23
“Well? Got anything to say?” he asked, as they sat opposite one another on the cart.
Zip was sitting with her school knapsack on her lap. At least, he assumed it was her school knapsack. Could have been filled to the brim with stolen diamonds, for all he knew. This being the late afternoon cart, every seat but two was filled with workers heading back to Sunhampton after a hard day in the city. There was Bertie Russel, who worked at Striding Central Bank maintaining the vault and safety deposit boxes. Lucy Sanders-Walker, a trainee scribe who was earning her token at the Striding Star, a salacious newspaper that was usually filled front to back with rumors and tattle. Other faces that Mick had seen around town, but couldn’t put a name to.
“I’m very proud of you, Uncle Mick. Getting on the program. Just think, you’ll be a fully classed inspector someday soon.”
“Sleuth,” he said, “Good, ain’t it? But don’t change the subject. What’s going on?”
“I was just hungry, and the fried potato vendor probably throws lots of unsold potatoes out at the end of the day. All that food going to waste, day after day. It’s terrible, don’t you think?”
“Not something I particularly like,” said Mick.
“It’s a crime. They ought to be arresting him, not me.”
“I hate throwing perfectly good food away as much as the next person, believe me, but that wasn’t your choice to make. What’re you doing all the way here in Striding on a school day, anyhow? Where’s your uniform?”
“School trip. We’re allowed casual clothes on trip days.”
That caught him off guard. It was almost plausible. When he went to Sunhampton School, they’d gone on all sorts of trips. Hardcastle Textile Museum, the Hattersdale Gardens. He distinctly remembered never having to wear his uniform on those days. This made him worry, though. Was Zip’s teacher in the city right now, frantically searching for her after doing a headcount and coming up one pupil short?
Something about his niece’s expression made him shove those doubts away. He leaned forward and said, “Look your uncle in the eyes and tell him that you were on a class trip today.”
Zip stared at him with her big, brown eyes and said, “I was on a class trip today.”
Incredible. She can lie right to my face like that, and not even blink.
“Then your Ma will remember signing a permission slip for it, won’t she?” he said.
“She’s busy…”
Mick’s sister, Kiera, was certainly busy. No doubting that. She worked at a farmer’s agricultural store in Perentee during the day, and she was studying towards her solicitor’s tokens at night. Sometimes, she covered a shift or two at the King’s Head, as well. The poor woman barely got a chance to sit down. Mick had bought her an artificed lounge chair from Lewis Cooper for her last birthday. It was supposed to mold itself around her to be as comfy as possible. He'd be surprised if she’d let herself sit down on it even once.
School trips, a busy mother. It was possible. This was what made Zip so dangerous, he realized. She didn’t just tell lies; she layered them with the truth. Master that skill, and you could get away with anything. Unless she applied her lying ability in a job where it was accepted if not expected, like politics or journalism, she was going down a dark road.
“Your ma isn’t so busy she’d forget where you’re supposed to be,” he said. “Especially if it was a school trip. You know how I know?”
“Because you know everything?”
“Your ma and me went on a trip to Fullridge Park with school, and she got too close to a nest of bees and got stung all over. There’s no way in heck she’d just sign away a permission slip for a trip without looking carefully at where you were going.”
“Oh. Well…”
“Zip, come on. Just tell me. You’re already caught. Lying hardly makes it better, does it?”
She crossed her arms. “I didn’t go to school this morning. I paid for a seat on the commuter cart. Happy?”
“Wagon.”
“Whatever. I came here and messed around a bit. Okay? Is that a crime?”
“Truanting might not be illegal, Zip, but stealing fried potatoes is, yeah. That’s why I bumped into you at Elmshore East station.”
Just then, something strange happened. A flash of yellow light caught his gaze, and words started to drift out from his token bracelet, knitting themselves into the air before his very eyes. He was caught off guard for only a moment, though; he knew about token text and how people saw it when they got new ranking and what not. It was just that he’d never seen it for himself except for in an illustration in a school text book.
Experience towards Simple Interrogation skill tree
You have learned information from a witness or perpetrator [1/20]
Mick pushed up his sleeve and stared at his token bracelet in wonder. Incredible how these tokens see what I do and tell me what experience I get. All I need to do is coax information out of nineteen more people, and I’ll get the Simple Interrogation skill tree.
He suddenly had the desire to talk to everyone on the wagon, even though commuters generally wanted to be left alone to destress after a hard day’s work, or to just snooze until they got home. Maybe their reluctance to talk would help him satisfy his skill tree requirements.
Then again, the token text said he needed to get information from a reluctant witness or perpetrator. Nothing had been witnessed or perpetrated here on the wagon, had it?
Besides, there was still Zip to deal with. He wanted to be a good uncle. He wanted her to be able to come to him when she needed something. Saints knew she needed a role model. Kiera was who Zip really ought to look up to, of course, but she was really busy, and Mick felt a kid needed a role model besides their parent. For him, it had been his geography teacher, Mrs. Clyde. When Mick was struggling at school, she’d pushed him. Maybe that was what Zip was lacking.
Thing was, as much as Mick wanted to be on Zip’s side, he also had a duty to tell his sister about this. No getting around that.
“Uncle Mick,” she said, leaning forward. “I’m sorry. I know it was wrong.”
He couldn’t tell if she meant it, or if she was playing him. That was the problem with Zip. She could be a lovely kid, an absolute diamond sometimes. But you never knew when to trust her.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
“I suggest you save all this for your mother. She’s gonna want an explanation.”
“Only if you tell her.”
“It ain’t my decision to tell her or not. I have to, it’d be irresponsible otherwise. That’s that.”
“Call yourself an uncle?” she said.
Mick couldn’t help feeling like some unseen assassin had slipped a dagger between his ribs and really wiggled it around to get it wedged in all nice and tight. Part of him knew you shouldn’t give credence to the words of a kid who was lashing out, but even stray arrows accidentally hit the right mark sometimes. His thoughts strayed to his bag by his feet, to the birthday present in there that was already late.
Then, a different part of him, somewhere along the path of his sleuth’s logical side, waved a hand and got his attention. She’s playing you again, it told him.
“You’re not sorry at all, are you?” he said.
Caught in her lies, Zip folded her arms to form a barrier around herself. “Have you been to school lately, Uncle Mick? It’s ridiculous. Concentrate in class, don’t swear. They ask too much. And the teachers are lazy. They don’t care. They ought to pay me to go there.”
“Saints alive. You’re going down the wrong path, girl, and your mother…”
“She won’t notice.”
“Now, that’s not fair. She works hard.”
Zip said nothing, and Mick found himself with not a word further to say, either. They sat there in a state of impasse as the wagon rolled along the travelers’ roads toward Sunhampton.
The wagon stopped abruptly, and with the absence of the sound of the wagon wheels turning came the yelling of an extremely loud curse. Fearing road bandits – a rare but not completely inexistent threat – Mick told Zip to stay there and climbed through the gap in the tarpaulin and out of the wagon.
Outside in the brisk, evening air, he saw that there were no road bandits around. The problem was that the carriage’s front-left wheel had broken. It had split in two near the top, rendering it completely useless.
He was about to ask the driver what had happened, when something gave him pause. He remembered the token text he’d gotten after getting Zip to tell the truth, and wondered if maybe this was an opportunity to boost one of his other tokens.
Time for some deduction and observation, he thought. What’s happened here, then? Let’s see. Wheel’s split in two. Only one wheel looks damaged, though. The others are fine. It’s either mechanical failure, or it ran over something on the road.
Mick had never heard of a mechanical failure that would cause a wheel to split in half. That made no sense. Thing was, there was nothing in the road that he could see that might have caused such damage, either.
Ahead of him, the driver hopped down from his seat. He was on the older side of things but looked sprightly enough for it, and he supplemented his long, gray-brown hair with a beard like an untamed shrub. Hanging out of the back pocket of his dungarees was a handkerchief covered in black stains. It had his initials embroidered in the corner – B.D. After a quick check in with his horses, he attended to the wheel, kneeling beside it with the look of a man who’d already had a long day, and by the saints’ beards, he really didn’t need this.
“What do you know, busted to heck and back,” he said.
“Wagons always have a spare, don’t they?” asked Mick.
“This is the spare. Had to change a wheel on the way to Striding. Shoulda bought a new one there, but they charge a fortune, an’ I thought I’d make it back to ‘hampton. Got half a dozen spares in my workshop – don’t see why I should fork out. Just my luck. Ever heard of a fella getting struck by lightning twice in one day?”
“My cousin Scott stood in two cow pats in one morning. And that was in the Hattersdale Museum of Fine Art. To this day we have no idea what happened.”
“Well, say a prayer and call the priest - this wheel’s seen its last.”
Mick joined him by the wheel, standing over his shoulder. Gaining no further information from his current stance, he knelt down beside the wheel just like the driver was doing. Everyone knew that if something was broken and you knelt by it, your odds of diagnosing the fault were instantly doubled. Just one of those magical, unexplainable facts of life.
He was no crafter, but up close, even he could see that the spare wheel’s wood looked completely different to the other wheels. It was a duller color, even green from the spread of moss in places, and it was as brittle as a cracker. This thing would have been better served as a rustic garden ornament, rather than supporting a commuter cart.
This didn’t make a lick of sense. Most carriage drivers in Easterly were self-employed. Every journey they missed was like throwing gold coins in a river. He couldn’t imagine any driver using a spare wheel that was in such a terrible state.
“That spare…it looks like it got submerged in water then dried out,” he said.
“Saints damn me for trying to save a coin or two,” said the driver. “Repairs come out of my own pocket, you know. There was this fella in Larking. He was selling wagon wheels for cheap. Bought me half a dozen of them, I did.”
Mick, a veteran coin-pincher, could only shake his head. “First rule of thrifting: it ain’t the price that’s important, it’s the value. Sometimes, you have to spend more to get something that’ll last longer.”
“Well, we ain’t moving for a while yet. Not until I can get us another spare.”
“And now it’s raining,” said Mick, holding his hand out to let raindrops fall on his palm.
“Perfect. There’s a tavern just over yonder. Do me a favor, will ya, and help me move Old Nellie to the side of the road. Then you and the other folks can go sit in the tavern, and I’ll see about a spare.”
Old Nellie. Sure enough, that was the name of the carriage, painted in black letters for all to see. Mick couldn’t wait to tell Nell about this later on. She’d get a laugh out of it.
The driver studied the vehicle at the side of the road. “That should be alright. It’s sticking out a bit, but wouldn’t say it was blocking the road, would you?”
“People can get past,” said Mick.
“Well, thank you kindly.”
With the wagon safely off the road, there wasn’t much else to be done. Robbed of anything practical, Mick could only fall back on ruminations to pass the time. That, or clamber back into the passenger compartment and try to coax conversation out of Zip. He’d have more luck panning for gold in a swamp.
All he’d wanted to do was get home and tell Ma about the exam, then go for a few celebratory beers in the King’s Head. This was a real pain in the arse. It wasn’t a complete loss, though; he wasn’t at all happy to be waylaid, but his irritation was eased a smidgeon by some more token text.
Experience towards Simple Deduction skill tree
You have used logic and observation to deduce something [1/25]
Just what was it that’d earned him the token text this time? Was it the stuff about the spare? All he’d noticed was that it didn’t seem right for a driver to use a wheel in such poor condition. Still, he’d noticed it all the same, told the driver, and the man had explained about it. He supposed that the carriage breaking down was an event, and this was a deduction.
Need to remember that. It doesn’t have to be a crime that grows my experience tree. It just needs to be a mystery, a puzzle, something to work out.
The driver walked around the wagon so he was facing the passenger compartment at the back, where the commuters were sheltering from the rain.
“Ladies and Gents, I’m sorry to say we’re stuck. Wheel’s busted. Now, you’re welcome to stay in Old Nellie, but it’s getting cold, and that thing ain’t artificed. There’s a tavern five minutes’ walk over yonder,” he said, pointing at a building at the end of a dirt path, not far from the road. “You go warm yourselves up. Get a nice beer, a cocoa. Heck, go wild if you want. Just don’t get so drunk so you’re causing a disturbance when we’re back on the road. Go on, you go inside that nice little tavern, and I’ll find another spare and get us back on the road.”
The commuters climbed down from the wagon one by one, then headed in a strangely solemn-looking procession toward the Salted Cod, a tavern not unlike many you’d see on Easterly’s commuting roads. Lots of taverns looked alike in this part of Easterly because they had been built on the orders of King Khaled, the same fella who’d lost his head in Sunhampton and had the local drinking hole named after him.
Khaled was fighting against the Kingdom of the Right and True back then, and he’d ordered the road taverns to be built at strategic spots all across Easterly so his soldiers could grab a comfy bed every so often. They were cheap, throw-em-up-in-a-week structures, although the taverns that were still operating had most likely undergone structural renovations in the years since. Back then, though, they were cheap to make, and they served the soldiers for free under royal decree. A decent guy was Khaled, if you asked Mick. He put a lot of stock in his soldiers’ welfares. Well, if you discounted the fact he called ‘em up to war in the first place. So actually, not a good guy at all, come to think of it.
Anyhow, the northern Easterly tavern design was famous throughout the land, and as such, lots of places looked just like the Salted Cod. If you were traveling the roads and you saw a building with a thatched roof, stables, and smoke rising from a chimney, odds were you could grab a bed, a bite, and a beer there.
“Is everything okay?” said Zip.
She and Mick were at the back of the group, which meant that they’d most likely struggle to get a table in the tavern. He bet the Salted Cod had never had so many visitors all at once. Whoever owned this place was about to have a very profitable evening.
“Just a break down,” said Mick. “Wheel decided to split in two.”
“Doesn’t he have a spare?”
“He did. It was the spare that broke. The thing looked older than Grandma Wells.”
Zip laughed at the mention of Granny Wells. She was Mick’s grandmother, which made her Zip’s great grandmother. She and Zip got along like a house on fire.