your Pa. I also told him that if he wanted someone else to get his land, he could write a will."
"What’s a will?"
"It’s a form that says who gets your property when you die."
Porkchop walked ahead of him along the edge of the field. The creek was running high with the thaw and PC Pierre had to raise his voice to be heard over the rushing water.
"I know the law. I know what can happen after someone dies."
"What? What happens?"
"If you don't have a will, anyone of age who’s on the property at the time automatically gets the farm," he told her. "Your grandfather didn’t want the farm to go to your Pa but he also didn’t want squatters taking over, so he made me the heir. I wrote it down, gave him a copy and filed the original with the court in New Key."
"So if Pater died tomorrow you’d get the farm? What about us?"
"I wouldn’t make you leave, you know that."
Porkchop nodded.
"Look, I only told you this because he got sick again. This is only if something happens. He’s a tough old man. Besides, a will can be changed."
Wills can be changed, Mixer mused as he slid from his sister’s thoughts.
___
The man had been working for Rank for three months now. He'd grown strong lugging sacks of produce through the streets of Andrastyne.
He'd told Rank that his name was Hap but not much else. The name had leapt into his mind so quickly that he'd briefly hoped that his memory was starting to return.
For his part, Rank stopped asking him personal questions after a day or two. He assumed that this man, Hap, if that was his name, was wanted somewhere. That could be of benefit to him. He watched him closely and casually asked around town about him. He found out nothing.
The thaw meant that fishermen could once more go out on to the sea and that trade could start again. It also meant that the labourers Rank ordered for his spring auction had arrived early.
Hap was on a delivery and Rank was rooting through a sack of beets when someone hammered on his door.
"Rank! You ol' sonofabitch, you in there?"
Gaines, ship captain and human smuggler, was Rank's labour connection. Gaines would snap up people along his travels and sell them to the highest bidder. These free labourers were told that if they could pay for their passage by the time they arrived, they would go free, but Gaines and his crew stole anything of value from them the moment they came on board.
Rank had always given him a fair price and always stood him some maple whiskey. Over glasses of it Rank asked him why he was so early.
"Had a bit of trouble with one of them, so I skipped a lot of my usual places and came straight here."
"But my customers aren't coming for another four days! What am I supposed to do with them? How'm I supposed to feed 'em?"
Gaines looked around at the sacks of food.
"Seems you've got plenty here."
"That's rations. Not mine."
"Sure, sure. And ol' Rank's not taking a bit off the top? Right. Look, you want 'em or not? I got others interested."
"How many?"
"Five. Four men."
"Don't get many women."
"Yeah, she was the trouble. Think she might be a defective."
"Yeah? Haven't heard of one of them for a long time. What's her problem?"
Outcasts always found their way into the biggest cities so Rank had come across his fair share of defectives in his lifetime. The first ones he could remember had been run out of Andrastyne when Rank was six years old. A healer and a painter, and their young daughter, he recalled. It was the healer they really didn't trust; she had tried to convince the council that taking a little bit of what ailed you was good for you in certain circumstances.
"Hard to say," Gaines shrugged. "But I don't mind saying, she gave all the boys the creeps. Best get rid of her quickly."
Rank paid Gaines and they both had another shot of whiskey. Together, they went to collect the labourers from the ship. Rank lodged the four men at the police station, bribing the duty officer with extra potatoes and onions, but the officer refused to take the woman.
Rank took a good look at her. She was tall, taller than he was, with light gray eyes. She looked strong. Still, she was just a woman, Rank thought, never mind what Gaines said. How bad could she be? Even if she is a defective, it's only for a few days.
He brought her back to the house and locked her in a wire storage locker in the cellar where Hap slept. He left her a bucket and two wormy apples.
___
PC Pierre had left the children the day after Bull and Jones had gotten the stag. Porkchop insisted that he take some of the meat with him; Jones had sliced off a hunk and Santa had wrapped it up in a cloth bag.
He spent a week at the summer cabin, readying it for the season. He cleaned and aired it out, oiled and set his traps, and chopped a month's worth of firewood to add to the months of fuel he had stacked against one wall of the cabin. He smoked the hunk of deer meat the children had given him. Mostly, he revelled in the sounds of the woods. He got reacquainted with his favourite spots and spotted familiar animals. He ate and slept well.
From his library at Baker's Yard, he had brought some of his great-grandfather's reference books with him and spent his evenings reading. One was a binder of essays written by his great aunt on his mother's side. He had the police diaries of his father, grandfather and Pappy, but the essays were the only link he had to his mother's family. At the top of each page was her name, Adelaide Mars and, in red pen, a letter. Most often the letter was a B but there were a few As and one C.
One essay was called The Three Theories of the Upheaval. The first theory was that an explosion at a nuclear plant — PC Pierre still wasn't completely sure what that was — caused a massive energy wave that levelled half the planet. The second theory blamed the damage on an earthquake, or a series of earthquakes. The third was that a meteor hit set off a chain of explosions and upheavals across the whole world.
"No matter what the cause," she had written, "mountains collapsed, rivers caught fire and more than half of the world's population died."
How could rivers catch fire? None of his references explained this or provided enough evidence to determine the exact cause. Everything he had was anecdotal. So much human and natural history had been lost during that period and so much more had been destroyed since. In the absence of any detailed scientific records, certainty was impossible. All he could surmise is that what was now Deloran County must not have been in the direct path of the destruction. It had suffered some — Spoon Valley attested to that — but roads and tunnels and the remains of some bridges remained. In some places, closer to New Key, he'd also seen metal tracks that had probably been used for transport at one time.
In another essay, Adelaide wrote about the infection. "The infection came after the Great Upheaval and killed a lot more people. It came from the west and it killed a lot of adults but not as many children. Some babies were born with defects, like knowing how to talk and read. Others could read minds or move things without touching them. It wasn't just humans. The Pecant Roster reported that, in East Dullinge dogs ran an inch above the ground and chickens laid fully cooked eggs."
PC Pierre through it might be nice to have a chicken that could do that. It would certainly be a time saver.
Over the years, the Constable had tried to assemble his library in chronological order but other than the police records, which were always dated many of his resources were not. His best guess was that whatever had occurred happened six or seven hundred years ago; the infection that followed had been virulent and almost always fatal for at least three hundred years. If the police records, which included all known registered deaths, were accurate, and he had no reason to suspect they weren't, fatalities had already begun to decline during his great-grandfather's generation.
Other texts suggested that the infection could lay dormant for decades at a time then resurface with the birth of a single baby
. The documentation for those periods was grim with many people killed on suspicion of being defective.
"The defect was never that bad. It would have even been quite helpful in some cases," his grandfather had written in his personal diary. "Imagine a lumberman able to lift an entire tree or a messenger who could run to New Key and back in less than day!"
It had boggled the young Pierre's mind at some of the things Pappy told him defectives could do and he'd told his Pappy he wished he had one.
"Listen to me," Pappy said, gripping Pierre by the arm, not hard enough to hurt but with enough quiet force that Pierre knew his great-grandfather was serious. "People with the defect have it hard. There are a lot of ignorant people out there. They're afraid of what they don't understand. You ever meet someone with a real defect, you treat them well. Help them where you can. They need the luck."
It wasn't just the ones with the true defect who were at risk; many regular folk who had a natural affinity for something — music or carpentry or farming — were killed out of fear that this masked a greater defect. In Pappy's police records were plenty of reports of ordinary farmers murdered because they'd been overheard singing to their goats.
It was part of the reason why the Deloran County law had been enacted. The pure anarchy that fell upon the population every few decades was eventually too much to bear. All known or suspected defectives were exiled and their property and belongings taken from them. Their property was then sold with the proviso that the land be