Oath Keeper

by Jefferson Smith

  —Agnitha and Rachel

  “I think the ‘rat’ means that the girl whose bunk I dropped the note onto can’t be trusted,” Sue explained. “There was another window further down that had a happy face drawn into the grime. I assume it’s the one above their bunks. Or closer, at least.”

  “And who are these ‘Unlovables?’” DelRoy asked, poking a finger at the first line of the children’s reply.

  “That is what those delightful nuns call the girls they force to cook and clean,” Sue said. “They say it’s because those girls aren’t adoptable, but I think it’s just a pretense to let them crush the spirits of the more resilient girls and put them to work.”

  “And the girls call themselves by the same name?”

  Sue smiled. “Eliza was very proud of it. Like a badge of honor. She and her friend Tayna were sort of the leaders of the bunch.”

  “That’s the other girl, the one who ran away, right?”

  “According to Eliza,” Ned said. “She talked about the girl nonstop, but the nuns say she never existed at all. That Eliza made her up and then blamed everything she did on this fantasy friend of hers.”

  “Oh Ned, don’t be ridiculous. You don’t actually believe that, do you?” Sue turned an irritated eye toward her husband, but Ned just held up his hands in surrender.

  “To be honest, I don’t know what to think,” he said. “She does have some pretty wild stories, after all.” Sue shot a glare at him that clearly meant, “We’ll talk about this later.” Then she looked back down at her note.

  “Anyway, that was yesterday. This is what I got from them today.”

  Sue: So your names are Agnitha and Rachel. How old are you?

  Kids: 12 and 5

  Sue: Do you know where Eliza is now?

  Kids: We thought she was with you.

  Sue: When was the last time any of you saw Eliza? Where was she? What was she doing?

  Kids: Last seen sitting on her bed. Waiting for you on pickup day. Jenny saw her.

  Sue: Do you know any reason why the nuns wouldn’t want Eliza to get adopted?

  Kids: Because she’s an Unlovable and getting adopted would make her happy.

  Sue: Do any grown ups ever come around who aren’t parents? Anybody who helps the nuns or maybe works with them?

  Kids: Lots of people come to their parties every week, and there’s a new guy, Lord Angerton or something. He’s really skeezy. But nobody actually works with them. It’s all Goodies, all the time.

  Sue: Is everything okay? Do you need anything?

  Kids: Send pizza!

  “They’re pretty young,” DelRoy said, once he’d finished reading it.

  “But they’re tougher than most kids that age would be,” Sue said, sitting back on the sofa and setting the notes on her lap. She ran her hands over the paper, smoothing out the creases while she talked. DelRoy doubted she was even aware she was doing it.

  “Any idea who this ‘Lord Angerton’ is?”

  Ned looked lost in thought, as though trying to recall, but Sue nodded. “Eliza did say something about a man who’d been visiting Sister Regalia lately, but she didn’t mention his name and I didn’t know it would turn out to be important, so I didn’t ask.”

  “You mean the angry guy?” Ned asked. Sue nodded.

  “Angry?” DelRoy said, looking back and forth between the husband and wife yet again, still confused by the odd body language he was seeing between them. They just didn’t act… comfortable with each other.

  “Just something Eliza said at lunch once,” Ned said. “That the angry guy had shown up a few days before Tayna ran away. Although ‘angry’ might just have been a reference to his name.”

  “I’ll look into it. See what pops up,” DelRoy said. “You think her friend left to get away from this Angerton guy?”

  “Eliza didn’t say, but that would be my guess,” Sue said.

  “And what about these parties the kids mentioned?” But neither Ned nor Sue had any ideas. “Might be worth keeping an eye on the place for a few days. If they have regular visitors, maybe we’ll get lucky and be able to tie one of the guests to something.”

  “I can do that,” Sue said, patting her camera, which was on the end table beside her. “And what will you be doing, Detective?”

  “Following the money lady,” he said. “Something tells me we want to learn more about this Regina Finch person. See what else she’s into, where she’s been, and so on.”

  “Can we meet again in a couple of days?”

  “Sure,” DelRoy said. “I should have something by then. Meanwhile, you be careful. You probably don’t want to be caught hanging around an orphanage taking pictures.” Sue smiled.

  “I’ll be careful, Detective.”

  With that, DelRoy thanked the two of them for supper and promised to be in touch if he learned anything important. Then he said goodnight and went back out to his car. He hadn’t said anything inside, but there was one other puzzle he would be looking into as well. No matter what they might say out loud, body language never lied, and he was sure of it now.

  Ned and Sue Nackenfausch were not man and wife.

  * * *

  “No warrant, no information!” The nun’s face vanished into the gloom and the heavy iron door clanged shut in his face. DelRoy blinked in mild surprise. Hardly the welcome he’d been expecting at a high school, but perhaps it had been predictable. In hindsight, he probably shouldn’t have announced himself as a policeman at all. He’d known, of course, that at the first mention of the missing girls, the nuns would shut down completely, which was why he’d chosen a different story. Surely a school entrusted with educating and supervising vulnerable children would want to hear about about a suspicious man seen wandering the neighborhood, wouldn’t they? He had fully expected that angle to get him ten minutes with the headmistress, or the principal, or whatever they called her.

  But instead they’d given him the clang of doom. Could the entire Sisterhood really be that paranoid? The reaction did not bode well. Not only would it make any further inquiries more difficult, but it also suggested they had something to hide. Maybe even something sinister.

  Whatever was going on, it might be bigger than just the orphanage. And if it extended to Holy Terror Collegiate too, did that mean that all the Goody businesses were involved? Something told the veteran detective that this was not going to be an easy investigation.

  Still wrapped in thought, he went back and got into his car. The empty seat beside him twigged a thought, and a slow smile spread over his features.

  What he needed was an accomplice.

  * * *

  “Thanks for coming with me,” DelRoy said, as Sue got in and pulled the door shut. The sign on the lawn outside read, “The Barbington Clinic for Toyfolk, Dr. Susan Nackenfausch, Chief Surgeon.”

  “That for real?” he asked, tipping his head at the sign as he pulled away from the curb and eased the car into traffic. He’d done a little digging, of course, and knew the documented facts, but he was honestly curious to hear how Sue explained it.

  She grinned. “You’d be surprised how many people think very highly of their toyfolk, Detective. Dogs and cats are not the only way people distract themselves from an unfulfilled longing for children.”

  He wanted to ask the obvious question, but he thought it might be a bit insensitive. But Sue must have seen the question on his face.

  “And no, I do not include myself in that camp,” she said. He could hear the grin in her voice as she said it. “Actually, my background is in anthropology. The doll hospital was my mother’s before me. I grew up here. I’ve worked with dolls and toys my entire life, so when it came time to pick a topic for my doctoral thesis, it was an easy decision.”

  “So you really are a doctor, then.”

  “Yes. A Ph.D. I may not be an M.D., but I do still have patients. When academic life turned out not to suit me, I came back here, and eventually took over the Clinic from my mother.”

  “So yo
u fix dolls for a living.” He didn’t mean it in a judgmental way, though. Far from it. It was such a quirky and intriguing job for her to have. It made her seem mysterious. Normally when DelRoy met people, he’d hear what they did for a living and immediately they would be painted by all the sordid details he’d learned about their industry in the course of his own job. But this was totally fresh ground. A doll hospital. Not an industry he’d ever given any thought to before. So it was paint-free. Totally new. Safe, unknown, and utterly charming. Three things that rarely went together in his world.

  They continued across the city, chatting about her experiences working with the permanently dead. Their chatter was easy and light-hearted. Sue was an easy person to talk to. They were leaving the downtown core when DelRoy turned his head and gave her a devious grin. “So, who should we kill, then?”

  He had told her on the phone where they would be going, and Sue easily shifted conversational gears with him. She didn’t even pause.

  “Oh, definitely your mother,” she said. “I never did like her. Too controlling. And she’s never going to let up. You know that, right? For as long as she’s around, there won’t ever be anyone else in your life—not in her view, anyway—and I’m tired of being shut out, Martin. It’s been fifteen years and I still can’t do anything right by that woman. I tell you, I can’t take it anymore. And I won’t. So you’re just going to have to kill her.”

  DelRoy turned to look at Sue in surprise. He hadn’t expected her to be quite that quick. Sue batted her eyes back at him, but said nothing. He cleared his throat. “So, my mother then. Um, Alzheimer’s?”

  Sue shook her head. “Total cliché. Besides, it’s too sad. Your mother’s a bitch. I want something nasty.”

  “Um, my mother is actually a very sweet woman, you know.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Sue said, placing a hand on the detective’s arm. “I’m not talking about your actual mother, of course. I’m talking about that vicious harpy who locked me out of the church on our wedding day.”

  “Hey!” he said, flinching away from the hand at his elbow. “That was an accident! How many times does she have to apologize?”

  “Accident? There were three bolts on that door, Martin, and all three of them had been locked. That’s no accident. That’s a mad old cow who— Oh! Say. Can it be mad cow disease? That would be perfect!”

  “I don’t know. Do people actually get that? I thought it was just for cows.”

  “People get something else. Cracky-Jacky Disease, or something like that. But I think it’s the same thing. Besides, we’re playing a married couple, not doctors. It’s more believable if we make some mistakes. Don’t you think?”

  “Remind me never to play poker with you.”

  “I shall, sir. And your compliment is noted and appreciated.”

  They continued rehearsing their story for several more minutes, all the way to the edge of town and out to the empty lots full of snow and the factories beyond the train yards. Eventually DelRoy pulled the car into a slushy, unpaved parking lot in front of a squat little concrete bunker. The corners and edges were crumbling and it looked like it had been abandoned since the war. A hand-painted sign hung from a nail next to the door: “Gruesome Harvest Mortuary and Crematorium.”

  DelRoy shook his head in disbelief. “Holy Terror Collegiate? Gruesome Harvest Crematorium? The Old Shoe? It’s like these women don’t speak English at all.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Sue said. “Because they do speak English. They know full well how those names affect people, and they just don’t care. Or maybe they even prefer it that way.”

  For a moment, the two of them sat there, unwilling to get out of the car. They stared at the low, brooding building, with its decaying, barely functional exterior, and its complete lack of anything gracious or comforting. It didn’t say “dignified interment services.” It said, “discount corpse processing.” There was even a vaguely organic tang to the air. Relax. You’re breathing in it.

  Both “husband” and “wife” shuddered simultaneously, and then flung their doors open. Maybe it would be better inside.

  But it wasn’t.

  “Whaddaya want?”

  The barked question assaulted them before the door had even closed behind them. An ugly old woman glared out from her desk in the inner office. There was no reception area. Just a bare concrete floor off the entrance, leading to a bare concrete wall, with that single inner door and the black hole of an office beyond. The crone’s eyes shone out of that pit, boring into his soul, burrowing after all his secrets. “Um, we’re uh…” he stammered, caught temporarily off his game.

  Sue rolled her eyes. “His mother’s about to croak,” she said, in a rough, nasal voice, hooking one thumb at her idiot husband. “We’re looking for the cheapest way to ditch the old bat when she finally kicks.”

  For a heartbeat, he could only stare at Sue, but then his brain found the missing gear and he turned his shocked expression into one of hurt. “Susie, you promised to stop calling her that.”

  “I will, dummy. When she’s dead and roasted and in a jar on the mantle.” Sue turned back to the woman. “You the manager? Watcha got that’s cheap and fast?”

  “I am,” the woman said, standing up and coming out to meet them. Well, coming to meet Sue, anyway. She ignored DelRoy completely. “Sister Gruesome’s the name. Best come in, I suppose. I’ll have you fixed up before hubby here finds his next clue.” Then she turned and ushered Sue back into the office and closed the door.

  DelRoy could only stand there gaping, wondering what had just happened.

  * * *

  “Sorry about that,” Sue said, as they climbed back into the car. “I got the impression that sweet and innocent wasn’t going to cut it with her. She’s just like all the other nuns I’ve met since this whole thing started. The only mood they seem to respect is ‘mean.’”

  “Whatever works,” DelRoy said with a shrug. He wasn’t too pleased about being left out of the conversation, but at least one of them had gotten past the front door. “Did you get anything?”

  Sue shuddered, and he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with the chill winter air.

  “It’s like… I don’t know, like we’ve lifted up an old board lying in a field and found all these bugs and worms and stuff scurrying around underneath it. It’s been right there all along, just hiding in a pocket of darkness nobody knew about, right there in the middle of all that light.”

  “That bad?”

  Sue nodded tightly, obviously too disturbed to say anything for a moment, so DelRoy started the car and got the heater going. By the time Sue was ready to talk again, he had driven them back to a less desolate part of town.

  “For a day’s pay, they’ll cremate your mother and put her remains in any jar you want to provide them with,” Sue said quietly. “For half that, they’ll just get rid of her. No jars. No remains.”

  “What do you mean, ‘a day’s pay?’ How much do they want?”

  “They don’t care,” Sue said. “If you’re a doctor, pay one day of doctor’s pay. If you bag groceries at the Super Saver, it’s one day of that pay. I’ve never heard anything like it. And the worst part is, she bragged about how they don’t do many jar-jobs. Most of their customers take the half-off service.”

  “And at those prices, I bet business is pretty steady,” he muttered, as much to himself as to Sue.

  “They do a lot of municipal work too,” Sue added. “On contract with the city. Vagrants, people who die with no friends or next of kin. It’s like some kind of garbage dump for human beings.”

  DelRoy suppressed a shudder. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing she actually said. I tried to get her talking about the rest of the organization. Told her I wanted a better price and demanded to talk to her boss, but she just laughed and said she was the boss, and there was nobody else.”

  “But you heard something? Saw something?”

  “Yes. Two somethings. First, I got a look
at her phone. It was one of the ones with speed dial and the numbers written in pen on little slips of paper. The only number on it was one I recognized. And no wonder, because I’ve dialed it a hundred times myself in the last couple of weeks. It was the number for the Old Shoe.”

  “So, despite what she told you, she probably reports to Sister Regalia. That fits. What was the other thing?”

  “I saw it as I was leaving. Next to the door. The business license was nailed to the wall.”

  “And?”

  Sue looked at him with a strange expression on her face. “Well, it wasn’t made out to Sister Gruesome, or to the Gruesome Whatsit Mortuary at all. It was made out to Regina Finch.”

  DelRoy drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in thought. “So there she is again, huh? Our mysterious woman behind the scenes.”

  “Have you remembered yet where you know the name from?”

  The detective shook his head. “No, and it’s making me crazy. Like it was the woman who lived next door to me growing up, or my fifth grade teacher or something. It’s in there somewhere, but I can’t seem to get my flashlight on it.”

  Sue patted his arm again. “Well, it’ll come. Keep ignoring it until it just pops out.”

  He nodded his head absently, but he hadn’t told her the part that bothered him most. Despite all his memory tricks and recall techniques, he hadn’t been able to dredge up any inkling of why he knew that name, but he had found the remains of one half-remembered feeling. A sort of déjà vu. And it filled him with dread.

  This was not the first time in his life that he had tried to dig up his memory of Regina Finch.