CHAPTER 67: All the mayor’s money
Tomu alluded to Hana paying for his respect, brave words coming from someone hardly half Hana’s size. I expected Hana to get upset about it, but without a word she suddenly grabbed Tomu’s head in an arm lock then proceeded to give him a rough head rub with her knuckles.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow.”
He cried. Not finished, Hana turned him upside down and started to tickle him while holding him in the air by his ankles.
“No, no, no. Ha, ha, ha.”
I thoroughly enjoyed Hana’s submission lesson. When she was finished he lay, panting, spread-eagled in the dust.
“I would like to know where our mayor Mr. Marset goes in the evening when he’s in the bush outside of town, and why?”
“How much you pay?”
The guy never quit.
“Twenty coppers as usual.”
“I can tell you now.”
He seemed pleased with himself.
“Okay?”
“He’s going to hide his money away.”
“You know what he’s doing?”
“Yes. I know where.”
“Are you the only one who knows where it is?”
“Nah, everyone knows. He’s a real dumbass.”
“So why has no-one tried to steal it?”
“Because no-one is stupid enough to try.”
“Why?”
“Because Old Betty lives out there.”
“Old Betty?”
“Mm. Old Betty eats dumb people who wander around out there.”
Man, that shook me a bit. I had a suspicious feeling Old Betty was the jerky stealing dinosaur, I could count myself lucky I hadn’t become a snack myself.
“What does Old Betty look like?”
Tomu held out his hand expecting another twenty coppers. I sighed; he was going to be a ruthless trader one day. After I handed the money to him, he explained further.
“People only know just before she eats them, but I’ve seen her. She’s big, got big teeth, big legs, and tiny little arms. I ran away before she could see me.”
Yep, that sounds like Old Betty.
“Aren’t you afraid it might eat you when you are out there?”
“Nah, I stay away from her area.”
I guess I’m the dumb one then.
“Why hasn’t she eaten the mayor yet?”
“I don’t know. Someone said he has a talisman.”
“You mean something that repels Old Betty?”
“I suppose so.”
I could see his interest in the subject beginning to wane. I wondered if that awful stench I smelled coming off the mayor be his talisman?
“I want to go to the inn. Would you be able to show me where about he goes to put his money?”
Tomu nodded.
“But then I want some of that money.”
There I had to draw a line for Tomu.
“Sorry Tomu, I can’t agree to those terms. You see this money is not mine so I can’t give it to you. I don’t want to keep this money. It belongs to those people he took it from, and I want to give it all back to them. I’m happy to pay you one silver from my own pocket. You don’t have to give the information to me if you don’t want to.”
I could see Tomu’s head drop, he nodded but he didn’t answer me and suddenly ran off somewhere. Hana shook her head.
“I like him.”
“Yeah, he’s quite adorable in a snotty nose kind of way. Probably the closest thing I have to a kid brother.”
Hana looked at me for a moment. Then as if making up her mind she changed the subject.
“You need to buy something for Haruhime.”
“Where did that suddenly come from?”
“You were late last night, and you are going to be late again soon. It would be wise to get something for her.”
Hana was already a few steps ahead of me in my planning. I wasn’t sure what to get Haruhime but thought I might find something at the adventurer’s supply shop. It was the only other place in town I could look anyway. There I found a hair pin resembling a small strawberry. It had a few of what looked like small diamonds scattered over the strawberry and green semi-precious jewels for leaves. I thought that would match nicely with her hair. Why the adventurer supply shop had anything like that I wouldn’t know but display shelves behind the counter held a few interesting jewellery items. I guess even adventurers needed jewellery sometimes.
Hana suggested I give the hairpin to Haruhime on my own and waited outside the door for me. When I handed the hairpin to Haruhime, she was totally surprised, seemingly lost for words. I couldn’t stay there too long, so I left her speechless, promising to catch up with her a bit later. Before I left, she handed me a small bag of cookies she made. I ate one of them right there. Heavenly, just heavenly. Haruhime’s grandmother was right, those cookies could change the world. I decided to keep the rest in my carry bag for later.
Tomu found Hana and me as we stepped out of the inn. He waited outside because he didn’t dare go into the inn because Haruhime would chase him out. He held a dirty looking rolled up parchment in his hand. Heaven only knew where he managed to find that. When he unrolled it, we looked at a rough map that was hand drawn on it. Someone had repeatedly scraped the continual writings on the parchment making it look something like a large captcha test.
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Tomu pointed out the areas where I could find Mr. Marset’s treasures. Despite Tomu indicating three places around the town, it would be difficult finding the specific location of Mr. Marset’s gold because it still covered a large area. Tomu also confirmed that Mr. Marset left once every three days from his house to make a deposit. He suddenly went quiet, and I sensed he was uncomfortable about something.
“Sorry, I want to apologise for being greedy.”
That came as a pleasant surprise to me. Tomu was a good person. One day he would make a good leader, and a leader willing to accept responsibility when making a mistake was a rare find.
“Apology accepted.”
He handed me the scroll to me, and I handed him the silver coin I previously agreed with him.
“The information you gave me is worth a lot, both to me and to the people of Obon.”
I parted ways with Tomu, not wanting him further involved with something that would become ugly soon enough. But first I had to ask the old man for a favour. I still worked for him, and I couldn’t take off without asking permission. Also, I wanted to find those stashes before sunset. When I asked, the old man was gracious enough to allow me an afternoon off.
“Yeah, yeah. Just don’t turn the town upside down.”
“Who me? Never.”
Grenfell just shook his head and shooed me away with his hands.
Mr. Marset’s residence and office were one and the same building so he would logically leave from that place as a common departure point. I carefully thought about the areas Tomu indicated on his map. I didn’t know the efficacy of his information, but I could systematically figure it out. There were three gates in town east, west, and south. Only two points in the town could logically be called convenient exits; eastern and western gates. Since the eastern gate was the only gate monitored by the mayor’s thugs, it would make sense for Mr. Marset to make his stashes around there and that corresponded to Tomu’s map. I couldn’t hang around that area willy-nilly without attracting the attention of the guards who had nothing better to do than pick their noses and harass travellers. That limited me to night-time operations only. A time when the town guards couldn’t see further than their hands in the night’s mist.
We started looking for tell-tale signs of well used intersecting paths in the bush. Most Obon residents would use the two main routes in and out of Obon. Since there would be no logical need for most people to be out in the bush, only those who went out with purpose would make paths. If those paths led constantly to a particular area I could expect the ground to be more compacted. Using our infrared lights again, we found what we were looking for. An ever so slight discoloration and compaction of the gravel. I used my solid skill to confirm the compaction by placing both hands on the ground, one hand on the compaction and the other on loose soil and comparing my results. We followed the compaction for as far as we could and then where it started to get difficult, I spent a bit of time searching the surrounding area.
Through constant repetition, I was quickly becoming proficient at being able to pick up the deeper differences in the soil densities. Somewhere along the line I may have picked up some sort of skill or ability that could work on the ground, an earth detection skill. Later when I did an appraisal on myself, I noticed I had a new skill called earth sense. I was pleased, that skill would be of tremendous value and since it was listed on my stats, it would take a lot less EE to activate. I finally got to a point where I thought the buried bags lay. Remembering where Mr. Marset had dug the hole in relation to the bush I decided to check every bush in the area facing the town while using my newly found earth sense skill.
But before starting, I decided to try an experiment. I took a single silver coin from my pocket and placed it just under the soil and I was able to detect it again using earth skill. Then in increasing depths I found that I could detect the coin up to a depth of half a meter. After that depth, my searches became more like guesses. Returning to searching for the underground bags of coins, it took me about an hour of fruitless searching before I finally found something. It was like finding treasure with my own personal metal detector. A little digging, and about two hand depths down, I found the first money bag filled with silver coins.
Once again that bloody reptile managed to sneak up on me while I searched with earth sense for more stashes. I nearly screamed like a little girl. My two-legged Old Betty didn’t seem particularly interested in my offering of jerky. Instead, it nuzzled my carry bag while snorting a few times. I pulled out Haruhime’s cookies from the bag. Surely a large dinosaur, wouldn’t be interested in cookies? To my amazement the clawed hand slowly took the cookie parcel from me while it’s eyes never wavered from mine. Too stunned to protest, I watched it dash off into the bush again. I wasn’t sure how to explain to Haruhime how I lost her cookies to some confectionery-loving velociraptor. Since I knew the creature liked cookies, how would I get Haruhime to make more?
As for the third site, I knew a far easier way to find it. After all, why exclude the fun of finding the next stash?
Three evenings later we waited at the spot I knew Mr. Marset would be visiting soon, the exact place where I found the first stash of money. True to his dependable personality Mr. Marset turned up at the exact time that night as he did the last time we saw them. He was as punctual as he was awful. He mumbled the number of steps under his breath while carrying his financial burden. I resisted the urge to start loudly counting a new set of random numbers to utterly confuse him.
He made his way to the first stash we already emptied, took a little pointless look around, and started digging. From where we hid, we could see him clearly through the bushes. He would never be able to see us with that lantern light in his eyes. When he realised the site was empty of money bags, he started doubting himself. He even stopped at a few nearby bushes to dig underneath them as if he had somehow missed the right bush. He looked a bit panicked and mumbled even more loudly to himself. Eventually he gave up and decided to try to count the route again. Half an hour later he was back, still carrying his money bags. I could see it was taking a toll on him because he walked far slower than his usual pace. He dropped the money bags he carried, glanced at the hole in the ground and started looking around nervously.
At that stage I was betting good odds that he wanted to confirm his other stashes were still undisturbed. Mr. Marset’s brain would never allow him peace until he had seen them with his own eyes. As fortitude would have it, he decided to first check stash number two which we emptied that very day. It wasn’t necessary to follow him all the way in, especially when a howl of rage from the general direction of the second stash confirmed my thoughts.
We positioned ourselves on the side of town I knew Mr. Marset would have to come through to get to the area of his third stash. True to form the short figure of Mr. Marset came huffing past. For one thing he still had the money bags strung over his back. If I was him, I would have dropped them back home and then looked for the third stash, but he was so distraught by the disappearance of his money, he no longer thought straight.
Both Hana and I had soft leather pieces strapped under our shoes so that we could easily follow him while making little noise. As it turned out, the exhausted Mr. Marset was easy to follow at normal pace through the bushes. There were no niceties this time, he kneeled onto the ground and started digging like a man possessed. Finding his stash untouched, he rejoiced, giving out a huge sigh of relief. However, there was a visible change in the man’s attitude as his mammalian brain computed that he might have inadvertently led someone to his last remaining stash. He would have only been half right because in truth I could have found the third stash on my own. He faced a dilemma. He couldn’t stay there the whole night to guard his money, nor could he leave it alone in case someone took it as well. He opted on a third, desperate way by moving the bags to a nearby location. It wasn’t a bad move really, although he was gambling on the fact that the people who took his money were not watching him at the time.
It took the man a good hour and a half to move the bags. They were not light, and he was quickly exhausted. He could only move them about fifty meters away. He must have moved about thirty bags of silver not including the four he carried. I suspected that stash must have been one of his first and then later decided to make smaller stashes. When he started to move the first set of bags, I had already figured out how the rest of the evening was about to play out he was that predictable. Mr. Marset would move his stash then make a beeline for the town and then raise a party of armed men and place them out there for the night. Then he could take his time moving his stash the next morning. We would only have a safe period of about ten minutes to the stash. When he finished shifting the last bit of dirt over the new hole in a slipshod manner, he hurried back towards town.
With that many bags it took a few minutes to shift them into my storage space. We had just enough time to cover Mr. Marset’s spot with earth again when we heard voices coming through the bushes. Forced to take the long way back to town to avoid Mr. Marset’s arriving thugs, we found the town crawling with people. Every man with a sword was running around in plain confusion and it would be difficult getting back to the inn unnoticed.
Then an almighty roar shattered the night. That creature wasn’t something the size of a velociraptor, it was more something along the size of a T-Rex. People shouted and screamed from the area where Mr. Marset last buried his money. Was there a monster out there bigger than Old Bettie? Did I manage to mix it up? I never confirmed with Tomu just how large his big was relative to mine when he described Old Bettie to me. I shuddered to think there might have been something with far bigger teeth out there.
The town quickly emptied of people as they headed towards the noisy cacophony at the back of town. That allowed Hana and I to quietly slip into town near the inn. We inadvertently bumped into Haruhime on the way in.
“What’s happening out there? Someone has Old Betty’s knickers in a twist.”
Why is it that everyone except me knew about the humungous carnivorous dinosaur living outside of town?
“Oh, probably some idiot walking around where they shouldn’t.”
I dryly commented. We didn’t hang around for more conversation in case more pertinent questions headed our way. For a long time afterwards, the town remained noisy. By the time I fell asleep, I rested in the knowledge that Mr. Marset wouldn’t be sleeping well that night. Desperation always takes short cuts.
The next morning the old man greeted me warily at work.
“You wouldn’t happen to know the reason behind all the commotion in town last night?”
“If you wanting to know about why Mr. Marset went out into the bush to bury his money and then discovered all his previous stashes were missing and then tried to rebury his third stash only to find it discover it too went missing? Then no. I also know nothing about why a large man-eating monster was chasing men out in the bush or why there’s more money bags in the back of the store now.”
“You sure don’t know a lot. Mr. Marset’s armed men managed to kill Old Bettie last night, probably cost them a few lives I imagine. I’d still be careful out there though, who knows what crawls out there in middle of the night.”
I smiled. If only he knew.