The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (34 page)

The telephone rang and the Sheriff regarded it a moment.

He was working late at the station, trying to get through the Red Wave Damage Fund applications.

Drinking whiskey, eating crackers, lost in paperwork, and that shrill, repetitive sound took him by surprise.

He answered it anyway.

“You there? I tried you at home first.” It was Jimmy.

“I am here,” confirmed Hector, nodding.

“Well, I know where they are.”

Hector waited. “Who?” he asked eventually.

“Those five missing people. The Central Intelligence reports? There
is
a connection, Hector. Guess where they are? Guess where they all are?”

Hector waited again.

Jimmy sure wanted to draw out the suspense.

“Where?”

“
They’re in the World.
All of them. All five of them — they’ve gone to the World.”

Hector swung himself into his chair, holding the phone closer to his chin. He was grinning. “How do you figure that?”

“I remembered World Studies classes from school — something Isabella said made me remember. Back in the days of cracks big
enough for people to go through, there used to be a kind of displacement when they went. A tremor in the air. An adjustment of reality. Small things would go wrong. A picture would fall off a mantelpiece. Or a branch would shift its position in a tree. It stayed in my mind because I liked the idea.”

“Sounds familiar, I guess. Yeah. And?”

“Well, every one of these reports gets me nowhere. I’ve never seen such a series of dead ends. There is
no
explanation. Or there wasn’t. But tonight I realized that in
every
one of these reports, there’s something. A waitress loses her earring. A guy has to retie his shoelaces. Somebody else says the radio switched itself on so she turned it off. There’s even a guy says the commas in the letter he was typing suddenly fell down a line. That one I dismissed as plain craziness; the rest I paid no attention to, thinking they were just asides — those irrelevant details people stop and look at when they’re making their way to the point.”

“Okay.” The Sheriff scratched at some dried paint on the edge of his chair. “But seems to me you’re drawing a heck of a long bow here. There haven’t been cracks big enough for people in hundreds of years. Just a handful of
tiny
cracks all this time, and those get closed before you can take a breath. Penalty for not reporting a crack is death. Penalty for even
suspecting
a crack and not reporting it is banishment. What are the chances that there are five people-moving cracks across the Kingdom and nobody knows? Seriously?”

“Small as the toenail on a Butterfly Child,” Jimmy agreed at once. “But there must be, because that’s where these missing people are.”

“And what’s more,” Hector continued. “If these people went through the cracks, why didn’t they turn around and come straight back?”

“I think somebody’s
moved
them across. Without their choice, I mean. Maybe closed them up right after they went.”

Hector sighed. “I’ll tell Central your theory.”

“It’s not a theory,” said Jimmy. “It’s a fact.”

“I’ll also tell Central to solve their own darn missing persons reports from now on,” Hector continued. “In fact, I’m telling police departments right across the Kingdom — I want my deputy back. I’m at the station working and it’s nearly midnight!”

There was a smile in Jimmy’s voice. “Don’t want to be the one to say this, Hector, but …”

“I know, I know.” Hector sighed again. “I asked for them in the first place. You’ve been patient with all this, Jimmy, which makes me feel even worse about the truth of the matter. I’m just about to admit that truth, Jimmy, but before I do, can you promise you won’t make too much noise? When you hear it? I’m too tired for noise.”

“Can’t promise anything.” Jimmy grinned. “I’ll do my best.”

“When I asked them to send in their missing persons reports, I only wanted a
specific
kind. I wanted missing people in the electronics field. Remember the first few? That electrical engineer? The sound technician? Where it went wrong was, you solved them so fast, word got around you were genius at it. So they started sending anything and everything.”

“All right,” said Jimmy. “Why’d you ask for missing people in electronics?”

“Because of Abel Baranski.”

“Ah, Hector.”

“Well, now, I’d almost prefer you to make a lot of noise than to go all soft-voiced like that.”

Jimmy blew air out of his cheeks and it came down the phone line like a breeze.

“I knew it wasn’t a Purple,” Hector admitted. “Purple got Jon, sure, but not the others. Thing was, I didn’t want it to be the alternative — those two running off together, Abel running off on his wife and his boy. Leaving his brother to tell the truth, and getting his brother killed for it — not intentional, of course, but still. What a shameful thing for a man to do, and I
liked
Abel. He was my friend.”

“I liked him too,” Jimmy said.

“So I stuck to the Purple — the idea that it had taken them alive, and in the end they’d find their way back. At the same time, I looked for a third explanation. Got to thinking about the fact that Abel was in electronics and Mischka in physics — sort of related, right? Maybe some Hostile group was snatching up people with those skills. Maybe we’d find a pattern if we looked at unsolved cases in that field across the Kingdom. That’s why I asked for the reports. Trouble was, like I said, you solved them, so they
weren’t
being snatched by Hostiles after all. No big conspiracy. I was wrong.”

“Ah, Hector,” Jimmy said again.

“Worst thing,” Hector continued, “the worst thing is, my Purple story gave Elliot false hope. Should never have done that. It’s ’cause of me he’s been off across the Kingdom, putting himself in danger everyplace he turns. Never figured he’d do that.”

“You know, if Abel and Mischka went off of their own free will, they’re not even technically missing, Hector. It’s not police business.”

“I know.”

“I’m thinking,” Jimmy said, “that
any
strange disappearances from now on, we should consider that they might have been sent across to the World like these five people. But Abel and Mischka? That wasn’t strange. I’ve told you this before, but I’ll say it again. The night before they disappeared, I saw Abel and Mischka walking out of the Toadstool Pub together. The strap on Mischka’s dress fell from her right shoulder, and Abel reached over and fixed it for her. His hand reached out like the next step in a dance. The way he did that — the way his eyes fell on her shoulder as he did so — well, it seems to me there was nothing strange at all about the two of them being gone the next day.”

Jimmy’s last few words disappeared into a cough.

“Coming down with a cold,” he explained.

Hector waited for the coughing to finish, then he spoke slowly. “Well,” he said, “there’s still a part of me thinks Abel fixed the strap on Mischka’s dress because he’s thoughtful that way. But a bigger part
is finally inclined to think you’re right. I’ll talk to Elliot. This one I got wrong.”

“You lost your mind, Hector. It can happen to the best of us.”

“You’re a good man, Jimmy. Occasionally you’re off your tree — people going across to the World, for example — but still, a good man. I’ll tell Central your theory about these five missing persons, and it might help to dry up the reports that keep coming your way. Meantime, I promise: Any more that do come in, I’ll send them straight back.”

“It’s a deal. Night, Hector.”

“Night.”

The fax machine started up just as Hector put down the phone.

He reached for his whiskey and watched as page after page whirred through. Eventually, he picked up the cover sheet.

To the Good Sheriff of Bonfire in the Picturesque Province of the Farms,

We here in Gwent Cwlyd, in the Startling Province of Olde Quainte, have heard tell that you there in Bonfire have a Deputy Sheriff whose skills in missing persons are like to a flower in a staple box. Hence, we have here a missing persons report — or if not TECHNICALLY a missing persons report, it is, at least, a missing cat report — and we would be grateful beyond —

“Oh, for the love of …” Hector murmured.

He was crumpling the fax, ready to throw it away, when he noticed a postscript to the letter.

P.S. We’re also sending through another unsolved case — a child has been missing for some time, and it is our hope that your deputy might solve it. Herewith.

Hector’s shoulders softened. He leafed through the pages.

The child was of a sweet and lively nature,
said the report,
and had no cause to vanish.

A few paragraphs on:

The child’s mother was known for her whistling — ah, she would go about so gaily, whistling more than she spake, and many it was that mocked her! But not now; not since the little girl set forth.

Hector stopped at that line.

He put the fax into his briefcase.

“Shame to waste a talent like Jimmy’s,” he said to himself. “Just this one last one.”

Then he knocked back the last of his whiskey, switched off the lights, and headed home.

The clock tower was striking twelve midnight, and Elliot Baranski was knocking on a door.

It was Apartment 4 (Directly Above the Bakery), Town Square, Bonfire.

The home of Olivia Hattoway, Grade 2 teacher; formerly, also, the home of Mischka Tegan.

Elliot knocked through the striking of the clock, and then knocked again into the silence.

Silence drained the air. Then a muffled thud. Slow footsteps. A pause. She must be looking at him through the peephole.

The door opened wide, and there she stood, Olivia Hattoway, smoothing down her curls. Her flannelette pajamas were patterned with hot-air balloons.

“I’ve woken you,” said Elliot.

“How did you guess?” Miss Hattoway smiled, which made her eyes disappear more deeply into sleepy lines. She was curvy in just the right way: as if a sculptor had smoothed her at the very point before curvy becomes plump. “Come in, Elliot,” she said. “I know we’ve never met but I certainly know who you are.”

“You teach my cousin, Corrie-Lynn.” Elliot followed her in, half smiling as he remembered Corrie-Lynn’s pronouncement that Miss Hattoway had a funny name. He tried to think of her as Olivia, but found he could not. She was Miss Hattoway.

There was something else, something Corrie-Lynn had
not
liked about her teacher, but he couldn’t remember that part.

“It’s small,” Miss Hattoway was saying, holding both arms up, and pivoting slowly to display the apartment’s living room. “But the location’s wonderful. Right above the Bakery. You can smell bread and pastries twenty-four hours a day! You smell that?” She breathed in deeply, closing her eyes, and Elliot raised his eyebrows.

Truth was, all he could smell was coffee and burnt cheese and something vaguely fishy, maybe sardines.

“Let me get you a glass of milk and a piece of hazelnut slice — I’ve been baking today myself.” She ducked into the kitchen and Elliot watched as she opened the fridge. He wondered, as any good Farms boy would, why people from other provinces thought they ought to bake. It made his heart sink, the idea of her hazelnut slice.

He glanced around the living room. There was a window that looked over the square, a small table beneath it. Rugs in primary colors crisscrossed the carpet; three or four mismatched throws were flung over a short, fat couch.

On the wall was a huge painting of a vase, flowers spilling over its side. There was something smudged and childish about that painting, something askew about the perspective maybe, or could be the flowers were out of proportion with the vase.

“Mischka painted that,” said Miss Hattoway. She was standing by his side holding a tray, which she placed on the coffee table. “We did an art class together, back when we were at teachers’ college. Mischka got this idea that we ought to stretch our artistic minds, or some such rubbish. Everything we painted was terrible! But we both agreed that
that
one deserved to be on the wall.”

She beckoned Elliot to sit beside her on the couch.

“Although now that I look at it again, well, it’s quite awful really, isn’t it? I bet that’s what you were thinking.”

Elliot smiled faintly. He was thinking that Miss Hattoway seemed soft and warm, bright and giddy, like a grade-school teacher should,
but there was also something perspicacious about her. She had slid the conversation straight to Mischka. She knew, even half asleep, that this was why Elliot was here and she’d smoothed the way to the point.

He appreciated that.

(Then, too, she had guessed his thoughts about the painting.)

“That’s where you two met?” he said. “At teachers’ college?”

“Yes, we were roommates. And when we applied for our first posts, we decided to try for the same town, which was a long shot. But we got it! Listen, is it just me or is it freezing in here?”

She stood up and switched on an electric heater, hitting it twice to make it work.