them an ear? Agree to consort with their oldest, ugliest daughter? Spill it. I’m a city man, remember?”
Mama sighed. “Tell him the rest, child. I’m liable to tell it wrong.”
I put my beer down a little too hard.
“Wrong or right, ladies, somebody better start telling me something right now.”
Gertriss cleared her throat. “I didn’t know this, until today. I swear I didn’t, Mr. Markhat. Mama just told me.”
“Keep talking.”
“Harald. Harald-he had a brother.”
“Lots of people do. So?”
“He’s dead too.”
Silence. Gertriss was on the verge of tears. I looked to Mama.
“Kilt with the same knife that kilt Harald,” she said. “On the same night. The Suthoms reckon Gertriss kilt him too.”
Gertriss wouldn’t meet my eyes. My mouth went dry.
“I have to ask, Gertriss. You know I do. Did you kill them both?”
She shook her head.
“I didn’t know nothing about the other Suthom boy ’til today,” said Mama. “The Sprangs got big mouths. They talked it all up and down the Old Ruth, about how they come to Rannit to put the vengeance on the man what took up with the woman what killed the Suthom boys. I reckon they aims to kill you, boy, and then go home and collect a reward from the Suthoms. So I ain’t sure eight crowns is going to stop this mess. I ain’t sure at all.”
I swallowed the rest of Gertriss’s warm beer, opened my cold bottle, and took a swig of it too.
“And I thought my day couldn’t get any worse. Funny old thing, life.”
Gertriss burst out crying, and I thought seriously about joining her.
It was nearly Curfew before I got the women settled enough to finish talking things out.
We were all out of beer. My throat was dryer than the Regent’s tears. Gertriss had cried away most of her make-up, leaving nothing but dark circles under her eyes. Even red-nosed and a bit raccoonish, she was still fetching.
Mama was gruffing and puffing and threatening to set out for Pot Lockney at first light to “set them Suthoms straight.” I’d dissuaded her from that notion only barely, and at the cost of most of my voice.
I’d filled two notebook pages with times and names and dates and places. I wasn’t ready to leap to my feet and declare the identity of the real murderer of Harald Suthom’s brother Ash, but I had my suspicions.
“I still say they can’t know the same knife killed both Suthoms,” I said. “Especially if the second body wasn’t found for nearly a month.”
Mama shook her head. “Old woman Nilkill says it were the same. She fancies herself a blood witch. If she says both Suthom’s blood is on that knife, that makes it so, boy, in Pot Lockney.”
“How convenient. And they know it’s Gertriss’s knife how, exactly?”
Gertriss sighed. “I carved my name in it when I was ten.”
I groaned. “Well, at least now I know you didn’t kill the second Suthom, Miss. You’re too smart to use a signed knife.”
“Boy!”
“Sorry, sorry, fine. So Harald Suthom meets his well-deserved demise at around eight of the clock. Gertriss is on the road by nine. Sometime in the next few days, Ash Suthom is dispatched with the same knife, wrapped in old burlap, and laid to rest in a briar patch. He lies there until a bear pulls him out and scatters him over old man Ferlong’s cotton patch. That about right?”
Mama and Gertriss exchanged glances, then nodded yes in unison.
“Since we know Gertriss didn’t kill Ash on her way out of Pot Lockney, that means somebody else did. Any idea who? Was Ash as charming and well-loved as his older brother?”
Mama shrugged. “Ain’t none of them Suthoms worth a damn. But I’d never heard tell of Ash ’til today.”
“He was quiet,” said Gertriss. “Never heard him speak. People were scared of him, just for being a Suthom, but I never heard any stories about him. He worked the cows. He paid his bills. He didn’t cause any trouble at the inn. That’s all I know. Except that I didn’t kill him.”
I doodled on the paper, drawing a little stick man with a knife in his back.
“So who found Harald?”
Gertriss looked at Mama.
“Way I hear it, it was his foreman, come looking to roust him out and get started working. They knowed he’d been to see Gertriss, he’d bragged about it. Came in and found him dead in her bed, and her gone.”
I gave my little stick man Xs for eyes.
“So for all we know this foreman took the knife out of Harald and then left it in Ash.”
Mama shrugged. “Ain’t no way for me to know that, boy. Nor you.”
“And then a bear helpfully pulls the corpse out of a briar patch and makes sure he gets a proper burial, right after the good people of Pot Lockney remove a signed knife from his back. How fortuitous. Miss, the next time you go to all the trouble to wrap a corpse and drag it into a briar patch, you might consider removing the murder weapon at some point during the festivities. Especially if said weapon carries your name.”
Mama opened her mouth to gruff at me, but caught on. Gertriss got there faster.
“Someone wants me blamed for Ash’s murder.”
“Oh yes. Bear my ass. They hoped the body would be found, but it wasn’t. So they helped matters along. Now, we’re looking at one of two things here. One, they knew you’d killed Harald, and they knew you’d left town. That made you the perfect pick for killing Ash, too, nothing personal, just business. Or second, somebody back home hates you enough to kill a second man just to make sure you’d be hanged for killing the first. Who would want to do that to you, Miss? Who hates you that much?”
“No one.” She shook her head. “Honest, Mr. Markhat. Nobody.”
I dropped my pencil and leaned back in my chair. Fatigue was settling over me like a coat made of rocks.
“All right. We can worry about who killed the Suthoms later. Right now, here’s what we do.”
And I spent my last bit of wile making plans for the night.
Chapter Six
The Big Bell clanged out midnight before I lay my weary head down to sleep.
My plan to keep Mama and Gertriss safe from any lingering Sprangs involved installing a pair of ogres at Mama’s door. I chose ogres because they’re out and about after Curfew, and are thus easy to find, and because short of a Troll or a brace of the Corpsemaster’s newfangled cannons there isn’t a better deterrent against mischief than half a ton of implacable ogre.
I lucked out and managed to catch up with a Hooga, who agreed to bring his cousin Hooga in on the deal. Don’t ask me how ogres keep identities established when they all bear the same name. But this was a Hooga I knew from Darla’s old job at the Velvet, and we were still on an eye-dipping basis, which practically makes us littermates according to Mama’s encyclopedic knowledge of all things ogre.
I’d given Gertriss orders that she wasn’t to venture outdoors for anything. She didn’t like that, any more than Mama liked hearing the same, but I had to trust they understood the necessity of staying safe behind a wall of ogres until we had a handle on the Sprangs.
So I handed out coins right and left and made sure the Hoogas understood spilling blood was only to be done as a last resort.
That done, I turned my attention to the bigger picture, a task made well nigh impossible by my sudden tragic lack of beer.
After the Hoogas trundled away with Gertriss, Mama and Buttercup, I put my feet on my desk and got out a pad, and tried to make sense of my sundry confusions by putting them down on paper in the form of questions.
