Promises to Keep Read online

  Promises to Keep

  Laura Anne Gilman

  A Sylvan Investigations Novella

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  October 19, 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-273-0

  Copyright © 2013 Laura Anne Gilman

  for Kerry Stubbs

  and Janet Gilman

  1

  The Thursday morning train was crowded, the weather was miserable with just enough rain to be, well, miserable, and we were coming up on a full week of non-employment. While I normally would never ill-wish anyone, it would not have bothered me if someone’d had something or someone go missing. At this point, I’d even take a stalk-n-snap job, just to have something to do.

  Our office was a full block from the subway entrance. The rain had paused, but the air was still so damp with humidity, it almost didn’t make a difference. My boots – acquired from a supply store in Oklahoma a decade ago – kept my feet dry, but my shirt was sticking to my back, and the cuffs of my slacks were soaked. At least I didn’t have allergies – it seemed as though every other person I passed was sneezing and red-eyed from pollen.

  I got off the elevator on our floor, took off my baseball cap and shook the dampness out of my hair, and checked my watch. Exactly seven fifty-eight. Well, at least I wasn’t going to be late.

  “Hey boss,” a cheerful voice greeted me as I walked through the door at exactly seven fifty-nine. “Coffee maker’s broken.”

  I stared at my secretary-slash-assistant-slash-not-quite-apprentice, and sighed. Of course it was. And the look on her face told me why. “What have I told you about using current in the office?”

  “I didn’t.” Ellen sat behind her desk, now the very picture of injured innocence, which considering I was the one out a coffee maker was just damned unfair. “Your new client did. But I ran down and got you some from the corner cart.”

  I hung my hat and jacket on the tree, and glared at her. She picked up an unmistakable blue-and-white food cart cup from her desk, and offered it to me. Good girl. Not her fault that current – magic, if you’re old-school – wrecked havoc with most appliances.

  “New client, huh?” The coffee smelled of heaven, and had cooled down enough for me to hold the cup easily. I took a sip, and then looked around as though she might have stashed the client somewhere, ready to leap out at me once I was caffeinated.

  The office still looked the same as it had when I’d opened Sylvan Investigations seven years ago, after I’d taken my twenty-and-out from the NYPD. The front room was clean but no-frills, a few potted plants clumped in the corner, waist-high and thriving, despite the fact that there’d never been a single ray of natural sunlight in this room since they put the walls up. The floor was polished hardwood, the walls were painted a non-industrial shade of sage green, and the wooden desk I’d bought at a fire sale for twenty bucks still sat in the middle of all that.

  The difference between when I’d first set up shop and today was the desk was now covered with manila folders, a dozen different colored pens, an antique but still workable electric typewriter plugged into the best surge protector my money could buy, and anywhere from three to seven cans of soda in various stages of empty, depending on the hour of the day and how bad a day it had been. And the girl behind the desk, abuser of both the typewriter and the soda.

  We’d been working together for four months now, since Ellen’s vision of three kidnapped mer-children first brought us together. And by “brought” I mean she came to me asking for help, and I was dumb enough to give it.

  Ellen was Talent, one of the magic-using humans of the Cosa Nostradamus. What earlier days had called a witch, a warlock, a sorceress. Me? I’m…not. Magic-using, or human. Despite that, we’d worked that first job together, well enough that her mentor, Wren Valere, had decided working for me on a regular basis would be part of her training.

  Valere hadn’t asked me first, of course.

  “Drink your coffee, boss. Your horns are showing.”

  I don’t know who’d taught her that was the fatae equivalent of calling someone a ditzy blonde, but I had my suspicions. If my office evoked a vague echo of the seedy-but-competent detectives of the 1940’s – and I’m not saying it did, intentionally or otherwise – then Ellen could have swung the faithful Girl Friday. She wasn’t particularly dishy, although she was young, and her style was more jeans and a sweatshirt than tight skirt and heels, but she had the sass down damn near perfect.

  When it was just us, anyway. Other people came into the picture, and the uncertain, beat-down-too-damn-much shadow I’d first met made an unwelcome reappearance. But we were working on that, too.

  “So,” I prompted Ellen, leaning my hip against her desk. “New client?”

  “In your office.” Ellen handed me one of the files from her desk, while I, obedient, took another sip of coffee. “Mrs. Christina Eloise McConnell. A Ms. O’Sullivan sent her.”

  I remembered O’Sullivan. Her secretary had been hanging out with some rather nasty people who took things that didn’t belong to them. She had been professionally grateful for my help - apparently enough to send her friends along, too. I’m fond of former clients like that.

  “What’s the deal?” I asked, even as I flipped open the folder and scanned the top sheet. Ellen had better-than-decent handwriting, but she typed everything out so I could scan it into the files later. Having an assistant who was Talent - and therefore as likely to short out the entire office as get a file saved - meant I did more work, not less.

  Fortunately, she had other skills and abilities that made up for it, when they weren’t getting us into more trouble, anyway. But this seemed like a standard-issue referral, not what I’d come to think of as a Shadow Special, where her foresight got us involved.

  “Missing husband,” Ellen said, and then let me read the rest.

  “Missing a full twenty-four hours, from… he disappeared from the roof?” I looked up from the report, surprised.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, that’s different. And I take it her distress translated into our coffee maker going spoffle?”

  Even when she smiled, Ellen looked serious. “Actually, she was detailing what he was supposed to be doing up on the roof, instead of disappearing, and it went spoofle. I don’t think she’s too happy with him.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” I said dryly, walking past the desk and opening the door to my inner office.

  oOo

  Mrs. McConnell was proof that you couldn’t put a stereotype on Talent. She was in her late fifties, well-preserved in the way suburban ladies of a certain income level get, dressed in a tasteful suit and carrying a bag that you could have hid a mid-sized Chevy in. She was from Westchester County, where the wealthy don’t-quite-flee NYC, though, so it was more likely a Prius, or a Volvo.

  She didn’t turn in her chair to look at me as I came in, but waited until I had shaken her hand and introduced myself. Her gaze could cut glass, but her body language said she was more than a little embarrassed.

  “I believe I owe you a coffee maker,” she said.

  I waved it off, pulling my chair out and sitting down behind my desk. “It happens. I take it you’re calmer now?”

  Either way, I wasn’t going to take my laptop out of the shielded drawer until she left the office.

  “Yes. I am sorry,” she said, and looked it. I guess it was bad manners for a nice suburban lady to bust up a guy’s coffee maker without having even met him yet.

  Apologies offered and accepted, I was all business. “So, what can I do for you?”

  Sylvan Investigations was, on paper, your basic private investigation firm. That meant that I took pretty much all comers, so long as they didn’t smell to
o badly of trouble, and tried to find whatever it was they were missing, or track down what they feared was wrong. Nobody ever showed up in my office because they were having a good day.

  But every PI has a specialization, even if they didn’t advertise it. Mine was magic. Not the using of it - I’m no Talent - but the problems that came from it, the use and abuse. And for a Talent to be sitting in my office first thing in the damned morning, that was trouble with a capital T and that spelled Talent.

  “My husband has gone missing,” she told me.

  “Off the roof of your house, yes.” I placed the file down on the surface of my desk which, unlike Ellen’s, was clear of everything. My citations and clippings were framed and hung on the wall, where everyone could see them and be reassured, and my pens and notebooks were secured in the drawer underneath my laptop, to be taken out when I needed them. I’d been raised to Navy standards, and some habits died hard. “He’s been missing more than twenty-four hours, according to this. And the cops aren’t interested?”

  “They came to the house and looked around this morning, but there was no evidence of foul play, so they took down all his information and basically washed their hands of the matter. They told me to wait for him to come home. Or contact a divorce lawyer. You were a member of the NYPD yourself, Mister Hendrickson. You know how it works. He’s a grown man, there was no sign of foul play, no ransom request or particularly odd behavior. They’ll look - but they won’t look very hard.”

  Unfortunate, but not unexpected. I had no doubt my former brothers-in-blue were running all the usual searches, but her husband, at least on paper, wasn’t wealthy enough to be worth ransom, he wasn’t important enough to have serious enemies, and unless a background search turned up something else, he was just another person gone walkabout. Kids, yeah. Kids and women, someone tended to take it personally. Middle-aged upper middle class white men, not so much. Not enough money to buy top billing, not cute enough to grab heartstrings, not ethnic enough to make good copy.

  Unless this was a Talent thing. If the Cosa Nostradamus was involved, the cops up in Westchester wouldn’t be much use, anyway.

  “Do you have any reason not to believe that he simply Translocated off the roof, and hasn’t thought to contact you?”

  Not every Talent could Translocate, use current to move themselves from one place to another. I didn’t understand the whys and wherefores of it at all, but apparently you needed a strong sense of self, plus what amounted to an internal GPS to get you there in one piece.

  “Al couldn’t have Translocated himself from the bathtub to the toilet.” Her words were fond, not frustrated or disparaging. “He isn’t high res at all - neither of us are, really. I suppose that’s why…” and she made a vague, slightly helpless gesture I took to indicate her encounter with the coffee maker. She hadn’t been expecting it to happen.

  High-res was someone like Wren Valere, or Benjamin Venec, who led the Cosa’s only crime scene investigation team. Or my Girl Friday, sitting calmly outside doing filing for minimum wage and pizza every Friday. You couldn’t ever tell from the outside. But strong emotions could do damage, even at a low level.

  “Had your husband been upset, or worried about anything? Money problems? Personal problems?” The next question involved sexual problems, so I wanted to get everything else squared away before I had to go there. If there was a cause that didn’t require me to hear the backdoor confessions from a client, I’d prefer that. Not that I’m a prude - pretty much impossible, considering my genetics - but I have a good imagination. Too good. And Mrs. McConnell wasn’t my type.

  “No.” But she didn’t sound certain.

  I’m a good investigator. I’m well-trained, detail-oriented, and trust both my brain and my gut. But I have an advantage that a lot of other guys - and women - don’t have. People want to like me. They want me to like them. It’s nothing I do, nothing I’ve learned; it’s just there, encoded into my genetics. Not being an idiot, I use it - carefully, but I use it. It’s not tricky. Lean forward, look them in the eye. Basic moves that make the subject feel that you’re engaged, that you do care - and then loosen the torque a little, the hold I keep on myself most of the time, and let some of that natural, damnable faun charm leak out. Just enough - like I said, she wasn’t my type.

  “I can only help you if you tell me everything.”

  “He… we’ve been married almost thirty years,” she said. “And I know he’s cheated on me. Not often, and never anything serious. They’re one-night stands. He loves me.”

  She wasn’t making excuses or justifications: these were things she knew.

  “But I think…” She swallowed hard, and her forehead drew in, careless of the wrinkles it might leave. “I think one of the times he screwed up. I think there was a child.”

  “You think, or you know?” Had the mother - or the child - come sniffing around, looking to cause trouble?

  “I think that he thought there was a child,” she clarified. “He hadn’t ever said anything, but there was a look on his face, sometimes. And he tried to find someone, once. Recently.”

  My finely-honed and trained investigative instincts – and my basic bullshit detector – told me that we’d gotten to the meat of it. “Someone?”

  She reached into her bag of holding, and pulled out a plain gray folder. “He hired another investigator to find someone. A woman. I found the files a few weeks ago, when we were doing a renovation of the study, but… it didn’t seem worth bringing up, then. Now, though… I thought it might be connected?”

  I took the folder, and flipped it open. He’d gone to one of my colleagues, another ex-cop who’d hung out his shingle. Keith Hartman. Hartman was a decent guy, good at his job. Not in my league, but decent enough. They’d been looking for a woman, who seemed determined to stay just out of reach. Hartman’s report went back three years: she’d lived in a rental apartment for the first year, then disappeared for a while, and then came back on the radar briefly, this time showing up on hospital records. And then she disappeared again, a little over eight months ago, about when our missing person starting asking about her. And that’s where the trail apparently ended.

  “Hospital. Maternity ward. And you think it was his?”

  Mrs. McConnell gave an elegant, if helpless, shrug. “I think that he thought it was possible. But all he did was what you have; he didn’t push them to look more, or…”

  And then he disappeared off the roof of their home. Taken alone, that was odd. Together with a mysterious woman and an unknown baby both disappearing off the face of the earth, it was odd enough to make my horns itch.

  “You realize that, once I start looking, I might find things that are uncomfortable?” The kid, yeah, but also the fact that he had probably gone off of his own free will, without caring what his wife thought or felt. Or at least, not caring enough to clue her in.

  Mrs. McConnell was a classy dame. She met my gaze square, and nodded once. “I understand.”

  oOo

  The door opened, soft on its hinges, and Ellen tilted her head slightly, waiting to hear if she was going to be asked to run an errand, fetch a file, or clean up ex-former-client off the floor. Instead, Mrs. McConnell shook hands all around - even Ellen’s which surprised Ellen a little, but she liked it - and nodded when Danny told her they’d email a contract that afternoon. They meaning he: she wasn’t allowed anywhere near his laptop.

  Then their new client was gone, and the boss exhaled once. It wasn’t an unhappy or exasperated sound, more like he’d been thinking too hard to remember to breathe. Then he turned and went back into his office, leaving the door open. That meant she was supposed to follow him.

  “So,” she said, standing in the doorway.

  “So.”

  Danny was sitting at his desk, his feet up, leaning back in the wooden chair at an angle. Every time Ellen saw him do that, she was convinced that he was going to fall backward and crack his skull open. It hadn’t happened yet, at least not when she’
d been around to see. She took the seat the client had just vacated, and tried to match his casual position, without actually putting her feet up. She thought that might be a bit much.

  “Missing husband,” he said.

  “Off a roof.”

  He waved a hand airily, dismissing that aspect. “Either he was snatched off the roof by something winged, in which case we’re probably not going to find him except as jumbo-sized pellets, or he went on his own. If he went on his own we have a chance.”

  “There are things large enough to take a grown man off a roof?” Ellen wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. There were still things about this world, about the Cosa Nostradamus, that she didn’t know, didn’t understand. That made it painfully easy for others to punk her.

  Not that Danny would. She thought. No, she was sure.

  “Rocs, although they’re not native around here,” he was saying. “There was a native bird that could have done it but I’m pretty sure any still around aren’t nesting in the suburbs. Dragons, natch, but if a great worm or even a lesser one took him, we’re done.”

  Dragons she knew about. Not quite first-hand but close enough. A distance of about two miles – this distance between Madame’s townhouse an their office - was close enough.

  “So where do we start?” They’d had a missing person case before, but that had been a pair of teenagers who’d run off together, what Danny had called good starter material. This sounded like it would be more complicated.

  “With what our missing man was looking for. Or rather, what he was rather carefully not looking for.”

  She really hated it when the boss got cryptic. It meant he was making shit up as he went, again.

  2

  When Ellen had first started working with Danny Hendrickson, she’d been relegated to following and watching. His shadow, he called her. This time, though, she had gotten handed her assignment, and sent off to do it. Alone. That made her feel triumphant for about ten minutes.