 
**The Information Man**

By Lore Lippincott

Copyright 2014 Lore Lippincott

Smashwords Edition

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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation to anyone bearing the same name or names. Any resemblance to individuals known or unknown to the author are purely coincidental.

**For Cousin Robin.**

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**Table of Contents**

The Information Man

About Lore Lippincott

* * * *

1.

For the fifteenth time in the last five minutes, George Weatherstaff patted the pockets of his morning jacket, wondering if he had packed into them all that he'd meant to. Handkerchief, cigarette case, photographs—yes, yes, they were all exactly where they should be. When handing them over, he could reach them very easily. That was good, since he knew his hands would shake. They always did shake whenever the day deviated from its preferred routine. He liked schedules. They structured his life, now that the bottom had been taken out of everything. He woke in the morning, yawned and watched the sunrise. He found the world unfolding as it was meant to, according to the timetable of his life. But then—

The whole blasted day was ruined by the unequalled worry steaming through him. Unused to such an exceptional state of concern, particularly when it came to the welfare of one he knew so well, George retained just enough awareness of his environment, and himself in a thankfully familiar environment, that he circled through the motions of an everyday morning proportionately distracted.

He patted his pockets for the sixteenth time in the last five minutes, descending on lithe but large feet on the shallow steps of the front staircase of his Deer Park mansion. In the grand hall below, he saw the lineup of his liveried staff, Domenico and Lucy and the sharp, trenchant Mrs. Bowman. A formidable staff, really. The majority of them leftover from his boyhood days, when his mother ruled with any compound of compassion that oxidized the iron fist his father used to rule.

Behind him, still in his chambers, his aide-de-camp, Williams, and the frisky, yet uncouth lad Williams was training as his potential replacement. Williams was, to everyone's regret, getting old, arthritic, and would soon retire in one of those faraway towns George had only heard about and never been, like Hamilton or Brampton. A man with power and influence on Toronto had no business going to Hamilton, unless it was to start a new factory or take over a company. George Weatherstaff hardly left Toronto. He hadn't left _yet_ —

But it was no use. He couldn't push the thing from his mind. It was the first time in his thirty-five years that he began to feel a pang of envy for Williams, a man who could walk away to Brampton, Hamilton, London, Owen Sound—one of those damnable impartial towns that didn't really exist and had no influence on the Dominion as a whole. It would almost be nice to become as invisible and unimportant as Williams, or as one of those unfortunate towns with nothing to recommend them but quiet, tree-lined streets, of skating and pond hockey in the winter, and mosquitos in the summer.

What was it like to live so anonymously? As George Weatherstaff, he'd never know.

"Well?" he demanded of Domenico, brushing off a peculiar piece of lint that Williams, eyesight about as useless as his knurled hands, had missed. George's conscious attempts to run the house with the compassion of his mother and the rusting iron of his father had landed him somewhere between indifference and sarcasm. Feeling that there were worse attributes his attendees could find in a master, George had no emotional woes when it came to his staff. If he were to tell them the problem facing him that morning, no doubt he'd find a crowd teeming with sympathy and a desire to fix it for him. It was like having a brazen fraternity at one's fingertips. Through the last three hours, George had found nothing to tell Williams, nothing about his suspicions or his doubts. He was equally silent in front of Domenico.

Domenico had been in Canada so long that his Italian accent had been lost, and he hadn't any of his brothers' haughtiness. It was why he had done so well for himself, and they so terribly. He bowed a bit to Mr. Weatherstaff. "Good morning, sir. If you are willing, I should like to go to Hamilton today. A nursery auction is—"

_New trees. Damn it all. A man comes to me with trees._ "Aren't you aware that it's November?"

"Yes, sir." He caught the smallest note of laughter in Mr. Weatherstaff's eyes, coming and going quickly. "Yes—yes, sir. But the ground is not entirely frozen, and if it should warm up—"

"Please yourself—go. Take the Oldsmobile, if you'd like. And take that firecracker boy with you, the one Williams is trying to house-train. Frankly, I support the idea that he's best suited for outdoor work, at least until the full brush of winter is upon us." He glanced out the window beside the oversized front door. "Which seems to be today."

Domenico agreed that winter was nearly at their door, and commented that Eustace would go with him to Hamilton.

In George Weatherstaff's much-inflicted mind, he wondered who Eustace was, and why he was going with Domenico to Hamilton. In a flash of understanding, he grasped what he needed, returned the name Eustace to the incompetent youth standing beside the bent old oak tree Williams, and sent the groundskeeper on his way with a symbolic wave of the hand. George longed to perform the same with Lucy. What could the cook want? Words about a dinner menu for his upcoming birthday party. He cared very little. On a day like that, to think of having a birthday party!

"Put the evening on hold," he demanded in his darkest, most guttural voice. "I will _not_ entertain guests at this time. It is ridiculous to suppose that I would."

"Yes, sir," mumbled the cook, curtseyed, and disappeared down the hall to her world of pots, pans, void of contrary masters.

"Mrs. Bowman, bring me some _sense_ this morning!" he begged, applying a corner of a soft linen handkerchief to warm spots on his roomy forehead, below thick hair not quite red and not quite brown.

Mrs. Bowman, employed the last dozen years by Mr. Weatherstaff, was under the impression that he was fatigued that morning. She teetered on the motherly verge of suggesting he return to his room before noting the intensity of his eyes as they hit the newspaper still folded in her hand. She held it out to him, wordless, practically thoughtless.

He grabbed it, fanned it to an open position, and hungrily tore through the headlines. A body on Mutual—but it was a man's body. That was gratifying—relieving, even. But there were other headlines he breezed through—economics on Prohibition, editorials, leads, sports, but nothing—nothing at all—of what he most wanted to know.

At least she was not lying dead in an alley on Mutual, and given a restitution of sorts through the hyperbole of a gifted journalist.

The newspaper, atrociously folded, was thrown back at Mrs. Bowman. Seeing the obvious distress of her master, Mrs. Bowman tried distracting him.

"Did you see the article on the new hockey rules, sir? Most interesting, allowing the gentlemen players to substitute even while the game is going on. I think that will prove to be very confusing."

He hadn't the faintest idea what she was talking about. Who cared for new hockey rules when his life was in turmoil? It might be best if he say something, permit the charade of wellness to go on a little longer. "Oh, yes, I suppose it will." Dumb and aimless, he began to follow Mrs. Bowman into the rear of the house, where it was more open, sparsely furnished, and several degrees warmer near the busy kitchen.

"Shall you have breakfast in the dining room or nook this morning, sir?"

"Neither," he said, suddenly facing the action he must take. "I think—yes, I'd better go out this morning. I have a call to make. Yes," he said, clearly distracted, "yes, I think that is the best thing to do."

For the seventeenth time that morning, George Weatherstaff patted the pockets of his morning jacket. He had everything required, hadn't he? Photos, handkerchief, cigarette case. But what hadn't he done? What was missing? Other than the obvious, of course.

"Morning post," he muttered below the flat din of the house. "Mrs. Bowman, has the morning post arrived?"

Mrs. Bowman, astounded, could do nothing for the subsequent seconds but blink at him. "No, sir. It doesn't usually arrive until nine-thirty, or ten at the latest."

"I can't wait for it, then. I must go out." Disheartened as he was over the lack of morning post, and alarmed that he should be in this position at all, he found Mrs. Bowman had an object tucked between her black dress and her elbow. "Is this the morning paper? Good. I'll read it on the way. Thank you, Mrs. Bowman. And cancel that birthday party for me, would you? I don't want to entertain any guests for a while."

Bewildered, Mrs. Bowman consented to his wishes, and retreated stonily into the kitchen. Lucy the cook was there, among two of the girls, and the second groundskeeper just finishing his breakfast. Two of Mr. Weatherstaff's pointers sat on the floor, eating bones and scraps. Mrs. Bowman was relieved to find Williams appearing from the back stairwell, slowly, meticulously, thinly in control of his aching hip, his lumpy hands.

"Williams," she wasted no time reaching him. He was a winsome man, still sound in mind, still counted among the most important member of George Weatherstaff's crew. He demanded respect despite his ailments, and, because of them, demanded a fair amount of well-hidden pity. "Williams, was Mr. Weatherstaff out of sorts this morning?"

"He was a bit dazed, yes."

"Tea, Mr. Williams," said Lucy, bringing around a cup and saucer to him, with Jones the second groundskeeper sweeping out the plain wooden chair for him, as if he was as important as the man of the castle. They hung about, Jones, Lucy, Mrs. Bowman, and even the pointers directed their ears his way.

"Mark my words, if you will," said Williams, neither interested in fanning gossip nor interested in perpetuating their dislike for Mr. Weatherstaff's personal life, "but the master's present state of discontentment is a result of that unearthly and foul woman's contamination. She alone is to blame for this."

Jones, Lucy and Mrs. Bowmen murmured a repository of agreements. The pointers blinked, blew out breaths that seemed, in their own way, to concur with Williams. After all, they'd never really liked that woman, and what business did the master have of marrying someone he hardly knew? No business at all, said one pointer to the other, each returning to his bone.

Stiff in the rear seat of his everyday limousine, George resorted to a second perusal of the _Gazette_. Uncertain that he would find a useful sentence, the murder in the alley off Mutual Street was nonetheless piquing his interest. The article was much too long, felt forced in portions, but a man of business was not so interested in the pretentious wording of a lowly newspaperman. It was unusual that there should be such a murder the same evening that he'd discovered that his fiancée had seemingly vanished off the face of the planet.

And this would be no good. No good at all. It would be another scandal to hit the illustrious personage of George Weatherstaff.

He needed to find his fiancée, find out what had driven her away, and he needed to go about it in the quietest manner possible. What he did not want was a third violent incident in his life striking glee into the hearts of newspaper editors and augmenting the hatred of naysayers. More than that, he wanted the remainder of his years to be free of his past, to have one life-changing incident not end in death. He began to feel a curse had come upon him, starting from childhood and seeing him through all subsequent years of his existence.

Was there always something cold, dismissive and distant in her eyes when she looked at him? Had she been disturbed in a way that he was too blissfully kindhearted to see?

If she was, it hardly mattered now. She'd disappeared.

Yet he wasn't the variety of man that was handed a desperate situation and let it make mincemeat of him. No one successful could manage his life in that haphazard manner. No, he would not let her walk away from him—or be taken from him without first fighting for her. He deserved a happy ending, perhaps twice as much as any other man.

"Smith," he said to his chauffeur, enclosed in the same windowed box as he, "take us round to Victoria Lane, would you?"

George wanted this dire situation handled quietly, delicately, and only one man in Toronto worked liked that. Among the photographs of a pretty, exotic face was a business card that George read again to comfort himself.

_Rex Malin_

_Information Services_

_Enquiries accepted 9 - 4, M-Sa_

_Victoria Lane_

_Toronto_

* * * *

2.

Secrets bounced around the office again. Estella had an extra sense that highlighted the growth of such things. In rooms like theirs, at a desk like hers, secrets were as commonplace as dust, as the stink of yesterday's discarded lunch. What aided the olfactory presence of secrets was the tell-tale crust of two slices of rye bread Estella found ineffectively buried beneath papery discard in the bin by her desk. Rex only lunched on rye bread if his nerves gnawed on him.

She ran a finger down the day's list of appointments, then, reflecting on her own affliction of apprehension, flipped the daily calendar to the next day. November of 1927 would soon be drawing to a close, and nothing too outlandish had yet happened. Benjamin had made mumblings about the shift of moons and stars, celestial objects with funny names, it was that time of the month again when the Zodiac shifted. Maybe that's all that had dipped Rex in a mood of rye bread and repressed aggravation.

Her buffed, perfectly shell-pink nail slid down the appointments: Tomlinson, Rickers, Oswald's for luncheon, a clear afternoon until early drinks with Inspector Newcombe at five-thirty.

She paused, reflecting. What would Rex eat for lunch at Oswald's? If it was any sort of cereal, sandwich or heavily breaded slice of meat, his nerves continued to be bothersome. She'd have to ask Oswald later. He was a good man, always willing to explain his brother's faults to those who'd had the misfortune to meet Rex Malin prior to his long stint of adulthood. Rex was one of those that it was perfectly indecent to imagine him as a baby, a child, an awkward schoolboy. But, as far as Estella could unearth, she was the only one who knew that Rex's appetite turned abnormal when secrets bounced around the office.

He was a fine private investigator—or whatever it was he did—and secrets were his business.

The paint on the door, the tag on the mailbox in the old building's dilapidated lobby failed to recognize Rex Malin as a private investigator. It declared him thus: Rex Malin, Information Services.

His was the business of gathering, distributing and realigning information that his clients wished him to congregate. At this, and perhaps only this, Rex excelled. It was his lone talent. He was not particularly good-looking, his face pockmarked and loose following a bout of some traumatic childhood ailment. He had a half-inch scar that slanted across the bottom corner of his mouth, the remainder of a brawl he'd been in as a youth. His left leg and left arm were at times slow, particularly on damp wintry days, of which Toronto possessed many, and these ailments were remainders of his time in war. He never spoke of his years in Europe. Once, when Estella seized the opportunity of asking Oswald Malin about Rex's deployment, she was given a sympathetic pat upon the shoulder, for Oswald was forever treating women as if they were his enfeebled mother, and remarked that he believed that his brother had never really quit fighting the war.

Even before 1914, Rex had shuffled information around as often as he could, as often as he was paid for it. He'd been known throughout town as a man who delivered.

Among the Toronto Police were those officers that both despised and respected Mr. Malin. Many times through the last five years they'd crawled, somewhat proudly, through the doors of Rex's office and wrung from the mercenary, laconic antihero a gobbet of information. Inspector Cavendish, Station 6, was one particular backwards praiser of Rex Malin's work. Cavendish didn't like to use Mr. Malin, but he did not like to refuse avenues of aid if his own instincts and talents fell short.

At exactly two minutes after nine in the morning, Estella was jerked into surprise by the stentorian ring of the telephone.

"Good morning, you've reached Rex Malin's office."

"Well, Ms. Bradley, is he in yet?"

The flat but tight voice of Inspector Cavendish sent a ball of apprehension into Estella's stomach. Mr. Malin was sitting on a secret too big to hide behind rye bread and long draws on a pipe, and Inspector Cavendish was in on it.

"No, Inspector; he's not come in yet." Estella wondered if she should worry about Mr. Malin. "Shall I have him telephone you when he arrives?"

"Tell him he'd better get in here."

"Yes, sir, I will—" But she quit talking into a dead line, replaced the earpiece on the candlestick apparatus, and ruminated on the unfolding of these darkened subjects.

No amount of thought could help. She couldn't do it another second, or she'd start biting nails, pacing the room, looking out the window down to Victoria Lane, waiting for Mr. Malin's brushed wool hat and loose coat to materialize. Rather than take the route of wallowing, Estella sorted through files.

Becoming a secretary to a man of information was not what she had wished to be at a young age, and her skills in the department of filing were not yet finely chiseled. She was twenty-four, two older sisters and one younger brother, each sister already married, her brother a happy bachelor. Mother lived at a home for the elderly and infirm far outside town, "dying by inches rather than yards," as Mother herself often proclaimed. Father was gone, injured in the War in more ways than physical, and it was a blessing, almost, when he'd finally lapsed out of life. But that left the older sisters to marry the first suitors that came along, for Benjamin, the man of the house, to do a remarkable and worthy thing with his life, which he had accomplished by routing himself into the beer industry and adjoining that business with the ludicrous hobby of astrology. Estella Bradley stood alone, without grand prospects. Having always been a soul of independence, or what she had thought was independence—what Benjamin had laughingly called stubbornness, what Minnie had called determination, what Hettie had refrained from calling anything—Estella found work, first in the office of a church, then, somehow, knocking on Mr. Malin's door on a rainy morning inquiring after a position seen in the _Gazette_.

But even that was a bit of an odd story. Estella's first espial of Mr. Malin's ad for a secretary was seen on the board of "local announcements" at a favorite eatery; then, at Eaton's one afternoon, she happened to overhear two women discussing an office on Victoria Lane, the rent of one Mr. Malin, and whether or not he could afford it. The rotational drives of her life centered around Mr. Malin's office on Victoria Lane. She was so terribly nervous, cold, and had had a spat with Benjamin in the morning, so that, when she knocked politely on the door of "Rex Malin, Information Services," she was agitated, hued with sorrow and apprehension. Being then out of sorts, Estella took one look at the fashionable, quiet, gray-eyed man who'd answered the door, and rather than say hello, give her name, or make a polite enquiry regarding his health, she blurted out, "You're supposed to hire me as your secretary."

"Am I, really?" he asked, sweeping his intense gaze up and down her form, rather liking what he saw, and stepped aside to permit her entrance. "It's a splendid idea, and I'm all for it," he paused to grin at her, "and I'll pass it along to my brother, who's a bit more in charge of those things. I'm Oswald Malin, lone brother to the man of information."

Estella had slipped into endless embarrassment, but found she appreciated Mr. Oswald Malin's amusement at her forthrightness. "I suggest you hire this lovely creature, Rex, or I will create some superficial and completely unnecessary position for her in _my_ realm of quotidian drudgery, and by and by you'll see what a parcel of human excellence you missed."

Many years before, Estella had ceased wondering if she would've been offered the position then and there had it not been for Oswald Malin's auspicious company. The result was too difficult to determine. Certainly, throughout the years, Oswald treated Ms. Estella Bradley much more like a lady than Rex. He brought her small bouquets on holidays, always remembered her birthday, purchased small corsages of orchids on the anniversary of her start of employment. If Rex had any memory of all of when he hired Estella Bradley, it was never brought up in conversation, except as a grunt when he asked where the "weeds" had come from, meaning his brother's gifted flowers, and received an answer that shone the light on a moment of history he'd ignored. That was Mr. Malin's way. Oswald was just the opposite: handsome, literate, charming, though both were unwed and harbored no conscious female fixation. Oswald was too social, preferring a coterie of Toronto's most glamorous to surround him while he took in plays, concerts and lectures. Rex did nothing about town but go to and from work, visit the stations of the inspectors and detectives who'd asked for his services; he'd long ago stopped accepting Oswald's attempts to make him a man about town.

Estella had an inkling that Oswald hadn't entirely given up on his brother. Lately, there'd been a minute mention of a Thanksgiving dinner held at Oswald's house, to which Rex was invited, Estella as well. It'd become one of Oswald's unusual traditions, rounding out the day with a fine feast and an evening of old-fashioned parlor games. Estella had never had such a good time as she'd had the last two years at Oswald Malin's for Thanksgiving, nor been among such glamorous people. Not even when George Weatherstaff stormed into the office—not once, but twice! But he had a way of making those around him realize that he was, in fact, _the_ George Weatherstaff, with an article and a position in the Government House. Oswald Malin never forgot that he was just another man in Toronto. Rex Malin threw himself into the background of Toronto as often as possible. That was Rex's way, too.

Newspaper clippings from a file fluttered to the floor. Estella was obliged to get on her hands and knees to collect the pieces, articles ranging from 1921 to 1923, for whatever reason still of value to Mr. Malin. He was not used to having his files relegated to the rubbish heap. And, very diligently, Estella replaced the clippings into the folder. She was in an awkward position, half under her desk, stockinged legs sticking out from it, the moment Rex paraded into the office. The door shuddered to a close after a hesitant second. He wasn't quite sure what Ms. Bradley was doing bent over the floor, her shapely gams sticking out for just anyone to see.

"Lose a penny, Ms. Bradley?" he asked, preferring to think that his impoverished secretary had a need for small forms of currency as intensely as she did the big ones.

Estella bumped her knot of hair against the edge of the desk, trying, seemingly without success, to not look like a fool as she rose from the floor, clippings in hand. Mr. Malin appeared atypically grotesque for a Monday morning. No one had yet turned on the switch of his thoughts, and his fair blue eyes were dumb as slate. He looked clean, however, and had on his favorite black silk tie, a gift from his brother. She ignored the remark about hunting for a penny. "Inspector Cavendish has already telephoned for you this morning."

"At nine o' clock precisely, I'll bet." He dethroned his head of brushed wool hat, removed his coat in a quick snap of fabric.

"Nine-oh-two. He asked if you would go to the station house and speak to him."

Rex's thin mouth thinned all the more as he drew it against his teeth. Must he? Already? Noon was too early to spend a minute in the company of Cavendish. Midnight, too, might still be considered too soon. Rex refrained from acknowledging Ms. Bradley's message, instead applying his attention to the morning post. There was nothing extravagant, only two bills and a catalogue.

Estella recognized Mr. Malin's "studious expression." Upon his features fell a bovine dullness, like a cow in a field chewing her cud and gazing emptily at a fine day. Should she interrupt him? She tested him with a rephrasing of her brief conversation with Cavendish. "I believe the inspector was in earnest, Mr. Malin." A development of some secondary thought prompted her to go on in a different direction. "Are you unwell today?"

"The weather's atrocious," he remarked, letting envelopes drop from his hand. "The wind is fierce, and it's started snowing. See," he gestured to the bare window with a view to the small Polish grocer's across the lane. Indeed, white marks daubed the scenery. "I'm feeling lazy this morning. I'd be happy not doing a thing."

And, again, Estella Bradley was prompted by some intuitive voice in her head. "Perhaps, if I went along with you, it would not seem so laborious."

He considered the proposition. A departure from the norm, of course. Ms. Bradley was meant to stay in the office, handle correspondence, send out bills, seek payments that might be in arrears, and, above all, answer the solicitations of potential clients either as they entered through the door or spoke through the telephone. Yet it was a beastly day. Who would have trouble on such a morning, other than the trouble of staying warm?

From the hat stand, he flung a dark green coat deftly caught by Ms. Bradley. "You do handle Cavendish better than most, so let's go."

He was planning to walk to the station, a few blocks away, and did not ask Ms. Bradley if the weather was too incommodious for her to withstand. It didn't occur to him that he should. But as they were exiting the shabby front hall, from a fine car parked at the curb, they were subjected to a series of hellos from the vocals of Oswald Malin.

"I've come to see if we might change our luncheon plans, brother," he said, tipping towards Ms. Bradley with a pinch at the brim of his gray hat. "You're not just going out, are you? Good heavens, whatever for? I should think you'd find it ghastly out here, Rex. I find it rather balmy myself."

And Rex found _himself_ a trifle annoyed at Oswald's loquacity. "Inspector Cavendish wishes to speak to me."

"In person?"

"Well, if not, then the walk there will be an exercise in inconvenient superfluidity."

"Ankling it, are you? Well, that's nonsense. I'll drive you there. Walk, in this weather," he opened the rear door of the coupe for them, "never heard of such a thing."

"You did just say it was balmy," Rex reminded him.

"For me, yes, it might be. But you shouldn't treat yourself so poorly, Rexie, and I won't have you treating Ms. Bradley with the same degree of misery you adopt for your own troubled soul. It's far too formulaic. Ms. Bradley, do sit in the front with me, and we'll see what our dear Cavendish bird wants of you."

Inside the car, Oswald, a motorist bent on achieving perfection as if every stretch of roadway was a test, Estella let her gander roam from tall buildings to pedestrians. Rex had a pipe in his mouth, unpacked and unlit.

"Oswald," he started, not yet sure that the subject he was about to acknowledge should be broached with his brother, "did you happen to see the newspaper this morning?"

"Indeed, my eyes couldn't have missed it."

Estella glanced at the driver, wondering what she hadn't seen. "I haven't a subscription, but, come to think of it, I did see many more persons on the trolleys reading it this morning as I came to work. Does it have something to do with the inspector's urgency?"

"A most potent urgency, I should think," Oswald added.

"There was a dead body found up on Mutual," said Rex, never sure how well Ms. Bradley took the news of cadavers, though she didn't then unleash a visible spark of squeamishness.

"Well, this is a big city, and, unfortunately, inhabited by people, who are, unfortunately, mad at times and capable of taking the life of another."

"What a philosophical slant you have, Estella," Oswald said in the cadence of one dishing a saccharine compliment. "But, you see, my brother aims to tell us that this dead body was particularly brutal, not just your ordinary murder. Oh, no."

Rex bit down on the pipe, thoughts harkening back to the words in the article, interposed with battlefields of bygone, ill days in his past. He disliked Oswald's choice of descriptor; there was no such thing as an ordinary murder. "It could have something to do with what Inspector Cavendish wants to say. It might have nothing to do with it."

"At this point, your conjecture is as hearty as mine, Rexie. And, now, here we are!"

Oswald drove by the stone and brick entrance to the sixth station house, but found no empty place on the street, either to park or to allow his passengers a quick sprint into the relative warmth of the building. He pulled into the nearest alley, found a suitable lot with a paucity of spaces, and accompanied them into the station. Rex hadn't any interest in his brother's appearance, sure that, when Cavendish saw that his information broker had come with a genteel phalanx, neither Ms. Bradley nor Oswald would be permitted entry into Cavendish's office.

It was painted that way in Rex's mind, but the reality was quite the opposite. Cavendish was pleasant to Oswald Malin, courteous to Ms. Bradley. He was one of those forward-thinking chaps that believed women were reliable in the workforce, and they'd carved a niche for themselves in the Toronto Police. Women, he knew, had their uses, and he didn't mind the presence of a brain as keen as Estella Bradley's. It helped, perhaps, that he had knowledge that she lacked, that they were distant cousins, some third or fourth according to his mother, whose own mother had been a Bradley. The presence of one another in their lineage had been known to him for some time, yet he'd found no reason to tell Ms. Bradley. He wondered if Rex knew of it, or suspected it, since Rex Malin seemed to know everything at any given moment.

He hadn't called Rex Malin into his office to discuss the avenues of his family tree. At the trio gathered in front of him, he flung the _Gazette_ headline-side up. "Seen this?"

"I have seen it," answered Rex. He'd devised a way of understanding Cavendish, a small, reedy man thickening just slightly at the waist, under the chin. "What do you want me to do about a dead body found on Mutual?"

Cavendish delayed, unable to reach the pith of the dilemma quickly. He brought the paper around to his own gaze, caught words on the page that he'd read three times already. As Ms. Bradley's fine contralto lifted, so did his attention.

"I suspect, Mr. Malin, that the man who's been found hasn't an identity at all, and something more atrocious than cold and calculated murder is behind his death."

Rex's eyes winced at Cavendish. "This is true," he said after a span of seconds. "How interesting. And what is it that the papers haven't said, Inspector?"

"I should think a dead body is harsh enough, a reason for journalistic censorship," said Oswald, hoping the interruption, the veil of his ignorance thrown the inspector's way, might incline the man to speak. For a policeman, Cavendish had a peculiar, introverted manner. Perhaps it wasn't a usual day for him, and this was no usual murder. Oswald had few difficulties persuading others to believe him an idiot if, for instance, it made them feel competent and confident.

"That isn't an accurate assessment, Mr. Malin," the inspector said to Oswald. "The journalist doesn't know what to think of it, and, rather than tell what he might've glimpsed over the shoulders of a dozen of my fellow officers, is doing this best to replace facts with fiction, and was asked by this department if he wouldn't be a bit hyperbolical—at least until we get this straightened out."

Rex's indifference stayed intact. "I still believe that there's something you're not telling me, something the journalist didn't want to put in the newspaper. What is it?"

Cavendish blinked, glanced briefly at Ms. Bradley, then to Mr. Malin. From below the newspaper, he brought out a series of large photographs.

"Just had these dropped off."

Rex took the stack, flipped through them quickly, Oswald peering at the terrible images over his arm. Cavendish started taking them back.

"Don't think they're fit for a lady, Ms. Bradley."

Estella's lips pinched together tightly, her light hazel eyes in a potent glare. Cavendish was so stupefied by the expression that he was unable to stop her from snatching the photos out of his fingers. What Estella observed were the remains of a man—the body of him so disfigured that only his shoes, still intact, gave any indication that he was human, had once walked upright, had once _lived_. Estella dropped them on the desk, once she'd gone through them as thoroughly as she could. Nothing seemed particularly off about the crime scene, an alley that debouched upon Mutual, but the man's body—mauled and mutilated—that was unusual.

Cavendish gave them a summary. "His throat was ripped clean out of him, and bits of his entrails, too. It was like a creature had come along and supped on his insides. Worst thing in a long while I've seen, and I've seen plenty of people dismembered, run over by trolleys, trains—things I saw in the War. But this was—well," he raised his gaze, remembering why he'd joined the police in the first place, "it was all the worse for being without a good reason. Trains and trolleys will disfigure anyone, and war is war, doing what it does. This hasn't got a reason, has it?" He anticipated Mr. Malin's next question. "Body's at the morgue, being looked at by the coroner." A square card of stable paper was tossed to Mr. Malin. "There's your passport to get in at the crime scene, if you need to go. Should anyone ask you too many questions, wonder why you're poking about, refer him back to me. If we find out anything of ahead of you, Malin, you'll hear about it."

Rex agreed, the terms being standard throughout the years of their productive dyad. Cavendish gave him no other command. Not one remark of appreciation passed between them, merely a nod as Rex left the office behind Oswald and Ms. Bradley.

"Oswald," Rex started, returned to the automobile seat he'd vacated only ten minutes before, "would you mind driving us to Mutual? I should think a connoisseur of detective novels wouldn't protest getting a look at the scene of a crime."

"I have nothing better to do today," he paused, "or any other day, come to think of it. We were to have lunch later, brother."

"Were we? I'm not hungry."

Estella was attuned to this. Rye sandwiches, limited amount of hunger. Something was definitely bothering him. Oswald went on.

"As you two fine beings of my friendship know that I have a taste for the unconventional, either in art or crimes, you'd know that I'd appreciate any intrusion I might make during your investigation."

Rex ignored him, biting on his pipe, trying to imagine how he might discover the identity of a man disfigured beyond recognition when the police had already failed at it. He'd forgotten about Ms. Bradley, thinking of her only as someone else in the car, before Oswald spoke to her.

"You didn't seem disturbed by Inspector Cavendish's revelations regarding our innominate corpse, Ms. Bradley, or while regarding those rather obscene photographs."

"No," Estella replied, feeling bold, "no, I'm not rendered into a quivering crier at the evisceration of a poor man, Mr. Malin."

Rex stared at the back of her sleek head, noting, for once, that her hair held the tint of dark brown sugar, that it had a frothiness to it. "Not afraid of blood, are you? I didn't think you were." _Perhaps a family trait_ , he thought, remembering what he'd unearthed about the Bradley line. "Does that have anything to do with the time you spent overseas?"

"Overseas?" echoed Oswald. Ms. Bradley's cheeks turned pink, and her heated expression tried to condemn Rex, but nothing under the sun could accomplish that. "Were you a nurse in the War, Ms. Bradley? I thought you a degree too young to be mixed up in the foolishness of disbanding empires, but perhaps I'm more the fool for thinking it."

She had no choice now but to mention it. "Yes, I was overseas. A nurse at a hospital in Devon—that's in England. Until my real age was discovered, and I was sent home. That is all that's ever been interesting in my story. But I wonder who this man was."

Though the deflection caused Rex to shift in his seat uncomfortably, Oswald appreciated it.

"We'll soon find out," Oswald said, pressing forward with optimism, as he commonly did.

"If it's possible," Rex countered.

Estella believed it wouldn't be long before the brothers, united for this strange investigation, would tire of one another's quibbles and oppositions, and opt instead to return to their conventional methods of investigation: Rex doing the work, and Oswald pleasantly bothering him at inopportune moments with the promise of fine dining, amiable company, and conversation so gripping and intelligent that he wouldn't be able to think of work for a succession of hours.

Estella began to change her mind once they neared the scene of the crime. A constable remained on duty to shoo away the infrequent unwanted pedestrian, but he was ineffective at hiding the large display of black, brown, rust and red that soiled the wavy old brick-laid alley. The unnatural coloration covered an expanse much wider than even Rex had foreseen.

"What kind of crime _was_ this?" Rex asked of no one in particular.

"All crimes are heinous," said Oswald, "but I believe we're about to plant ourselves upon the tip of a very frightening iceberg."

* * * *

3.

As a trio, they were quiet once returned to Oswald's vehicle. Rex maintained a sufficient, and very silent, line of pondering what he had seen, and, when applicable, continued making notes in Pitman shorthand with a pencil stub and a tired paper pad. Oswald, focused on steering the car through heavy traffic, both of the vehicular and pedestrian variety, turned to humming sprightly tunes if his thoughts became too tangled. Estella continued to think of rye sandwiches, and hoped that Rex was not so ill of body or mind that he'd entirely negate his brother's wish to luncheon together. Surely, Oswald was too sensitive to Rex's attitudes that a slight disinterest in food would be taken seriously; Oswald would force his brother to eat. Such a thought prompted imagery, and Estella found her mind developing thoughts of little boy Malins and how mean they might've once been to one another. She snagged a snicker, unnoticed, as Oswald had just turned the car to Victoria Lane. The tires fished for traction, but the car righted itself and narrowly missed kissing the metal bumper of a fancy limousine.

"I do believe that belongs to Mr. Weatherstaff," Oswald commented, braking then cutting the engine. He saw his brother's head crane about for a better interpretation of the fancy vehicle parked directly in front of his office building's sad and dirty lobby. "Don't you think so, Rex?"

"Could be," he replied, feeling the answer was unimportant. The real question was what in the world George Weatherstaff wished to use Rex Malin's services for—again.

"That poor man," said Estella, smoothing leather gloves over thin, short fingers. She thought back to the news headlines she'd read about Mr. Weatherstaff through the years. "I do hope he's not come for anything too serious."

Rex opened the door with a flourish of urgency. "I'm going to find out, rather than sit here speculating. Coming, Oswald, Ms. Bradley?"

Estella lingered a moment, as Oswald hadn't moved, even after Rex had shut the door with undue force.

"Has he not ever called you anything but Ms. Bradley?" Oswald possessed a smidgen of sympathy, and, for what, he wasn't entirely sure. His brother's daftness—but that was nothing new. Or was he sorry for Estella being so obviously overlooked and overworked; unappreciated, though perhaps not particularly underpaid. "And how many years have you worked for him?"

"That's all right," she dismissed with a slanted smile, "I still call him Mr. Malin," and exited the car to tiptoe across the snowy street.

Oswald was the last to enter, yet found he wasn't so far behind the steps of Estella and Rex. The latter was in the process of discarding his hat, the former undoing just the second button of her coat, when Oswald added himself to the collection of brumal-garbed persons standing in the front office. George Weatherstaff was the other. More than ever he did, Mr. Weatherstaff appeared pale and bedraggled, without the benefit of much wisdom but the boon of good looks.

"Mr. Malin, how pleased I am that you've returned," started George, repressing the need to rush them into the conversation.

"Mr. Weatherstaff," Rex finally got out of his coat, shook the hand of Toronto's leading businessman, one of its city politicians, "I hope you haven't been kept waiting, but we had some business at the station house to attend to."

"Of course," Weatherstaff replied, for a moment letting it dawn on him that Rex Malin was more than a man who knew things, intimate and frightening and hairy things, but a man who was important to the police, who might know information useful to more than everyday citizens. "No, no, haven't been waiting long. I feel that I just got here." He wondered if he had just gotten there, but the last few minutes had been brushed from memory. He couldn't even recall getting out of the car, entering the building, taking the flight of stairs—or even how he got into the office.

"We leave the door unlocked," said Rex, somehow understanding the patterns of Mr. Weatherstaff's thoughts, "more often than not, particularly when we know the office won't be empty so long. Mrs. Lange, across the entresol, keeps an eye on the place." More than she should, but he failed to add that aloud. He saw the dip of Ms. Bradley eyes, and figured she knew what he hadn't said of unfailingly nosy but endearingly sincere Mrs. Lange. "This is my brother, Mr. Oswald Malin. He's been helping me with a case."

Oswald brightened in the pleasure of being included. As he shook Mr. Weatherstaff's rather limp hand, he refreshed the old man's memory. "We've met—more than once. Most recently, we bumped into one another at Captain Anderson's benefit concert."

"Oh, yes," George recalled a lot of unusual fruit punches in pretty glasses, beautiful women hanging on the arms of sour-faced, war-torn men—and sitting through the concert with Lydia next to him. His heart thumped. "I was hoping that I might have a word with you, Mr. Malin. It's an urgent matter, and one that is rather private, I'm afraid."

Rex's expression shifted from blank to intrigued, Mr. Weatherstaff supposing that he had been offended.

"That isn't to degrade the competency of your coworkers, Mr. Malin," he bumbled through the apology, adding leers to the other Mr. Malin, to the secretary who was then returning to her desk, "but I'm sure they're quite capable of—"

"You don't have to apologize to them," Rex interrupted. "Come along into my office." But with Mr. Weatherstaff walking ahead, Rex flipped round to eye his brother, hoping that some of their childish methods of telepathic communication hadn't been depleted through the years. Oswald winced, nodded, and Rex reluctantly shut himself into the office.

Oswald leaned half of his fundament, what he thought of the good half of his fundament, upon the front edge of Estella's desk. "What do you make of that, Ms. Bradley? Poor George Weatherstaff, indeed."

Estella ignored the question, unable to formulate an answer that didn't sound too feminine; she was too sorry for Mr. Weatherstaff. Instead, she drew her gaze upon Oswald's, discovering that his intrigued rooted quickly from Mr. Weatherstaff, the body on Mutual, and whatever she might say next. "Oswald," she set her elbows on the desk, leaning in as he leaned in an additional handful of inches.

"Estella, my dear, dear Estella."

She snorted a laugh at his deep and affected tone. It was bothersome when he attempted to ladle romance upon her. Oswald was too much like her own brother, and he was too gussied in the labels of bachelorhood to render lighthearted insinuations into seriousness. "Do you know, Oswald, if there is some ailment attacking Mr. Malin—Rex?"

"Ole Rexie, is it? Well, I can't imagine what might be eating at the old bird." He looked away, looked back at her. "Rye bread sandwiches, by chance?"

She nodded. "I'm pleased you know about that."

"You're not the only one who pays attention to Rexie's unfortunate and storybook-like diet. I can read his food like a fairytale. Even as a child, we knew what mood he was in, and occasionally even what was bothering him, by what he ate—and by what he did not eat. If it's rye bread sandwiches," he stroked his lantern jaw, listening to the voices of reason as he unwound them from within, "then it's probably business-related. It could hardly be anything else with Rexie. He's never been in love, that I'm aware of. It's an unfortunate side-effect of being a male Malin. We're far too selfish to promote feelings of unselfishness, or to harbor any inclination to let the whimsy of love sail us away."

Estella had no use for the Malin men's lack of passion. Some men, after all, do not require an amorous union to obtain a happy marriage. "If you think it is business, I have every reason to trust your assessment."

"I sense the approach of an argumentative preposition. Don't disappoint me, dear Estella."

"But," she said, wagging her eyebrows as he let loose a boyish, pleased smile, "you forget, don't you, that I am at the root of this business, and I oversee the payments received, and there is no coin that flies out of this room without my knowledge."

He reached up to her ear, causing her to flinch, then he drew his hand away with a coin between thumb and forefinger. "That is true. Now," he slid from the desk, "what do you make of this body?"

"I don't make anything of the body but that it was a body. My lone reason for tagging along behind Mr. Malin was to smooth Cavendish's feathers."

"He does have sharp and pointy feathers, doesn't he? He's like an ambulatory busby."

Estella chortled. "With freckled hands and oversized feet."

"Yes, exactly. A busby shaped like a stork. I'm glad you went along to smooth our busby's addled feathers. Perhaps the mollification of one of his distant cousins is just what he needs." He tossed the coin, caught it, and let the two of them exchange a question-and-answer sessions without a word being passed. "Old Rexie is not the only one who is capable of discovering what is hidden. We're all archeologists of data, either that which has been brought to importance by an event, such as, let's say, an eviscerated corpse in an alley, or of information that continued to exist despite its uselessness, like keynotes in Mr. Weatherstaff's personal history."

He'd no sooner finished speaking than the subject of his oration launched himself into the front office. Hatted, coated, gloved, he gave his greetings—and a selection of farewells—to the woman and man he spotted on his way out the door.

Rex emerged from his office, yawning, wishing he had a cup of coffee and a good stew. Out the window, snow continued to fall, alluring, beautiful, sparking in him faint reminders of a home that'd existed before the war. "Oswald, are you still here?"

"As you see. I haven't quite found a way to blend myself into the wall just yet, but I'm working on it. What did Mr. Weatherstaff want?"

"The same thing anyone who walks through my doors wishes to have: information."

"Yes," Oswald continued, "but what sort of information?"

Rex unloaded it upon them, Oswald and Estella. They were his counterparts, and many times he realized how much he owed to Oswald's city connections, and to Ms. Bradley's business acumen. "Poor Mr. Weatherstaff! If it isn't one thing with that man, it's another. He woke up this morning to find that his fiancée is missing. Or, at least, he supposes that she's missing, but he hasn't enough proof of it, and she hasn't been gone long enough to bring about the concern of the police. He's asked me to look into it."

Oswald returned to a seat, this time in a more appropriate and functional wooden chair before the wall of windows. He felt the cold penetrate the exposed skin above his collar as he stared at the floor. Eventually, his gaze found Rex. "I know the woman, of course; she was at Captain Anderson's benefit. Beautiful woman, a bit exotic."

"This is she," Rex removed a photograph from his breast pocket. Oswald accepted it with his fingertips.

"Yes," he said, "that is she. I can't remember her name. Something musical. Greek? Is she Greek?"

"Canadian, through and through. Part aboriginal and part French, I guess, though Mr. Weatherstaff insists on keeping that quiet, for reasons that are rather obvious."

"French and aboriginal? Métis, is she?" echoed Oswald. A merry twinkle in his eyes suggested he'd slipped into a humorous mood. "And he still wants to marry her? I must say that my respect for him has crept upwards a noticeable notch or two. I didn't think such a stick-in-the-mud would defy the philosophy of the times—which is, of course, so backwards that it must enjoy a fine view of its ass—pardon me, Ms. Bradley—and marry whomever he wishes, with ill regard to her status and bloodlines. I did believe him better off marrying a purebred poodle! I can't say that I ever supposed her to be anything but Greek. She has passed herself off marvelously well as a European. Even I feel scammed, in quite a satisfactory manner, I assure you. I do so love it when a woman is smart enough to scam me. That woman, not Greek! I should eat my own socks. Find me some salt, Estella, and I will."

"Don't eat your socks, Oswald; it's snowing too hard outside for you to be without them. I believe that Mr. Weatherstaff is losing the battle of keeping the identify of his future wife buried, if I may say so," said Estella, having glanced at the photograph before returning it to Mr. Malin. "She is too exotic, and people will always wonder—and gossip aloud—about those who are beautifully different."

"I've been both beautiful and different all my life," Oswald interpolated, soliloquizing, "and no one has ever gossiped about my origins, though they have gossiped about plenty of other—h'mm, shall we say unconventional?—aspects of my character."

"So it seems that I'm to find her," Rex said, glancing a final time at the hand-tinted photograph before putting it away. She looked familiar, and it bothered him. "What her real name is, I can't say because I don't know. We know her in Toronto as Lydia Botsaris. As you've devised, Oswald, she has passed herself off as a European socialite educated in England."

"But she must've been educated elsewhere," Oswald continued in the same vein. "If she wasn't, then half the people I associate with on a weekly basis would know her from such-and-such public school. I know gentlemen and ladies from all parts of our fine country, and she has never been more than gossiped about, _breathed_ about, but no one has ever come forward and mentioned that they know her from church, or school, or from a shop in Ottawa that they used to frequent. No, there is something very strange at work here. That Ms. Botsaris is of Canadian roots, I'm inclined to believe. But she is not _from_ Canada, not raised here to be thoroughly Canadian—or, at the very least, British, if she must be that! Which begs me to interrupt your latest case, brother, and backtrack us to the body from this morning, now all properly covered with snow, I suppose."

"What about it?"

Oswald took a moment, pressing a fingertip below mustache, to his lip. "Something odd about his shoes. Did you notice?"

"They were brown—and new."

"Quite new." Oswald leapt up, careened around the room. "And manufactured by a shoe company with a factory in Hamilton. I wish I'd had a better look at his hands."

"To see if they were working-man's hands?" asked Rex, now his turn to sit, to play with a pipe that Estella hadn't seen him light in years. "I looked at the photographs, as did you, Oswald, the one Cavendish handed to us. I didn't notice anything particularly telling about his hands. They were—" He eyed Ms. Bradley engrossed in filing at her desk, but how engrossed he couldn't guess. "They were covered with blood, perhaps even gnawed on for all I could tell."

"We shouldn't be too hard on the photographers. They hadn't much to work with, and the lighting—quite atrocious. We were fortunate at all that they managed to snap a few shots before their breakfasts were lost to them. We are not all of us so desensitized to violence."

Rex carried the same belief, having had his imagination snapped and disfigured while stuck in European battles. Now wasn't the time to discuss philosophical avenues. "I can't exactly follow where you're going with those shoes, Oz."

"He means to find the man's identity using the shoes and the shoe factory," Estella piped up, hardly aware of having said anything, except the Malin brothers stopped pacing and glared at her. She regarded Oswald. "Isn't that correct?"

"Yes," he smiled at her, "it is correct. It's our only established lead on the man's identity."

Rex was unsure. "A pair of shoes?"

"A pair of shoes so new that even a shoe-hound like myself has yet to regard them in any store, including my favorite haberdashery—or everyone's beloved Eaton's. The head of the men's accouterments department telephones me whenever there is a particularly pleasing new arrival."

"You have a terrible illness, Oz," Rex commented, who hadn't purchased a new pair of shoes in five years. "You think our victim works at the factory?"

"That's my guess. At present, that is better than your guess, since you haven't one."

"Why work at a factory in Hamilton, and come to Toronto to get murdered?"

"I'm not sure how far ahead he'd planned his agenda, Rexie, and I somehow doubt that he penciled 'Get Myself Murdered' upon his all-important datebook."

"No, probably not. If you want to go to Hamilton, Oswald, be my guest. I'll gladly turn over the discovery of the victim's identity to you, while I roost on Mr. Weatherstaff's latest and greatest scandal."

Oswald was happy to oblige. His hand flipped away from his forehead as he bowed shallowly to his younger sibling. "Thank you, I shall. I've always wanted to visit a shoe factory, and now I've harnessed a legitimate reason. I'll call my friend Teddy. He's in the shoe business, and he knows practically everyone in Ontario that's laced into—please note the pun—such manufacturing. He'll know someone necessary to facilitate the thing. But, brother, before I'm on my way and wrapped up in my side of the case, tell me what you're going to do about the missing Lydia Botsaris."

"I don't have to tell you," Rex said, taking from the filing cabinet behind Estella a blank case-file sheet that he'd fill in. In another drawer, an unexpected empty space startled him, dulling his enthusiasm. "Ms. Bradley, have you seen the— Oh." George Weatherstaff's file, one of the thickest in the office, was handed to him. He planned to shut himself behind a closed door to peruse it. "Well, Oswald, I'll do what I normally do when faced with any of George Weatherstaff's troubles: tread carefully—very carefully. Hold my calls for a while, would you, Ms. Bradley? Not that there will be many. Oswald, happy traveling."

"What about luncheon, Rexie? We're supposed to enjoy a bit of nosh together. My treat."

"I'll grab a sandwich later," Rex said, shutting his office door so harshly that the glass panes rattled.

Oswald set palms to Estella's desk, leaned over, his air one of a master of secrets and a creator of none. "Are you sure he's not encountering any sort of financial turmoil?"

Estella quit fiddling with the troublesome ribbon in the Royal typewriter. She sighed, seeing the crisp grayness of Oswald's emotive eyes, and thinking of those stinky rye sandwiches in the trash bin. "You know, Mr. Malin, I'm not really sure at all."

He touched the end of her chin, again treating her like she was his mother. "I'll go across the way there and grab for you soup and crackers and coffee. Rex can hunt and spear his own food when he wishes to eat. But you, my dear, will not starve on my account. I should like a crumb or two if I'm on my way to the Birmingham of Ontario. Back in a few minutes!"

He left a moment later, distracted by his brother's attitude and wishing he could be a trifle more beguiled by Estella's sympathetic attitude and industrious work ethic.

* * * *

4.

As the day dribbled off its hours, Rex paid little attention to anything but his thoughts of Lydia Botsaris. This wasn't the first time in his life that such a devotion to her crossed many minutes and hours. It was not the first time that, through some mystical power at work in the universe, he'd been drawn towards helping her.

The photograph Mr. Weatherstaff had left behind kept Rex's thoughts fresh, his memories of the past on constant repeat. No facsimile of her was required to guide him across the smooth angles of her face, the tiny hollows below her cheeks, the little dip between chin and plush bottom lip. He remembered the slow curve of her brow, with the dark, soft hair that drooped over it when she had been too hard at work, too lost in the business of war to maintain combs and pins. How her agile, useful hands had swept across loose knots at the back of her head, absentmindedly, disinterestedly, as she fixed her kindness upon a worthy, injured man.

No photograph was required to remind him of her. It was hard to forget a woman of her beauty, means and, most respectfully, _power_.

The morning he realized she'd floated to the surface in Ontario was the morning he saw her photographed with Mr. Weatherstaff for the first time. He supposed, being a man who collected information, since it was the way his mind worked as it tumbled through the world, he was one of the few men that read the society columns. This was partly due to the information he longed to collect, how one item might be connected to another, and he might be the only person in Toronto with the intelligence to connect Item A with Item B. His business relationship with Mr. Weatherstaff had been lucrative, and was, thanks to the gentleman's rather harsh luck, as continual as it was faithful. But it was a surprise to find Mr. Weatherstaff mentioned in the society column, seen at the theater with a woman identified as Lydia Botsaris.

For many reasons, Rex had been astounded. What was George Weatherstaff, a man inflicted with one scandal after another, doing with a woman who'd supposedly died in France seven years ago?

Naturally, no one knew the answer to that question, and certainly not Rex Malin, to whom all the answers came if he worked hard enough for them. If he wanted to hold within his mind the treasure of that answer, he was surely on the trail of it. Really, only one person he knew could answer the question of misappropriated death, and that was the beautiful woman herself. He had to find Lydia Botsaris.

Or he had to find the woman he'd known in France, the nurse with no name, the nurse with a reputation, a rumor, an unidentified power. Forget finding Ms. Botsaris. Perhaps she'd run off, back to the Continent, once realizing that she didn't fit in so well, after all.

Yet—why leave, if her life was so close and settled and cozy, if she were going to marry George Weatherstaff and settle into the high and gilded rims of Toronto society? With her photograph and name boldly set into the _Gazette_ , she had already climbed to the top and had eked out a means of remaining on the elite plateau. If inclined, she could certainly stay there. She had a fiancé who'd willingly set her on a pedestal every day.

Gone she was. Ergo, Lydia Botsaris, soon to be Lydia Weatherstaff, did not want to stay in Toronto and be with a man who'd willingly set her on a pedestal every day.

Or something had driven her into hiding.

Rex hunted for the photograph Weatherstaff had left behind, and unearthed it from debris that crisscrossed his desk no matter how often he tidied it. Her exquisite image was frozen on a thick sheet of high-quality photographer's paper, from a studio on Cambridge Street. It was only when she was stuck to paper and tinted by hand that he could look at her eyes. In France, he'd had difficulty looking in the eyes of anyone but enemies and commanding officers. The unknown French nurse that he'd encountered multiple times, injured and uninjured, in battle and out of it, was one he had tried to look in the eye. He recalled that her eyes wore no gentle, womanly expressions, either. She was hard and chilled. The photograph failed to catch that.

Could it be a different woman? Identical twins was an option, of course, but the scarcity of finding one in war, one at home in Toronto, were too enormous. The probabilities of it being the same woman, a nurse in France, a socialite in Toronto, were nearly as astronomical as it being a set of twins. Rex was rather resigned to believe it was the same woman—or ghost—or whatever she was. A spectral being flushed from his dreams and into his reality, and for the third time in his life.

He wished he had saved her using the same practices that she had saved his. But the circumstances were different, and six months apart. His had involved specters, of a sort. A pack of beastly wolves crept across the field at night. And a woman, a nurse that he'd never seen before, was trapped between the wolves and the edge of a cliff. He'd caught her in a scene like something in a fairy tale. He'd crept behind the wolves and fired a shot that scattered them, angered them. They were gone long enough for her to run off with him in an ambulance with a cranky, sick motor and hardly any petrol. He returned her to her hospital, had never asked what she was doing away from it, did not think of asking any questions at all thanks to the intensity and sobriety of war, the destitution of the Belgian town around them.

Six months later, she patched up a hole in his shoulder. "A graze," she called it, accent thick, neither French nor German, not the combination of the two that his ears had grown accustomed to. He liked the way she'd made it sound, "a graze," as if it were a pastoral landscape, something that sheep were likely to do. But when he squinted at her, the soft slope of her cheek, the velvet softness of the arc of her bottom lip, he knew her, and tried to tell her that he knew her. She'd smiled weakly, saying it was possible. A woman might do better to remember the fairytale knight who'd saved her from a pack of hungry wolves.

He tossed the photograph back on the desk, disgusted. Maybe women like that simply forgot, over and over again, as it was convenient for them.

After his shoulder had healed, and he was on the verge of being released, his orders yet unknown, he'd tracked his mystery maiden to the nearest old church and found her sitting in a pew. He slipped next to her, held her hand, didn't say a word. Three minutes like that, he'd always estimated it'd been three minutes, and she kissed his cheek—and vanished. As soon as he'd gathered the nerve required to follow her, he'd stepped in her wake out the back door, to an abandoned laneway of cobblestones, litter and snow. No one was there.

Less than an hour later, a transporter came and left him and twenty-six others at a camp in Rouen, France. He started the war all over again. He then piloted primitive airplanes rather than taking out Germans with a shot his wrists had grown too shaky to commit adequately. But whenever he happened to fly near a Belgian town, he looked for the church where he'd met her, where they'd sat for an estimated three minutes, holding hands and not saying a word. He never found it again.

By the time he'd taken up three different planes, hadn't shot down a single one, the war was over. He stayed for a while longer, drifting about listlessly, restlessly, like many of the men in Rouen. And, finally, the barriers began to come down, and if they couldn't get out someone, inevitably, came to them. A rich and bored brother, curious as to how the war had scarred France, listed his way down the Seine and found Rex in Rouen. Oswald was rather unchanged, his general soupçon of indifference, humor, charm and cynicism as well represented as ever. He cheered the men with his tales, his flippancy, his mannerisms and his fine suits. Oswald couldn't make any man feel the need to ridicule him, even if he was something of a caricature sprung to life out of the pages of a novel. Nonetheless, Rex had been pleased to see him, to hear his tales, his artfully-tongued mysteries about his doings in Britain during the whole of the war. "Ah, that is a secret. I'm afraid I can't tell you, but I'll be more than happy to spend the money I've made from that secret, and perhaps some others, on you and Mother, if you'll permit me."

When the day came to leave France, mustered out with the skeletal remains of his company, Rex was taken to London in Oswald's own plane, flown by his own hands. If nothing else, Oswald hadn't been idle while in England, and, for certain, he had made a great deal of money. Rex knew this by Oswald's careful extravagance: his fine pied-à-terre in London's most fashionable and upscale neighborhood; he tongued off a list of his elite-named neighbors with laughter and ease. He bought his brother, who had nothing but khaki and a blue pilot's uniform to his name, the smartest of clothes, made sure that he had the best hot shaves by the finest barbers, the finest soaps for his evening ablutions. And, through all of this, their grand six months in London, Rex felt different, somehow more alive, somehow less familiar with his past and less afraid of his future. He thought there must be something wrong with him. He never told Oswald how he felt, and the doctor who'd examined him said he was "fit as a fiddle." Rex had never told Oswald about the nameless nurse in France. He'd told a handful of the guys he used to fly with in Rouen, two of whom were dead, and the other four had whereabouts and lives unknown.

For a long while, Rex had supposed that the woman with her photograph in the newspaper was not the same nameless nurse he'd known in France.

How on earth was he going to find her again?

An idea struck him, and leaving the Weatherstaff file a mess upon his desk, slipped into the rest of the office. Estella, behind the typewriter, glanced up at him the instant he was there. He fumbled excuses, attempted to vocalize words that might, if strung together, present an excuse viable to her, as he flung on hat and coat and scarf against the fierce weather. She mouthed a phrase he didn't hear, but, in hindsight, as he took the gritty granite stairs, that it was about Oswald having taken off to Hamilton, and perhaps something in regards to the meanness of the climate.

He felt it on him as soon as he was out the door. The wind had turned colder since the morning excursion to the murdered man in the laneway, and he passed a fleeting wish for Oswald's trusty car rather than the use of his two feet. By luck, his destination lay two blocks east, but was glad when the short hike ended. The wind was far more fierce than the snow, too arctic for November, too eerie to be natural.

Inside the Church of St. James, the oldest church in Toronto, Rex took off his hat and slipped into the sanctuary. Though its Gothic Revival style was a far cry from the simplistic architecture of the church in Belgium, it was no less solemn and regal. Eagerly, Rex scanned the pews for any woman befitting Lydia Botsaris' physical characteristics. So few people were present, on a day of terrible weather that certainly lowered the piety of parishioners, that his inspection was finished far too early and unsuccessfully.

He sat in an empty pew near the rear of the church, and let himself regroup. If not there, where was she? Did she know he was in Toronto, too? Is that why she'd appeared there?

Out the corner of his eye, he saw a moving mass silhouetted by the light of the pointy glass windows. As the mass neared, knowing it was too wide and misshaped to be the nameless nurse, and unsure who it would turn out to be, Rex kept still. Eventually, the man sat, and by the natural odors he emanated, Rex's shoulders relaxed, his insides stopped leaping, and he looked up.

"I've never seen you in an Anglican place of worship," Rex whispered to his old friend, Egbert Watching Moon. Rex hoped he sounded snippy and offensive; Watching Moon often appreciated the sarcasm and meanness they bandied about. The two of them had worked on one of Cavendish's more difficult cases in the last four years, the death of a young girl and the suspect a young Algonquian man. Rex and Watching Moon were both collectors of information, built to be observant through the years, and had become fast friends. Inspector Cavendish, on the other hand, had used Egbert Watching Moon only to wring pertinent facts from him, then quickly discarded him, yet crawled—Watching Moon had used the word "slinked"—back to "Mr. Egbert" in the event that he required a tribal liaison. Rex thought it was best to keep on the good side of another culture, and he appreciated Watching Moon's skills and strengths, his quirky sense of humor. They hadn't seen one another in months.

"Well," Rex had his temper rise at Watching Moon's provoking silence, "what are you doing here?"

"Isn't that obvious? I came to find you. And I have. Now," he grunted, his bad leg giving him spasms of pain in the cold weather, "we must get out of here so I can explain to you why I wanted to find you."

Not far from the Church of St. James was a local eatery, cozy with its old-fashioned parlor stove and rows behind the U-shaped counters of candy jars and oddments. Watching Moon seemed to be known and welcomed there, for he sat at the counter without a qualm, his big coat billowing out behind him, hanging down from the stool. His fingerless gloves took off his hat, and his expert aim tossed it successfully to the nearest hook on the coat rack. Rex left his hat and coat in place, the weather having left him chilled to the bone. Watching Moon sized him up.

"Do you want me to get prophetic about the weather? I say it won't last. Two coffees, please, Tony," Watching Moon said to the lad behind the counter, apron shirt and hat stark white and as fresh as he was. Tony brought the coffees a moment later, and Watching Moon enjoyed seeing his friend not hesitate to sip the too-hot brew. "You look very unhealthy."

Rex sputtered into the coffee, laughed. "Thank you very much. Kinder words have never been spoken."

"Truer words have never needed to be said. I suppose that you are in with Cavendish on the dead body in the laneway off Mutual." He turned the cup around on the plain porcelain saucer, emoting no eagerness for a response.

"I guess you already know the answer. Oswald's away now, following a tip that may lead to the boy's identity. Why? Do you know who he is?"

After a moment, Watching Moon pressed his hands together beneath his chin, eyes wincing, eyebrows squeezed together in the middle. "No, I don't think I do. I thought I would see Cavendish about it, anyway. There was something strange about the scene."

"Following dead bodies around again, are you?"

"The dead are not my hobby, at least not when I don't want them to be," Watching Moon replied in his typical mysteriousness and ambiguity, laced with just a touch of humor. He shot his gaze to Tony, washing spots off clean sundae glasses with another stark white item, a towel. From the pocket of his coat, Watching Moon scrounged up twenty cents. He left it in Tony's outstretched palm. "Go powder your nose, kid."

Tony smirked, took the hint, and left the front unattended. Rex sipped his coffee, again waiting for Watching Moon to say what he wanted to say in the privacy of a desolated eatery.

"The body of that boy was gnawed and mauled," Watching Moon said.

"I noticed. What are you thinking? A disgruntled dog, a starving one?"

"More like a pack of wild dogs."

"In Toronto?"

Watching Moon took a long sip of coffee, smoothing back his pepper-and-salt hair. The light of levity had been snuffed from his eyes. "There have been many strange things happening in Toronto lately. Haven't you noticed? You've been busier than usual. So has Cavendish. That's why he's been crankier than usual."

Rex picked up on this. "And why he was so eager to have me do most of the work on this case."

"See, you are much smarter than you let on." Watching Moon smirked.

Rex's concentration went from Cavendish to the hint that a pack of wild dogs had killed that boy in the alleyway. Wasn't it too coincidental that he'd once saved Lydia Botsaris from a pack of wolves, and was looking for her at the same time a young man is murdered, then presumably eaten by giant canines? He mulled, and Watching Moon aided him.

"There are two full moons this month. We are coming upon the second. Two eclipses this month, too. One was earlier this month, a small solar eclipse we couldn't see here in Canada. And the other is in three days, a lunar eclipse coinciding with the hunter's moon. It doesn't take my cultural imprint to say that things are always stranger when eclipses and full moons come much too close together. It is the time of year when the veil between our powerful and realistic world, and the intangible, spiritual world is a very fragile, flimsy thing, capable of being shredded—if someone or something is powerful enough to do it."

Rex played with this. "Hence, wolves come out of the dark and kill an innocent victim."

"Could be. But wolves such as that have a master that is a part of them, that controls them. That's what all the legends tell us." The glare Rex gave flung insight to him. "This is not your first encounter with such a legend. H'mm, yes, that's very impressive. I'm agog. Every time we meet, Rex, you surprise me. You're made of layers, and underneath every one of them there lurks another story. What is your story?"

With Tony still off powdering his nose, or, more appropriately, starching his apron, Rex confided in Watching Moon. As quickly and succinctly as he could, Rex informed him of the missing affianced to George Weatherstaff, a name that did not impress Watching Moon; he told of his meeting with Lydia Botsaris, or the woman he supposed was she, in the wilds of Belgium. Mentioning that he'd saved her from wolves, that among the allied soldiers there had been told a ghost story of a wolf keeper that floated around abandoned battlefields, but that he hadn't connected the two until that day.

Watching Moon expressed his reaction in the typical manner that irked and amused Rex. "You should have left her to die with the wolves. You've made your life too interesting as a result."

Rex's knees began to tremble, his insides quake. To put them to rest, he gulped down the remains of his coffee. "Are you going to stay and help me?"

"No," Watching Moon said, sliding off the stool and patting his friend on the back. "I'm going home to pray for your spirit. Someone else will come along and help you, if I pray the right way. Here's some change," he left it on the table to pay for the coffee, and there was a bit extra. "Get yourself some sweets. I have a feeling you will need to feel like a little kid again."

Rex held him back. "Any idea how I can start finding her?"

Watching Moon shook his head, ducking it into the wide-brimmed hat, speckled in melted snowflakes. "I suggest you ask the wolves."

"You've come here just to fill me with ominous warnings, Egbert Watching Moon."

"That depends entirely on how you look at it, Rex Malin."

He disappeared into the snow, the small brass bell upon the door tinkling. It announced a departure to Tony, for the kid returned swiftly to the front counter.

"Anything else for you, sir?"

Dejectedly, lethargically, Rex inched the coins forward. "Give us a bar of chocolate, Tony. I've got one very long day ahead of me."

He still didn't know how he was going to find Lydia Botsaris. He couldn't very well wait for an anthropomorphic wolf to tell him where she was. And he couldn't wait for Lydia to fall into his lap for the third time in his life. Though he had a feeling that if he waited around long enough, she might wind up doing just that.

He ought to get to George Weatherstaff. Whether the distinguished gentleman was at home or at his office, he deserved to know that his lady was not likely to return to him in the near future. She was as likely to vanish into the snowflakes and blue twilight as Watching Moon had done, as those spectral wolves he'd witnessed in Belgium.

Another scandal tacked upon the figure and form of George Weatherstaff. As if the poor man needed another one.

* * * *

5.

George Weatherstaff was not, at the present, all that interested in the creation of another scandal. He was sitting at his office at home—his father had once called it the "study" and the noun had stuck, although it was really no more than a glorified library with a comfortable, saddle-leather armchair and a desk big enough for three large men. He had fanned before him a selection of handwritten notes and newspaper clippings that chronicled the three scandals that had dragged his name through the press since he was a lad of six years. That's when his father had been killed accidentally in the home, "with a revolver that _just happened_ to go off," as the prosecuting attorney had piquantly put it. Following the inquest, involving the staff and his mother and his brother, his sister having been away at school at the time of the shooting, there'd been no consequential proof that anyone in the house had shot Mr. John Ambrose Weatherstaff. But his brother, who'd been in charge of the revolver, had never quite been the same man again.

Thankful to be cleared of any impending charges, the oldest boy in the clan, Augustin "Gus" Weatherstaff, had gone off to the sea under a name and an age that were not his. Following four years of silence, postcards began to trickle in from ports around the world, the Orient, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Peru. Then letters, with Gus's tiny print often done in pencil rather than pen, "a pen being too top-notch and worthless on a ship," so Gus had written.

Now, in the midst of the torment George was going through, he was expecting his brother to return any minute of any impending hour. According to the last letter, sent from Southampton, Gus was taking time away from the sea and getting homesick. Away for years, he hadn't even come back at Mother's unnatural death.

Which was scandal number two. Their mother, kind and sweet, was a woman meant to be loved, meant to give love. For many years following John Ambrose Weatherstaff's death, Lillias had stifled those basic needs of loving and being loved. Then she met Wilkerson Peabody at a benefit—George could recall that it had been a benefit for an orphan and adoption program so urgent following the war—and Lillias Weatherstaff was swept off her feet and suddenly remarried.

George hadn't liked Mr. Peabody, even from the beginning. But George, through years of hard work and following years of scandal, had learned to hide his dislike. He had to, being a man who'd once held politics and the men in politics as the height of proper and established society. His dislike for Mr. Peabody was so severe, and startled him so thoroughly, that he begged his mother to reconsider marrying him, and he'd set out to discover Mr. Peabody's background, first by himself, which was too involved for his busy schedule, and then with the help of the information man himself, Rex Malin. He considered Malin to be one of Toronto's greatest secrets. Though when it came to discovering dirt on Peabody, there he had rather failed, since Peabody was a clean and careful man with no blemishes on his character. No more than his, George Weatherstaff's, that much was certain.

It didn't take long for Mr. Peabody to show that he was a man who'd hold his wife in place with ridicule, embarrassment, and, if necessary, physical violence. George's hatred doubled. He even wrote to his brother, hoping to find him at the port of his last postcard. No word came from Gus regarding the danger their mother was in.

When she'd fallen down the stairs, broken her back, conked her head, and died two days later, George was shocked—and yet not shocked to find the police were eager to investigate. Peabody was held as a main suspected, and in a Toronto courtroom his tumultuous relationship with Mrs. Lillias Peabody was exploited and examined. Although there was a lack of evidence to convict Peabody of any murderous charge, he was fined and thrown in prison for a lesser crime involving a bar maid he'd harassed.

Following the trial, when the case had closed and her body was no longer needed as evidence, George buried Lillias Weatherstaff next to his father. The tainted name of Peabody did not grace the headstone.

And still Gus did not come home.

Again on the verge of slipping into a scandal, George was anxious for the care and comfort his big brother might be able to provide. Gus, who'd been preened from a young age to be a lawyer of vast corporations, and, eventually, a man of Parliament, had certainly seemed brighter and more inclined to the wisdom that had so long evaded George. Even his letters, with its tiny, crooked scrawl, showed the infinite intelligence that George remembered of his brother—a man who'd given up everything to become a sailor, get away from the tragedy and accusations that'd plagued him since he was a youth. More than twenty-five years later, Gus would be over the age of forty, likely tanned and wrinkled from long exposure to the elements. Would the brothers reunite gladly, or would there be tension from memories, from George's missing girl?

He sighed, trembling as he did so. Where the devil had Lydia gone? He didn't like to pick up the evening paper and see that the police were still stumped in the case of the dead body of the mutilated young man. He didn't like to think of Lydia being out there in the city, alone, frightened, some murderer hunting her down like wild game. Was she all right? Why had she gone, and gone without telling him? If she hadn't wanted to be married to him, why hadn't she just said so? She was frank enough, able to tell him that without all the secret actions and daring escapes.

He tried to be furious with her, but he was too afraid for her. She was so odd, really; so ethereal that she might've returned to the stardust that'd birthed her.

He rapped his nails on the desk, staring at the candlestick phone. Was Malin ever going to get back to him? Was Lydia ever going to call him? Wasn't anyone?

The doorbell croaked through the downstairs. Hearing it first, then an echo of it, George zipped from his seat and cranked open one of the study doors. He heard low voices, then the amicable chatter of housekeeper Mrs. Bowman. George swallowed, so sure that it was Gus who'd come, but, if that were the case, Mrs. Bowman wouldn't have shown the old Weatherstaff sailor into the guest parlor while she informed her master of his company. Gus wouldn't have desired the ceremony, being treated like someone who hadn't grown up in that house.

George pulled the door in all the way, revealing himself in one big blast to unsuspecting Mrs. Bowman. "Who's come?"

She clasped her hands together, pitying him. He'd wanted Gus—they all did, at least those of the staff that remembered him. "It's Mr. Malin, sir. Mr. _Oswald_ Malin," she said, hoping to clarify.

Oswald, Mr. Rex Malin's brother. "What the devil does he want?" He often asked this of Mrs. Bowman, and often received no answer. This was one of those exceptions.

"To speak to you, sir, saying it was urgent." She had just enough time to hurry her short legs around Mr. Weatherstaff and open the parlor door for him. An intrinsic curtsey followed, though neither gentleman paid attention. She shut the door behind her, pausing a second to see if voices were raised, but they were dim as introductions and queries of health were passed. A ruse of courtesy used to keep the ears of hesitantly departing housekeepers from catching wind of true business.

"Well, Mr. Malin," George slumped into a chair, set an ankle over the opposite knee, "what is it you wish to see me about?" He offered Mr. Malin a cigarette, but was waved aside. While Mr. Malin formed his purpose, George stuffed tobacco into his pipe and had it lit before Mr. Malin caused him to choke on the first puff.

"We have reason to suspect that your affianced and the boy dead in the alley are somehow connected," offered Oswald, beating around the bush for no man. He never did, certainly not for George Weatherstaff. The man had been through so much that it seemed inhumane to make him wallow in fear and uncertainties longer than necessary. But there was a mean streak in Oswald that enjoyed, in a frivolous manner, seeing men as handsome and as rich as Mr. Weatherstaff writhe beneath the unaccountable foibles of life—just a little. The procurement of such moments rarefied the male object by bringing him to a level quite like the rest of them. "I'm aware that this is probably a great shock to you, and equally bewildering. I have no ability to tell you how, just yet, the two of them are connected, but I can tell you that they were seen together at the Hamilton railway station around one-forty-five yesterday afternoon. Do you have any idea who he might be in relation to Ms. Botsaris?"

Feebly, George confessed that he had no idea. "She hasn't brothers, sisters, nor cousins that I've ever heard her mention." But what had he been _thinking_? It occurred to him, and, aloud, he chastised himself. "I do not know her so very well."

"Well, Mr. Weatherstaff, I think you will not be surprised to hear me say that the woman you are engaged to and the woman my brother and I are investigating are turning out to be two very different people. One and the same, as it seems, but very different. Now, if you'll forgive me for departing so swiftly from your company, and for bringing cumbersome facts to you—"

"You can hardly be helped bringing facts to me, Mr. Malin," interposed a weary George.

"I'll take myself away from you swiftly, and allow you ample time to consider what I've said, and to look back over your history with Ms. Botsaris. Perhaps you'll discover incongruent patterns—and perhaps you'll wish to jab me with your fist for making untoward suggestions."

"I rather doubt that."

Oswald's faint smiled appreciated the chivalry, as well as the concession that it might've grazed George Weatherstaff's mind to hit the harbinger, but that he was too gentlemanly, and likely too heartbroken, to do so. "Then I wish you a pleasant evening, as pleasant as it can be under the circumstances. I'm off to tell the other Mr. Malin what I've discovered on my adventure today."

"You haven't told him yet?"

"Afraid I haven't. Came straight to you from the station. I thought you'd be waiting here, poised on tenterhooks, for it's unlike Rex to telephone a client with information, whether or not he has found any, until the next day."

"That's odd of him, but, thinking of the other work I've had him do for me, it's very true," George said, hardly aware of reacting at all. His mind was clouded. Lydia knew the dead boy, did she? And where was Gus, why hadn't he come home yet? Along with Mrs. Bowman, George showed Mr. Malin to the door. "Goodnight, Mr. Malin, and I thank you for coming directly to me with this information."

"Use it wisely." Oswald, perhaps not the great sketch artist of character that Rex was, understood that the Weatherstaff household faced ample distraction, and it was more than the disappearance of Ms. Botsaris. That he had forced George Weatherstaff to reconsider the design and history of Ms. Botsaris, Oswald was not in doubt. That it had come as a surprise, well, there rested a modicum of tangible doubt. Perhaps it was the widespread misfortunes that had plagued Weatherstaff since his sixth year of life, and perhaps it was an intuition that told him that his beautiful affianced had malefic and unusual intents. Perhaps it was none of the above. Perhaps George had really been blinded by love. What a fool he was, then, worthy of pity, if such a thing proved true. In the old-fashioned way, Oswald tipped his hat to Mr. Weatherstaff, smiled without a trace of smugness or pity, and turned on his heel to find his brother.

George shut the door, winded in his lungs, fuzzy in his head. He asked Mrs. Bowman to follow him to the study, and asked if she wouldn't mind pouring him a drink from a secret stash hidden behind the first volume of Edward Gibbon's magnum opus. With a kind and almost maternal complacency, Mrs. Bowman complied. He drained a shot of scotch and dropped into his chair. It squeaked, rolled back several centimeters, before he rolled it ahead, and again it squeaked while his mind tripped through the teases Mr. Malin had left behind.

"I want to know the moment my brother's arrived, Mrs. Bowman," he said, hoping to dismiss her. "And turn off that blasted light on your way out." He felt he'd hurt her. "Please," he added, mellowing his curmudgeonliness.

"Yes, sir," she replied, thankful that she had a master sympathetic enough to amend his moments of meanness. She turned out the light, shut the door, and took up post by one of the windows next to the front door. If a car stopped, she'd be the first to know.

George had no idea what to think of Oswald Malin's interpretation of recently acquired facts. What did Lydia—his beautiful Lydia—know of a dead man in an alley? She couldn't know anything. It was nonsense.

But he bent his elbow, set his forehead to it, and wept over the stinging memories of a child who'd been too absorbed in scandals, who'd had his life ruined by the rapacity of journalists and nonstop adversity. He didn't want another.

Although he'd always suspected that there was something too secretive about Lydia. Marrying a foreigner brought plenty of whispers among this rich friends—his friends that he began to see were snobs, elitists, drawn by bloodlines and money, like they were a fine equine breed.

He'd loved Lydia. Did, in fact, love her still. Only—that boyish fancy, that utter devotion, had begun to fade. It was difficult to worship an object as catchable as a moonbeam. He may as well be in love with a fairy maiden from a children's story. At least then there'd been no journalists around to report about it for the society column. "Mr. Weatherstaff and Lydia Fairy Maid were among the guests and Mrs. Hayes' Saturday afternoon garden party. Mr. Weatherstaff wore a light gray flannel suit, and Ms. Lydia Fairy Maid—soon to be Mrs. Weatherstaff Fairy Maid—wore a mauve chiffon over a faint green silk sheath, strung with pearls and diamonds like dewdrops."

That was as nonsensical as Lydia Botsaris knowing the dead young man in the alley.

But could she know him, and could she be in trouble? Why wouldn't she come to him, her powerful and influential and rich fiancé? Perhaps there were problems in the world not solved by manmade materials. If such things existed, then his money and his influence were useless.

He tore a circle around the room, hands in his pockets, thoughts going around and around as often as he did. What should he do? What could he do? He was tired of waiting for scandals to come to him. And he didn't want to be a part of one ever again.

Then he couldn't marry Lydia. He just couldn't.

But he could help her, if she wanted it.

Too beguiled by his own problems, and gorging on an inner monologue, he didn't hear Mrs. Bowman's knock, only heard her announce:

"Here's Mr. Weatherstaff, sir."

George looked up at the same moment his brother found him across the room. Mrs. Bowman lingered long enough to see the Weatherstaff boys embrace after years of separation, and brought out her handkerchief to dry her eyes as she shut the door on them.

George had his hair played with, mussed, pressed, and his mustache pulled at the ends. Gus's hair was clean, slicked down, and his face beardless. When they'd calmed, Gus ran a hand over his chin.

"Makes me look ten years younger, that thing being gone. Had so much gray in it! You wouldn't have known me if I hadn't stopped in Ottawa on my way further inland."

"I think I would've known you." George said it solemnly. Poised on the idea that his brother had come, he knew everything would be all right. Rejuvenated by hope, George hugged Gus again, clinging longer this time. "I'm very glad you're here. I've got myself into another jam, I think."

Paternally, Gus patted the back of his little brother's head. "That sounds like you, Georgie. Guess it must be about that girl you said you were going to marry. I heard about it in the Ottawa paper."

"I'm not so sure that I can marry her, after all. And now there's this body—and Mr. Malin thinks that the body's connected to Lydia—only I can't see how—I can't see how at all!"

Gus held his brother's pale and moon-like face between his tough and scarred hands. He jostled George a little, like he remembered Father doing to him when a particularly important piece of information or a fleeting sentiment was passed along. "Looks like I came back just in time. You're a mess. And I'm going to get you out of it, even if it means I have to get myself wrapped up in another Weatherstaff misadventure. I don't mind so much."

Then something sharp took over the softened glaze across his eyes, and, for a moment, Gus grimaced and teetered on feet not entirely used to land.

"Malin? Who is this Malin?"

George scanned Gus for an interpretation of the name. "Well, it was Oswald Malin that visited a half an hour ago. But he's been working with his brother, and the two of them together have been trying to find Lydia."

"The brother to Oswald Malin, what's his name?"

George, for good reason, hesitated. He didn't think it was possible that Gus Weatherstaff would know the information man. "Mr. Rex Malin."

But Gus Weatherstaff did know Mr. Rex Malin. "I thought that's what you'd say." He licked his cracked lips, eyes falling to the room's distant corners, to faraway memories. His look leapt back to George's. "It's more than coincidental that I should come home at this time. You needed me. Let me get changed, wash up a bit, and then you must take me to see Mr. Malin immediately."

"Good heavens, Gus. Why?"

"Don't know if I can tell you right now. It's got me all messed up in my head."

"Can't it wait till tomorrow?"

"Nothing this important can wait till tomorrow."

* * * *

6.

Oswald was at a loss, unable to explain his brother's absence from the office as well as the impersonal, certainly imperfect and shed-like flat Rex endearingly called home. What to do if Rex should not appear anywhere? Absolutely senseless conjecture, of course, since, eventually, Rex would reappear. He always did, even when Oswald believed he'd been lost in the war. And, voila, he flitted to the surface again, over the skies of Rouen. Rex never disappeared for any significant length of time, and not when he was needed for a case.

Oswald, annoyed more than concerned, as he and Rex rarely met outside the office, began to feel uncomfortable carrying around such pertinent information. Yes, he'd unleashed it upon one to whom it was very consequential: Mr. Weatherstaff. But Rex would be equally delighted—or appalled—the moment he heard the news. If Rex, in his beguiling manner, hadn't already ascertained the poor dead boy's identity. Knowing Rex, as he'd been after his return from the war, he was capable of finding the boy's name and address, his age, where he'd gone to school and what European village his ancestors hailed from. It was Rex's way, almost as if he existed at the edge of a fantasy world, where all information came floating to him and he breathed it in, held it in him forever.

Stopping at a corner store, Oswald slipped into the telephone booth and gained access to Estella's boarding house. He happened to talk to the always glib and forever flirtatious Anne. Thankfully, his good humor prevailed, and he was at last able to wring from Anne, between her giggles and saucy remarks, that Estella hadn't yet returned. "She left a message," finished Anne, "and said she was likely going to be late getting in, and she hoped we wouldn't hold the curfew against her. I'd like to see us try! Well, hope that helps. If it doesn't, you can come on by sometime and I can try to explain it better—in person."

He stumbled through his next set of phrases, that it wasn't necessary, that he thanked her for once again being his source of much-required particulars. But he rung off, standing in the booth another moment before a bothered, wiry-looking gentleman in queue pounded his fist upon the door.

So—neither Rex nor Estella was at home this evening. Oswald, determined to see Estella happily settled with her brother, if it could be done, if Rex would simply wake from the trance that'd been upon him since Rouen—perhaps even before Rouen. Oswald, optimistic as he was, couldn't legitimize his hope that the two of them, Rex and Estella, had gone off somewhere for a quiet evening of dining and talk that, for once, might have nothing whatsoever to do with work.

He rather doubted this.

If Rex grew no sense about Estella, her fine qualities and her bewitching eyes, Oswald would like to rap Rex on the back of his head, where it might do some good. Better still, he'd like to revitalize Rex's cold and unfeeling—and very unaware—heart.

Then again, it might be best if he kept his interference to a minimum. It was even likely that Estella, good as she was, aware as she was, did not want Rex Malin for a husband. If he would only focus on something else for once in his life, he might create a very happy marriage with a woman he'd been unable to function without for several years.

Oswald returned to the snowy, blowy sidewalk, not entirely sure where he was. His thoughts hindered his awareness of common surroundings. He knew Toronto so well, really, that, like a human compass, he knew which direction was the lake, and knew which roads and avenues were which merely by the shadowy backdrops created by thousands of buildings. A hush had fallen across the city, and the streets, commonly flooded with pedestrians, had an unnatural blankness to them. The air felt drenched with the supernatural and the unfamiliar, but all the shadows of all the buildings were in their usual places.

Continuing to be puzzled, Oswald's feet, not usually so utilitarian, took him in the direction he was not expecting to go, and soon stopped at the information desk of Inspector Cavendish's station. He watched as the constable wandered off for a moment, saying the inspector would be told of his arrival. The moment passed, and Oswald was soon in Cavendish's office. Immediately through the door, Oswald halted. Two persons were in the cramped room with Cavendish.

"You see, I don't come unprepared when I'm hunting for a killer," Cavendish said, luxuriating in the surprise on Oswald Malin's face.

"Ms. Bradley," Oswald gave her a bow, and received her soft smile in return. "I've been rather worried about you. I telephoned your house a bit ago, had a long chat with Anne, who circumvented, as only she can do, that you were not at home, and had supplied them with an incontestable excuse to miss curfew."

"I'm sorry you went through all that trouble, Oswald," replied Estella, knowing how Anne could be, particularly towards attractive and wealthy bachelors, though she understood so little about perennial bachelors outside of her brother. "I've been having a nice conversation—"

Her distant cousin snorted.

"—with Jack and Watching Moon."

Watching Moon was the other presence, who had stood to shake Oswald's hand and comment on how robust he was looking. "It is very cold out to be wandering the streets in search of someone."

As usual, Watching Moon's phrases required seconds of rumination, as they contained meanings beyond the obvious. Oswald felt himself slip into a numbness, a kind of stupidity, and struggled to reply. "Yes, isn't it? I'm glad to find the two of you in one place."

Cavendish gaped. "Were you looking for Mr. Egbert?"

"I had an inkling he would float in from the snowy mists soon. I didn't expect it to be so soon, I admit. Well, since I'm here," Oswald removed his hat and peeled gloves from his hands, "we should have a solid chat, shouldn't we?"

Cavendish again gaped. "Is that a question, Malin, or a statement?"

"It's a suggestion, which can be taken as either a question or a statement, as your preference prefers, Cavendish."

Cavendish let a low groan pass through his throat. Oswald was only tolerable if Rex Malin was around to interpret and tamper. "Bother," he grumbled, unable to say anything else with his lady-cousin present. Not that she wouldn't have heard it all from Rex Malin, more than likely. "What've you got to tell us that's so important you came all the way down here?"

"It wasn't really that far, and I'm injured that you would suggest I didn't wish to see you for the purpose of a friendly chat."

Estella snickered behind her hand, receiving a shot of daggers from her cousin's eyes. "Oh, lighten up, Jack. You know that Oswald never says exactly what he means. He plays with words. It's part of his charm."

Jack had nothing to say to this. "What've you got, Malin? Make it quick. I would like to get home before the end of the decade, if possible."

"I've been to Hamilton," started Oswald—and, unable to follow it up too quickly, dove into unwelcome silence.

"And?" Cavendish gestured with both hands, hoping to have them filled with solid information. "Watching Moon's already told us that. He's seen your brother."

"This afternoon," Watching Moon clarified. "We had coffee. He was looking for the woman."

Estella didn't like the way Watching Moon called Lydia Botsaris "the woman." Were there not millions of other women? "It seems he was unsuccessful. You, Oswald, look as though you've had some success."

"Yes, I have." Since there was no other chair to claim, Oswald paced the room slowly. "I went to the shoe factory in Hamilton, met with the overseer, and after my description was given, I was informed that the boy was one Gerard Leventis." He waited for the surname to kick into the minds of the trio ahead of him. Estella was the first to respond.

"Isn't that a Greek surname?"

"Yes, like Botsaris," said Oswald. He caught Cavendish scribbling on a notepad, and tried to help. "That's L-e-v-e—"

"N-d-i-s?"

"No, t-i-s. Pronounced with an n-d sound, however. I have the information here," from the pocket of his trousers, neatly folded into quarters, pieces of paper taken from the Hamilton shoe factory, "about the lad that the very helpful Mr. Gleason bestowed upon me. Very trusting man, Mr. Gleason. I could've been any old thug from the street, but he knew that I was sincerely interested in helping identify the young man. Mr. Gleason had had a sort of precognition that the boy he'd read about in the morning paper would turn out to be Leventis."

"And why's that?" Cavendish said, scanning the papers Oswald had left on his desk.

"He'd been missing for two days. And, prior to his going rogue from a good, steady job at the shoe factory, he'd been agitated, preoccupied. Mr. Gleason had had a private meeting with Leventis to see if there was trouble at home."

"And?" Cavendish continued to goad, which he knew Oswald appreciated, as it soared the value of his information.

"And there was no trouble at home. That is to say that Leventis denied that there was trouble at home."

"Which you doubt," stated Estella, now pawing through the employment sheets Oswald had brought from the shoe factory.

"Of course I doubt it. My idea, you see, is that Ms. Botsaris and Mr. Leventis were related, and, being fiercely clannish, found it absolutely necessary to help one another, as it sometimes goes in families."

Watching Moon examined the information, too, but only for a glance. Oswald's points were more informative than handwriting on a piece of paper. "What trouble would they run into?"

"I don't know," Oswald admitted, pausing to stroke his chin and glare at Cavendish. "For that answer, Cavendish, I'm afraid that I will require the expertise of my brother. I very sincerely doubt you have come up with a connection or a lead that would satisfactorily explain everything."

Cavendish countered this the best that he could. "Damn it all, Malin, don't you downplay the work that I've been doing. As it so happens, Mr. Egbert has his own theories."

Oswald turned to Watching Moon. "How often did our dear Inspector laugh at your theories, sir?"

"A good many," Watching Moon replied, a smile lingering in his eyes.

"He tells me," continued Cavendish, "that there are many things in this world that I can't help but be misguided about."

"That is not precisely what I said," corrected Watching Moon. "I said that there are many things in our world which none of us will ever fully understand. This is a strange time of the year—a very strange and unusual time, both celestially and spiritually."

"He's beginning to tell me that the moon's got some influence on us," said Cavendish. "A big hunk of rock floating round our planet, stuck in its orbit? I don't think so."

"But the moon controls the tides," Watching Moon glanced at Estella, the only female in the room, and practically the only one in the whole station, "and many other physical things."

"I concede that it has an influence on the tides, all right, but what's that got to do with a dead boy mauled and gnawed to bits in an alley?"

"I'm going to side with Watching Moon," said Oswald. "In my experience, it is always better to side with Watching Moon's beliefs than bother trying to come up with my own. Generally speaking, his make far more sense. And you'd better not be so hard on those objects in space, Inspector. Not influence us? Are you sure? Whenever I step outside on a sunny day, I expect to feel the sun's heat, and watch its influence on flora—"

"Yes, yes, all right! Stop turning this impromptu meeting into a biology lesson!" cried Cavendish. "Until one of you three can tell me what any of this has to do with a dead boy gnawed up in an alley, you can keep your damn sunshine, your moons, and your celestial objects!"

"I do not think you will ever be ready for the answer," Watching Moon told him.

"Not that werewolf business again," grumbled Cavendish.

"Werewolf business?" echoed Oswald, a piercing glare locked to Watching Moon's steady gaze. He was so titillated by the prospect of annoying Cavendish with a werewolf suspect that it was difficult to hide the amusement from his demeanor. "Absolutely extraordinary. And I'm so heartily glad I decided to side with you, Watching Moon. It has proved my point, that what you believe is so different than what I believe that it would take me years— _years_ —to come up with the idea of a werewolf."

"It wasn't a werewolf!" Cavendish slammed a fist on the table, rising from the squeaky desk chair. He gathered the personal information of Leventis, giving his excuses prior to being gone for a minute. "And don't any of you turn into leprechauns or unicorns before I get back!" The door rattled closed behind him.

"When you saw my brother," began Oswald to Watching Moon, "what was his temperament?"

"Sleepy," Watching Moon replied, thinking it a legitimate answer. "He seemed very sleepy. And confused. He's very bothered by that woman, Ms. Botsaris. I could tell. He's hunting for something in his past that connects to the present. He wanted me to stay and help him, but it isn't from me that he will receive his help."

"Then why are you here?" pressed Oswald.

"That's my doing," Estella said. "I was leaving the office as Mr. Watching Moon was coming in. He thought I might be worried about Mr. Malin, and wanted to tell me what he's told you. We came to the station together. I thought Cavendish might want to know what Mr. Malin was up to. Not you, Mr. Malin, but your brother—the other Mr. Malin."

Between Oswald's dark eyebrows, a crinkle formed. His mouth pulled tight to one side. "Watching Moon, where did you find my brother?"

"The Church of St. James. I saw him go in when I was on my way to the office, and then I went in after him."

"Interesting." Oswald took to pacing the room again. An old story Rex had told him, from his little brother's time in the war, trickled to the forefront of his thoughts. "Most interesting."

"My brother Benjamin believes there is much to be said about the stars," Estella said to fill the silence. "He's an astrologer. Now that I think of it, he did mention that this month was very chaotic. We're supposed to have lunch this week, but he telephoned the other day and said that I shouldn't be surprised if our plans are disrupted."

"We should always anticipate the disruption of plans," said Watching Moon. "And we shouldn't look too closely at our futures. That will certainly bring about disruption."

"I've heard much about the famous patron-of-the stars, Benjamin Bradley," Oswald said, "but haven't yet met him. Does he hide in the moon's shadows, or beneath the unearthly fins of Neptune where the rest of us can't ever find him?"

"I wouldn't be at all surprised," answered Estella, relieved that Jack stormed back in.

Cavendish was angrier than ever now he had two additional persons with him. Watching Moon rose, wondering if he wouldn't be asked to leave, or looked upon with a horror by George Weatherstaff. But Weatherstaff had more on his mind.

"I'm not surprised to see you here," he said to Oswald Malin.

"I should be less astonished to see you here," Oswald said, "yet I'm afraid that I am more astonished than I care to admit. You know Ms. Bradley, my brother's secretary. And this is Egbert Watching Moon, a consultant on certain cases, and a very good friend to us all."

"How do you do, Ms. Bradley, Mr. Watching Moon." He shook the hands of both secretary and consultant. The happiness had been wiped from his expression, and he was tired to the bone. "This is my brother," he indicated the weathered man, looking as though he'd been the mast of a ship for far too long and was thus living up to his surname, "Augustin Weatherstaff. He's just come home."

"I've not been in Canada these thirty-odd years. I think I was meant to come home now, though."

George pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to massage away a pounding ache there. "Well, Cavendish? Any word yet on Lydia?"

"It's like I told you a minute ago, Mr. Weatherstaff: We haven't located her just yet, but we're following some leads."

"And one of those leads is that my brother has also decided to vanish into the gory evening light," added Oswald with a dramatic flair, and getting a rise out of Cavendish.

"We have no proof that Mr. Malin is _missing_ ," the inspector tried to correct.

The sailor, Gus Weatherstaff, took off his hat and turned it in his hands. "It's really Mr. Rex Malin that I wish to speak to."

Estella wondered why, and throwing her gaze upon the others in the room, Watching Moon and Oswald, she wasn't the only one.

Cavendish suddenly rose form his seat, stare fixed outside the door's window. "I think you'll get your chance." He stormed to the door and swung it in. "Malin!" His billowy holler lifted over the noise of a police station busy during the night of a full moon, and an eclipsed full moon at that. His voice sank right into the aural canals of Rex Malin. "Get yourself in this office immediately!" Even as he said it, a hush swept across the constables at their desks, and the ringing telephones fell silent in homage to Inspector Cavendish.

Red in the cheeks from cold and a touch of embarrassment, Rex sauntered through desks and into the inspector's office. A whole parade of eyes stared at him. He smoothed a hand down his face, afraid that his weariness, fatigue and fright showed. Yet all of that was worthless the moment he calculated the height, build and recognizable facial structure of the man in front of him.

"Gus Weathers?" Rex, in awe, whispered the name, croaking on the final syllable.

"Hello, Rex," Gus returned. They grasped each other's palms. "It's good to see you."

"Gus Weathers," Rex repeated. "What—why—are you here? I thought you were dead."

"I took to the sea again after we were all through in Rouen. Been at the sea since, and before that, too. But a lot of odd things had been popping up in my life, and I thought they might be signs that I was to come home. I'm glad that I did. I've got something I want to talk to you about. About that woman, that nurse. And one other thing you should know. I'm Augustin Weatherstaff, George's brother, the one almost arraigned for shooting our father a long time ago. Gus Weathers was a name I've been using outside of Toronto. You should know the whole truth about things, that's all. And I'm glad I got to you in time."

In time for what? But Rex just gulped and stared and thought of the Gus Weathers he'd known in the Flying Corps of Rouen. Two of which were dead, two had whereabouts unknown and undiscoverable—and one stood right in front of him.

The airs of the oldest Weatherstaff boy were vividly and rapidly restored. With an indisputable authority, he said, "I'd like to speak to Rex Malin alone for a minute, if I may."

Cavendish gave his office over to no one. "There's an interview room you can use a couple doors down the center hall." Everyone stared. He cursed. "Fine, I've got some paperwork to file, anyway. Gentlemen, lady, let's respect these veterans' need for privacy, however resentfully it's given."

Estella failed to mind being excused. Rex looked as though he could handle himself in front of Mr. Gus Weatherstaff, and she wished to have a word with Mr. George Weatherstaff. Watching Moon found a seat on a bench, resting his aching knee. Next to him, a man, tattooed in the face, handcuffs at his wrists, that, when seeing that he was sitting within striking range of an Indian, inched over. Watching Moon noticed, but he was too busy observing the body language of the silhouettes, barely discernible in Inspector Cavendish's office. He'd known someone else had been destined to appear out of thin air to help his friend.

Inside the office, Gus informed Rex that he was going to ask him some uncomfortable questions. It was like Gus Weathers—Augustin Weatherstaff—to disclose the hell he was about to unleash.

"May I ask a question first?" Rex started, hopeful that Gus wouldn't mind, and might've even anticipated it.

"You'd like to know why I never told you whose son I was, whose brother?"

"The son part I understand. But you knew I was from Toronto, and you never mentioned that you were also from Toronto. Why didn't you? Even with your assumed name, I wouldn't have recognized you as the son of John Weatherstaff."

"My years growing up here became unimportant—like a dream. And I put it aside. I think I told you I was from Barrie. Seemed easier that way, and we used to have a summer house out that way, so I knew the place. Made it easier to talk about. Home started to haunt me more. And I mean that it haunted me. At night, I had dreams about home. Not the violent nightmares that I used to have after my father's death. Pleasanter dreams. I'd find myself talking to strangers, either Canadians or those who'd just come from Canada."

"Are these the odd events you mentioned?"

"No, not entirely. That has to do with what happened to us in France, and about that nurse. She's that Botsaris woman that my brother wanted to marry."

"Did you know that to begin with?"

"When he first wrote that he was getting married? No. How could I know? But that's when the dreams started coming along. About home and what'd happened in France and Belgium. You knew her better than the rest of us. She'd healed you more. You were worse off. You saw her outside the hospital, too. You loved her a bit, I suppose."

"Only in the way stupid young men love someone that heals them. But she haunts me, too. When I saw her photograph in the newspaper—"

"You wondered who she was."

Rex nodded, attempting to draw out a response that didn't seem ludicrous. Considering what Gus had been telling him, nothing would seem beyond belief. "I dreamed about her, too. That first time I met her. With the wolves."

"George told me about the boy killed in the alley."

"You think it was wolves, too. But how is that connected to your brother's fiancée?"

"It goes back to what happened to us in the hospital. I became obsessed with the fact that something out there changed all of us—made us a bit more than human. Something supernatural, in fact. I've been puzzled by my characteristics since you and I got into the Flying Corps at Rouen."

Rex had no chance to ask what those characteristics were.

"No doubt there's something about yourself, too, that's different than it was before you went off to war. I don't mean the subtle changes that a man goes through when he's forced to kill his fellow man. I mean something real, something about you, your mind, your body, the way the two go together. Something there that's real different."

Rex refrained from mentioning the unusualness about himself, the one that he had put to use after returning to Toronto. "What's this have to do with the nurse in France?"

"I've been thinking about that. I've had a lot of time to think about it, coming over on the boat, getting here on the train. Lots of time to think. And you're probably not going to believe what I'm about to tell you."

Throat tightening and stomach twisting, Rex clenched his hands into fists to keep his anxieties from ruling him. "I've seen many strange things in my days, Gus. Tell me."

Gus thought Rex would make a brave declaration. "It's got to do with those wolves you found her with, back that first night you came across her. It's got to do with the fact that I think—I think she's—"

"Powerful," offered Rex.

Gus gulped, briefly losing nerve. Overcoming a pang of intense fear, he looked Rex square in the face. "I think she's a god."

* * * *

7.

The perpetual din of the police station wasn't loud enough to break the concentration of Inspector Cavendish. With a phone to his ear, his free hand collected a stack of slips containing numerous complaints. Or, rather, one complaint filed numerous times. He scanned the slips, heard the voice of a constable on patrol giving a description of what he'd witnessed, and Cavendish felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. He grumbled something to the constable on the telephone, then let the earpiece drop till it dangled over the side of the desk. He didn't notice, his thoughts dragged through the quagmire of possibilities. At every desk around him, telephones rang—one after another. His fellow officers, of every rank, were dashing in and out of the station. In a daze, he wondered what was expected of him, what he could do to stop this. He looked at Oswald Malin, who remained composed—always had and always would—even in the terrific cacophony that plagued the station.

"Malin," Cavendish said, for the first time in his life having his voice sound small, "I think you'd better take your guests and skedaddle. Looks like things will be getting kind of strange here."

"What is going on?" Oswald examined what he'd already been observing: the chaos of the station, a rigorous ballet of attentiveness and diligence. He tossed his head around, first over his shoulder, then transferred to a position best suited for examining Cavendish's office. Rex and Mr. Gus Weatherstaff were still in a discussion. From what Oswald could see of Rex, his brother was pale, his mouth hanging open slightly in the anticipation of words that wouldn't come. To his left, Estella watched the same feature he did. He rather doubted Estella would go home, even at Oswald's suggestion. Watching Moon, living up to verb in his name, watched on, hands clasped over his knees, the calmest person in the building.

Estella picked up words here and there. Those that answered telephones were saying what they were expected to say at such moments. "Yes, sir, we're aware of the problem and we've sent many officers to investigate." It'd gone on like this for the last three minutes, though she hadn't yet heard a description of the problem, able to gather that it was a multitudinous plight. The serene voices of the station staff suggested it was nothing too frightful, not a fire that was swallowing the city in flames, or any other disaster that threatened life. By the way Rex handled the discussion with Mr. Gus Weatherstaff, Estella was not wholly alarmed, but intrigued.

"Don't worry," George Weatherstaff said to her, "I'm sure Mr. Malin will be fine. My brother's got a way with words, and he won't say anything that'll hurt Mr. Malin's feelings—even if he wanted to. And I rather doubt there's much he could say to Mr. Malin that Mr. Malin doesn't already know. It's kind of you to worry about him."

Estella glanced at Mr. Weatherstaff, wondering what he was about. Feeling a tingle of heat hit her cheeks, she glanced at Oswald. He seemed to think the same as she, that Mr. Weatherstaff was making implications about her relationship with her employer. "Being his secretary and business associate, yes, I've my fair share of concern for Mr. Malin, but perhaps not so broadly as you think, Mr. Weatherstaff."

He blinked, sucking in his lips. He'd forgotten that women could be bold. Lydia—Lydia was a timid mouse who professed opinions only that matched with his. He was embarrassed, too, that he'd spoken of what had seemed very natural to him, very unnatural to Ms. Bradley. Stuttering over the first few words of an apology, he was interrupted by a large holler from the far corner of the room. There stood a tall, big man with graying black hair and a thick, almost invisible neck.

"Chief Inspector Hendry," Cavendish explained to Weatherstaff. _About time the old goat did something!_ —but he didn't say that part out loud.

"Listen up, all! We've got a crisis on our hands, and we'd better be on our toes the whole night! I'm dividing you into squads, and I want each squad to stick to the plan I give them!"

He started calling names off a list. Though the telephones continued to ring, as more officers were collected and given orders, far fewer calls were answered. Cavendish had answered one, but had to hang up promptly when his name sounded through the room. Just as he was receiving his orders and meeting his squad, the door to his office opened and closed. Taking a glance at Mr. Malin, he saw a disturbed mask in place of Malin's common blandness. Gus Weatherstaff had evidently said something startling enough to displace Malin's mood. Now, of course, he wouldn't find out what it was.

He tried to have a word with the chief inspector. "The thing is, I think Malin's on to something, something that might have to do with what we're dealing with tonight." A response would've been more likely if he'd thrown it at the wall rather than the chief inspector.

"What's the jigging featherhead doing here?"

Cavendish could only guess the derogatory term meant Egbert Watching Moon, who'd moved from his harmless observance on a seat to standing, almost crookedly to favor his bad leg, with the Malin brothers and the rest of the crew. A second passed, and Hendry commented on the woman standing in his station.

"Who's the dame with the Indian? Get them out of here, Cavendish."

"I will in a moment, sir." The obstreperous comment received an unintentional result: Cavendish had his boss's full attention. "But they know something—something more about what's going on around here. It's got to do with the wolves and a lady, sir."

"Cavendish, I hope you realize that your statement makes very little sense _._ "

"No less than a bunch of wolves running around Toronto make sense, sir. There's nothing I can say that will make it more believable. Trust me. I've tried."

Hendry liked his hard-nosed, cranky and occasionally rowdy inspector. Examining the squad lines he'd spent the last ten minutes putting together, he saw where he could excuse Cavendish and put the rest of the inspector's squad into another. "Fine, do what you think is best. Your judgments are usually fairly sound. But get the featherhead out of here unless he's been arrested. The squaw, too."

Thinking it a better success than he might've hoped for, Cavendish returned to his party. His hard, dark stare hit Rex Malin. "You've got five seconds to explain to me where we're going and who we're going after, Malin."

Five seconds to explain was hardly within Rex's capabilities. He thought he was stronger and more resilient than most men, but this was too much information in such a short amount of time. "I think I know where to go, sir, but as to an explanation—"

"All right, I waive my rights to an explanation. A destination's good enough for me. We'll have to walk. We'll never get a car tonight."

"May I offer the use of my vehicle?" Oswald said, dangling the possibility of a swift and rather painless jaunt to his brother's mysterious location. "I have it parked around the corner, and it should still be there, in working condition, save in the event a fictional character has decided that it would make a very savory meal."

"Why didn't you say so in the first place?" griped Cavendish. "I'll drive."

Oswald laughed openly at this, as if they were planning on motoring through the countryside. "My car, my driving, Inspector." He regarded his brother, eager for information, but far more eager to be of service. The condition wasn't lost on Rex.

"The Church of St. James," Rex said, and let out a long breath. He was thinking of the woman he'd known in France. "Again."

Inspector Cavendish rounded out their small crew with the only other available compeer, Constable Holland, who had a leg almost as bad as Watching Moon's. Exempt from the beat, but anxious to be a part of the uncanny and scary circumstances then gripping Toronto, Holland threw on his coat and followed his superior's orders. On their way out the side door, Cavendish stopped in the armory room to load him and Holland down with a rifle each.

"You will not need it," Watching Moon told the inspector, softly applying his hand to the rifle barrel.

"What's that matter? I'm taking it anyway. Holland!" He hailed his plebeian, calling to the rest of them in effect.

Watching Moon passed a grave expression to Rex, but followed Cavendish from the station. Silently, words too unimportant and thoughts to grave to say them, the rest trailed into the open, leaving the safety of stone walls behind them.

The air was cold, a touch of metallic in it from dry snow, a touch of dirt in it from pollution. In a clear sky only the brightest stars shone. The streets were strangely deserted, but lights lit up the sides and fronts of nearly every surrounding building, indicating that people were burrowed safely in their dens. But for all the abandoned roads and alleys, for all the silent shops and dim-lit storefronts, there came a constant wail mixed with a constant howl, a fight of sounds between police car klaxons and spectral wolves feasting on the odd moon's energy.

Oswald stopped and, being the tallest of their troop of good intentions, made the rest stop with him. "If you want to stay," he started, finding their blank faces full of the same determination he carried within, and he had a self-imposed need to finish his statement. "If you want to stay, I'll fetch the car and bring it round here. That way, not all of us have to walk—"

"Wasting your breath, Malin," grumbled Cavendish, stooping his shoulders and adding more gumption into every step. He carried the rifle at port, seemingly not the only one of the company having flashbacks to France, Belgium, and other horrors from a decade ago. The smell was hardly the same. The territory was too familiar. French towns had a scarcity of automobiles as nice as Oswald Malin's.

How they managed to fit everyone inside, no one quite figured out. Never again would they be able to emulate the feat, only laugh about it when the danger had passed and the memories ceased to sting. Nothing happened to them, except at the end of their piling into the cabin, when Holland, who'd been set to watch, caught sight of a pack of three wolves traipsing across the road ahead. Their silhouettes against moonlight, snow and ambient glow was enough to make him freeze, stare in disbelief—then come to in time to usher himself into the vehicle. Aloud, without being aware of his speech, he said he'd heard the stories from numerous telephone calls he'd answered at the station the last forty-five minutes, and knew that a dozen citizens in the same city couldn't be dreaming up lupine visions all at the same time. But he hadn't really believed it. He found himself sitting next to Watching Moon. "I believe them now," he said pointedly, with a self-humbling tone.

Cavendish, concentrating on the road and watching for creatures one normally didn't watch for in Toronto, had no ability to interrogate Rex Malin and Gus Weatherstaff. He only sneered when he said, "You've got some explaining to do, Malin—and you, Weatherstaff—" He had to inhale sharply when Oswald Malin braked suddenly for a small, bony white wolf that crossed the road. "God help us. I'm going to throw you in a holding cell, Malin—and you, Weatherstaff—assuming each of us lives through this."

Oswald thought this was no time to dally, and cops or no cops in his car, dropped heavy weight on the gas pedal. The car lurched forward. They all tilted sharply when a left turn was taken far too fast. His jaw set tight, his focus was for the road and what might happen when they reached the church. "Why the church?" He asked no one in particular, just to ask, just so they might talk about it.

"Algonquin legend states that the wicked wolf spirit is afraid of daylight," Watching Moon was the first to speak. "The church has many hiding places."

Oswald supposed that was fair. "Wolf spirit?"

Rex laced his fingers together, forming a unified fist that represented his strength and his madness. "She's a god," he said, the last bit of it curled into a laugh. "You'd think I'd have noticed."

"A god?" George echoed. Rapidly, his recollections of Lydia Botsaris flew through his mind. He'd always thought her beautiful, a kind of virginal aura about her. But—a god, a goddess? A member of a magical pantheon? He laughed loudly, shunning the idea as his absurd laugh died in his throat. And yet—yet— "Why should you have known, Malin? You weren't planning to marry the girl."

"I'll explain another time," Rex answered. Estella, sitting next to him, showed him a sympathetic grin, wavering in its uncertainty and flashing with speculation. "You're handling this well, Estella. You don't seem a bit concerned."

"She's a brick," said George. "Plain and simple." If they'd had any sense, they would've asked the one lady on their excursion not to join them. He wondered why he hadn't, other than the confusion of the moment, but he'd never been unaware of Ms. Bradley. He'd been sure that she'd been used to such strange goings-on by now, the overworked secretary of a man who never forgot anything.

Any continuation of that idea was lost when Oswald yanked the car into another too-fast turn. George's head tapped against Ms. Bradley's, into the soft, yielding fabric of her cloche hat, until their skulls knocked together. "I beg your pardon," he said, rubbing the sore spot. It was so silly, and so ridiculous to try being comfortable with Oswald driving at a preposterous speed, that they almost chortled at the aches in their noggins. They nearly rammed into one another again, and the back of the seat in front of them, when Oswald braked the car.

They tried to see what had caused him to stop, only to notice that they were parked in the middle of King Street, right in front of St. James—and the whole front of the church seemed to sway and move with the dark waves of wolves' bodies. They covered the snowy-sleek grass to the street, the shallow front steps leading to the inset doors, beneath the pointed entrance to the narthex.

Holland had a tickle in the back of his throat, a tingle at the end of his nose. If he didn't say something, he was going to laugh, and though he wouldn't be the first one to laugh in the last five minutes, he felt, somehow, that he shouldn't. "Isn't there a legend about St. Francis and a wolf?"

Oswald maintained his wits long enough to reply. "Yes, but he was Catholic. I hardly think it applies."

"Still, it'd be nice if he were here."

"Invoke him with prayer, if you'd like. It certainly couldn't hurt. Well," Oswald deadened the idling car, "suppose we should just park here. Don't think any constables will come along and give me a ticket for my flagrantly illegal parking job."

Rex stood with the others just outside the automobile, with its doors still ajar should they need to run into it again. If the wolves wanted to attack them, they were using the tactic of disinterest, perhaps planning for a surprise maul, to go about it. Out of a nervous habit, Rex stuck his pipe in his mouth, and, without thinking, lit the remaining tobacco in it. He puffed, observing with the others the wolves' rest.

Holland looked around, waiting for another wolf to come by and threaten them. None did. It was unnerving and unreal, standing on King Street and watching wolves.

"Where'd they all come from?" he asked, feeling again that it was too eerie to be real. But he had a practical side. "And how are we going to get rid of them? And are we sure she's in there, this god or goddess or whatever she is?"

"A god's a god, and giving it a feminine suffix isn't going to change matters," Oswald said, externally very composed, while internally suffering a battle with himself. "I think the thing to do, in this case, is walk right in."

"She'll be expecting me." Rex said the words biting on the pipe.

"Why you?" George asked. "Why will she not expect me? I was going to marry her—a god."

"No one will blame you for reneging your promise, you know, Weatherstaff," said Oswald, hoping to prove a point and elevate the man's lacking perspective. "She's not likely to hold it against you. Not now."

"Oh do be quiet, Malin," George spat, folding back his quirky, loose hair with a quivering hand and putting his hat back in place. "I'm tired of your sassy remarks. She was supposed to be my wife, and now all of this has—it has—"

"Precluded any agreement, verbal and binding, that the two of you might've entered in. Yes," Oswald flashed a shallow but winning smile, "see, I _do_ understand your predicament, George, I do, I do! But let's maintain the idea that Lydia, whoever and whatever she is, has somehow touched the lives of two men in our mighty if tiny squadron: my brother Rex and his old pilot friend Augustin. If anyone should have a vendetta against the unwanted interferences of a god, it belongs to Rex and Gus, not with us."

"I don't understand any of this," griped Cavendish, but he was regarding Rex with blatant sympathy. He winced, aggravated by his own frustration. "She did something to you?"

"I'll explain later," Rex retorted, feeling lost, floating in the brook of a late-night dream just beginning to switch and fade. "But my brother's right: this is for me and for Gus. The rest of you had better stay here." He made a show of telling it to Estella, and then he lingered for a moment in front of her. He might never have another chance to explain. "You'll find a few messages hidden in my desk. Letters from Mr. Abernathy."

Estella refused to echo the man's name. The landlord? Why was Rex bringing this up now? "What a silly and stupid thing to talk about right this minute, Rex Malin!"

He ignored the outburst. She knew why he was telling her these things. "In the locked drawer, left-hand side. Key," he gave her his small set of keys from his coat pocket. "Mr. Abernathy is um—he's demanded that we vacate the building. It's been condemned. It's being demolished in two months. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before, Estella. It's been worrying me."

She breathed heavily, a faint, playful grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. "That explains the rye-bread sandwiches I've found in the bin."

"I suppose it does," he said, not sure how and not sure why she mentioned rye sandwiches. He saw that she was crying a little, he didn't even know Estella Bradley could cry. But he unwound his handkerchief from a pocket, gave it to her, and patted her on the shoulder as a means of bulwarking her despondency. "Look after her, if she needs you to."

Expecting to say it to Oswald, Rex found himself saying it to George Weatherstaff. George touched the brim of his hat.

"I would do, Rex, and I will do, but that I'm planning on going in with you," George said, sounding grand and proud, not a smidgen afraid.

Rex saluted him as a means of thanking him for the proposed sacrifice. He didn't eye his brother again before turning away, thinking it would be too painful. Oswald had always looked out for him, and, even if they'd been separated during the war, Oswald, Rex had felt, still looked out for him. But he didn't walk towards the wolves alone. Quietly, Gus shuffled along beside him—and then a fourth set of footfalls reverberated through the night. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the tell-tale limp of Watching Moon.

"You don't have to come, old friend."

"I've always looked out for you, too," Watching Moon said, as if reading his thoughts, " _wìdjìwàgan_."

Back at Oswald's automobile, Holland leaned towards Cavendish. "I feel that I should've gone with them, sir."

"They didn't want you to." Cavendish continued to carry the rifle, but no longer at post. He teetered between fright, disbelief and anger. "It's their battle. Not the first time they've ever faced anything resembling hell, either."

Estella stood still, eyes fastened to the three men approaching the first wave of wolves. She inhaled as several wolves moved aside, one stopping to howl. It sent a wave of otherworldly canine pules into the uncanny night. Even the smell of Rex's pipe tobacco lingered in the still air. Those by the automobile caught wafts of it, and Estella found it pleasant against the terror of a thousand urban wolves.

Oswald grimaced and shifted when the wolves parted to allow his brother to reach the church doors. The three of them didn't let the delay of entrance stop them. The door slammed shut at Watching Moon's back, and the wolves settled down again. Oswald sighed, unsure how long they would have to wait, far less sure what they would be waiting for.

In the narthex, Rex caught his bearings from his previous visit to the church. He whispered to his companions. "There must be a lower gallery to this place. The trick is to find a way into it."

"It's this way," Watching Moon said, sidling into the nave between two columns of pews.

"How's he know that?" Gus queried, then, getting no response, he turned to Rex. "How's he know that?"

"I did some work on the building not too many years ago," Watching Moon answered for himself. It was very dark; the stars didn't cast their dying light far into the church, even through stained glass and clerestories. The disappearing moon offered nothing. Watching Moon brought out his butane lighter, held it above the level of his eyes to keep the flame's glare from blinding him. "I know this place well. I don't think they belong here, though."

A pile of wolves upon the high altar caused Watching Moon to freeze, and, with him, the mass of startled bodies suddenly stopped. No further search was required to find Lydia Botsaris. She'd crept from the shadows, or she'd oozed from the rock, and formed herself into the shape familiar to the rest of them. Gus and Rex saw the woman they'd known in France. George saw his former fiancée, the veneer of the gentle and charismatic soul he'd known set over the hardened, flinty outline of a being no longer able to hide her form.

At first, Rex thought Lydia must be immobile, a mere caryatid, sculpted from stone or marble, lost in ancient days. His mouth opened, ready with a breathless warning, the moment she moved. She did not exactly walk, but she did not exactly float. As she stepped from the high altar, through the chancel and choir section, closer to them, the wolves parted, set their heads down as if to bow to her. Her shadowy form became more definite. Her clothes shifted from a thin blackness to bulkiness, from ebony air to black feathers and streaky gray fur. She stopped the top of the stairs, and enjoyed the spectacle she'd created, savored their presence, their defiance of the oddness that'd overcome their city just to find her.

When she spoke, it was with the great echo that came upon anyone who spoke in the empty place, and with a chill in it, full of its own vocal massiveness.

"You've come about the boy."

Her voice boomed and rattled through Rex's chest. He set his hand over his heart, not for a display of sentimentality or depth of feeling, but to keep the necessary organ from shaking through skin and bone.

"The boy in the alley," Lydia continued, stoic in tone, but mindful of the destruction, the sense of loss. "He was my brother."

Oswald snapped his gaze up, left it on Lydia only for a half-breath. He'd traced the history of Leventis, from hours after his death to his life inside a shoe factory. No one could've been further from the pantheon. "Was he supposed to watch the wolves when you had left them?"

She nodded, then, noticing so few of them saw her, gave her answer a voice. "Yes, he was supposed to. For a while, he did, and he was successful. His power soon ebbed. His distractions were too many, and perhaps he was too young to withstand your realm's intrigues. It must be very difficult to be a young man in this world, too much to see and do. The wolves are not meant to be shown the slightest crack in their guardian's strength. That is what happened to him. Seeing their opening, a chance to be unrestrained, they attacked him, destroyed him, killed him. And I am sorry for him." Lydia bowed her head, remembering, then remembering why they had made the journey in the company of others. "When my brother died that morning, I had to leave. There was no other guardian. Now, there will never be another guardian. Only I have a spirit resilient enough to contain their force. Here I will stay."

Gus wasn't altogether pleased. His stomach rolled over and bile entered the base of his throat. "What a wretched existence you gods must endure. You should pack up your animals and get out of here as quickly as you can."

Her smile upon Gus was short and shallow, an edge of warm affection in it. "We depart at daybreak. There is another round of business I must settle first. Not with the wolves, but with my friends—or those who were once my friends." A gaze swam across Rex Malin, returned to Augustin Weatherstaff. "Gentlemen, were my gifts of compassion and magic not enough for either of you?"

Gus's eyes were glued to the shallow steps, a small shaft of moonlight that seemed to be stuck there. "I didn't know you'd given me anything, my lady." She could've told him how to address her, a goddess, if they ever happened to meet again. "Didn't know it till I fell overboard in a storm, and thought I was going to die, and didn't die at all. In fact, I found myself under the water a long time, sucking in the air just like a fish would do. And breathing like that until I found a rope my mates had thrown overboard, and I caught it. They hauled me up, and it was like I'd thought I'd died. But I hadn't. Why," now he looked at her, angered, humiliated all over again by the instance that'd once frightened him, whose sensations of uniqueness continued to plague him, "why would you gift me with something like that?"

She paused briefly before speaking. "It fit with your inner desire, your call to the sea, your love of water and the life it took you to."

Rex felt her eyes boring into his forehead, since he, too, was unable to look upon her without flinching, without a sour memory. She failed to speak directly to him, and spoke to the two of them.

"It seems as though I've bestowed gifts upon subjects who are now uncertain of themselves, unsure of what they want, unsure that they have the wish to use what was given to them. My concern for your disinterest in your gifts has returned me to this place."

The door at their backs opened and shut. Oswald hurried inside, carrying no weapon but his intention to be protective of his brother. He saw Rex with Gus, George and Watching Moon, and all three were unharmed. The goddess herself was perched at an altar not decorated to worship her array of miracles. Oswald was wholly unafraid of her, but trembled slightly in a kind of awe for her—and a stark awareness of the wolves at her feet.

"Are you all right?" Oswald asked his brother. He received a nod of gratefulness in return. "I was sitting in the car," he said, "and figured everything out. I hope you don't mind that I've dropped in." Being the boldest of them, and having no quarrel with the lady, aside from what she might've done to Rex, took a half-step forward, cleared his throat. "I beg your pardon, my lady, but if your queries were for my brother and Mr. Weatherstaff, wouldn't have been much simpler if you had merely rapped upon the doors of each gentleman and said, 'Hello, why do you not like my gift?' Why all the diversionary tactics? Why the great display of lupine control and hoodoo about the moon?"

"She can't," Watching Moon said. He waited to be reprimanded by the wolf-goddess for speaking out of turn, but she encouraged him in his explanation, her dainty eyebrows lofted interestedly. "She can't, since she's been here too many times already, and too many times in the last ten years. It takes less energy for her to be here with her parade of wolves than it does for her to be here without them. She's already come here too often just herself."

"And why not remind the world, once in a while, that we are still listening?" Lydia smiled a little, funneling her humor upon Oswald Malin. "I hope that answers your question. Haven't you spoken to your brother about his desire to quit his work, give up the gift I presented to him when he was injured in France?"

"I confess that I should expect to be the last person in whom my brother confesses most anything, my lady."

Lydia laughed a little, not out of politeness but genuine amusement. "I gave him the gift of being able to remember as much as he possibly could, as much as he wanted to. He's used it well. But not well enough. He's grown discouraged."

The news was fresh and revolutionary to Oswald, who'd guessed his brother's soi-disant attitude of despair was nothing more than a manifestation of boredom. He did what no other man in his presence had been able to do the last two minutes: He ignored their visiting goddess. "Is that true, Rexie? Are you really in a constant ponder as to whether you should forfeit your career, your wondrous career that you've brought up from nothing, save, of course, for this superlative talent of yours to remember every speck of detail? Are you? I understand how taxing a dilemma it must be, both emotionally and, I may say, physically, to know that the building out of which you work seven days a week is shortly to be rubble upon the street. But there are other offices you may move into. Better ones, with nicer views and a finer eatery across the street. Why on earth wouldn't you have told me about this? I should've been able to help, you know. I know a great many person of business in and about town, who are own all sorts of useful edifices! Merely say the word, and I will introduce you to them, find you a more suitable location. You needn't give all of this up."

Rex's mouth drew tightly to his teeth, his hand touching a small itch, where a lock of hair bothered his skin, at the end of his brother's heartfelt monologue. Oswald was right, that a brother was meant to help a brother. It'd happened so fast, however. One moment, he was enjoying the perpetuity of his position as a man who had the city's smallest and sharpest points of information at the tip of his fingers, and the next moment his time at the dilapidated building had been cut short—very short, in fact. "I never got a warning, and I needed time to think—"

"Time to think of what to do," Oswald nodded, "yes, I understand. But I wish you'd come to me sooner."

Rex inhaled, exhaled as he gave voice to an idea that'd been dancing around his mind since the announcement of demolition. "I've been thinking of taking a holiday, anyhow." Now he was able to renew his strength and regard Lydia. He saw the same exquisite and earthly beauty he'd known of his French nurse. "Thank you for my gift. I'm sorry I doubted it. And I'm sorry I didn't realize sooner that you were responsible for it."

"I'm grateful for mine, too," said Gus, giving his head a modest bow. "Without it, I'd never have seen my brother Georgie after all this time, when he really needed me. And I'm sure I wouldn't have thought about you again at all, my lady. That nurse who staunched my bleeding wounds and wrapped them for me, healed them up with her own magic. But why were you here at all? Why then?"

"We have a fascination with humankind's wars," she replied, setting a hand on the crown of a wolf beside her. "The contradiction of it. The dichotomy of men. It shows the best and worst of you, what you can do, what you cannot do without. Those lessons teach you nothing, only how to better equip yourselves for future occurrences of worldwide belligerence. We are sorry you learn so little. But we've fought among ourselves, too. The great curse of the world. We can leave gifts to help you better your lives, though we have no gift that prevents conflict. Will you continue to use your talents? All of you?"

Rex said he would. "After I've had a holiday. I'm... I'm tired."

"Having a talent that makes you stand out from crowd, yes," she paused, reflecting on her own history. "The burden of a gift can, at times, outweigh its created marvels."

"I should like to know, my lady," piped up Gus, "if you've made me immortal throughout time, or if I'll grow old and die?"

"Your gift is an imperviousness towards water, drowning, and death in that way, not in any other way. You will grow old and die," she answered, a quirk of amusement burning in her silver eyes. "But not if you are under water."

"Oh," Gus slammed his cap back on his head, still slightly unsure. "If I went and lived with mermaids, you mean I'd live forever?"

She provided no answer, merely gazing at him at the epitome of a goddess thoroughly entertained by the little mortal people of Earth. The humor faded as she watched George Weatherstaff. "I always intended to stay and share a life with you. I am sorry I've brought you regret."

"Don't be," he said bravely. "It was good for me. I'm too used to always getting what I want. You gave me a gift, too, Lydia. Humility. I needed a lesson in that. But I thank you for the memories."

Lydia brought her palms together, held them under her chin, and gave him a smile laced with sweetness, a tilt of the head holding respect and gratitude. She turned to Watching Moon. "What is your wish? There's nothing I can give you that you don't already have."

"I have no need of gifts," he returned, seeing her, seeing the wolves in the shadows beyond her. "I have friendship and I have purpose. Those are all that I need."

"We don't need anything, the rest of us," Oswald said. He jammed his elbow up and over to George, who eventually repeated with a mumbled and a rapid series of nods. "Just leave the city in peace, and that's all I ask. And if I see you in Toronto again, my lady, I want you back as a goddess stepping around town in human form. No more wolves and spells and magic. You've given the police a serious headache, and, admittedly, I rather liked it, though I've been at the zenith of confusion since this morning."

She laughed, a mild, soft thing that slipped down three notes and faded. "Tomorrow morning, all will be as it was, and those who never spoke to me will not remember the wolves."

For the first time, she stepped from the stairs and walked to one of them. A small, glittering object was held out to George. He pinched it, looked at it, and gave her his thanks for its return. With the ring back in his pocket, he saw Lydia climb the steps again, two wolves flanking her, and thought he must've loved a dream, what a thrill it must've been for her to be engaged to marry a mortal man. Perhaps the rest of the gods were jealous. Perhaps the wolves had been jealous, unable to let her exist in a world with an ending for all living things.

"Try to be happy yourself, Lydia," George told her, for once sounding as earnest and sincere as he felt. "Try."

"I will."

He wondered if she meant that she'd try, or if she was declaring that of course she would be happy. The time to ask her had drawn to a close.

She lifted a hand, palm out and full of an impossible light. Beams and rays shot from her, catapulting them into temporary blindness.

Rex opened his eyes, seeing a glassy sky above, a film of clouds incubating the dawn's silvery radiance. He was damp, chilled, but still. He had a fleeting reminder of what had transpired just seconds ago. But the light of day told him hours had passed. He cocked his head up, and found himself lying on the grassy portion in front of the church. Stopped along King Street were workers of all trades, up early and ready for the day. One, a milkman, scratched his head under his cap, watching him.

"You all right?" he finally asked, figuring someone should.

"Yes," Rex propped himself up on his elbows, still looking around, "yes, I'm all right."

Dotting the grass were his friends, even Cavendish and Holland, Watching Moon and Estella. Oswald had an inquisitive squirrel darting over his waistcoated belly. The rodent's friskiness must've woken him. Oswald scurried to his feet, frightened by the squirrel and frightening the squirrel himself. Others were slowly waking to the day. Estella batted her eyes to adjust them to the sight of a blank but beautiful sky over her head. She touched the curled ends of her bobbed hair, feeling them slick and cold with dew. Even the tips of her shoes were smothered in watery spots. She peeked at everyone else lying on the grass, a few having risen to their feet. She found George Weatherstaff tilting over her, then helping her upright.

"I didn't expect that you would remember or that you'd be here with us this morning." George, an arm at Ms. Bradley's waist, led them to the group meeting on the stone walk in front of the church.

"I don't remember much," Estella admitted. "But I remember watching you and Oswald going into the church. What happened in there?" She'd asked it just as they reached the assembly. Cavendish, pale and groggy, had heard her.

"I think we'd better get back to the station and figure things out from there." His next line was a reaction to the three police cars that hoisted themselves in front of the church. "Great, now the cavalry shows up, just when I don't want them to. Come on, Holland. We'd better explain."

"I don't even know what to say, sir," admitted Holland, trying to swipe dew off his cap. He jumped when Inspector Cavendish laughed.

"I don't know, either! We'll just make something up."

Rex stood in with Gus and Oswald. "Well," he felt exhausted, and disappointed for a reason he couldn't pinpoint, "I wonder what happens now?" Melancholia swam through him. Very likely, he was sad to hear that he did, indeed, have a gift from a goddess, that his talent wasn't his alone, something he'd hone through the traumas of war. But, when he thought of it in another handful of seconds, was there really any difference?

"We go home," Oswald swooped in and looped an arm at his little brother's shoulders, "and start planning your holiday! I'm very good at planning holidays. I've had an interest lately in visiting Rome, and perhaps Athens. I grant you, it does sound a bit EM Forster of me, but I hope that doesn't influence your decision to come along."

"I don't want to miss the demolition."

"Hogwash," Oswald spat. "Demolition be damned! I'll have some strapping young haulers remove your goods from the office in the next few days. They'll move your belongings into the empty study at my country residence. It'll be a fine temporary office until we return from our European sojourns and discover a new place for you, Rexie. And perhaps you'll be able to add my name to yours on that painted entry door. It's high time we considered forming a decent partnership. You can hold all the details your mind is capable of, and I'll continue doing the grunt work. Besides, I should like to have a business card that, for once, says something more than 'Oswald Malin, Gentleman.' A splendid card is exactly the variety of perquisite I've been searching for my whole life."

"We can discuss that on the ship," Rex said, giving his first laugh in days. Soon, though, they were hailed by a piercing whistle. Cavendish wanted them with the rest of the officers. Rex hadn't seen much of Chief Inspector Hendry, but he was fairly sure he would never see the man so bewildered and so angry ever again. He certainly hoped he wouldn't. "It's going to be a long morning," he said to Oswald and Gus.

Suddenly, he realized one of them was missing. Glancing around, he caught no trace of Watching Moon. Oswald knew who he was looking for.

"I saw him sneak away," explained Oswald, then winced. "At least, I'm fairly certain it was he. I'm sure he's fine. Perhaps he just couldn't face our dear Chief Inspector again. If that were the case, I can set no blame upon him."

"No, neither can I blame him for that," Rex agreed. "If I need to speak to him again, he'll show up. He always does. Do you remember anything at all that happened last night?"

"I remember it only in the way one remembers the edges of dreams, and things that have happened that we discard as small magics, as things that are too improbable to really exist."

* * * *

8.

On a glimmering, cold day more than a week later, Estella filled another crate with files taken from the cabinets behind her desk. She, along with the other workers in the office of Rex Malin, were having a grand time quizzing him with objects they came across. It was wonderful fun having a man who forgot so little.

"File number twenty-six, fifty-six," Estella said, casting a grin at George, who knelt on the dirty floor in his "workman's" trousers, and wrapping vases in newspaper. Oswald, handling the office plants with extraordinary tenderness, paused with his hands wrapped at the pot of an ugly ficus, just to listen to his brother's response. The man himself was scraping his name off the front door.

"File twenty-six, fifty-six, h'mm," Rex started, pausing in his scraping to wipe the peeled paint from the flat end of the metal utensil. "The missing cat of Mrs. Oxbury, I believe. Made particularly interesting because the cat's collar contained three priceless emeralds of that rare blue-green shade from a specific African mine."

Estella snapped the folder to a close. "He's one Arthur Conan Doyle would be proud of."

"Without all the chemistry," Rex inserted on his behalf. "And I have very little medical background. None at all, actually."

"But you know airplanes," George added, chortling.

"I do know airplanes," agreed Rex. He continued chipping away at his name, knowing it didn't matter if it was up there or not, if the building really was going to be demolished. But landlords had a way of changing their minds. If the building should remain standing when he came back from Europe, he wouldn't be surprised. He'd refuse to be annoyed, and thus he was scraping his name from the door, hoping to save himself from aggravation. And it was rewarding, too, watching his name and occupation fall into oblivion.

The entrance door below opened and closed, footsteps on the narrow, steep staircase soon following. Rushed footfalls they were, too, and Rex glanced up to see the approach of a handsome and somewhat distracted man. It was Benjamin, Estella's sibling. Though the two of them were not strangers, they hadn't seen one another in quite some time, and it produced a false awkwardness. Benjamin hadn't expected to arrive to find Rex Malin with a tool in hand, occupied in a way foreseen by none. He'd expected to arrive and storm into the office to speak solely to his sister.

"Hello, Mr. Malin. Have I come at a bad time? I heard it was moving weekend. I was hoping to catch Estella before I had to disappear again."

Having seen what he'd seen lately, Rex almost believed that Benjamin Bradley _could_ disappear off the face of North America if he chose. But Benjamin's hobbies took him across the globe, and, more than likely, that explained his long absences, and Estella's frequent tales that started "When Benjamin was in such-and-such..."

Estella flung herself out of the office and glared at her brother. "Ben! Oh, don't tell me something's happened!"

"Something has happened, yes!" He grabbed her shoulders, smooched her forehead squeakily. "I came to tell you that this last month, according to the stars, was the most fortunate and interesting month you're going to have—or have had—ever! But I'm sorry I'm so late about it, now that the month's nearly over. You know that I enjoy making up predictions for you, and I _had_ done one for this atrociously long and dull month, but it seemed, at first, like it was nothing but the same thing, day after day. Then, the other day, I woke up and _knew_ that I'd done your whole progressive chart _completely_ wrong! I accidentally used last year's planet information! Can you believe I'd ever do something so dumb? I can't! But! But-but-but! When I did the new chart for you, I finished it last night, I saw the most wonderful planetary alignments and plenty of trines and sextiles and—oh!—it was beautiful! I had to come right away and tell you! And also to tell you that I'm going back to England, but we can talk about that later!"

Ben had pulled from an artist's satchel a long piece of paper. It had the standard astrology wheel of twelve houses, with glyphs and lines to each glyph. The language wasn't one that Estella had ever understood, but she appreciated her brother's efforts, and enjoyed supporting his hobby. He was renowned and respected in certain circles.

"What's this of you going back to England?" Estella was more interested in talking about him. He never liked to talk about himself. "So soon? Weren't you just there?"

"Yes, I came back in August. I'm going again to help Madam Marcus with her next book. But I'm sailing into Calais first. There's an astrologer living in France somewhere that I very much want to meet, if I can find him. Hello, all!" Benjamin waved as he entered the office, finding two men, each with a job to do. He didn't know either gentleman. Well, George Weatherstaff he recognized from the newspapers, but it wasn't the same as _knowing_ him. And the tall, elegant man bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Rex Malin, that he had to be a Mister Malin himself. "Introduce me?" he begged his sister.

"George, Oswald, allow me to introduce my brother, Benjamin Bradley, an astrologer who spends his time looking at stars and planets in books rather than in the sky." Estella usually applied a smart, wisecracking way of introducing her brother to her friends. "This is George Weatherstaff, and Rex's brother, Oswald Malin."

Ben shook each man's hand. By a look at George Weatherstaff, the good news he'd spotted in Estella's chart had manifested before his eyes. By a look at Oswald Malin, and the quiet little ripple that carried on between them, Benjamin spotted the good news of his own chart manifested before his eyes. It couldn't be a coincidence. It wasn't.

"Did I hear you say that you're sailing to Calais?" Oswald asked, still fiddling with the plants and suddenly feeling silly and self-conscious of his green thumbs, however temporary they were.

"Yes, I'm taking the boat train Tuesday afternoon."

"Rex," Oswald called, "isn't that the train we're taking?"

"Yes," Rex answered, trying to keep his tone even, strong, without a lick of amusement.

"We're sailing to Calais, too," Oswald continued, and thought he would have more to say but was abruptly without the words and gift of babble that'd comforted him for years. He cleared his throat and held tightly to the crate of greenery. "I'd better get these to the car."

"Let me go down with you and open the door," Benjamin insisted. He palmed off his goods to his sister and preceded Oswald out of the office.

"I hope I like him," Rex said, at last finished removing his name.

"Who?" George padded the crate of breakables with wads of newspaper. He'd been distracted by the despondence of once again losing Gus to the strangeness of the sea. Mollifying Gus's absence was the constant presence Estella Bradley had claimed in his life. They'd dined out almost every evening since they'd met.

"My brother! That's who Rex means!" cried a chipper Estella. She held up the chart Benjamin had completed for her, shaking her head at its mysteriousness. It couldn't really predict the future. It could only guess at it a little. "Very likely, this gobbledygook doesn't know more of my future than the black cat that steps in front of me! You'll like Benjamin just fine, Rex. Don't worry. Perhaps he'll keep Oswald occupied well enough that you'll be able to write those memoirs you've used to threaten us non-literary types."

"Bah, memoirs! But I hope I like Benjamin well enough to spend so much time with him." Rex picked the chart from Estella's hands, raised his eyebrows at it. How was anyone to make anything of such nonsense?

"You're going to be with him on that ship for an awful long time," George said, finally catching on.

"The ship? Oh, sure, the ship. I'm sure to see an awful lot of him for the rest of my life."

"Poor Rex." Estella leaned in and kissed his sandpapery cheek. "Aren't you pitiful! It's all my fault. I should never have told Ben where I worked. I should've kept it a secret forever and ever. And I tried. Believe me."

"I hardly believe the entire misfortune—or fortune—leaves me in a position to blame you, Estella. They would've met eventually. It was inevitable." Rex angled the wheel chart around, giving it quizzical look after quizzical look. Finally, he flipped it around to Estella and George. "I'm sure that's in here somewhere. The mark of destiny."

"You'll have to find Ben's or Oswald's chart, not that one! That one's mine!"

Rex glared at it again, eager to tease them while he could. It was much harder to purvey his humor in letters written while in the shadows of the Acropolis. "Which is the marriage star? Does it say anything in here about a glorious summer wedding of my good friends, George and Estella?"

Estella ripped the chart from his hands, her cheeks turning crimson. "Stop your mischief." She buried the chart under Ben's portfolio at rest on a naked desk.

"I'm sure it does," George said, sounding airy, casual, but delighted. He winked at Estella. "If it doesn't yet, maybe Ben will get it right next month."

A knock at the open door announced a new visitor. Cavendish came in, dusted with melting snowflakes. From a gloved hand, he extended a file folder.

"I brought this for you, Malin. It's a copy of the statements we made following what'd happened that night. I thought you might like to have it for your collection. Moving out day, I see. Mr. Oswald Malin isn't much help outside, is he? He's busy chatting it up with some friend of his, didn't even see me. Aren't the two of you sailing?"

"Tuesday," Rex replied laconically, turning away to read the file.

"Don't go if you're so unhappy about it," offered Cavendish. "You're a grown man. You don't have to do everything your big brother tells you to do."

"I want to go. It's time I got out of Toronto, if only for a couple of months."

A couple of months! Cavendish hadn't adapted to the idea that Rex Malin wouldn't be around precisely when he was needed. "I hope no one in Toronto dies while you're over in Europe looking at a bunch of old dusty things in museums, Malin."

"Estella will be here," Rex said with a shrug. "You can always ask her for help. And, if you're very, very lucky, Cavendish, she'll know exactly where I am and can send me a telegram."

"I like the idea of no one dying while you're gone a whole lot better." Cavendish received a conciliatory smile from Malin, but no other appeasement. "Anything I can take down the car while I'm here, Ms. Bradley?"

They ended the day in the unused study of Oswald Malin's country house, surrounded by the crates that contained all the information, in material form, that Rex Malin had gathered in his years of service. Stacks and piles of crates filled the regal old room. Oswald and George threw a ghostly white sheet over one stack, with several more to go. Estella continued to rummage through them, at least until the sheets hid them from view. Each file contained a piquant reminder of her life since she'd walked into Rex Malin's office almost eight years ago. Nearby, the inspector was also pricked by nostalgia.

"Look at all of this! What a mess. Imagine what it'll be like when you've worked another eight years, Malin," said Cavendish, helping himself to his third chocolate truffle from the fancy container Benjamin Bradley held out to him. Oswald spared no expense when it came to entertaining—and feeding—his guests. "Place will be absolutely stuffed with crates. Do you really need all of this?"

"No," Rex answered, lounging on a saddle-leather chair, sticking his loafers on an ottoman. "I don't need it. I remember all of it." He flung his hands behind his head, lacing his fingers, closing his eyes. For once, he could relax. It failed to bother him that he'd obtained an unnatural gift from a natural talent. "I remember everything."

###

**About the Author**

Lore Lippincott has published

several short stories

and one previous novella,

The Carols of Holly House.

Please visit

http://www.breezydaystories.com

for cover information,

an Information Man trivia game,

and more tales.

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