Chapter 1 #3
Jasper could still remember his brother’s last letter.
It had arrived folded twice, written in a hurried hand and full of technical details their mother had pretended to find dull and had later read until the paper began to split at the seams. Everett had liked the work, that was the cruelest part of it.
He had liked the smell of oil and smoke, the exactness of the timetables, the feeling of being attached to something larger than himself and useful within it.
Then that day, on November 3rd, 1885, the train had gone off the line. The official men had come, and within a few short months the whole business had been closed as cleanly as though the dead had been an inconvenience to paperwork.
Jasper had never understood the speed of it.
Disaster on that scale ought to have left more questions behind, more dirt under someone’s fingernails.
Instead, it had been tidied away with suspicious efficiency, and he had learned that institutions didn’t always lie, but they did grow impatient with truth when truth proved to be expensive.
With a sigh, holding his reins thigh, Jasper took another glance at the place, and rode on.
***
The lighthouse came into view an hour later, white against the black rock of the headland, standing so starkly by itself that it looked less built than placed there by some deliberate and joyless hand.
The house crouched beside it, low and weather-beaten, as though years of wind had taught it humility.
Jasper took in the path, the outbuildings, the bare patch of ground where a cart might have stood, and the tracks half-washed by the night’s rain. Habit did that before thought had its say. Nothing immediately offered itself. There was no second horse, no wagon... No sign of hurried departure.
He dismounted, looped the reins, and went to the door. It opened before he had properly finished knocking, and the woman who stood there was not what he expected.
She was tall for a woman, though not in a way that suggested fragility.
Lean rather than slight, with the look of someone shaped by labor.
Her hair was auburn, braided and drawn back plainly, and her face had the freckled, wind-marked look of a person who lived outdoors whether she wished to or not.
Her grey eyes met him directly. Her hands, resting loose at her sides, were roughened by work no lady ever bragged of doing.
She wore a plain dark skirt, sturdy boots, and a shawl of faded wool that had seen better years and outlasted them.
What he noticed first of all, though, was that she did not flinch.
Most people did, a little. At the sight of a stranger with the bearing of official business. The woman filling in the worn-out doorframe, however, looked at Jasper as if she had already measured him and found neither threat nor comfort in the result.
“Ma’am,” Jasper said after introducing himself and touching two fingers to the brim of his hat. “I’m looking for a woman and child who may have come this way.”
Again, her expression didn’t alter. “You’d best tell me who’s asking first,” she replied dryly.
“I already told you that.” He almost smiled. “Jasper Rede, private detective.”
“As if that explains it all,” she scoffed. “I already told you that.”
That did it. The corner of his mouth moved despite himself.
He drew out the badge wallet and showed it to her. “Employed by the Harcourt Agency, out of Portland,” he explained one more time. “I’m making inquiries on behalf of a client in a family matter.”
Her gaze dipped to the badge and returned to his face without any visible increase in regard. “And who is your client?”
“Victor Rathburn,” he said simply. “He reports that a servant absconded from his household several days ago. She may have taken refuge along the coast. She would be traveling with a small boy, about eighteen months old. And if that’s the case… It would be difficult to miss your house.”
“And you imagine they came here,” the woman at the door said, barely interested in the matter.
“I can't imagine anything yet,” Jasper tried to stay professional, though he couldn’t ignore the fact that her words stirred curiosity in him. Who was this woman?
“I’m asking whether you’ve seen them,” he added after a small pause.
“No,” she answered decidedly. “I haven’t.”
Jasper moved his head a bit and glanced past her shoulder. He saw the dim shape of the room beyond, a table, a chair, the rough plainness of a life lived without decorative ambitions. Nothing more.
“You live here alone?” he asked.
“No.”
“Your husband?”
“No.”
“Your father, then?”
Her eyes cooled by a degree. “You ask many questions for a family matter,” she said sharply.
“And you answer very few for an innocent one,” Jasper provoked.
That should have irritated her. Instead, it drew the faintest narrowing of her eyes, as though he’d ceased to be merely inconvenient and become interesting enough to watch.
Wind moved the loose wisps of hair near her temple, but she didn’t raise a hand to fix them. “There’s no woman here,” she said. “And there’s no child. That’s all you need to know. And now, if you excuse me, I need to get back to work.”
Behind her, somewhere in the house, a board gave a small creak.
“Would your father confirm that?” Jasper didn’t give up.
Weariness sharpened to irritation appeared on her face. “My father would confirm that the sea is wet if it spared him the effort of standing,” she said. “I don’t think he’d be of any help.”
Jasper looked at her a moment longer. “What was your name again, miss?”
“Elara,” the woman answered. “Elara Selkirk.”
She spoke her name without haste and without apology, and it fell between them with the quiet finality of her own determination not to be questioned anymore. Jasper found, to his surprise, that he respected her more for that than he would have for any show of gentleness.
“Miss Selkirk,” he said, keeping his voice even, “if the woman comes here later, or if you hear anything of her, it would be wiser for you to send word than to place yourself in another family’s trouble.”
“And if your client’s trouble is more important than any other,” she replied, frowning.