— Olive Whitley, A NEW COMMON SENSE (pamphlet)
CHAPTER TWELVE
HUGINN, Day 168
She can’t be even seven months along, but Vonda’s water has broken, and I’m alone with her waiting for Doc Sounds, and I don’t know if he’ll even come. He shut himself in his house after Maria died last week, and he hasn’t come out even for meals.
Oh, God, I don’t know if I can do this.
I’ve helped with lots of babies before, but nothing about this pregnancy is normal.
Oh, God, the blood —
— LATER —
DOC SOUNDS CAME, little help as he was, save for sewing up Vonda’s belly, and my stitches would have been finer than his. Now he comforts Orrin while Vonda sleeps. I asked Orrin for a name — something to put on the tombstone, at least — but he couldn’t bring himself to speak, let alone name that ill-made scrap of flesh.
I believe it was a mercy of God that it never drew breath and that Vonda never saw what passed for its face. No mother should have to see that, even if it was her bad choice that ruined her baby in the first place. She should have never gotten pregnant when she knew she was going into cryo.
Sometimes I wonder why God gives us free will when we make such terrible decisions.
I’ve bundled the little corpse in the quilt we made for it, and now I am just waiting for Matthias to return from digging its grave next to Maria Sounds.
The cemetery has grown every day this week.
STANDISH AWOKE GASPING from dreams of open sky to find Hattie prodding her face with a cold nose. It was like the fingers of some icy angel pulling her from terror. Standish fumbled to stroke the dog’s soft ears, the thick ruff of hair around her neck. After a long minute, she sat up and shivered. She’d sweated through her nightshirt and the damp had worked into her bones. The square of tin at her throat was the only warm bit of her.
From experience, she knew there was no point staying in bed. The dream would only come back.
So she took a hot shower and then bundled into work clothes and her only sweater. She should buy more clothes. She hadn’t done anything to settle into her new life or new home; Canaan Lake had folded her so tightly in its octopus arms of wild dogs and trouble, she hadn’t been able to think beyond the strangeness.
She reached for Hattie’s lead. She should have known Saturday’s misadventures would trigger a response. She reminded herself that while she felt like shit right now, she and Hattie still had her anxiety under control. She’d been fine yesterday, hadn’t she? Even Peter’s snoring hadn’t bothered her.
She would see him today at work, she supposed. Would it be awkward? Would he want to get beers? She opened the door and led Hattie outside.
The air felt soft on her skin, the rain gentle as butterflies’ wings. The softly sculling shapes of the clouds overhead made the world seem friendly despite the monstrous dogs and vicious leather birds.
She slowed her pace a little. Was she safe here on the lakeshore? She hadn’t even brought her hand unit. Anything could happen out here and her only protection was a dog who ought not be able to bite.
“Fuck, I’m an idiot.”
She heard something then, as if in response to her voice: a low rumbling that shook the sky. She craned back her head in time to see the low streak of light made by a shuttle hurrying overhead, its vapor trail reflecting back the lights of town in a creamy orange scribble across the clouds.
It was easy to forget she was on a world connected to the rest of the galaxy. Canaan Lake was all woods and wilderness, but there was more to Huginn than just Canaan Lake. There were other towns consuming and producing, importing and exporting, transforming the raw materials of a planet into useful goods. The spaceport connected them all, sending out material and bringing in money and people. It was the beating heart of humanity.
She thought then of the bills of lading she’d found in Duncan’s secret box. All those trips on and off world, and not one with a shipping fee. She wanted another look at those.
She urged Hattie back toward the house, breaking into a jog as they went. The sky in the east showed a very faint hint of pale gray at the horizon, a promise of sunrise. Darkness still reigned supreme, clinging in thick masses around the edges of things. She nearly ran into the cart sitting in front of her house.
“Ma’am? I saw your lights,” a young voice said from her porch.
She edged past the horse and saw the boy she’d met by the lake her first day on Huginn. The produce boy. “You’re up awfully early.”
“My dad’s seeing to the milking,” he explained. “And this is the best time to catch people working the third shift at the mill.” He rapped his toe tip against the crate sitting on her door mat. “Your first produce box. I hope you like the radishes. I grew them.”
Standish tried to remember the last time she’d eaten a radish. She couldn’t imagine her parents serving such a humble vegetable. “I look forward to them.”
He moved toward his cart and stopped before he passed her. “Your dog’s on a leash today.”
“It seemed like a good idea,” she said. “After that wild dog attack.”
He looked away from the dog then and she thought he blinked hard and fast. “My dog ran off. He was a good dog, but he still ran off.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He nodded and then got into the little wagon. “You take good care of your dog, Miss. Watch out for her.”
She took the vegetable box inside and fit it into her barren refrigerator. The poor boy. She couldn’t imagine what she’d do without Hattie.
And then, before she could forget it again, she opened Duncan’s box and dug out the folder full of shipping invoices. She checked the signatures. They were all Songheuser ships, and they had all been received by the same person: M Williams.
M Williams.
Duncan had noticed that Matthias Williams had some kind of credit with Songheuser’s shipping arm. Had he gone to Matthias? Was that what had happened? She couldn’t imagine a Believer owning an air bolt gun, but the man was smart enough to use that for his advantage. She checked her hand unit. She had three hours until she’d be expected at HQ, and if she was lucky, Matthias would be up already, tending his orchard.
PETER SQUEEZED through the door of the Mill Cafe and between two old men blocking the way. He was pretty sure the entire first shift and half the loggers in town had come in for breakfast this morning. He found a clean spot at the counter and ordered his breakfast. A new waitress shot him a smile and then bent over to grab a fresh caddy of silverware. He watched with admiration.
“Mind if I sit here?”
He pulled his coffee cup closer, wrestling his eyes away from the waitress’s hemline to make a hospitable expression at the older woman beside him. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks.” She took a seat and the cute waitress filled both their mugs. The old gal had to be a regular. He thought he recognized her from someplace, maybe a potluck or a community meeting. She had the sturdy build of a woman who’d spent her younger years working hard.
“Your usual, Chameli?” the waitress asked.
Peter recognized the name, for sure. Chameli Paulus had led the group that had argued against letting the Believers sell their land in Sectors 13 and 14 to Songheuser. Her statements had crossed his desk, and even though her lack of training was obvious, he’d admired her commitment to local natural history.
He put out his hand. “I’m Peter Bajowski. I remember your notes about Sector 14. You’ve done a lot of data collecting out there.”
“I know who you are, Dr Bajowski. Part of the reason I sat here.” She took a drink of her coffee. “Thanks for remembering me.”
The waitress appeared with Peter’s breakfast and he took a moment fiddling with his food before answering. “Sounds like you’ve got a question for me.” He forked beans and potato into a tortilla and took a bite large enough to give Chameli a chance to pour out her heart. She was probably looking for support fighting the ne
xt phase of development out on the edge sectors — he knew these political old ladies. They never gave up.
She surprised him by pulling out a plastic box with a snap-on lid. “I source a lot of pigments from the woods,” she began, and stopped, misreading the confusion on his face: “Oh, don’t worry. I’m damn careful how I get the stuff. I’m not out crushing rock-eater in the field or stripping whole trees of their lichen. I know how to tread lightly in the woods.”
He took another bite instead of answering. He was more interested in what she was doing with the pigments; he didn’t know a thing about the woman besides the fact she irritated the hell out of the company.
“So one of my dealers brought me this yesterday.” She pushed the box toward him. “I’d say it was Hepzibah’s blue, but there’s something different about these. Maybe a subspecies?”
Not political wrangling at all, but actual biology. And a question worth investigating. He dried his hands on his napkin and opened the box. “Wow.”
There had to be at least a hundred dead butterflies in the box, or at least the wings of a hundred dead butterflies. He reached into his shirt pocket and took out the tweezers he carried with him as a matter of course. With care, he lifted out a wing and held it up to the light. The blue scales shimmered softly, their powdery color a good match for the sky over his parents’ house in Monterey, the kind of blue that made you want to throw off your shoes and jump into the sea for a quick swim. “Magnificent.”
“Do you see the gold?” Chameli pointed to the border of tiny gold dots running along the edge of the wing. “That’s not normal for a Hep blue. I’ve been using their wings in my work since I started making jewelry, and I’ve never seen that.”
An artist. It explained the pigments. Peter looked away from the wings to see her eyes, gray and serious, fixed on his face. “Do you mind if I take one of these back to the office? I’d like to examine it more closely.”
She nodded. “Sure. I’ve got plenty. And I’m more curious about something new than I am worried about making a batch of paint.”
He found a plastic bag in his pocket and bagged a specimen, making a quick note of who he’d gotten it from. “Any idea where your source found these?”
“She’ll never tell. Trade secret.”
“Drat.” He took another bite, thinking it over. It seemed Earth insects were adapting to this world with new kinds of caterpillars finding a place to live in the forest and new kinds of butterflies winging through the skies. All of these changes happening, and not even a graduate student keeping track of them. Biologically speaking, these were the most exciting events in the whole galaxy — and the only observations being made were those he squeezed into his days off.
Chameli began work on a bowl of Cream of Wheat. He watched her for a moment, thinking. Someone like her — someone who spent time outside and paid attention to the world around them — could be very useful. She was at least another pair of boots on the ground.
He had another thought. Not only was she a citizen scientist, but she’d been on Huginn a lot longer than he had.
“Hey, you’ve been here a while, haven’t you?”
She washed down a bite with a swig of coffee. “It’ll be twenty years in three months.”
“Have you ever heard of leather birds attacking anyone?”
“Leather birds?” She shook her head. “They’ll bother your cow herd if it gets too close to one of their nesting trees, but all told, they don’t have much interest in anything terrestrial.”
“That’s what I thought. The leather birds—”
“Leather birds?” The man speaking had the kind of voice that could carry over a chainsaw’s roar. “What do you two know about goddamn leather birds?”
The whole room had stopped talking. The coffee maker made a soft gurgle and went silent.
Peter turned around slowly. He didn’t know the man behind him, but he’d seen dozens of his kind since coming to Huginn. The beefy build, the weatherbeaten skin, the waterproof coveralls, all spoke of life out in the elements, wrestling nature for a living. Men like that had PhDs from the school of hard knocks, and they looked down on anyone who couldn’t out-muscle or out-shout them.
“We’re just shooting the breeze, man. Don’t let us bother you.” Peter swung to face his breakfast, hoping the man would move on.
A hand descended on his shoulder and spun him back around. “Oh, you ain’t bothering me. I just want to make sure you’re not letting some treehugger preach to you about them things. They’re a menace, that’s what they are.”
Peter pushed the man’s hand off his shoulder. “I’m a company biologist. I don’t need a report on leather birds from a logger.” He didn’t mean to make the words come out so full of attitude.
“Oh, I see. You’re the smart one here.”
“Yes, I am.” Peter had been on this side of the conversation his entire adult life. From condo developers to timber fallers, they all hated to be told they weren’t the smartest men in the room, as threatened by Peter’s degrees as if the diplomas might physically crush their dicks. “You see, a leather bird’s physiognomy is built out of an entirely different sequence of amino acids than ours is. They get no nutrition from our flesh. Plus, they’re about the size of a hawk. Big for a bird, but no real threat to a man of your size.”
“You talk big, but you don’t know the woods.”
“I’ve spent the last four years in these woods, and I’m not riding around in a saw-mech. I actually look at the creatures on this planet while you’re playing masters of the universe.”
It was too much and he knew it even before the man’s fist shot out. He had a second to be glad he’d left his I+ glasses in his satchel before his head smashed backward and he slammed into the edge of the counter. Ceramic shattered. His face hurt.
“Stop it.” Chameli shoved the big man aside with ease. “Just stop it.” She kept her hands up, ready for the man to make another move. “You all right, Dr Bajowksi?”
Peter wiped blood off his top lip. “Yeah.”
“Then get the hell out of here before you cause any more trouble. Some of us have breakfast to finish.”
He didn’t need encouragement. He found his satchel tucked beneath the counter and headed out the door. The bell jingled as it swung shut behind him. He guessed he’d just go to work early. There was coffee there, after all.
At the end of the parking strip, Sheriff Vargas rolled down the window of her UTV and stuck her head out. “You eighty-six’d again, Peter?”
“Just thrown out.”
“You’d best remember there are only so many places to eat around here,” she called out, laughing.
Peter gave her a wave. She was right, but some days it felt smaller than others.
THE UTV’S lights lit up two circles like owl’s eyes on the horsetail gate in front of Matthias Williams’s house. Standish turned off the rig and waited for her eyes to adjust. The sun had come up during her drive, but Wodin’s shadow lay heavily over the moon, smudging everything gray.
The farmstead had several outbuildings, but Standish found Matthias at the whetstone in front of his barn, a wide and alarming array of honed blades around him: shovels, loppers, hoes, and scissory-looking things she couldn’t identify. He stopped pumping the foot pedal of the grinder as she approached, but did not get up from his three-legged stool. Once again, the silence of his place unnerved her.
For the first time, she wondered just what she was doing out here. Sheriff Vargas had Duncan Chambers’ body. This was her case to solve. She had training and skills and a gun, whereas Standish had only curiosity and a canister of pepper spray in her pocket. She’d be in real trouble if she’d just stumbled onto Duncan’s murderer.
It was possible, she supposed. If the shipping invoices Duncan had found were clues to some kind of Believer-Songheuser conspiracy, it was just possible Matthias had been forced to kill the man.
Hattie went to Matthias’s side and began sniffing his boots. Matthias
rubbed the dog’s ears, smiling at her.
Possible, Standish reminded herself. Just really unlikely.
“Something I can do for you, Miss Kate?”
“You were friends with Duncan Chambers, weren’t you?”
He reached for a hoe. “Most of Canaan Lake was friends with Duncan. He liked people.” He took a file out of his pocket. “Too bad you didn’t get a chance to meet him.”
He began filing at some imperfection in the hoe’s blade. Standish studied him. She was strong, although she still needed to recoup muscle after her time in cryo, and she was tall. On a good day, she thought she could overpower him, especially if she fought dirty. But Matthias had all the advantage here, and if he had killed Duncan, he’d have no qualms sticking that file through her throat.
She knew she should be nervous, but she somehow wasn’t. “I live in Duncan’s house,” she began.
Matthias looked up. “You do? Was any of Duncan’s gear left behind or did Peter clear it all out?” His hazel gray eyes were clear and curious, his posture relaxed.
“He left some stuff. Food and whatnot. And some papers that I found.”
“Papers?”
“I’m not sure they’re Duncan’s.”
Matthias put down the hoe and file and stood up. “Let me get you a cup of tea,” he said. “I don’t mean to be inhospitable.”
Hattie pawed at his leg.
“Hattie,” Standish snapped. “Come here.”
“She’s taken a liking to me.” He patted the dog and then pushed her paw off his leg. He began walking toward the house.
“She’s trained not to put her foot up. Come here,” she ordered again.
Hattie trudged to her side. She’d never seen the dog act like this.
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather she stayed on the porch,” Matthias said. “I’ll bring her out some water, if you’d like.”
Standish kept a good hold on Hattie’s collar. She could hear Matthias’s footsteps inside, a squeak of metal and a sudden whoosh of water. She made the sign for Hattie to sit and then narrowed her eyes at the dog. “You stay.” She couldn’t understand why Hattie was acting like this.
An Oath of Dogs Page 14