They couldn’t prove she had snatched children and disappeared with them over and over, always moving to set up in a small village and play her manipulation games with business owners and neighbors. They couldn’t prove Tom Saulner and his friends had been youngsters that Ellen had released from her care because they were damaged enough, and still dependent enough, to commit atrocities to please her.
They couldn’t prove anything. They’d even asked Paulo Diamante, the village’s human attorney, to review the material. He was appalled by what they had found, but he agreed that it was all circumstantial, and he couldn’t see Ellen Wilson successfully being convicted of any crime in a human court, especially if she went into court sounding like an emotionally unhinged woman with a tenuous grasp on reality.
They couldn’t keep her in the cell in Sproing, and the other towns where she had lived vehemently refused to keep her in their jails, not with the lockdown of Sproing being fresh in the mind of every human official.
Nothing they could do but let her go and watch her move on.
That was what Grimshaw, Julian, and Ilya believed.
That was when the phone in the police station rang and Grimshaw answered it.
He knew those voices. They crept into his dreams some nights.
“Grimshaw.”
“Griiiimshaw.”
He wrote down the instructions—the roads, the route, the place where he was supposed to leave Ellen Wilson. The place where she would receive a different kind of justice.
Saying nothing to Julian and Ilya, he left Osgood in charge, put Ellen Wilson in the back of his police cruiser, and drove away from Sproing.
He followed the roads, the route, recognizing where it would lead. He was complicit in what was about to happen, but he couldn’t see a way around it. Human law had checks and balances, and that was right and necessary. But sometimes it failed when viewed through the eyes of the terra indigene. One or many? Not the first time he’d made a choice, and it wouldn’t be the last. But it was the first time he’d made such a choice about someone he knew by name, even if he didn’t like her.
As he drove, she talked and talked and talked, her voice finding the crack in his resolve and working it open, working it open, telling him what he already knew—that delivering her to the Others wasn’t a human, or humane, thing to do. She should be punished for not taking better care of Theodore. She should go to prison.
Talking and talking and talking, and he couldn’t keep that voice out of his head. It drilled into his brain until he finally saw reason. She needed to go to a human prison and be punished in a human way.
When he was within sight of one of the prisons, he put on the flashers and turned off the cruiser, resisting the urge to drive right up to the gates. While Ellen Wilson demanded to know what was going on, Grimshaw opened the back door and said, “End of the line.”
She got out, a look of triumph in her eyes.
Uneasy, he got back in the cruiser, locked the doors, and turned back the way he’d come, leaving her standing in the middle of the road.
Something wrong. That look of triumph in her eyes.
He wasn’t supposed to leave Ellen C. Wilson within sight of a human place. He was supposed to take her on a long ride into the wild country. This wasn’t the bargain he had made with the Five.
Talking and talking and talking, her voice like a drill piercing his brain and changing his intentions, leaving him to explain why he had defied the instructions he’d received from Elders.
He was a strong-willed man, but she’d gotten to him, had found that tiny chink of doubt that he was doing the right thing by handing her over to a brutal justice.
If she could wear him down enough for him to alter his intentions in just the time it had taken to drive to this place, what could she do with all those prisoners in a few weeks’ time? And how many people would die because of what she might do here?
He stopped the cruiser and watched her in the rearview mirror. Watched her marching up the road toward a place that was considered neutral ground.
Grimshaw opened his door, stepped out of the vehicle, and shouted, “That female stole human children and killed them.”
He got back in the cruiser and let the vehicle roll forward as he kept his eyes on the rearview mirror.
He never saw what snatched Ellen Wilson off the road and took her into the trees. All he saw was her dress and coat as a blur of color before she disappeared.
The terra indigene didn’t kill their young unless a youngster became warped in a way that threatened the rest of their kind. For them, what Ellen Wilson had done made her the very worst kind of human, and the Elders who guarded this road and kept watch on the humans had done what human justice couldn’t do.
And in the end, he had done what the Five had told him to do in order to protect the people in Sproing.
* * *
* * *
Present, Earthday
Grimshaw drank coffee turned cold.
“Hard decisions,” Hargreaves said quietly.
“Yeah. But easier to live with than doing nothing and having a hundred other people die,” Grimshaw replied. “Possible contamination brought in by these newcomers. A threat to the terra indigene settlement at Lake Silence.”
“Some of those newcomers are going to run back to wherever they came from.”
He nodded. “I imagine some are already packing up after seeing how fast a place like Sproing can be cut off from everything human.”
Hargreaves studied him. “It was easier for you being on highway patrol.”
“In a lot of ways. But the hardest thing about all this will be calling Theodore’s family. Julian Farrow, Ilya Sanguinati, and Paulo Diamante are going through the information other police stations have sent, and they’ll find the boy’s parents. Then I’ll have to call those people and tell them we found their son, but not in time.”
Grimshaw took some cash out of his wallet and set it at the end of the booth to pay the bill. “Those people will grieve again for what they lost, but if they understand what a DLU form is and what it means, I think they’ll take some comfort in that.”
EPILOGUE
Vicki
Michael and Ian Stern, Ineke Xavier, and I reached an agreement.
Ineke pointed out that winter around Lake Silence wasn’t prime tourist season—yet—and she’d be willing to rent her best en suite room to Michael at a reduced rate if he committed to renting the room for the whole season. Which he did.
Then she encouraged Michael to rent one of the lake cabins from me as his writing room for the same amount of time. Michael agreed to do that if he could share the cabin with Ian, who had rearranged his prior commitments so that he could be in The Jumble a couple of days each week to offer counseling to the terra indigene—or any human brave enough to come to The Jumble to talk about their fear of things that would eat them.