She picked up that very folder from years gone by, a pale red stamp on its cover reading closed in bold block letters. She peeled the tape holding its edges together and flipped through the notes. Many of them were in Holston’s neat hand, a forward-slanting print she recognized from just about everything on and inside her desk, a desk that had once been his. She read his notes about her, refamiliarized herself with a case that had seemed an obvious murder but had actually been a series of unlikely events. Going back through it, something she had avoided until now, gave birth to old pains. And yet—she could also recall how comforting it had been to distract herself with the clues. She could remember the rush of a problem solved, the satisfaction of having answers to offset the hollowness left by her lover’s death. The process had been similar to fixing a machine on extra shifts. There was the pain in her body from the effort and exhaustion, offset slightly by the knowledge that a rattle had been wrenched away.
She set the folder aside, not yet ready to relive it all. She picked up another and placed it in her lap, one hand falling to the brass star on her knee.
A shadow danced across the wallscreen, distracting her. Juliette looked up and saw a low wall of dirt spill down the hill. This layer of soot seemed to shiver in the wind as it traveled toward sensors she had been trained to think of as important, sensors that gave her a view of the outside world she had been frightened as a child into believing was worth seeing.
But she wasn’t so sure, now that she was old enough to think for herself and near enough to observe it firsthand. This up top’s obsession with cleaning barely trickled its way to the down deep, where true cleaning kept the silo humming and everyone alive. But even down there, her friends in Mechanical had been told since birth not to speak of the outside. It was an easy enough task when you never saw it, but now, walking by it to work, sitting before this view of a vastness one’s brain could not comprehend, she saw how the inevitable questions must have surfaced. She saw why it might be important to squelch certain ideas before a stampede to the exits formed, before questions foamed on people’s mad lips and brought an end to them all.
She flipped opened Holston’s folder. Behind the bio tab was a thick stack of notes about his last days as sheriff. The portion relating to his actual crime was barely half a page long, the rest of the piece of paper blank and wasted. A single paragraph simply explained that he had reported to the up-top holding cell and had expressed an interest in the outside. That was it. A few lines to spell a man’s doom. Juliette read the words several times before flipping the page over.
Underneath was a note from Mayor Jahns asking that Holston be remembered for his service to the silo and not as just another cleaner. Juliette read this letter, written in the hand of someone who was also recently deceased. It was strange to think of people she knew that she could never see again. Part of the reason she had avoided her father all these years was because he was, simply put, still there. There was never the threat of her not being able to change her mind. But it was different with Holston and Jahns: they were gone forever. And Juliette was so used to rebuilding devices thought beyond repair that she felt if she concentrated enough, or performed the correct series of tasks in the right order, she should be able to bring the deceased back, be able to re-create their wasted forms. But she knew that wasn’t the case.
She flipped through Holston’s folder and asked herself forbidden questions, some for the very first time. What had seemed trivial when she lived in the down deep, where exhaust leaks could asphyxiate and broken flood pumps could drown everyone she knew, now loomed large before her. What was it all about, this life they lived in underground confines? What was out there, over those hills? Why were they here, and for what purpose? Had her kind built those tall silos crumbling in the distance? What for? And most vexing of alclass="underline" what had Holston, a reasonable man—or his wife for that matter—been thinking to want to leave?
Two folders to keep her company, both marked closed. Both belonging in the mayor’s office, where they should have been sealed up and filed away. But Juliette kept finding herself returning to them rather than the more pressing cases in front of her. One of these folders held the life of a man she had loved, whose death she had helped unravel in the down deep. In the other lived a man she had respected whose job she now held. She didn’t know why she obsessed over the two folders, especially since she couldn’t stomach seeing Marnes peer forlornly down at his own loss, studying the details of Mayor Jahns’s death, going over the depositions, convinced he had a killer but with no evidence to corner the man.
Someone knocked on the bars above Juliette’s head. She looked up, expecting to find Deputy Marnes telling her it was time to call it a day, but saw a strange man peering down at her instead.
“Sheriff?” he said.
Juliette set the folders aside and palmed the star off her knee. She stood up and turned around, facing this small man with a protruding gut, glasses perched at the end of his nose, his silver IT overalls snugly tailored and freshly pressed.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
The man stuck his hand between the bars. Juliette moved the star from one palm to the other and reached out to accept it.
“Sorry I’m late getting up here,” he said. “There’s been a lot going on, what with the ceremonies, that generator nonsense, and all the legal wrangling. I’m Bernard, Bernard Holland.”
Juliette felt her blood run cold. The man’s hand was so small, it felt like it was missing a finger. Despite this, his grip was solid. She tried to pull back, but he refused to let go.
“As sheriff, I’m sure you already know the Pact inside and out, so you know that I’ll be acting mayor, at least until we can arrange a vote.”
“I’d heard,” Juliette said coolly. She wondered how this man had gotten past Marnes’s desk without some sort of violence. Here was their prime suspect in Jahns’s death—only he was on the wrong side of the bars.
“Doing some filing, are you?” He relinquished his grip, and Juliette pulled her hand away. He peered down at the paperwork strewn across the floor, his eyes seeming to settle on the canteen in its plastic bag, but Juliette couldn’t be sure.
“Just familiarizing myself with our ongoing cases,” she said. “There’s a little more room in here to . . . well, think.”
“Oh, I’m sure a lot of deep thought has taken place in this room.” Bernard smiled, and Juliette noticed his front teeth were crooked, one of them overlapping the other. It made him look like the stray mice she used to trap in the pump rooms.
“Yes, well, I’ve found the space conducive to sorting my thoughts out, so maybe there’s something to that. And besides”—she leveled her eyes at him—“I don’t expect it to remain empty for long. And once it’s occupied, I’ll be able to take leave of all this deep thought for a day or two while someone is put to cleaning—”
“I wouldn’t count too much on that,” Bernard said. He flashed his crooked teeth again. “The word down below is that the poor mayor, rest her soul, plumb wore herself out with that crazy climb of hers. I believe she was hiking down to see you, isn’t that right?”
Juliette felt a sharp sting in her palm. She loosened her grip on the brass star, the knuckles on both hands white from making fists.
Bernard adjusted his glasses. “But now I hear you’re investigating for foul play?”
Juliette continued to level her eyes at him, trying not to be distracted by the reflection of the dull hills visible in his spectacles. “I suppose you should know, as acting mayor, that we’re treating this very much as a murder,” she said.