The man shook his head. His smile didn't quite seem genuine. "No, thanks. I won't keep you long. Looks like you're pretty well moved in. How long have you been here?"
The cramp of paranoia returned. Why did this guy know anything about him? "About three weeks. Well, if you're sure you don't want anything to drink…"
"Bear with me, I'll make this as quick as possible. Just out of curiosity, Mr. Vilmos, where were you the night before last?"
Theo went through a moment of panic — where had he been? — before remembering. "I drove down to the coast for the evening. Wandered around on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz. Had some dinner. I thought about seeing a movie, but I was tired." He had a sudden idea, pulled out his wallet. "I think I've probably got the receipt in here." He found it — a yellow credit card slip for an upscale diner called Jimmy Brazil — and handed it to the cop, who surveyed it briefly. "What's this about?"
"What time did you get home?"
Theo shrugged. "Not sure — probably sometime between eleven and twelve. Nobody saw me come in, if that's what you're asking." He tried a casual laugh, wondering how he could feel so guilty with nothing concrete to feel guilty about. "You can see that it's a little tough around here to know what your neighbors are doing."
The policeman nodded slowly, as if what Theo was saying had answered a question he had nursed for a long time. "I see."
"Look, I know you're just doing your job, but this is kind of freaking me out a little. Did someone get robbed around here or something?"
Detective Kohler held his eye for a long time. He had the sharp, unhurried gaze and thin mouth of an Old West gunfighter. The shirt and cheap slacks began to seem like a disguise. "How well do you know Dennis and Stephanie Marsh?"
Theo shook his head. "Sorry, can't help you. Who?"
"They bought your mother's house."
"Oh, Jesus, them! The name didn't ring a bell. How well do I know them? Not at all, really." He tried to remember if he'd ever actually seen them. It would have had to have been at one of the viewings at the house — all the sale papers had been signed at various real estate and title company offices, and buyers and seller had never been in at the same time. "Are they… is she kind of tall?" He vaguely remembered a woman with dark hair and long legs, the skirt on her business suit surprisingly short. If that was the right couple, he had thought Stephanie Marsh was a bit sexy, but he couldn't remember her husband at all.
"You didn't meet them?"
"Only if I was there when they came to see the house. The real estate agents took care of everything. I wasn't real sentimental about the house — my mother just died there, but I had never lived in the place before that, so it wasn't like I was all worried about making sure it was going to nice people or something, like they were adopting some puppies from me or something…" He stopped. Babbling again.
"And you haven't been back to the house since?"
"No, no. Like I said, it wasn't a real happy place for me. Why?"
The detective nodded, apparently lost in thoughts of his own. "They're dead," he said at last.
"What?"
"Dead. Murdered, maybe as part of a robbery that got out of control, maybe for some other reason."
"Jesus!" He stood for a moment, overwhelmed. "Jesus. In the house? In my mother's house?"
"Yes. Did you… did anything happen while you were still there that seemed suspicious to you? Prowlers? Strange people coming to the door, or hanging around the neighborhood?"
Theo could not help a moment's flashback to the moaning sound that had brought him out into the backyard, heart thumping. But what could a randy tomcat have to do with people getting killed? "No, nothing I can remember. Christ, is that when it happened? Night before last?"
"Yes, and fairly early in the evening, as far as we can tell, so if this receipt checks out you don't have anything to worry about. Do you mind if I keep it?"
Theo waved his hand, anxious to get rid of it, as though merely by being from the same night it was somehow tainted. "But why would you think I might have anything to do with… with that? Jesus."
"We don't think anything, Mr. Vilmos. We just have to ask questions, get ideas, try to get a feeling for what happened." The detective shuffled his feet a little, looked around. "I'll get going, let you get back to what you were doing."
"Doing? I wasn't doing anything, really…" Theo frowned. "Have you talked to the lady next door? To my mom's house?"
"Why?"
"Because she's the kind of, excuse the expression, nosy old bitch who was probably watching the new neighbors like a hawk. Mrs. Kraley, that's her name. She could probably tell you everybody who went in or out of there, to the minute. She probably writes it all down."
"The neighbors haven't had anything very useful to say so far, but I'll check with her again, based on your… characterization." His smile was a grim thing; Theo suddenly wondered how you could have a job like that without it burning away parts of you.
"Can you… what happened? I mean, how were they killed?"
Detective Kohler examined him again. "We're keeping the details to ourselves as long as we can. It makes it a lot easier to sort through the good and bad information as it comes to us. But I can tell you this — it wasn't pretty."
For long minutes after the policeman's car had rumbled away down the driveway, Theo could only pace back and forth across the cabin, unable to settle, his thoughts tumbling like windblown leaves. Why should the deaths of two people he didn't know bother him so much, people less real to him than the fictional characters of a daytime soap opera, connected to his own life only by one thread of coincidence — two people out of the thousands that died somewhere every hour? Why should these two distant deaths, however awful, give him such a feeling of morbid, fearful helplessness? Was it something to do with his mother's death, with his own lost, miserable hours in the house?
Whatever it was, he didn't like it. But that didn't make it go away.
8
RUNAWAY CAPACITOR
Findus Dogwood always thought of himself as a decent chap, unlike some of the other supervisors — that Barberry, just to name one, was sour as curdled milk — so when he was told that one of the capacitors from the day shift was feeling poorly and wouldn't work, he didn't send Saltgrass or one of the other foremen to beat the slacker out of the dormitory and onto the line, but put down his cup of saxifrage tea and went to go see for himself. He walked across the station briskly, just as if Lord Thornapple himself were sitting in the big main office looking down at him. It was actually possible he could be, although it would be the first time in several years the owner had made an appearance on the premises: Aulus Thornapple was one of the most important people in all Faerie, after all.
"What's the problem's name?" Dogwood asked Snowbell, the wizened block captain.
The old fellow, who had long since given up on a promotion to management, but still harbored hopes of a little something better in the way of his eventual pension, bobbed his woolly white head up and down. "Kind of you to ask, Mr. Dogwood, very kind. Nettle comma Streedy is what the boy's called."
"Metal Comets Greedy? What sort of name is that? Is he a goblin or somesuch?"
Snowbell's rheumy eyes grew wide. "No, sir. Sorry, sir. His name is Streedy Nettle, out of some farming village in Hazel."
"What's wrong with him?"
"Couldn't say, sir." Snowbell managed to make it clear that he didn't think anything much was wrong with the shirker at all. "He didn't sleep well — his bunkmates say he moaned and groaned all through the night. Then he didn't get up for breakfast." Snowbell sucked one of his remaining teeth. He was an urisk; like many cold-climate fairies, he had aged rapidly in the warmth of the City and looked two or three centuries older than he actually was. "Lovely bit of porridge, it was, too. Fool boy."