identification, he says. So, as for women and jealousy—or men and jealousy—perhaps not as much as formerly, but . . .”
“But women are women?”
“You said it, pal. And men are men. Come on, let’s search the beach at least up to the cliffs . . .”
On the path over the saddle into Garden Rest’s little valley, the sinking sun stretched our shadows long and thin behind us, as if our dark sides wanted to merge with the Purple Sea.
“Major,” I said, when we were just starting to descend into the valley, “don’t you think there’s something off about this whole search? From what I can see of the afterworld, people are always coming and going and . . . her being gone just doesn’t seem so strange. Especially when she seems to have had some kinda resentment against him.”
“Yes, it’s common for people to come and go here, Fogg—some people—but it’s also common for other people to stay put for years at a time.” The trail jogged steeply around several large boulders, and we skidded a little, before he went on, “She had been here for years. And—there is the whole question of Morgan Harris. And the vagabond. Two sets of remains.”
“That’s true—and Doyle was investigating them. I was thinking that if someone really did snatch her, this might be a hostage situation.” I shook my head, not able to quite articulate how uneasy I was feeling. “This whole thing with Touie has me . . . I don’t know which way to go with it. It’s getting me down.”
“Let’s take a breather here, and get a little of this sunlight, before it sets . . .”
We did, and drew reassuring strength from the sun. I felt a bit cheered up afterward and we’d taken just a few more steps when I saw a figure darting from shadow to shadow, in a copse of trees down the hill between us and the village. The furtive man seemed to be looking mostly behind him, as if he were being pursued.
“Is that Bolliver?” I asked, squinting.
Brummigen nodded. “I think it is Hale Bolliver, yes! Doesn’t seem to have seen us. Let’s step off the trail . . .”
We stepped behind a big outcropping of gray stone, and waited. In a couple of minutes Hale Bolliver came loping up the grade past us, his slumped shoulders twitching as he looked over his shoulder every third step . . .
Brummigen muttered. “He’s in no mood to stop for us and that’s a fact. Go on, Fogg, you’re the private cop.”
I felt a sharp, twisting pang, at that. You’re the private cop. I was still bothered by the dream memory about Marissa.
But I sprinted out from behind the rock and tackled Bolliver around the waist. He went down, and so did I, the two of us rolling on the slope.
He made an animal wailing sound and scrambled away from me, but then Brummigen was there, beefy hands raised, blocking Bolliver’s way. “Just want to talk to you, Hale!”
I got to my feet, dusting myself off, as Bolliver gasped, “Fogg jumped me! He knocked me down!”
“You looked like you were running,” I told him. “Couple of people got hurt and then Louisa Doyle went missing. So . . .”
“Major!” called a familiar voice, from down the hill. I turned to see Doyle climbing grimly up toward us, legs pumping on the hillside. “Fogg! Keep him there!”
“No!” Bolliver whined, turning to point at Doyle. “He threatened me! He threatened to hurt me! He’s been stalking me!”
“Oh what rubbish,” Doyle said, laboring up to us, red faced. This being the afterlife, Doyle was not breathing hard.
“You said you’d dump my body!” Bolliver wailed, backing up from him.
“No no, I said I’d drub you bloody, you fool!” Doyle said. “I didn’t mean it literally. But I was angry—you kept running off from me, when I was trying to simply ask you a few questions!”
“I’ve heard she hasn’t come back!” Bolliver said, backpedaling from Doyle. “Bertram told me! I didn’t tell him what I saw because . . .”
“Because why?” I asked.
He glared defiantly at Doyle. “I was there, near your house, watching to see what might happen, because I know there are people who hate you, and they might come after you—but I know better now!”
“What is it you know better?” I asked. “Do tell.”
“I was watching his house, and she came out and . . .”
“Who came out?” Brummigen demanded.
“Mrs. Doyle!”
“Why were you watching my home?” Doyle thundered. “By God I will drub you, if you don’t tell me—”
“I pick someone’s house to watch every night!” Bolliver said. “Just different ones! Just in case I see . . . something!”
“Okay, Hale, you saw her come out,” I said soothingly. “Where did she go?”
Bolliver pointed at Doyle. “Where he took her! Doyle was the one who took her out, and told her to go into the street, and she said yes Arthur, and he . . . he just herded her out down the street!”
Doyle stared at him. “What!”
Brummigen shook his head. “Are you saying that Doyle kidnapped his own wife?”
“Yes! That’s what I saw!”
“What rubbish!” Doyle snorted.
“I saw you! It hasn’t rained, I bet your tracks are still there!” Bolliver snarled, taking a step back from Doyle.
“My tracks? If anyone’s tracks were there I’d have seen them! But they can’t make tracks, it’s paved! It’s all cobbles!”
“Not there—at the edge of town!”
Brummigen pursed his lips. “He’s doing a better job at detective than you and Fogg are. We didn’t really look for Mrs. Doyle’s tracks at the edge of town.”
“Which way?” I asked.
Doyle looked at me, his eyes narrowed.
Bolliver looked as if he were thinking of bolting again. He took a step back from Doyle. “To the southeast. Toward the Raining Lands. I swear it!”
“Hale,” Brummigen said mildly, “we’ll look into all this. Come on with me, we’ll see you get some accommodations where you’ll be quite safe, I promise you.”
“You can protect me from Moore, maybe,” he said. He pointed at Doyle. “But not from him!”
Doyle turned away, puffing out his cheeks with a long, slowly exhaled breath. “Oh let him go, Brummigen. He’s seen something of some kind. He’s just conf
used. Suggestion made him suppose he saw me. Let us go to the southeast of town.”
“Wait,” I said, blocking Bolliver’s exit. “What about Bull Moore, Bolliver?”
Bolliver looked off toward the swampy forest. We could see it from here, the water glinting red in the setting sun; the trees becoming black outlines. “He was my friend—almost anyway. Then he tried to confuse me with a lot of nonsense about creatures from space. He said I shouldn’t watch people, and I think I know why. Because he didn’t want me to see him . . . doing things.”
“What things?” Brummigen asked.
“Stealing from the village.”
Doyle waved dismissively. “We knew all that.”
I looked at Bolliver and thought about Moore. “Dueling paranoids.”
“I’m not a paranoid!” Bolliver said excitedly. He jabbed a finger into his own sternum, jagging rhythmically with every word: “I suffer from compulsive paraphilic voyeurism and maladaptive personality syndrome!” He seemed almost proud as he added, “I’ve been diagnosed!”
Doyle turned to him with a perfect mixture of disgust and curiosity. “We do not have organically based mental illness here. Why do you not evolve past these compulsions? Simply give them up?”
Bolliver looked at him as if he’d never considered the possibility before. He blinked twice, and then said, “I don’t give them up because . . . I enjoy them.”
“Because you . . . ?”
It was the only time I ever saw Arthur Conan Doyle slap his own forehead.
We all had lanterns, me and Doyle and Brummigen and Bertram. We were making our way along a gravel trail on the southeast edge of town, looking for signs of Touie Doyle. Doyle went a little ahead, as if eagerly following up this thin lead from the twisted Bolliver.
Up ahead, Doyle was a hunched shape, bent over in a cone of light. I found myself watching him, from time to time. I had a fear that he might be erasing tracks instead of looking for them.
Doyle was important to me. I knew that already. He should be what his gravestone had declared him to be. I just didn’t want him to be unstraight and untrue—like my old man had been. I wanted him to be as good a man as one of his fictional heroes.
I was ashamed of myself for doubting Doyle. Bolliver’s word didn’t seem good for much. But—I have a suspicious mind. I’ve cultivated it. And I couldn’t help wondering if Doyle was going a little crazy being around Touie, for decades, when he was in love with Jean Leckie. I just couldn’t help wondering if he wanted to get rid of his wife.
Maybe Conan Doyle had killed Morgan Harris himself—experimenting on the “deformulation” process, before using it on Touie? And maybe all this investigation had been a smokescreen. And . . . Doyle could rationalize that all he had destroyed was her “afterbody.” Her soul would go on to be sorted out by the afterworld. Maybe at this point, he could live with that.
But wouldn’t it be easier for him to just walk away from her?
Maybe not. Maybe he figured she’d follow him wherever he went . . .
I felt sick and broken, thinking about it. Inside I was wobbling back and forth between having these thoughts . . . and despising myself for having them.
“I don’t see any damn nothin’ out here, yet,” Bertram said, squinting at the ground.
“You may go back to the village,” Doyle muttered. “I shall continue.”
“I say, Doyle!” called Chauncey, walking up through the darkness. “Bull Moore’s out on the edge of town, and he says he’s seen something of Mrs. Doyle!”
ELEVENTH
“Well, Chauncey? Where did you see Moore?” Doyle asked, as we stalked along a side road from the east side of town toward the raised path into the swamp forest. To our right was Garden Rest, with its glowing lamps, the angles of its roofs. As usual, Doyle was charging ahead, and we were trying to keep up.
“See him?” Chauncey looked at Doyle in puzzlement. “Oh, I didn’t see him, Doyle, not myself. I put out the word that everyone was to watch for Moore! Mrs. Singh—Mrs. Peller now, actually—she got in touch, she saw him when she was collecting lilies on the edge of the swamp . . . I say, Doyle, do slow down!”
Doyle was pressing ahead, twice as fast as the rest of us. He shouted over his shoulder, “Not a hope of it, Chauncey!”
We kept after him, trotting to keep up. Our four lanterns bobbed along in the darkness, seeming, sometimes, to move on their own, without people carrying them. There was, after all, no starlight, no moonlight. There never is.
“Gonna trip and break my damn leg,” Bertram muttered, beside me.
“You can break bones in the afterworld?”
“I thought I told you . . . hell, if you doubt it, how about a bet. Fifty Fionas says I can break your arm.”
“I’ll take your word for that, just like the punch in the face, thanks. You don’t seem to think we’re hot on the trail . . .”
“Seems kinda obvious to me the lady just took a hike. Went off with some other tubby Englishman that reminds Bolliver of Doyle. No tracks . . .”
“Ah!” Doyle said, up ahead. He came to a sudden stop. “Tracks!”
We rushed where he was crouching over the path. “You see?” he said, pointing. “Two sets—I thought I saw traces, back there, where we began, on the path toward the Raining Lands, but that path is gravelly, takes so little imprint. This though—two sets of prints in the soft ground on the edge! One of them seems certainly Touie’s . . .”
He seemed a bit theatrical about all this. Was this some sort of a setup? Should I still trust Doyle?
I bent over, stretching my lantern over the marks. One set was partly blurred, but there was a shoe print that seemed about the size and shape of Doyle’s. The other set was smaller, and definitely a more feminine cut of shoe.
Doyle straightened up. “Do you see? The tracks are coming from the direction Bolliver indicated—someone must have seen Bolliver, and took her that way to throw him off. Then they took the roundabout trail, and came this way—toward the swamp. Come along, we’ve no time to waste! We have several leads now!”
He started toward the swamp.
We began to follow—then Mayor Chauncey came to a sudden stop and called out, “Doyle! I am not going into that woods at night! I’ll fall and get myself all mucked up and get those damned forgetters all over me! I don’t think much can be accomplished by it tonight—and I simply won’t do it!”
Doyle stopped, turned with his lamp raised over his head. His face was etched with a cross between cold fury and exasperation, the expressions all the sharper in the lamplight. “Well, where did she see Moore, then, and what did he say?”
We all stopped then; I stood with Bertram and Brummigen, in our triple overlap of lantern shine.
Chauncey put his lantern down. “Mrs. Singh . . . er, Peller . . . saw him not forty paces from here, where this trail meets the path into the forest, Doyle. She spoke to him—asked him if he’d seen you. You know how kindly and disarming she can be. He responded more or less rationally—apparently he told her he’d seen someone with your Touie walking into the woods. They were coming from this direction—the direction we’re taking now. He couldn’t see who the chap was. They did not carry a lamp, either one. He only saw her for a moment in the glow of a forgetter passing by.”
“Does she know where he is now?”
“No. He was carrying some lumber . . .”
“So he had been stealing lumber again. Then he’s gone to his hut in the sky. Very good— my thanks Winn. Off you go. Bertram, do take His Honor back home, he may fall into a hole if he toddles along here without a lamp.”
“Sure, boss,” Bertram said tartly. I could tell he was annoyed. “That’s just what I’m going to do, too. Major—mind if I open your bar?”
“Sure, sure, it’s not locked.”
Bertram turned to Chaun
cey. “Come on, Your Honor—it’d be my honor to buy you a drink.”
“That would be most agreeable. It is has been a long scrum of a day. I remember once when I was in India . . .”
They hurried off toward Garden Rest. Doyle turned to Brummigen. “Major—are we friends?”
“What? Of course we are!”
“You don’t think I’m a Spiritualist buffoon or . . . a wife murderer?”
“You’re certainly not a wife murderer. As for the other—buffoon is too hard a word.”
“Yes. Especially as we’re now in the afterworld. But we won’t get into that—would you do me a kindness? Would you go back to my house, and wait there, in case Touie comes back? Fogg and I can handle all this . . . if Fogg is game for it . . . and I want someone there. And I’d rather have no more footprints to obscure the trail than necessary.”
Brummigen looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Sure, Doyle. The house locked up?”
“Until now, I thought there was scarcely a reason to lock up, and rarely did. It still remains unlocked. I cannot say I will ever leave it unlocked again. Brandy’s up in the turret.”
“Okay, you got it. Let me know if . . .”
“I will, you may rest assured of it.”
Doyle turned on his heel and strode off. Brummigen shrugged at me.
“Brummigen,” I said, almost whispering, “do you think I should go with him? I mean—I know both Moore and Bolliver are unreliable but . . . maybe Doyle had motive. Maybe Doyle took Touie off and . . . Can I trust him? I thought I could, but . . .”
Brummigen raised his bushy eyebrows. It took me a moment to realize he was actually shocked. “Fogg . . . you know anything about Doyle’s life?”
“You mean, in the Before?”
“Yes. In the Before.”
“Some. I read a biography of him, and a book of his letters. And a lot of his novels and . . . why?”
“Do you know who George Edalji was?”
“No . . . wait. Was he that guy Doyle defended—a real detective case?”
“Yes. His father was from India, his mother British—there was heavy-duty prejudice against the guy, in those days, and someone framed him to make it look like he’d mutilated local stock animals. Doyle got wind of this and spent just incredible amounts of time defending Edalji, rallying people to his defense—and proving, with a Sherlock Holmes logic, that George Edalji was innocent. Do you know what he did to raise awareness of the atrocities in the Belgian Congo?”