I think she got tired of him.”
“Did she give you any reason to believe that?”
“She struck me as someone who’d get tired of any man pretty quick.”
“What else can you tell us?”
“She was a pilot of some sort. She had a pretty high opinion of herself. Thought she was better than everybody else. I was living over in Brentwood when she first came to town. I was at that time just out of school. We both belonged to a theater group. That’s how I met her.”
“You did some shows together?”
“Yes. I had a good voice then.”
“Do you know what she piloted?”
“I was a singer,” she said. She listed a few of the shows she’d been in. We listened, tried to look impressed, and Alex asked his question again. “Starships,” she said. “Like I told you. She used to be gone for long periods of time. Off to the stars.
She’d drop out of sight for months. Even after she got married.”
“Did they have any children?”
“No. No time for kids, I guess.”
“Did they have any family that you knew of?”
“I really don’t remember, Mr. Benedict. Actually, I’m not sure I ever knew.” She shook her head. “The only thing I can tell you is that she was gone a lot. Then her husband died. And not long after that she took off for good, and we never saw her again.”
“But she sold the house first.”
“I guess so. I don’t know.”
“Did she tell anyone she was leaving?”
“If she did, I didn’t know about it.” She shrugged again. This time I thought I saw regret. “Don’t know what happened to her.”
“How long did she live in Walpurgis? Do you know?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe ten years.”
We went down to the city hall, logged in, and began scrolling through the public record.
The first item of interest was the dead husband. We found that easily enough in news accounts dated over a twelve-day period in late autumn, 1404.
CASINO EMPLOYEE FALLS TO DEATH FROM PRECIPICE
And, eight months later:
Police denied today they are working on the assumption that Agnes Crisp’s disappearance is connected with the death of her husband last year.
There were pictures of Agnes, in uniform and in civilian clothes. Some wedding pictures. She and Ed made a handsome couple.
Ed had been a young worker at one of the casinos. The reports jibed with what Casava had told us. They’d gone out walking one night. To Wallaba Point. According to friends, they went there frequently. It was part of a workout routine. But on that particular evening Agnes admitted there’d been a quarrel. Apparently there was some pushing and shoving, although Agnes denied that she’d sent him over the edge. “He lost his footing,” she’d insisted. “I loved him.” Apparently the police uncovered no convincing evidence to the contrary. No arrest was ever made.
What had the argument been about? “We were trying to decide about kids. I didn’t think we were ready to do that because he didn’t earn that much, and I’d have to give up my career.”
We checked the almanac. It had been a moonless night, dark and overcast.
Crisp had had the build of a moonball player. Young, athletic, good features. He wore his black hair cut short in the style of the day. He’d had dark, penetrating eyes, a broad forehead, dark skin. Neatly clipped beard and mustache. Was employed as a host at the Easy Aces Casino. He didn’t look like the sort of person who would accidentally stumble off a cliff.
There was no avatar available.
Police had questioned Agnes for several days. People who knew them said there were no problems between them. They were good together, everyone seemed to think. (I wondered if anyone had questioned Casava.) Nevertheless, suspicions in the town ran high.
Ed Crisp reminded me of somebody.
“Again?” asked Alex. “Who this time?”
I was running my interior catalog. Clients. Relatives. People from sims. “James Parker,” I said. The actor.
“Everybody you see,” he said, “reminds you of somebody else. He doesn’t look at all like Parker.”
Actually he didn’t. But there was someone. Well, I’d think of it later.
Casava and her husband had bought the house near the school in 1409. Brackett had picked it up three and a half years earlier.
The media archives revealed that, on a pleasant day in the late spring of 1405, eight months after Crisp’s death, Agnes had sold her house, left Walpurgis, and not returned. No one knew where she had gone.
She’d bought the house in 1396. There was no mention of a former husband. Or of children. That seemed to suggest she was not Teri Barber’s mother. It looked as if we were chasing the wrong rabbit.
“Maybe not,” said Alex. “When people leave a place, they usually stay in contact with somebody. Right? A friend. Someone they’d worked with. Or people down at the club. Agnes did theater.”
“I don’t-”
“People don’t do theater without getting close to other people. Can’t be done.”
“How do you know?”
He laughed. “I don’t. But I think it has to be true. Yet this woman stayed in touch with nobody.”
“Nobody that we know of.”
“Okay. Anyhow, what I was getting at: Who else did something like that?”
“You mean walked off and disappeared? Taliaferro. But that’s an odd sort of link.”
“Odd ones are the best. Teri Barber would have been three or four at the time all this happened.”
“But we don’t have a connection between Barber and Shanley. Other than that they look alike.” I began to suspect we were seeing patterns where none existed.
There were all kinds of studies that showed people tended to find the things they looked for, even if some imagination was required.
Several weeks after Agnes had gone, there was a final piece of news:
Attempts to identify Edgar Crisp’s family and notify them of his death have been unsuccessful. Crisp was a native of Rambuckle, in the Rigellian system.
He came to Walpurgis in 1397.
“About the same time as Agnes,” I said.
“Yes.” Alex’s brow furrowed. “Why couldn’t they locate his family?”
“I don’t know. What are the rules on Rambuckle? I’ve never been there.”
“Maybe they don’t maintain a directory.”
“I guess not.”
He was making faces, the way he always did when he was trying to puzzle something out. “But I wonder whether we’re looking at somebody else with a fictitious identity.”
“Oh, come on, Alex. If you were going to adopt a pseudonym, would you opt for Edgar Crisp? ”
THERTEEN
Stride the mountaintops and survey the world. But watch your step.
- Tora Shawn, Firelight
In the data banks we found pictures of Agnes’s home. It had looked pretty good at the turn of the century. It was smaller then. A wing had been added since, and that sagging front porch. One of the pictures, taken during a snowstorm, showed a glowing post light-the same one that now leaned sharply toward the walkway-and two people gazing out through the front window. Agnes and Ed? We couldn’t tell.
The illumination behind them didn’t reach their faces.
The media stories described Agnes as a superluminal pilot and indicated she was often gone on long cruises. (In those days, of course, flights could take months. Or even years, if you could pile enough food on board.) They also mentioned that she’d captained the Echo flight. “Incredible,” Alex said.
“Why?” I asked. “What’s an Echo flight?”
He took his time answering. “You know the notion that the loss of the people on the Polaris was a supernatural event?”
“Yes.”
“In 1400, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the mission, a few people belonging to the Arrowhead Club decided to reproduce the voyage, as nearly as possible.”
“What’s the Arrowhead Club?”
“You know it as the Polaris Society today. It was a group of enthusiasts. They chartered the Clermo from Evergreen. The Polaris. What they wanted to do was to try to re-create the original circumstances to see whether the occult event would manifest itself a second time.”
Sometimes it’s hard to believe the extent of human gullibility. I saw a report recently that more than half the population of Rimway believes astrology works. “I remember hearing about it. The loony flight.”