“Okay. Jeff? What have you found about Pipers?”
He shook his head, lips pressed into a thin line. “There’s a lot of unity in the narrative since it’s a relatively recent story, as such things go. The Piper comes to town, is hired to pipe away the local vermin, is cheated by his employers—”
“That. Right there.” I stabbed a finger at Jeff for punctuation. “The Piper turns on the town when someone convinces him that he’s been cheated out of what was rightfully his. So what happens if someone convinces Demi that she’s been played by the Bureau? That we’ve somehow cheated her out of something that she was supposed to receive?”
“Like what?” asked Andy. “Vacation benefits? Fat lot of good those’ll do her. She’ll never get the chance to use them.”
I frowned. “What are you talking about? Sloane uses vacation days all the time.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been with the Bureau for more than fifty years,” Sloane said. “I have like, infinity vacation time banked up. They only let me take any of it because the shrinks say it’s good for my mental health and probably keeps me from stabbing people, and even then I have to cancel half my vacation days because we come up in the rotation.”
A chill washed over me, like snow falling in a forest I’d never seen, but that knew my story intimately. “What do you mean?”
“Shit, you’ve never taken vacation, have you?” Sloane wrinkled her nose. “Days off can be canceled for any reason, at any time, and we have enough vans and magic carpets and flying horses and crap like that that if you’re wanted back at the office, you’ll
be
back at the office. No slacking allowed. How did you never pick up on this?”
“All I’ve ever wanted was to do my job and do it well,” I said. “As long as I can do that, what would I need vacation time for?”
Andy looked at me gravely. “Henry, that is about the damn saddest thing I have ever heard in my life. You need a vacation.”
“How about we worry about me having a social life
after
we get Demi back and avert whatever the hell is going on in this city, huh?” I glared at Andy for a moment before turning back to Sloane and saying, “I need you to really consider your answer. If you had taken a vacation day or called in sick today, tonight, would you be here now?”
“What,
tonight
?” Sloane snorted. “I would have been dragged kicking and screaming out of the pleasure domes of Xanadu. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation, and you know it. Why?”
I stood, dropping the folder that I’d been reading from and yanking open my desk drawer in almost the same motion. I pulled out a fresh clip of ammunition, sliding it into my pocket. “Because our dispatcher didn’t show up for work today. Demi may not be the only member of our team in trouble.”
“Birdie?” asked Jeff.
“Yeah,” I said tightly. “Now let’s roll.”
There were a few other field teams outside in the parking lot, clustering around their vehicles like trauma victims—which they technically were—as they eyed the building. Once they went inside, they would need to start their paperwork. I knew from experience just how exhausting that could be. I avoided eye contact as I hurried toward our van, the rest of my team trailing along behind me. It said something about how anxious we all were to find out if Birdie was safe that Sloane didn’t say anything nasty to any of the people we passed.
To my surprise, Jeff crammed himself into the front passenger seat. I gave him a startled look. He held up one of the file folders from my desk. I hadn’t even seen him pick them up. “I’m going to see if I can find anything in here that suggests a pattern,” he said. “Not to demean your research skills—”
“But they’re not as good as yours,” I said. “I know that. Everybody buckle up, we’re going to break a few speed laws.”
I hit the gas.
Birdie’s home address was programmed into the van’s GPS, along with everyone else on the team. It made the vehicle a liability if it was ever stolen, but the risk was counterbalanced by situations like this one, where trying to contact Personnel to find out where someone lived could mean the difference between a timely rescue and a corpse. I pulled up her name even as we roared out of the parking lot, following the route appearing on the tiny display screen.
“Thirty minutes out, people,” I said.
“Where the fuck does she live, Jupiter?” asked Sloane.
“Close,” I said. “She’s in a housing development out near the edge of the wildlife preserve. I guess she likes being close to nature.”
“Or she’s cuckoo-bats,” said Sloane. “That’s a horrible commute. I’d be road-raging weekly.”
“That’s why we don’t let you drive,” said Andy. “Henry, you going to light it up?”
“No,” I said. “No lights, no sirens. We do this quiet.”
“Because we’re so subtle,” said Sloane.
I rolled my eyes and focused on the road. The local police would let us go without so much as a warning if we got pulled over, but that wouldn’t give us back the time we’d lose flashing our badges and explaining that the lights were off because we were trying to run quietly through the dangerous hours of the night. I didn’t know exactly why I was so against turning on the notifications of our official presence, but something about the idea felt wrong to me. Call it a hunch; I have them rarely enough that I try to listen to them when they show up, if only for the novelty. We needed to do this without attracting attention.
“Henry.” Jeff’s voice was soft enough that I would have missed it had the siren been running. As it was, it was almost drowned out by the sound of the wind rushing through the broken driver’s side window. I glanced to him. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixed on the file in his lap, and the small block of text illuminated by his handheld flashlight. “I think we may have a problem.”
“I think we have about thirty, so cutting it down to one would be a real treat,” I said. “What’ve you got?”
“All of the stories that went live tonight were under observation at some point, although several of them had been marked as too minor to ever be at risk of activation,” said Jeff, moving his flashlight’s beam down the page slightly. “We knew about all of them, at one point or another. It looks like less than half were ever routed to a field team for examination. The rest were just filed and forgotten.”
“Okay,” I said. “That sucks, but it happens.”
“In every case, the Dispatch officer who decided that the story would never activate—meaning it could be dismissed without further action, and didn’t have to be investigated by a field team—was Birdie Hubbard,” said Jeff. “She signed off on every one of these.”
“Our dispatcher is evil?” Sloane stuck her head up between the seats. “Okay, well, that’s new. Does that mean I can smash her skull in with Andy’s crowbar as punishment for making me flash a preteen?”
“No,” said Jeff.
“You did what?” asked Andy.
“We don’t
know
that Birdie was involved,” I said. “Dr. Reynard was killed for his files. Maybe Birdie is in trouble because the same person wanted to have access to
her
files.” The excuse sounded weak and mealy-mouthed even as I was making it. Dispatchers all put their files in the same repository. That was how we’d been able to access them. What would have been the point of attacking Birdie?
Unless she was taking work home with her, that was. If she had files that hadn’t been stored at headquarters, that might have been sufficient to put her at risk. For one sickening moment, I found myself hoping for exactly that. Better an endangered dispatcher than one who was doing the endangering.
“How much farther?” asked Jeff in a tight tone. I glanced in his direction. From the look on his face, his thoughts had been mirroring mine.
“Not far,” I said.
“I am reluctant to give you driving advice, but Henry …” He paused for a moment before shaking his head, the light seeping in from outside the car casting glints off his glasses. “Floor it.”
I did exactly that.
Birdie Hubbard lived in exactly the sort of house that you would expect a woman named “Birdie Hubbard” to live in, especially if that woman existed in a world where fairy tales were real and had teeth. It was small, burdened with an excessive amount of decorative gingerbread carving, and painted a lovely shade of eggshell white accented with a variety of pastel colors. There was a white picket fence around her perfectly manicured lawn, and beds of wildflowers nestled close to the house like baby birds cuddling up against their mother.
The four of us stood on the sidewalk outside the fence, briefly frozen by the sheer storybook perfection of the scene in front of us. As usual, it was Sloane who recovered her wits enough to speak first.
“She has
garden gnomes
,” she said, tone somewhere midway between horrified and impressed. “Those are contraband. She could be seriously disciplined for allowing a representation of the Fair Folk this close to her home.”
“I think we have a bigger problem,” said Jeff. I turned. He was pointing to her mailbox where, I saw, someone had painted a line of cursive script on the side. “This says the house belongs to ‘M. Hubbard.’”
“Is Birdie married?” I asked.
Jeff shook his head. “No; she’s single, no family, no close friends outside the Bureau. All dispatchers are like that. You can’t work in Dispatch if there are people in the outside world who might wonder where you go all day.”
“Hell, you can barely work in the field,” said Andy.
I decided not to comment on that particular sore spot. “We can’t stand out here forever,” I said. “Birdie may need our help. What are you getting at, Jeff?”
“I think that ‘M.’ refers to Birdie—that it’s her first initial, or at least the one she uses with the world,” said Jeff. “But I don’t think it’s a name. I think it may be short for ‘Mother.’ Does that ring any bells?”
“‘Old Mother Hubbard went to her cupboard to fetch her poor dog a bone,’” said Andy. “It’s a nursery rhyme.”
“A woman who calls herself ‘Birdie’ and uses a nursery rhyme as a mask between her and the world.” Jeff shook his head, expression grim. “We need to be careful here, Henry.”
“We will be,” I said, and opened the gate. “Sloane, you’re on point. I want to know if you pick up anything strange. Andy, take the rear.”
“I have no fucking clue what you people are talking about,” said Sloane, slinking nimbly around me and beginning to stroll down Birdie’s front walk. She made it look utterly casual, like there was no potential for bloody mayhem in our immediate future. “Is Birdie a bad guy or not?”
“There are a lot of characters in nursery rhymes named ‘Mother,’” I said, following Sloane but directing my words at Jeff, who was staying close behind me. “She could have just chosen the name to be ironic. Or that could be the narrative she’s tied to. Maybe she has trouble keeping food on the table.”
“Or maybe she was hiding in plain sight,” said Jeff. “All anyone ever had to do was stop and go ‘Hubbard, isn’t that from the rhyme about …’ and the rest of it would fall into place.”
“Still no clue what you’re talking about, getting sort of pissed off about it,” said Sloane, in a singsong drawl. She stopped as she reached the door, twisting around to look back at me. “Now what?”
“Knock. If she doesn’t answer in thirty seconds, you can break it down.” I didn’t like sanctioning property damage, but Birdie could bill the Bureau if she was just taking a nap.
Sloane grinned. “That’s the sort of instruction I like to hear.” Turning back to the door, she hammered her hand against it, pounding loud enough to wake the neighbors—if Birdie had had any. I reached out and grabbed Sloane’s wrist before I could think better of it, stopping her arm in mid-hammer.
Andy made a small, dismayed sound. Jeff went still. And slowly, deliberately, Sloane turned around to stare at me. I didn’t need light to know how dangerous her expression was. Malice was practically rolling off her in waves.
“Now I know you’re not stupid enough to touch me without a damn good reason, so how about you tell me what that reason is, and I’ll decide whether I’m getting written up for breaking your nose or your neck.” Sloane’s tone was perfectly reasonable, like she was asking me how I took my coffee.
“Does Birdie have neighbors?” I asked.
Sloane blinked. “Snow bitch says what?”
“Does Birdie have neighbors?” I repeated. “When we drove up, when we came up the street, were there any other houses?
Don’t look
.” My hiss caught her in the process of turning her head to the right. She stilled, attention flicking back to me. “Just answer the question. Are there any other houses here?”
“No, it’s just forest,” said Sloane. Then she froze, her eyes widening. “But that’s impossible. You can’t have a suburb with just one house. We would have noticed. Someone would have said something about Birdie living too far from civilization, you need to keep people around you as a stabilizing influence …”
“Turn now,” I said, letting go of her wrist.
Sloane turned. So did the rest of us, and as a group we stared into the tangled wood that encroached on Birdie’s perfectly manicured property, slinking up on all sides until it was stopped by the delicate barrier of the white picket fence.
“It’s like something out of a fairy tale,” said Andy in a choked voice. “The little house in the middle of the forest, with the flowers and the … and the garden gnomes. This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.”
“Knock again, Sloane,” I said tightly.
She looked at me thoughtfully before swiveling and resuming her pounding on the door. There was no motion from within. “Guess we’re breaking it down,” she said, and started to raise one foot to kick the wood.
“Try the knob,” said Jeff suddenly.
“What?” Sloane shot him a dirty look. “You spoil all my fun.” But she reached for the doorknob, only hesitating for a moment before she closed her hand around it and twisted.
The sound of the latch opening seemed very loud in the stillness of the nighttime air.
“Huh,” said Sloane, and pushed the door open, releasing it rather than stepping over the threshold. It bumped to a stop against the wall of a small, spotlessly clean hallway, with woven rag rugs on the floor and knickknacks lining the walls. The smell of baby powder, chocolate chip cookies, and apples drifted out to greet us.