The Heartreader's Secret

by Kate McinTyre

  She paused, as if waiting for Olivia to disagree and fight with her about the relative safety of the Faraday estate in Summergrove, but when Olivia said nothing, Maris balled up her fists and continued. “So—we have a system. Every damned day, at sunset, without bloody fail, she mirrors me. We don’t always talk long, but we always say something, and I get to go to sleep knowing that she’s all right.”

  “She missed last night?” Olivia asked gently, but Maris shook her head hard.

  “You think I’d be crawling in here with my hat in my sodding hands if she missed last night? The last time I heard from her was last Eadday. I know she talked to you that day. You were at the house. Don’t deny it. She told me to forgive you. I told her to piss off. Gods, if those are the last words I ever said to her….”

  “I’m—” Chris said, and his voice cracked. Both women swiveled, their attention falling on him, and he cleared his throat, feeling like a trapped insect. “I spoke to Rachel—that is, my sister’s governess—only just last night. Surely if… if something had happened, she’d have said something?” He tried not to think of Rosie’s absence so late into the night. Tried not to let it feed into all his worst fears.

  Maris’s eyes narrowed. “Right. So I’m unreasonable, is that it? Hysterical? You with all your insight into what’s going on there—did you even ask about Em? Are you even grateful that she’s up to her ankles in your—”

  Olivia tightened her grip on Maris’s shoulder, and Chris sighed with relief when the policewoman turned roughly away to meet his employer’s eyes. “Maris, come now. Leave him alone and look at me. You want my help? You need to calm down. You’re throwing accusations, talking about last words, and all I know is that she didn’t mirror for a few days.”

  Maris pushed Olivia away and stalked across the office. “For five days, Olivia. She didn’t mirror for five bloody days.” It was the first time Chris had ever heard Maris use Olivia’s given name. It sounded strange on her lips. “I tried mirroring her, and nothing. And then, today, this arrives.” She whirled and held up a sheet of paper. Chris could make out Em’s serpentine handwriting flowing across its surface.

  Olivia darted forward and snatched the page. Her eyes scanned it. “It’s postmarked for Healfday,” she murmured.

  “The day after she got back to Summergrove,” Maris nodded.

  Olivia’s eyes moved back and forth as she read the page, and then she sighed, dropping her arms to her sides, the letter in her hand. “Maris…” she said, very gently. It was a different tone from what she’d taken before. Chris heard something that had to have been relief in her voice.

  “Don’t,” Maris said, stepping back and glaring fury. “Don’t just—actually read it, Olivia!”

  Olivia pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “It just says, very plainly, that Em heard her mother was ill, that she had to catch the next available ship posthaste, that she tried to mirror you, that she’ll try and contact you when she disembarks in Khari—”

  “I know what it bloody well says, Olivia Faraday, I’ve only read it half a hundred times! Are you so rubbish a truthsniffer as all that, after all? Look at it again. Don’t read the words, read what she’s saying.”

  A furrow appeared between Olivia’s eyes. She refocused on the letter. Her eyes narrowed as she studied it, and an eternity seemed to pass as she read it over and over.

  Finally, she spoke again.

  “Maris,” she recited. “I love you. Something has happened. I have it in hand. It could be dangerous. Don’t come after me.”

  Chris felt a thrill of fear vibrate up and down his spine.

  Olivia tapped the page. “This is a very good cipher. I wouldn’t have seen it if you hadn’t told me it was there. You came up with it together?”

  “A brilliant engineer and a truthsniffer,” Maris said with a shrug. “It wasn’t exactly a challenge.”

  “Right. I can’t imagine a pair who could come up with a better code. Except, of course, two of me. We would absolutely destroy this thing.” Olivia smiled, but Maris didn’t echo it.

  “Olivia…” Chris murmured, trying not to think of the likeable Miss Banks in any sort of real danger.

  Olivia sighed, dropping her hands. “So,” she said, after a momentary pause. “The pretext of Imari’s illness is just a smokescreen. Which is, I suppose, good news. I found Missus Banks a rather lovely woman, on the occasion we had to meet. But…” Her hands moved about, and Chris realized that she was trying to find something to do with them. Would she lay one on Maris’s shoulder? On her head? Just shrug? Wave her away? It was like watching a marionette malfunction. “Well!” Olivia said, hands still flying about. “Well, this just says the same thing, more or less, doesn’t it? That she has this sorted?”

  Maris’s gaze snapped up. Her green eyes seemed to cascade sparks like an out-of-control sylph as she gritted out, “’Something has happened.’”

  Olivia folded her arms. Tapped her foot. “’I have it in hand.’”

  “’It could be dangerous.’”

  “’Don’t come after me!’ Goodness, what could possibly be clearer than that?”

  “That’s not what you say when you’re all right!” Maris shouted, her arms moving in an explosive motion. She took an angry half-step towards Olivia, who actually jumped back. “That’s what you say when your bloody ship is sinking, and you don’t want the person you love most to go down with you!”

  Olivia couldn’t seem to meet Maris’s eyes. She handed the letter back, slowly, and Maris took it. Olivia drifted away. Her heels clicked on the floor, strangely loud in the tense quiet of the room.

  She spun back, skirts swirling. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.” She took a deep breath. “But I don’t see what it has to do with me.”

  Maris took another half-step forward, fists curling. But then she released them, settled back, and growled something low under her breath. “Summergrove is your home. And you’re an investigator.”

  “Right.” Olivia sighed and turned back away, but not before Chris saw her brow furrow stormily. She paced a few steps. “Right, except I’m a Deathsniffer. I truly hope you don’t think that I’m necessary?”

  “Deathsniffer is a label you choose,” Maris shot back. “It’s not its own bloody categorization. It’s actually meant to be an insult, you know. Like Faceshifter! Macabre, anti-social ghouls snuffling around in corpses. It isn’t actually a badge of honour.”

  “This is a very strange time to bring up my relationship with that particular term, Maris—”

  “Putting it on your business card doesn’t make you incapable of solving other cases!”

  “Oh. Is this a case, then?” Olivia asked, cocking her head, her voice thick with feigned innocence. “Are you going to forcibly assign me some missing persons out in Summergrove? Goodness, the jurisdiction issues alone! You should be mirroring the Summergrove police, Maris, I’m quite sure—”

  “Now the woman who gutted the most successful method of catching killers is suddenly concerned about a thing like jurisdiction!”

  “Oh hells, Maris, that wasn’t me.”

  “You didn’t do a thing to stop it!”

  “Frankly, I don’t see why the hells you’re taking the whole affair so personally! I realize you like things to remain the way they are, but Gods! It’s been months! Why do you care so much about timeseers and the sanctity of evidence and—”

  “Because it’s your fault she’s involved in all of this!” Maris shouted, face red, and both women froze in their respective tableaus of anger. Maris with fists balled and features locked in a snarl, Olivia with her dismissive, frustrated hand motions and steely eyes. Chris barely dared to breathe as, slowly, Olivia’s features slackened.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Maris’s mouth worked as if she would say something, hands twitched like she would do something, but she was still and silent.

  Olivia pinched the bridge of her nose. “I get the feeling that you want to march out of here in a ti
ff,” she said.

  “If I do that,” Maris ground out, and Chris ached for her at the sound of ragged pain in her voice, “then there’s still no one out there helping Em.”

  Chris cleared his throat quietly. “Olivia….”

  At the sound of his voice, she dropped her arms and the tension melted from her shoulders. She sighed expansively. “Bollocks. For all the Gods’ sakes, Maris, come sit the hell down. Chris, get the tea back out and make a cup for Maris, please. If we’re going to talk about this, let’s bloody well just talk about this. I’m already exhausted.”

  Chris slipped Maris’s tea in front of her. Three lumps, no cream. Maris half-turned to acknowledge him with a tight nod, which was more than he’d hoped. If she considered Olivia responsible, he was even more so.

  Olivia accepted her cup and looked into it with a grimace. “Ugh. Tea? Really?” She fixed him with a pained expression.

  He smiled an apology. “No more ice.”

  She sighed and waved him off. He took a seat, and, too full of nerves and feelings to drink himself, he simply waited.

  Maris’s jaw worked like she was going to lash out again, but she took her time drinking and, after she set her cup daintily back on the saucer, slowly managed to say: “Em and I don’t agree on politics.”

  Olivia’s brows raised. “Is this supposed to be news?”

  “Shut your mouth and let me talk.”

  “Oh, dear. Yes, ma’am.”

  Maris glared down into her tea, brow furrowed like a cliffside. “Right from the start, we knew one another’s politics. But I thought I could temper her idealism, and she thought she could infect me with it. By the time we realized how set in our ways we both were, we were too damn in love to split. So we just… settled into an agreement.”

  “Mutual peace.”

  Maris nodded. “What we mean to each other is more important than where we stand on the issues of the day. It’s really all a matter of how you look at a thing, anyway. She frames my opinions in the context of keeping order in a city that needs it. I frame hers around her brilliant godsdamned mind, and her passion, and her spirit, and her incapacity to accept something less than perfect just because it’s too hard to change it, and her—” She suddenly flushed deep scarlet and cleared her throat.

  “Yes, Maris. We know you’re somewhat fond of Miss Banks.”

  Maris shot Olivia a look so venomous that Chris almost leapt up to prevent her from flinging her scalding tea in his employer’s face. “As I was saying,” she said gruffly, “it was easy enough to just put the whole damned thing to one side, our little peaceful disagreement. Until the night of her exhibition.”

  A night Chris would never forget. He sat back with his own cup of tea, trying not to recall the smoking corpses, the dryad’s rampage, the blood-freezing terror. He took a sip. It wasn’t his best pot.

  “We argued the whole way home. Em said that all her ideas for alternative tech weren’t going to count for a unicorn’s fart unless she could get people using them. She said that if Livingstone were somehow to be cleared of charges…” Maris ran a hand through her unruly nest of curls. She sighed. “I told her that it was a good thing that would never happen.”

  “But then it did,” Chris murmured. “Because of Will’s testimony.”

  Maris’s jaw bulged, and she looked down into her teacup.

  Olivia looked back and forth between them. “…And? I still hardly see what that has to do with us! It seems to me as if your real grievance is with Em tangling herself up in this chaos! And yet, according to her, the two of you been on wonderful terms! Meanwhile, you haven’t spoken a friendly word to me in months! It seems as if you know very well that Christopher and I were, at most, tangentially involved, so why—”

  “Olivia,” Chris said, cutting off her flow of confused words. “She knows all of this.”

  Maris’s shoulders hunched up as if to protect herself from a blow.

  Olivia tapped her fingers along her knee, brow furrowed. “I feel as if I’ve missed something.”

  “Because you’re an idiot,” Maris rumbled.

  “Well, then! Isn’t that just—”

  Chris stood up, running a hand through his hair. “She doesn’t want to be angry at Em, but she has to be angry. So… you, me, Will….”

  Olivia opened her mouth, and then snapped it shut. She blinked. “Redirected anger? Like what all of Tarland tried to do to the good doctor? Goodness. I… I would never have… hm.”

  Maris flushed, gripping her tea in both hands, her saucer forgotten on the side table. Chris fought the urge to go to her side, to lay a hand on her shoulder. She’d not welcome it, but… he thought he understood it, why she’d blamed them. The alternative was quarreling with someone she loved. Wasn’t it easier to redirect it all onto a scapegoat?

  “That does make some logical sense,” Olivia said finally, and Maris rolled her eyes and heaved a sigh.

  “Mother Deorwynn, Faraday, I swear. I sure as sod didn’t miss your big-eyed innocence when it comes to basic bloody human interaction! I—” She growled under her breath. “Look. If you need me to get on my hands and knees and damned well beg forgiveness before you’ll actually consider going after Em, then I’ll do that. But if you’re just going to—then tell me, and I’ll find her myself!”

  Chris watched Olivia’s face soften, and she made a dismissive gesture with a flick of her fingers. “Goodness, Maris,” she chided gently. “Do you think that I, of all bloody people, am going to force an apology? For some of us, a swift death is preferable.” She shuddered. “Gods, even a slow one.”

  Maris swallowed, and then one corner of her lip turned up in a tiny smile. She didn’t say a word, but gratitude was writ large on her face.

  Olivia leaned back in her chair and cradled her tea. Silence reigned, and Olivia sat, features locked in concentration and one leg bouncing for what seemed like a very long time. Then she sighed. “This is a terrible idea, though,” she said. “You know me. I’m drawn to the scent of blood, not… not mildly suspicious happenings. Really. Really. You should find someone else. There are plenty of decent investigators in Summergrove proper. It’s a small precinct, but, well, I could give you the frequency for Officer James Geoffries! Mirror him, won’t you. He’s a fine sort. Let me tag along for some of his jobs when I was just an ankle biter. He’s semi-retired, but he’d do it.”

  Maris had been shaking her head for some time and jumped in the instant Olivia stopped talking. “And file a formal report? Involve strangers? Em contacted me in code, warned me off! She doesn’t want attention drawn to any of this!”

  “Officer Geoffries can be very discreet…” Olivia tried, her expression pained.

  “But he’s not as good as you. No one is. And no one is better suited to investigate your family’s estate. You know the people. You know the dynamics. You know Em. You could even do it without throwing up any alarms!”

  Olivia snorted. “See, no, you are very wrong about that. Nothing could possibly be less innocent than my showing up willingly on my mother’s doorstep.”

  “Everyone has family troubles.”

  “They most certainly do, and yet, somehow, mine still manage to be beyond the pale! Believe me, Maris. If I try and say that I just came by for a visit apropos of nothing, whatever guilty parties might be present will see me coming from miles away. That is if my mother doesn’t laugh me all the way back to the city first!”

  Maris’s round face split into a grim smile. “So if you had a better reason for being there, a more believable reason, you’d consider it?”

  Olivia’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”

  Maris produced a plain brown file.

  With a furrowed brow, Olivia took it and flipped it open. She scanned the first page; she turned to the second. She glanced up at Maris. “Oh. This is… Roger Greene’s committed suicide? That’s really quite a shame, I—he was always such a good stable master. I had no idea that he was… but, ah, well! This seems very open and s
hut.”

  “It is,” Maris said. Her voice was rough, and she avoided Olivia’s gaze. “But, er, the thing is, I’ve already called in some favours. We can doctor the records. Say that some flag went up in autopsy and we have reason to believe it might have been foul play. Everyone knows how insular your family’s holdings are. And your mother apparently has something of a reputation with regards to law enforcement. It wouldn’t seem strange to send her daughter to investigate an actual murder there.”

  “Or at least pretend to.” Olivia settled back into her chair and looked over the papers again. “Well, I’ll give it to you. That is believable. My mother really does hate police.” She closed the file and then broke into a grin, shaking her head. “This is all actually rather clever, I’ll admit. And I’m deeply impressed that you, of all people, would be willing to tamper with Crown files! Has a model police officer been corrupted, Maris?”

  Maris ducked her head, colour in her cheeks and ears, a glimmer in her eyes. “It’s Em,” she said, simply, and Olivia’s mirth evaporated.

  “So it is,” she agreed with a sigh.

  They sat in silence. Chris looked back and forth.

  Maris took a deep breath. “Well?” she asked, her voice pregnant with shuttered hope. “Have I convinced you, Olivia?”

  Olivia tapped the cover of the file. “I can’t guarantee I’ll find anything,” she said slowly. “Emilia isn’t an idiot, you know. If she’s disappeared on purpose, I doubt I’ll be able to find where she went.”

  “But you might be able to find whatever she was running from.”

  “Mn, fair enough. I’ll need a spot of time to find someone to look after my…” Olivia’s eyes flickered to Chris and then back to Maris, “my flat while I’m away. I have things there that can’t be left untended for longer than a day or so.”