gate and the front walk gate are closed, but we can see a woman on the carriage way, and she’s shaking, and there’s a body on the stones. We go in, and the body is a schoolgirl, it looks like, and the woman who screamed is her mother.”
“Who is she?” I knew one or two people on Geusynor, or I had, years back. I supposed most of them still lived there.
“Her name is Rauchelle D’Roulet, and her husband is a factor.”
“Roulet D’Factorius?” I hadn’t heard of him.
“She said he deals in musical instruments, and manufactures pianofortes.”
A factor dealing in musical instruments? I’d never heard of one, but that didn’t mean such a factorage didn’t exist. “What happened to the girl?”
“It looks like one of those elveweed deaths, sir.” Zellyn shook his head. “Pleasant-looking girl, too. She would have been, that is, if her face wasn’t so twisted up. Looked like she was running for help or something when it hit her.”
I was the first out when the hack came to a stop. “How much?” I asked the hacker.
“Be three, sir.”
I handed him four coppers. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure, sir.”
We walked toward the front gate, partly open, and through it I could see Dhean standing on the side porch and the top of a woman’s head, as if she were sitting on a bench or chair with a low back. Zellyn’s description of the house showed his own background, and my response to his description, when I saw the place, betrayed mine. The dwelling was slightly smaller than my parents’, with a mansard roof and slate tiles that had to have been wired in place, given the angle. The walls were mortar over brick, in a provincial style, and the trim was a pale yellow. The carriage house was in the old style, barely large enough for a single coach, with a rear stable.
A white woolen blanket, likely Tilboran prime wool, covered the body lying at the foot of the steps up to the side porch. I bent over and took a corner of the blanket, pulling it back to see the girl’s face and upper body. Her face, contorted into a rictus of pain and shock, was narrow and triangular above thin shoulders. She’d only been wearing a filmy white cotton night-dress. I guessed her age at fifteen or sixteen. I eased the blanket back over her.
Zellyn let me go up the steps to the covered porch first. He followed silently.
The woman who rose from the wicker chair with the faded oilcloth cushion was angular, her face similar to that of the dead girl. The mother was the kind who was so nervous she looked like she was always on the verge of shaking all over. Her hair was tinted a shade of henna-blonde unbecoming to someone with white chalky skin, and the redness of her eyes and the blotchy appearance of her face only accentuated the clash between skin and hair.
“Madame D’Roulet, I’m Patrol Captain Rhennthyl.” I inclined my head.
She gave me a second look, then a third, before she spoke. “Oh…you’re the imager. Chenkyr and Maelyna’s son. I’m glad it’s you.”
That could have meant many things, but I just nodded, then asked, “Can you tell me how this happened?”
“I don’t know. Jessya didn’t feel well at breakfast, and she stayed home from school. I heard her moving around upstairs, and then she ran down the stairs…and the porch door opened. I didn’t hear anything after that. For a moment, I thought she had run onto the porch because she needed air. I started to follow her, but then I smelled something burning, and I ran upstairs. There was this funny pipe lying there, and it had charred the carpet. It’s a very good carpet, a Mantean Forssya. Her whole room smelled like bitter weeds had burned.”
“Have you ever smelled that before?”
“I…I don’t think so.”
I let the lie pass. She’d smelled that odor before, but not often, and probably not strongly. “Then what did you do?”
“I ran downstairs and out onto the porch. That was when I saw her…lying there…”
The patrollers in Third District had found a number of dead elvers outside, some of them nude, and I’d thought that was because their bodies had been stripped and robbed, but it sounded like what ever the weed did to some people led to them feeling hot and needing air.
“Where did she go to school?”
“Jainsyn’s School for Girls.”
I nodded. My sister Khethila called the fashionable school “Jayne’s Sins.”
I spent a quarter-glass going over what Madame D’Roulet had seen and done, but it was clear enough that, while she might have suspected her daughter was doing
As I was getting ready to leave, Madame D’Roulet cleared her throat. “What will you do now?”
“There’s not much more we can do for her. We’ll keep looking for dealers and runners, and we’ll report her death.”
“You won’t have to take…her, will you? I wouldn’t want anyone to see her…like this.”
“No.” There wasn’t any point in that. “You can make what ever arrangements you like.”
“Jessya is such a good girl…” Her eyes drifted past me to the blanket-covered figure on the drive.
I didn’t point out that the past tense was more appropriate to the dead schoolgirl, and that any schoolgirl who had access to elveweed couldn’t have been all that good…unless she was truly naive and had gone along with bad company, but I had my doubts about that. “Sometimes, it’s the innocent who get hurt the most, Madame. They really don’t understand the dangers, and they think nothing bad will happen to them.”
“Why can’t…you stop…things like this?”
“We try very hard. But the people who sell it make a great deal of golds from doing so, and they go to great lengths to avoid us. Those who buy from them also avoid us, and I don’t think anyone would want the Patrol intruding into every home and every business continually, trying to root out dealers. Most crimes are solved because people either come to the Patrol and tell us, or because they’re willing to answer our questions. Most who buy, sell, or use elveweed don’t do either.”
“There must be something…”
“We keep looking, Madame.” What else could I say to a distracted mother who didn’t seem to fully realize that her daughter was dead? Especially since there was so little we could really do. “Is there someone who can help you?”
“My sister Neldya…she’s inside. She sent a messenger to Roulet.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t seem real.”
“Officer?” came a quiet voice from my left. “If you’re through…Rauchelle might need some tea.”
I turned to see a smallish gray-haired woman standing in the porch doorway. “We’re through. Would you like the patrollers to carry Jessya inside?”
“If you would.”
I glanced to Zellyn, and he and Dhean went down the steps to the drive, wrapped the blanket around the body, and then carried it back onto the porch and inside. The ease with which they handled her suggested she’d weighed even less than I’d thought.
When the two returned, we walked back along Geusynor toward Saenhelyn Road.
“She’d been smoking for a while, sir,” offered Zellyn. “Elvers get thin like that.”
“Her mother didn’t notice?” asked Dhean. “The smell alone…”
“Most factors and their families have never smelled elveweed.” Certainly, I never had until I found myself as a Civic Patrol Liaison. “I’ll have to visit the school.”
“Better you than us, sir,” replied Zellyn.
When we reached Saenhelyn, I caught a hack. After a short ride, one I could have walked, it stopped before an imposing set of wrought iron gates fronting the parklike setting due north of the Plaza D’Este that contained the Jainsyn’s School for Girls.
The single guard in the booth beside the gate looked at me and decided not to say a word. I walked up the stone drive and around the circle that held a fountain. The bronze figure was that of a fully clothed girl holding a
