“I want my money.”
“Those pants you're wearing have holes in both pockets. So, that coin will do you for today. I’m going to put the rest in a bank, Stick. They’ll keep it safe for you, and you can take all of it out, if you want. I hope you won’t. I hope you’ll clean yourself up and get off the weed and have what’s left of your life. I doubt that’ll happen. I figure you’ll march into whatever bank I choose and take all of it out and you’ll be dead before you spend a tenth of it. But that’s your decision. This is mine.”
He eyed me and eyed the knife and finally his eyes fell on the crown in his palm.
“This is a lot of money,” he said.
“Enough to buy you a brand new life. Come back around before Curfew. I’ll tell you where your bank is; give you the bank chit so you can get to the rest anytime. Deal?”
Maybe, just for an instant, Stick really meant to start over. Maybe he realized what a stroke of rare good fortune had befallen him, and maybe he meant to turn his miserable life around.
He stood. He looked me in the eye. And after I stood, too, he shook my hand.
“Thanks,” he said. “I mean it.”
And then he was gone.
I did all that, by the way. I went to Crowther and Sons. I opened an account in the name of Mr. Stick. I deposited the nineteen gold crowns. I had the bankers make up a chit just for Stick, made them promise not to throw him out even if he stank, and I put Stick’s bank chit in my pocket.
Stick never returned. The chit is in my desk, waiting for him. I suspect it will wait forever.
Even rare good fortune can be too little and too late.
I spent the rest of the morning greeting other respondents to my waybills. I stopped counting Marris Sellways after the fifth one sashayed into my office. All of them, though, seemed surprised to learn they had a daughter. One couldn’t even recall where she’d lived. One was obviously a man.
Mixed in with the would-be Marris Sellways were the people who claimed to have known her. Not a one recalled her daughter’s name, or much of anything else. Reported ages ranged from teenager to granny lady. One asked me, “How old do you want me to say she was?”
I shooed them all out and only had to resort to waves of my head-knocker once.
I paid the urchins, as promised, and I even flipped a pair of coppers to the man in drag because at least he showed a sense of humor about the whole wretched mess.
Skillet came back around and got the rest of his pay and his bonus. By early afternoon, the crowds had thinned out, and I posted Skillet at my door with instructions to tell any stragglers they’d have to come around later.
I wasn’t very happy when I left Skillet behind and hit the street. The sun could beam and the birds could sing all they wanted to-I’d been lied to, either by a dead man or the old lady who claimed to speak for him. And since Granny was the only one of the pair with a corpus, it was her I headed to see.
I stopped by Mama’s, more out of a desire to snag a cup of her tea than anything else. She was waiting, and instead of her usual tea she’d splurged and made coffee. I cleaned off a spot on her card-reading table and plopped myself down.
“I seen quite a crew file in and out of your place,” she said.
I grunted. “All a waste of time. All but one.”
Mama nodded sagely. “The stinkin’ one?”
“He ran a gang called the Bloods back before the fires, when Cawling Street was Cawling Street. He remembers the Sellway woman. Remembers her kid. He also remembers her husband getting himself killed in a bread riot a year before the War ended. That business about the spook being a soldier coming home never happened.”
“I reckon dead ’uns ain’t no more honest than the living.”
“And I reckon I’m being played, Mama. Spooks my ass. You know Granny. Tell me why she’d need to make all that up? If she wants me to find Marris Sellway, fine, I don’t even need a reason. Just hire me to find her. No questions need be asked.”
I half-expected Mama to shake her dried owl at me, but she just shook her head.
“Boy, I know you don’t believe. And maybe I don’t blame you much. For every Granny Knot, there’s two dozen put-ons. Just like for me. You do believe in me, don’t you, boy?”
“I worship the ground you drop feathers on, Mama, you know that. But Granny. I don’t know her. And somebody is lying to me. What am I supposed to believe?”
“You ain’t never supposed to believe nothing but the truth, boy.” Mama cackled. “Trouble is, sometimes the truth gets buried with the dead.”
I thought about Stick. “Sometimes it’s better that way.”
“This ain’t one of them times. I done some askin’ on my own, boy. I got some answers you ain’t going to like.”
I can read Mama pretty well. When she lowers her voice and leans in toward me, I know to expect Eldritch Wisdom wrought from her dealings with things Mystical and Arcane.
“This involves portents and signs, doesn’t it?”
“There’s worse things than tellin’ lies afoot, boy. There’s killin’. And a powerful want to kill.”
“Throw in some vengeance from beyond the grave and I’m sold.”
“Ain’t about vengeance, boy. At least folks might have a reason for wantin’ that. Ain’t no reason here.”
“That part I believe.”
Mama snorted. “Boy, I’m telling you plain that Granny ain’t a fake. That means you are dealing with a dead man.”
“A dead man who’s so far lied about everything but the money.”
“Why do you reckon that is, boy? Why do you reckon he’s gone to all this trouble just to find that woman, if what he said about being her husband ain’t true?”
“I don’t know. Yet.” I stood and drained my cup. “I’m going to see Granny and ask her.”
“Take this with you.”
Mama rose and rummaged around on a shelf behind her and finally produced a little cloth bag tied at the neck with a piece of dirty yellow yarn.
“You get in a tight with that there dead man’s shade, you remember you got this.”
She put it in my hand.
“Mama.”
“And if you drop that in the gutter a block from here I’ll know it,” said Mama. She shook her owl for emphasis. “Took me all night to mix that up and hex it. Now get. The Eltis sisters are comin’, any minute.”
I put the pitiful little bag in my pocket.
“Thanks, Mama. The coffee was good.”
“The advice was better. One day you’ll appreciate that.”
“I always do, Mama.”
I heard a cab slow to a halt outside, so I hurried out.
Again, Granny wasn’t home.
I didn’t sit on her porch this time. I started banging on doors. Having once been seen in Granny’s company, a couple of faces poked outside. No, they hadn’t seen Granny today. No, she didn’t keep any kind of regular hours. The first face had no idea where she might be.
The second gave me a “what, are you stupid?” look and suggested Granny might be down at the bone-yard.
Some finder I am. Where else would I look for a spook doctor but the cemetery?
Rannit’s well-heeled dead spend their eternal rewards laid out on the Hill, on the other side of the Brown River. On this side of the Brown, the lucky ones get planted at Noble Fields. Those who can’t afford a plot there wind up providing ash for the crematorium smokestacks or being interred, on a yearly paid basis, in one of the tiny, rocky cemeteries granted grudging existence by the Church. Poverty plots, they’re called.
Families who go more than seven days late on a payment wake up to find their deceased relative dumped without ceremony on their doorstep.
No one ever accused any of Rannit’s churches with being sluggard when it came to collecting their due.
I got directions to the nearest such place and headed out. It wasn’t far, and I saw Granny hobbling along just inside at the same time I saw the open cemetery gates.
There’d been a funeral there recently. The fireflowers in the gate urns hadn’t even wilted yet. The place was tiny, less than a block in any direction, and it was enclosed on all sides by buildings and a wall of scraggly hedge-bushes. The gravewards were crude affairs, some obviously homemade, all leaning in different directions. Some had fallen, and hadn’t been righted.