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CHAPTER EIGHT

OLIVIA AND BEN SAID THEY would get Ghaliya back to her room safely. While Ghaliya rolled her eyes and protested that she could get back to the hotel on her own, she was twenty-nine years old, damn it, I hurried down the stairs and around the end of the block, back to the main street.

The hotel door stood open as usual, and the curtain over the bar doorway hung closed, also as usual. But there were merry sounds coming from inside. Hirom was a spectacular barman. He knew how to listen, how to change moods, how to keep a room from breaking out in fights. He was oil over choppy water, and I wasn’t sure there wasn’t a touch of magic in what he did.

I was glad he was running my bar. And yes, I also liked his homemade whisky.

I moved around the bar itself, which jutted out into the big room, while a small sea of tables and the spindle-backed chairs spread across the rest of the room.

No one sat at the locals’ table by the fire, which looked like a screaming advertisement that something was afoot, to me. But King didn’t know that Broch and the others virtually lived at that table, watching the world go by.

The two dryads, my other guests, were talking quietly at the table by the window, where they could still see green growing things through the panes. They both had tall glasses in hand and from the color of the liquid inside, I guessed they had also discovered Hirom’s lemonade.

My mystery guest, the woman I still wasn’t ready to call human, Ms. Caro, sat all the way on the other side of the room, with her back to the wall, and a hardcover book open on the table in front of her. She was drinking beer, which just seemed…wrong. I would have guessed she was a Radler drinker, if she drank beer at all. Sherry seemed more her style.

Not that Ms. Caro had a lot of choice over what to drink, in Hirom’s bar. But most people found his limited range of drinks perfectly adequate. Especially once they’d had a mouthful of either his beer or his whisky, even more so if he poured from the reserve bottles that he kept under the bar.

Ms. Caro’s hair looked too perfectly coiffed. It was the type of hairstyle that went with pearls and a twinset, while she wore a cheap zippered hoodie, and a simple cotton shirt beneath it.

Jarring notes. Trevalyan was always encouraging me to not ignore the jarring notes. But so far, she was one of the few people in my life who wasn’t causing issues. I turned away from the little mystery she presented.

Axel King and his people were in the middle of the room, spread around two of the tables that they had put together. They weren’t crowded up around it, either. They had pushed their chairs out and were sprawled in relaxed positions. None of them wore their jackets. Those were all hung on the backs of their chairs. They’d loosened their ties or taken them off, too.

At least one empty glass sat in front of all of them. Bowls of chips and pretzels and nuts were between them, most of them near-empty.

“Give me a tray,” I told Hirom as I reached the front of the bar.

He didn’t ask why. He just moved down his narrow platform to the shelf where he kept the trays and put one on the bar. I moved along the bar and picked it up. “What round number is this?” I asked him.

Hirom didn’t ask who I was referring to. “They’re on their fourth. I was about to catch the man’s eye, see if they wanted a fifth.”

“Pour a fifth round for me, on the house. I have some buttering up to do.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I glared at him.

“Sure, Anna,” he said, with a broad drawl, and a wink.

I went over to the twinned tables and rested the tray on one corner. Immediately, the six of them sat up straighter. The conversation halted.

“Sorry, just clearing out the empties,” I told them. “Another round is coming, too.”

“I didn’t order one,” King said. He sounded perfectly sober.

“On the house,” I told him.

“Nice,” one of the others murmured, and King speared him with a scowl.

I cleared off the table and picked up the tray. “Coming right up,” I told them. I paused by King’s end of the table, the heavy tray on my hip. “Might I have a word, Agent King?”

He looked up at me. This close, I noticed that he had…well, nice eyes. Then I realized that they weren’t being narrowed, and he wasn’t scowling. That was probably why I hadn’t noticed before. “Sure,” he said, after a minute hesitation.

I took the tray over to the bar and left it there for Hirom to deal with. Agent King followed me over.

“Do you like whisky?” I asked him, because the empty glass that had been sitting in front of him had beer froth on the side.

“Not while I’m working,” King replied.

“Oh.” Well, that killed that ice breaker. “Are you still working?”

“Right up until I step back through my front door.”

Hirom came over and put a full beer glass in front of King.

Okaaay . “How long until you get back?”

“Three months, so far.”

Three months on the road. Wow.

Hirom put a glass in front of me. I had no idea what was in it, but I picked it up anyway and glanced around the bar. My three guests were occupying the wings, and King’s people had the middle ground. “This way,” I told King, and headed for the door. I ducked under the curtain, and across the foyer, into the dining room. It was dim in there, because I had turned the overhead lights off when I had finished in the kitchen.

I veered away from the locals’ table and picked one of the round tables close to the kitchen door.

King had followed me. I expected him to sit directly across the table from me, but instead, he gripped the back of the chair next up from the one beside me, pulled it all the way out, and turned it so he was facing me. He put the beer on the table and sat in the chair. He leaned back and rested his ankle across his knee.

“Ms. Crackstone,” he acknowledged, and waited.

“Do you plan on using my dining room tomorrow, too?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Perhaps.” He looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t think this place runs to conferences rooms.”

“No,” I admitted. “How long do you think you’ll be here?”

“Until we’re satisfied we have all the information we’re looking for.”

It was a nice government-speak null-content answer.

“It’s just that…we’re expecting a lot of guests over the next little while.”

“We’re guests, too,” he said. “Paying guests. Highly paying guests.”

I didn’t bother looking guilty. “Are you going to talk to the people in the diner in Gouverneur?”

King didn’t give away anything, even though I had dropped a bomb on him. He didn’t react at all. But he did reach for his beer and sipped it thoughtfully, and I knew he was playing for time.

“How do you know about that?” he asked softly.

“It’s on the internet.”

“It is not.” He said it with complete assurance.

“Your people are monitoring every Discord channel, every sub-reddit, every private bulletin board out there?” I asked. I did my best to remove all dryness or sarcasm from my voice. I didn’t want to alienate him. Not yet, anyway.

He didn’t answer.

“Who was the woman in the diner?” I asked. “The one who wouldn’t look at the cameras?”

His eyes narrowed again. Yeah, that was the expression I’d seen all day. “That’s on the chat boards, too?”

“Yes.” I gave him a small smile. “We only look as if we’re tucked away from the rest of the world, here. We keep up. Do you know her name, yet?”

He ran his finger up and down his glass, swiping at the condensation. “That, Ms. Crackstone, is none of your business.”

“Call me Anna.” I paused. “You know, Harper does hunt. She’s good at it.”

“You want to talk to me about her hunting on a Federal land reserve, without a license?”

“She stays within the town limits. Always.”

“How do you know that. Do you go with her?”

I know because the Will of the Town won’t let her step across the wards that protect it. I said, instead, “She was here for breakfast. Nine of us saw her at the breakfast table. And she was here for dinner. Nine of us ate roasted pork chops and applesauce with her. Breakfast is at seven-thirty, and finishes after eight a.m. Dinner was like tonight, just after five. You think Harper could have cut across the reserve, and around two lakes, sneaked into Gouverneur with not a single CCTV picking her up, killed Calloway, and got back in time to clean up, shower and walk into my dining room as cool and distant as usual?”

“She is that, isn’t she?” Axel King said. Then he made a hissing sound and pushed the glass of beer away and sat up. “Even if it took her four hours to get to Gouverneur, that still gives her an hours’ window. That’s plenty of time, trust me.”

“And what time did the M.E. say Calloway died?” I asked and watched King’s face carefully. This was the question I had been sent in here to ask. The critical question, for which we needed the answer.

King looked away.

Bingo. Calloway had died either early in the morning, or late in the afternoon, outside Harper’s “window of opportunity.” King had been busy trying to crack Harper open and get her to confess. He hadn’t put it together until now.

If he had considered it, if he’d put it together himself earlier in the day, he would have stared me in the eye right now. I wouldn’t have surprised him.

I was mildly relieved he hadn’t stared me in the eye. Because that would have meant he already knew that Harper couldn’t have done it, but for reasons that didn’t bear close inspection, he had persisted in hammering her, trying to make her…what? Confess to something she hadn’t done?

King reached for his beer once more, and I had to hide my smile. Had he figured the damage was done, so what the hell?

He took a deep swallow and hissed as he put the glass back on the table. “Damn, that’s good,” he said, with a touch of bafflement in his voice.

“Hirom makes it himself. The smallest of microbreweries. He supplies just one bar.”

King nodded absently. “You know, we had a hell of a time finding this place.”

I nodded. “Lots of folk do.” I resisted adding that I had got lost myself, my first time visiting Haigton. It felt like oversharing. I couldn’t forget that this man was a federal agent.

“It’s the damndest thing,” King said. “When we asked for directions at Edwards, even they seemed unsure about where Haigton Crossing was.” Then he frowned. “No, it wasn’t quite like that…” he said, almost to himself. “It was as if they had forgotten about this place, until we mentioned the name. They were almost surprised to hear it.”

I nodded, because that was exactly the reaction I’d got when I’d asked for directions to the turn off, when I had arrived last December.

At least King hadn’t had to tackle knee-high snowbanks to get here.

I sipped my glass of whatever. It was some sort of tart-but-sweet fruit cocktail, with a featherweight kick. The spirit was one of Hirom’s experiments with the still that he kept in the cellar, until he could figure out what to do with it.

King was nodding to himself. “This isn’t the first place to drop off a map.”

“Really?” I said, genuinely surprised.

He nodded again. “I collect maps. Old ones.”

“That’s…I’ve never heard of anyone collecting maps, before.”

“We’re called cartophiles. There’re groups.”

“Recovery groups?”

His attention snapped back to me, and his eyes narrowed.

“Joke,” I said weakly, damning my big mouth. I scrambled to recover. “What is it you like about maps?”

“The history they hint at,” he said. His tone had gone back to far away again. Back to maps he had known, I guessed. “If you study maps, you can tell a lot about the history of a place without cracking open a book. Gouverneur, for example. That’s a French name. Perhaps Gouverneur was settled by the French before the War of 1812. Plus we’re less than twenty miles from the St. Lawrence and the Canadian border here. A lot of people in Gouverneur are probably related to a lot of people in Quebec.”

I nodded, although I knew he was wrong on one point. Gouverneur had been named after a stateman who lived there. I couldn’t remember who, or why. I didn’t know if he was right about Gouverneur residents being related to Quebecois people. I’d have to look it up, later.

“Then there’s Haigton Crossing. Haigton .” His gaze came back to me. “Names on maps mean something.”

“Someone named Haigton built the inn here?” I suggested, with an innocent, but interested tone. In fact, I already knew what the name meant.

“A town of witches, with a crossroads thrown in.” King’s smile was minimal, but it was there. “Maybe a few old women who knew their herbs founded the town. Although this isn’t exactly a crossroads.”

I kept my mouth shut. He was wandering all around the truth without quite stepping on it.

King took another mouthful of his drink. “If you look at maps across time, for the same region, you can see towns grow. And you can see towns vanish.”

“Towns don’t vanish, do they?” I gave a soft laugh.

King studied the bubbles in his glass. “Clarkesville, down in Alabama. It used to be the county seat, but that got moved in the middle of the nineteenth century. The town wasn’t on the maps by the time Queen Victoria died. There’s nothing there now.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Does that happen often?”

King gave the same tiny smile. “If you look at just about any map of what used to be the Gulf of Mexico, up until the end of the nineteenth century, you’ll see an island called Bermeja in the Gulf.”

“A whole island disappeared?”

“It was never there. Surveyors couldn’t find it. No one knows why the island was on maps for over three centuries.” He drank, put the glass down. Only an inch of beer remained. I could wait.

“It goes the other way, too,” King said.

“Maps add places?” I guessed. “I mean, you could put anything on a map that you wanted, can’t you?”

“Sure. And they used to do just that. If you pick up a map of Lancashire made in the 1930s, you might spot a town called Argleton on it.”

“Argleton didn’t exist?”

King shook his head. “Mapmakers put the town on there as a copyright control thing. They would know who was copying their maps, if the town was replicated. But then a general store right in that area adopted the name, and Argleton became a real place for a few decades.”

“It’s not there anymore?”

“Nope. The store closed and Argleton disappeared again. But it lived for a few years because someone put it on a map first.” He drained his beer.

I straightened. “Well…I have to get back to work.”

“This is the first time I’ve found a place in the US that isn’t on a map,” King said. His gaze stayed on me. He was watching for my reaction.

“I got lost getting here the first time, too,” I told him. “Will you be talking to the woman in the diner?” I kept my tone casual.

“No one knows who she is, and we have twenty other witnesses.” His tone was offhand. He kept his gaze on my face. “There’s something odd about Haigton.”

My innards jumped a little. “There’s something odd about any small places, haven’t you noticed?”

“Not like here.” His gaze released me. He got to his feet and picked up his glass. “Thanks for the beer, Ms. Crackstone.”

“Anna,” I said. “Enjoy your evening.”

He didn’t look back as he crossed the foyer and moved back into the bar.

I waited until he had disappeared, then I hurried to the stairs. I had an appointment of my own to keep.