All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred thirty-seven)

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

Chapter Five

Collecting Debts

(part one hundred thirty-seven)

 

 

 

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“Weem, my father wants rid of you. I don’t know why.”

Weem made a noise in his throat. “I gave something away.” She heard the rummage of his bag. “You remember us ever talking about Dr. Stoltz. I’d asked Rutherford, ‘on a friend’s behalf’, this was back last year… You want to drive on til we get a little out of town.”

She clucked at Dancer.

“…what those random bones had come to, ones the hooligans dug up… Take Mill Road. And those ones you and your helpers found, jumbled with the rotted boxes.”

“They went to Dr. Stoltz. At the college. Students’ aids.”

“Score two. Well, I went to Stoltz. Opened his closet to me. Not opposed to it, that…I won’t say stunt…experiment? you had in mind. Allowed me one intact, had two other good ones, four without jaws. Now, I need this bag for my travels, so I figure you’ll put Yorick in some other receptacle.”

 

The hatbox sat on Ebrach’s purple velvet. A change of custody, in case Ranilde visited, and Lidah had another spell of wanting to try on Miss Gremot’s things. Yorick was stamped in India ink: No. 13.

No. 13 would nestle in Mother Nature’s bosom soon enough; Ebrach favored burial over the curio cabinet. He raised the skull to the light, his left hand saying, “Don’t speak.”

His right positioned the sockets to catch beams through stained glass. “Blue eyes.”

Élucide wrote this in the margin of her sketchpad.

“Sandy hair.”

“What is sandy hair? I always see it in books… I’ve never heard anyone say it about themselves.”

“You’re a bit unserious today.”

“Sorry. You know it was a small idea, just a flash at that moment on the train. I didn’t think Weem would really stick me with Yorick. You don’t get a name?”

“Brownish blond. I feel he’ll be an Andrew.”

“Sandy Andy.”

“There again.”

“Tall or short? Fat or thin? Young? Maybe dead of the typhoid at…”

“Twenty-five or so. Short…short-legged. Stocky in the chest. Worked, when he worked, at something with a kiln. Bricks or tiles.”

“But…Scottish?”

“Yes!” Delight at this, tempered. “Andrew’s will is to be discovered. He would like to be known. That radiance of his ardor is what you are detecting yourself.”

She gave the face a youthful contour, the squareness of a stocky laborer’s, neck buried in a kerchief. Nose ordinary, rounded above the nostrils. Some pitting to the skin, complexion a little red and rough.

 

 

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And how much hair…or, any whiskers? “You don’t mean will and testament when you say will?”

“I shouldn’t think so. He died in poverty.”

“And nothing in particular…itemizable, that he wants discovered?”

“A young woman. Young, in their time. I sense she is not living. He had not married her. He does not know if the child had been born alive.”

“Wallace?”

“That, I’m not receiving.”

“Is Wallace a Scottish name?”

“It often is. It can be English.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred thirty-eight)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)