The Buried Life

by Carrie Patel

  “Burn that paper.”

  “Besides that. You’re not giving me any options.” Jane realized that, while Fredrick had retreated into a hoarse whisper, she had begun to raise her voice.

  “That’s because this is crazy. You don’t need to get involved, and you run a real risk of getting yourself killed over a hunch.”

  “That’s your opinion, isn’t it? But it’s my decision,” she said, thrusting her flat palm toward him. “It’s my find and my choice. It’s evidence.”

  “Says who?”

  “You can’t really believe that this problem will solve itself, can you? I need to do something. If I’m wrong about the right people,” she said, thinking, “then I imagine this won’t change too much in the long run.”

  In the hall between the dim glow of the workroom and the distant radiance of the fireplace, Fredrick’s face was cast mostly in shadows, but Jane could still see the dark look that crossed it. “How gruesome,” he said. “You don’t mean that.”

  “No more than you mean to have me sit by while people, including people I know, are killed. I want this whole mess to be over too.” She pointed to the little paper. “I need to do what I can to stop the killers before they decide I’m a liability.” Her breathing slowed as the pace of their argument slackened.

  He winced as she said it and grudgingly dropped the creased paper into her hand. His hand froze over his thigh as he resisted an urge to wipe his palm on his pants leg. “I can’t argue with that. Do what you have to do.”

  Despite her thudding heart, she smiled a lopsided little grin. “Hey, I’m surprised at you. If you were in my position, you probably would have published it.”

  He returned a strained smile, smoothing his hair back with the heel of one hand. “But you’re in your position. Besides, the Council’s lackeys are practically editing the paper nowadays. Look, I’m not going to argue about it anymore. Just promise you’ll get rid of that thing as soon as possible.”

  “Tomorrow, Freddie. I’ll take care of it first thing in the morning. I can’t imagine that anyone would raid the apartment over that scrap, though.”

  “No, but if they searched your place based on your connections and found it, that wouldn’t be good for you.”

  “There are plenty of people in Recoletta with similar connections,” she said, tucking the scrap away before he could change his mind.

  “Yes, but none who have stumbled upon a fresh murder.” He walked back into the den.

  “Point taken, Freddie.”

  He spun on his heels. “That reminds me of something else,” he said, his voice resuming a matter-of-factly bossy tone with which she was more familiar. “You should get a boarder. Things would be that much safer if you had someone else living here with you, and you could rest easier.”

  “Which of us are we talking about? I sleep just fine. Besides, considering that the murderer snuck past several attendants to get to Hollens, how would one more warm body keep me safe?”

  Fredrick rolled his eyes and leaned with both hands on the table. “What harm will it do? You can split your rent, and this might even be fun,” he said. “Just until everything cools down.”

  Jane shrugged. “I suppose you’re right. But where would I find someone?”

  He sniffed and waved a hand. “That should be the easy part. The factory districts are swarming right now with recent arrivals looking for decent quarters. The recent immigration boom, you know.”

  “I hadn’t heard about it.”

  Fredrick shrugged. “Some say it’s drought in the south, some say it’s seasonal labor, but this kind of influx happens from time to time. Now we might at least get a little news from some of our neighbors. Anyhow, we’ll find a boarder. I’ll put an ad in the paper right away and send some notices out to the bulletin boards, and we can expect some responses within the next week. If we don’t, we can make some visits to the bunkhouses, and I’m sure we’ll find someone.”

  She suppressed a wince. “Thanks, Freddie.”

  He smiled back. “Don’t mention it, Jane. My, it’s late. I need to look in at the paper, and you’ve got your laundry to finish.” She could tell that he wanted to advise her to make her rounds early tonight, but he held his tongue. His expression became graver again as he continued. “Promise me, though, that you’re going to be careful. That you’ll let me know what you find.”

  “I will, and I will. Look, don’t worry about me, OK? I’ll come by later and we can have dinner at your place. Even bachelor stew is fine by me,” she said, referring to Fredrick’s haphazardly concocted surprises.

  She followed him to the door and he rested his hand on the knob before turning back to her. “If I don’t see you tomorrow, if anything happens, I’ll know where to look first.” The sentence hung in the air like an incomplete threat.

  Jane could not restrain the fond smile from her lips, but she kept the condescension out of her voice. “Freddie, you’re not a Municipal, you’re a journalist. But I’m touched all the same.”

  He patted the back of his hair. “No, but I can still do something. You’ve said it already. You have your resources, and I have mine. Until later.”

  “Take care, Fredrick.” The door closed behind him with a gentle snick, which she prudently complemented with the heavier click of the lock and, after a moment’s thought, the thud and slide of the bar.

  Chapter Nine

  Correspondence

  Liesl Malone did not hear of Hollens’s death for a full two hours and thirty-seven minutes after Fredrick rushed into Jane’s apartment. Malone had returned from an unproductive afternoon at the train station and in the slums, pursuing connections to Stanislau, while her partner had stayed behind, researching related contracts. After a series of dead-end interviews, she concluded that either no one remembered Stanislau, or no one wanted to. Both possibilities seemed plausible.

  Dusk had already settled, and the police station was next to deserted on Monday evening. Lights shone from under doors and through shaded office windows, but Malone passed no one in the silent hallways. Her footsteps reverberated in the stone corridors, and besides the trembling flames above her, she saw no other movement. When she reached her office and turned the key in the lock, a hand shot out of the darkness and clamped onto her wrist. She gasped and twisted out of the stranger’s icy grip, raising an elbow to strike when she recognized Sundar’s wide-eyed stare. Following his finger to his lips, she nodded and led him into the office behind her.

  Once they were safely inside, Sundar told her what he had discovered over two hours ago. A contact from the papers had slipped into the station earlier and informed Johanssen of Hollens’s murder. Johanssen, in turn, had sent for Sundar, who had been thumbing through old smuggling contracts. When Malone finally arrived at the station that evening, it was his turn to break the news, which he did with a quaver in his voice. Though the murders of a historian and a whitenail had consequences enough, the murder of a councilor was something else, entirely.

  Sundar recounted every detail, from the butler who had brought Councilor Hollens his tea at 3.30, to the maid, a quiet girl named Lena, who had come to remove the tray at 4.15. Tiptoeing around the silent, still man, Lena did not see the blood on his shirt front, and what she saw spilled on the tray she first took to be marmalade. It was not until she nearly tripped in a slick of it that she realized her master was not sleeping. The crash of the tray and the wailing scream brought the rest of the household thundering into the sitting room in seconds. Not one servant noticed a cracked window or a door ajar.

  By the time Sundar had finished itemizing every detail from Hollens’s last afternoon and his servants’ frantic, fruitless search, all of the other lights in the station had been extinguished. Malone felt her own innards flutter, knowing what she and Sundar must do next.

  * * *

  A woolly fog lumbered over the surface streets the following morning as Jane crossed town to deliver the list. Much to her annoyance, the news of Hollens’s murder an
d Fredrick’s anxious warnings had spooked her, and her imagination endowed the streets around her with a sinister quality. Despite the cold, her palms and feet felt warm and clammy.

  Even through the fog, her breath formed visible puffs in front of her. The beginnings of morning traffic were just stirring in the streets, and the clatter of veranda gates, muffled footsteps, and creaking carriage wheels formed a comforting cacophony in the obscuring mist.

  Jane imagined that she could feel the weight of the list, which she had tucked into an envelope in her bodice. It seemed to press into her flesh, an urgent reminder. In that moment, it recalled the memory of a similar errand some fifteen years ago.

  In that now-distant moment, she’d wandered through a dusty hallway with cracked, peeling walls and a pervasive musk. Then, also, a tremor in her legs reminded her of the distressing task she had set out to perform. The dirt caked on the skylights made it difficult to tell the time of day, but as she neared the end of the hall, she saw dust fluttering in murky shafts. To seven year-old eyes, the swirling particles looked like dull will-o’-the-wisps.

  She was grateful to see the daylight glow crest the haze.

  The sun’s rays began to cut through the thick fog, crowning passing people and horses with blurry halos. Nearing the Dispatch, Jane could already see messengers darting along alleys and between buildings. Messengers were typically men and women of a small, sprightly build, and they spent the better portion of their days traveling between various offices and homes at a pace somewhere between a jog and a sprint, delivering messages. Their bright, fitted suits and distinctive orange sashes could part most crowds. Despite their petite stature, messengers had been known to bowl over larger men and dart under horses in a pinch. Flitting in and out of the mist, they looked like tongues of flame leaping through smoke. By the time Jane reached the Dispatch, so many messengers filled the block that the mist appeared to burn from within.

  In her memory, Jane tiptoed into another office, which was brighter than the children’s quarters below, but dark nevertheless. She did not marvel that the taunts of peers had urged her that far; she only wanted to prove that she was not scared, even though every nerve and tissue within her quaked. By retrieving a token from the headmistress’s office, she would prove to the others that, for all her reserve, she was not a coward.

  Descending a curving staircase, Jane had to back against the railing four times to dodge passing messengers. She wished she had taken the elevator, but the Dispatch encompassed several levels of postal boxes, and she did not know where she would find Malone’s. Fortunately, a sign at the first landing directed her to the second floor, where a hall branching from the stairway phased into antique green tiles and brass fixtures. Recognizing this floor as her destination, her pulse quickened, and the hidden letter weighed heavier yet.

  In the headmistress’s office, it dimly occurred to Jane that neither she nor her mockers had settled on an appropriate token, but she felt herself drawn to the cabinets in the back of the room, behind the desk. Inside, she saw a series of boxes, each covered with dust and printed with the name of a child in the orphanage. Since the children were not allowed personal possessions, the headmistress stored whatever had been dropped off with the orphans. Jane could read well enough to recognize her own name, and she reached for it.

  Jane only saw a few torches lining the passage in the Dispatch, but the brass paneling made the walls flicker and jump with firelight. The hall she traversed ran the full length of the oblong level, and at its terminus she saw another large stairway and set of elevators. To her right was a series of desks spaced against the glowing wall where helpful employees waited to assist visitors and prevent anyone from tampering with the boxes. She wondered if any of them were monitoring Malone’s mail drop, ready to apprehend her after she delivered the list. In her mind she could see a phalanx of city guards waiting in the stairways and stoically marching her off to a pitch-black prison cell in the Barracks on the charge of treason.

  In a more gruesome scenario, a slinky, hooded figure dogged her steps, obscured by the morning fog, and now waited in the shadows to execute her after the completion of her ill-fated errand. In any case Jane’s fevered mind envisioned, she felt at the mercy of forces already set in motion. For the first time since her harrowing encounter in Fitzhugh’s house, she felt helpless.

  Young Jane’s small hands slid the top off of her box in a cloud of dust. She pulled a small book from inside, the title Grimm’s Fairy Tales emblazoned on the front. Tucking the thin volume into the folds of her dress, she heard footsteps coming toward her from down the hall.

  Jane closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and expelled fluttering panic, turning her thoughts to the postal boxes in front of her.

  Patting the letter beneath her clothes, she followed the numbers to her left, which marked the numerous corridors stemming from the main hall. Almost halfway down it, she ducked into one of these smaller passages, which was lined with boxes set into the stone. Reading in the dull, brassy glow, she followed the numbers on the front until she came to box 1364, an unremarkable receptacle that was identical to those around it except for its particular pattern of tarnishing. Jane peeled the letter from her layers of clothes, slipped the envelope into the mail slot and eagerly made her way back.

  Back in the orphanage, Jane had just enough time to return her empty box, close the cabinet, and scurry away from it when the headmistress entered the room. Two eyes blazed at Jane from under a grime-colored sweep of hair, and, after leaving their impression, they darted to a half-empty jar of candies on the desk.

  “How many?”

  Jane noticed the candy box for the first time, but she understood that she had to give the headmistress a reason to punish her to her satisfaction if she wanted to conceal her prize.

  “Five.”

  “Your hands, Miss Lin.”

  When Jane took them back, they were striped red and raw. Jane was banished to her cot at dinner, and she hid her book beneath the lumpy mattress. Seeing her hands, none of her classmates asked to see what she had taken, and she was glad to keep it to herself.

  * * *

  Since hearing of the latest murder, Malone was racing to keep abreast of the implications. Her wanderings and Sundar’s readings on Mortimer Stanislau had turned up nothing, but now, with Hollens dead, she was not even sure that the Stanislau connection was relevant anymore. Worst of all was the Council’s reaction to Hollens’s death. In the hours following the murder, armed men had broken into bunkhouses and union headquarters across the factory districts, showing the kind of delicacy that marked the City Guard. Four “suspects” had been killed in the ensuing interrogations, and it had become an even contest between the Council and the murderer to see who would tear the city apart first.

  Malone remembered Hollens’s contingency instructions, so her next goal was to follow them: to slip into his residence and find the safe in the wine cellar.

  Of course, this was much more easily said than done. The block would be swarming with city guards in the aftermath of the murder, none of whom would take well to meddling by rogue inspectors. Malone was confident that Hollens had hidden his safe well, but she grimaced to think of what might happen, and what might be lost, if the Council found it first. As she and Sundar pondered their situation, a very relieved Jane Lin was returning unhindered from her errand at the Dispatch.

  “Surely Hollens would have imagined this scenario,” Sundar said, settling into his now-familiar chair across from Malone’s desk. “Grim as it is, right? I mean, what would be the point in telling you about the safe if you would never be able to reach it?”

  Malone took her own seat. “He wasn’t convinced that I could. Besides, it’s not his problem now. And the more time we lose waiting for opportunities to open up, the greater the risk of our leads disappearing and of another assassination.”

  “But the assassin isn’t the only one we have to dodge,” Sundar said. “If the Council gets wind of what we’re doing, the
y’ll book us an extended stay at the Barracks.”

  “You know the stakes.”

  Sundar was not ready to admit defeat. “What if Hollens had a confidante – someone he trusted who could get us in? There must be someone on his staff that he knew well enough to give a contingency plan.”

  Malone shrugged. “Even if we knew who that was, he couldn’t let us in the front door now. The Council has removed Hollens’s staff for interrogation and replaced them with the guards.”

  Sundar rubbed his chin. “What about another role-playing scenario? If it got us into the Directorate of Preservation and the gala, we could pull it off again.”

  Malone shook her head. “Not there. They’ll have more than a secretary guarding the door. Besides, after our last trick, they’re going to be more careful. Our best option is stealth.”

  Sundar grinned and flicked an eyebrow at her. “Your way, then. Are we going in through the chimney?”

  “I was thinking we’d try the other end. Pull schematics for a radius of two blocks from the house, and tonight we can stake out the place and plot a way in,” Malone said. Sundar had turned to go when she stopped him.

  “Sundar.”

  “Malone?”

  “This is what I consider serious. Since you asked.” She paused, watching his expression. “Breaking into a councilor’s house. It’s over if we’re caught.” He nodded, and when she said nothing further, he continued out the door.

  Malone read through the Sato contract again, and Sundar returned an hour later with several rolls of blueprints and a stack of papers.

  “It’s more than we need,” he said. “But I had to pretend I was looking for smuggling tunnels.” Malone nodded.

  The pair spent the next ninety minutes poring over the designs, searching for neglected passages and concealed crawlspaces. Malone had mapped out a plausible route to the house when a station messenger came to the door with a plain, gray envelope. Sundar watched as Malone extracted the paper inside and slowly read the list that Jane had sent that morning. Too slowly, his fidgeting fingers suggested.