by Gene Wolfe
Dr. Fevre smiled. “And you do your duty, just as I strive to do mine.”
“I said we weren’t required to load dishes. We aren’t, but we generally try to be helpful within reason. For one thing, it looks good for us if we’re checked out a lot. It doesn’t have to be different patrons. If one patron checks us out four times in a year, our record shines. Do you know what I mean?”
Dr. Fevre said, “Certainly.”
I stuck my oar in. “There’s a lady who checks me out once a year, every year.”
Audrey said, “That alone makes Ern pretty solid. It’s when a year goes by and nobody checks a certain resource out that she looks bad.”
I said, “Now you know where we stand. You’ve been to Lichholm. Several times, I believe. We haven’t, and I don’t think your wife knows anything about it.”
Chandra put in, “I don’t either.”
Audrey said, “You’re going there on your sabbatical, and I’m reasonably sure you’ve been there before. Since Ern and I know nothing about the place, how about filling us in?”
“Gladly.” Dr. Fevre smiled. “Lichholm is a small island off the northernmost coast, not far from the Arctic Circle. I don’t know the population but it cannot be much more than a thousand, and may be less. Some of the world’s richest fishing grounds lie to the southeast, and nearly all of the men fish.”
For a moment he fell silent.
“Their island came to my attention originally because of its ice caves.”
I suppose my eyes opened wider or I sat up straighter or something. Whatever it was, it made Dr. Fevre chuckle. “That’s right, caverns of ice. Caverns in a glacier. Very extensive and very beautiful caves of crystal-clear ice, although to see them you have to bring a flashlight or a lantern. Their existence is almost unknown to the rest of the world, but I have explored them. I’ll be delighted to show them to you when we get to Lichholm—assuming that you’d like to see them.”
Very truthfully I said I certainly would.
Audrey nodded, and Chandra exclaimed, “Me too!”
“In that case I must warn you”—Dr. Fevre was still smiling gently—“that those ice caverns contain thousands of corpses.”
Audrey gasped loudly enough for me to hear her.
“For generations, the inhabitants of the island have interred their dead in the ice caves, where the intense cold preserves them perfectly.”
Audrey said, “Now I understand the name of the island. I’ve been wondering about that.”
Dr. Fevre nodded. “It makes perfect sense, when one thinks about it. If a young woman wishes to see what her great-grandmother looked like, she can be taken there and shown. Or suppose a man is away from the island when his wife dies of a fever. When he returns, he can be shown his wife’s body. He knows then that she is in sober fact dead, and that she did not die by violence.”
I said, “What about the treasure? Why not tell us about that?”
Dr. Fevre started to speak, but closed his mouth firmly before the first word came out. Audrey stared at me.
“I saw a map of that island once,” I said. “There was a star on it in a little rectangle. It seemed pretty clear that whatever the rectangle represented was the reason the map had been made. When I saw it, I had no idea who had drawn it, but I believe I could offer a really good guess now.”
Audrey and I waited for Dr. Fevre to speak; when he said nothing Audrey turned to me. “We’ve stopped pitching. Have you noticed, Ern? Almost stopped, anyhow.”
There was a lot more talk, but I have given all the most interesting stuff. When Dr. Fevre’s clothes were dry, he and Chandra went off to visit Adah, and Audrey went out on deck again. I knew she expected me to join her, but I went up onto the bridge for a few minutes first.
When I came down again and found Audrey on the main deck, she asked, “Are you taking questions?”
I shrugged. “Depends on what they are. I don’t know everything anyway.”
“What do you know about the star on that map you saw? Does it mean treasure?”
I shook my head. “I’ve no idea what it means. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Then how about this one?” She lowered her voice. “What do you think of Dr. Barry Fevre?”
I shrugged again. “He’s handsome, brave, smooth, and plausible. Maybe slick, too. I haven’t quite made up my mind about slick.”
“Was he telling the truth? About those ice caves, I mean.”
“Probably. I don’t know.”
“Does our patron trust him?”
I shook my head.
“You know she doesn’t, or you just think she doesn’t?”
“Now you’re splitting hairs,” I told Audrey. “I’m reasonably confident that she doesn’t. Let’s say she may trust him sometimes, but not most of the time.”
Audrey pulled the wool coat Adah Fevre’s money had bought her a little bit tighter. “Do you?”
“Of course not.”
“I don’t either. It’s just a feeling.”
I said, “For me, it’s more than a feeling. For one thing, he lied when he told us he expected to find his wife on this boat. He would never have climbed across on that net if he had. From his point of view, Adah’s going to complicate the hell out of things.”
“He was expecting someone else?”
I nodded. “Absolutely.”
“Who? Do you know?”
“Not for sure, but I can make a good guess—a lady called Peggy Pepper. Professor Peggy Pepper, if you like P’s or want to be formal. Black hair, clear complexion, and quite attractive, facially at least. I’ve never met her, but I screened her once. Good voice, too.”
“I’ve been married twice and I still didn’t guess.” Audrey made a joke of it. “Silly me!”
I said, “A good-looking man, barely middle-aged, has money and an attractive but emotionally disturbed wife. He leaves her, which I find understandable; but he never comes back for a visit. Not in years. Their twelve-year-old daughter hardly knows what he looks like.” I paused, staring out at the dark and rolling sea and thinking about the old Ern A. Smithe, his bowed shoulders, thin gray hair, and despondent face; someday soon that would be me.
Trying to shake the thought off, I said, “You can bet the rent that Dr. Barry Fevre’s got somebody else. Maybe two or three somebodys, but one for sure.”
Audrey was a nice distraction, linking arms and pressing herself against me. “I’m surprised he doesn’t divorce Adah.”
I said, “There’ll be a reason for that, too. I’m not going to guess because it could be any of a dozen things.”
Audrey nodded. “Chandra, to begin with. His wife might get custody, although with an emotional illness…”
“Doubtful, I agree. He’d almost certainly get custody, which he may not want; but it’s probably something else. If a wife dies without a will, her husband gets her property. I’ve never gotten the impression there was a great deal, but she rents her house and pays her bills—although her housekeeper may be writing the actual checks—and has done it for years. So it’s quite possible that there’s a lot more money than I would guess.”
“What else?”
“He may not want to marry the lovely Peggy, or anybody. A living wife’s the perfect excuse.”
“I’d think she’d pressure him to get a divorce.”
I said, “Perhaps she does, but look at it! His wife’s chronically ill and he divorces her and walks away. How would that go over at the faculty meeting? As things are, he’s standing loyally by her as far as they know.”
Audrey nodded.
“Here’s another one. There’s a dark secret in his past. Let’s say he murdered another fully human ten or fifteen years ago. The fact is known to his wife. He, knowing his wife, feels sure she’ll go straight to the police if he files for divorce.”
Audrey snapped her fingers. “Wait a minute! He said that when he screened, this boat told him she was chartered. She wouldn’t tell him where she was going, but
she told him who had chartered her.”
I nodded. “You’re right, that’s what he said.”
“Then he would’ve known his wife was on board!”
I shook my head. “He would if it were true, but it sounded terribly unlikely to me. If the charter were confidential, wouldn’t the name of the person—or entity, it might be a company or even some government agency—be confidential, too? Say that I’m going on a terribly private errand. I tell you that you mustn’t tell anyone what it is, but it’s all right if you tell them that I’ve gone on a very confidential private errand. Does that sound sensible?”
“I see what you mean.”
“So I asked the sim about it. She said no, she just told people she wasn’t available. Not why, not even how long, since she couldn’t know that with much certainty. Just unavailable.”
It was late afternoon before we sighted Lichholm. If the North Atlantic had been quiet and the sun bright, I would have seen it a lot sooner. As it was, it didn’t first appear as a tiny dot on the horizon and slowly grow, the sort of thing you read about in travel books. By the time I noticed it—a white peak rising above roaring, white-maned waves—it was already near enough for me to make out a few details. I know how silly this sounds, but my first thought was The Snow Giants’ Castle. When the first me had been a little kid, some grown-up had given that first me a big, rolled-up picture map of Fairyland. It was supposed to be about fairies, but the biggest thing on it was the Snow Giants’ Castle, way back at the back and high up in the mountains. It was twilight in Fairyland, and that picture map gave me the impression that it was always twilight there. A few years later I read about perilous seas in fairylands forlorn and thought yeah, I know about those. Now I felt that I was on one.
Lichholm was a mountain—one big mountain, wide but not very steep—rising out of those perilous seas. A lot of the mountains Arabella and I had seen when we flew in Colette Coldbrook’s yellow flitter were snowcapped, and they had been majestic and beautiful. So was this, and more if anything. Lichholm’s snowcap ran down to the water, snow on the land and so much snow on the roofs of the houses that I could barely make them out. I wouldn’t have noticed them at all if it had not been for the dirty gray smears of smoke that rose from their chimneys until they were whipped away by the wind. Just a couple of days ago, when I was fooling around on one of the screens, I came across a song about whaling; it said, “The king of that country is a fierce Greenland bear.” You could sing the same thing about Lichholm. You’d think there was nothing there for bears to eat; but they ate seals and fish, mostly, and once in a while a seabird or one of us.
9
THE ONLY VILLAGE ON CORPSE ISLAND
When we tied up in Lichholm’s little harbor next day, the lugger was already there. That surprised me; I thought we would make better time than a fishing boat with sails could. The bottom fell out of my surprise when a second lugger rounded the point, giving me a good laugh at my own expense.
Both these luggers were fishing boats, the ancestors of the Three Sisters. Later I found out there were more than a dozen of them, all about the same size, all with small engines they rarely used, and all spreading lug sails on two masts.
The gray smoke and the name of the island had led me to expect something pretty grim, but the village looked clean and bright thanks to the new-fallen snow. As far as I could see, there were no big houses and no big stores, no big buildings of any kind. There wasn’t a whole lot of money around here, in other words. Just about all the houses were cottages, with steep roofs that had lofty attics under them. It was all one room up in those attics sometimes, or maybe two or three attic rooms with slanted ceilings—take your pick. When a thing’s simple enough it can be hard for it to look old, and that was how it was with those cottages. Unpainted stone walls and gray slates instead of shingles. Stone was cheap here, but wood was for boats and maybe furniture—only there wasn’t really enough for either one; more wood had to be brought up from the south. The shops I saw had no window displays to show what they sold. You knew they were shops from the weathered signs hung out front. A needle stuck into a spool of thread is one I remember. Another was a cow’s horn with white foam dripping from the big end; it meant the shop sold ale. From what I’ve said, you can probably tell I kind of liked the place; I would have liked it a lot more if the people hadn’t stared so long at strangers like me.
Dr. Fevre was boarding with a family in the village, but they didn’t have room for all four of us. They asked around and eventually Audrey and I landed with an old couple named Eiriksdatter. The old folks had six kids, but their kids were grown-ups now, with little stone cottages and big families of their own. The boys were fishermen, all four of them; and none had drowned. Mr. and Mrs. Eiriksdatter sounded proud and happy when they told us about that; it seemed like a good many fishermen drowned. Later on I noticed that when the old woman talked about it she said it like I wrote it: “Not one has drowned.” The old man never corrected her, but he said, “None have drowned yet.” It makes a real big difference.
We got the kids’ old rooms, of course. They were up under the roof and pretty small, so we never did much more than sleep there. The four boys had slept two to a bed; one room went to Adah and another to Chandra. Adah’s was bigger and had a window, plus plenty of room for Audrey and me to sleep alongside her bed. We pretended to be a little edgy about having to undress in the same little room. Maybe we fooled the old people, but I could see that Adah and Chandra were not taken in for a minute.
After dinner on the first night, while the old man dozed and his wife did the dishes with a little help from Chandra, I bided my time until Adah went up to bed; call it fifteen or twenty minutes. Then I whispered to Audrey, “You ask me a lot of questions, how about if I ask you one?”
“Sure, if I know the answer.”
“Why was Dr. Fevre on that lugger?”
Audrey looked puzzled. “I have no idea. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I’m sure he’ll have a story. It may be the truth, but I doubt it. He’d tried to charter our boat first. He said so. It wasn’t available. What did he want it for?”
“I suppose he wanted it to come here and pick him up. Then it would have brought him back to the mainland.”
“To Polly’s Cove, that being where it was based.”
“Right. To Polly’s Cove, where Chandra and his wife live. He teaches in Spice Grove, doesn’t he? There’s a university there? I think you said that.”
I nodded. “He does. But look at the time line. I saw him in the library in Polly’s Cove. He walked through the lobby and he may—I said may—have cut a tattered old Ern A. Smithe’s throat then and there. How long would you say it was between that day, the day I got Adah Fevre to check you out, and the day the Three Sisters sailed with you and me on board?”
Audrey took her time. “Close to a week. Maybe a little more.”
“I make it six days. I may be off by a day or two, I admit; but I think six days is right. We were three days on the boat before we sighted the lugger.”
“Were we? It seemed longer.”
“It was bound to, since we didn’t have much to do.”
“Bad food didn’t help either.”
“Right you are. It could be that you’re more right than you know. Anyway, we’re talking about nine days altogether. Nine days from the time I saw Dr. Fevre in the Polly’s Cove Public Library to the time we both saw him cross from boat to boat on a fishing net. Did I say he was brave?”
Audrey nodded. “I think so.”
“I hope I did, because he is. He’s rich, too. I know he must be because he checked two resource reclones out of the library at the same time.”
“Your girlfriends from Spice Grove.”
“That’s right. Now here’s another question. Was the lugger taking him back to the mainland?”
“I see what you mean. It doesn’t seem likely, does it?”
I paused, listening to old Mrs. Eiriksdatter chatting with Cha
ndra. “No. No, it doesn’t. He would have to come here, presumably with Millie Baumgartner and Rose Romain in tow, and just a day or two later turn around and come back, with or without them.”
Audrey said, “I admitted that it doesn’t seem likely.”
“Agreed, and here’s one even less likely. He was on his way back to Polly’s Cove, but was perfectly happy when he found out we were going to Lichholm. Wouldn’t he have insisted we take him to the mainland first? Or wanted to get back onto his lugger? He was fine with our going to Lichholm. Not one single complaint.”
Slowly, Audrey nodded. “He was on his way to Lichholm in that lugger.”
“Correct, I’m sure. The question is where are Millie and Rose? My guess is that they were on the lugger with him. Either they stayed below and out of sight, or they were wearing oilskins like Dr. Fevre and the Lichholm men and I wasn’t able to spot them among the crew. I think the first one is more likely, but I could be wrong.”
“Has the lugger made port yet? Do you know?”
“No, I don’t. It could have beaten us, but that’s unlikely. Most probably, it was at least a couple of hours behind us. I doubt that it would have tried to tie up after dark, although that, too, is possible. Do you remember the house where Dr. Fevre’s staying?”
Audrey nodded.
“Remember where it is?”
“Down at the other end of the street, about as far from the docks as you can get.” She paused. “It’s almost the last house on the street, and it’s a little bigger than the houses on either side of it.”
“You’ve got it, and it seems to me that it’s possible that Millie and Rose are in that house with their patron. I’m going down there, keeping my ears open and my mouth shut. If they’re there, we may be able to catch a glimpse of them or hear them talking. I know both of them pretty well, and I guarantee that I’ll recognize their voices—if they’re really there.”