Chapter 18: Who Is the Rat?

Frankie

Oren’s wife came before dawn.

I met her outside and moved the men away from the door. They could stand somewhere else.

She looked at my face and knew.

“Where?”

I took her to him.

Elin. Her name was Elin.

I knew that. It was on the accounts. So was the address and the money for the kids.

“Oren’s wife” had been quicker to say.

She sat beside him.

Mara brought water. Elin didn’t drink it.

“He said the new door was safe,” she told me.

I looked at the floor.

“It should have been.”

“He said you looked after your people.”

I had promises. Money. Men I could send.

She was holding his hand.

I kept my mouth shut.

I stayed until she asked me to leave.

* * *

The prisoner called himself Renn.

He worked where work presented itself. Sometimes carrying goods. Sometimes taking them. He had a sister in another town and an excellent memory for the portions of his life that might persuade me not to kill him.

I let him talk.

The meeting had been at the old tannery. Four men besides him. A hooded woman with instructions, a purse, and a drawing of the tavern’s rear entrance.

“Her voice,” I said.

He glanced at Mara, then looked away.

Hobb moved beside the door.

“Say it,” I told the prisoner.

“Like hers.”

Mara kept her hands folded.

“Did she say who sent her?”

“Said the governor needed a book removed. Said nobody was supposed to get hurt.”

“Who cut Oren?”

Renn swallowed.

“The man with the crossbow.”

The man I had shot. Convenient.

Could be true. Dead men cause plenty of trouble before they get convenient.

I asked him to describe the purse. The drawing. The woman’s boots. How she held the lamp. What hand she used to count the coins. By the end, he was sweating through his shirt and angry that his life might depend on noticing things he hadn’t known would matter.

I understood the feeling.

Mara had been with Rosella during the alleged meeting. Rosella said so without hesitation.

Renn said he knew the voice.

Rosella hadn’t lied to me yet. Renn was betting his neck on that voice.

Something stank.

I sent Dren to inspect the tannery.

* * *

The first packet arrived in the hands of a frightened boy.

Someone had paid him to deliver it. He hadn’t seen the man’s face. He began apologizing when he saw our faces.

I paid him for his time and sent him home.

Inside was a receipt bearing Brannik’s workshop mark: copper, wire, and a locking mechanism for delivery to the tannery.

Brannik read it.

“That is my mark.”

“Did you sell the parts?”

“No.”

“Could somebody have taken them?”

He looked offended enough to power a small mill.

“Yes. I have apprentices now. And orders. And doors people occasionally enter without being shot.”

I’d told him to take more orders and hire help. Now I was asking why he let people into the shop.

We checked his accounts. The amount existed. The date existed. The customer didn’t.

Liora found the second problem.

The silk around the packet came from her workroom.

Not something similar. The same weave, the same dyer’s irregularity near the edge. She had cut it from a damaged bolt the previous afternoon.

Hobb looked at her. She held his gaze until I put the packet down.

“Nobody starts.”

“Starts what?” Hobb asked.

“Picking a rat before we found one.”

He sat back.

Liora smoothed the strip of silk with one finger.

Her hand wasn’t quite steady.

* * *

Dren returned from the tannery with two coins from the stolen lockbox, a piece of Hobb’s old fighting-club debt paper, and a knife of the same make as Benny’s.

Enough to hang somebody.

Trouble was, you could pick which somebody.

Hobb had burned most of the debt receipt after his first payday. We had all watched him do it. He’d called it sentimental nonsense while carefully making sure the whole thing caught.

Benny had four knives. Now he had three.

Liora had left her sewing basket in the common room while we took the injured to the church.

Brannik had been repairing shutters instead of watching his stock.

Half the town could’ve got at that stuff. Or any one of us.

“Someone could be planting these,” Mara said.

“Someone could,” I agreed.

“Someone inside,” Hobb said.

Benny turned away. Hobb’s hand stopped short of his cup.

“Or somebody with access,” I said.

I had built a place where everybody came for help. Where doors opened. Where people brought letters, goods, grievances, soup, and other people’s children.

I could put a man at the door. Search the deliveries. Have Hobb go through the rooms.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Benny was watching me.

I left the keys on the table.

By noon, suspicion had reached the kitchen.

A supplier refused to accept Mara’s signature for a delivery. He wanted mine. Nothing personal, he assured her. Just a temporary precaution until everything had been cleared up.

Mara brought him into the office instead of arguing in the passage.

I asked whether he believed she had ordered flour she didn’t need.

He said no.

Whether the amount was wrong.

No.

Whether he expected her signature would suddenly stop being hers because somebody had found a knife near a tannery.

He looked at his shoes.

“People are talking.”

“They tend to.”

I handed the account back to Mara.

“Your job. Your signature.”

She signed. The supplier accepted it. He left with the hurried courtesy of a man who would tell the story differently when he reached the street.

Mara remained beside the desk.

“You needn’t rescue me from every insult.”

“He was questioning an arrangement I made. That’s my problem too.”

She considered that. We both knew I was a terrible liar.

Then she went back to work.

Through the doorway, I watched a carter stop talking when Mara passed.

Hadn’t taken long. We hadn’t even accused anybody yet.

In Chicago, sometimes all you had to do was stop greeting a man. By supper, nobody would sit beside him.

I called the carter in and asked him about his delivery. Made him speak up.

* * *

Aldric came under escort in the afternoon.

He examined the white cloth from the ford, then the burn marks Brannik had copied onto a piece of wood.

“Someone wants you looking toward the church.”

“Someone wants me looking everywhere.”

I showed him the other evidence.

He read it without commentary.

When he reached the knife, Benny stepped forward.

“If you’ve got something to say about my past, say it.”

“Your past does not tell me whether you committed this act,” Aldric said.

Benny rubbed his mouth. Whatever he’d expected the paladin to say, it hadn’t been that.

“You can oppose a man honestly,” Aldric said to me. “You know I oppose you. That does not require poisoning the people around you until you cannot distinguish friend from enemy.”

“It’s effective.”

“So was your machine.”

Benny looked away.

I left my next argument where it was.

Then Mara brought in the final letter.

* * *

It had been found under a loose stone outside the tannery.

Dren sent it sealed in a new envelope, with the name of the man who discovered it and the time. Good procedure. I had taught him that.

The handwriting looked like Mara’s.

I knew the slant. The way she crossed her letters. Saw it on everything from the payroll to notes telling me I’d missed supper.

Now this.

The letter described my rounds, the money drawer, and the hours I usually slept. It mentioned the back-room window that stuck in damp weather. It gave the changed watch, precisely.

Near the bottom, it described how to reach my room after midnight.

Frankie always locks his door before sleeping. Bring the narrow pick for the lower tumbler.

Then an amount.

Enough money for a young woman to leave the valley and never need another employer.

I read it again.

Mara stood opposite me.

Everybody else seemed very far away.

“I did not write that,” she said.

“I heard you.”

“You haven’t asked.”

I looked up.

The room waited.

“Did you write it?”

“No.”

She held my gaze with her hands clenched at her sides.

When she caught me looking, she spread her fingers on the table.

“Ask the priest,” she said. “Question me. Put me under oath. Whatever he needs—”

“No,” Aldric said.

We both looked at him.

“I have no spell to settle this. Nor will I put a woman to the question on the strength of a stranger’s voice.”

Mara swallowed.

“Then ask me yourself.”

I thought of Shiiruk on his knees and the prisoner downstairs measuring every answer against what he thought might happen to him.

I’d gotten plenty of confessions. Usually got the one I wanted.

“Everybody go upstairs,” I said.

Hobb didn’t move.

“Frankie.”

“We ain’t finished investigating. We are finished doing it with an audience.”

One by one, they left.

Aldric went last.

He looked at the letter in my hand, then at Mara.

“I will be in the common room.”

I nodded.

He understood me well enough to stay close.

I wasn’t sure whether that comforted or insulted me.

* * *

Mara remained standing after the door closed.

I pulled out her chair beside mine.

“Sit down, Mara. We got work to do.”

She studied me before taking the chair.

I put the letter between us.

“Go through it. Every detail. Tell me what’s true, what’s wrong, and who else could know it.”

“And when I reach the part only I know?”

I looked at the line about the locked door.

“We’ll discuss that too.”

She drew a breath and began.

Twice I wanted to cut her off and get to the part that mattered. Twice she told me something I hadn’t thought to ask.

Outside, somebody whispered. Footsteps hurried past the door.

I kept my hands flat on the table.

And I listened.