The Gold in the Dark

Chapter Twenty-Four

Thurie walked hand in hand with his father down the street. They had left the oilcloth pouch of art supplies at home this time—a good thing, because it meant nobody else had been hurt.

It was an unforgivingly cold morning, the weak sun peeking through an overhanging canvas of clouds. Thurie didn't mind the cold—liked it, actually. As a rule, he wasn't a fan of crowds, and the cold kept people a few minutes longer in their beds, so the streets were near deserted. Still, he couldn't shake the habit of peering into every window and down every alley as they walked.

Dunna Jore's deep, rumbling voice broke the silence as he shot another furtive look behind them. "Always so careful... Like father, like son." Thurie twisted back around and gazed up toward his father, his mouth curving up into a small, closed smile. It faded when he registered the melancholy in his father's eyes.

They crossed the street to the guard station. Thurie held open the door for his father, and they slipped from the cold stillness of the city into the bustling cacophony within. The scene was a familiar one, complete with the usual cast of unsavory characters sitting on wooden benches at the front of the station: a woman with a split lip and clothes too tight and colorful, a short man in a lumpy gray overcoat murmuring something inaudible, a boy several years younger than Thurie, his face smeared with dirt and grime. He didn't mind this group much, unsavory though they were. He'd been in enough guard stations to know the sorts of people who formed the regular crowd.

Meanwhile, a group of guards formed a cluster in the center of the room, listening as a man at the front of the crowd rattled off assignments and orders for the day. The man giving instructions was the station's guard captain, a tall man with a barrel chest and grizzled hair cropped short. The captain consulted every so often with the secretary sitting behind the front desk, a man with ruddy cheeks and an impressively bushy, straw-colored beard. As Dunna and Thurie waited for the captain to finish up, several runners bringing messages from other stations burst through the door behind them and swarmed the secretary. He swatted at them as if they were little more than flies and snapped at them to form a line.

Only when the guard captain finished giving his last instructions did he register Dunna's presence, nodding his head upward as he caught Dunna's eye over the crowd. The guards dispersed and the captain strode over, the barest hint of a smile lurking behind his stern expression.

"If it isn't my favorite former guard himself."

"Hello, Gery," Thurie's father said.

The captain looked down at Thurie and now cracked a true smile. "And son in tow! Give it a few years and you'll be heading out into the city with the rest of them." He reached out and ruffled his hair. Thurie reddened. Sometime in the last few years he'd grown so accustomed to his father's lifeless, wooden hands that a warm touch was unexpected.

The guard captain cast a surveying gaze over father and son. "Now Dunna, it's been a good amount of time since you graced our humble station with your presence. What brings you here on this fine, fine morning?"

"I've been thinking about our favorite killer. It occurred to me that when we interviewed the dancer she was with two of her friends. Three girls, two beds."

The captain stilled, though his eyes flicked downwards toward Dunna's hands. "They sure did their best to drive you out of the guard—but some things can't be forced, I suppose."

"It's not likely to lead to anything, I know. I'm just hoping you'll indulge a retired guard's curiosity."

"Of course. Let's go now, before I get sucked into the pending disaster that today's promising to become."

The captain rattled off a few instructions to the secretary, and then all three of them set off. Dunna and the captain were a merry pair as they strode down the street. Thurie's mood lightened as they walked, seeing a spark return to his father's eyes as he settled into the back-and-forth banter of the city guard.