Free Supernatural Noir by Ellen Datlow Page A

judgment.
    “You decided to dress like a detective today,” she said, like she couldn’t decide why this was wrong. I nodded and tipped my hat. Mr. Palatino had died. Some years ago. I pegged him as a coward who took the easy way out.
    On the way to my office I thought about Bertrade and the dream and how in it she had told me some things I couldn’t quite remember.
    For some years after that encounter in Red Hook in ’41, I didn’t see Bertrade. When she reappeared, she was still beautiful and young despite being a couple of decades older than me. But she looked maybe frayed, and Darnel wasn’t with her.
    They had both served in something called the War of the Elf King’s Daughter—fairies versus elves. At one time, the idea would have made me laugh. But not after Bertrade let me see a bit of what she’d gone through.
    Her war occurred at about the same time as World War II and looked in some ways just as bad. Spells and magic, getting tortured to the point of suicide by hideous nightmares, seeing friends—minds invaded by the enemy—tearing out their own throats. Darnel hadn’t come back. He wasn’t dead, because the Fair Folk never die. “Lost to this world,” was how she put it, and I knew it made her sad.
    For other guys, maybe it was Garbo or Hayworth they thought about. For me, ever since that first encounter, it had been Bertrade. And whenever she came back here and wanted to be with me, it was like a daydream became real.
    She knew more, had seen more, than anybody I’d ever met. Something she once showed me, which I thought about as I walked to work that day, was a whole unit of trolls, ordinary soldiers like I had been, if you ignored how they looked, caught by tall elves. Rifles fell from their hands as their minds were seized and twisted by the Gentry. They fell dead, wiped out without a sound made or a shot fired.
    Weapons were beneath the Fair Folk, she told me. You could walk up to one, pull out a gun, and shoot him, provided you could somehow keep all thought of what you were about to do out of your mind.
    At the Bigelow Building I went into the big pharmacy on the first floor, got a few black coffees to go, and took those upstairs, drinking one on the elevator. It was still just short of noon. My energy and purpose amazed me.
    The mail had already been delivered: a couple of bills, a few fliers, and a report on the whereabouts of a bum who had skipped out on the alimony and child support he owed a client of mine. All but the last got tossed in the wastebasket. I’d had nothing from Bertrade except maybe that foggy dream.
    I called Up to the Minute and got Gracie. “You have six calls, including four so far this morning from Anne Toomey.” She paused. “Mr. Grant, this is none of my business. But a couple of times a man—I think it was her husband—was yelling at her. It sounded bad.”
    “Thanks.” This time Jim must really have jumped the rails.
    I hung up and made the call. Anne answered halfway through the first ring. She spoke softly, like she didn’t want someone to overhear. “Sam, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you.” She did sound very sorry. “And I’m going to have to ask if you’ll do it again today. I promise I’ll get—”
    “I was going to volunteer. How’s Jim? The operator says he was shouting at you.”
    “He’s quiet right now. Sam, this whole case is strange. I’ve tried half a dozen times to call Mrs. Culpepper, you know, while her husband’s at work. No answer. They’re not listed in the telephone book. Jim’s the only one she’s talked to. And he’s . . . not good. Last night he was talking, yelling at someone who wasn’t there. And he told me someone was in his head. He’s been saying that for the last couple of days. It’s never been this bad.”
    “Was it more than just shouting at you, Anne?”
    She said, “This is what I’ve been afraid of.”
    “Anne, I’ll be out there as fast as I can. Is there some place you can go