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The Gravedigger and His Assistant - Chapter Three

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It only took about twenty minutes for the questions to become asinine and tedious. Even after half an hour, when they had exhausted all questions that could have been in some way relevant, the examination continued. An officer with dark eyes and gentle hands took the cuffs off of her sometime around the first hour.

She asked if that meant she could go home.

"The detective assigned to the case still needs to speak with you." The officer across the table put the pen that he'd been scribbling away with down on the table. "We now have more information on the state of the body, as well." The officer stood and gestured to his companion, who opened the door to the hallway and stepped to the side.

Red stayed silent on their walk down the stone grey walls. She kept her eyes forward and her expression neutral. Even with the cuffs off, they held her arms tight to her sides as though they were still on; as though they were afraid of her running off. Her wrists felt sore.




The first floor of the old manor was used as the village's school. The stairway in the foyer led to the second story, where rooms were rented out to civilians. Some used them as storage, others as studios or studies, and some as simply a place to stay if and when they needed or wanted it.

Red swept floors after school hours and cleaned the upstairs during them. She had copies of all the room keys and permission to enter all but two of the rented out rooms. Martialis M. Lane's room was not one of these. He requested her, specifically, to water the flowers in the shelf twice a day, to open the window and move them onto the sill in the morning and back to the shelf and close the window in the evening.

They never spoke of her brother.

Even one day, after Darren had come home with three broken fingers, a black eye, and a missing tooth she bit her tongue. Even when he vanished for a week straight only to come back with crude stitches barely holding his right side together.

They never spoke at all.

But he watched her, she knew, any time he happened to be there when she was. Which incidentally was three times a week without fail. He watched her and made notes of her movement and the flash of her eyes when she turned to and from him.

On that sunny summer day, nearly a year after the Gravedigger had come to the village, Red opened the door of M. M. Lane's room and entered. She knew it would be unlocked. It was one of the days he would be there, and he was always already inside when she got to his room on her rounds.

She picked the flower pot and carried it to the sill, opened the window and spun around for the doorway in quick, methodical movements. Halfway through her first step, she froze.

A figure stood in front of the doorway, the white-blue of a cloudy sky and with a pinched enough waist and wide enough hips to assume it was female. Her features were round, undefined and shadow-less, like a background character in a comic book. She stood still for a moment staring at Red with eyes the color of a storm cloud.

Then she raised an arm and pointed to the desk where Martialis M. Lane sat, engrossed in his work.




This new examination room was indefinitely darker than the previous one. A steel door was the only marker of the room's existence from the hallway. Inside was a pitch blackness waiting to swallow her away from the cruel, cold-tinted overhead lights of the halls.

Her escorts guided her in and closed the steel door behind them.

She widened her eyes in an attempt to find some source of light to see by. She had almost forgotten that darkness this absolute could exist. Nothing before or since compared with the ineffable darkness of the stairway under the chapel, but this established itself as a very, very close second.

The two officers seemed to know where they were going and what they were doing. She heard the scraping of a metal chair over cement floor one moment and the next, hands on her shoulders forcing her down to sit. The chair moved once more after she had been seated.

The soft patting of the officers shoes on the floor as they backed a few steps away acted as a prelude to a period of silence. She heard only her own breathing. Her hair sweeping across her shoulders felt like the darkness of the room beginning to wrap its tendrils around her. Just as she was beginning to wonder if she was the only person left in the room, a chair some feet in front of her squeaked.

A light clicked from the middle of the table. Red squeezed her eyes closed and looked down, flinching at the sudden burst of light aimed right at her face. Papers shuffled. She looked up to see a man mostly hidden in shadows. He'd set the light up in such a way that only the edge of one side of him could be at all seen. From the width of his shoulders, she assumed the detective was a bear.

"Your name." The growl of his voice confirmed her suspicion.

"Red."

"Your real name."

"...Odette."

"Surname?"

"Everhart."

A pen scratched along paper.

"Your relation to the deceased?"

"I water the flowers in his study at Bluerise Manor."

"That's all?"

"I knew he existed. I had never formally met him before I started working at the manor."

Another oppressive silence. The shadow of the bear detective leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk. "So," he looked up from the paperwork at her. "He hit his head."

"Yessir."

"Mind running the story by me once more?"

"He hit his head."

"Hit his head?"

"Yessir."

"How? What was he doing?"

"He stood up from his desk."

"And?"

"He tripped."

"On what?"

"Hell should I know? He went to stand, but tripped and fell."

"And hit his head?"

"Yessir."

"On what?"

"The corner of his desk."

"It says here his skull was fractured in two places, his jaw was broken, and his spine was snapped at the second, third, and fourth vertebrae."

"He hit the floor pretty hard."

"And where in the room were you?"

"By the window."

"Which is where in relation to the desk?"

"Other side of the room. There's a plant box there by the window. I was watering the flowers. Like I said - my job."

"Miss May said that when she turned into the hallway, she saw you turning down the opposite corner. As if running away from the scene."

"Would have looked that way, yeah. I went to go find someone. That was the direction I happened to go in."

"You didn't hear Miss May in the other hallway?"

"Nope."

"Miss May also said that she heard several loud crashes coming from the room. More than just the sound of him hitting the desk and the floor."

"The chair made a lot of noise when it fell. It was probably that. Look, this is all circumstantial evidence. Just because he wasn't my favorite person in the world doesn't mean I wanted to kill him."

"Circumstantial or not, considering the history between - "

"That?! That has nothing to do with this. I'll be honest - yeah, I'm glad he's dead. That's a huge relief to me. The greatest weight off my shoulders and the biggest load off my brother's chest. But what happened in that room on that day was entirely an accident! I even ran out to find help because watching blood pour out of someone's ears is the most terrifying thing I've ever seen!"

A sigh. "Alright, Red. Calm down."

She relaxed her shoulders, hardly having realized before that her brows had furrowed and her Hands were clenched into fists against the desk. At some point, she had stood up and the chair had fallen backward away from her. She took in a deep breath. "I didn't do anything to him." The words came slowly. She made sure to keep her voice low, even.

Another sigh. "Alright. Mrs. Song, however, has asked us to inform you of your new employment status due to this incident."

Red stayed silent. She felt her lips tighten into a worried line. Her brows scrunched together.

"She believes it would be best if, for the time being at least, you were no longer employed at the Bluerise Manor." He paused and picked through the pile of papers before him. "Which is for the best, considering the matter of where you will be staying."

"What."

"You are the only suspect in this case. You are the only plausible guilty party. You were in the room with him.” He paused for a long while, as though considering whether or not adding the next part was really such a wise choice. “You had a motive."

"If I wanted to kill him, I could have done it long before now. I would have done it long before now. I don't see how any of you idiots think that a nineteen-year-old girl who waters flowers all day could overpower and murder an adult man with ties to I don't even know what."

"Red, please." The detective stood, to even himself with her, she knew. There was nothing threatening in the movement, nothing commanding or intimidating. "I've been told to inform you that you have a bit of a choice in this matter. As we are running under the assumption that this is a murder case, the suspect would normally be detained in the jail. However, for cases such as this, certain members of the community have offered to act out alternative punishments. As you are underage, and as this may have very well been an accident, you've been asked to go to," here he slowed down, and searched through the papers again, "this room to draw your lot."

He reached across the table and handed her an index card sized piece of paper with a number and a letter on it. She nodded curtly and grumbled a thanks.

"You're expected promptly. Good luck, Ms. Everhart."




"Jail or working for the Gravedigger." Red leaned against the door frame of Darren's bedroom. "Only two options. I start tomorrow."

"This is a mess." Darren stayed straight faced, but his voice raised in such a way that Red found herself worrying that he wouldn't be alright without her there. "I'll head out tomorrow to find out anything I can. With Lane gone I may be out of a job, too."

"I'm sorry."

The man with the thunder strike voice flashed through her mind, his fist slamming itself into Darren's stomach. She saw the man with cat eyes break the bottom from an empty glass bottle.

"It's not your fault, Red."

"I know. But it feels like it is."
Favs with comments by KaleidoKittles

EDIT:

Another updated bit~ Huzzah. Since previously I was calling the first chapter a prologue, some of the chapters are now repeated. That should fix itself as I update.




Oh look more of this. Working on it on and off all day today. The chapters are getting shorter and shorter. >.>''

Uhhh... stuff happens here. Boring stuff mostly. But look, a plot!

Enjoy~! And remember to tell me about any typos that managed to sneak in and not get kicked out. c:



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