And now it’s gone to ruin overnight, Conn thought, shaking his head.
“Reckon we’d best go see for ourselves,” he said.
* * *
“N
UKE THAT
M
ATHUS
C
ONN
!” Wymie exclaimed, slamming her fist on the breakfast table in the boarding house Widow Oakey ran. The assorted crockery clattered and tinkled. “I can’t believe he stuck up for those outlanders like that!”
“Now, Wymie,” the widow said, tottering in from the kitchen holding a steaming pot of spearmint tea on a battered tray. “You got no call to be pounding around raising a fuss like that.”
Wymie judged the old lady had to have seen her. She was deaf as a rock, unless you hollered in her face. At that there was no telling how much was lip-reading rather than any kind of hearing.
Widow Oakey was a tiny woman, who seemed to consist entirely of a collection of dried hardwood sticks bundled up in what had most likely started its existence as a gingham dress, but now seemed mostly made up of roughly equal amounts of soaked-in seasoned sweat and patches, all topped off by a bun of yellowish white hair.
She seemed frail and so bound by arthritis and rheumatism that her joints barely functioned at all. Yet Wymie knew she chipped her own kindling like a pro, and her cooking was better than passable good.
It was her housekeeping that fell by the wayside.
“Why are you wishin’ death and devastation on Conn?” asked Garl, one of her fellow lodgers, from across the table. A few fragments of scrambled egg dribbled from the side of his mouth and cascaded down his several chins toward his belly, which kept him so far back from the table his comically short-seeming arms had trouble reaching his plate. He looked as if he went straight from being a baby to being a vast, gnarled, weathered, grizzly baby, without passing through the intervening stages of childhood and adulthood.
“How dare he stick up for outlanders who chilled my baby sister?” she asked hotly. “Cannie coldhearts. The worst thing! Worse than muties, even! I saw it with my own eyes!”
“Now, are you sayin’ you saw them all in the act of chilling your sister, Wymie?” the other boarder at breakfast asked. “Because that sounds double crowded to me. They’d all be gettin’ in each other’s way. Not to make light of a terrible thing, or nothin’. Still, it don’t seem practical.”
Duggur Doakz was a middle-aged black man with a fringe of gray hair and not a tooth in his head. A gifted silversmith, he could have been a rich man—an important tradesman to some important baron. But that would take him far off beyond Pennyrile, and he hadn’t chosen to leave the place where he was born. He kept his hand in and his body out of the ground by being a tinker and general repairman.
Wymie scowled furiously into her own plate. It was bare except for a few crumbs of biscuit and near-invisible scraps of egg. She had eaten like a ravenous wolf. She had a hearty appetite at the best of times. For some reason the onset of the worst had made her even hungrier.
Or mebbe it’s because I ain’t et since yesterday, she thought.
A cat jumped as if on cue onto Wymie’s shoulder. She started to swat it off, but refrained. She was a guest in the oldie’s house, after all. And her pa had seen her raised right as to politeness to one’s elders. She in turn had passed that on after he died to— Her eyes drowned in hot, stinging tears.
The cat jumped to the floor, then rubbed against her leg and purred.
Wymie didn’t like cats. She couldn’t trust a creature that looked only after its own interests and never after hers. But Widow Oakey’s rickety-seeming predark two-story house was overrun with the wretches. Mebbe a dozen of them.
The whole place reeked of cat piss and shit, which at least kept down the smell of dust and mold. The house was a crazy quilt of scavvy furniture, decorations and irregularly shaped lace doilies apparently made by Widow Oakey herself, without apparent skill, and strewed haphazardly over chairs, tables and bric-a-brac alike to protect them from…something.
“I saw one of them,” she muttered fiercely. “The mutie. I saw the white skin and white hair, plain as day. And the eyes. Those red eyes…”
“Now, now, Wymie,” Duggur said. “Albinos aren’t hardly muties.”
She raised clenched fists. But becoming vaguely aware
of Widow Oakey hovering fragilely nearby with her tray trembling precariously in her hands, she refrained from smashing them down on the piss- and grease-stained white damask tablecloth.
Someone knocked on the front door. Widow Oakey set down the tray, spilling about half a cup of tea out the spout of the cracked pot. She tottered off to answer.
Before Wymie could reach for the spoon to ladle out a second helping of eggs, she came back with a trio of locals.
Her cousin Mance Kobelin immediately came to her, spreading his arms. She rose to join in a wordless embrace. She felt the tears run freely down her face, moistening the red plaid flannel of his shirt beneath her cheek.
“We heard what happened, Wymie,” intoned Dorden Fitzyoo, hat in hand, as Mance released her. He had doffed it per Widow Oakey’s stringent house rules, revealing a hair-fringed dome of skull that showed skating highlights in the morning sun as filtered through dusty, fly-crap-stained chintz curtains. “It’s a terrible thing.”
Wymie nodded thanks, unable to speak. Dorden, who made and milled black powder on the far side of Sinkhole, had been a close friend of Wymie’s mother and father. He had been driven somewhat apart from the family after Tyler Berdone’s accident. Like so many others. Wymie still thought of him as a kindly uncle.
He had already sweated through the vest, which didn’t match the suit coat he wore over it, straining to contain his paunch. “What happened to your parents, then, child?” the third visitor said in a cracked and quavering voice. “We heard they’re dead too.”
“They got chilled,” she said.
“Ah. How horrible that you had to witness that.” He
shook his wrinkled head, which showed even more bald skin that Dorden’s though, as if to compensate, his hair stuck out in wild white wings to both sides. “Only the good die young.”
So long as you’re talking about Blinda, she thought. I wonder if you’d say that if you knew how often Mord talked about grabbing you some dark night and hanging you over a fire till you spilled the location of that fabled stash of yours.
But Wymie’s stepdad had never acted on his gruesome fantasy, and never would’ve. Though this man’s hands shook like leaves in a brisk breeze most of the time, they steadied right down when he gripped a hammer or other tool. Or a handblaster. He was still the best shot for miles around with his giant old Peacemaker .45 revolver.
Wymie had a hard time believing the stories that oldie Vin Bertolli had been the western Pennyrile’s biggest lady-killer in his prime. But that was decades ago: he had lived in and around Sinkhole for over half a century, since arriving as a young adventurer in his twenties who’d been forced to seek a quiet place to settle by a blaster wound that’d crippled his left hip some.
“The outlanders did it,” Wymie said. “I saw the white face and red eyes of the murdering son of a bitch myself. I could almost reach out and touch him! But that taint Conn sticks up for them!”
“You got to do somethin’ yourself then, Wymie,” Mance suggested. “I’ll help.”
“Obliged,” she said.
The older visitors exchanged uneasy glances.
“Mathus Conn’s a good man,” Vin said. “A good man is hard to find.”
To her surprise, Wymie found the stuffy air inside the
boarding house could smell worse than it already did. The oldie ripped a thunderous, bubbling fart. Her knees actually weakened as the smell hit her.
A black-and-white cat rubbed against the wrinklie’s shins, purring loudly. It’s like the little monsters are applauding him for out-stinking them, she thought.
“How can he be good if he shields murderers of little girls?” she demanded.
“I hear tell he wanted evidence that what you saw was really one of them outlanders, Wymie,” Dorden said.
“I saw him with my own eyes!”
“You saw an albino,” Dorden corrected her, “just like Shandy Kraft was. There’s likely one or two more in the world than just that skinny kid with the outlanders.”
“Are you defendin’ them, too? Whose side are you on?”
He raised his hands. “Yours, Wymie. We’re not blood kin, but I allus been close to your family. But Conn’s a good man, like Vin says. Always dealt square with everybody. Dealt square with your ma and your pa, while he was alive.”
He didn’t mentioned Mord Pascoe. He didn’t need to. Wymie’s late stepdad never dealt square with anybody. And once the gaudy owner had caught him trying to cheat him one too many times, he refused to deal with him at all.
“More’n that,” Dorden said, “he protects himself double good. And if anybody pushed Conn too hard without good reason, Tarley Gaines and his clan would step up to back him. And that’s a bunch nobody wants to mess with.”
“If aidin’ and abettin’ little-girl-murderin’ outlanders isn’t good enough reason, I don’t know what is!” Mance declared furiously.
“Words are like birds,” Vin said. “They fly away.”
Everyone stopped and stared at him for a moment. He seemed unfazed.
“Fact is,” Dorden went on deliberately, “more people here around Sinkhole reckon Conn’s got the right of it than you do. No, don’t scowl at me, girl. It’s true.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Vin said. He leaned painfully on his walking stick to pat an orange tabby cat that was rubbing his head on his homemade deerskin moccasins. This entailed ripping another ferocious fart.
Wymie sat back down.
“I don’t care about that!” she stated.
“We all have to live here,” Dorden said gently. “That means continuing to get on with our neighbors, best we can.”
“I’ll leave, then!” she half screamed. “Once I get Blinda avenged.”
Vin straightened creakily. He shook his head. “The impetuosity of youth.”
She glared at him. “What does that even mean?”
He beamed toothlessly at her.
“Never mind,” Dorden said. “But maybe you can set things straight without making enemies here among your home folk.”
Wymie kept her jaw clamped on the bile she wanted to spew on him. She knew he spoke out of genuine friendship. She also, deep down somewhere, knew he was making sound sense.
But she wasn’t in the mood for sense.
“And what if you’re wrong?” Dorden said softly. “You take your vengeance on the wrong people, that leaves the real murderer out there free to murder more. You don’t want that, do you?”
“I know what I saw!”
“You need to help us see, too.”
She frowned so fiercely it almost shut her eyes, and angled her face toward her lap.
“What’d you have in mind, Dorden?” Mance asked.
“Simple,” the older man said. Wymie heard the smile in his voice. “You need to look for evidence to back your claim. You got a power of folks hereabouts willing to help. Everybody wants to see justice done for your family—and the chillin’ stopped. This here’s a peaceful district in a world full of strife and misery. We mean to keep it that way.”
She didn’t miss the warning in his words, but she had to admit he had a point.
Better people help you than stand in your path, she thought.
“And while we’re out lookin’ for evidence to show you’re right,” Mance said, with eagerness growing in his voice as he spoke, “we can also start lookin’ for the outlanders. You gotta find ’em to take care of ’em, right?”
“They been triple good hidin’ their tracks,” Duggur said.
Garl was taking advantage of the conversational distraction to spoon the rest of the scrambled eggs directly from the serving bowl into his mouth. Yellow fragments bounced off his chins and down the massive slope of his belly.
“Nobody knows where their dig is, or their camp, should it be a different spot,” Duggur said.
Wymie sucked down a deep breath, then let it out in a shuddering sigh.
“You’re right.” She felt tears drying on her face, leaving salt-sticky tracks down her cheeks. “That’s a double-good thing I can do. And I
can
do it!”
Her cousin squeezed her shoulder. “I’m with you, Wymie!”
“We’re all with you,” Dorden said, “in findin’ your family’s killers.”
“Wymie, dear,” Widow Oakey called in her cracked voice from the entry to the parlor. Wymie hadn’t been aware she’d left the room. “There’s a crowd outside to see you. I’d let ’em in, but they’d frighten my babies.”
Wymie stood up again, trying not to be too obvious about kicking away a black cat that was slithering up against her leg. She managed to shift it a ways with her boot.
“I’ll come see,” she said, her heart pulsing faster.
“You know, Miz Oakey,” Dorden said, “not to be overly critical, but you need to clean out your cat boxes more often.”
She blinked rheumy brown eyes at him. “Cat boxes?”
* * *
“F
OR A LONG
time we’ve enjoyed an island of stability in the midst of the chaos of the outside world,” Conn said. “I hope it’s not invadin’ to stay.”
His nephew, Zedd, who had tan, freckled skin and rusty, tightly curled hair, emerged through the door.
“Looks like Layna and Mord, Unk,” he said.
“Ugh,” Nancy said. She turned away. She was hard as nails about most things, but had a squeamish touch. Her cousin and employer, Conn, respected that in her; it made her seem more human.
“How do they look?” Conn asked, despite his cousin’s visible discomfort.
Zedd showed pressed-together teeth. They were white and mostly even. Patriarch Tarley enforced hygiene in
his clan with an iron hand, despite his normally easygoing ways. He had a rep for being tough when it counted.
“Like you’d expect,” Nancy said, as if she were gritting her teeth to hold in puke. Evidently she was hoping to stave off further details.
If so, she hoped in vain.
“Not really,” Zedd said. “Chills ain’t burned so much as, well, kinda roasted. And not really all over, you know?”
Conn kept his gaze steady on the young man as his cousin loudly lost her battle against throwing her guts up. “And they don’t look et so much as busted all to nuke. Like they got hacked with an ax. Heads’re both busted wide-open, and don’t look as if their brains swole from the heat and popped through the skulls like taters in the oven.”