Black Locust Letters Read Online Free Page B

scare at night. You
need to move.”
    He
was too loud to hear a whispered reply about gremlins. Betty could
only shake her head. The policeman was a new transfer to Sunny
Glenn, presumably from near the Rift, and would soon learn the
Never Were territories or meet his end with the fairies of the
market.

Chapter 4
    The
hospital glided into view, each tick of a leaf in her bike spokes
marking another rotation nearer and nearer. Despite the frosty
touch of autumn air, Betty sweated. She would be nervous, wondering
what she'd say so she wouldn't attract attention to her
investigation, except the ride had made her too tired for worrying.
She knew the hospital nurses, besides.
    For
whatever reason, the hospital had been built from an old
tuberculosis sanatorium design, though the nature of Sanctuary had
transformed its rectangular walls into soft curtains of hops and
doorways into climate defying wisteria. Once concrete steps were
now shelves of slate beneath Betty's feet, and a nurse came forward
to talk.
    “ Betty, come in. I have a nice steeping of willow and
echinacea which would be perfect after your exercise. How are
things, what is new, and all of the usual questions?”
    Gertrude, a slump-shouldered woman which time had turned into
a humpback, had been nursing since Sanctuary was still called Area
71, and she'd keep on nursing until the day she could no longer
hobble from room to room. The other nurses were keen to leave Betty
sitting in the sun room with Gertrude, and brought Betty the best
of puddings and gelatin to entice her to stay as long as possible.
Betty had worried she would be conspicuous, but once Gertrude's
guest, any strange question she asked was immediately lost in the
flood of conversation issuing from Gertrude like a bursting
dam.
    Such
a mood one would always find Gertrude in, talking of this and that,
everything under the sky and above it and within it. She talked
like this to patients in particular, for the other nurses and
doctors had long since wearied of her stories.
    “ Did
anyone come in looking like they'd taken a beating?” Betty finally
squeezed in.
    “ The
market incident? Heavens, no, or I'd have put him to rights
immediately. Why, only last spring a red bear and a gryphon got
into such a tangle, you'd never have seen anything quite like it
before. The bear they sent to the veterinarians, the ones on the
riverside, what's their practice called now, old Doc Francis' son
bought the place, anyway, and the gryphon wouldn't be sent to the
veterinarians. He demanded to see me. I was so charmed, and in no
time we were the best of friends, and he healed up so beautifully
from my salve!” And on and on she went.
    By
the time Betty left, two hours had gone by, and Gertrude waved
Betty off with the parting words, “You've tired me out. Come again,
dearest, and we will talk again. Good-bye, good-bye.”
    It
was getting late by Betty's schedule, but there was one more place
to check on Tom and it was on the way home, and the mortician liked
visitors but didn't like to talk, so it was made all the more
agreeable to Betty.
    The
morgue looked like it should be a landscape center instead of a
place to prepare the dead. The mortician swore the path groomed
itself and annuals cropped up overnight fully in bloom. In a place
other than Sanctuary, he might have been disbelieved, but Never
Weres were strange about giving the newly deceased a picturesque
farewell, so it seemed rather normal to someone like Betty, who had
never lived anywhere else.
    The
mortician talked a whole ten minutes, said that he hadn't had
anyone come through his doors in the last two days, and so it was
with sore legs and nothing to show for it that Betty went
home.
    That
night she kept her ear to Welch's show and wrote down suspicious
words and phrases. Every minute she wasn't on the microphone
herself, she listened to the others, the Alpha day hosts in
particular, though Welch seemed forthcoming.
    It
was unfortunately impossible to