But I did have something I don’t usually have when I’m trying to find someone.
I had a fat bag of solid gold crowns.
Three-leg Cat felt the shift in my mood and jumped out of my lap, insulted and stiff-tailed.
“Somebody has to work around here.”
Three-leg broke wind and sauntered out, his opinion of that statement made pungent and all too plain.
I found a printing shop and had them make up a waybill. I ordered four hundred and fifty copies. I’d never seen anybody covered in that much ink ever look so happy.
Then I went looking for Granny Knot. I don’t like spending a client’s money without their say so, and since my client was currently busy pushing up the oft-quoted daisies I figured Granny would have to speak for him.
Mama wasn't home, and when I finally found Granny’s place she wasn’t answering her door either.
Granny Knot had said she had a place on Elfway. I’d been a little surprised. Elfway is one of those old, narrow lanes that twists and turns and are now so popular with the newly wealthy because, I suppose, they look quaint.
And it did. I gathered a lot of people spent a lot of time and considerable effort to keep it looking that way. The storefronts were all tall, with exaggerated overhangs and round-topped doors (because nothing says Elf like a round-topped door, apparently) and leaves worked into every visible surface. Everything was Elf-themed, whether it was taffy or glass or hats or jewels. Even the restaurant menus posted in the windows were done up in faux Elf.
And here I’d always thought Elves were a bloodthirsty lot of murderous elementals with a penchant for casual torture and a taste for human infants.
I kept watching the numbers posted haphazardly here and there, and the street suddenly seemed to end well before I got to Granny’s scribbled address.
I kept going anyway. The street didn’t exactly stop, it just sort of lost its cobbles and became a hard-packed dirt footpath for a while. Vacant lots sprouted weeds and trash about me. Here and there, the hulk of a burned-out building stood twisted in the sun. The backs of buildings a street over rose, windows boarded against the grim sight of Elfway and the burglary-inclined residents thereof, until I made another block.
And then I was on cobbles again. A hand-painted sign informed me I had just entered Old Elfway and that I should enjoy my visit.
The prospect seemed unlikely. The structures were all pre-War wood, grey with age and weather and neglect. Not a board I could see had been spared curling and splitting.
Faces moved behind curtains. Doors slammed shut as I passed.
I decided Mama would be right at home in Old Elfway just as I reached No. 19.
Granny’s door had no glass. But painted on it was a grinning white face, which, like my painted finder’s eye, led the illiterate to our doors.
As I said, Granny wasn’t there. I knocked, and then I sat down on her tiny rotten porch. I decided to wait until the Big Bell clanged out four before I headed back to the print shop to check on my waybills.
Granny’s neighbors began to show themselves once they could see I was waiting for Granny and not, therefore, looking for random heads to knock. Half a dozen paraded back and forth before me, carefully not making eye contact or acknowledging my wide and charming smile.
Still, I waved and greeted each one.
I was still waving and greeting when I heard a familiar cackle ring out down the street, followed by a much softer muttering.
I stood up and wiped ants off my britches. Mama and Granny ambled up, gabbing away in some private, incomprehensible Old Lady tongue while giggling and snorting like tipsy teenagers with their first bottle of grown-up hooch.
“Good day, ladies,” I said, with a practiced tip of my hat. “I hope I’m not too late for tea.”
Granny shrieked in laughter and gobbled something at Mama. I suppose it was funny because it set them both off for so long I nearly sat back down again.
“I was hoping to talk to you, Granny,” I said when the gales of laughter subsided.
Granny muttered into her fist of rags, and then scampered up and unlocked her door.
Mama barged in, right at home. I followed, stooping to fit beneath the door, which lacked a rounded top but was scaled for Elves nonetheless.
Granny shut the door behind me and then listened to her rags for a moment before motioning me into a chair beside Mama.
I sighed and sat. Asking Mama to leave would be like asking goats to take up painting.
“I need to spend some of that money,” I said without preamble.
I laid out the problems inherent in locating people who’d last been seen ten years and two major fires ago. I hinted that something that had happened in that neighborhood, which might not have had anything to do with Marris Sellway, was making people nervous and therefore quiet.
Then I described my plan to use good old-fashioned greed to provoke recollection and loosen lips.
If Granny had rather Mama didn’t hear our dealings, she’d have to throw her out herself. She didn’t.
Mama chuckled, and Granny held a long conversation with her rags. When that was over, she looked me in the eye and nodded, and when Mama wasn’t looking, she winked.
That was all I needed.
Almost all.
“I do have a question, Granny.”
She tilted her head, silent and expectant.
“Something’s bothering me. You say the dead-you say your client spent ten years wracked with guilt, amassing a small fortune to give to this Marris.”
Granny nodded. Mama listened, too, her beady Hog eyes fixed in a frown.
“Why doesn’t he know where she is, then? Surely he kept tabs on her, on the kid. Anybody willing to put that much coin in a bag isn’t going to just let them vanish. He’d want to know if they had a roof, had food. He’d want to know if they were dead or alive. So, why can’t he tell you where she is?”
Granny listened. Her handful of rags apparently had things to say, directly into her ear, as usual.
“He couldn’t bear it.” Her voice croaked and wavered. “The guilt. The shame.”
“Horse flop.”
“Boy!” Mama grabbed my elbow. “Don’t you shame me with that lack of manners.”
“I’m not saying Granny is lying. I’m just saying that if her spook had the ability to tell her where the bag of coin was, it’s reasonable to ask why he suddenly forgot an address he certainly knew.”
“The dead. Don’t think like the living. Confused. Life fading like a dream.”
I sighed. I was really wishing Mama would scoot, so I could speak to Granny in plain Kingdom and dispense with the carnival sideshow diction.
“Fine. Our heart-broken, guilt-ridden spook can lead you to a bag of coin in a buried butter churn in a privy, but he can’t cough up even part of an address. Wonderful. So I have your assurance, Granny, that he won’t come a rattling his chains at my place in the middle of the night because I spent thirty of his precious crowns to find his estranged spouse?”
Granny dutifully whispered all that back to her rags, giggled at the reply, and finally gave me my answer.
“No. Do it.”
I nodded. “Ladies, if you’ll excuse me, I have chores to tend.”
We exchanged farewells, Mama and Granny and Granny’s rags and me. I got out of there when Granny uncorked a bottle of something pungent and dark. The prospect of seeing Mama tipsy was far more daunting that walking back through Elfway and its faux Elf tackiness.
I didn’t figure the print shop was even a quarter of the way rolling out my handbills. So I had time to take the long way back toward my place. Long enough to visit the workhouse over on Kerston, long enough to gather up a mob of street urchins and feed them all at a soup stoop, and then sit them down and explain what I wanted them to do.