by Lumen Reese
“Okay. Thank you.”
“Do you wanna have dinner?” he asked suddenly.
My mind froze. The words tumbled out on their own. “I just ate.”
“How about a drink, then?”
“I don’t drink.”
“I respect that, dessert?”
“No, thanks.”
“How about ice skating, have you ever been ice skating?”
“I should probably find something to investigate,” I said, and my voice was stronger as I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be acting like myself. “I appreciate the offer… but I’m here to work.”
“Okay,” he said gently, and still smiling. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
My heart was pounding. I lifted the map off the bar and asked Dorothy, “Can I hang onto this while I’m here?”
“Absolutely. And here, have your room key.”
Henry closed the door behind him as he left, and I felt sure he wouldn’t spend any more time that night thinking of me. That the rejection wouldn’t burn him the way it would if our roles had been reversed.
“He’s a nice man,” Dorothy added.
“I’m sure,” I said, more dismissively than I meant to. And so I added, “Thanks again,” as I headed for the door. I didn’t want to act like myself, but that didn’t mean that I was okay with acting like a jerk.
More eyes were on me as I stepped out into the snowy street. Henry was halfway to the lake; maybe he meant to go ice skating on his own, or maybe his house was in the loop of houses on stilts on the hills around its bank. I went the other way, and consulted the photograph I had in the file in my satchel. Figuring its exact angle from the view of a dry goods store across the street from the fugitive’s hooded figure, I found the spot where the camera which had taken it had to be hung.
But there was no camera there, that I could see; just the corner of a butcher’s shop. The cameras had to be small, and well hidden. So, really, they could be anywhere and everywhere.
I consulted the photo again, headed past the next building and slid into the alley where the fugitive had been lingering, and looked around. Nothing but snow on the ground, the lumber of the buildings on either side very close, a nice view of the street if I leaned out, which he appeared to have done. Taking stock and checking the map, I tried to put myself in his head.
If nobody else in the town had seen him, then he hadn’t gone into town to get food from anyone, or extra clothes or medical supplies or attention. He wasn’t desperate for anything; not some person from the outside hoping to invade a better life like a cancer cell, the way Dorothy supposed he was. On my map I realized that if he had been in the woods by the wolf’s cave, and come down into the town out of curiosity, he would have come in on the complete other side. To get to the spot where I stood, he would have had to go either through the main street or go all the way around the town and cut through the back alleys and between people’s homes, which seemed more likely.
So why would he go through the trouble to get to that spot?
I could see the dry goods store, and a tailor’s, too, and between them a tannery, a slender building with smoke rising from its chimney, and a shed out in the back of the place. I crossed the street and went looking around the shed, which was locked, and peered into the alley behind the row of buildings. There was nothing extraordinary around it, except that there seemed to be a storm cellar below the tannery, with big double doors in the ground leading below it. I almost missed sight of them entirely, they were covered by the thick blanket of snow. They were locked like the shed was, with a padlock and heavy chain.
Humoring only a hunch or boredom, I went back around to the front and stepped inside the tannery.
Hung all along the walls, overlapping, were furs and pieces of hide. A fat man with a ponytail was sweeping in the back behind his sales counter, and looked up when he saw me.
“Hello.”
“Hi. I’m Stella Grady,” I said, approaching. “I’m investigating something for the company, do you know about me?”
“Yes ma’am,” he said. He had a high voice, and his eyes squinted at me. “Can I assist you with something?”
“You have a cellar under this place?”
“Yes.”
“What do you keep down there?”
“It’s where I do a lot of the processing for these hides. Dyeing and drying and some stretching. It’s smelly work, I wouldn’t want to do it in the shop.”
“Mm-hm… Have you been down there, today?”
“Yes…” He was beginning to sound nervous.
“You’d notice if anything was missing, or askew?”
“Definitely.”
“And are the doors outside the only way to get down there?”
“No, I can go down through my bedroom floor, too.”
“I’m sorry if it’s a bother, but I need you to take me down there.”
He looked a bit confused but said, “That’s alright. Come this way.”
“Thank you. What’s your name, Sir?”
“Oh. Albert.”
He took me into the back room, where he had a bed and dresser and a chess set. He heaved up a trap door in the back corner and I instantly knew what he meant about the smell; strong and chemical and just a tiny bit of the leather he was making. I followed him down very steep, creaking stairs.
“You take this way, not the cellar doors outside?” I asked.
“Yes, always.”
He lit a lantern in the path of light that came from his room upstairs, and the room sprang to life around us. Racks of drying leathers, black and brown, and other pieces of hide still being stretched, secured at points all around like they were being drawn and quartered. It was long and large, with a high ceiling. It had to run longer than the space of his building alone; probably underneath the street.
“Quite a place,” I said, wandering around.
“Thank you.”
“You’re sure that nothing is missing?”
“Very sure.”
“Hm.” It killed the theory that the fugitive wanted something particular from the tannery, and so I asked the next thing that came to mind. “Are there other buildings in town with big cellars, like this?”
“Big cellars? No. Inn probably has one, but not like this. Although, there’s a bomb shelter under the church, that might fit the bill.”
“You go to church, Albert?” A new idea was picking at my brain.
“Yes.”
“It’s a Tuesday, now. You went to church on Sunday, three mornings ago?”
“Yes.”
“You would have noticed, if someone were down here while you were upstairs?”
“Definitely. You think someone broke in here, while I was at church?”
“Maybe.”
“Why? If he didn’t take anything, why?”
I shrugged, and started up the stairs. “Looking for someplace to squat, maybe.”
He puffed as he labored up the stairs behind me, closed the trap door and followed me back into the store. I thanked him and he called after me as I was heading out the door, “Happy to help!”
The sky had darkened from dusk to heavy night in only the fifteen minutes I had been inside. Lanterns were being lit all down the main stretch, hanging from in front of shop doors and on polls were there were gaps.
My next stop was the church, which had a big cross on top and a steeple and bell, too. Down the street on the opposite side, right on the main stretch. The heavy door was unlocked and light was beaming from within stained glass windows, so I went right in. It was a cozy place, though I had never been fond of churches. Only a dozen pews in two rows, a little stage for sermons or weddings or anything else. The seats were mostly empty but there were a few people in silent prayer scattered among them.
I found myself tiptoeing up the length of the place, to where there were dozens of candles lit and flickering along the back wall. A man in black was lighting them one by one.
“Excuse me?”
/> He glanced over his shoulder, still lighting one after the other in the row without even looking. “How can I help you?”
I kept my voice low. “I’m an investigator working for the company-.”
“-Yes, I know.”
“Can you show me the bomb shelter underneath the church, please?”
“Certainly.” He finished the last row after a few long seconds and then lead me through a door in the back. There was a small kitchen back there, and in a little pantry another door which led to a slender stairway of grey stone.
“I’m Father Kim, by the way,” he said.
“First or last?” I asked, starting down the stairs after him.
“First.”
“So you’re one of those hip priests,” I said, and he chuckled.
“I try to be.”
At the bottom of the steps was a door unlike the others that was several inches of thick metal, and a chore for the slender man to drag open, so I reached around him and grabbed on to help. The air coming from inside was cool.
To my surprise, when Father Kim entered, he flipped on a light switch, and track lighting flickered on the whole length of the rectangular place. Stone walls and floors and ceilings, several hundred utilitarian beds and bedrolls and stacked on one wall there were green metal cases which I would guess to contain rations.
“Does anyone come down here?” I asked, focused on the stone steps going to a metal door which had to lead up to the street.
“No, I can’t see why anyone would.”
“And nothing has been taken?”
“No.”
On the inside of either metal door there were heavy-duty locking systems, strong bars which seemed they would slide into the frames on either side and hold steady, making it near impossible to break them down. “Do you keep the other door locked?”
“No, there’s no need.”
“That’s all I need, then,” I said, and he let me go out first.
I waited on the stairs to be polite, then as we climbed back up into the pantry, he said, “Nobody really locks their doors in town, you know. And what would be the point of an emergency shelter, if nobody could get into it in an emergency? Something could happen to me, and something could happen to Henry -the sheriff, he has the only other keys in town-and then nobody would be able to take shelter.”
“I’m not here to get anyone in trouble,” I said. “Although I should look at the cellar entrance from the outside, to be thorough.”
“I’ll show you.”
He stopped to grab a thick coat from off a hook in what looked like his office, and then took me out a back door, past a bathroom and another closed door. The night was cold but still, without even a little bit of wind.
Around the corner of the building, we came up on the cellar doors. On the outside, they were wooden and blended in with the building and the whole town’s aesthetic. I stood watching them for a minute, unable to figure out what I was looking for.
Until, all at once, it dawned on me.
“When did it last snow?”
He thought a moment. “Would’ve been… Sunday night.”
“And you haven’t been down here, since then?”
“No… but somebody has,” he said, and I could see the realization taking over his pointy face. “Somebody went through here, or else the doors would still be covered with snow.”
I nodded, feeling pride swell in my chest.
“Thank you for your help,” I said, and began the walk back to the inn, satisfied with my discovery.
I had put together a loose timeline , it seemed. Two days ago, on Sunday, the camera had caught sight of the fugitive as he was on his way to check into the cellar of the tannery. And probably on Sunday there had been people around the church all day, so he had to wait until Monday to go and check out the bomb shelter. The night before he had been in the woods, waiting around, when he had been spotted by Pete on a wolf hunt.
Why a fugitive would sneak into the Four Quarters only to creep around in people’s basements I did not know, but I felt a surge of hope as I stepped in out of the cold that I could do it, that I knew what he was doing even if I didn’t know why.
Chapter Six
I hardly slept that night, apart from a few hours just before dawn. After I had retired to my room, and was laying in the cool dark, under a quilt and a bear pelt, there came a commotion outside. I pushed aside the curtains on my window and looked out at the street, where a crowd gathered around the scream I had heard, with a dozen lanterns lighting the street from one side to the other. I picked out Henry Haskell in the crowd, where he was stooping and lifting a girl who looked to be in her teens, limp in his arms, blood rolling down her arm and dripping a trail into the snow as he carried her away.
A man I wouldn’t look twice at on the street was calling over the milling of the crowd, “Enough of this! Enough letting the wolf take our livestock, our children! I will lead you if your sheriff won’t! The moon is full, we go tonight!”
The crowd cheered and men started to break away.
I felt like I was looking into something very personal. The heart of that man’s most primal desire. Something that simple, just to have people follow him. Maybe he also wanted to be the one to kill the wolf, to connect to something primal inside him that he was also being denied, the same as he was denied the respect he wanted. And Four Quarters was supplying him with that, which he couldn’t simply buy in the real world. Maybe his scenario would sustain him through the rest of his life, would quench the urge all people had to have done something greater than push papers around desks or work on an assembly line.
That got me thinking that maybe my time inside the Four Quarters would be my ‘something greater’, too. That -while I wasn’t about to go leading men or slaying beasts-I might be a hero to Joey and Stacie and the kids, back home. And that could sustain me the rest of my days in factories, my nights going to bed alone instead of being out in the city playing detective. I might tell the kids all about it someday, or even their own children, if I lived that long; about the time that their odd, castaway aunt Stella went into a storybook.
It kept me up a while, then sleep came, then Henry came, rapping on my door when the sky was lightening to grey outside.
“Sleeping Beauty?”
“Coming.”
I grabbed my bag and hurried to wrench the door open.
Henry looked down at me and blinked, then a wide smile broke out on his face that turned into a laugh that rumbled up from deep in his chest. I instantly knew what it was and started combing through my hair with my fingers, hissing, “Shut up!”
“You look like a lion,” he said, following me through the too-tight hallway. He gasped and slapped a hand to his chest to be dramatic. “You look like a lion… you’re afraid of the wolf… you’re the cowardly lion.”
“I’m not afraid,” I snapped, starting to go down the stairs.
“You are, but it’s okay. I was scared of it when I first came here, and it’s my alter-ego.”
The gentleness of his tone made me soften, and I glanced back over my shoulder. “If I’m the cowardly lion, what does that make you? Scarecrow or tin-man?”
“Scarecrow,” he said forcefully. “Rather be brainless than heartless any day.” He rounded the turn into the Inn’s main room and bellowed out a welcoming, “Dorothy!”
His booming voice made me flinch , and he noticed that and watched me for one lingering second before advancing to the bar.
“Good morning,” she said. “Here.” She set two apples down on the counter. “Porridge when you get back.”
“Mm, thank you Dorothy.”
I made the counter and accepted one of the apples. “Up so early,” I praised her.
“That’s my job. I feed people.”
“Thank you.”
“Alright,” Henry said, and took the lead to the door, holding it open for me and then hurrying into the front again, heading toward the path up into the woods. “We should be fine fo
r time, but let’s not dawdle. I have a scene later with a buyer -the one who lead a wolf hunt last night, had a brush with danger, didn’t get his kill-I have to hassle his love interest while she’s still wounded, be a real jerk…”
We had crossed the street and started up the sloping hill to leave town. It had snowed the night before and was still dusting down lightly, and I had to fight the angle to keep from sliding back down.
“His love interest?” I was aghast. “The girl from last night? Who was injured by the wolf?”
“She wasn’t, really,” he said, misunderstanding my concern.
“How old is she?”
“Oh. Calm down. Simone’s twenty-two.”
“She looks fourteen.”
“We’re paid good money not to notice that this guy likes them young, or that the last woman could only get off on adultery.”
“That’s sick.”
“Yeah, I had to have a wife for a month.”
He glanced over his shoulder at me. I could feel the heat in my cheeks. “So you’re a love interest?” Stupid girl, I thought. Look at him. Of course he is.
“Sometimes,” he said, and while his tone told me he knew what I was thinking, he didn’t sound regretful. “It’s not all bad. Nice pay bump. At least I get normal ones, when someone goes for my type.”
“Probably pretty often.” I was puffing out big breaths with every labored step up the hillside.
He looked back again, squinting. “Was that a compliment?”
“No. Just an observation.”
“Mm-hm. Isn’t it better if that creep does that in here, with someone who only looks like a teenager? World’s not safe out there.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be catering to men like him, letting him think it’s okay.”
“ Lady! ” he huffed, wheeling around, and I stopped short.
But he cracked a grin, and finished, “I’m just a whore…”
I sputtered a laugh that sounded foreign in my ears, and, satisfied, Henry went on walking.
He made the top before me and turned back to offer a hand. I hesitated only a moment before accepting, and he gave a great pull and I stumbled up onto the ridge with him. To one side the village was starting to slowly wake. On my left, the forest sprang densely to life but I could see through the scraggly, dead tops of their branches where the sky was beginning to lighten to pinks and oranges. I caught my breath, Henry waited a moment and then began heading into the woods.