A Quill Ladder by Jennifer Ellis

Author:Jennifer Ellis [Ellis, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Moonbird Press
Published: 2014-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

11. Always Together

Mark carefully placed the bus schedule back in his satchel. He pretty much had it memorized, but he liked to refer to it, just to make sure. He withdrew his photocopied hand-drawn copies of the three maps Dr. Ford had given him and then probably stolen from him. He had made three copies of each at the drug store. He now kept one set in his satchel, one set in his desk, and one set in his fire-resistant Protex safe. He wasn’t happy with his renderings though. He wasn’t certain of the precise location of the dots on the original maps, or the cross, or the watermark.

The only thing he could think of to do to improve them was to take the bus around to the locations he thought were dots and see if he could see anything of interest. He had done this (focusing on one dot a day, as that seemed to take him to the edge of his reserves and tolerance for being out of the house using public transit), and aside from the two downtown dots marking Coventry’s most ornate heritage buildings, he could see nothing special about them. He reviewed them one by one again: the old Heximer office building, the old Coventry museum building (which had burned to the foundations in 1986, but had been rebuilt in the same style, and which everyone said was haunted), and the Dorset Hotel.

He was leaving the northernmost dot (which was in the orchard land north of the city and would require three bus rides and two transfers) until after Christmas. Today, he was going to the spot where the two lines of the cross on the second map intersected. He was fairly certain that this spot and the museum dot were directly north of the midpoint between the two humps of the M of the watermark, which was odd. But without the original maps, Mark was concerned that he could be manufacturing this.

He already knew the general location of the spot where the lines intersected. But he had avoided thinking about it, and as he alighted from the Downtown Central bus and walked toward the location, he slowed his pace and stared at the square that he must now enter.

Mark had never set foot in the small Square of the Mother with the weird statue. It was generally acknowledged around town as a place where druggies and drug dealers hung out. He wasn’t entirely sure what druggies and drug dealers looked like, but he figured (hoped) that they would look bad (and, more importantly, obvious). And even though he didn’t believe them to be druggies or drug dealers (or perhaps they were), bedraggled men generally occupied the benches that stood on the outer perimeter of the square, and the grass was always dotted with rolled-up sleeping bags and shopping carts full of clothes, blankets, and other strange and random objects. Because of the orientation and height of the surrounding buildings, the sun rarely reached the square, and it always seemed desolate and damp, the green grass covered in a dew that never lifted.

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