“Harry,” rumbled the figure in a very, very deep voice, the words marked with the almost indefinable clippings of a Native American accent. “You have an unsophisticated sense of humor.”
“I can’t help it,” I said, wiping at tears of laughter. “It never gets old.” I waved to the open ground across the fire from me. “Sit, sit. Be welcome, big brother.”
“Appreciate it,” rumbled the giant, and he squatted down across the fire from me, touching fingers the size of cucumbers to his heart in greeting. His broad, blunt face was amused. “So. Got any smokes?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d done business with the Forest People. They’re old-school. There’s a certain way one goes about business with someone considered a peer, and Strength of a River in His Shoulders was an old-school kind of guy. There were proprieties to be observed.
So we shared a thirty-dollar cigar, which I’d brought, had some s’mores, which I made, and sipped from identical plastic bottles of Coca-Cola, which I had purchased. By the time we were done, the fire had burned down to glowing embers, which suited me fine—and I knew that River Shoulders would be more comfortable in the near-dark, too. I didn’t mind being the one to provide everything. It would have been a hassle for River Shoulders to do it, and we’d probably be smoking, eating, and drinking raw and unpleasant things if he had.
Besides, it was worth it. The Forest People had been around long before the great gold rushes of the nineteenth century, and they were loaded. River Shoulders had paid my retainer with a gold nugget the size of a golf ball the last time I’d done business with him.
“Your friends,” he said, nodding toward the disappeared researchers. “They going to come back?”
“Not before dawn,” I said. “For all they know, you got me.”
River Shoulders’s chest rumbled with a sound that was both amused and not entirely pleased. “Like my people don’t have enough stigmas already.”
“You want to clear things up, I can get you on the Larry Fowler show anytime you want.”
River Shoulders shuddered—given his size, it was a lot of shuddering. “TV rots the brains of people who see it. Don’t even want to know what it does to the people who make it.”
I snorted. “I got your message,” I said. “I am here.”
“And so you are,” he said. He frowned, an expression that was really sort of terrifying on his features. I didn’t say anything. You just don’t rush the Forest People. They’re patient on an almost alien level, compared to human beings, and I knew that our meeting was already being conducted with unseemly haste by River Shoulders’s standards. Finally, he swigged a bit more Coke, the bottle looking tiny in his vast hands, and sighed. “There is a problem with my son. Again.”
I sipped some Coke and nodded, letting a little time pass before I answered. “Irwin was a fine, strong boy when I last saw him.”
The conversation continued with contemplative pauses between each bit of speech. “He is sick.”
“Children sometimes grow sick.”
“Not children of the Forest People.”
“What, never?”
“No, never. And I will not quote Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“Their music was silly and fine.”
River Shoulders nodded agreement. “Indeed.”
“What can you tell me of your son’s sickness?”
“His mother tells me the school’s doctor says he has something called mah-no.”
“Mono,” I said. “It is a common illness. It is not dangerous.”
“An illness could not touch one born of the Forest People,” River Shoulders rumbled.
“Not even one with only one parent of your folk?” I asked.
“Indeed,” he said. “Something else must therefore be happening. I am concerned for Irwin’s safety.”
The fire let out a last crackle and a brief, gentle flare of light, showing me River Shoulders clearly. His rough features were touched with the same quiet worry I’d seen on dozens and dozens of my clients’ faces.
“He still doesn’t know who you are, does he?”
The giant shifted his weight slightly, as if uncomfortable. “Your society is, to me, irrational and bewildering. Which is good. Can’t have everyone the same, or the earth would get boring.”
I thought about it for a moment and then said, “You feel he has problems enough to deal with already.”
River Shoulders spread his hands, as if my own words had spotlighted the truth.
I nodded, thought about it, and said, “We aren’t that different. Even among my people, a boy misses his father.”
“A voice on a telephone is not a father,” he said.
“But it is more than nothing,” I said. “I have lived with a father and without a father. With one was better.”
The silence stretched extra long.
“In time,” the giant responded very quietly. “For now, my concern is his physical safety. I cannot go to him. I spoke to his mother. We ask someone we trust to help us learn what is happening.”
I didn’t agree with River Shoulders about talking to his kid, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t hiring me to get parenting advice, about which I had no experience to call upon, anyway. He needed help looking out for the kid. So I’d do what I could to help him. “Where can I find Irwin?”
“Chicago,” he said. “St. Mark’s Academy for the Gifted and Talented.”
“Boarding school. I know the place.” I finished the Coke and rose. “It will be my pleasure to help the Forest People once again.”
The giant echoed my actions, standing. “Already had your retainer sent to your account. By morning, his mother will have granted you the power of a turnkey.”
It took me a second to translate River Shoulders’s imperfect understanding of mortal society. “Power of attorney,” I corrected him.
“That,” he agreed.
“Give her my best.”
“Will,” he said, and touched his thick fingertips to his massive chest.
I put my fingertips to my heart in reply and nodded up to my client. “I’ll start in the morning.”
IT TOOK ME most of the rest of the night to get back down to Chicago, go to my apartment, and put on my suit. I’m not a suit guy. For one thing, when you’re NBA sized, you don’t exactly get to buy them off the rack. For another, I just don’t like them. But sometimes they’re a really handy disguise, when I want people to mistake me for someone grave and responsible. So I put on the grey suit with a crisp white shirt and a clip-on tie, and headed down to St. Mark’s.
The academy was an upper-end place in the suburbs north of Chicago, and was filled with the offspring of the city’s luminaries. They had their own small, private security force. They had wrought-iron gates and brick walls and ancient trees and ivy. They had multiple buildings on the grounds, like a miniature university campus, and, inevitably, they had an administration building. I started there.
It took me a polite quarter of an hour to get the lady in the front office to pick up the fax granting me power of attorney from Irwin’s mom, the archaeologist, who was in the field somewhere in Canada. It included a description of me, and I produced both my ID and my investigator’s license. It took me another half an hour of waiting to be admitted to the office of the dean, Dr. Fabio.
“Dr. Fabio,” I said. I fought valiantly not to titter when I did.
Fabio did not offer me a seat. He was a good-looking man of sober middle age, and his eyes told me that he did not approve of me in the least, even though I was wearing the suit.
“Ms. Pounder’s son is in our infirmary, receiving care from a highly experienced nurse practitioner and a physician who visits three days a week,” Dr. Fabio told me, when I had explained my purpose. “I assure you he is well cared for.”
“I’m not the one who needs to be assured of anything,” I replied. “His mother is.”
“Then your job here is finished,” said Fabio.
I shook my head. “I kinda need to see him, Doctor.”
“I see no need to disrupt either Irwin’s recovery or our academic routine, Mr. Dresden,” Fabio replied. “Our students receive some of the most intensive instruction in the world. It demands a great deal of focus and drive.”