The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,110
stood with one foot up on the tire.
“That Emily’s a firecracker,” Sivart said as he ate. “Reminds me a little of Cleo’s girl. Now, Penny, she was an odd kid. Barely ever talked, listened to everything like she was taking notes. I used to see her down there on the swing. It never seemed like she was playing, really. More like she was just—I don’t know—waiting.”
Unwin spread butter over his pancakes. “Hoffmann looked almost afraid of her when I saw them together in Lamech’s dream.”
Sivart grinned and stabbed another piece of bacon. “He should’ve been. I wish you’d seen him when he realized what she was doing with his sleepwalkers. I thought his skull would break open and we’d both fall out.
“You know, Penny caught me at Central Terminal the day I was headed out here. We talked it all through in advance, about you being our agent in the field. We needed radio silence through the whole thing after that. Between Arthur and Enoch, there were no safe channels.”
“That’s why she’s at Central Terminal every morning,” Unwin said. “She’s waiting for you to come back and let her know it’s over.”
Sivart chewed thoughtfully, washed it down with coffee. “I’m not going back, Charlie,” he said.
The two women came inside, and Miss Greenwood went straight for the coffee. Emily stood in the doorway until Sivart gestured at her and said, “Sit. Eat.” Then she reluctantly found a chair and put her lunch box on the table.
Sivart looked at it and said, “Do you have one of an old detective, ready to retire, a respectable gut under his coat?”
“No,” Emily said. “They’re all active-duty.”
“Well, those days are over for me,” he agreed. Then he turned to Miss Greenwood. “How about you, honey?”
“I’m going to get some sleep,” she said.
“Here? Or in the slammer?”
“Here,” Emily said. “But that depends on Detective Unwin, really. He’ll be the one writing the report.”
Miss Greenwood looked at Unwin over the rim of her cup.
“I’ll have to include everything I know,” he said. “But I’m a clerk again, so it’s my job to determine what’s relevant and what isn’t.”
Sivart shook his head and snickered. “Spoken like a true-blue spook,” he said.
For a while the only sounds were the clatter of forks on plates and spoons in coffee cups and the ticking of a clock in another room. Sivart, sated, leaned back in his chair and raised his arms over his head. “Still,” he said, “I wish we all could have sat down and talked about it. The three of you, me, Hoffmann. Even Arthur down there.”
Miss Greenwood had begun to doze in her chair, but now she was listening again. Her voice was cold when she spoke. “It would have been helpful for your memoirs,” she said.
Sivart shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Unwin knew they were all thinking the same thing—that those memoirs, if Sivart ever wrote them, would have to tell the story as it was in the files, not as they knew it now. The detective was looking to Unwin for help, but it was Emily who spoke first.
“Maybe we can open the archive to you,” she said. “For your research.”
Sivart took the napkin out of his collar and said, “Fine. That would be fine.” He got up and started gathering the dirty dishes.
Later Sivart and Miss Greenwood walked Unwin back to the station while Emily returned to the clearing. (“Someone has to start cleaning up,” she said.) A cool breeze was blowing off the river, and Unwin noticed details he had failed to include in his dream of the place: the second church steeple at the south end of town, bits of trash floating along the shore, some old railroad ties in the weeds beside the tracks. If Arthur had not been asleep for so long, he might have sensed that something was wrong when he followed Unwin here. But waking and dreaming must have been a blur to him by the end.
One part of Unwin’s dream had carried over to the real world somehow. The rain was gone, and the sun was rising into a clear sky. It was as though no one trusted it yet—all the people climbing into the train still wore raincoats and carried umbrellas.
The conductor called for them to board. Sivart, suddenly sheepish, rubbed the bristles on his chin and said, “I think I promised you a drink once, Charlie.”
“Another time,” Unwin said. “Maybe next month, for your birthday.”