The Wild Dead

by Carrie Vaughn

  Mart shook his head. “Poor kid. Did you have to tell him what happened?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “He liked her,” Mart said.

  “Did they get along? Did they ever argue?”

  “You think he might have hurt her?” Mart asked.

  “We’re still trying to figure that out,” Teeg said.

  The head of Last House shrugged. “Yeah, they argued. He didn’t like being here, was always trying to get her to leave. She did all the trading; he just kept watch.”

  “Stood guard?” Enid asked.

  “Guard against what?” Mart asked, and Teeg looked at Kellan.

  If Teeg was trying to scare the guy, it worked. Kellan dropped his poker, launching a burst of sparks. He had a screwed-up look on his face again, still trying not to cry. Maybe still upset by all that had happened out on the marsh. By their own accounts they hardly knew the dead woman, but grief was strange. Maybe this touched on something else for him. “Leave us alone! It’s not our fault, it’s not!”

  Mart held out a calming hand. “Kellan, it’s all right. This isn’t about us. Really.” Then he raised an eyebrow at Enid. “Right?”

  “I don’t have it! I looked for it, it wasn’t there!” Kellan insisted. And ran off, down the hill.

  “Kellan!” Mart stood, stunned for a moment, glancing at the investigators, then at the fleeing Kellan. Then he dropped his knife and carving and ran after him.

  “Well, what do you make of that?” Teeg said, seeming a little too smug.

  Enid wasn’t sure it meant anything, except that Kellan had had more crash in on him than he was capable of dealing with over the past couple of days.

  “Let’s go find him,” Enid said with a sigh, and she and Teeg gave chase. He was younger and faster, so Enid let him get ahead. She’d already chased after one person today.

  The young investigator quickly outpaced Mart, but Kellan managed to keep ahead. He was stumbling, though, fighting against the slope of the hill. He’d taken off, paying no attention to the terrain. This side of the hill had no path, was all scrub and rocks. He kept looking back at the threat behind him. Inevitably, his footing slipped, and he went down, this time tumbling, flailing, unable to stop himself.

  Mart gasped and called out, “Kellan!”

  Teeg got to the fallen man first, grabbing his arm and hauling back like he thought Kellan might still try to get away. But Kellan was finished, sitting with knees pulled up, face pressed to his arms, sobbing. A cut across his temple was bleeding into his hairline.

  “I’m sorry, it’s my fault. I know what it looks like, but I didn’t mean, I shouldn’t have—” He cut himself off there, choking on his own breath, hugging himself. He wouldn’t look up.

  Enid stood back. She hardly knew what to do, how to soften this situation. Mart knelt by his friend, whispering something to soothe him, but Kellan kept repeating the vague apologies.

  Teeg looked hard at Enid. “See there? A confession.”

  “It’s not a confession, he hardly knows what he’s saying.” She knelt by Kellan, held his shoulders. Tried to be gentle, however much she wanted to squeeze an answer out of him. “Kellan. Something happened that you don’t want to talk about. I see that. But if we’re going to learn how Ella died, you need to tell us what you know.”

  He shook his head, over and over.

  Mart said, “Kellan, I know it’s hard, but the only way to make all this better is to talk.”

  “I don’t . . . I can’t . . . it’s such a blur, it’s all a mess—”

  Teeg said, “Kellan, did you use a knife on Ella and kill her?”

  “I—I didn’t want her here, so it must be my fault . . .”

  “So you did do it,” Teeg insisted, and Enid stood and took his arm.

  “Stop it. You’re pushing him.”

  “He did it, Enid. He’s all but said so.”

  “Exactly. He hasn’t answered your questions, and it’s all tangled in his head. You’re not going to get a clear answer from him now.”

  Mart stared at them, all anguish. “He couldn’t have done it! He just . . . he just isn’t like that!”

  “But what if I did!” Kellan pleaded. As if they could tell him. His eyes held confusion, helplessness.

  If he did it and didn’t remember, if he’d blacked it out of his memory somehow—what then? A murder always had at least one witness: the person who did the killing. But what if that witness was unreliable?

  “I don’t believe you,” Teeg said accusingly. “This, whatever you’re doing here, is an act. Play crazy and no one will believe you. You expect us to just walk away?”

  “But . . . I don’t think I did it . . .”

  “You don’t think? But you’re not sure?”

  Enid stepped in. “Teeg—”

  “I don’t remember!” Kellan insisted. Kellan, huddling on the ground, was surrounded now, the others looming over him. The man was frozen; he wasn’t going to say a word.

  Teeg was practically spitting. “I think you do remember, and it’ll go easier if you just tell us—”

  Enid grabbed Teeg’s arm and hauled him back.

  “Hey!” He tried to yank out of her grip, but she was ready for him. For a moment, he looked like he was going to take a swing at her. Part of her wanted him to, just to see what would happen next. Instead, she shoved him, putting some space between them, glaring.

  “The man isn’t stable and you’re pressuring him,” she said. “You need to stop it.”

  “But what if he did it? What if he’s a murderer?” Teeg pointed. So sure of himself.

  “I don’t trust his testimony. We find evidence. Where’s the evidence?”

  “We’ll never find any evidence; all we have is instinct!”

  “And you trust your instincts, do you? Think it’s infallible, that gut feeling?”

  “It’s all we have,” he said, but weakly now.

  “I would rather walk away than punish someone who can confess only while sobbing on a hillside with two investigators looming over him!”

  By the hard look in his eyes, the tension in his expression, Enid guessed that Teeg felt differently. Right, so they wouldn’t be able to walk away from this.

  Mart was staring at them. Investigators were supposed to present a united front. So much for that.

  Enid said, “Mart, we’re going to take a bit of a walk. See if you can calm him down. If he tells you anything, let us know, yeah?”

  He nodded quickly, reaching for Kellan and urging him to his feet. The man was weak, shaking. His hair had fallen to cover his face. As Enid took a last glimpse of him, he seemed to stop crying. That was something, at least.

  Meanwhile, she marched Teeg away, back toward the path. But he was insistent. “Kellan did it, I’m sure of it.”

  “What’s your evidence?” she asked tiredly.

  He counted off on his fingers. Didn’t take many of them. “He found the body. If she was scavenging, he might have seen her as competition. He might have been unhappy with how friendly the household was being toward her.”

  “Then why not bring it up with the rest of the household?” Every single person within a fifty-mile radius might have done it, she thought. She could make up a story for any one of them.

  “I didn’t say it would make sense. There’s something clearly wrong with the guy.”

  That didn’t make him a murderer. “Teeg, all you have is speculation.”

  “Speculation is all we have! Somebody killed her.”

  “And Kellan’s the easiest one to point the finger at, isn’t he?”

  “What if it’s easy because it’s true?”

  Their instincts were at battle. Enid’s gut told her they were still missing something, that none of this fit together. Teeg’s gut wanted to solve the case, right now.

  She said, “The last murder I investigated, the one in Pasadan—you know what the easiest solution to that one was? The simplest? That the victim just fell. Tripped and fell i
n his own workshop. Easiest thing there would have been to say it was an accident and walk away.”

  Teeg had read the report. He knew this. “So you’re saying the simple solution isn’t ever the right one.”

  “I’m saying, be suspicious of anything that comes easy. It makes you blind. At Pasadan, one more walk around the scene showed the smear of blood on the wall that meant someone else had been there, that someone had witnessed what happened. And we almost didn’t find it.”

  He frowned. “What if it’s impossible? What if there’s no possible way to find out what happened? We can never really know, can we? Without witnessing a thing ourselves.”

  “Hmm, wouldn’t that be something? Be omniscient? Able to witness everything we ever wanted? Get the answers to just about anything, then, couldn’t we?” She’d been born long after the Fall, but what if, somehow, she could see what the world was like before. The way it really was, and not the way they all thought it was from the stories, the cautionary tales handed down about waste and corruption. Despite how much she’d read—and she’d read so much in the Haven archives—she always wanted to know more.

  “I’m serious, Enid.”

  “We’re not omniscient. We can’t do it all. Maybe we just walk away.” It wouldn’t be the simplest decision in this case. No, walking away might be the hardest thing to do here. But they might not have a choice.

  Pointing back at Last House, Teeg said, “Mart won’t tell us anything he finds out. He’ll protect Kellan; that’s what households do.”

  “We’ll just have to risk it.” She spit out the words. Part of her thought walking away might be the best thing. But no—they’d already picked out too many threads. Had to clean up at least some of their mess. Enid straightened, rearranged her mental to-do list, and readied herself to go back into the fray. She nodded down the road. “You go. I’ll see what else I can do here, if anything.”

  Teeg glared hard at her, but did as she asked.

  Chapter Thirteen • the estuary

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

  Evidence

  Enid met Teeg for the first time at the start of the Semperfi case. She’d known his name; investigators sent one another updates about who was in training, who was thinking of training, and who was almost finished training, and shared advice. Their little cohort was close-knit; that helped with the job. Enid hadn’t been paired with a new partner since Tomas died. Instead, she’d been picking up nearby cases as she was needed. If she and Teeg worked well together, he might become her new partner. She’d been looking forward to working with him. It was part of why she took the case when she might have bowed out to stay home with Olive.

  When Enid had arrived at the committee house and investigator station in Morada, the young man was already there, going over records and prepping for the case—his first. He’d spread out ledgers and notebooks across the whole length of a table by a window, sunlight illuminating his work. She’d pulled up a chair next to him, and he’d immediately started talking.

  “I think I’ve got everything,” he said, showing her both his notes and all the records he’d reviewed. “Do I have everything?” He’d seemed like a kid, and she wondered if that meant she was getting old, if he looked too baby-faced and optimistic to be doing the job.

  She went over it all again and didn’t find anything wrong with his work. “Been six months since anyone’s been out there, so we might need to update some of this. We’ll see how it looks when we get there.” He eagerly added that to his long list of notes.

  “What about the old case, with the implant? That going to have a bearing on this one? If so, how do we handle it?” He pointed to the page in his notes that discussed Bridge House, Neeve cutting out her implant, the whole distant mess of it.

  “Ideally we won’t mention it at all. Happened a generation ago, shouldn’t be relevant to a construction mediation.”

  That was the first time he’d frowned. “But the woman cut out her implant. Doesn’t that mean something? About what she’s like, what the whole place is like?”

  “Not if she hasn’t done anything wrong since, so unless someone brings it up, it’s done. One case at a time, Teeg.” Enid tried to be gentle and mentor-like. Who was she, to be offering advice on anything? She’d barely gotten out of training herself, felt like. Some days she still felt off balance, especially without Tomas there to steady her. She didn’t feel ready to do that for someone else.

  At least this case was supposed to be easy, a simple mediation. A good one for a newly minted investigator to partner on.

  They finished their research, headed outside to a small yard at the front of the building. Noontime, the crossroads town was bustling with work and traffic.

  “We leave in the morning, yeah?” Teeg asked.

  Enid shook her head. “No reason we can’t leave in an hour. There’s a way station just a couple of hours out; we can get there by nightfall. The sooner we start, the sooner we can wrap it all up.” And the sooner she could get home to Serenity and the expected baby.

  Teeg ran off to finish his preparations. She was already packed from the trip up from Haven, and so had a few moments to herself.

  A man in a brown tunic joined her in the yard—another investigator, Teeg’s mentor. Enid didn’t know Patel well, but had crossed paths with him a few times. A big man, serious and thoughtful.

  “What d’you think?” he asked her, nodding after his student.

  “He reminds me of me ten years ago. Exhausting.”

  Patel chuckled, but didn’t really smile. “Just do me a favor and keep an eye on him, yeah? He may need a bit of reining in.”

  She raised a brow, studied her colleague, the set of his frown. It wasn’t just what he said, but the careful way he said it that raised an alarm. “You sure he’s ready for this?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said quickly. “He’s got to start somewhere. We all do.”

  This would be an easy case, she reminded herself. Wasn’t a whole lot that could go wrong. “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she assured Patel. “We’ll get along great and be back before you know it with the report.”

  “Exactly,” Patel said. “I look forward to hearing all about it.”

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

  At the time, Enid thought maybe Patel was just nervous. How Teeg did on the case would reflect on him, after all. It was the worry of a parent watching a fledging leave the nest—or tumble from it. Now she was trying to figure out exactly what she would tell Teeg’s mentor about how his trainee was doing on the case. She wasn’t looking forward to that conversation, not anymore. Patel had told her Teeg was brave. Headstrong. He thought this was one of his student’s better qualities.

  Headstrong in the wrong direction was something else entirely. Reining in, Patel had said. Right.

  Kellan was far more likely to say something helpful if he wasn’t being directly accused. Anyone would, really. Enid turned back to Last House to try to clean up the aftermath of Kellan’s breakdown.

  The household came back into view, its lone cottage tucked in at the edge of the sparse woods. She tried to look at it without all the assumptions, the judgments imposed on it—that its folk were strange, isolated, antisocial, and that this must mean something was wrong with them.

  Easy to see the house itself as rundown, lacking in charm. Too far out of the way to bother with. In truth, it was a nice spot. Higher up the hill meant cooler air, away from the muggy haze hanging over the marsh. Farther away from the fishing and such, but closer to the trees. Protected from flooding.

  The house was simple. Usually, Enid liked to see a home with at least some decoration. A well-marked path, flowers in flower boxes, maybe even some painted trim. It showed pride in a place, a willingness to put in extra effort. This was a plain house, not even a kitchen garden to add some green. But the pile of driftwood and rusted salvage was organized, neatly corralled and sorted, not scattered about haphazardly. The roof was in good re
pair. The front steps weathered but not warped. The bone wind chimes on the front porch knocked hollowly, like someone was tapping a drum.

  You could look at a house like this and see anything you wanted. She was pretty sure Teeg didn’t see anything good.

  Enid heard voices around back. In the direction of the pyre. She held her breath. A group spoke quietly, two voices, low, male, and the tone of the conversation had an urgency to it. She thought one of them was Mart. Enid looked around for a way to keep hidden, maybe eavesdrop. Stepping softly, she circled around the house, moving along the wall until the words came through.

  “She came here, now she’s dead, and you can’t explain it?” A husky, angry voice—the outsider, Hawk.

  “We don’t know what happened, honest.” That was Mart, sounding weary.

  “She’s dead and it’s your fault!”

  “Hawk. Please. You should be looking at your own folk; they didn’t want her here any more than we did—”

  “Mart!” Neeve hissed. So the woman was with them, part of this discussion.

  More calmly, Mart said, “If we all just keep quiet, the investigators’ll be gone in a day—”

  Hawk said, “You don’t know that.”

  Silence answered this.

  Then, Neeve said softly, “It happened, it just happened. Something bad was bound to happen—”

  “It should have been you,” Hawk shot at her.

  Enid was baffled. Teeg might not have been far off after all. Not about who had killed Ella, but that people were keeping secrets. Lots of secrets.

  The question was, how might some of those secrets be cracked open?

  Enid left the cottage, running to the path so she could approach by the usual way. No one had to be startled by her arrival.

  “Hola,” Enid called, still some distance back, and waved.

  The whole household was indeed there, behind the house. Mart stood, facing down Hawk. After Hawk’s confrontation with Enid, the guy must have come back around to interrogate the folk at Last House. He might have done so earlier, if Enid hadn’t ambushed him. Telman was off to the side, pacing, glancing up at the trees, uncomfortable and avoiding the discussion. Neeve and Kellan, unhappy-looking, were sitting on a set of steps leading down from the back porch. Kellan had quieted, but his face was still red and puffy.