Gary rubbed his forehead and then his eyes, yawned, and pushed the printout away. His head throbbed, and he wished for the hundredth time that Jane hadn't printed the whole damned inventory dump in single-spaced ten-point Arial Narrow. She'd wanted to save paper.
They'd already run searches on the file for known tribal names, including spelling variants, and for keywords such as "kachina" or "doll" or "fetish" or "idol." That had taken about five minutes total on her IBM laptop, mostly meat-brain cycles thinking up new guesses and tossing out obvious junk hits like baskets or pots. No go. Now they had to bring human search-routines to bear, intuitive jumps or simply the ability to spot typos.
Right now, his ability to spot typos had dropped to zilch. Teeny tiny words kept running in front of his eyes. And they weren't the right words, either. They were words from the previous page or two.
Give her Ben's sermon on false economy. An extra ream of paper would have cost, what, two bucks? Three? Add another dollar for the ink?
But then, he didn't know how close she skated to the edge, living on a flock of minor scholarships filched from dust-bunnies hiding under the desks of the financial aid office. Her grades weren't good enough for a full ride. Not good enough except in computer courses, stuff she cared enough about to even attend class. So three or four bucks might be her food budget for the week.
Or her rent. She'd furnished this apartment from the dump and the furnishings fit the place, two musty rooms in the cellar of a rooming house built in the early 'twenties, with the shared use of plumbing and kitchen upstairs. From the smell of things, you got a second chance at the sewage once it had been flushed. Probably a leaking pipe in the walls or under the concrete floor.
If the place caught fire, you climbed a short stepladder, busted a window sealed shut by a couple of generations of paint, and crawled out through the splinters. Damned good thing both of them were thin.
For her, thin was an understatement. When she stretched out naked on her mattress, her ribs looked like a picket fence. Not anorexia, not stylish voluntary thin — when he was paying, she ate everything in sight. Hungry thin.
She stirred, over at the wooden door slab on milk crates that served her for a desk. "What's an obeah?"
"Obeah? Hmm. I think that's African witchcraft. Could mean the witch, as well."
"Accession number TX-1937-B-275. You think they've got a witch stored away in Mason G-53? Hope they feed her every week or so."
Her finger pointed about halfway down the page in front of her. He leafed through his matching stack, sorting dead storage from the active research collection and the stuff the museum had on public display. "Mason" would be the dead storage, artifacts nobody had asked to examine in at least ten years — ranks upon ranks of shelving and bins, subbasement under the Memorial Gym, archaeologist's junk sifted out of the trash-heaps of prehistory. The TX numbers would be near the end of the list.
And according to the catalog code, TX-1937 would be "Texas, collected in 1937." The year would be close, late 1930s, but Caroline had said the kachina had disappeared from Arizona. He'd been searching New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado listings as well, because the reservations covered that whole Four Corners area. Even allowing a few slips in record-keeping, Texas was a whole state further off. Past the Apache and Pueblo reservations. Damned sloppy, if that was Caroline's quarry.
There it was. "Negro obeah, wood, 47 cm, cotton dress, braided hemp collar and belt."
47 cm. He wasn't used to thinking in metric. That would be somewhere close to half a yard. He picked up a ruler and measured his forearm. About right.
Jane's dictionary lacked front and back covers and an unknown number of pages at each end. But it was thick and wide and heavy, unabridged until the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had abridged it right into someone's trash. Luckily, "obeah" would be found closer to the middle. He riffled through dog-eared pages.
"Obeah. Noun or verb, the noun means a form of West African magic or the practitioner or an object or fetish used in that magic. I've never heard that third use. And cataloging a dress and ornaments sounds like it's some kind of figurine."
"Hah!"
He shook his head. "Log it as a possibility. 'Texas' and 'Negro' are both a long ways from what my sister's after." He stopped and stretched. "That's what, twenty-five possibles? Thirty? Maybe Caroline can narrow it down. She knows more of these terms than I do."
Muffled shouts interrupted him, a slurred male voice from overhead. He cocked his eyes toward the ceiling, tracing heavy feet stomping on the upper side of the floorboards.
"Danny. Drunk again." Jane grimaced and reached into one of the milk crates. When she pulled her hand back out, it held a .45 Auto. She laid the pistol on the desktop by her right hand, casually enough that Gary shivered. Then she picked up another sheet of printout.
Gary stared at the pistol. First thing, Ben's training, he checked the safety. No safety, none at all — the lever had been broken off flush against the frame. The gun was so old most of the bluing had worn away to leave dull steel. Its handgrip showed cracks and a missing corner, and brown rust spread like patchy fungus along the slide and frame. No sights. But it was cocked, with a magazine shoved home. Gary stared at it some more.
She glanced up from the paper and then followed his gaze. "Looks like dog shit, but it works. Ask Danny." She nodded sideways toward the door. "Drilled the peephole with it, last time he came calling."
He'd noted the peephole, standard security fisheye lens centered about chest high on his body, a little low for her to stare through without bending over. Outside, the door was splintered around it, damn sloppy job with a brace and bit or electric drill, but he figured it fit the general ambience of slum. And the brass tube through the door would be about half an inch diameter.
A hole left by a .45 caliber slug. Instant drill.
He stared at the door. Wooden door, cheap flat unpainted luan veneer slab, with deadbolt lock and chain. Chest high, centered, a .45 caliber hole.
"Bastard was drunk, yelling, pounding on the door. Said he'd break it down. Three in the morning. Don't have to put up with that kind of shit. Fuck 'im."
So she put a slug through the door. Shooting blind, inside a rooming house. Another shiver ran down Gary's back. Maybe Dad and Ben were right about her.
"What if you'd hit him?"
"I'd be out of here before anyone had time to call the cops. Computer and wallet and the clothes I was wearing. Two minutes, max. Half that if I didn't sleep naked."
He looked around the room. No books, no pictures, no stereo, no TV, no nothing. Her printer was a cheap inkjet, one of those freebie rebate "specials" where the replacement ink cartridges cost an arm and a leg. Homemade desk, three mismatched chairs, mattress on the floor, dresser and mirror picked up off the curb with one drawer missing and a corner held up by a pile of scrap bricks.
This was a hideout, not a home. His own looked a lot like it, but he needed places to keep stuff he didn't dare leave in a dorm room where the Admin had passkeys. Morgan stuff, like her .45.
He wondered where she studied for her classes. Besides his dorm room, that is. He wondered where she kept her textbooks. He wondered where she lived. Or maybe this was it — and nearly a palace, compared to the streets of Naskeag Falls or an upstairs room in the Paramount Hotel.
"Fingerprints?"
"If the cops match my fingertips to their fucking records, one dead Danny'd be the least of my problems."
His brain fiddled with that statement for a moment. One dead Danny would probably have rated as manslaughter at worst. No premeditation, and it might pass as self-defense under the circumstances. So she must think the cops had evidence for a murder charge or two, looking for a print match.
Well, he already knew that she avoided cops.
He started to reach for the pistol, just curious. She snatched it away, didn't quite point it in his direction, and put it down on the far side of her computer.
"Not on your life, lover boy. You're cute, but not that cute."
That phrasing seemed a touch . . . indelicate. Under the circumstances, with her sitting there naked from the waist down and the sweat of sex still drying on their bodies. He settled back in his chair, and then straightened up as it creaked alarmingly behind him. A door slammed upstairs. Silence fell.
He sat, and thought, and stared at that peephole in the door. And at the gun. And at her. And then he understood.
Barn cat.
A high-school friend's family had kept horses, raised a heifer or steer for meat each year, still used their barn. They'd had cats, house pets and a couple of others that hung out around the feed-bins in the barn and kept the mice and rats and sparrows twitchy.
The barn cats acted almost like house cats. Almost. They came to the food dish, the water dish, they meowed at you if the dish was empty. Sometimes you could scratch their ears and rub their chins, if they wanted your help in shedding excess fur. But if you tried to pick one up, you'd lose blood. If you tried to back one into a corner and catch it, it turned into a ball of teeth and claws and yowling screeching cat-curses.
He'd helped out with that minor war one time, for a trip to the vet for shots. They'd finally ended up catching the cat under a horse blanket. The cat had torn three holes in the blanket by the time they finished.
Those cats were not tame. They weren't totally wild, but they weren't tame. He made a mental note to never get between Jane and the nearest exit. If she sensed a trap closing around her . . . .
He stood up and grabbed his shirt, tucking the museum catalog disk in one pocket and the list of possibilities in another. "I'm going cross-eyed staring at that damn typeface. It's Saturday, the rain's stopped — let's go over to the Union and score some ice cream."
She glanced at her wrist. "Sounds good. The football game should have started, so all the lemmings should be piled up in the stands." She pulled on a pair of pants, buttoned her shirt, and shoved the computer into her backpack. She stopped, glanced at him, and stowed that pistol back in the milk crate.
Outside in the stairwell, he noticed a shallow spall in the concrete foundation, with a dimple in the center about half an inch in diameter. It lined up with the peephole. "You find the slug?"
"Yep. And tossed it. Mommy knows about rifling marks." She paused before locking the deadbolt. "Just a second." And she vanished back inside her rooms, pulling the door shut behind her.
Probably moving the gun, hiding it from him. Barn cat.
*~*~*
They strolled across the grassy mall in front of the Undergrad Library, autumn sun golden in the sugar maples under breezy blue sky, standard-issue laughing college couple except they weren't watching the big game. And Gary thought about barn cats, soft and cute and furry and purring except when they turned into screaming buzz-saws.
She scared him. She fascinated him. And she liked sex. A lot. She carried everything she valued in that backpack. She even kept a change of clothes with her at all times, clothing a different style and color from whatever she was wearing. He'd found that out after a short interlude in his dorm room between classes.
He didn't think she kept another gun tucked away in there, but she'd never given him a chance to check. The only times she hadn't been carrying it, they'd been someplace she had to leave it in a storage locker, like checking out the museum. He doubted if she ever left it in that basement apartment.
Anyway, this girl lived on the edge of cut-and-run. If she never went back to those two musty rooms, she'd lose some trash furniture that had cost her nothing in the first place and a few changes of clothing straight from the Goodwill store. That fit in with the gnawed fingernails.
He'd thought maybe he'd ask her about the Paramount Hotel fire. Now he thought maybe he wouldn't.
Still, she'd let him pretty far inside her fences. Not just the sex. He knew her true hair color, for example, black, almost as thick and glossy as Caroline's. The green and orange and purple were more paint than dye. She'd slept in his bed, actually just sleeping there while trusting him to stand guard. And sometimes she cried in the middle of the night when she thought he was sleeping. He'd seen some scars he didn't think she intended him to notice, small old puckered spots the size and shape of a burning cigarette under the hair of her unshaved armpits.
Those had looked like torture, not just abuse. Torture done years ago by someone who cared about leaving marks where they could be seen. Might be that somebody had needed killing.
And Gary was still getting his head around the fact that his whole family lived just as far outside the law as she did. Five hundred years of pirates, complete with loaded artillery on the roof of their stone tower. Sir Henry Morgan had been a cousin, left about three tons of loot in Stonefort when he sailed back to England for the pardon and respectability. When piracy turned unprofitable, they switched to robbing land-lubbers and sneaking goods past Customs. Now they raided banks by computer and ran a thriving trade in looted art and antiquities. And if anyone threatened them, they killed. His true father Ben served as capo di capi of a Welsh mafia.
Three months wasn't really enough time for him to digest that, but he'd worked through it far enough that a murder or two in her past didn't send him screaming. He still woke up sweating, remembering that he'd killed a man with his bare hands, a man that needed killing.
So they walked across the grassy mall shuffling through drifted gold and crimson maple leaves and they dipped plastic spoons in plastic bowls of ice cream courtesy of the high-butterfat pedigree cows of the Ag School farm. Band music drifted across from the stadium, sour notes and staggering beats and all.
She slipped loose and turned in front of him, licking French vanilla off her lips, and pulled his head down until her breath tickled his ear. "Hey, all the jocks will be watching the game. How about we stick our noses into the gym, check out the security system and the stairs down to that anthro storage in the basement?"
Just a typical pair of undergrads.
"Nah." He shook his head, automatic response. "Caroline's the one for that. She's got the 'in' with her grad studies, just checking pottery fragments to chart the distribution patterns from a particular Anasazi site. Or something. Typical boring thesis research, livened up by a little espionage. And she warned me to stay away from her dolly. It doesn't like men."
He winced, suddenly realizing how much he'd just told her. Dad and Ben were right. Loose lips sink ships.
They walked on, eating good ice cream and herding insolent panhandler squirrels back into their trees. Off at the far corner of the campus, the halftime show ended and the band's attempt at music lapsed into blessed silence to let the equally-inept football team reclaim their field.
His cell phone rang. They stopped under the shade of a tall pine and he checked the caller ID display. It wasn't a number he recognized, but the exchange code was near Stonefort — maybe Winter Cove. He couldn't remember.
"Hello." He turned his back on Jane, walking around the tree trunk for an impromptu phone booth.
"Gary?"
Voice was either Dad or Ben — they sounded the same on a phone. He'd been told he did, as well.
"Yep."
"It's your cousin Dan. Where the hell you been? I've been trying to get you since last night."
"Had the phone switched off. Didn't want to be disturbed." True enough, spending the night in Jane's bed. But it also meant family code for 'I didn't want to be traced by the cell locator signal.'
And 'Cousin Dan' was code for Dad, in case of phone taps. Gary actually had a Cousin Dan, common name in the family from 'way back. The guy lived in New York.
"Roger that. I wanted to get to you before you saw the news or had a visit from the police. Problem at Morgan's Point."
That straightened him up. "Police?" Then he remembered Jane and dropped his voice back to near whisper. "What happened?"
"Cops found a body dumped on your dad's memorial stone, anonymous telephone tip. Yard service says it wasn't there Wednesday. The police may want to talk to you because you own the place now. Just routine, they know you've been away to school for a month."
Routine meant the cops hadn't stumbled on any Morgan secrets, like the entrances to the tunnel complex or the tower. "You said 'dumped.' Killed someplace else, like the one out on the ridge?"
"No statement yet. Word on the street says someone had cut the heart right out. No blood, though."
So "yes" to "Killed somewhere else." Probably dumped on the Morgan grounds for a reason. Question was, what? "Man or woman? Anyone I know?"
"No word. I've called your guardian and told her. Don't roll in any meadow muffins while you're green-grassin' your gal out in the cow pastures."
And the phone clicked dead before he could come up with a snappy comeback. Gary stared at the black plastic lump in his hand. Messy corpse left on Dad's memorial marker. More family code there. They had security cameras covering the grounds. Dad would have said if they'd picked up anything.
And 'meadow muffins' were the tunnel traps. He hoped Caroline got that word. She might be off in Arizona right now, but she'd be coming back damned soon and had this habit of wandering around the tunnels without an invitation. Said she belonged there just as much as any other Morgan.
Gary took three deep breaths, slowly, and then pasted a smile on his face before turning back around the tree. Jane didn't need to know that stuff.
But she wasn't there. He stared frozen at the empty grass, the dropped ice cream dish, and then pulled himself together to scan the mall and the stately ranks of oaks and maples and the equally formal columns of the flanking buildings. He caught a flash of green that might have been her backpack disappearing around the corner of Howell Hall. That route led into a maze of smaller walks and outbuildings and doors and shrubbery.
Gone.
He'd damn near shouted 'police' and the clock struck midnight at Cinderella's Ball. Gary's breath caught in his chest, and he sank back against the rough bark of the pine.
He didn't have a clue where to look for her. Damned sure she wouldn't go back to that cellar. Next class they had together would be Wednesday, odds were she'd skip that.
Hell, he didn't even know if 'Jane White' was her real name. She could be like Dad or Ben, five different valid driver's licenses from five different states in five different names. Of course, that sort of thing took money.
Gone. The word echoed in his head. Paranoid as she was, she might not even trust campus email, afraid the sysadmins could nail down an IP address and send the cops straight to a network jack.
She might check email from off-campus, dial-up or internet café, just hit-and-run faster than a cop could trace her. That was the closest thing he had for a substitute glass slipper.
Gary picked up her ice cream dish and spoon. Not just being neat as a substitute for doing something — they'd have her fingerprints. As Ben pointed out, all those jokes about paranoids sometimes having real enemies wouldn't exist without a grain of truth behind them.
The campus felt empty, in spite of cheering from the distant crowd. She was gone.