“That’s absurd.”
“In addition to its absurdity, it also has truth. And I cannot account either for where I was about when she died, and neither can anyone, for I was alone. The officers who questioned me were skeptical of this. I will be the suspect, and the trail of the true murderer will lose his musk. So I must be the one to sniff him out before. I do not wish to offend you, but I believe that you should not attempt this investigation without me.”
“Why does everyone think that I’m trying to investigate this?
“I am sorry. But regardless of whether you do or not, I am afraid that I must.”
“You know, you remind me a little of my dad sometimes.”
“I do not know why you say that, but it is complimentary.”
“Yeah, it’s good that you remind me of him, but that’s why I can’t—Even if I had a suspicion or an inkling about how Shirley died, I couldn’t tell you about it when you’re like this. Because you’d just go off and—”
“You have a suspicion?”
“I—No. But my point is… what if I had a suspect and I was wrong? My dad’s the same way; if he even had a vague idea about who did this, he’d just go and—”
“I must go now. I am sorry to depart with such brusqueness, but I have wasted too much time already. Thank you for consoling me, but catching the killer will be the thing that consoles me most.”
“Well, you’re welcome, I guess. But you—I still wish you’d reconsider about doing this yourself.”
Blaise stood, but he paused before turning toward the door. “I think I do know something of how you are miserable about Prescott. I am sincerely sorry that there is no killer to catch that would console you.”
Our Heroine married Prescott in 1986. It was the summer of her first year at college and about a year and a half after her mother died. She had finally popped the question that spring—after years of tentative advances and Byronic hesitation on Prescott’s part—and for once he had been decisive enough to simply say yes. It wasn’t the first time that he had been a groom, however.
His half-sister Gerd had brought her Vanaheimic independence movement to the United States in 1981. After holding a demonstration in New Uruk City, she’d headed upstate to New Crúiskeen to try to recruit Prescott into the cause. She reasoned that he—as the hereditary leader of Vanatru society—would be able to gain greater international recognition for Vanaheim’s plight than she alone had managed thus far. At first she just tried to explain the politics of colonialism to him in the simplest terms possible, but when that failed to arouse his passions, she’d decided to play more on the issue of his heritage, trying to convince him of how much he’d been deprived of by being raised in America. In his homeland he was a god; here, he was a sidekick. This approach proved far more successful.
Prescott was eighteen years old at the time, and he’d already been developing an interest in exploring his roots. Our Heroine tried to convince him that Gerd must have some ulterior motives in mind, and that he shouldn’t trust her, and that he was being played for a fool. But this had only angered him and quickened his resolve. Within a few days, then, he had agreed to fulfill his arranged and long-delayed marriage with Gerd, as a show of respect for the customs of his people. Gerd did indeed have her own vested interest in the matter; the marriage promised to reinforce not only the legitimacy of her cause but also her own legitimacy as Vanaheim’s self-appointed monarch, which only added, of course, to the fact that she claimed to love him.
This had been around the same time as the murder of Guy De Clerk, and while Our Heroine had busied herself with trying to convince Prescott of Gerd’s malevolence, Emily had been attempting to prove Blaise Duplain’s innocence. At first, they each refused to help the other, which caused some degree of annoyance for both parties. Yet once all the facts had come to light, mother and daughter discovered that they’d actually been working on the same case the entire time, and with the help of Skoll—son of the Fenris Dachshund—they managed to overcome their differences, break up the wedding, and catch De Clerk’s true killer before he could get away.
Prescott had never completely given up his devotion to the cause of Vanaheimic independence, of course—no matter how little he understood of the details of the situation—and when for reasons entirely mundane he and Our Heroine had separated in July of 2000, he’d moved immediately back to his native land to embrace the deification that Western Society had long denied him. And it wasn’t long after this that he’d embraced Gerd, as well.
Our Heroine remained at the table and gazed out the window, down through her pale, pellucid reflection. She saw a small dog skulking near a steaming sewer grate. A fox, rather. Not Garm. Blaise emerged from the door of the cinema below. Our Heroine turned her eyes up, from him, and watched wisps of gray smoke rise in the distance, watched the snow continue down, as if it were all the same snow and still involved in the same fall instead of discrete flakes involved in falls of their own… Indecipherable hieroglyphs sent from the sky. She’d always been good at seeing the hidden meaning in things, but no matter how closely she looked, she couldn’t make any sense of these.
Once, Emily Bean told Our Heroine that she loved her. She’d been driving—Our Heroine in the passenger seat—toward a New Uruk City bank that, as they’d recently discovered, was holding Arne Saknussemm’s[16] encrypted notes in an anonymous customer’s safety deposit box, and which they suspected Surt might therefore attempt to rob. Forgetting the clutch, Emily—who had only taught herself to drive earlier that year—had just forced the T-bird’s gearshift into first and then managed to shake it to an engine-dying halt along the curbside, narrowly avoiding collision with an old woman in mourning and her husky Boy Scout companion, both of whom were standing beneath a sign that read PEDESTRIAN XING and waiting to cross to the street’s other side.
Our Heroine’s first thought as she lifted her five-year-old forehead from the face of the glove compartment was of amazement that the concept “to cross” could be conveyed by having the two lines of the letter “X” intersect with each other—it was her first English ideogram—and she told her mother how clever she thought it.
“But mother,” she continued, “I just don’t see what’s so pedestrian about this crossing. Considering the fact that it doesn’t coincide with any intersection of roads, not to mention those men in silly costumes within it or the pleasant shade of this displaced eucalyptus looming alongside it, I would say that this crossing is quite droll.”
This was when Emily had said the three words and leant over the gearshift to kiss her, smearing crimson lipids across Our Heroine’s snow-cold cheek. Emily had had to explain the other meaning of the word to Our Heroine much later, because immediately after this she realized that the old woman and the Boy Scout now entering the bank were actually Surt and his dwarfish cohort Draupnir in disguise.
“Let’s go,” she said, grabbing her daughter by the wrist and pulling her out the driver’s side door.
Our Heroine left the Elite Café, reluctant only to lose its warmth, and headed down to the bustling Telegraph Avenue of Bean Day. She was uncertain of where she should go next, though she knew that she didn’t want to linger in a place where Boris would be in residence for at least the next few hours. She decided just to start walking, and she would think about her destination as she went.
At the corner of Telegraph and Dixon, then, she stepped down from the curb and into the Xing, musing as she did so that she probably ought to stop by Hubert’s store—which was just around the corner, really—and see if he was there. To make sure he was okay. But then before she could make a final decision she was once again almost run down by a big black car.
16
Sixteenth-century Icelander who is purported to have discovered an underground realm that may or may not have been connected to Vanaheim. See Volume 2 of the