“Then why is it here?”
“My brother and a friend of his moved it up from the beach, a couple of mornings after the murder. They don’t know if maybe it fell off a ship or what, but they handed it over to the widow. She told them to stick it over there. Then she skipped town, and as far as I know, she ain’t been back.”
“Hard to blame her,” Sam murmured. “Her husband gets stabbed to death . . . right here.” He peered down into the knotty grass and wondered where, exactly. Beside the fountain? Under the entry arch? The body must have fallen down and bled itself dry somewhere close.
“I’ll tell you what strikes me funny, though.” Dave abandoned the porch edge and meandered along the stone path until he stood beside Sam, in front of the strange statue set in the courtyard wall.
“What?”
“The widow’s daughter went missing, too, at the same time. But she never stuck around to look for her. It’s like she knew the kid was dead or gone for good.”
Sam nodded a little. “I guess that’s strange.”
“Sure it’s strange. Your kid vanishes the same night your husband dies, and you don’t even hang around? What if the kid came back, or if she got hurt, or kidnapped? Nobody knew. But I think the widow knew. I think that’s why she didn’t stay.”
“You think the widow killed them both?”
“No, no. I didn’t say that,” Dave said quickly. “I met her once, and she seemed like a real nice lady. She was real torn up about the whole thing. She looked . . . she looked lost. You know? But she didn’t look surprised, and she didn’t act like a lady who had a lot of questions. It’s hard to explain.”
Sam still hadn’t taken his eyes off the statue. He gazed at her with fascination and suspicion, like he half expected her to blink and look away.
She crouched in a cubbyhole built into the courtyard wall, a spot that was originally meant to hold a potted plant or a garden urn. And she—because it was hard for Sam to think of the statue as an “it”—she was made from an indeterminate gray stone that was streaked with mineral deposits.
Life-sized and seated, she had one arm wrapped around her face and her legs were drawn up to her chest. The other hand she held out, fingers open as if to ward something away.
A ladybug scaled that outstretched arm. Sam followed it with his eyes.
“Who do you think she’s supposed to be?” Dave asked.
“Who says she’s supposed to be anybody?”
“She must be someone. Look at her face—what you can see of it. She looks too real, you know?” Dave didn’t have the vocabulary for what he meant, but Sam understood well enough.
“Yeah. It looks like a portrait, not like a decoration.”
“That’s it. What you just said. But come on, let’s wrap it up. It’s hot out here. Let’s do the survey, set the address, and get back to the station.”
“It’s not so bad in the shade.”
Dave cleared his throat and grumbled as he walked away. “It’s hot. And it’s going to get worse within the hour, so hurry it up.”
“I already know what the insurance charge ought to be.” Sam tore himself away from the statue and let his gaze wander around the courtyard. “Whenever you’re finished checking the place out, I’m ready to go.”
But even as he said it, that peculiar feeling was creeping back up his neck. And there was something else, too, some undercurrent to his discomfort that he had a hard time placing. It was the sensation that he was missing something—like he was looking at something important without seeing it.
“I wish I could get inside,” Dave complained. “They nailed this thing up tight, though. I’d yank the boards off, but I’m not sure if we’re supposed to do that or not. I don’t know if Langan wants us going inside.”
“He told you to look around, didn’t he?”
“He wasn’t real specific. I thought he meant the outside, and I can tell by looking around out here that the place is sound. But I’d like to look around inside all the same.”
Sam wrinkled his nose and stared hard at the grass, not looking up at Dave. “Why?”
“Never been inside a house this nice. Have you?”
“No,” Sam lied. He had a rich aunt in Georgia, but Dave didn’t like to be one-upped, and Sam didn’t like talking to Dave enough to start a conversation on the subject.
“Then don’t you want to go inside?”
“I don’t care,” he said, and that much was true. “If you want to pull off a plank and go in, I won’t say anything about it, if that’s what you want to know.”
Dave was already working his fingers around the sheet of plywood on the back door. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folding knife, then worked its flat blade underneath the nails. “Good. Because I want to be thorough. If anybody asks, if Langan or anyone wants to know, that’s why I’m doing this. He paid me to check the place out. Least I can do is see that the man gets his money’s worth.”
The wide, thin wood strip splintered and peeled back. Dave pushed his hand into the interior and levered the barrier until there was space enough for him to reach the doorknob. He tried it and it twisted easily.
“It isn’t locked,” he announced.
“Great,” Sam said.
Sam’s eyes had settled on a dark spot in the grass, and he was no longer paying attention to anything Dave said. Rationally Sam knew that there was no more blood left between the paving stones, that years had passed and there was nothing left of the crime once committed there.
But while Dave squeezed himself around the boards and into the house, Sam looked more closely at the spot in the grass. He was almost certain that it was blood, regardless of the facts.
He sank down low and his knees popped. His clipboard did a small slide between his fingers, but he caught it before it hit the ground. His glasses tried to escape again, too, but he caught them and held them firmly while he investigated the dirty patch.
Something wet had dried to a crusty, reddish brown. Sam didn’t have a free hand to swipe a finger along the mess, and he wouldn’t have done so anyway. But it did look like blood. And it couldn’t have been there very long. It rained almost every day.
Dave staggered around inside the house and swore. “It’s dark in here!”
“Hard to believe,” Sam mumbled, “what with all the windows boarded up.”
The blood—if it was, in fact, blood—could’ve belonged to an animal, he supposed, but where was the rest of it? Animals don’t hang around and bleed, then wander off. Something must’ve carried it away and eaten it.
He stuffed the clipboard up under his armpit again and ran his palm lightly along the top of the grass, ruffling and spreading it. A bright, quick gleam of reflected light shone up from the ground.
Sam paused.
He let go of his glasses so he could fish around between the bristly green blades. Eventually he retrieved a sharp sliver of metal shaped like a triangle. A small round grommet dangled from its end. It looked like a hinge, but not for anything so hardy as a door.
He turned it around in his hand and wiped a smudge of dirt away. He held it up to his nose and forced his glasses closer to his eyes, which sharpened his vision by a small amount.
“Brass?” he guessed aloud. Not gold, at any rate. This was shinier and cheaper, and it wasn’t tough enough to hold anything heavier than a book cover.
Sam considered this, and strained to see the object better. He’d known of big books to be bound that way, and maybe those brown fibers strung from the grommet were leather.
Dave cursed loudly and caused a crash. “I’m going upstairs so I can see!” he shouted.
“Knock yourself out.” The upstairs windows were boarded, too, but Dave would figure that out soon enough, so Sam didn’t holler a warning.
Over there, beside the fountain, there was a streak of something rust-colored and nasty. More blood? He climbed all the way to his feet and went to look. He couldn’t be sure, but the consistency was the same.
A nub of soft material sank under his shoe. He lifted the edge of his heel and found a burned-down lump of wax. It was the last inch of a candle.
A swift gust of ocean air shook the mimosa tree, and the shadows in the courtyard shifted, waved, and broke. He returned one hand to his glasses and kept his eyes on the ground, where he found several swaths of grass that weren’t shaded, but charred. Patches of earth had been scorched; and when he stood up straight, Sam thought he could detect a pattern. The burned spots had a shape like a circle.
“Dave!” he called out.
“What?”
“Down here! Take a look at this!”
Dave took a moment to reach a window, and even though it was boarded, it was easier for him to hear. “At what, the statue? I saw it already!”
“No, not that! Come back down here, would you?”
“In a minute!”
Sam began taking careful notes: how many burned spots, where they were placed, and so on. Behind him, the statue watched and withheld comment. Even so, Sam got the oddest feeling that she approved, and she encouraged him.
He wrote quickly and precisely, in slanted handwriting that other people found difficult to read. He cataloged positions, guesses, and theories. He mentioned proximity to the building, likely flammable materials, and estimated a time for the spotty, contained fires.
Dave stumbled back downstairs and squeezed himself between the door and the plywood. He popped out into the yard with a grunt. “What are you going on about?”
“Come and see.” Sam waved down at the ground, using his clipboard to cover a bigger chunk of yard with the gesture. “Come on, this is strange. Really strange. Someone’s been using this yard for something.”
“Like what?”
“Like,” Sam hesitated. “Like for cooking, maybe. Do we have any new transients on the island, do you think? Look at this; someone’s made little fires all over the place. You can hardly see them because of the trees and the shade, but if you look close, there they are.”
Dave dutifully scowled down at the ground, paying extra attention to the spots Sam indicated. He stood up straight and wiped a dirty streak of sweat off his forehead. “Sure. I see it. So what?”
“Is that all you have to say about it?”
“Yeah, so what? Langan will need to put up a gate. What’s the big deal?”
Sam’s ship of logic ran aground on Dave’s willful ignorance, and he tried to find a way over it. “It’s . . . it’s a fire hazard, isn’t it?”
“Oh yeah.” Dave nodded slowly. “Yeah, I get it. We can charge him more for insurance. Good thinking.”
“No. No, that’s not what I’m thinking. I’m thinking . . .” But he couldn’t finish the thought, because he wasn’t sure where he was headed with it. “I was thinking it’s weirder than hoboes cooking, that’s all.”
“Why? What else would it be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll ask around.”
“Go nuts,” Dave told him. “Write it up, submit it to the chief, and we can bill the buyer extra for the fire hazard. As long as you’re the one doing the paperwork, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“Don’t worry.” Sam didn’t trust Dave to write his own name correctly, much less file readable paperwork.
Some people might have been inclined to complain about the extra effort, but Sam was not that sort. He’d rather do it right himself than enlist inferior assistance. Dave was all right, but he wasn’t much of a clerk. That was fine—Dave didn’t make his living as a clerk. And when it came down to it, Sam wouldn’t have made much of a fireman, either, so he supposed it all worked out.
Dave dusted himself off, gave the courtyard wall a final jab with his toe, and announced that he was ready to head back to the courthouse.
The courthouse was barely half a mile away, so the men had walked to the house via the beach. The island had no fire department of its own, but it had a fire wagon—left behind when the bridge had washed out during a hurricane. The truck languished in storage on city property, and the chief would’ve thrown a fit if they’d fired the old thing up just to ride over to the beach house.
Sam finished noting the number and positions of the small fires. He straightened his clipboard and shoved his pencil into its latch.
“Fine,” he said to Dave, even though Dave was already out of earshot. “I guess we can call it a day.”
The Exposition of Monsters
Moments after Sam left, a curling, crackling, gravely noise whispered through the shaded courtyard.
A tall, rough-edged creature assembled itself from the gritty mulch beneath the grass and disintegrating leaves. It cobbled itself into a manlike shape with sticks for bones and dew for blood; it gave itself eyes made of crumbling bark, and it fashioned a mouth from yellowed strips of dead palmetto. Everything it used smelled of some quick rot, accelerated and nourished by the wet, warm air.
It stood up straight and was taller than a man usually comes.
It paced toward the statue in the courtyard wall and when its makeshift feet thudded against the earth, they made small, rhythmic crashes like sand and shells in a leather bag.
“Hello,” it said, but the voice wasn’t made by any clod-filled chest. The word sighed forth and it might have come from anywhere, or everywhere. The palmetto lips shifted, shaping themselves to project and pretend. It wasn’t a very good impression of speech, but it was a show for courtesy’s sake and not a strict necessity.
Hello, Nia said back in her helpless way. The response echoed in her head and traveled no farther.
She was awake, inasmuch as she was ever awake anymore. It was easier to let her mind go numb, to switch off for days at a time. It was easier to insist that her eyes were closed and that her ears heard nothing. Sometimes, she even dreamed—or she thought she did.
But the two men in the courtyard had caught her attention with their chatter and she’d watched them, not closely but idly. What was the point in watching closely? What could she contribute, or warn, or assist?
“They’ve gotten it very, very wrong, haven’t they, dear? All of them. The ones who light the fires, the ones who found the fires—none of them has it even halfway right. Probably, for now, it’s just as well.”
Its brown, flaking eyes twitched and cast dust.
Nia was unsure but unafraid. Nothing frightened her anymore, even the things that ought to . . . even things like the creature that assessed her so callously and fed her questions and answers in a roundabout way. She didn’t know what it meant, but she didn’t know if it mattered.
“You’re coming along nicely, for what it’s worth. It won’t be much longer now.” It cocked its head to the left, and a bright red centipede scurried out of the place where his ear should have been.
“I ought to say, it won’t be much longer ‘in the grand scheme of things,’ to borrow one of Edward’s worn-out phrases. I don’t suppose that makes you feel any better.”
She wasn’t sure what the creature was talking about, but she couldn’t respond, so she let it slide.
“Also, I doubt you would be cheered to learn that all of this—” It swept a fingerless hand at the wall, the ground, and the sky. It left the appendage pointed at her. “—all of it was to save you. The water witch, she would’ve killed you. She would have drowned you and fed you to the creeping things with shells and claws. But I thought . . . I thought I might find another use for you.
“I watched the way you fought, and the way you ran. You were afraid, but you were thinking—and it might surprise you to know how rarely I’ve found men who can manage both states at once. I think the water witch was right to try a woman this time. And the woman she took, that woman was kin of yours.”
My cousin. So beautiful. I wanted to be like her.
“I know terribly well how complicated kinship can be. I’ve learned it over the lifetimes of continents, so it means much more to me than to a flesh-and-blood spark like yourself. You’re born, you live, and you’re gone, and it�
��s as if just one short cycle of the tides has passed. Before I’ve had time to notice you, I’ve absorbed you.
“But if you lived a longer stretch, and if you saw the arc of time as I do—like the curve of the planet’s surface, like something immense, taken for granted more than known—then you’d have time to know real betrayal and real conflict. In the end—” It paused as if to take a breath, but a thing so made does not need to breathe. Soon it recovered its intent. “—in the end, most of it comes down to kinship, of one kind or another.”
My cousin, Nia thought again. A name flitted through her memory, but she couldn’t catch it and didn’t try very hard. She isn’t dead, is she?
It had lost its train of thought. It picked it up again and continued. “The other girl, the one she took—that girl must have been wicked from the inside out. Did you know that, when you were with her? Did you see her for what she was all along, or did you only figure it out too late?
“The water witch must have been watching her from the moment she landed on the island. She used you, too, though you couldn’t have known it. Convinced you to lure your cousin into the ocean. She won’t come far onshore, herself. The earth slows her. It weighs her down and costs her too much to cross. So yes, you were used that night. First you were used by the water witch, and then I used you myself.
“At least, I set you up to be used. But I think that once you understand, you will not hold it much against me. Once the cost becomes clear, you’ll come to agree that what I did, I did for the purpose of good.”
Nia watched the creature shift and settle in its improvised bones. It moved a shoulder in a guilty shrug and she wondered idly where it had ever learned to lie.
I can’t trust you, can I? Not even a little bit.
The thing met Nia’s eyes with a perfect, dedicated stare. “No, you cannot. But there’s no one else to tell you anything, except for the water witch herself—and you already know what she’s made of.” It shuffled itself loosely, and its grassy lips simulated a scowl. “Eventually, the imbeciles who frequent the ground at your feet will succeed, and then the water witch will learn of you. If you’ve ever been given to prayer, I might suggest that you do so now—petition whatever gods might hear you. Ask them for time. Beg them for the incompetence of men. Because if those ridiculous people setting small and futile fires ever achieve their goals, they’ll summon up their water witch and then, my darling, she’ll destroy you before you have time to be born.
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