It felt bad to get started from nothing again, but the time had come. Harriet was in a small pocket of the city just left of downtown, where the cars didn’t run and the people who occasionally walked down the sidewalk didn’t make eye contact because they never did with people they didn’t know. That was fine with her; she didn’t know them either. She had a scrap of paper on which John Mouser had scribbled an address. After an hour decyphering his gryphonage, she’d ended up here looking down row after row of nearly-identical red brick fronts, a neighborhood of sardonically grinning capped teeth. She tried to pick number 17 out of the jumble.
Her second time around the block, she spotted it out of the corner of her eye, a two-story walkup with a row of electric blue pansies lining the uphill side of the walk. She saw it because something moved in the shadows at the edges of her vision, something she decided was an ordinary cat. Harriet walked through the neat little garden, uphill to the prissy steps leading up to the door. There was a bell, but knocking felt friendlier.
Harriet stood with her fist raised, but the door slipped its jamb before she could start, and she was left trying to recover from her awkward fist-salute while putting a personable look on her face. She failed at both.
The small woman inside was withered and shrunken. Harriet had the fleeting idea that she looked like the child of a week-old apple and the last balloon after a child’s birthday had faded into oubliette.
“Hello,” Harriet decided to try. “Mrs. Quimby?”
The small woman made a pleasant noise that indicated Harriet should continue, so she leapt over the social cliff.
“My name is Jane,” Harriet began. “I understood you might know something about a man named Barnabas who has gone missing. Someone told me he might have stayed here for a time, before all this,” she waved vaguely at everything, “began.”
The woman looked pensive but nodded, made another darling eruction, and moved to allow Harriet into the small cardboard box of a house with doll furniture and the daintiest design aesthetic Harriet had ever seen. The rugs were intricately woven with a design intended to make Harriet think of lace doilies. The air smelled of age and medicine, but also of rose and lilac and dust and china and tea and books and long afternoons after short morning rains.
“Tea?” The word from the woman surprised Harriet, but she felt she must remain resilient.
“Please,” said Harriet. The woman gestured to a setee upholstered with polished cotton fabric depicting cartoonishly proportioned samurai weilding feindish polearms and riding horses with dog heads. Harriet sat and, in a whirl of dust and car hair, sunk into the plush fabric.
The woman toddled into a kitchen nearby, leaving Harriet to look around the room.
Through a doorway, she heard the small woman moving cups and running water. Down a hallway ran five doors, two on each side and a fifth at the end. Light spilled out from under two of the doors, one on the right and the one at the end.
A loud crash brought Harriet back around to the woman, who now stood over a tray and poured tea. She handed Harriet a cup and saucer with a small gingernut cookie balanced carefully on the lip.
“So, June,” said the woman, “tell me what brings you to me.”
“I told you, Barnabas. I’m looking for him. A friend said you might know how to get hold of him.”
“I might,” said the woman. “Why don’t you give me the message, and if I see this Barnabas, I’ll pass it along.”
She stirred her tea with a tiny spoon and blinked her watery eyes quite slowly. A tear formed at the outside edge, and she dabbed it with a pink handkerchief.
“It’s the allergies,” she explained.
Harriet nodded and sipped her tea, which was bitter and badly overbrewed. She grimaced before she could stop herself.
“Oh, you don’t like it,” said the woman.
“It’s fine,” said Harriet. She coughed to clear the taste out of her throat. “I need to talk to Barnabas. There isn’t exactly a message, just that.”
“So there’s nothing I could pass on to him?”
“Just that Jane wants to see him.” To appear nonchallant, Harriet took another sip from the astringent teacup.
“Well, if I see him, I suppose I’ll-“
“No.” Harriet cut her off as sharply as she was able, hoping to get a little blood out of the conversation. “You know how to get him. You call him now and I’ll just sit right here and wait.”
Mrs. Quimby looked at Harriet with owl’s eyes.
“You do that, dear,” and she stood up carefully and pitter-pattered down the hall and through one of doors to a dark room. Harriet heard the sounds of a phone being picked up and the elderly rustling whisper of polite telephone banality. Harriet lay back in her chair and closed her eyes, listening to the shape of the words of the phone call and the hum of machinery in the kitchen. She thought she could get a few minutes sleep before she had to deal with Quimby again. She was just so-
She realized she’d been drugged, but the jolt of realization was blunted by the waves of exhaustion. She fumbled under her shirt and pulled her .32 out of the low profile holster under her arm and tucked it carefully into the cusions of the couch.
She blearily turned her head toward the hallway in time to see Mrs. Quimby grinning and tottering toward her as the purple fog jostled around the edges of her vision, rushing in to swallow the rest of Harriet’s day. As the world closed, the last image, the one she’d carry through it, was Quimby’s disappointed eyes and her little, pinched asshole of mouth as she said, “oh, you didn’t get to try your cookie.”