Press "Enter" to skip to content

A Brief Intrerview

As the late evening sun settled on the horizon, a young
woman made her way through the lobby and quietly through the hospital milieu to
the bedside of a brave, badly wounded rabbit. After a cordial greeting, she
pretended to study the patient’s chart and assess the room conditions, as  she made a cursory judgement about Kasa’s
fitness for a brief interview.

Satisfied that the stress would be manageable and its impact outweighed by
its necessity, Eloise carefully made one last visual sweep of the vicinity to
verify privacy, then broached the matter of the bombing and Kasa’s attack as
directly as she dared.

“Kasa, what do you remember about how the attackers
approached the candy store?”

“ They came in from the sea. Had a boat across from the
shop. Ugly thing…they took off south in it…” As Kasa paused to get more
comfortable, Eloise again noted the obvious effort of the crew in question to
appear to both ingress from and egress to the south. All of the evidence was
beginning to destabilize her hunches.

As Kasa appeared to be settling down and getting more
relaxed, Eloise tried to sound merely curious as she asked whether the bombers
had said anything to each other.

“They was yelling that we shouldn’ta been there…they’d
warned him…”

Eloise immediately understood that the  ‘him’ wasn’t Cyan at all, and that Cyan knew
nothing of the likelihood of such an attack. Allowing the young rabbit a chance
to calm down, Eloise finally asked the question she needed to:

“Was there a tall, thin, long-haired albino man among them,
possibly hanging back out of sight?”

“No. Oh, a dandy bloke, smelled fierce…  “ Kasa paused to cough. “Covered in that
perfume you adults like to wear”

“Was he wearing lots of gold, with a big pocket watch,
constantly checking it?” Eloise thought she might mean Fitzsimmons, but then
heard Kasa’s descriptions of all she saw and didn’t recognize anyone.

About the time it began to seem that Kasa was getting a bit
agitated about things, Eloise noticed a doctor taking an uncomfortable level of
interest in the meeting and approaching closely enough to possibly hear the conversation.
Kasa lay back down and tried to get comfortable, visibly beginning to wonder what
all this was about.

“Relax now and rest, Kasa. Time to heal. Events outside will
sort themselves out. “ Eloise resisted adding `soon` to that last sentence–since she knew it wasn’t true–and
tried to hide the concerned expression on her face as she made her best effort
to put the young rabbit at ease.

How could Chase not be involved? It had his brutality written
all over it like a personal calling card. And this business of again trying to
make it appear that they came from the south, when she knew the ship was from
the east. It was just as troubling that he wasn’t hiding in this somewhere,
because she realized she had no idea who was terrorizing the urchins, beyond a
hunch linked tenuously to an incident months earlier involving an interim mayor.
She took a deep breath and refocused. Her next task was unavoidable.

After waiting to make certain that the doctor had lost
interest, Eloise quietly and efficiently made her way out of the building and
into the mist.

Spread the love

Be First to Comment

Leave a Reply