I Speak for the Dead

Part Ten

Maybe it’s the little old lady in me, but tea always calms my nerves, even if it takes two or three cups.  Tonight was a three-cup event, and I stirred sugar into the final cup.  I was finally starting to relax, so I opened the manila folder Terry had prepared and began to read again.  Terry.  I blew steam from the top of my cup, watching it disappear into the atmosphere faster than my hope of any romance in the next twenty years.  Terry bugged me.  I closed my eyes, only to have his face float up in front of me, his brown eyes soft and his hair tousled just so.  "You're disgusting," I snarled, although I wasn't sure if I was talking to him or myself.   

"Get to work," I admonished myself.  And since I was the boss, the client, and most of the investigative team, I hunkered down to do just that.   

The facts on Emma Gold were pretty scanty.  By which, I mean there weren't any that I could be sure.  There was her headstone, sure.  She had lived, and then died, but lots of people do that every day.  I laid the picture aside.  It told me almost nothing about the person who lay beneath it.  The newspaper article shed a bit more light.  Jamesfort was a smaller city back in 1888, but I had no doubt it was as busy, or even busier.  There were no safety nets, and those who didn't work went hungry.  In some ways, I liked that.  I know there are lots of people who can't fend for themselves, but my neck of the woods seems to be blessed with more than our fair share.  And when there are more hands taking out of the pot than putting in...well, you don't have to be a wizard to know it can't keep going that way.  Not for long.  My credit card bills were a testimony to that bleak truth.  

In a small city, a murder gets noticed.  Edgar Allan Poe once said there was nothing more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman, but I disagree.  There is nothing more disturbing than death, and murder is the worst of deaths.  The murder of a child is the worst of murders...and I came back to the newspaper.  What was true to me, and felt right to me, didn't apply to everyone...if it did, there would be a lot less baggy pants in my world.  But I had a hunch I was right on this one.  The murder of a child would shock a small city, especially with the gruesomeness of the method, especially, especially...nothing.  The paper had a small story, about two inches of column, and the following days brought less.  Finally there was nothing.  Emma Gold's death seemed to have made little impression on Jamesfort.  How could that be? 

There are times when two heads are better than one, even if they're both dancing on the head of a pin.  I needed Terry to bounce some ideas around, but if there was one thing I knew was a bad idea, it was inviting him to my apartment at midnight on a Friday.  I'm not saying things would get out of hand, but I'm only human.  I dismissed the notion, after I had run the scene through my mind a few times, just for laughs.  Maybe someday he and I could see if somehow, someway, we could align our stars and be more to each other than casual acquaintances, but at the moment all I wanted was to get into my empty bed and let the night terrors take me where they would. 

And they did.  I guarantee you, they did.