Free The Seer by Jordan Reece

your vision?”
    “It is.” Tammie had captured her well, all the way down to the nervous expression.
    “I don’t recognize any of the three, not that I would, but hopefully someone will if Scoth is still employed and working on the case. Strange, this murder. Strange all the way around. I can’t make head or tails of anyone dragging a body to Poisoners’ Lane of all places. You couldn’t make me go into the dead zone for any reason under the sun and stars.” She put the drawing on the empty table and packed her things haphazardly in the satchel. The door to the drawing room opened and Lady Ericho came in. Giving a crisp nod to the three pictures, she stowed them in her belongings.
    “Mr. Currane, it has been a pleasure,” she said formally.
    “As always,” Jesco returned with a polite bow.
    “I hope to see you again on another case soon.” Taking up her case, she returned to the door.
    “Until next time, Tammie,” Jesco said.
    “I’ll be back before you know it, just as long as the fine citizens of this country keep murdering each other, and we both know they will.” Tammie smiled brightly. “Take care of yourself until then, Jesco, and get a fast rolling start should you come across someone with an agricultural sprayer over his shoulder, asking if you’re a member of Parliament. He’s up to no good.”
    “Ms. Squince!” Lady Ericho said in aghast. “Don’t make light of a madman!”
    Tammie threw Jesco a wink on her way to the door, and then Gavon ferried him to dinner.
     

 
    Chapter Four
     
    He was tottering around with his cane by the next day, and as fit as any man the day after that. Gavon was reassigned to other patients and the children hammered at Jesco for details of his latest case. He gave them only what was in the newspapers, since the case was unsolved, but the fact of the man being naked scandalized and titillated them enormously and they did not inquire much further. The story of poor Taniel caught them up in horror. Jesco took some comfort in that. The boy had not faded away entirely into the mists of time. Now his sorry life and sorrier demise was engraved in the minds of fifteen othelin children who reenacted his desperate flight in the garden until an unnerved nurse told them to stop coughing and squashing flowers in the throes of death.
    His pay came in the post and was duly allotted to his three interests in life. Rafonse had been secure in his financials, but his untimely death left his wife in a fix. The house was not quite paid for; Jesco’s two nephews attended an expensive, private academy and his niece was due to start there as well once she was old enough. With the money that Jesco sent, Isena didn’t have to return to South Downs with her children to live with their parents. Their education would cease at once, were she forced to do that. Teachers in farm communities only held school through the summer season, and the basics of reading, writing, and figuring were all that was supplied.
    Many of the othelin within the asylum had no one. Their families had turned their backs for good. To have the love of a sister, two worshipful nephews and a little niece made Jesco rich among his company. He had a few roots whereas they felt severed. That pain had been his own from ages eight to eleven before Rafonse pushed Isena and Jesco back together, and he did not speak of them too often lest he hurt someone inadvertently. But when his family visited, Jesco could hardly contain himself. This, this was his beautiful and loving sister, and they had the exact same shade of brown hair atop very different faces. These, these were his nephews Bertie and Alonzo, and Bertie was the top of his class while joking Alonzo was an echo in appearance of Jesco himself as a boy. And this tiny, golden-haired one at their heels was his niece Gemina, and she could count to one hundred and loved horses both biological and auto-mechanical alike.
    He wrote a letter to them upon his personal store of