The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (21 page)

“Now did I tell you,” said Hector, leaning forward to frown at the report in his typewriter, “that I heard from the folk in the Golden Coast? About that missing persons report you figured out for them the other day?”

Jimmy hit the space bar twice. “The sound technician,” he recalled. “One with all the money from the prize win. No, you didn’t tell me.”

“You were right,” Hector said.

“Ah, that’s a shame.”

“It is. They found his body at the nephew’s place, just like you said they would. Now
how
, Jimmy, did you know that?”

Hector looked sideways once, then turned the handle, winding the completed report out of the machine.

“I did background checks on them all, not just the ones who stood to inherit, and turned out the nephew had spent years bending Colors in Nature Strip. For one thing, they’ve got some loopy hereditary laws in Nature Strip — up there, the nephew
would’ve
got the fortune. I figured, he maybe got it into his head that the same would be the case in GC. See, bending Colors for too long can bend your mind a little. You start to mix things up. You start to
see
Colors, always there, just at the edge of your vision.”

“Don’t we all?” Hector said, surprised.

“Well, now —” Jimmy began doubtfully, but the door to the station jangled, and they both looked up.

It was Elliot Baranski.

Jimmy ran to open the door wider, so Elliot could hop his way in on his crutches.

“Well, if it isn’t Elliot Baranski!” said Hector, studying the cast on Elliot’s leg. Cody had painted a complicated pattern there, diamonds overlaid with scorpions.

“Look at that decoration!” Hector exclaimed. “It’s just like —” but he found he could not think what it was like, so he asked after the ankle bone instead. Then he and Jimmy asked after Elliot’s mother, and the farm, and the Butterfly Child.

Eventually, Elliot said, “Anyhow, the reason I came here was — Hector, remember when we made the list of things that might be missing from Dad’s stuff? Well, last night — in the middle of the night — I remembered something else that was missing.”

Hector and Jimmy both blinked.

“His magnifying glass.”

“His magnifying glass?”

“It was special to him. My mother ordered it from the best glass makers in Jagged Edge, for his birthday a few years back. He used it all the time, and I’ve been thinking lately that something was wrong about his tools, something missing maybe, and finally, I realized — his magnifying glass is gone.”

There was quiet in the station for a moment. Hector’s face shadowed. The bandages were gone now, so you could see the healing welts crossing his cheeks. You could see the shapes the scars were going to be.

He scratched at the scabs on his hands.

“Well, now,” he said. “You think that’s the kind of thing he might have been carrying home from work? In the pocket of his overcoat maybe?”

Elliot shook his head. “No. He had tools at home, including a cheap magnifying glass — he’d have just used that if he needed one. And this magnifying glass, it was big.” He held out his hands to demonstrate. “Had a special case, sort of a tartan green.”

“And you’re sure it’s not with his things?”

Elliot shrugged. “I’m sure.”

“Could he have loaned it out to someone?”

“Doubt it. He wouldn’t even let
me
use it, not unless he was watching over my shoulder.”

“Could it have been left behind in the repair shop when you packed it up? Maybe fallen off the shelf and got under something? You want to ask the Twicklehams about it?”

Elliot’s gaze was steady for a moment.

“We did a pretty thorough job,” he said, “cleaning the shop out. Don’t think we would have left anything.”

Hector nodded slowly. “All right,” he said. “Let me add it to the report and have a think about it. About what it might mean.” Then he paused and fixed Elliot with his own gaze. “What do
you
think it means?”

Elliot shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t mean anything. I guess he did have it with him that night, after all. In the pocket of his overcoat, probably. Anyhow” — Elliot swung around on his crutches, and Jimmy stood again to hold the door — “just wanted to let you know.”

He turned back, though, when the door was almost closed, used a crutch to hold it.

“I guess,” he said, “there’s been no news?”

“Soon as there is,” Hector said firmly, “I’ll let you know.”

Elliot nodded and the door closed behind him.

It was quiet in the station for a moment.

“Don’t you say a word,” said Hector, not looking at Jimmy.

So Jimmy didn’t. They both started typing their reports again, every click and clack a kind of punch.

When Elliot got home from the Sheriff’s station, the house was big with quiet.

His mother was still out at the greenhouse, he guessed. He checked the doll’s house and the Butterfly Child was asleep.

In the kitchen, he made himself a cup of coffee, cut a piece of chocolate-coconut cake, took a pile of homework from his backpack, and sat at the table.

There was a faint rustle and clatter. A bird landing on the porch railing. The fridge buzzed. The bird flew away again. He opened his mathematics textbook, then closed it.

“Ah,” he said, looking down at his plastered ankle.

He pushed the chair back and limped upstairs, leaning and pulling on the banisters all the way. He found painkillers in the bathroom cupboard, took a couple, and headed to his bedroom.

He opened the bottom drawer and dragged it all out: folders, books, notes, photocopied articles, newspaper clippings, official documents. He dumped them on his bed and leafed through the documents:
Missing Persons Report: Abel Garek Baranski
;
Missing Persons Report: Mischka Elizabeth Tegan
; and there it was.

Coroner’s Report: Jonathan Kasper Baranski.

The report on his Uncle Jon.

To look at it, he had to breathe himself sideways. He had taught himself this trick of shifting, inside his head, so that only part of him saw the words. Even doing that, he had to skim fast — past phrases like,
lacerations to the face, neck, torso
and
severed carotid artery; severed spinal cord
— and then he found what he was looking for.

In a box in the bottom-right corner, the coroner had written her
Conclusions
.

In the adjoining box for
Additional Notes
, the coroner had written:

Elliot returned the report to its manila folder.

This is pure speculation
, he thought.

There were people in this town — not many, but a handful — who were convinced that Elliot’s father and uncle had both fallen in love with Mischka and fought over her. That his father had killed Jon, leaving him dead on the side of the road and fleeing with Mischka.

There were others — most of Bonfire, probably — who thought that, more likely, Abel and Mischka had decided to run away together. Taking the train, or maybe a boat upriver. They’d asked Jon to take the truck home to Abel’s farm and pass on the news, but the Purple attack had happened while Jon was en route.

The rumors had started right away, and Elliot, hollow with shock, had felt their poison pouring into him.

Then the Sheriff had sat him down one day. It was in the Bakery, in the Town Square, he remembered; autumn chill in the air; the Sheriff in that black corduroy jacket he liked so much.

Hector had taken out this very coroner’s report and made Elliot read it.

“This’ll hurt like the blazes to read,” he had said. “But look here now,” and he’d run his finger hard under the phrase
absence of evidence of human involvement
.

“I’ve seen my share of love triangles,” Hector had said. “And yes, a man could kill his brother over love. It happens. But when it does, it’s a fistfight got out of hand, not machetes and hunting knives! You don’t slash your brother to pieces over a girl. I’ll tell you categorically, Elliot. Your father did not do this to your uncle.”

Elliot remembered the heat of his coffee mug at the time; the Sheriff said those words and Elliot realized his hands were ice-cold and held them around his coffee mug.

“As for running off with the teacher.” Hector had shrugged. “I’m not saying they
were
lovers, but let’s say, hypothetically, they were. Well, I’ve seen my share of that too, lovers running off. But they make plans. They come up with the idea, get cold feet, get more determined. Inch their way toward it. Never heard of someone deciding in a pub one night and asking his brother to let the family know. They write a note. They take money out of their bank account. And listen, they
pack
. Now, tell me again what you think might be missing from your dad’s things.”

“Well,” Elliot had said. “Like I said, there’s his overcoat and hat. He’d’ve been wearing those. And the other things he was wearing. His wallet. His watch. We thought maybe a framed antique map was missing, one he used to have on his workshop wall, but turned out he’d given that to Jon and Alanna for the front room of the Watermelon. So, that’s it.”

“No medications? No photographs? Not those spell casings he got from the Magical North that he was so proud of?”

“No. Like I said, they were still on his corkboard.”

“No clean underwear? No favorite pair of boxer shorts?”

“Not sure he had a favorite pair,” Elliot said with half a grin.

“You know what I mean. People don’t run off with nothing — they take a keepsake. A memento. A photo at least. You do know what I mean?”

Elliot had nodded, and that’s when Hector had leaned forward and run his thumb under the words on the coroner’s report.

One could speculate as follows: The Purple attacked the truck … they pulled over … the Purple slaughtered Jon, and then carried Abel and Mischka away.

“It’s ugly,” Hector had said. “It’s ugly and distressing, and I wish I
could
say they’d run off together because much as that would hurt you — that betrayal of you and your mother — well, at least we’d know he was alive. But it seems to me that
this
is what happened. Like it says right here.”

“And if a Purple took them,” Elliot had said, looking Hector full in the eye, “if it did, they might still be alive. Alive and held prisoner in a Purple cavern somewhere.”

Here Hector had paused for a long time.

“Again, I want to talk straight with you, Elliot,” he’d said eventually. “Purples don’t carry people away and let them live.”

“But until we find them, until we find their bodies,” Elliot had persisted, “we don’t know for sure.”

Hector had tilted his head, not a nod, but not a shake either.

“Elliot, I’m not giving up. Like you say, until we find the bodies, we don’t know for certain. In a lot of ways, that’s the toughest kind of loss you can have, the one where you don’t know for sure. You can be 99.9 percent sure, Elliot, that your father isn’t coming back — but yeah, until there’s proof, there’s always going to be that glimmer. That
tiny, tiny
glimmer of hope. I can see it in your eyes all mixed up with the pain. And I’m not going to lie and tell you I don’t feel it too.”

Then Hector had leaned forward.

“The tough thing,” he had said, “is how to live with that.”