It went like this.
While reviewing what I’d learned, I noticed that there was a commonality among the passengers of the ship who had claimed to have seen the monster – all of them had held a similar job among the conspirators, working to manage the finances of the factory. I also learned from one of the detectives I’d spoken to that, during the course of their investigation, it had come to light that the leaders of the operation had taken a loan from a organized crime group in Last Respite in order to finance the the construction of the machinery. Together, I found these details curious.
So, on a whim, I decided to do a little digging while working on my article draft. I spoke with one of the members of this group, as well as a worker at the factory who had only been charged with lesser oath breaking due to giving themselves up freely. And, slowly, without even really meaning to, I found myself forming a theory.
What if, in truth, there hadn’t really been any money to smuggle at all?
What if the group that managed the finances had miscalculated in their original estimates as to how profitable the factory would really be, between evading the law and purchasing all the required equipment? According to the data I’d obtained, the war ended only 2 years after they’d finally managed to get up and running. What if, by the time it had run its course, they’d failed to break even?
The idea gripped me. Against my better judgement, I went looking deeper into their paper trail. Into the proxies they’d used to sell the parts they were producing, and how much profit they recorded. Then, finally, I spent a large chunk of the money my father had given me when I left home to take a ship out to the site of the wreck, along with a few experts. (This is where I started to get a bit uncharacteristically obsessional.)
And there, following a little inference, I discovered the truth.
The financial overseers had made a terrible mistake. The operation had not only failed to break even, it had failed to even pay off their original debt. Fearing punishment by their associates, they’d kept this a secret for as long as they possibly could, first assuming that the war would simply linger on long enough for them to avoid the problem, and then after it had ended, that they’d be able to sell the machines on the black market to at least eventually recoup the costs. But then, when news came that the oath keepers were planning a raid, it was too late.
They saw no other option but to keep up the lie even as it became dangerous. They made excuses to their associates as to why they couldn’t see the money, and offered the money-lenders desperate platitudes. Their plan, awkward and foolhardy as it was, became to flee the rest of their group once they arrived at Sacred Valley and the truth came out.
But half way through the trip, it all went horribly wrong.
While they were at sea, their leader, becoming paranoid, decided it would be better to distribute the money before their arrival, to make sure there was no funny business. When he refused to change his mind, they told him the truth. But he didn’t believe it. By this point, he’d invested and lost so much that he wasn’t able to accept that it was all for nothing. He became convinced the financial circle was simply hiding it for themselves.
And as it turns out, a group based around manufacturing weapons is likely to keep a few of their own lying around. The situation devolved into violence; the true cause of the massacre.
The boat descended into chaos. Almost all the crew and most of the central members of the conspiracy were killed, including the leader. But in a twist of fate – or perhaps because some of them had anticipated this eventuality – the majority left alive were of the financial circle. But though they had managed to save their own lives, they now found themselves on a ship they could barely steer and was now obviously the sight of a massacre. Docking at Sacred Valley as they had planned was now impossible.
In a panic, they made a desperate bid to turn a terrible situation into merely a bad one. They invented the story of the monster to absolve themselves of guilt and coordinated their accounts so a disproportionate amount of the crimes would be laid at the foot of the dead. They destroyed records that highlighted their involvement, while making sure the rest would survive. Then, after desecrating the bodies to match their revised version of events, they punctured a hole in the hull and fled.
And that was it. The truth of the monster of the Silent Sea, which had lingered for almost a hundred years. A mundane story about some idiots who couldn’t balance their books properly.
Or so I’d thought. But as it turned out, that wasn’t how it would perceived at all.
18 Days Hence
“Frankly, she was a cunt.”
Well, I thought, this is off to a fantastic start.
We were in the Forum, though not the Forum part of the Forum. Still, it was one of the more prominent public squares, a medium-sized enclave of maybe forty higher-end shops and restaurants about twenty minutes walk from the center of the district, sitting at the base of a bunch of tall, modern stone offices and apartments; the sort of area where everyone lives and works in tiny boxes, and pays a fortune for the priviledge. Everything was grey, but the expensive-looking shiny sort of grey, where you could mistake it for a sort of dirty marble if you didn’t squint. At the center was a fountain, four-levelled and ornate, but it was shut off on account of them pissing around with the water supply for something to do with the parade route.
(If you’re wondering how I knew that last piece of trivia– Well, let’s just say it will come up later.)
We were outside, at one of the multitudes of the cafes that always spring up around such locations, like a breed of lichen exclusive to middle class indulgence. The air smelled of coffee, hastily-made bakery, and the faint acidic bite of human sweat. It was busy. This was a hub for office work, and multitudes of people were on their lunch breaks.
Him included. Fahri Demir.
The other side to Anna’s coin, I had already decided. She had been the apostle; close enough to her in the right contexts to develop affection, distant enough in others. The correct combination of affirmation and alienation to cultivate that phenomena we call celebrity. To elevate Michelle from a human being into something that almost resembled the divine.
For him, it was the inverse. He saw only the ugly parts.
It was a pity that Sidney wasn’t here. She’d managed to arrange the meeting – he’d offered to do it on short notice, so we’d only discussed it a couple hours earlier, a little after my conversation with Abigail – but had been too busy with her classes to make it herself. She might’ve appreciated the perspective, after the previous night.
“You’ll pardon my vulgarity,” he said, stirring his tea in a harsh, swift motion, “but there’s simply no nice way to put it. Everyone loathed her, and with good reason.”
“Everyone?” I asked, redundantly.
“Everyone,” he affirmed. “I can’t think of a single individual within the staff who didn’t find her immensely frustrating. She exploited her ‘special status’ to its absolute bloody limit.”
“Can you elaborate?” I asked.
“God where to even begin…?” He furrowed his brow. “It wasn’t just that she treated the job like an accessory. She treated us like accessories. She knew the managers wouldn’t let her go, no matter how she behaved, and used that as an excuse to turn the job into an ego trip at our expense. Whatever our positions on paper, we all ended up with only one in practice: to sniff her farts and tell her they smelled like roses.”
I nodded, taking a sip of my coffee. It was black, which I didn’t actually like. But people take you slightly more more seriously if you drink black coffee, which can make a important difference.
Hey, don’t give me that look. When you’ve spent long enough interviewing people, you notice these things.
Fahri cut a distinct figure. He was a tall and skinny man, with dark tan skin and a long, angular face. His hair was deep black, thick and coarse, and he bore a heavy beard – but all of it was finely groomed and trimmed, giving him something of an air of cultured hyper-masculinity. I imagined this was was designed to offset the fact that his frame, especially around the shoulders, was actually rather slight. He wore a brown suit and a black tie; professional but not quite conventional, like something you’d expect to see on a university professor.
Finally, there was a certain smug aloofness in his eyes, and his attitude of refined but unreserved bluntness reflected it. I had the distinct feeling that I’d hate him if I tried to get to know him personally, (we’d only been sitting together for five minutes, and I’d already developed something of a distinct distaste) but as an interviewee, it was not inconvenient. It was a lot easier than dealing with politely reserved people, like Abigail.
Abigail. I was still trying to process her.
Annoyingly, Fahri had turned out to be less useful than we’d originally presumed he’d be, because he wasn’t actually still employed at the observatory. In a stroke of bad luck that was almost a little amusing, it had turned out he had resigned just six months prior, making using him as a means to secure a visit to the place impossible.
Still. I had the sense he still had something to offer, after a fashion.
“I haven’t had the chance to read it,” I said, “but my co-investigator–”
“You mean the plain girl with the short hair?” he asked. “I spoke to her this morning.”
Maybe it wasn’t a pity that Sidney wasn’t here, after all. “That’s her. She told me you did an article for a magazine in Thousand Seeds about some of the troubles the rest of the staff had with her. You talked about her forcing people to change their schedules around her, placing blame on others for her mistakes…”
“Oh, that’s not even the half of it,” he said. What was probably an office assistant walked past us out of the cafe’s interior, carrying a bag stuffed to the brim with sandwiches. “They didn’t print half what I told them. The editor all but told me outright that she wanted to push some kind of milquetoast narrative about her being tragically troubled and acting erratically out of stress, rather than the truth, which is that she was just fundamentally selfish person.” He rolled his eyes. “Not that one can expect any better from the mainstream press.”
Hmm. “What did they cut out?” I asked.
“Doubt I could recount it all if I tried. It was the greater part of the interview.” He shook his head. “Individually, it was small things, but the result – the totality of it – came to dominate every aspect of working there. To name a few, her project proposals would always be accepted and prioritized over others. Her name was always listed first on every paper the observatory put out. And anyone who didn’t accommodate her requests – usually passing work on to someone else – would be scolded by the director. I should know; it happened to me more than once.”
“When you say ‘director’, you’re talking about Ernest Lorrel, right? I heard a little about him, earlier on.”
“Yes, that’s the man,” he said, nodding. “Director and head researcher– And a smug bastard, if I do say so myself. Michelle and him were close. I heard that even before she become famous, he used to do her a lot of favours and overlook her bad behavior.” He eyed me. “Though that’s only rumor, so don’t ask me to back it up.”
“I understand,” I said, stirring my spoon through the dark liquid in my cup. I was tempted to push the line of inquiry a bit, but he came across as the type of person who was cordial only so long as you accepted their narrative wholesale. Who expected you to play the role of supportive listener, and only that role.
On the other hand, it wasn’t like he was an essential witness. I tested the waters a little. “Couldn’t this all have been just due to Ernest’s bias, then? These sound more like problems to do with management then than with her own character, strictly speaking.”
As I’d predicted, I saw him flinch slightly, and switch to a more defensive tone. “Well– Bear in mind, she was well aware that all of this was going on. I all but confronted her about it, on one occasion.”
“Is that right?” I asked. “What was the context?”
“It was one of our shifts together, analyzing some data from the previous nights observation. We alone in the building, and she commented, in her oh-so-smug tone, that she was looking forward to our next project… An investigation into an incidence of abnormal gravity in a binary system, if I recall. Of course, it hers, like always. But she seemed utterly bereft in self-awareness concerning the matter. So I said outright–”
“You know the only reason that the director picked the project was because it was you who suggested it, don’t you?”
She hesitated, putting on that infuriating faux-demure air that she always fell back on when pushed, and looked away from me.
“You’re always taken more seriously.”
“You don’t know anything,” she said, not looking back up. “Without me, this place wouldn’t even be getting grants, and you’d be out of a job. You should be grateful I’m here at all.”
“Can you believe that?” he said, sneering. “The absolute nerve! I’ve never met someone so full of themselves.”
“That… does make it sound like she had a rather inflated ego,” I said, hoping my skepticism didn’t come out in my tone. I didn’t get the impression he was outright lying – he seemed far too worked up for that – but his depiction of the event was obviously biased as hell. It was increasingly obvious that he had a chip on his shoulder the size of a mountain range when it came to Michelle.
“And there was much more than that, too. The way she made us all work around her went well beyond just making us cover for her absences, or trying to pin blame on us for her mistakes,” he went on. “There were three occasions when were all but forced to do interviews for the newspapers about our experiences working with her. And when I say forced, I mean literally. We were told to do it, and practically given pre-written answers for their questions! Fucking outrageous.” He ran a hand through the side of his beard. “And before you tell me I’m blaming her for the actions of the management again, she was the one who set them up to begin with.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“She told us openly. Plus, she was there when we got the lecture from Ernest about how we were expected to conduct ourselves to the press, and let me tell you– She didn’t show a lick of shame. The bitch had this chipper attitude throughout the whole process, like she was taking us all on a fun adventure.” He rolled his eyes.
I thought about his words for a few moments, trying to consider how the events he was describing could look from other perspectives. “Do you think it’s possible she was being instructed to do it, herself? Maybe to promote the observatory to the public or to investors, something like that?”
He shook his head. “I very much doubt it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the two of them had some sort of tacit arrangement for her to play the role of mascot, but she made more money then all of the rest of us put together, including the director. It’s not as though he’d have been able to put much pressure on her.”
“Mm.”
“She took control of the work environment, too. Everything from petty things like how the tables ought to be arranged to changes to the entire building. She was so paranoid about the idea of people coming to stalk her at work that she had this excessive security system installed, which made it impossible to even take a quick cigarette break outside without the director knowing about it.”
Oh, I remember reading about this. “You’re talking about the logging system on the door, right? Where it keeps a record of everyone who enters or exits.”
“You know about it already, then,” he said, leaning back.
“Yeah, it came up when I was initially researching the case.” I shuffled forward a bit, in accord. “At the time, I remember feeling puzzled that an observatory would have something so advanced.”
“Well, now you know. Just another example of everything orbiting around her.” He sipped from his own drink. “I know that you’re probably thinking that I’m being unreasonable for discounting her personal safety, but if she was concerned enough that simply installing a better lock wouldn’t do the job, then frankly, she ought to have resigned. It made the place feel like a prison. She poisoned the atmosphere there. If it wasn’t for some of my friends, I would have quit.” He set the cup back down on the table. The motion was harsh, like his tone. “Besides. It wasn’t as if it did much to help her, from whatever happened in the end.”
Wow, that’s callous, even by the standard you’ve been setting. “Right,” I said, with a stiff nod. “Speaking of your colleagues– I feel like this question might come across the wrong way, but are you sure everyone felt the same way as you?”
“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said, his tone absolutely confident. “Other than her and the director, the rest of the staff were all very close. I met my wife there, though she resigned years ago. We went out together for drinks once a week, and let me tell you– We all spoke quite openly about our feelings for miss Corrick.”
Hearing that, regardless of if she was as insufferable as he described, I couldn’t help but feel a little pity for Michelle. I knew firsthand how miserable it was to work in an environment where everyone seemed to hold you in contempt.
“She wasn’t invited, I presume?”
“Oh, no, that’s the funniest part. She was. Fuck me, the director would have given us no end of torment if we’d excluded her explicitly.” He crossed his arms. “But she never once came along to anything since she came back from the war, even in the earlier days when everyone was giving her a bit more of a chance, even myself. Too busy with her high-society friends to pay us any mind, I suppose.”
Never? That seemed… Odd. You’d think that, since she went out of her way to keep her job, she would have made at least a token effort.
But if her relationship to her colleagues really was that terrible, maybe Russel’s speculation about a conspiracy to cover up her death wasn’t too far-fetched?
“Since we’re talking about the staff,” I said, with an attempt at a smile, “I suppose this is where we sort of come to the difficult part…”
He raised an eyebrow. “Which is?”
“Where I ask you if you think anyone might’ve wanted her dead.” I hesitated. With the way people discussed the matter, it was easy to forget that there was no definitive proof that Michelle had actually died on that night. “Or for her to disappear, at least.”
“Ah, that part.” He chuckled. “You needn’t stress yourself, miss Stadahl. I knew what I was signing up for when your friend contacted me.”
“I was a little surprised when I heard you’d offered to do this so quickly, to tell the truth,” I said. Make them feel they’re being let behind the scenes a little bit, and their tongues will loosen. That was a move even known by novices. “I even told my partner she could offer you some money.”
“Heh, well, now I feel a bit stupid for agreeing so quickly.” He idly tapped his finger against the side of his cub. “How much would it have been?”
I shrugged. “Probably something in the realm of about 200 vouchers.”
“Pity.” He clicked his tongue, shaking his head a little. “I think I just wanted to vent, more than anything else. Nowadays, the only context that most people talk about Michelle– Well, it’s like they’re discussing a fallen saint. Always going on about her virtues, her selflessness. I have to have these talks every so often, or it feels like I’m losing my mind.”
“It really bothers you that much? I mean– Even after all this time?”
For a moment, his expression seemed a little distant and vague, and he seemed to struggle to find words. But then it hardened once again into a smirk. “What can I say. I hold a grudge, especially when it’s for a mistreatment that lasted so many years.” He finished off his tea, taking a few gulps at once before exhaling deeply. “But to your question: No. I don’t think any one among the staff would have gone as far as killing her. We all disliked her, but she was more of a particularly persistent irritant than someone anyone genuinely hated.”
“You feel confident in saying that?” I asked, pushing a little hair out of my eyes as the wind picked up a bit. There was more rain scheduled for the day, but not until late in the evening.
He nodded. “I’ll tell you from personal experience, you have to be really close to someone to genuinely want them dead. And she made extremely sure to keep her distance from everyone there. Even the director, by the end.”
“I see.” I furrowed my brow slightly. “Out of all the staff, was there any one in particular who disliked her the most, do you think?”
“You’re looking at him,” he said, in a surprisingly amused tone. “If you’re hoping to find a suspect among the regular staff, then I’m afraid I’m the best you’re going to get.”
I chuckled, though the gesture was largely empty.
In truth, as a suspect, he was a bit of a mixed bag. He obviously had some deep-seated resentment towards Michelle that went beyond the objections he was openly describing. His expression from a moment ago had all but betrayed that much. But on the other hand, if he’d had anything to do with her disappearance, going out of his ways to do interviews about his feelings – his profoundly negative feelings – towards her, seemed like rather a stupid move.
The conventional wisdom (and when I say “wisdom”, I refer to the popular culture understanding of the term, where if something is repeated often enough then it becomes viewed as a sort of “honorary truth”, regardless if it is or isn’t utter horseshit) was that the killer always returned to the scene of the crime, either literally or figuratively, out of some twisted combination of guilt and fear. So that didn’t render it entirely out of the question that he was involved, but…
“Were you even there, on the night it happened?” I asked.
“Ah, you’re spoiling my joke, miss Stadahl.” He let out a single snort of laughter. “As a matter of fact, I wasn’t. Like much of the regular staff, my wife and I had taken the holiday off to spend some together.”
Ah, that’s what I figured. “Were you attending the parade?”
“Good lord, no!” He scoffed. “Even if it weren’t for Michelle’s involvement, we both loathe the tasteless theatricality around the damn thing. And that’s back then, let alone whatever gaudy nightmare they’re going to pull out of their arses this year.” He sighed to himself. “No, her brother passed away during the revolution, so we’ve made a tradition out of visiting his grave on the day in question. It’s down near the Glass Dock. That was the case on that day, too.”
“I see.” I nodded a little. “That does seem like a fairly tight alibi, yes.” It was probably the reason he wasn’t afraid of being honest about his feelings.
Of course, an alibi is only as good as the people willing to back it up.
“The Watch felt so, too,” he said. “Not that it would matter either way. I’m sure you’re well aware that that the staff all reported – Ernest included – that no one other than her went upstairs all through the night. The rest of the staff were working together closely on the first floor… So even if a bad actor was present, they wouldn’t have been able to act on their own.”
I nodded again. That much was certain, at least. And he wouldn’t have been able to get into the building without triggering the logging mechanism, which showed no one entering…
I frowned to myself.
“For whatever it’s worth to you,” he continued, “I did feel somewhat guilty for my resentment to her, when that all happened. I might have found her insufferable, but I wasn’t wishing for her to be killed, or abducted, or whatever actually happened. I’m not a psychopath.”
“At the risk of being a little impolite, you don’t seem very regretful about it, at this point,” I said.
I worried that this might have been pushing things a bit. But instead, he spoke with only dismissive apathy, not even meeting my eyes. “I don’t believe in whitewashing the dead simply because they’re dead. She was an absolutely dreadful person to be around, who happened to meet an unjust end. One doesn’t cancel out the other, in my book.”
I made an accepting hum, but I struggled to believe that was the truth. Most people didn’t really think like that – loftily managing both contempt of someone and sadness at their misfortune at the same time – and every signal he was sending showed he really didn’t give a damn about her in any capacity.
But then, I wasn’t here to question his moral character.
“That said, if you’re looking for a lead, I can certainly provide you with one I doubt you’ve heard before.”
“Really.” I raised an eyebrow.
He seemed to contemplate something for a moment, then his lips curled into a smirk. “It’s not something well-known, but… Michelle actually wasn’t the first person to disappear in that observatory.”
What? “Go on,” I said, frowning in surprise.
“You must have come across the proper name of the building at some point in your investigation, I assume? The Philippe Kradlowe Observatory.”
I nodded, though it was a detail I only vaguely remembered from some newspaper articles.
“Ernest has done his best to bury it in terms of public perception, but the building actually has quite an interesting history.” The waitress wandered past again, and this time, he quickly caught her eye. “Ah, some more tea, please? The same as before.” She muttered something in assent and moved on, and he turned his eyes back to me. “It wasn’t constructed, originally, as a scientific institution. Instead, it was something more akin to a… Private project, let’s say.”
“That’s a bit of a vague way to put it,” I said, narrowing my eyes as I sipped again from my coffee.
“Forgive me, miss Stadahl. I’m merely best considering how to explain this.” He ran his tongue around the edge of his lips, his eyes turned upward in thought. “The founder, Philippe Kradlowe, was a man with some… eccentric beliefs. You could call him something like an occultist, perhaps.”
I furrowed my brow. “He believed in the supernatural?”
“Perhaps not per-se. He would, at least, have described himself as having a scientific mindset, even if it’s unlikely most of his contemporaries would have agreed…” He clasped his hands together in front of his mouth. “I doubt you’ll have heard of it as someone outside the field, but there’s a fringe theory at the periphery of the astronomy community referred to by its followers as Extrachronistic Portentism, of Emanation Theory.”
“Extrachronistic Portentism,” I repeated. I turned the words around in my head. “Portents… Outside of time? Is that what it’s meant to be? Doesn’t sound very… Scientific.”
He snorted. “It isn’t. But sounding fanciful is more important than strict legitimacy, in these sorts of circles.”
“What is it supposed to be, exactly? Telling the future through looking at the stars?” I spoke in a skeptical tone. “That’s basically astrology, isn’t it?”
“In fact, it’s inspired to a considerable degree by astrology. It even uses some of the symbology. But it coats itself in aesthetic of scientific pretense.” He chuckled a little to himself. “You’re aware how we perceive time in the rest of the universe in a dilated fashion, of course.”
I nodded. “The Spine perceives information trans-planarly at a much faster rate than light, so what we’re seeing when we look up at the sky is the final moments of the old world in incredibly slow motion.”
“That’s close to the truth, but not completely accurate,” he explained. “Time, you see, is itself understood to exist as only a single dimensional axis within conventional space; a facet only perceivable from certain positions within the multiverse rather than an absolute. While the Spine de-facto emulates the linear progression of events from our perspective, what we perceive in the outside universe is not, strictly speaking, the end of time, but rather a… ‘memory’, for want of a better term, of its breakdown and the subsequent inviability of conventional matter.”
“Uh, you’re going a little over my head, mister Demir.” I actually understood the better part of it, but I wanted him to get to the point.
“My apologies,” he said, though he didn’t look very apologetic. I was willing to bet he was the sort of person who liked to use his knowledge as a sort of conversational bludgeon on a regular basis. “What I mean is, there’s a school of thought who interpret astronomy not as a study of past events, but something more usefully conceptualized as taking place at the same time.” He lowered his hands. “Which means interactivity is possible. That’s what gave birth to this theory – the idea that trans-planar forces might respond to our world in some way, or vice versa.”
“You know, you could have just agreed with me when I said they thought they could see the future,” I said, dryly. “That would have been simpler.”
He made a dismissive gesture. “For the sake of context, I feel it’s important to convey that these people imagine themselves as intellectuals. But yes, you’re essentially right. They believe that certain stellar phenomena can be interpreted to determine real world events. Some attribute it to some sort of feedback between the Spine and the old world, others to the Dying Gods…” He shrugged. “The specifics are unimportant. But Philippe Kradlowe was a true believer. One of the first, almost 200 years ago.”
“And he built the observatory for this end?” I asked, frowning at how ridiculous this all sounded. Of all the bizarre nonsense already wrapped up in this case…
“Precisely. And for the better part of a 150 years, it served exactly that function. Groups of believers would use it for their divinations, hold meetings. That sort of affair.” The waitress returned with his tea, and he smiled. “Oh, that was quick. Thank you.”
“What ended it?” I asked, as she left.
“Monetary problems, more or less. After Philippe died, the remaining members didn’t have the funds to maintain it, and they ended up selling it to the current owners, who converted it to the scientific purpose it has today.” He sipped from the cup. “But an arrangement was brokered with the organization as part of the sales contract. So long as they obeyed a few basic regulations on conduct, they’d be permitted to continue to use the building and perform their… ‘Studies’, once a week. So it had been since the 830s.”
“Had been,” I echoed.
“Had been, yes.” He smiled wryly. “I’ve only heard the story second-hand, but… Supposedly, it happened in the early 860s, on one of their regular nights. They met up at a nearby pub called the Weary Cat – demolished now – and headed off to the observatory at about eight, as was their routine. They went upstairs to the telescope room… And then were never seen again. Just like Michelle.”
I had to confess, I was a little thrown off. If he was telling the truth, how hadn’t I heard about that already? It sounded like quite a big story, and only 30-something years ago.
Why hadn’t the papers discussed it?
“I… don’t want to be rude, but are you sure this actually happened?” I lifted up my cup again, finishing off my own drink. “It couldn’t have just been– You know, office folklore?”
“Absolutely positive,” he said, nodding. “A lot of the staff, including the director, worked there at the time. It was common knowledge.”
“But I’ve never heard a word about it,” I objected. “Not in the press, not from the inspector I spoke to, not… Anywhere.”
“Perhaps they were simply being negligent,” he said, in a tone that came across as so dismissive that I felt almost certain he was trying to pull something over on me. “As I said, Ernest can be very thorough when it comes to protecting the reputation of the observatory.”
“And you think it’s connected to Michelle’s disappearance,” I said, my eyes narrowed.
“Well, it’s not exactly a leap to assume as much, is it?” He spoke in dismissive tone, as if my statement had been a little stupid. “Same place, roughly the same events. It would surprise me if there was no connection at all, even if only an indirect one.” He stirred his tea. “If you want to find her killer, or kidnapper, looking into that incident is where I’d begin, not chasing trails that have led everyone else nowhere. Figure out one, and I’d bet my shirt the other will be blown right open.”
I nodded, though all of this felt deeply sketchy. He was making a really explicit attempt to direct my inquiry in a direction completely contrary to not just himself, but anything that was going on in the observatory at the time of the murder.
He might not be guilty himself, but was it possible he was protecting someone who was? Had that been why he was so eager to volunteer for the interview– To try and derail the investigation? Or did he have more of a connection to this past incident than he was letting on? Was this whole story just an elaborate fabrication he was inventing on the spot to mock me? Multiple possibilities ran through my mind.
I clicked my tongue. There’s no point fretting about it now, I thought. Direct confrontation without something to back it up would obviously get me nowhere with someone like him. Right now, the best thing I could was simply let him finish what he wanted to say, and think it over later.
“If I were to look into something like this,” I said, as the bells rang out distantly for 1 in the afternoon, “Where exactly would you suggest I start?”
“Most of the staff who were there when this all happened have moved on, but they’re still kicking around. You could likely track them down without too much effort.” He set his up back down. “But I’d be careful. There are a lot of strange rumors that have got wrapped up along with the original story, over the years.”
I detected a note of teasing edging his way into his tone, which I did not appreciate. “Such as?”
“A lot of the staff used to say that the place was haunted by some strange specter or entity, invited by Philippe’s rituals. There was always talk of strange noises in the night, peculiar sightings on long evenings in the upper dome… Even now, some are hesitant to take long shifts alone.” He chuckled. “Of course, you don’t strike me as the superstitious sort, miss Stadahl.”
“I’m not,” I said, bluntly.
“Still, I’d be careful,” he continued. “And avoid looking into it alone, if you can. Even if you’re not contending with a supernatural threat, someone like you could easily get herself hurt, looking into something like this. Whomever orchestrated the disappearances… Well, they’d have to be quite capable.”
I bit my lip. How was I expected to take that?
This discussion had gone to an very strange place.
“One more thing, if you don’t mind,” I said, deciding the best choice was simply to ignore it. “You said that you neither you nor your wife were working on the night of Michelle’s disappearance.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
“How did they make up for the losses? I read that there was some important celestial event that lots of people had come in for– that was supposed to be happening in the evening.”
“Ah, you’re referring to the Norhikan Cluster Collapse. When the impact of the Final War was due to reach an interesting gravitational system in a manner that hadn’t yet been observed.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Frankly, I’m not sure where the director found the manpower. Sometimes he would bring in students, when things were strained. If that was the case, they were probably quite excited to meet Michelle.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t they have been expecting it?”
“I doubt it,” he said, shaking her head. “As far as I’ve heard it, her turning up on that night was a surprise. She’d been coming in more and more erratically during the last few months running up to her disappearance, treating it more and more as a hobby.” He snorted. “She only deigned to grace us with her presence on the occasional whim.”
“Mm,” I said, my tone furtive. It was really getting annoying, how he felt the need to remind me how he hated her guts at literally every single turn, like it was some sort of self-affirming mantra. It was no wonder the magazine had cut half of his testimony.
Later, I would look back on this moment and feel very stupid. That’s the trouble, with dealing with complex matters. Your assumptions of what must be true are built on so many little facts stacked on top of one another, you become so preoccupied with trying to balance new additions at the top of the tower, that you don’t even notice when one or two right at the bottom are quietly stripped away.
