The Wild Dead Page 3

  “She was murdered,” Enid said. Stating the obvious, needing to say it, out of some sense of procedure. Saying it out loud made it real, and she didn’t want anyone to argue otherwise.

  She glanced over her shoulder at Teeg, who stood with a hand over his mouth and horror in his gaze. “Murdered?” he said. “Like, someone did this to her?”

  “I expect so,” she said. “I suppose there might be some scenario where some accident did this.” She considered. What possible accident could have caused this? Could someone possibly fall on a blade in such a way as to make a cut like that? “But then she likely wouldn’t be washed up in a marsh, would she?”

  “No, I guess not,” Teeg said. “So . . . what do we do now?”

  “We start another investigation.”

  It pained Enid to say it—she had so wanted to foot it for home this afternoon. She thought briefly that she could maybe pass this case on to another pair of investigators . . . but no, getting more investigators here would take too long. Besides, Enid had to find out who did this thing, even if it meant delaying her return home. She supposed she ought to send a message on to Sam and the others, saying what had happened. Get word to the regional committee.

  She straightened and looked over the wetlands, streams of sparkling water cutting through thick dark mud, all flat as a table, bounded by stands of grasses. They ought to be able to find some evidence. But artifacts, like whatever had made that awful cut, would sink and disappear in this kind of marsh, among a century’s worth of ruins. And of course there wasn’t anything so obvious as a suspicious figure running away; the woman had been dead enough time that the assailant was long gone, likely.

  “Find anything?” she asked Teeg.

  He was still staring at the body, and shook his head as if waking up. “No . . . I don’t think so. I . . . I should look again. Just in case.”

  They stepped around the body, searching for anything that might look out of place. Only the body itself, Kellan’s bag, and Kellan, still standing rooted some distance away.

  Enid was going to have to talk to everyone in the settlement. Make a decision about what to do with the body. She didn’t know where to start. But she knew what her mentor, Tomas, would have said: you pick one thing on the list and do that. Then the next, then the next, and eventually the task reaches an end. That was how they’d solved a murder once before. Or rather, she had solved it. He’d died on the investigation before they finished. A year gone and her thoughts still shied away from the memory. Now, though, she needed to remind herself of his steadying presence. You can do this, he’d have told her.

  She had a job to do.

  “All right,” she said finally. “Let’s see if we can get a stretcher down here to carry her out of the mud. Find out if there’s a cool space to keep her, at least for the next little while.” With the water table so high in this area, there weren’t any cellars. They probably ought to plan on burning the body in the next day or so, unless Enid could find out for sure where the woman had come from, then deliver her to her people. Maybe this wouldn’t take too long.

  Or maybe they would never find out what had happened.

  She picked up Kellan’s bag and carried it to him. Couldn’t resist peeking inside—it gaped open when she pulled the strap over her shoulder: junk, mostly. A couple of lengths of rusted metal. Didn’t look good for anything, as far as Enid could tell, but she might be wrong about that. An intact glass jar the size of her hand. A few seashells. Exactly what one might scavenge off a beach like this.

  Kellan took the bag from her and hugged it to his chest. “What do we do?” he asked. His voice was tight, like he might cry.

  “We’re going to try to figure that out. Do you recognize her? Is she from around here?”

  He quickly shook his head. “No, no, she’s not from here. No.”

  “Any idea where she might have come from?”

  He kept shaking his head, over and over. The man was going into shock, and Enid tried to anchor him, speaking calmly.

  “You scavenge the coast here regularly,” she said. “Have bodies ever washed up like this before?”

  “Never.” Fearful, he looked past her, at the lump in the mud.

  “She was just like that when you found her?”

  “I—I ran, soon as I saw she wasn’t alive. To get help.”

  “And that was the right thing to do,” Enid said, to reassure him. “Okay. I’ll probably have some more questions for you later on. In the meantime, you know where we can get a stretcher?”

  “No . . . no, I don’t think so.”

  “Can you do something for me, Kellan?”

  The tears had broken; he was crying now, and might not even be listening, much less able to do what she asked. Enid pressed on, speaking gently. “Go up to Bonavista or Pine Grove and see if they have a sturdy sheet or a big length of canvas we can use. Can you do that for me? Everyone’s still waiting up on the road; someone should be able to help.”

  A glance told her that yes, the whole gathering who’d spent the previous fifteen minutes arguing about a broken house was still standing in a clump. They’d moved closer to the marsh, to watch the commotion, but no one else had ventured onto the mud. Help would have to be fetched.

  “Kellan?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll go.” He trotted up the way, back to the road, each step squishing as he went.

  Enid returned to Teeg and the body. “You want me to go for the stretcher instead?” he asked.

  “I think Kellan can handle it. He needs a job to get his mind off this. Meanwhile, you and I can keep those birds away.” The gulls had backed off at their approach, but dozens of them now circled, waiting for their chance at the body.

  Enid studied the mud again. The depressions from their footprints formed a series of tiny puddles. All were recent, belonging to her, Teeg, and Kellan—arriving, circling, and leaving again. This meant the woman hadn’t walked here recently, hadn’t been killed here in the past day or so—and in the meantime the flowing water of the tide had erased any earlier history.

  The way the wound in her neck was scoured clean, along with the bloated look of her face and hands, suggested she’d been dead for a couple of days at least. That she was lying here at all meant she’d died after the storm; it would have washed her away, and they never would have found her. That gave them a window to start with, at least. Too big to be really useful, but it was something.

  “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” Teeg asked.

  “Done what?”

  “A murder investigation. I read the report from that case in Pasadan last year.”

  “Yes,” she said, sighing inwardly. She had done this before.

  “So you know what you’re doing.” He said this hopefully. Needing her to know what she was doing.

  She shook her head. “This is nothing like that case.” The Pasadan case had essentially been an accident, the result of bad temper and bad feeling—it hadn’t been obvious or clear-cut and required some real sleuthing to tease out the situation. This . . . this, on the other hand, signified a great deal of intent, which meant someone in the area was a deliberate murderer.

  Teeg said, “You think that Kellan guy might have had something to do with this? You spot that machete on his belt? That could have done this.”

  “Like maybe he’s in shock from having done the thing? So . . . what, he sees a strange woman wandering up the river and he decides to swing a blade at her? And then call for help? Why would he do that?”

  “Sometimes people just go crazy, I guess. If he spends a lot of time out here by himself—”

  She shook her head. “You’re making assumptions. No one goes off like that without some warning. Some other evidence of instability.”

  “All the crud he runs into, scavenging in this mess—lead, mercury, whatever else—that’d be enough to make anyone unstable, don’t you think?”

  “It’s too early to talk about such things,” she said. “Don’t invent a sol
ution.”

  Kneeling by the body again, Enid studied it in more detail. If the woman had been attacked, she might have tried to fend off the weapon. But there was nothing on her hands or arms: no cuts or bruises other than those that arose from blood pooling after death. Enid pointed out the details to Teeg. The one straight wound and nothing else; this suggested she’d been attacked suddenly. This hadn’t been a fight but a single blow, finished as quickly as it had begun.

  Lifting the woman’s hands, Enid studied the fingernails, and yes, there were bits of blood caked there—dark brown flecks that hadn’t washed away. “She had enough time to put her hands to the wound, to try to stanch the blood. Not much more than that, probably. But where did it happen?”

  “And did she wash down from upriver, or was she dumped by whoever did this?”

  Enid smiled up at Teeg. “See? You know how to do this. It’s like any other investigation: you ask the right questions until you learn what happened. Here, look at this.”

  She pulled apart strands of the woman’s hair, brushed fingers over a section of the kerchief. Debris had caught on the fibers. Pine needles stuck in knitted loops; dried leaves and even a few twigs tangled in hair. Bits of forest.

  “What’s all that?” Teeg asked, leaning in. He tugged a couple of pine needles from the kerchief and spun them between his fingers.

  “Look around,” Enid said. “It’s not anything that grows around here. She came from upriver.” Up the hill, past the settlement, where scattered trees marked the start of a forest.

  “Ah,” he sighed. “So we need to go up the river there and look.”

  Kellan hadn’t yet returned with the canvas. Enid glanced back at the crowd, but no one seemed inclined to make their way down into the marsh. The gulls, more accustomed to the presence of people now, grew bolder and began swooping in closer to the body.

  “Stay here,” she said to Teeg. “Keep those birds away.”

  This was going to be a really long day, Enid thought, trudging back through the mud. Her boots were already caked with the stuff, and from wiping off her hands, she’d gotten it on her trousers as well.

  Back at the road, Enid surveyed the crowd. No one had gone looking for a sheet. Bear the dog was barking at Erik’s feet, and the man didn’t try to quiet him this time.

  “Hola,” Enid said. Erik and Kellan looked like they’d been arguing—Kellan pleading with some amount of desperation, clutching his bag to his chest, and Erik shaking his head.

  Enid was about to ask them what the problem was when Juni came forward, full of concern. “Kellan says there’s a body, that you found a body.”

  “Yeah, ’fraid so. I sent him to find a sheet or something we can use to carry it up out of the marsh.”

  Juni shook her head. “That can’t be right.”

  “I think I know a body when I see one.”

  “But . . . who is it?” Juni looked around at her neighbors, who shook their heads, murmured, confused.

  “That’s one of the things we’ll have to find out. Lucky you’ve already got investigators here, isn’t it?”

  Nobody smiled. Enid wondered whether they would have bothered to send for investigators, if she and Teeg hadn’t already been here. Or would they have simply burned the woman and pretended she had never washed up at their front door? Enid liked to think they’d tell. You didn’t just ignore a murdered body. Maybe this place wasn’t missing a young woman, but someplace was. It was no use trying to hide it—such knowledge would fester in a small community like this and come out one way or another.

  One of the other women, Anna from Semperfi, said, “I think we’ve got some canvas up at our place, I’ll go get it.” She ran off.

  “What’re you going to do?” Juni asked, her voice gone uncharacteristically small.

  “We’ll try to find out what happened. Take care of the girl as best we can. Do you have anyone here in charge of pyres, or is that done household by household?”

  Another long silence, folk waiting to see if someone else would answer. Finally Erik said, “Last House usually does pyres, since they’re closest to the timber.”

  Most places had a household that did the more difficult jobs, the ones no one else wanted to do. Like tending to funeral pyres. Often, such folk lived on the fringes, didn’t fit in anywhere else, like the nervous Kellan. Enid was curious to meet the rest of the folk of Last House. “Kellan, can you go to your folk and see about putting together a pyre?”

  He’d pulled off his floppy hat, was kneading it in his hands. The strap of his bag had ended up back over his shoulder. He looked disheveled, mud covering his boots, spattered on his sleeves. Enid was about to repeat the request when Kellan’s understanding seemed to settle in, and he mashed the hat back onto his head. “Yeah, okay. I can do that.” He raced off, seemingly relieved to get away from the marsh.

  Well, that was a couple of things off the list. A good start. There’d be some momentum now, and Enid felt better equipped to start talking to everyone else.

  “While you’re all here, I’d like to ask a few questions. The body, this young woman, was maybe eighteen or nineteen. She’s in a blue skirt and brown tunic, has a knitted kerchief. Brown hair, brown skin, slender, about this tall.” She put her hand at the level of her chin, just over five foot. “Does that sound familiar? Any of you recognize anyone fitting that description? Not necessarily from here—maybe someone from down the road. Someone you might have seen at the Everlast market?”

  Blank stares answered her. Enid wasn’t surprised.

  “Any of you who feel up to it, if you could take a look at her and see if you recognize her, I’d appreciate it. Finding out where she came from will be a big step toward learning what happened to her.”

  “Maybe she drowned in the storm,” someone ventured.

  “Ah, no,” Enid said. “Trust me, she didn’t drown.”

  No one seemed to know what to say to that, resulting in an awkward moment of silence.

  “Well then. If anyone thinks of anything, come tell me, yeah?”

  Chapter Three • the estuary

  ///////////////////////////////////////

  An Unknown Burden

  Enid had to do some cajoling, but she got Erik and Jess to help her and Teeg carry the body out of the marsh after Anna returned with a bundle of canvas. One of them on each corner of a makeshift stretcher would make the gruesome task easier.

  Bonavista, close to the wetlands as it was, had a house and outbuildings built on pylons, almost as tall as she was, to keep them above the flooding. Enid thought they could temporarily store the body under one of the work houses. Juni, Jess, and their folk wouldn’t be happy about it. But this was exactly the sort of situation for which Enid needed the authority of the uniform. They couldn’t very well argue with her; it was clear she had jurisdiction over the situation. Somebody had to.

  “Oh,” Erik breathed, when he saw the dead woman and the gaping wound. Couldn’t avoid seeing it. Jess gagged and looked away, hand over his mouth.

  “Best if you keep your eyes on the sheet,” Enid suggested. “Sorry to put you through this. But I do have to ask—do you recognize her? Even a little?” If she came from somewhere nearby, Enid would prefer to deliver her back to her household.

  Unlike Jess, Erik couldn’t seem to look away from her. Slowly, he shook his head. “No,” he murmured. “No.”

  At least this would head off the gossip: the young woman had most definitely not drowned.

  Jess asked, “Where could she have come from?”

  Teeg said, “We’ll do our best to find out.”

  A body with multiple mysteries. Enid didn’t like this at all. “All right. Let’s get her out of the mud, yeah?”

  The gulls wheeled angrily and scattered, crying, as Enid and Teeg lifted the body onto the spread-out tarp. The body flopped as they moved it, neck twisting awkwardly—far past rigor mortis. The bloodless wound gaped wide. The rank smell might have belonged to the corpse, or might have been t
he odors of the marsh around them. Enid focused on the task, to avoid thinking too much about who this woman had been a few days ago.

  Erik and Jess looked like they wanted to flee, but Enid’s authority carried them forward. When Enid gave commands, folk listened. So, on the count of three, the four of them—one at each corner, twisting the canvas in their fists—lifted the body. It sagged in the middle of the fabric, but they were able to keep it taut enough to carry. Teeg tucked his staff under his arm.

  The hike back to Bonavista household was a long one, silent and—appropriately, Enid supposed—funereal. A somber procession, as they focused on not dropping the burden. The body wasn’t very big, but it pulled at Enid’s arms and seemed to grow heavier as they went. Dead bodies were awkward things.

  When they arrived at the work house at Bonavista, they settled their load onto the ground, with relief. Erik and Jess backed away quickly, brushing their hands, avoiding looking at what they had just carried. Enid took a moment to straighten the body’s limbs, smooth back the hair. She made sure the face and wound were exposed, visible, so there’d be no question what had happened when the rest of the Estuary’s residents came to try to identify her.

  A few of the crowd found the courage, or maybe the overwhelming curiosity, to follow the impromptu procession up to the work house. Juni was at the front, wringing her hands.

  “Juni,” Enid called. “You see everyone who comes by on this road. You know most everyone, yeah? Can you come and take a look?”

  At the invitation, Juni stepped forward, and the others pressed up behind her. They were curious; they wanted to see. Enid stepped back and let them. Next to her, Teeg gripped his staff and frowned. Being official and intimidating.

  One of the women covered her mouth and turned away, eyes closed. There was murmuring. Enid was sure they’d all seen death; you didn’t live life in a village like this and avoid it. But they might not have seen violence. Enid didn’t have to explain the wound—they saw it, and understood.

  “Juni?” Enid prompted. The woman stared at the body, studying its face.