Each visit, right before Enid and Teeg left, folk all asked what she’d decided about Semperfi. Was she going to make them let the house go, or force the rest of them to prop it up? Enid told them it wasn’t important, not right now. They’d find out her judgment soon enough. It was like they didn’t see the dead body as something that concerned them. Only the house and their neighbors. Enid left them hanging.
As for the identity of the young woman, many of them said to ask at Last House. Last House traded with the wild folk, they might know. Ask them. People seemed relieved to send the investigators on their way with at least that suggestion. As if it helped.
Finally Enid and Teeg arrived at Last House.
The last household on the path was a sprawling, sturdy two-story cottage with rooms added on to the back. Unadorned, maybe even uninviting, though Enid avoided judging the inhabitants. They may have chosen to use their energy and resources on tasks other than making their house pretty for other people. Enid looked for the usual: a cistern full of drinking water, a solar collector for heat and light, a latrine an appropriate distance from living quarters—the essentials. Last House had them all.
They might have tried coming up with a more interesting name.
Piles of salvage were neatly arranged in a clearing on the cottage’s south side. Fallen trees and driftwood mostly, but also rusted rebar, flat sheets of weather-stained steel, bins containing broken glass and loops of cable, coils of wire, and broken-up electronics. Clearly a scavenging household. A set of wind chimes made of bits of animal bone and seashells strung on hemp hung silently off the front porch.
“So where’d Kellan go?” Teeg said, looking around.
They hadn’t heard from him since Enid sent him off to see about a pyre, and no one seemed to be working on it. Nobody was outside working at all.
Teeg knocked on the door. It felt odd; the grapevine in most villages was such that they rarely had to knock on doors. Folk saw them coming from far off, seemed like. As if their uniforms came with warning bells. Everyone in the Estuary had been watching for them, and Kellan should have already brought them word of the dead woman. Folk usually came out looking for more news after something like that.
They waited. The quiet drew on. Not even footsteps on the other side of the door.
“Maybe nobody’s home?” she asked.
“There’s four people supposed to live at Last House, from the records, right?” Teeg asked. “If they ran off—what does that say?”
“What do you think it says?”
“That they’ve got something to hide?”
Enid reached out and knocked again.
“Coming!” a voice inside said.
Enid shrugged, and Teeg seemed almost disappointed. So much for intrigue.
An older man opened the door. He seemed distracted, looking over his shoulder, his soft face flushed. When he saw two investigators on his porch, he stepped back, his mouth open in shock, as if they were monsters. With a deep breath the man managed to settle his expression. He turned stony.
“What’s wrong? What’s happened?” he asked, with forced disinterest.
Enid’s brow furrowed. “Is Kellan here? We sent him back home.”
“Yeah, he’s here.” Then nothing.
Enid paused, waiting for him to fill the silence. But the man didn’t fall for the trick. “He didn’t tell you what happened?” she asked.
“He’s upset, and he doesn’t talk much when he’s upset. He hasn’t been able to get a word out. What’s happened?”
She was both surprised that Kellan hadn’t said anything, and not. “There’s been a murder, down on the mud flats. Kellan found the body. Can we come in and talk?”
He stammered, “Murder? What? Who—”
“Are you Mart? May we come in? It’ll only take a moment.”
Still, he didn’t step back. “This happened just now, yeah? Today? There wouldn’t have been time to send for investigators. How . . . we haven’t done anything wrong, I don’t know what the others told you, but there’s nothing wrong here.” His wall-like demeanor slipped, and politeness and panic vied for control of his voice. “Why are you here?”
Enid frowned. “I’m sorry—you didn’t know? Erik at Semperfi requested an investigation about that old house, the one sitting on top of a mudslide. We were handling that, and then Kellan found the body. We got sidetracked.”
“You didn’t know that we were here at all?” Teeg asked the man. “That an investigation had been requested?”
Everyone had known, Enid thought. They’d all fallen over themselves to tell Enid and Teeg just what they thought of the house at Semperfi.
The old man gave a quick, wry smile. “We—we don’t talk to the others very much.”
The time it took for Semperfi to request an investigation, for the message to be delivered—by foot, horse, and solar car—and the time Enid and Teeg took to travel all this way, would have been a couple of weeks at least. In all that time, the area’s gossip hadn’t reached the Last House folk? They hadn’t traveled down the path to Semperfi and Bonavista and the others to hear the news? Had they not even been part of discussions about the dilapidated house?
Not if they wanted nothing to do with it, Enid supposed.
She tried to sound reassuring. “Let’s start over, then. I’m Enid, this is Teeg. We’re talking to everyone. Originally it was about the old house at Semperfi. But, well, now we’re talking about a murdered woman. May we come in?”
Relief softened the man’s features. “That explains why Kellan’s so upset. Maybe he’ll talk to you.”
“Thank you,” Enid said, still finding her own balance, trying to see where Last House fit in with the rest of the settlement. Maybe it didn’t . . . and maybe that was fine. Then again, there was the old investigation from years ago. The finger pointing. Everyone thought the folk at Last House knew something. Did they?
Stepping aside, the man opened the door for them.
Much like the outside, the interior was plain and functional rather than comfortable. The wide space was left open, with a sitting area by a fireplace. A basket of mending sat beside one chair, some carving tools rested on another. Beyond the fireplace was a kitchen—pump and sink, open shelves holding dishes and mugs, pots and pans. And beyond that, a door that led to a screened porch. Wooden steps on one side led upstairs, presumably to bedrooms.
Records from the area, collected and updated by the medics during their semiannual rounds, said four adults belonged to Last House. Enid took the usual quick inventory of the property, glancing over the interior, seeing if what she saw matched the records she and Teeg had reviewed before they came.
“You’re Mart, yeah?” Enid asked, moving through the house. Mart was listed as head of house.
“Yeah, I am. Sorry. Was just a shock, seeing you—the uniforms—at the door. Been a while since we saw uniforms around here.”
“Almost twenty years, I think. That’s a good run without trouble.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Without that sort of trouble, at least. Still plenty of the usual kind.”
“Oh?” she asked.
“Folk getting into each other’s business. You know.”
She chuckled, thinking that Mart might end up giving her the best account of the region of them all.
“I don’t know what the others told you, but it really doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about that Semperfi house. The next storm, that thing’ll slide into the river, nothing anyone can say about it.”
Enid agreed. “So you didn’t know about the request for an investigation. You have an opinion about that?”
“Or about investigators in general?” Teeg added softly, and the man looked sharply at him.
“Don’t know that the problem needed investigators at all. But Erik . . . he’s stubborn.” Mart led them to the back of the house. “Have to warn you, the others won’t be happy to see you. Might be twenty years on, but they’ll remember.”
The other three
members of the household were on the back porch, which was set up as a workspace. Screened in, open to the air, the space was cooler than the rest of the house. Kellan sat on a chair. A man knelt by him, holding his hand, murmuring to him. A woman stood holding a large mug, maybe of water. Either Kellan had just drunk something or she was trying to get him to.
The woman would be Neeve, the one who’d cut out her implant twenty years ago. No one would ever know, looking at her now. She wore long sleeves; the scar wasn’t visible.
From the doorway, Mart made a curt announcement. “I think I found out what’s got into Kellan.” Stepping aside, he gestured to Enid and Teeg. The two in their brown uniforms filled the doorway. Even spattered with mud and worn from travel, those uniforms intimidated.
The way those on the porch reacted, the investigators might have walked in swinging axes. Wasn’t just shock on their faces as they drew back; it was fear. Enid smiled calmly and turned to murmur to Teeg to maybe put the staff away, but he’d already shifted it behind his shoulder, partly out of sight.
“Hola,” she said. “I’m Enid, this is Teeg—”
She was about to ask for their names, but froze when she got a good look at the woman, Neeve.
She looked just like Juni.
A more tired, wary version of her, but still the same: round face, hair in a braid instead of up in a bun, streaked with gray where Juni’s wasn’t. Frowning and quiet where Juni would be smiling. Nothing in any of the notes Enid had made prior to coming here had mentioned that Juni and the woman at Last House were sisters, much less twins. Yet they clearly were.
“They’re Neeve and Telman,” Mart said, nodding at the woman, then the man. “You met Kellan already.”
Telman—near forty and balding, with brown skin and a long face—looked back and forth between Neeve and the investigators. He would jump in to protect her, if he thought he needed to, Enid suspected. They were wary. They had every right to be. This, not the eager helpfulness they’d seen so far, was the reception investigators usually got.
Enid studied the woman again, getting over the initial surprise of her appearance. Forty or so, with ruddy, sunburned skin, Neeve stood with her gaze downcast, clutching the mug to her chest. She stood like she was bracing for something terrible.
And why shouldn’t she? The old investigation had been about her. But this wasn’t about her. Enid turned to the man in the chair.
“Kellan. You had a shock. How are you doing?”
The others watched him carefully; they didn’t seem to know what to expect from him, either. Kellan straightened, took a deep, unsteady breath, and scrubbed his face with his hands. “There’s a body,” he said.
“Yes,” Enid said. “We’re talking to everyone. You said you didn’t recognize her.”
“No, no, I didn’t, no.” He shook his head quickly, nervously. Looked at the others, almost pleading, as if he wanted them to confirm.
Mart said softly, “Any idea who it was?”
“She was a young woman, maybe twenty. Brown hair, about five feet tall or so. We think she’s from outside. Not Coast Road.”
A silence stretched on, fraught and interesting. The folk of Last House seemed to hold themselves unnaturally still, afraid to speak.
Finally, Neeve said softly, anxiously, “Can we go look? I . . . I’d like to look.”
“You think you might know her?” Teeg said, leaning in, maybe a little too excited.
Mart said, “The others probably told you, wild folk come here to trade sometimes. We might recognize her at least.”
Finally, something solid. A line of information that didn’t end in I don’t know.
“Do you have a way to get a message to them? Let them know that something’s happened to one of their own?”
“No,” Mart said, shaking his head quickly. “They come here a few times a year. It’s unpredictable. We don’t know where they come from. Someplace upriver, that’s it.”
If they could even get a name to go with the body, Enid would feel they’d accomplished something. “Well. This is a start, at least. It’s more than we had before we got here. Yes, please come, we’ve got her at Bonavista—”
“Why there?” Neeve said.
“It was closest,” Enid said. “Juni never said that you were her sister. Are you really twins?”
Neeve folded in on herself and looked away, out the screen to the slope of hill and the distant water. Lost in thought, lost in herself. Enid almost prompted her again, but Mart explained.
“They don’t get along. Not since the old investigation.”
Juni would blame Neeve for breaking up their old household, Bridge House. Grudge like that would go on forever.
“Understood. But please come and look, if you can tell us anything. Also, we’ll need a pyre for her. I hear you’re the house that handles arrangements. That’s what I sent Kellan up here for.”
Mart nodded. “Yeah, we do. We can do that.”
“Thanks. We may have more questions later. The sooner you can come down, the better. We should probably take care of her tomorrow.”
Teeg added his thanks, and they turned to go.
“You’re not going to say anything else about Neeve?” Telman burst out.
Harsh glares from the others and a spike of tension answered him. The investigators stopped, looked back.
Enid said, “Anything we should say?”
“The medics always check on her. Every time they come through, they check. I just assumed, investigators—”
“Telman,” Mart hissed, and the other man looked away.
The folk of Last House would never welcome investigators, and this was why. Even twenty years later, they remembered. As Telman said, the medics still checked her implant, every time, to make sure she hadn’t tampered with it. They didn’t trust her. Did anyone? It was the reason Neeve lived here, at the edge of civilized territory, without a single banner on the wall.
Because no one else would take her.
Enid said, “Your implant’s still in place now, isn’t it?”
“I never tried anything like that again,” Neeve said softly, putting her hand over the spot on her left upper arm, squeezing idly. Covering the scar that would be under the sleeve, from where she cut herself.
No bannerless pregnancy had resulted from the sabotage. She’d been found out, reported by her own household. In the end, it was always hard to hide a bandaged arm in that distinctive spot. Her punishment had been straightforward: no banner for her, nor for whatever household she lived in, ever. She’d left her old home to come here, to a small, scrabbling household that never expected to earn a banner. She’d never made trouble again.
A sad story, some people would say. Olive would say it was a sad story, but she’d spent the past few months being emotional and weepy about any story that had anything to do with banners and babies. Enid was sympathetic to Neeve—one rash action, impacting the whole of her life like this. That was hard. But she had no sympathy for the idea that one person could take the fate of an entire community into her own hands. A place like the Estuary settlement couldn’t feed an extra, unexpected mouth like that.
“Then there’s no reason to say anything,” Enid said. “Well then, unless you’ve got anything else you’d like to talk about, we’ll be off. We’ll look for you down at Bonavista.”
They nodded dutifully, the silence drawing out, cut suddenly by the cries of gulls out on the water. Enid was pretty sure she wouldn’t be hearing from them again.
“Afternoon,” Teeg said, and left them on the porch. Likely to discuss whether the investigators really were going to let them alone—and if the old trouble really was securely in the past.
Back on the path along the river Teeg asked, “So, Juni and Neeve are sisters? Twins? Did we know that?”
“Must be written down somewhere, but no, I didn’t.” They’d studied the records. This included a list of every banner awarded to the region, every child born here. Juni and Neeve had been listed as p
art of the old Bridge House. But not as sisters. When the old household broke down, so did the records. It happened sometimes.
“Juni didn’t say anything?” Teeg asked.
Enid thought about it, everything the woman had said about the other households and what they’d find. She’d been quick to talk about Last House, bitter about the old case. But she hadn’t mentioned a sister.
“Would you say anything? If you had a twin that did what she did?” Enid said.
They were out of sight of Last House now. Curious, Enid next turned uphill, wanting to see how much farther the path went, what else might be up here.
“What’re we looking for now?” Teeg asked, using his staff as a walking stick as the way grew more rocky.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to look,” she said.
Up the hill, away from the Estuary and the saltwater, trees and scrub got a roothold, and farther up was actual forest. Cottonwood, oak, a few pines. Stumps were in evidence—this was where the settlement harvested lumber. But they weren’t clearing the forest, which was good. They kept to the quotas they had for harvesting lumber.
Not more than a hundred yards past Last House, the path narrowed to a dirt track, then trickled out to nothing, overgrown with grasses. It was possible people came up this way, but clearly not often.
“See anything?” Teeg asked, looking around, again with that furrow in his brow like he was searching for something without knowing what it looked like.
“Just trees and wild,” she said. They were up in real hills now; the river turned shallow, rushing over rocks, cutting a narrow gulch far below. She could barely hear it from here. “Next I think we should walk up the riverside, see if she left anything behind when she washed down, or if there’s any sign of what happened.
“Like maybe a knife someone threw out of sight.”
“That would certainly be convenient for us.”