Worde on the street.

[dogbitesman]

For all that dramatic events weren't as common as they were in a city the size of Ankh-Morpork, William had to give the island credit; it seldom dealt in small potatoes, or when it did, they were so small you just left them in the ground to grow

Comments

[the_cop]

Ray turned, all innocent curiosity, until he saw who it was. Then he put on his cop face, the suspicious bastard one. Guy might be hitched to two of Tabula Rasa's nicest ladies, but that didn't put him at their level. Ray still couldn't figure out what Maladicta saw in him (Sacharissa he could understand, reporter hivemind and all that, probably).

"Yeah, you could maybe even have two if you're here to give me a wedding invitation," he replied, thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets, "instead of asking me do I know why Vimes takes bribes or why wasn't I around to save Timmy from last week's shoot-out and what will I do to make the beach a safer place for new arrivals?"

[dogbitesman]

William would have made a comment about Vimes being as liable to take bribes as William was to suddenly take flight. But he didn't; instead, he staring wide-eyed straight ahead and said, "Wedding invitations," in the tones of someone who has just remembered something.

Then he snapped back to normal. Surely Sacharissa was on top of things like that. "Well, unfortunately, none of those are on the agenda," he said. "Er, although you probably will get an invitation when they go out. But today I'm here about the girl who fell down the well." He consulted his notebook. "Miss Samara Morgan?"

[the_cop]

"Better get one," Ray mumbled.

When William brought up Samara, Ray went tense. Didn't mean to, but he also didn't think it was William's business, paper or not. "Yeah? What about it?"

[dogbitesman]

"The IPD doesn't normally mount searches for people who've disappeared," William said, careful not to make it sound like an accusation, because it wasn't. "I'm curious as to why you did this time."

[the_cop]

"Oh, this one's easy. It didn't have anything to do with the IPD," Ray said, careful to use good grammar in case this showed up in print. Back in Chicago he wouldn't have cared, but here it felt like he knew everybody. "Klaus came to the office, sure, and told me she was gone. He had a hunch she hadn't disappeared, and being a hunch kind of guy I wasn't gonn-- going to dismiss him. Plus, I care about Samara personally, so I was more than willing to look. Horatio and Fraser came with me as my partners, not IPD."

[dogbitesman]

"That was a stroke of luck, then," William said. As a journalist, he had to respect a good hunch, although he wasn't about to say that out loud. "How did you find her, in the end? It's a big island, and a small well. Above ground, at least."

[the_cop]

"Heh. You kiddin me? Fraser and Dief can track a skunk in a toilet patch," Ray said with a proud smile.

[dogbitesman]

That was ... colourful, but William suspected it was accurate. "Still, to keep searching, for six days - that's right, isn't it - you never thought about giving up?"

[the_cop]

Ray gave William a look of disbelief. "We found some clues," he said vaguely, but pushed past it, seeing as how their big clue hadn't shown itself until day six. He wouldn't talk about the whole seven days thing, either, 'cause he would've looked anyway. It was irrelevant, plus, it was none of William or anyone else's business. "Come on, William. You've got two fiances, right? One of them disappears, and you have a hunch, a good one, that they might be out in that jungle somewhere? You tellin me you wouldn't take the time to look?"

[dogbitesman]

"I'd be in here demanding to be lent a direwolf and then I'd look extensively," William said, without any rancor. Sometimes you had to ask even though you knew the answer, just so you could say you'd been told the answer. "But you've got to admit, an awful lot of people on the island seem to be content to just assume their loved ones have disappeared on superficial evidence," he added, with a sideways frown.

But that wasn't the most relevant of avenues, just then. Right now, he was more interested in what Ray was pushing past: "Going back, what clues would those be?"

[the_cop]

"Well...I think there's a couple factors. Usually when somebody disappears their stuff, the stuff they came with or that showed up especially for them, goes too. Or it'll happen at an odd time, where they wouldn't normally be gone," Ray contemplated. And there was that feeling. He felt it when Fraser had gone, but he couldn't explain it.

"Uh, one clue was her bracelet. Klaus had made her a bracelet and he found it out in the jungle. That was a pretty sure sign she was around," he explained.

[dogbitesman]

"And from the bracelet, you were able to track her to the well?" William said, making sure he had the chronology right.

[the_cop]

"Yeah, that helped. It told her we were going the right way, and, uh, we found her soon after," Ray said. He thought an article about Samara wouldn't be a totally bad idea, 'cause keeping the other island folks on the alert to what happened, especially since whoever'd done it hadn't been found yet, would help. And most folks read the paper.

"We still don't know who pushed her down there," he added, in case William didn't know.

[dogbitesman]

William stared at him. This part, he hadn't known; what he'd gathered had all been about there being a child in a well. All the second-hand sources had neglected to mention if they knew how she got down there.

"Pushed?" he said.

[the_cop]

Ray's eyebrows go up, but only for a second. For some reason he expected William to know, the way reporters always knew shit they shouldn't.

"Yeah, uh. She remembers being pushed, but she can't remember who did it. She hit her head pretty bad," he said, jaw clenching a moment.

[dogbitesman]

"That's horrific," William said, frowning intently. "Do you have any suspects? Were there any clues as to who could have done it?"