Bannerless

by Carrie Vaughn

  “If he’s so hard to get along with, why doesn’t anyone vote for a change?” Enid said.

  “He’s . . . popular.” She gazed steadily across the table. “He’s . . . quite political and makes sure that people will support him. Convinces everyone they need him.” Her puckered smirk told exactly what she thought of that.

  “Makes it hard to stand up to him, I imagine.”

  “Someone has to,” she said.

  “Do you know why he’s so set against having Sero’s death investigated?”

  She knew—Enid knew that she knew. The way her expression didn’t so much as flicker, the way she straightened and spoke her words carefully. “I imagine . . . he doesn’t like having investigators around. You challenge his authority.”

  A simple, straightforward answer. “And do we challenge your authority?”

  Her smile tightened. “I’m not sure I have any, not really.”

  Deflecting attention. Enid took a chance. “Do you remember where you were, what you were doing, that morning four days ago—or rather five days ago, now?”

  Finally, the woman looked startled. Her hands clenched over each other. “You can’t think I had anything to do with Sero. I’m the one who wanted an investigation.”

  Enid’s voice was bland. “Which might be a very good way of deflecting attention from one’s self. If you had something to hide.”

  “No, I’m not hiding anything. I was just as shocked as anyone when the body was found. I didn’t do anything—”

  “Not saying you did. It’s just a routine question. Helps us get a picture of what else was happening. So where were you?” Tomas had taken out his notebook, as if recording her testimony.

  Ariana nodded. “All right. Okay. I was at home, working. Baking, I think. Ask anyone from my house. Tull, or . . . or Dak. We were all there when Arbor came to get Tull.”

  “Dak was at the house that morning, too?” Enid narrowed her eyes. Dak had said he was away, that he didn’t get home until the next day.

  “Yes . . . I think so.” She seemed to notice her clenched hands then, and smoothed them onto her lap and sighed. “Maybe I was wrong about the whole thing. Maybe I overreacted, and Philos is right about this being an accident, an unfortunate accident—”

  “Yes, you said a moment ago you thought it might be. But you still called for an investigation, and I want to know why. It can’t be just to annoy Philos. Because if that’s really the reason you called us, there’ll be consequences. And not for Philos.” Despite Tomas’s warning, Enid didn’t try so much to tamp down on her own growing anger. Let Ariana be frightened.

  The committeewoman stared back at her and breathed, “You wouldn’t. You can’t. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “False reporting? Wasting our time?” Waste, one of the worst things she could accuse anyone of, and Ariana drew back as if Enid had raised a fist at her. “And all for the sake of simply making a man’s life difficult?”

  “No, that wasn’t it; there’s more to it than that—”

  “Then tell me what it is. Tell me why you really called us here.”

  Stricken, eyes wide, she might not have been pressed up against a wall, but she looked like it. Enid thought the woman might flee, and planned what she would have to do to leap out of her chair and cross the room to block the doorway. There was a secret here; Ariana knew it—she just didn’t want to have to be the one to expose it. Yet here they all were. Enid and Tomas stayed quiet, letting the silence press on her until she sagged.

  “I think he’s violating quotas. I—I don’t have proof, just that too many of his folk are gone off doing some kind of work that the rest of us can’t explain, and they’re trading too much. They have too much.”

  “Philos is violating quotas,” Enid said, just to make sure.

  “Yes,” she said. As if confessing the infraction herself. She had wanted to throw the investigators in the middle of the town and step back, Enid suspected. Now here she was caught up in it herself.

  Proof in these cases was sometimes tricky. If the household bypassed the checks, the counts, and committee monitoring entirely, no one would ever know. Since Philos was on the committee—controlled the committee—he’d be able to bypass monitoring easily. But there were signs. There was always evidence to find, if you knew what to look for.

  Ariana continued. “He’s going to request a banner and use Bounty’s productivity to back him up. But it’s a false productivity, based on breaking quota. He doesn’t deserve it! Especially when he’s purposefully blocking other households’ requests for banners. It’s not fair—”

  “And you felt you didn’t have enough support to bring a complaint against him to regional on that score?”

  “Can’t bring a complaint just because you have a grudge against someone.”

  “So you needed a reason. An excuse.”

  “Yes, I suppose you can look at it—” She stopped, bit her lip as the implication dawned on her.

  Tomas said, “You want the banner for your own household? For yourself?”

  “Of course—but only if that’s what the committee decides, if the decision is fair. But this doesn’t have anything to do with your investigation—”

  “Except you used Sero’s death as an excuse,” Enid said. “Brought us here and now you’re trying to point us somewhere else, when you could have just reported your suspicions. We could bar your household from earning a banner for years, based on false reporting.”

  “Except . . . except you think Sero really was murdered.”

  She saw investigators as a tool—which they were, Enid had to give her that. But they weren’t a tool someone like Ariana could just use.

  “Yes. And don’t you dare be glad of it,” Enid said.

  “Thank you, Ariana,” Tomas said, with a professional calm that Enid couldn’t quite muster. “You can go now. Thank you for the lunch.”

  The woman stood and gave the barest bow, jaw set and lips pursed, before calmly walking out. Enid grabbed a piece of cornbread and started tearing it to pieces. Some of it ended up in her mouth. Patiently, Tomas sat back and let her be frustrated.

  “Would she really have done it?” she finally exclaimed. “Killed someone just to draw in investigators so she wouldn’t be accused of holding a grudge?” The one person in town without a household, who wouldn’t be missed even. It seemed ludicrous. Which was why Enid couldn’t discount the idea out of hand. “What a terrible thought.”

  “Should we go to her household and look for bloodstains on clothes?”

  “They’ve had plenty of time to wash everything,” she said. “You know—Dak told me he was gone that day. Traveling back from the market at Porto, didn’t get back to town until the next day when everything had already happened.” So was Dak just scared, or was he hiding something as well?

  “They should have worked a little harder to keep their stories straight,” he said. “So what do we do about this quota question?”

  “Investigate, I suppose,” she said. “What a mess.”

  “They usually are, by the time we get called in to clean up.”

  She finally abandoned the cornbread and frowned at the crumbs she had scattered over much of the table. “I feel like I’m messing this up. My first lead on a murder, and I’m screwing up. You’d tell me if I was screwing up, yeah?”

  “Enid. You’re not screwing up.”

  “But you’d tell me.”

  “Yes, I would tell you,” he said with some exasperation, and she felt suddenly like a child.

  And what would happen if they didn’t figure this out? A villain wins. Some of the perceived authority of the investigators gets chipped away. People here might keep telling her Sero’s death wasn’t important, but that wasn’t true. The stakes were real.

  Tomas didn’t give her more calm reassurances, which meant he was worried, too.

  “I think I’m going to take a walk,” Enid said, cleaning up the crumbs and finishing off her drink. If Philos and Bounty w
ere violating quotas, there’d be evidence. You just had to know what to look for.

  Tomas nodded. “Good hunting.”

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////

  Enid needed to look at the whole of Pasadan as an outsider, with fresh eyes.

  Taking the whole afternoon to do it, she walked a circuit not just of Pasadan proper, but of the outlying households, including a creek and a grain mill, a couple of orchards, and miles of farmland growing barley and corn. Pasadan even had a quarry, and a household whose main occupation was making bags of concrete mix they traded up and down the Coast Road. She walked out along the hillside they’d cut into for their limestone, and the gash in the rolling hills made her stomach turn a little. Maybe they all needed concrete, but rock would never grow back and that exposed wound in the land would take years to heal. A half-dozen people worked, some of them digging into the rock with pickaxes, a couple of others carrying broken rock in wheelbarrows to a building where some kind of machinery wheezed and pounded, smashing the rock to powder. They all wore cloth masks over their faces. A chalk-smelling dust seemed to hang in the air around the site. It was all very loud and off-putting.

  Pasadan was prosperous. The questions she had to answer: Was it more prosperous than the records said they should be? Were they using more resources than they had a right to? She almost preferred the murder investigation. The town’s general anxiety about an investigation might have nothing to do with Sero’s death. The way to untie a knot might very well be finding the other end of the string Ariana had given her.

  Hiding an entire cultivated field of grain was easier than one might expect. It really only required a couple of specific quirks of geography, or a willingness to travel far off a town’s beaten path, into wilderness. Some kind of ravine that could be camouflaged, or some other loud and busy activity distracting from anything unusual.

  In her first case, the perpetrators had planted a stand of cottonwoods to disguise the gully they’d used to grow extra oats. From a distance, the place looked like an ordinary copse of trees. But the blind also proved that they knew very well they were doing something wrong. They couldn’t claim ignorance.

  Enid searched for those signs here. Which brought her back to the quarry, and the grinding racket and chalky smell that made one want to circle wide around the place. A distraction. A place one wouldn’t look because you assumed you knew what was going on there.

  She went straight through the site, ignoring the workers who paused to watch her. Followed the rock cut along the hillside until she left the quarry behind, and the hill turned into exactly the kind of gully she was looking for. Tall meadow grasses gave way to stalks of cultivated barley. From a distance, you couldn’t tell the difference. You’d have to walk right up to the field in order to learn what exactly was growing here.

  A ton of work, cultivating an awkward out-of-the-way field like this, just to avoid drawing attention. Much easier to petition for a higher quota . . . except a petition could be denied.

  So, someone in Pasadan—Philos, according to Ariana—was growing grain outside their quota. Likely using it for trade in small quantities to avoid raising suspicions. But they could acquire extra cloth, foodstuffs, incidentals. Lumber for fencing and paint for pretty signs. None of it by itself was suspicious—lots of places had pretty signs. But all of it together made a picture.

  Now she and Tomas had two investigations to conduct.

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////

  “Might Sero have known?” Enid asked Tomas. She’d pulled some stalks of grain from the hidden field—just a couple of weeks from harvest, if she judged it right—to show to him. “Might he have threatened to report it? Might that be a motive to hurt him?”

  “Except he didn’t talk to anyone,” Tomas said. “That’s what everyone says. Wasn’t like he’d be motivated to report it.”

  “Maybe. But . . . Tomas—if the extra grain was to try to get a banner quicker, then everyone in town who wanted a banner might have a motive.”

  “For violating quota. But not for killing Sero. We’re only speculating that he knew, that the two cases are at all connected.”

  “If he knew, would he have told anyone?”

  He thought for a moment, until a connection lit in his eyes. “Miran. If she was the last person to speak with him, he might have told her something.”

  “Let’s talk to her again,” Enid said.

  They decided to bring Miran to the community house, to the meeting room they’d made their own for the investigation. Their own territory. Since Enid had talked with her before, she went to Sirius household to get the young woman. It would rile folk, seeing an investigator escorting one of their own, and word of that would spread just as fast as word of their arrival at Pasadan had. That they were focusing attention on such a young and demure thing—people would read that badly, and Enid was almost glad for it.

  Back at Sirius household, the wash had been taken in and the chickens were safe in their coop. Enid heard voices from what must have been a kitchen but didn’t see any sign of Miran. Instead, an older woman was working in a standard kitchen garden, picking herbs—chives, looked like.

  “Hola,” Enid called.

  “Oh!” The woman looked up, first startled, then fearful—her hands clutched tightly, crushing a bundle of chives—then she quickly calmed herself. “Hi. Can I help you?”

  “Just wondering if I could speak to Miran. Is she here?”

  “I think she’s busy—one of the dogs got into some brambles; she’s cleaning him up. But it should only take her a minute. I’ll go get her—”

  “Before you go, can I ask you a couple of questions?”

  The woman had that round-eyed startled look again. The one so many people got with investigators.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Fern. I’m Fern.”

  “You head of household here?”

  “One of ’em, yeah. We’re pretty informal here.” She flashed a smile. She seemed to just remember the chives in her hand and went to drop them in a basket on the ground.

  The woman reminded Enid of Olive—smiling, considerate, unable to pass a puppy or goat on the road without stopping to coo over it. At least, how Olive used to be before the miscarriage.

  “Can you tell me about Sero?” Enid asked. “Did you talk to him much?”

  “Oh, no, not really. But . . . well. I worried about him. It’s just not right, him out there all by himself. Maybe no one else worried, but I did. Doesn’t look good for the town, you know, having one person cut off like that. Like an outcast. It’s just so sad what happened, and maybe it wouldn’t have if he’d had someone. You know?”

  Fern must have been in her early fifties, with a worn, pale face and a long graying braid resting over her shoulder. Matronly. Enid wondered if she’d ever had a baby.

  “But you never spoke to Sero?”

  “I sent Miran there with food. To thank him for all his good work. I thought, well, if we reached out to him enough, he’ll come to us—ask to be part of Sirius. We had the space for it.”

  Enid grew frustrated. “You thought he could be part of your household, but you never went to talk to him yourself.” She stated it, just to be clear.

  “Well, I never really had time. And Miran did, quite often, I think. I didn’t want to force him with too many of us going at him. Scare him off, you know? Like how some dogs are.”

  Yes. Because Sero was exactly like a dog. “Can you think of anyone who might have had a grudge against him? Maybe didn’t think much of him living like an outcast?” Enid wondered, if Fern had been of a different disposition, might she have thought of a different solution for the “problem” of a loner than setting out food for him like he was a stray?

  The woman’s eyes clouded for a moment, as if she caught a hint of Enid’s implication but just missed grasping it entirely. “Enough of a grudge to hurt him? Oh, no. No. I can’t even i
magine.” Her hand went to her heart, a guarding gesture. Purely symbolic. Olive would have left Sero alone, as the man seemed to have wished. Enid was sure of it.

  “Thank you, Fern. Maybe you could call Miran for me now?”

  Fern disappeared into the kitchen, and Miran rushed out a moment later.

  “What? What is it?” She saw Enid and pulled up short, stricken.

  “Miran. Could you come with me? My partner and I would like to speak with you somewhere a little more private.”

  “But I haven’t done anything.” Her voice was tight.

  “Yes, I know. It’s just we’ve got our office set up in the committee house. You don’t have to go, but it would be really helpful if you came and spoke with us.”

  Enid always gave people an out. Always told them they didn’t have to go with her. But somehow, they always did.

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////

  The walk back, Miran seemed to struggle to keep from crying. Hunched in on herself, shoulders slumped, arms in tight, she looked as cowed as a person possibly could. Enid stayed more than an arm’s length away from her. Escort, not captor.

  Enid spotted Dak walking across town. Or they spotted each other. He was too far away to call out but raised his hand in greeting. His smile seemed to waver a bit when he spotted Miran with her. Enid tried not to read too much into that. Tried not to spin ways that Dak might be involved with this whole mess. Either he’d lied about being in town when Sero died, or Ariana had.

  She answered his wave with a nod and kept going.

  “Lived in Pasadan your whole life, then?” Enid asked. A casual question, but it would sound like part of an interrogation. Couldn’t be helped.

  “Yeah, I was born here. Fern’s my mother.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s ever been an investigation in Pasadan in your lifetime. You ever even seen one of the uniforms?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding quickly. “I’ve been to the fall market in Haven a couple of times. Seen investigators walking around and things. I heard a lot of investigators live in Haven.”