The Seer

by Jordan Reece

  “Who are her friends?”

  “I don’t know any of them except her brother has come once or twice and I’ve heard her introducing him, and there was an older man one time she said was her uncle or cousin. I don’t remember. Most are young, but not all; I’ve seen one fellow bring his baby along. He didn’t come with his child to this one with the bonfire, or I’m sure it would have toddled straight into the flames and burned itself to a crisp. No one would have been minding it, least of all the father. I just wanted to cry in the morning when the sun shined down on all the destruction. Every inch of the yard here was in tatters, and a part of mine, too. The bonfire pit was still smoking, twisted metal bits jutting up from it. I can’t imagine what the inside of her house must have looked like: splattered with vomit from end to end, no doubt, and holes kicked in the walls. Her guests had all gone by then. The girls were agape to see the aftermath. They spied some of my statues tossed about over in Grance’s yard and rounded the fence to bring them back. Then Grance came out and pushed some money on the girls to give to me, and that bicycle.”

  Scoth’s pen stopped. He looked up. “A bicycle?” he asked pleasantly.

  “They’d been betting on cards on top of everything, and a friend had lost his bicycle to her. But she didn’t want it. She said the girls could have it. Molly declined but Grance insisted, and they were a bit frightened of her so they just brought it back here with the statues.”

  “And is it still here?” Scoth asked, his shoulders tense.

  “They took it home with them. It’s much too big for Patty, she’s only eight, and Cordelia. She’s ten. Molly could just about manage it. She’s thirteen and a leggy girl, and her friend Sonora is even taller. I told them they should sell it and split the proceeds four ways to make up for that broken night of sleep.”

  “What color was it?” Jesco asked, his heart pounding.

  “Blue. A beautiful sapphire blue. It was a very nice bicycle, but I wouldn’t expect any less from a friend of Grance’s. They’re from well-off families, judging from their clothes and jewels and carriages. But why are you interested in that specifically?”

  Scoth came clean about their purpose, and then they were in the woman’s living room as she hunted down her calendar. “Enza Elveig, and that’s Ocel,” she called by way of introduction. Her husband was sitting upon an armchair, looking stunned as he considered the replacement photograph of Hasten Jibb and picture of Tallo Quay. He was not one to be rushed, and Scoth was letting him peruse the pictures as long as he liked.

  Mrs. Elveig bustled back, her gardening gloves removed, and paged through a calendar. Her husband motioned to Jesco, who went to the chair and said, “Yes?”

  “This is the fellow killed?” He pointed to Jibb.

  “Yes, that’s him. Do you recognize him?”

  “No. There are so many couriers that go down this lane. I don’t pay them any mind. She gets a lot of deliveries, the Dolgange woman. I heard her complaining to her husband once about how she wanted to buy something, and he said that she spends too much. Money slips through her fingers like water. He’s a nice fellow, Dircus. I’ve only spoken to him a few times, but always nice. I can’t say the same about his wife. She’s one of those sorts that only has something to do with you if you’ve got something she wants. At least that’s how I read her. Since I don’t have anything she wants, she’s got no reason to be pleasant. Not even a wave over the fence. And she wasn’t at all pleasant when her husband said no about what she wanted to buy. It was a painting she was after. And then I saw it being carried in not three weeks later, so the lady found her money somehow.” He set down the photograph to examine the picture of Tallo Quay. “No, not this fellow either.”

  “It was the same night,” Scoth said to Jesco with intensity. The party and Hasten Jibb’s murder had happened at the same time.

  “And you think the bicycle belonged to the dead man?” Mr. Elveig said.

  “Yes,” Jesco said. “Was there anything you noticed about it?”

  “I helped the girls to ride it a little, before my nephew came to pick them up and take them home. It took us a while to figure out how to fit it in when the carriage was full of girls and bags and what-not. But we finally squashed it in there. Lovely color, that blue. There were silver letters on the side of the seat reading Fleetman.”

  That had been the brand of Jibb’s bicycle. It had to be his. He had left his home and ridden back to Melekei, right to the house next door and proceeded to lose his life. And for some reason his body was transported to Poisoners’ Lane and dumped there. Scoth showed the timepiece to the Elveigs and neither recognized it. They gave him the Cantercaster address of their nephew’s family, and the information that they had not seen Grance Dolgange for several days. They’d figured she had left early for her summer in the Sarasasta Islands, and were relieved to have her gone.

  In the carriage, Scoth could hardly sit still. “We’re going to put this together.”

  “What if he walked into that drunken party?” Jesco asked. “They sound like they could be prone to violence. What if a few fellows were picking on Jibb, goading him to fight, and killed him? Carriages were coming and going all night long, the husband told me. One could have had Jibb’s body inside.”

  “And they dumped him far from Melekei,” Scoth said. “That still doesn’t explain the timepiece.”

  “If Tallo Quay gave it to Torrus Kodolli to prove himself, and Kodolli gave it to his granddaughter . . .”

  “But it was nothing special. Why would she want it? Unless she gave it to one of her friends, a friend who ended up dumping the body for her or with her, and then it got caught on the nail and dragged off. But then why were none of that man’s memories in the timepiece for you to see?” Scoth looked out the window. “We need to track down that bicycle!”

  They rode to Cantercaster. The younger Elveig family lived only two miles from the asylum, in a small but sweet home with a picket fence around the garden. Janos Elveig answered the door, a trim man with a friendly disposition, and welcomed them in for a chat. The daughters spilled down the hallway to see what was going on, and their father said soberly that the detectives had come to talk about the night of the party and the bicycle.

  They were adorable girls, each a head taller than the one before, and all with long brown curls and bows of different colors atop their crowns. All three sat down upon the sofa, the oldest straightening her dress and the younger two imitating. Gently, Scoth said, “I understand there was a noisy party when you were visiting your great-aunt and great-uncle. Could you tell us everything you remember?”

  “Very noisy,” Molly said, her sisters nodding vigorously. “They were shouting and screaming-”

  “And burning things!” the littlest girl interrupted.

  “And burning things, yes, but let me finish and you can have your turn,” Molly said. “The burning didn’t come until later.”

  “Did you see a man arrive at the party upon a blue bicycle?” Scoth said. Jesco sensed that he was reluctant to show the photograph of the body or even talk about the murder to these girls.

  Molly shook her head. “No, sir. A lot of carriages came in the evening, and a bicycle that was green as a shamrock. We were out in the yard playing hide-a-penny when the people showed up. And then they stood about in the front and side garden saying . . .” She looked to her father, suddenly in desperate emotional straits.

  Watching from the doorway, the man said, “It’s all right, love. The detectives need to know exactly what happened for good or ill.”

  “They were saying very rude things to each other, and laughing as they drank. Cursing, kicking at the plants and picking the flowers, cursing again when they got thorns in their fingers. It wasn’t just whispered curses, like it’s all right when you’re alone and there’s no one to hear. It was loud. They called each other . . . demonic assholes.” Her eyes slid back to her father, who gave her more encouragement to keep going.

  Mortified, the girl said
, “One man was going about to look at all the women’s breasts and saying what sizes he liked and who had the best, and a woman shoved him in the fountain for it. Everyone laughed as they screamed swear words at each other. She said she’d seen what he had in his trousers and it wasn’t anything to brag about. The whole lot of them got fouler and fouler, even the oldest people, and my great-uncle turned his hose on them. It sprays out far. They went inside, yelling at us for getting them wet, and we went inside, too. It was getting too dark to play out in the yard anyway. Auntie and Uncle and all of us went to the kitchen. Do you want to tell the detectives what we did then, Patty?”

  “We made beaded purses,” said the youngest proudly. Cordelia was the middle child, and only nodded now and then to confirm what her sisters were saying.

  “We listened to music and made our purses,” Molly said. “Sonora’s was the prettiest, but all of them were quite nice. Sonora is my friend.”

  “And mine!” Patty insisted in umbrage.

  “Sonora is a good friend to all of us,” Molly amended. “We cleaned off the table and had our dinner, read the comics in the paper and it was bedtime. We didn’t have to sleep if we didn’t want to, but we had to be up in the spare room and quiet since it was night. But they weren’t being quiet. They’d come out of the house, mostly in the backyard. It was dark but they had lanterns. It was still hard to see anything. We watched from our window and there’s a tree blocking a lot of the view. But we saw that orange flame go licking up into the sky. Patty fell asleep, and Cordelia read a book. She couldn’t sleep with that noise. Sonora and I sat by the window and watched what little we could. We made a solemn pledge to never get drunk.”

  Jesco held back a smile as she went on. “I’ve never seen adults acting like that. They were . . . without decorum. Kissing and dancing, screaming curses, pretending to summon demons, and the fire would throw sparks into the air when something new was tossed in. Cordelia fell asleep around midnight. Sonora and I did some time after that. The noise still woke us up over and over. In the morning . . . it was awful. Cordelia screamed.”

  “Can you tell me about what you saw?” Scoth asked the middle child.

  Nervously, Cordelia said, “I woke up first and got dressed, sir. I wanted to see if those people were still there, and the view from the window in our room wasn’t good. So I went downstairs and outside to look over the fence. The carriages were all gone, and so was the green bicycle that had gotten propped up atop the fountain and the horse they’d been letting wander around the garden in the evening. But those people had come in my great-aunt and great-uncle’s yard at some point and torn a part of it up. I helped to decorate that garden with the statues, and they were all messed up. The flowers were stomped to bits and I knew my great-aunt was going to cry. She loves her flowers, sir. Everyone came out and saw it.”

  “They were in the other yard, some of the statues,” Patty said, about to burst from being quiet for so long. “We went to get them and the lady gave us a blue bicycle.”

  “She wouldn’t let us not take it,” Molly said. “She said, ‘Here, here, a brand-new bicycle! I don’t need it. Take it, take it! Have fun!’ She rolled it at us and I didn’t know what else to do so I took it.”

  “Did any of you hear a man shouting sometime in the night?” Scoth asked.

  “Sir, they were always shouting.”

  “And what did you do with the bicycle?”

  “We brought it home. It was much too big for Patty and Cordelia. I could just about ride it, but I already have a bicycle and it’s purple. I like purple better than blue. We let Sonora have it all to herself. She doesn’t have a bicycle, and she’s tall enough to ride it with the seat adjusted. She took it home with her.”

  “Do you know if she still has it?”

  “Yes. She rides it to school everyday.”

  “And where does she live?”

  “She lives just around the corner. Turn left at the door, pass three houses down, turn and that’s Sonora in the white house. Are you going to have to take her bicycle away? Is it evidence of a crime?” Anxiously, Molly said, “Sonora needs a bicycle, sir. Her family can’t afford one.” The littler sisters were aghast.

  “We may have to take it, since we believe it was stolen,” Scoth said.

  “But she will be reimbursed for its cost,” Jesco said. These girls were darling, and he hated to see them so distressed about their friend losing her bicycle. He had plenty of money to cover it.

  “Is there anything else you remember, even something that you think might not be important?” Scoth asked.

  Molly and Patty had nothing more to say, but Cordelia spoke hesitantly. “She wasn’t happy to see it there, sir.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The lady. Mrs. Dolgange wasn’t happy to see that blue bicycle when she came out of her house in the morning. It was parked below her porch and had tipped over into the bushes. I saw her face when we were over there picking up the statues. I thought that she was going to yell at us for being on her property, or be upset at how her friends had destroyed her whole garden and broken the fountain, but she just stared at that bicycle like she couldn’t figure out how it had gotten there and then . . . then she didn’t look happy about it. She covered her hands in her shawl to get it out of the bushes. Then she saw us there, and she gave it to us. Molly is telling it right, sir. She wouldn’t let us say no. She said that a friend lost it in cards to her, but what was she going to do with it?”

  “And it smelled,” Patty said. “Just a little, like someone had spilled ale on it. We cleaned it off. There was ale spilled on just about everything, even the statues and we had to wash those, too.”

  Scoth thanked them, and he and Jesco went outside. It seemed foolish to ride in the carriage such a short distance, so they started for the corner on foot. “He was naked,” Scoth said. “I bet that was some of the clothing that Mrs. Elveig saw getting tossed into the fire. It was Jibb’s. I wonder if his satchel went into it, too. But Grance Dolgange didn’t think about his bicycle, so she pawned it off fast on those girls. She knew they were just visiting her neighbors and would take it away home.”

  Sonora Khessmyn was a tall and slim girl, the only child of two aged parents. All of them were polite but intimidated at the badge of Scoth’s, and again he and Jesco listened to a story about the party. Sonora could not even bring herself to repeat the obscenities, and she took them into the backyard to see the bicycle in the shed.

  It was a sapphire blue Fleetman, lovingly tended, and with green and lavender ribbons twined around the handlebars. “I added those,” Sonora said. “Those weren’t there when Mrs. Dolgange gave it to us.”

  “We’ll have to take it,” Scoth said.

  Her eyes filled with tears, but she kicked the stand and pushed it to him. Jesco promised to have the money sent to her so that she could buy another, and that made her brighten a little. Scoth got her address before they left.

  The bicycle was too large to fit in the compartment beneath the carriage, so they parked it between the seats. It made a tight fit with the wheelchair. “Didn’t you want me to touch it there?” Jesco asked, overcome with uncertainty. “It might not be his-”

  “It is,” Scoth said with intensity. “This is Jibb’s bicycle, I have no doubt. The thrall might land you on the floor, so let’s get you back to the house where you can land on the sofa instead.” He gave the autohorse the destination and they drove away.

  They did not speak for most of the drive. There was nothing to say with the bicycle between them. At the house, Tammie gasped to see it come out of the carriage. She cleared space in the living room for it to be parked, and sat in a chair to watch.

  Scoth covered the sofa in one of Jesco’s spare blankets, and stood to the side. Removing his glove, Jesco approached the bicycle. Here were the answers that they had been searching for, locked in the cool metal skin and padded seat. They would know, and this could come to an end.

  “Go on, Jesco,” Scoth sa
id. “Let’s bring Hasten Jibb some peace.”

  It would bring all of them peace. Jesco touched his fingers to the handle.

  Chapter Eleven

  -he was-

  -he wasHe was Ansel and he loved this bicycle but it cost so much so much so much that he was going to have to get an Arkkadian instead but Fleetman was the best and everyone would go wild at school to see it and he just wanted to touch it one more time before he chose a lesser bicycle . . .

  -he was-

  -he was-

  -she was—

  She loved her son, her pride, her joy, but if Nini didn’t pick a damn bicycle in this store soon then she was going to have to ask for a chair to sit down while he dilly-dallied, her feet ached and this blue bicycle was so pretty . . .

  -she was-

  -he was-

  -she was-

  -he was-

  -he wasHe loved this bicycle and he had it, he had the money at last, he had the money! It was perfection, lightweight and fast as a bolt of lightning. Crack! Gone! There was no better bicycle anywhere, nothing and here it was and here he was and here was the money and sold!

  He was Hasten Jibb, and he owned a Fleetman. Pride filled him to walk the bicycle out the door and a man asked even before he mounted, “Is that a Fleetman?” And Hasten said yes. Quality, he loved quality, he was no pirate and he had no treasure chest but this was what he had instead and it was no less to him than rubies and emeralds and diamonds. Why did people want those things so much? They didn’t do anything but sparkle. At least clothes covered a body and he had fine duds, the finest duds, and now the bicycle, too. He rode it home, his pirate booty, but he had earned this and not looted it. People craned their necks to see the brilliant blue and he was so proud that he could burst.

  His favorite tale had been Snake of the Seas, one installment published every month that he grabbed up with the ink barely dry. Mama called them junk but no! No! Hasten forgot to breathe when he was reading them! How they’d battled over control of the Ribbons, Captain Vannen Chank of the dreaded pirate ship Mormodune and Lord General Viscey du Spelwether of the Ainscote Sea Guard! They fought and fought, winning and losing and betrayals and lost cargo, and then they came to the last battle and found out they were twin brothers separated at birth . . . amazing . . . That story had ended but he was rereading them, one installment a week so he could lose his breath all over again.