Tomas nodded. “We ought to get to Ant Farm as soon as we can. If it’s anything like this, there’s a lot more work ahead.”
“Yeah. Enid, could you help me lift this?”
She stood frozen a moment. She had wanted to help. She had wanted to work, but she hadn’t imagined this. Tomas lingered a moment, as if waiting to see what she would do. That more than anything prompted her. “Yes. Yes, I can.”
Tomas turned to the barn to deliver the bad news, and Enid helped prop up the broken boards while the investigator extricated the body and carried it to the soaked grass, to lay it there neatly for his people.
In the meantime, a loud cry of grief came from inside the barn.
The rest of the household emerged soon after and came to see their dead and to gather whatever they could from the wreck. They’d move on to Haven, rejoin Bret, and decide what to do from there. Rebuild or find another household to join.
Picking through the cottage’s rubble, one of the survivors picked something up: a foot-long square of cloth, woven in a red-and-green pattern, still recognizable even soaked in mud. A banner—very likely the banner authorizing the child who clung to the woman’s cloak now, unwilling to let go and maybe still get washed away. She held the banner to her face and cried, her whole face puckered. The kid hugged her tighter, and they held on to each other for a moment. The woman never let go of the banner, as if it were an anchor that would keep her from drifting into a void.
When the investigators and Enid arrived at Ant Farm, the household folk were trying to herd together a handful of goats and a pair of horses who’d fled the half-fallen barn. They’d also found shelter in a ravine, but the tornado hadn’t struck here directly as it had at Potter. They did have a couple of hurt folk—one with a concussion, another with a broken arm.
They hitched one of the horses to a wagon for the trip back, to carry the injured to the clinic at Haven. Enid found blankets, passed around water, carried tools. She looked around with a sense of growing disbelief and wondered how any of them were going to get through this.
Toward nightfall, the group started back to Haven. The storm clouds were breaking up—they even caught a hint of deep blue twilight sky, blazing against the gray they’d lived with for the last couple of days. Still, night was close, and they decided it would be better to travel at night than wait to get back to Haven. Enid and Tomas walked ahead of the wagon, carrying lanterns to light the way. The medic walked behind, to keep watch on the injured. They stopped on the way to pick up the survivors from Potter.
They traveled slowly, checking the road for hazards, avoiding flooded spots. The horse’s hooves sucked in the mud. The night was damp, turning colder by the moment, and Enid’s wet cloak didn’t do much to warm her. She shivered.
“You all right?” Tomas asked her.
She didn’t know. But if she kept walking, she’d get back home, and then she’d be all right. “I probably shouldn’t have come. Wasn’t much help.”
“You did fine.” His smile was kind, but she was still unhappy. She’d never forget the way that body looked, twisted and fragile.
This was not the last body she and Tomas would examine together, but she didn’t know that then, either.
CHAPTER THREE • PASADAN
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The Body
Enid and Tomas walked partway to Pasadan that afternoon and spent the night at a way station outside the village of Tigerlily. Along the way they passed a couple of solar cars, as well as horses and wagons. In a month or so, when the harvest trade fairs started up, the Coast Road would fill with cars, horses, wagons, and travelers, carrying with them a party air.
They waved and offered greetings to folk, who returned the hails cautiously, eyeing their uniforms, unsuccessfully hiding their trepidation—no doubt wondering where the pair was headed and what poor household had drawn the attention of investigators. Enid was used to the anxious look-overs by now, and even found them amusing. Most folk would never come under the scrutiny of her or any other investigator. But everyone worried they might, and what did that say about people in general?
Tigerlily had a solar car for communal use, usually reserved for the old, the young, and the injured. Enid and Tomas requisitioned it, to save time but also for the sense of authority. The people of Pasadan would hear the hum coming down the lane and look up. Their arrival would be an event. We are here now, would be the message, delivered by the investigator and her enforcer, and those in the village would pause, daunted by the authority without consciously realizing it. An investigator’s power wasn’t something Enid wielded so much as donned like a coat. They wouldn’t really see her and Tomas at all.
Tomas drove the rest of the morning until the early mist had burned off and the sun was high and warm. Bouncing, swaying on its low tires, the car came over the crest of a hill to a valley that looked imaginary, constructed to be beautiful. Green meadows covered shallow hills, and the road curved around to a wide vista cut through by a river, lined with copses of cottonwoods and perfect squares of cultivated fields, grains nodding and rippling in a breeze, all of it lush and welcoming. Far on the western horizon, a hazy gray line marked a distant ocean. The Coast Road continued west and south around a set of hills to a series of fishing villages along the ocean, another two weeks’ walk at least.
A friendly sign marked the turnoff, a whitewashed plank nailed to a couple of sturdy posts. PASADAN, written in artistic black with little flourishes at the beginning and end, with a couple of painted strands of ivy for a border. It was charming.
The town came into view; they got a look at it from above, before the road descended. Pasadan was set on a grid—it might have been built on the bones of a small town from before the Fall, the old concrete and steel knocked in and cleared away for salvage, the asphalt rotted, a new town built on the old. Square paddocks of fenced-in green pastured sheep, goats, a few horses. There were chickens and geese. Houses and communal buildings clustered along dirt paths, and a group of windmills stood on the side of a hill. Noise drifted from workshops; smoke rose up from a forge and another shop that looked like a glassblower’s. Color fluttered from clotheslines, stretched along the edges of the pastures. It was all clean, well organized, pleasant. Enid couldn’t find fault with the place, not from this far out. Finding any cracks would take time. Speaking to people, looking at the body, poking around for anomalies. Discovering what had caused enough suspicion to call for an investigation in the first place.
“They must have someone who’s good at building fences,” Tomas said. The place did seem to have a lot of them, from pens for goats to pretty whitewashed planks surrounding garden squares, more decorative than functional. Tomas was probably right—someone here was building fences for fun.
The car trundled down a gently sloping road. Tomas steered it around a pair of switchbacks before leveling off and heading toward the first of the buildings, a sprawling whitewashed structure built half into the hillside. He asked, “Strategy?”
“We present ourselves to the village committee and ask to see the body,” she said.
“And if they refuse? If they’ve gotten rid of it since the request for an investigation went in?”
“One of them requested the investigation,” Enid said. “If they got rid of evidence since then, that’ll be on them.” If there was dissension within the town’s committee, set the factions against each other until the truth, or something close to it, came out. There’d be a lot of interpretation. “If it’s an accidental death, the evidence should be clear enough. The committee here should welcome an investigation.”
“No one likes an investigation, Enid.”