Lake Silence (The Others #6)(70)

First thing this morning, three teenagers came into the station, admitting that they had ignored the after-dark curfew and had gone for a swim at The Jumble the previous night. They swore they’d heard voices—angry female voices that were so close the females must have been in the water too, giving the boys a reason to scramble out and go home. The words? Something about a monkey, which was an animal that lived in Afrikah. So that made no sense. Either the boys hadn’t heard what was said or they were too scared to repeat what they’d really heard.

It didn’t matter to Grimshaw what was said. What mattered was the gut-level belief that warnings had been issued. From now on, anyone trespassing at The Jumble wouldn’t be so lucky to get away with a few scratches on his ass or hearing weird voices. And he and Osgood would be filling out Deceased, Location Unknown forms instead of incident reports.

Which was something he wanted to discuss with Julian Farrow.

He raised a fist to whack the door, then thought about the OUT TO LUNCH sign and walked over to Come and Get It. He ordered two of the sandwich specials and returned to the bookstore a few minutes later. Then he whacked on the door.

Julian stared at him through the glass for what felt like minutes before unlocking the door and letting him in.

The man looked like he hadn’t slept in a couple of days. Or shaved. Since the clothes were clean and he didn’t smell, Grimshaw figured Julian had at least gone home long enough to shower and change.

“I brought lunch.” He held up the carry bag from the diner.

Julian led him to the back room that served as an office and break room. Grimshaw unpacked the carry bag and wondered where to set the food since most of the table was covered with an enhanced version of the Murder game.

Leaving the food, Grimshaw studied the game and the little figures scattered throughout the rooms and outdoor areas. He knew from Pops Davies that Julian had bought the game and as many different sets of little figures as Pops had available. The people weren’t quite the same as the figures in the set Vicki DeVine had. For one thing, the police officer had brown skin and black hair like Osgood and the figure that had been teeny Vicki was now a long-haired redhead. No, wait. There was a figure with shorter brown hair standing next to an upright athletic sock that had a face drawn on a square of paper that was attached with a safety pin.

“That’s your Fuzzy Sock Elder?” Grimshaw asked.

Julian moved to the other side of the table. It wasn’t casual enough to be anything but a man trying to put something between himself and a potential adversary, which Grimshaw found disturbing in too many ways.

“My great-grandfather’s brother on my mother’s side,” Julian said. “He could sense a place. Worked construction, building houses mostly. The work took him beyond Intuit villages, but he was good and was hired on whenever he wanted the work. The company was scheduled to build a rich man’s house, and when the uncle saw the land, he went to the foreman and told him it wasn’t a good place, that the land was weak there and couldn’t support the house. He pointed out a couple of other locations on the property where the house could be built safely, but the owner and the architect were firm about wanting the house to be built on the spot they’d chosen. He insisted that location would only bring darkness and sorrow to the family. He refused to work on the house, so he was assigned to the crew who built the barn and other outbuildings.

“The house was built. A month after it was completed, a sinkhole opened up and swallowed the house. The edges of the hole kept collapsing, so within hours, the house was buried under so much earth there was no way to save the man’s family.”

Grimshaw felt a bead of sweat trickle down his spine. “What happened?”

“People said the uncle had cursed the man and that was why the ground opened up and swallowed the house and family. One night a mob came to the uncle’s house. They dragged him out of bed and hanged him, and when his pregnant wife ran out and pleaded with them to stop, they beat her so badly she and the baby died.” Julian stared at Grimshaw. “A family story, told as a warning of what can happen to us when we tell people who aren’t Intuits what we sense.”

That explained a few things about Julian Farrow.

Not knowing what to say, Grimshaw pointed to the game. “Have you figured out anything from that?”

“I figured out that the reason I had so much trouble playing this game in the past is because the game board represented a place without being a place. So I was trying to sense something that didn’t have enough markers—like trying to breathe in the scent of a rose by smelling a photograph of one. But this?” Julian waved a hand over the board with its additional woods and blue-paper lake. “That’s close enough to act like a model for The Jumble.”

“Do you think the same thing would happen with a model of a place you didn’t know?” Could an Intuit look at a model of a village and sense a coming storm or a human-made problem like a bank robbery? Considering the story Julian had just told him, convincing Intuits to participate in such an experiment would take a lot of persuasion.

“I don’t know,” Julian replied. “We usually have a feel for the place where we live and the people around us. And unlike the blood prophets, who can see the future, what Intuits sense is immediate most of the time.”

A thought for another day. “So what have you figured out about The Jumble?” He noticed a figure that could be teeny Julian standing two squares into the water and several other figures in the space between the “lake” and the house. “You’re okay with your piece being in the water now?”