POLARIS by Jack McDevitt

Author:Jack McDevitt [McDevitt, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf

CASINO EMPLOYEE FALLS TO DEATH FROM PRECIPICE

And, eight months later:

Police denied today they are working on the assumption that Agnes Crisp’s disappearance is connected with the death of her husband last year.

There were pictures of Agnes, in uniform and in civilian clothes. Some wedding pictures. She and Ed made a handsome couple.

Ed had been a young worker at one of the casinos. The reports jibed with what Casava had told us. They’d gone out walking one night. To Wallaba Point. According to friends, they went there frequently. It was part of a workout routine. But on that particular evening Agnes admitted there’d been a quarrel. Apparently there was some pushing and shoving, although Agnes denied that she’d sent him over the edge. “He lost his footing,” she’d insisted. “I loved him.” Apparently the police uncovered no convincing evidence to the contrary. No arrest was ever made.

What had the argument been about? “We were trying to decide about kids. I didn’t think we were ready to do that because he didn’t earn that much, and I’d have to give up my career.”

We checked the almanac. It had been a moonless night, dark and overcast.

Crisp had had the build of a moonball player. Young, athletic, good features. He wore his black hair cut short in the style of the day. He’d had dark, penetrating eyes, a broad forehead, dark skin. Neatly clipped beard and mustache. Was employed as a host at the Easy Aces Casino. He didn’t look like the sort of person who would accidentally stumble off a cliff.

There was no avatar available.

Police had questioned Agnes for several days. People who knew them said there were no problems between them. They were good together, everyone seemed to think. (I wondered if anyone had questioned Casava.) Nevertheless, suspicions in the town ran high.

Ed Crisp reminded me of somebody.

“Again?” asked Alex. “Who this time?”

I was running my interior catalog. Clients. Relatives. People from sims. “James Parker,” I said. The actor.

“Everybody you see,” he said, “reminds you of somebody else. He doesn’t look at all like Parker.”

Actually he didn’t. But there was someone. Well, I’d think of it later.

Casava and her husband had bought the house near the school in 1409. Brackett had picked it up three and a half years earlier.

The media archives revealed that, on a pleasant day in the late spring of 1405, eight months after Crisp’s death, Agnes had sold her house, left Walpurgis, and not returned. No one knew where she had gone.

She’d bought the house in 1396. There was no mention of a former husband. Or of children. That seemed to suggest she was not Teri Barber’s mother. It looked as if we were chasing the wrong rabbit.

“Maybe not,” said Alex. “When people leave a place, they usually stay in contact with somebody. Right? A friend. Someone they’d worked with. Or people down at the club. Agnes did theater.”

“I don’t-”

“People don’t do theater without getting close to other people. Can’t be done.”

“How do you know?”

He laughed. “I don’t. But I think it has to be true.

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