“Kilt in a bread riot. Stabbed in the street. We brung him home. She cried and cried.”
Something in the back of my mind said softly but plainly, I told you so.
“What? Tell me again. And tell me who died, and who you brought home.”
Stick rubbed his chin. “Mr. Sellway. Got hisself stabbed dead in a bread riot down on Forge. We found him, brought him home. Me and Eggs and Lark and Stubby. Mrs. Sellway. Marris. She cried and cried.”
Bread riot. The last one had been on Midsummer Eve, a year before the War ended.
Which meant my dead client-or Granny Knot-was lying through his metaphorical teeth.
“Army wouldn’t take him. Mr. Sellway. He had a bad leg. Bad hand, too, all twisted up.” Stick curled his right hand into a claw and held it limp at his side. “We didn’t know what to do. She just stood there crying and screamin’. Eggs started cryin’ too. Lark took off. Me and Stubby wound up sitting with her ’til the dead wagons came. She had to let him burn. Couldn’t afford no burial. Can I have another biscuit?”
“Are you telling me the truth, Stick?”
Stick tilted his head, genuinely confused. “I think so. Is that not what happened?”
I looked into his yellowed, rheumy eyes, and I realized he no longer had the capacity to create such an elaborate lie.
“I’m sure it is, Stick. Here, have two.”
I sat back and watched him gobble down a week’s worth of food. Tears ran down his cheeks, from what I couldn’t discern.
“What happened to the lady after that, Stick? What did she do? Where did she go?”
Stick gobbled and nodded. “Heard she took up with some other fella,” he said. “Or something. Moved after the second fire. Up and took off, left her door wide open. Don’t know about that.” His face clouded. “War ended, them soldiers came. Lark dead. Eggs dead. Stubby…”
He teared up again. I tossed him my last biscuit. He gummed it and gobbled like he’d not just eaten six of its kin.
“So, let me get this straight. Her husband died in a bread riot a year before the War ended. She was seeing another man shortly after. Then came the fires, and she left in a hurry. Is that about right?”
“About.”
“Any idea who this second man was? A name?”
Stick shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said. Worry creased his brow. “Sorry. Don’t know.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ve told me what I needed to know.”
“I get the coin? The twenty crowns?”
“That was the deal. You did your part. I’ll do mine.”
I flipped him a single Old Kingdom gold crown. He could buy a decent place to sleep with that for a month, and food, and clothes, and maybe even a middling good set of carved oak false teeth.
Or he could blow it all on weed and vein and whatever other drugs were in vogue, and wind up encrusted in his own wastes and drooling before the Curfew bell rang again.
It took Stick a long time to count the single coin he gripped in his skeletal hand and realize that one coin was, just possibly, fewer than twenty.
His face darkened.
“You said twenty.”
“I didn’t say all at once.” I pulled my Army knife out and stuck it point-first in my desk. Weedheads don’t respond to subtlety.
“We both know what’ll happen to you if you walk out of here with twenty gold crowns in your pocket, Stick. You got a place? You got a bank? Have you got so much as a sack to keep your money in?”
“I want my money.”
“Those pants you're wearing have holes in both pockets. So, that coin will do you for today. I’m going to put the rest in a bank, Stick. They’ll keep it safe for you, and you can take all of it out, if you want. I hope you won’t. I hope you’ll clean yourself up and get off the weed and have what’s left of your life. I doubt that’ll happen. I figure you’ll march into whatever bank I choose and take all of it out and you’ll be dead before you spend a tenth of it. But that’s your decision. This is mine.”
He eyed me and eyed the knife and finally his eyes fell on the crown in his palm.
“This is a lot of money,” he said.
“Enough to buy you a brand new life. Come back around before Curfew. I’ll tell you where your bank is; give you the bank chit so you can get to the rest anytime. Deal?”
Maybe, just for an instant, Stick really meant to start over. Maybe he realized what a stroke of rare good fortune had befallen him, and maybe he meant to turn his miserable life around.
He stood. He looked me in the eye. And after I stood, too, he shook my hand.
“Thanks,” he said. “I mean it.”
And then he was gone.
I did all that, by the way. I went to Crowther and Sons. I opened an account in the name of Mr. Stick. I deposited the nineteen gold crowns. I had the bankers make up a chit just for Stick, made them promise not to throw him out even if he stank, and I put Stick’s bank chit in my pocket.
Stick never returned. The chit is in my desk, waiting for him. I suspect it will wait forever.
Even rare good fortune can be too little and too late.
I spent the rest of the morning greeting other respondents to my waybills. I stopped counting Marris Sellways after the fifth one sashayed into my office. All of them, though, seemed surprised to learn they had a daughter. One couldn’t even recall where she’d lived. One was obviously a man.
Mixed in with the would-be Marris Sellways were the people who claimed to have known her. Not a one recalled her daughter’s name, or much of anything else. Reported ages ranged from teenager to granny lady. One asked me, “How old do you want me to say she was?”
I shooed them all out and only had to resort to waves of my head-knocker once.
I paid the urchins, as promised, and I even flipped a pair of coppers to the man in drag because at least he showed a sense of humor about the whole wretched mess.
Skillet came back around and got the rest of his pay and his bonus. By early afternoon, the crowds had thinned out, and I posted Skillet at my door with instructions to tell any stragglers they’d have to come around later.
I wasn’t very happy when I left Skillet behind and hit the street. The sun could beam and the birds could sing all they wanted to-I’d been lied to, either by a dead man or the old lady who claimed to speak for him. And since Granny was the only one of the pair with a corpus, it was her I headed to see.
I stopped by Mama’s, more out of a desire to snag a cup of her tea than anything else. She was waiting, and instead of her usual tea she’d splurged and made coffee. I cleaned off a spot on her card-reading table and plopped myself down.
“I seen quite a crew file in and out of your place,” she said.
I grunted. “All a waste of time. All but one.”
Mama nodded sagely. “The stinkin’ one?”
“He ran a gang called the Bloods back before the fires, when Cawling Street was Cawling Street. He remembers the Sellway woman. Remembers her kid. He also remembers her husband getting himself killed in a bread riot a year before the War ended. That business about the spook being a soldier coming home never happened.”
“I reckon dead ’uns ain’t no more honest than the living.”
“And I reckon I’m being played, Mama. Spooks my ass. You know Granny. Tell me why she’d need to make all that up? If she wants me to find Marris Sellway, fine, I don’t even need a reason. Just hire me to find her. No questions need be asked.”
I half-expected Mama to shake her dried owl at me, but she just shook her head.
“Boy, I know you don’t believe. And maybe I don’t blame you much. For every Granny Knot, there’s two dozen put-ons. Just like for me. You do believe in me, don’t you, boy?”
“I worship the ground you drop feathers on, Mama, you know that. But Granny. I don’t know her. And somebody is lying to me. What am I supposed to believe?”
“You ain’t never supposed to believe nothing but the truth, boy.” Mama cackled. “Trouble is, sometimes the
