Read Between The Lines

Chapter 7: Famous Last Words

Nick pounded on the door of New Renaissance.
"Steve?" he called, "Mariana?"

The shop was dark inside. Everything looked exactly as it had when Nick had left it the previous morning. He kept pounding. He could see paper waving at the window near the peak of the roof. Finally, he could see Mariana through the window in front of him, coming out of a door at the back of the store. Nick leaned out of the cover over the porch to look up at the window again. The paper was gone.

"Yes?" Mariana opened the door. "Detective! What's—"

"Who's up there?" Nick demanded, blowing past her and weaving between bookshelves to get to that door.

"What are you talking about? There's no one here but me!"

"There's someone—" Nick stopped when he realized what she said. "No one but you?" he echoed. "Why? What happened to your uncle?"

"I'm sorry, I don't—oh, you mean Steve? He, um..." Mariana kept glancing toward the door, obviously trying to insure that she could reach it before he did. "I think he said he had to go get—" her concern for the door consumed her focus away from crafting a convincing lie. "—something," she finished lamely.

Nick's eyes lit up; he was onto something. "It finally killed him, didn't it? Are you hiding it up there?"

"Hiding what?" Mariana still stalled. Nick had no doubt that even now, a lone figure was squeezing out of one of the upstairs windows as they spoke. He feinted left and darted right around Mariana, flinging open the door and charging up the steps behind it.

"The Kinderphantasie!" he called over his shoulder.

Mariana ran up the stairs behind him. "Kinderphantasie? What—"

Nick reached that small attic and stopped. He saw a writing desk right in front of the window—the same one visible from the front door. A typewriter sat upon it, surrounded by small stacks of printed pages. Evidence—but no culprit. The window was still closed; where had it gone?

"Where is it?" he asked Mariana, approaching the writing desk and scanning over the pages, as if to find some clue in the writing. "Where did the Kinderphantasie go?"

Mariana watched him from the doorway. Fear showed plainly in her wide blue eyes. "Detective, there is no one else here, I've been trying to tell you that!"

The stories weren't yielding any evidence; one was about a magpie who used magic to turn into a human, but she could not cease her thieving ways, while another used grisly descriptions to describe a naive young girl's marriage into a family of ferocious beasts. Nick picked up a third stack.

"What's all this?" he asked Mariana.

"That's my writing," she said, not too pleased that he was reading it. She tried to take it from him. "I finished it ten minutes ago—"

Nick shrugged her away and kept reading. It appeared to be a story much like "It's A Wonderful Life," without the angelic influence. The story took place on a grey, rainy day, and concluded with the man committing suicide by throwing himself off a bridge into the water. Something about the tale nagged at Nick; in fact, all three stories he'd read so far felt familiar. He read while Mariana watched him. As he neared the end of the last page, the young Wesen moved to take it from him.

"Well, if you've satisfied your curiosity—"

"Wait!" Nick pulled the pages back as the phrase "flood tides of the Abyss" caught his eye. Hadn't he heard that phrase before? He searched out the main dialogue for the story.

"'How are the kids?' He asked himself, trudging along the highway. 'Why aren't they in school? Where is their father?' Their father was lost; gone, swept away by the flood tides of the Abyss. Surely this shell of a man could not be anyone's father! Perhaps if the shell were broken, the man could emerge. Perhaps the longing spirit would be reborn, if only the worthless coating could be cast down."