The Wild Dead

by Carrie Vaughn

  “Kellan,” Enid said sharply. “What are you talking about? What thing?”

  Whatever Kellan was looking for, he’d never find it the way he was searching, at random, digging in the same patches of mud and blinking blindly through tears. Cautiously, she stepped closer. She expected him to lash out and prepped for it, ready to grapple with him if need be. He lurched from one spot to the next, dropped to kneel again, and she took this chance to put her hand on his shoulder. “Kellan, stop. You’ve got to stop!”

  Finally he looked up at her, eyes round, and let out a shuddering breath. He slumped, sobbing, inconsolable, hands covering his face, streaking himself with the sticky brown mud. It clotted his hair, matted his clothes. He didn’t seem to notice, or maybe he didn’t care.

  Enid put an arm across his shoulders, trying to comfort him, not knowing why he needed comforting. Maybe he’d known Ella a whole lot better than he’d let on.

  “Kellan, hush,” she said, to soothe him. Tried not to be impatient, but she really wanted to know what was going on here, and he didn’t seem inclined to speak. “What’re you looking for?”

  He leaned into her, but she still wasn’t convinced he was really aware of her, that he recognized exactly who she was. He was responding to the presence of another person, that was all.

  “Help me understand,” she said. “What are you doing?” She was about to ask Teeg to run up the hill to get Mart or Neeve. Maybe one of them could calm the man down.

  “She wasn’t one of us,” he said weakly. “Pretended, but she never was. Why did she go? Why did she stay away? She shouldn’t have come back.”

  “Are you talking about Ella?” Enid said. What he said had to mean something; Enid should be able to figure this out. “Did she pretend to be Coast Road? Was there something else going on with her?”

  “No, no!” he said, and put his hands over his face again. He acted like someone making a confession. “It’s Neeve, I’m talking about Neeve!”

  Maybe not a confession, but a betrayal.

  Enid glanced at Teeg, confused, seeking the piece of information that was missing. It was like a rock in her shoe, tiny but aggravating. It could ruin a whole trip. Her partner shook his head, just as lost as she was.

  “What’s this got to do with Neeve?” she said to prod Kellan, desperately trying to keep calm. She wanted to shake him, but then he’d never talk again. Had Neeve, that quiet, unassuming woman, killed Ella? Enid would never have thought so, but something had set Kellan off.

  “Thought Neeve would want to go back.”

  “Go back where?”

  He pointed up the river, up to the hills. To wherever Ella had come from.

  The logic of this belonged to Kellan alone.

  “Teeg, we’ve got to get him out of this muck,” Enid said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Teeg said. Kellan had cried himself out, and he let them, one at each arm, pull him to his feet. They didn’t quite have to carry him, but he hung between them, listless, his feet part walking, part dragging. “What’s got him so upset?”

  Enid kept trying. “Kellan, what’s wrong? Can you tell me?” No, he couldn’t, and remained quiet.

  Last House was a couple of miles away, so Enid steered Kellan toward Bonavista, to the front steps of the main cottage, where Juni had remained, watching them, worry pinching her face.

  “What’s wrong, what’s happened?” she asked, but Enid didn’t have an answer.

  “Sit him on the steps there, thank you. Juni, can you go get a cup of water? A big one. And a spare cloth. Thanks.” She didn’t give Juni a chance to say no. If the household didn’t want to take care of everyone, then they shouldn’t have parked themselves right here on the front of the road. Juni rushed up the steps to comply.

  Enid wasn’t a medic—she couldn’t diagnose Kellan—but she guessed he was having some kind of anxiety episode, an uncontrollable panic. Speaking softly, she offered to hold his hand, and he clung to it hard, like he was drowning.

  “Can’t really blame you,” she murmured. “Murdered bodies ought to make everyone panic, yeah?”

  Kellan let out a sigh that almost had a smile in it. The man was exhausted.

  Juni returned with water and a damp cloth; by then Kellan had recovered enough to take a long drink and wash up his own face. His breathing had steadied, though his body was still clenched, like he expected an attack.

  The Bonavista woman hovered—loomed, really—regarding Kellan with sharp focus. Waiting for him to blow up, maybe. Kellan wouldn’t say anything as long as Juni lurked.

  Enid pointed up the hill. “Do me a favor, Juni—can you run and get Mart from Last House?”

  Juni hesitated. Likely she didn’t want to go all that way to her least favorite place in the settlement to deliver a message. Or maybe she didn’t want to miss what was happening here.

  Enid continued. “Or maybe you could get Tom to do it? Is he back from Everlast yet?”

  “Yes, he’s out back—”

  “Then send him up to Last House. Kellan needs a friend, and Mart might be able to help. Can you do that? Thanks,” Enid said curtly, to dismiss Juni, willing her to leave. Juni trotted to the back of the house to find Tom.

  And that was why investigators wore the uniform. So much easier when people just did what you told them to, when there wasn’t really time to argue. Still, Enid likely had only a few moments to question Kellan before Juni came back.

  Teeg planted his staff. “I’ll keep a lookout for her,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  Kellan drained the cup of water and continued clutching it with both hands, staring out at the marsh.

  “Kellan. Can you tell me what you were looking for out there?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not important. I just . . . She didn’t have it, so I thought it might have got dropped.”

  “Teeg and I searched that area yesterday. We didn’t find anything.”

  “Yeah. But I just thought . . .”

  “What was it? If it turns up someplace else, maybe I’ll recognize it.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  This was starting to drive Enid just a little bit crazy. He’d been looking for something—maybe to keep her and Teeg from finding it. Accusing Kellan of hindering an investigation would likely send him into another panic, so she refrained. The next question: Was he trying to protect himself? Or someone else?

  “Kellan,” she said, as gently as she knew how. “I really want to learn what happened here, and I really need your help. What were you looking for?”

  His face screwed up, highlighting lines of mud still caught in the furrows at the corners of his eyes, around his nose. He heaved a shuddering breath, one last sob escaping.

  “A knife,” he said.

  Chapter Ten • the estuary

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

  Just a Knife

  Kellan tried to describe the knife—“Just a knife, a normal knife!” he said; Coast Road–made, forged, with a polished bone handle and a carved flower on the end. The blade was old and well sharpened, maybe seven or eight inches long. Exactly the kind of weapon that might have killed Ella. It had belonged to Neeve at one time, Kellan said, but they traded it to Ella for leather a couple of years before.

  “An expensive trade,” Enid suggested, but Kellan shook his head.

  “They don’t have blades, not like that. Forged. Right? Them, they grind pieces of salvage for blades. A good knife like that? That’s treasure for them. They always have leather. And, well—Neeve . . . Neeve liked her. Ella wouldn’t have just left it somewhere; she must have dropped it.”

  Or her killer had taken it, used it, kept it, Enid thought. The solution still eluded her. Ella could have been killed anywhere, which meant the knife could be anywhere. Assuming it was the knife that killed her, and not an ax, or something else.

  “Why didn’t you say anything about this yesterday?” Teeg asked.

  Kellan sniffed loudly, on the edg
e of sobbing again. “I barely remember yesterday. Who would do such a thing? Today I remembered, and I thought . . . if I could find the knife, if I knew she had the knife, then I knew . . . I knew that it hadn’t . . . that someone hadn’t . . .”

  “That someone hadn’t used it to kill her,” Enid said softly. He nodded. “Kellan, why did you say those things about Neeve? About Neeve not belonging?”

  “What?”

  “When you were digging in the mud, I was asking you why, and you said some things about Neeve.”

  “I . . . I’m not sure. What did I say? I wouldn’t have said anything about Neeve, I wouldn’t have!”

  “This is useless, Enid,” Teeg said, scowling.

  Enid frowned. Kellan might have been telling the truth. He might have spoken without even realizing it. But the way he shut down, his stare, his trembling grip on the cup of water—he was hiding something.

  Yesterday Enid would have insisted that the old case against Neeve didn’t have anything to do with this new, surprise investigation, any more than it had to do with the investigation of the house at Semperfi. Now, everything about this settlement seemed off balance, all tangled up, and Enid found it exhausting.

  Movement drew her attention—a young guy with a flop of black hair jogging across the bridge. Tom, off to talk to Last House.

  “Kellan,” Enid said. “Mart will be here in a little bit to look after you. Can you sit here and rest until then?”

  He nodded and let out a sigh. “Yeah. Thanks. Thank you.” He still looked grief-stricken.

  Teeg continued studying him, with an accusing gaze. “If you remember anything else you forgot to say, you’ll tell us, right?”

  Kellan just stared back at him.

  “It’s all right,” Enid said gently, and went around the house to look for Juni. She ran into the woman coming the other way. Juni let out a squeak and stepped back.

  “You startled me!”

  “Sorry,” Enid said, smiling blandly.

  “I sent Tom off. It’ll be a while before Mart gets here. I assume it’ll be Mart, he’s got the sense out of that bunch.”

  “Yeah, he seems a bit of a caretaker.”

  “That bunch needs it.”

  Enid tilted her head, inquiring, but Juni waved off the unspoken question. “Never mind.” She nodded to the front of the house, referring to Kellan. “Is that one going to be okay?”

  Honestly, Enid wasn’t sure. Kellan was holding something back, and it was making him anxious and scared. But she also had the impression he was often anxious and scared, and she didn’t know how far outside normal this was for him. “I think so,” she said. “Once all this passes and things get back to normal.”

  “Normal,” Juni said wryly, with a hmph. “Though I suppose this is normal for you, all this . . . mess.”

  “A thing like this is never normal. I know she isn’t your favorite person, but can I ask you about Neeve?”

  “If it’ll help, yeah, sure.”

  “Thanks. Let’s go inside.” Enid didn’t want anyone eavesdropping.

  Enid followed Juni into the house.

  “Get you something to drink?” Juni asked brightly, bustling, in her element. A little like Olive in that respect.

  “No, thanks,” Enid said. “Out on the marsh, Kellan said something odd: that Neeve left, that she should have stayed away. Do you know what he might have been talking about?”

  “It just keeps coming back to her, doesn’t it?” Juni’s mouth twisted.

  “What is it?” Enid prompted. The words were there; Juni just wasn’t saying them.

  “I don’t like talking about it. It’s embarrassing, I think. What she did was so horrible, I didn’t want any of it to rub off on me.”

  “You don’t look that much alike,” Enid said, and Juni chuckled. Relaxed, just a bit.

  “What I didn’t say was that the contact went both ways. It isn’t just that Neeve was trading with the wild folk, inviting them down, wanting them to stay—she used to go walking up the hill. She’d be away for days at a time. She was going to see them. They’d never have come this far down the river if not for her, if she hadn’t found them first.”

  “So you didn’t always have contact with them? They didn’t always come looking for trade?”

  “Oh no. That was all Neeve. I don’t know that she was ever happy here, in the Estuary. Especially after what happened.”

  “With the investigation, you mean. When she cut out her implant.”

  “Yeah.” Distracted, Juni leaned up against the counter and faced the opposite wall, her gaze turned inward. To memories, maybe. “Just goes to show she’s always been a troublemaker. All the Last House folk, that’s how they ended up there. Mart wanted to be by himself, and then, well. He kept taking in the strays. What else would you expect?” She turned her crooked smile toward Enid, like an apology.

  Grudges over something like banners, and lack of them, could last forever. Enid didn’t know what to do with this information, whether it was any more than gossip. But she tucked it away, just in case. This need to assign blame annoyed Enid, because it caused folk to make assumptions—made them think they knew exactly what was what, and that they didn’t have to actually look at facts.

  Enid masked her frustration. Keep Juni talking, see what fell out. “So Neeve traveled. Made friends with the folk in whatever settlement they have upriver.”

  “That’s right. They started going back and forth, then. She’d go up there, then they’d come here. I could never see why she liked them so much.”

  “Did she ever talk about leaving for good? Going into the hills and not coming back?”

  That happened sometimes. Not very often. Those who didn’t want to follow the rules—who didn’t care about the Coast Road and banners and the rest—could leave. They rarely did, since it meant being banned from the markets, from everything familiar, from the shelter of the road.

  “Oh, not in so many words. But she was never happy, you know? Was a time I assumed she’d go and not come back.”

  The kind of stigma that came from cutting out one’s implant might have had something to do with that, Enid thought. People tended not to forget that kind of thing. She shouldn’t have come back, Kellan had said.

  Juni said, softly, “Not so easy to just walk away, in the end.”

  Enid needed to talk to Neeve about this. Get some more details, who else might have traveled back and forth regularly, if any of Ella’s people might be willing to talk to Enid. Briefly, she wondered if there was a way to deliver Ella’s body back to them. But without any of Ella’s folk to talk to, she didn’t know where to take the body. And even if she did know, without a well-cleared path to whatever distant settlement, several people would need to take time to carry it there. And the body would never last long enough for such a trek.

  Juni found something to do, grabbing a pitcher and filling it with water from the pump. “It’s not like they even do anything, up at Last House. They’re all just scavengers. Might as well be wild.”

  Enid said, “Nothing wrong with scavengers. You all wouldn’t have much timber otherwise, I think.”

  “But they’ll never get a banner.”

  “Not everyone wants one,” Enid said. And thought of Olive, and the strange pulsing of her belly when the little one pressed out a hand or a foot. She’d call Enid and the others over to put their hands on her, to feel the movement. For a long time Enid had thought she didn’t want a banner. Now that Serenity household had one, she thought of little else.

  “I suppose—” Juni started, then paused, like she didn’t actually understand at all. “I imagine we’re lucky to get any around here. This is a hard place to live. A hard place to raise babies.”

  “Bonavista earned banners,” Enid said.

  Juni smiled sadly. “It’s like so many other things; you always want more, don’t you? But every time we get a new case of malaria, it sets the banners back a couple more years. And I think . . . well.”


  “Well what?”

  “That Bonavista is still being punished for not stopping Neeve from doing what she did.”

  Interesting, how few people said the words, the details of Neeve’s crime. That she cut out her implant. That she presumably wanted a child without waiting to earn a banner. If Neeve really had walked away from the Estuary, into the wild, would she be spoken of at all back here? Did they wish they could forget her?

  “Could you have stopped her, do you think?” Enid asked.

  Juni must have thought of that question so many times over the years. Her answer came instantly. “No, I don’t think so. I hardly knew her by then, she was gone so much. She’d gotten so quiet. So strange. People say twins are supposed to be magical—they can tell what the other is thinking, sense each other’s pain. But I don’t think I ever knew her. I hated that we looked alike. I always made sure we dressed different. So people would never mistake us.”

  Enid took out her notebook and flipped to a dog-eared page, quickly read over it just to be sure she had her details right. “The old household, Bridge House, wasn’t dissolved after the investigation.” The household wasn’t held responsible; the investigators on the case had punished Neeve alone.

  “No, but Bridge House folk got discouraged. Weren’t many of us to start with. Three transferred out right off.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Oh no—I like it here. This is home. Then I met Jess at the Morada market. And well, seemed a good fit. Starting a brand-new house can be an adventure. Even when you’re picking up the pieces of an old one.”

  Enid nodded. “Oh yes, starting a new household is a challenge. The best kind, though.”

  “You say that like you know all about it.” Juni’s smile widened, making for a bright, open expression. She seemed younger. Juni liked talking about families, Enid decided. She clung to families, after what had happened to her first one.

  “I do. I helped start a household back in Haven. Serenity.” Where Enid’s family was right now, where she ought to be too.

  “I heard somewhere that investigators don’t have households. You just travel up and down the Coast Road looking for trouble.”