Frank Tuttle - The Cadaver Client

I put the pitiful little bag in my pocket.

“Thanks, Mama. The coffee was good.”

“The advice was better. One day you’ll appreciate that.”

“I always do, Mama.”

I heard a cab slow to a halt outside, so I hurried out.

Again, Granny wasn’t home.

I didn’t sit on her porch this time. I started banging on doors. Having once been seen in Granny’s company, a couple of faces poked outside. No, they hadn’t seen Granny today. No, she didn’t keep any kind of regular hours. The first face had no idea where she might be.

The second gave me a “what, are you stupid?” look and suggested Granny might be down at the bone-yard.

Some finder I am. Where else would I look for a spook doctor but the cemetery?

Rannit’s well-heeled dead spend their eternal rewards laid out on the Hill, on the other side of the Brown River. On this side of the Brown, the lucky ones get planted at Noble Fields. Those who can’t afford a plot there wind up providing ash for the crematorium smokestacks or being interred, on a yearly paid basis, in one of the tiny, rocky cemeteries granted grudging existence by the Church. Poverty plots, they’re called.

Families who go more than seven days late on a payment wake up to find their deceased relative dumped without ceremony on their doorstep.

No one ever accused any of Rannit’s churches with being sluggard when it came to collecting their due.

I got directions to the nearest such place and headed out. It wasn’t far, and I saw Granny hobbling along just inside at the same time I saw the open cemetery gates.

There’d been a funeral there recently. The fireflowers in the gate urns hadn’t even wilted yet. The place was tiny, less than a block in any direction, and it was enclosed on all sides by buildings and a wall of scraggly hedge-bushes. The gravewards were crude affairs, some obviously homemade, all leaning in different directions. Some had fallen, and hadn’t been righted.

Here and there were open empty graves, evidence of the Church’s unflagging and doubtlessly holy efficiency in all manners fiscal.

I caught up with Granny easily. I hadn’t wanted to shout out for her, not among the dead. Mama Markhat had instilled a few manners after all.

“Granny Knot,” I said, puffing a bit. “Glad I found you here.”

Granny held her rags up to her mouth and looked carefully around to make sure we were alone.

“Good to see you as well. Do you have news for me?”

I fell into a slow amble beside her. The sky was bright and cloudless and blue. The gravewards gleamed white all around us.

“I do.” I retold Stick’s story, gave an accounting of money spent. I didn’t voice my own misgivings just yet.

“So, my shade has lied to us.”

“It seems that way, Granny.” A pair of ink black crows gazed down on us from atop a leaning, above-ground crypt and issued a chorus of ragged caws. “Any idea why he might do that?”

Granny shook her head. “None whatsoever.”

“Think you could ask him?”

“I intend to.” Granny shook her rags. “I don’t enjoy being lied to. Especially when by doing so he made me complicit in his lie.”

“Can you ask him now?”

Granny halted. We stood before a relatively new wardstone. This one had been bought, not made by a grieving but unskilled family. It bore a few words of Church, and at the very bottom, a single name.

Gorvis.

“I’m very much afraid I cannot, Mr. Markhat.” Granny scowled at the graveward. “At least, not at the moment. But I shall, I assure you. As soon as possible.”

“This is him, isn’t it?”

“First name H-O-R-A-C-E.” Granny spelled it out so the name wasn’t spoken aloud. “Yes, I believe so.”

I frowned. “You believe so?”

“Like you, Mr. Markhat, I have my resources. I employed them with the aim of learning the true name of the spirit who called himself Sellway. These-resources have provided me with a first name and led me to this spot. This is not who the spirit claimed to be. I am as surprised as you are. Possibly more so.”

Granny’s handful of rags fluttered in her hand. There wasn’t a breath of wind.

Granny whirled to face me.

“We must go, Mr. Markhat. Now!”

“Why?”

That was as much as I got out before Granny grabbed my wrist with her implacable, elderly hand and dragged me at a middling fast run away from the graveward.

We made good time down the winding path to the gate, and through it, and onto the street, before Granny halted and bent double, gasping for air.

I let her catch her breath.

“That. Was close.” She was grinning, like we’d just outrun the Watch. There was even a twinkle in her eyes.

“What was close?”

“He almost saw us there.” Granny straightened. “I’m not ready for him to know I know, just yet.”

“Who, the spook?”

“The spook, as you say. They often return to the location of their remains as they prepare to intrude upon our world. This one is no different.”

“Won’t he see us?” I could see the wardstone plain from where we stood. The hedges were not much more than sticks on the street side of the cemetery. I guessed that wagon-drivers let their ponies nibble on the foliage as they passed.

Granny shook her head. “No. Not in broad daylight, not before he has a chance to…let us say, assert himself. We are quite safe here.”

Granny turned and started marching for home, and I followed.

“So, his real name was Gorvis.” It wasn’t a name anyone had mentioned yet. Not that I was at all convinced by Granny’s fist of rags. She could easily have staged the whole scene when she saw me coming. For what purpose, I still didn’t know.

“He’s buried not far from your house, Granny. And that’s not a name you know?”

“It isn’t.” Traffic started picking up, so Granny fired up her public spook doctor act, complete with muttering and random bursts of howled laughter.

“I’m not a big believer in coincidence, Granny.”

“Nor am I.” She replied in a whisper between rants about spying spirits and groaning ghosts.

“I’m going to go out on a limb, Granny. I’m going back to Regency Avenue, and this time I’m going to ask about a man named Gorvis. If you just staged that whole, little scene back there on the spur of the moment, tell me right now, or so help me I’ll start handing out the crowns at random, on the street.”

Granny guffawed.

“You go. You ask your questions. You get down off that roof, shade of Angus Fergis!” She said the last in a screech that caused pedestrians all around us to stop and search the rooftops for spooks.

“And when you’re done, come back. You and I will have business tonight. After Curfew. You and I and a man named Gorvis. Are you willing to do that, Mr. Markhat?”

“If that’s what it takes to earn my pay.”

“I see you, shades of the Lowrey twins! I see you peepin’ in them windows!”

Granny winked.

I said my farewells and headed back to Regency Avenue.

The first thing I did after arriving at Regency was present myself to the biggest pair of Owenstall’s bullies I could find.

They knew my name, and they knew I had the blessing of the boss himself. One of them even went so far as to suggest a place or two some of the older folks might be at the moment.

Oh, what a difference a few words from Mama had made.

I thanked them and started making my rounds. This time, I wasn’t concentrating on the name Sellway, but on Gorvis.

And I wasn’t having much better luck, either. Blank looks. Shakes of the head. Frowns and creased brows and ultimately, variations on the theme of no.

I expanded my search, no longer just talking to people of a certain age and above. I talked to kids. To their parents. To their nannies, to their grannies, to their yipping poodle-dogs.