by Lumen Reese
“Okay.”
I moved to a small crowd around a fish stall, and asked anyone who was looking my way, “Excuse me, have you seen a man in a blue sweater today? Anyone.”
I got stink-eyes and head shakes all around. I moved on, keeping sight of Henry as he crouched to talk to two men in a rowboat right alongside the nearest dock. Passing by on the road, two women in Victorian dresses, with lace umbrellas.
“Excuse me, ladies?”
They stopped. They seemed to be a mother and daughter, and while the mother looked at me disapprovingly, the daughter -a few years younger than me-smiled kindly. “Yes?”
“Have you seen a man in a blue sweater around?”
“Oh!” the mother called, plucking herself up like a chicken ruffling its feathers. “ Have we. He stuck out like a sore thumb. He ruined the atmosphere. If you’re just going to let people wander around and do whatever they want, I don’t know what we pay you for.”
Realizing I was speaking to a buyer, I felt a bit nervous, and was summoning the strength to grovel when the woman’s daughter spoke up.
“Obviously they’re trying to rectify the situation, mom. If you couldn’t suspend your disbelief, you shouldn’t have booked us this getaway.”
“We should get some kind of discount for this disruption. It takes me completely out of the moment.”
“Mom, I see dad over there,” the daughter said, pointing at the nearest row of shops to the water’s edge. “Go act like you’re strangers while I talk to her.”
I followed her gaze to where a gray-haired man was conspicuous against the crowd. He wore the blue coat and smart uniform of a man of significant rank in the royal navy. He was watching us, but tried to look distracted when the mother started over.
The daughter offered her hand to me. She had a round face and big eyes. “Elena.”
“Stella.”
“Stella, that’s a beautiful name,” she said. Then, watching her parents at the street corner, she sighed. “My birthday gift, and they decide to come along to rekindle their marriage. But now you’re here!” she clasped my hand still in both of hers. “This is fantastic, ask me anything.”
“Well, where did you see the man in the sweater?”
“It was on the main stretch, in town. He was heading for the shore, that’s why I wanted to come for a walk, to see if I could find him again.”
“And that’s all?”
“I wish I could be more help. We can meet up later, and I can help you look!”
“That’s alright, but thank you.”
She looked dejected, and admitted in a low voice, “I thought maybe you were for me. But I guess my folks wouldn’t have allowed that.”
And she walked off to join her parents.
She seemed so sad. I was stunned for a minute, watching her go, but I shook my head to clear it and moved over to Henry.
“Hey!” he said, “Any luck?”
“Found someone who saw him, but that doesn’t help us any.”
“Right.”
I chewed my lip for a minute. The sun was hanging low in the sky, out over the horizon. “Why did a bunch of people see him this time, when almost no one saw him in the Hollow?”
Henry was distracted, keeping his eyes at work scanning the crowds that passed us by. “Population density.”
“No. Why is he down at the shore, anyway? He was looking in cellars and caves, last we knew. Something secluded. A ship wouldn’t work, there are always people on ships. Maybe he let himself be seen, and he chose this area because it wasn’t where he really wanted to be, he could be leading us astray. Looking for him here will only be a waste of time.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“We try to find a place he might look into, to cut him off,” I declared. “We need maps, and people who know the area. We might as well find a place to stay, so we can set up shop.”
“Good, I’m starving.”
I looked up the main stretch of Ocra Port, cobbled stone slanting downward. I didn’t start back up into the line of shops, though. “But I hate to just sit around while that other guy is getting closer.”
“Maybe we can find a place to check out, tonight. Come on.”
He put an arm around my shoulders that I shrugged off, turning and walking down the length of the dock to the the clipper ship with its sails furled and a single man on its deck, whittling.
“Excuse me? Can I come up?”
He looked over, squinting. Clean shaven, well dressed, but not handsome, he nodded and focused again on his wood. Henry followed behind me.
“We work for the company,” he said. “Henry, and Stella.”
“Figured,” the man said. “Thomas. Can I help you?”
“This might sound impossible, but are there any places around that are very secluded? Anything would help.”
“There’s the trading post a lot of us use. Sickness Island.” He turned and pointed at a spot on the horizon. “The small one. We meet there, trade, and leave. There’s a town on that island that’s abandoned. Supposed to have been a plague, but no story lines ever run through there.”
“That sounds interesting. Can you think of anything else?”
“There’s the cemetery outside of town, to the east. People do go through there, sometimes, but it’s usually pretty empty, and there are mausoleums and stuff.”
“Okay. Okay.” I looked at Henry, who was peering over the ship’s rail, and I wondered if he had ever been on a boat before. “Those both sound good. Could you take us out to the island?”
“Not right now,” Thomas answered. “Crew is done for the night. I could take you in the morning. We leave around ten.”
“Great.” I held out my hand, which he shook obligingly. “Thank you.”
“Come back tomorrow, be here early.”
“Alright.”
I turned to Henry and he shrugged, gesturing for me to go ahead down the gangplank first.
“So that’s it, we go to the island in the morning. Let’s get some dinner.”
“We should go to the cemetery tonight,” I said.
“It’ll be dark by the time we get there,” he said, beginning up the inclined street. “Do you really want to go stumbling around a cemetery in the dark, looking for a man who could be dangerous?”
“Yes. And you’re coming with me, right?”
“Yes,” he sighed. “But dinner first.”
“Deal.”
*
The sun was down but the sky had not fully darkened when we reached the hilltop cemetery outside Okra Port. We each had a lantern as we stepped inside a rickety gate of gnarled wood. Headstones were in sloppy rows, some round stone, square stone, little plaques in the ground. There were wooden crosses with carved names and dates that I couldn’t help but to reach out and touch.
Henry saw that, and said, “I asked our host at the inn and he said that most of these graves are for show, but a few of them are real, for extras who died here and had nowhere else to go.”
“That’s appalling,” I muttered.
“Why?”
For a moment I couldn’t even put my finger on it. “Real people’s graves, being used as props. -Let’s check out this mausoleum.”
We flicked on our lamps and I stepped first into the tiny building with the high ceiling. It was all marble, and the walls held plaques, multiple tombs with a few different family names.
“There’s nothing here,” I realized immediately.
“If we don’t know what he’s looking for, how can we know this isn’t it?”
“I don’t know, but this isn’t right.”
“Alright, fine. Let’s go get some sleep.”
I lingered just a minute as he waited in the entryway. But the more I stood there, the more sure I was that it wasn’t the right place.
We went back to the inn we had found to bunk at earlier, the Little Bird Inn. It was a place with big windows, three stories, and they had given us two rooms, conjoining. The doors between our rooms were Frenc
h, and once I watched Henry’s light flick off through the muted glass panels in the center, I got up and checked the locks. The door which led to the hallway, I wedged a chair under the handle for extra protection.
I had a window, which only latched. But we were on the second floor, and it was a long way down to the street below, dotted with globes of golden light from lanterns strung along the street. There were still people out there, and faint music coming from a bar next door.
My exhaustion hit me all at once. I crawled into the soft bed and could barely pull the covers up before my eyes were closing and I was asleep.
Chapter Nine
I woke to a bell in the morning, chiming loud, eight times.
Henry was there, tapping at the door a minute later. “Stella? You up?”
“Yeah,” I called.
I brushed my hair and teeth and changed into a new set of clothes that had been left folded on the table the night before. I headed down and saw Henry spooning scrambled eggs onto his pla t e from a steaming bowl at the communal table. I pulled out a chair and joined him, taking the eggs when he was done. There was ham and fruit, too, and I ate, quickly but thoroughly.
Henry and I looked said nothing while we ate, but when we looked over at each other, he would grin a wolfish grin and I would smile, and shake my head, and keep chewing. Finally we put our forks down and he said, “Ready?”
“Ready.”
We made for the door, down the street to the dock and approached the ship where we had met Thomas. It was full of men loaded cargo onto the deck, and working up in the sails. Thomas waved for us to head over as soon as his eyes locked on me.
“It’s a good thing you’re early. I did some asking around last night. A captain I know says he ferried a man out to the island, yesterday. Said he wasn’t wearing modern clothes, but he wasn’t schedule to go out, either.”
I looked at Henry. “Maybe that’s why he had no problem being seen. He changed is clothes and that was all we had to go on.”
“We also have a crappy sketch,” he reminded me.
“This captain,” I asked Thomas, “What’s his name?”
“Deacon. Captain of the Mary-Ann. Down there.” He pointed toward the starboard side where there was a row of at least a dozen ships.
“Thank you,” I said, and started back down the gangplank.
Henry followed, and we went walking down the shore, checking the names of the ships we passed by. The sixth had Mary-Anne painted on its side. Larger than Thomas’s ship had been, it had two masts, with twin sails on each. Men were working on it, and we had to hurry up the gangplank to avoid them.
The captain was a man with a dark beard, but no hair on his head. Burly and tall, he could easily have been terrifying, even without the sword and pistol at his hip. But when I approached him, his smile was timid.
“Hello, girl,” he said, “You must be the investigator. And you, big fella,” he clapped a hand on Henry’s arm. “I’ll tell you what I can.”
“Please,” I urged him on.
“Alright, well, the man came aboard yesterday afternoon. We were late making our run to the island, we were the last ones out. He asked to join us. He wasn’t on my script, so I figured he was either an extra joyriding on his time off, or a buyer going off-book. -They always do whatever the hell they like, anyway. I took him out, he kept to himself. When we reached the island, the guy went marching into the woods, and didn’t come back my way. Someone else could have given him a lift back here, though.”
“But he might still be on the island?” Henry asked, “In the abandoned city.”
“It’s possible.”
A man called from the ship’s aft, “Ready to sail!”
“Cast off!” Deacon hollered back. “You are coming with us, aren ’t you ?”
“Yes,” I said. I found my phone in my satchel and pulled up the very blank, nearly shapeless face of the sketch of the fugitive. “Does this look at all like the man you took to Sickness Island?”
Deacon squinted. “Sure. But then it also looks a bit like my sister, Carol.”
“When you’re finished for the day,” I said, “You need to contact the company, so we can get a better sketch.”
Looking a bit irritated, then, he gave a nod.
The anchor was raised, and the sails puffed out like a large man’s gut as the ship launched forward, slicing through dark water. It was a short sail, and I was alone with my thoughts. A few weeks until taxes. What could SHEEP be looking for? If they had infiltrated Four Quarters, then that had required a level of sophistication which made them very dangerous.
When we came up to the island, blanketed with tropical trees, another came into view beyond it, much larger. It had to be the other port that the sailors came to Sickness Island to trade with. The captain sought out a usual contact as the crew started to bring the cargo up, and Henry led the way down onto the dock.
“We sail in two hours, folks!” one man called after us .
He asked directions to the abandoned ruins of the city on the island, and we started off into the forest, following a stream that flowed into the ocean, fighting the slope of sand overgrown with weeds. When we reached higher ground, the forest floor was covered in thick moss, and bright flowers sprung out from in the shrubbery. One tree had an orchid growing around in, and made me think of Jericho.
After we had walked not more than ten minutes, I began to see short, red brick houses through the trees.
I stepped out of the thick foliage first. The weeds all around the empty structures rose to above my waist. The buildings were scattered on the hillside, some caved in with bricks strewn across the ground. The only one which reached a second story was a church with a large white cross on top. When I stopped to take it all in, the only sound was a faint wind rustling.
Henry set a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s look around. Just stay with me.”
“You stay with me ,” I said, and went through the open doorway of the first house I came to. Inside the floors were creaking wood, and the rooms were empty. Vines had crept up the next building I went into, and Henry came thudding in after.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Right place? Wrong place? What’s the vibe?”
“I don’t know. Let’s check the church.”
We made our way across an empty courtyard. As soon as I stepped in, my eyes locked on the fireplace at the back of the room, its metal grate torn off the brick chimney and exposing the hole in the back of the wall. It looked empty and dark and deep.
Henry, though, wandered over to the stairs and took the first few steps up, craning his neck to look up at the steeple.
“Henry!” I called.
In a few seconds he loped in through the doorway again, tensed for a fight. “What?”
I nodded. He followed my gaze, and I moved to crouch by the hole. A foul smell wafted up from inside. I dropped my lantern and it clattered but didn’t break. It threw its light far enough for me to see either of the side walls, and everything was still. “I can see the floor. It looks like there’s a room down here.” And with that, I shoved myself feet-first into the hole and hit the ground hard a second later, crumbling. Pain climbed a ladder from my ankles to knees to my ass.
“Are you crazy!? Get back up here!”
“Coming or not?” I asked.
I grabbed the lantern. When I turned I could see the end of the rectangular room, and I gasped. Henry hit the ground in a crouch as I eased forward. Along the stone walls were chains and shackles equal distances apart. Enough to hold a fifty people. One set of shackles at the end held a girl was very obviously dead. Her skin was gray, clinging to bone. The angles of her face were severe, almost alien from the sunken eyes and taut skin over her cheekbones.
“She looks like a slave, chained up like that,” Henry said. “Someone probably kidnapped this poor girl.”
I wasn’t listening. My head spun and sweat broke out on my forehead as I hunched over in the back corner of the room and heaved up my b
reakfast.
“We need to call Jericho,” he said.
I caught her breath. “I have a transmitter that I can activate, and he’ll show up.”
“No… let’s wait until we get back. There are phones in every town, in case of emergencies.”
“Why would they build this?” she whispered. “A secret… torture chamber. What the hell is this place!?”
He couldn’t answer. He grabbed the edges of the hole in the floor, braced a foot on the wall and heaved, managing to get his elbows up to ground-level. He hauled himself out. A surge of fear made me hurry over to stand in the light coming down from the church up above, claustrophobic and worried suddenly that he would leave me. But he offered a hand and dragged me up.
“Do you think the fugitive did this?”
“Who else?” I gasped, breathing deeply to calm my stomach.
The girl was recently dead. She wasn’t decomposed and she wasn’t being eaten by pests. I would have guessed less than a day, but I wasn’t a doctor.
Henry said, “We need to get back. The ship will leave soon.”
“We’re just going to leave her?”
“We have to,” he said gently. “It’s a crime scene.”
I groaned. “I just puked in a crime scene.”
Henry handed me a canteen. I took a drink, rinsing my mouth.
They started back through the woods in silence. Every time I blinked, the girl’s face was there. She was younger than me, probably only a teenager. She’d been starved. She’d been abandoned. She’d probably died cold and alone and terrified. And if we had been there a day earlier, or caught the fugitive a day earlier, she might still be alive.
“Don’t worry about her,” Henry said suddenly, reading my mind. “She’s in a better place.”
“If that’s what you believe,” was my answer.
He filled the silence once more with, “Maybe that’s what he was looking for. A place to leave the body.”
“But I found that room as soon as we went in. He could have closed the grate back up. It doesn’t make sense…”
We walked some more. His eyes kept lingering on me until I would glance over, then he would look away. When I caught him looking, he smiled apologetically, reached out and nudged my arm with his. I rolled my eyes, but it did pull a smile from me, even though it faded quickly.