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No one could see the woman as she slid through the snow in her slippers.
She wore a knee-length pastel dress and a wide-brimmed hat over her gray hair. Her gleaming pink-pearl earrings matched the opulent necklace that she twirled between gloved fingers, and the small marigold that she pressed sat in her pocket as it always had when she was alive.
A marigold for grief. A marigold for the son that she had lost after having lost herself.
She had first heard of the Dead Boy Detective agency from a pair of young-looking ghost children in Tudor clothing – the detectives, according to them, were heroes. The boy twin – for they looked too similar to be anything else – found himself under the enchantment of a charm that made memory loss all too easy, and the woman sympathized. There were memories that she would never like to lose, either, especially of her own children. She remembered them playing together, once, her son reading books aloud to her daughter as she clapped and encouraged him to speak in the character’s voices.
Her husband had not liked it, and she had cared back then.
But she had always wondered. And now, perhaps she could get answers.
Perhaps the Dead Boy Detectives would know what happened to her little boy.
The one who she knew that she had wronged beyond words.
-
“Do you guys want to watch something on the TV?” Niko’s voice was light. She was acclimating well to ghosthood, Charles thought, by which he meant that she wasn’t letting much get her down. He was relieved – and he knew that Edwin was relieved – to know that she was the same old Niko as ever. “I’m thinking that we should watch The Rose of Versailles. It’s an anime about Marie Antoinette-”
“Marie Antoinette the historical figure?” Edwin sounded baffled. “Do not tell me that the French Revolution has been adapted into an animated story.”
“It’s not historically accurate.” Crystal looked amused. “She falls in love with a female knight named Oscar de Jarjayes, who I’m pretty sure didn’t exist.”
Edwin cocked his head. “If not accuracy, then what is the point of a historical tale?”
“It’s a romantic setting,” Niko said. “And there’s lots of sword fighting.”
“Cmon, mate,” Charles said, turning to Edwin. He smiled slightly at his best friend’s furrowed brow, the intense expression on his face as he tried to puzzle out the ins and outs of Niko’s odd shows. “It’s like A Tale of Two Cities, isn’t it.”
“That depends. Niko, does this-” Edwin waved his fingers about – “Rose of Versailles end in horrific tragedy?”
“Yes,” Niko said. “Obviously. It’s the French Revolution.”
Charles, who had only read the first half of A Tale of Two Cities but had remained hopeful about its conclusion, shrugged. “Well, Edwin, you can at least appreciate the appeal of sword-fighting. You’re a fencer; you’re practically an all-knowing expert, yeah?”
A smile spread across Edwin’s face, and Charles’ heart would have skipped if it still beat. “I can appreciate a good tale of battle,” he agreed, inclining his head with his hands folded in front of his body. “Though I-”
A knock sounded at the door. It was an unsure one, and Charles’s head turned to the door to meet the eyes of an eerily familiar woman.
Her green eyes were sunken in her face, her pale skin sagging; her attire pointed toward her death being in the early-to-mid 1940s. One gloved hand was clenched in her pocket and the other shook as it rested against the door where she had knocked. But when she smiled…
Charles couldn’t place it, but he knew that look from somewhere.
“Hey, ma’am,” Crystal said. “Can we help you?”
Charles assessed the woman further, but she did not seem to notice him.
Her eyes were wide and resting on Edwin, and he gazed back at her with a sort of stony indifference that Charles had never expected to see on his best mate’s face. He made a small choked sound, one that he would never have associated with Edwin, and the client – was she a client? – brought her hand quickly to the elegant o of her lips. “Edwin?” Her voice shook.
“Hello, Mother,” Edwin said in a businesslike tone. And then, with no further warning, he shot up from his seat, slid on his gloves, and pivoted.
He pushed past the woman – his mother – and did not look back after strutting from the room, his coat trailing behind him.
Edwin’s mother fidgeted with the pearl clasps on her gloves and attempted to remove them with shaking hands. She was unsuccessful, and finally she gave up and met Charles with a haunted look. “I am Eleanor Payne,” she said. “I… I came to inquire about my missing son. But clearly, as he was here…”
“Yeah,” Charles said, standing up. “I don’t think he wants to chat right now, does he. But you can stay here with the girls and I’ll see what I can do.”
And then he pushed past her too, after Edwin, and went to the place he knew that he would find his friend.
-
Charles found Edwin on the rooftop of the Agency building. Of course he did; he knew that Edwin always went for high ground when he required a moment to compose himself, wishing to feel free within the space of the open sky and London fog. Edwin ought to have known better, truly.
But he required a moment to think, to remember. To gather himself.
He tapped the fingers of his right hand rapidly against the back of his left, feeling the movements in a way that his ghostly form could not feel the cold night air around him or the bricks underneath his feet. He was breathing, steadily – it always struck him as odd that ghosts still had the urge to breathe – and leaned over the railing, looking down over the streets of London.
He turned to Charles, aware of the affect in his movement as he gracefully spun toward him. He was not usually so aware of himself anymore, but seeing his mother…
Well, it was no wonder that he was so self-conscious.
“You alright, mate?” Charles strode over beside Edwin and hung his own arms over the rail. “Do you want to do some of those calming breaths, or whatever?”
Edwin let out a breathy laugh. “No, Charles. I do not want to do calming breaths.”
Charles blinked, and he was beautiful. His brown eyes always held so much emotion, and Edwin could practically feel it radiating onto him, making him warm in a way that he never could be again. “Alright, then. You just want to stand here, do you?”
Edwin closed his eyes and set his shoulders. “I never thought I would see her again,” he told Charles quietly.
“Well, I think that’s pretty reasonable, seeing as you’re dead and all.”
“Yes, Charles. I am dead. And she does not give a damn, so why is she here?”
“Maybe she does, though,” Charles said. “Wouldn’t that be aces? If you could… reconnect somehow?”
Edwin looked Charles up and down. “No,” he said simply.
Charles looked over the side of the building in silence, the lights reflecting in those eyes that Edwin loved so much. “Look,” he said finally. “I get it. I wouldn’t want to see my old man, either, so I’m not fit to judge you or anything. And I’ll go down, tell her to get mad lost and threaten her with my cricket bat, if that’s what you want. I don’t know what happened, not fully, but if you don’t want her here, she won’t be.” He paused. “But, if there’s any chance…”
“She never looked for me,” Edwin said in a clipped voice. And then, sounding hurt, he began to shout. “She never cared what happened to me, could not even be bothered to put in a bloody obituary, Charles. So, no, I do not believe there is a possibility that we will salvage our relationship!”
“Well.” Charles said with decision. He pulled Edwin into his arms, and Edwin’s face rested in the crook of his shoulder while he continued. “Cricket bat is is, then. Brills.”
But then…
A voice spoke from the staircase leading up to the rooftop.
“I did care,” Eleanor Payne’s voice was small, stubborn. “How could you think I did not?”
“Oi,” Charles said, and Edwin put his hands into his pockets while Charles inserted himself between the Paynes. He would not move his hands, not in front of her, he would not move oddly.
Do not pivot, he told himself. Do not spin, do not speak with your hands. He stood as motionless as possible, determined not to curl in on himself as he used to despite his discomfort.
Charles was holding his cricket bat, now, though he was not pointing it at Edwin’s mother. “You’ll talk to Edwin when he says so,” he told her. “Not a second before.”
Eleanor’s lip quivered.
Edwin sighed. There was no avoiding this. He strode over to Charles, hoping that the movement was not too dandyish, as he had heard his mother once whisper to his father. With a very stiff, very forced movement, he took the cricket bat from Charles. “It’s inevitable,” he said, forcing his voice to be flat. “I shall have to hear her out.”
Eleanor sighed, her face relaxing and her emerald eyes glinting. “Is there somewhere private…?”
“I’ll be staying right here,” Charles said. “Or wherever Edwin wants to have this conversation.”
“Here will do,” Edwin said. He felt the compulsion to fold his hands in front of himself; he clenched them harder in his pockets instead. “What do you need, Mother?”
She sighed. “I came here looking for you,” she said. “I thought that perhaps the Dead Boy Detectives could assist me in learning what happened to you.”
“Well,” Edwin said. “You thought correctly. However, I do wonder why you’re choosing to care now, seeing as you did not in the past.”
“That’s not true,” Eleanor ground out, and she gasped. Charles glared at her, but Edwin did not think that Eleanor noticed. “I always cared what happened to you. You were my son. But your father…”
“Of course. You could not look for me because Father prohibited it.”
Eleanor looked relieved. “Exactly. Yes. I’m glad that you understand-”
“You should have looked anyway,” Edwin said flatly, unable to believe that the words were coming from his mouth. “You were my mother. You ought to have at least considered looking, or finding out what became of me.” He tilted his head slightly. “Why didn’t you?”
-
Charles was, to say the least, displeased with the conversation. Because the things Eleanor said were right mad, ridiculous, cruel but unintentionally so.
“It… I…” She coughed. “Your father prohibited it. Is that not answer enough?”
Edwin closed his eyes, veiled anger passing over his features. “No,” he said. “It is not.”
“Edwin, my baby, please.”
Edwin spoke in a monotone, all of his usually graceful movements robotic. “Tell me why.”
Charles hated to see Edwin like this. Still and uncomfortable, unable to be all of the wonderful things that he was because self-consciousness had zapped all of the gnarly individualism from his manners and affects and humor and self. But he hated the way he flinched when Eleanor continued even more.
“Our family, we had our reputation to preserve…”
“Surely the society that you love so greatly would have wished for you to find your missing sixteen-year-old,” Edwin sniped, and for a moment he sounded like himself. Charles wanted to go to him, to rest his arm around his shoulder, to offer silent support, but he didn’t – it hurt like Hell, but he didn’t. He let Edwin navigate this the way he best knew to, because this was his mom and his past and his life-turned-afterlife. Not Charles’s. Family ties were, as he knew better than anyone, complicated.
Eleanor sighed. “Edwin…”
“You did not look for me because you did not care for me enough to,” Edwin said a bit too pointedly. “You may have wished to look for me. I believe that, and I am sorry you were unable to. And yet, you still went along with Father’s relief?” Charles watched his best mate’s eyes narrow. “It was a relief,” he said. It wasn’t a question, and Charles felt something inside himself break along with Edwin’s heart. “I always suspected, but I see it in your eyes now. It was a relief to be rid of me. For others, at any rate.”
“I did not say that. I did not think-”
“Charles,” Edwin said, and he jumped slightly with the shock of having been addressed during such a high-stress moment. “Am I behaving as I usually do?”
“Er…” Charles was unsure how to answer, so he twisted his gloved hands around his cricket bat. “You seem tense, but like. Good reasons.”
“The answer is no.” And, in that moment, Edwin appeared to throw caution to the wind. He took his hands out of his pockets, folded them in front of himself as he always did, though Charles could see that they were shaking. “I am not, and do you know why? It’s because my mother – and my father, and the other schoolboys, and the instructors, and the headmaster, they all used to tell me how to move. How to speak. How not to allow everything I did to be wrong.” He paused. “Did you know, Mother? Know that I curled inward, stopped speaking, stopped being anything at all so I would not be noticed and… harassed?”
Eleanor waved her hand, and for a moment Charles thought that she looked precisely like Edwin as she did so. “That is neither here nor there. I am not here to recount your less-favored memories of the past.” She sighed. “Oh, my Edwin. I cannot believe… I mean… what happened to you?”
“I died,” Edwin said with finality. “I was murdered. You know. Act of God.” He spun on the balls of his feet gracefully and strutted over to the side of the building, peering off the edge again as though his eyes might burn if he looked at Eleanor.
“I never called it an Act of God,” she said. “I never believed that.”
Edwin laughed. “Everybody did, Mother. You did not object, at the very least.”
“I… I did my best, for you and your sister. Your father was concerned about a scandal – what of Evelyn’s prospects? – and it just seemed best to…”
“To forget the son that vanished into nothingness? I suppose that’s a sensible course of action.” He packed as much sarcasm as possible into his tone, and Charles felt an odd mix of grief and pride as Edwin turned to her, rolling his eyes.
“You were gone,” she protested. “Evelyn was not, and your father was not.”
“Well, you would not want me sullying your family name with my existence.”
“You would have grown up to be a fine man, Edwin,” Eleanor said. “I always had hope-”
“He was perfect already, wasn’t he.” Charles couldn’t contain himself anymore. This was such horseshit. He wasn’t going to leave Edwin to deal with it alone. “You’re just the one who couldn’t see it.”
Eleanor assessed Charles. Her eyes were kind; it was mad unsettling. “I can tell from your outfit and bearing that you are from a different time than us. I am certain that you mean well, but Edwin’s disadvantages could easily have brought all of us to ruin.” She turned back to her son. “Edwin, I love you dearly. But you must understand how it would have looked if I had searched for you when… well. We had no proof that you had left the realm of the living, and-”
Edwin waved a hand in the air. “And having a son that everyone presumed was a homosexual was quite the burden on your family name, so you chose to be rid of him. Understood.”
“I think it’s time for you to jet now,” Charles said.
“I did not choose to be rid of you,” Eleanor said. “I wanted the best for you. Look.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small pressed marigold. “A marigold, for grief. It was always my secret.”
Edwin’s emerald eyes shone.
“I carried it with me always,” she said quietly. “To remember you by.”
Edwin closed his eyes, and he turned back to stare down at the city lights when he opened them. Charles could see tears there, but he knew that Eleanor could not from her angle. But she walked over to Edwin slowly, her high-heels clicking and her hand outstretched. “I would like for you to take it now,” she said. “To look at it. It’s been a reminder, so you would not be forgotten.”
Edwin opened his mouth and closed it several times before speaking in a shaking voice.
“I was murdered,” he said quietly. “And… just a tick. Do you remember what Father used to always call me?”
Eleanor’s mouth turned downward. “I’m not sure such concepts are fit for public discussion.”
“He called me a Mary Ann,” Edwin said. Eleanor made a disapproving face, though Charles feared that it may be more for the concept than the derogatory term. “That,” Edwin said, “is what my killers chanted when they were killing me. It echoes in my head sometimes still,” he said. “I quite wish that you had not allowed me to be mocked.” He paused. “I was always inquisitive. I enjoyed mysteries and learning new things, and I was quite well-read. I wished to ask questions, but you personally told me that I oughtn’t speak as I did. So I did not speak, for fear of Father’s less-than-kind words. I did not ask questions, and I was not myself.” He paused. “I am sorry that you loved me and wondered about me.” The words were devastatingly gentle now, the anger gone and giving way to exhaustion. “I love you and wondered about you, too. But you did not know me, Mother, and you did not care to.”
A beat passed, and Charles ran his hands along the sides of his cricket bat.
“I spent over seventy years in Hell,” Edwin said quietly. “When I came back, I checked the catalogs and old papers to discover what had happened. As it turned out, nothing had. Everyone, including you and Father, were glad to be rid of what you clearly perceived as a liability to your reputation.” There was a bit of characteristic bite in his voice again, and Edwin gestured widely toward Eleanor. “That broke my spirit more than anything Hell had to throw at me. And that is all I have to say. Besides the fact that, yes, it was all true.” His voice broke. “You were all correct about me, I’m afraid, and I cannot say that I very much care for your opinions on the matter when the way that I am has only caused me strife when my family and others around me decided that it should.”
Eleanor looked oddly devastated. “You were in Hell?”
Edwin laughed humorlessly. “I very much was.”
“Because of the…”
“Oh, for goodness' sake. Because a bunch of schoolboys committing what is now known as a hate crime summoned a demon from Hell to drag me away,” Edwin snapped. “That is the only reason.”
“It was a muck-up.” Charles heard his own voice as angrier than he had intended.
Eleanor looked down at her shoes, the marigold clutched between her fingers. “Oh.”
“So, there you are,” Edwin said, folding his hands in front of himself. “Case closed on Edwin Payne.”
Eleanor held out the marigold tentatively.
Edwin extended his hand slowly. He looked exactly as he should when he did so.
“I truly am sorry,” Eleanor said, placing the flower in his hand.
And, right as she vanished, Edwin whispered under his breath. “Me too.”
-
“Edwin,” Charles said, walking over to his best mate. He was sitting down now on the cold floor of the rooftop, shaking as though he could feel its chill. And, as Edwin twirled the marigold idly between his fingers, Charles felt his heart crack. “You alright?”
Edwin met Charles’ eyes with his own. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“That’s fine, then,” Charles replied. He sat down beside Edwin and shrugged an arm around his shoulder, and Edwin leaned into the touch oddly. “That was rough, mate. I’m sorry. If you want to talk to me about it…”
“I don’t know,” Edwin repeated. His voice cracked, and he swiped at his eyes, and Charles simply sat there with him. There was nothing to say, if there was nothing Edwin wanted to say, but perhaps they could begin to mend his broken heart in this quiet space between them.
Perhaps, after all, that was what Edwin needed.
-
Edwin had to hand it to Charles: he always knew precisely what he would need. Whether in moments of joy or in heartbreak, Charles always knew what to say, what not to say; understood what to do or what not to do. And sitting on the rooftop with Charles, allowing himself to feel the hurt and grief of never having truly had a family, had been all that he needed. Emotion. Support. Kindness.
Acceptance.
And when he finally turned to Charles and gave him an awkward smile, it was at least genuine despite the sadness that raged inside of him. “I think we ought to go back downstairs now,” he said. “Niko and the others are likely worried, and Crystal may have declared herself the new head of the Agency and changed our name to something ridiculous.” He adjusted his collar. “Crystal’s Hoverkraft Palace, perhaps. Though her surname is far longer than that…”
Charles chuckled slightly as he helped Edwin up. “I don’t think we need to worry about Crystal, do we. Especially not with the Night Nurse coming ‘round all the time.”
Edwin sighed. “I do miss our humble two-person operation.”
“Sometimes I do, too,” Charles confided, and Edwin took it as an odd sort of admission. “But… well, I also like that there are more of us, now.”
“I cannot complain of Niko,” Edwin said, descending the stairwell with the elegant movements that he thought that Charles might oddly adore. “But besides that, it’s rather crowded.”
“I think it’s aces,” Charles argued, and they quipped at one another as though Edwin’s heart had not been shattered that very night.
Which made sense, considering.
They entered the office slowly, and Niko ran to Edwin and gathered him up in a hug. Edwin folded his arms up around her, too, as she spoke. “Oh my God,” she wailed. “I was scared that your creepy mom took you away to another realm and was never going to bring you back, and that I would miss you forever and we’d never finish Detective Conan.”
“Niko, Niko,” Edwin laughed. It was odd. He would not have thought himself capable of laughing just moments ago, and yet. “I assure you I am quite alright.” He waved a hand, as though dismissing all of the nonsense with Eleanor. “She just wished for a chat, is all.”
“Well, Niko was right. I was worried, too.” Crystal smiled slightly.
Edwin made his face neutral and cocked his head at her. “I suppose that you were worried about having to decipher my meticulous notes if I went missing? Or attempting to match my attention to detail?”
Crystal rolled her eyes, and Edwin smiled slightly. “I will do you a favor and save you a bit of time: you cannot.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” Crystal deadpanned. “Very funny, Edwin.”
Edwin matched her tone. “I do aim to amuse periodically.”
“You think you’re very funny, don’t you.” Charles laughed, plopping down onto the desk and mussing up Edwin’s paperwork yet again.
Edwin shrugged. “I suppose…”
“You’re important to us, Edwin,” Niko said, her eyes bright. “Crystal, too.”
“Ugh, don’t tell him that he’s important to me,” Crystal complained. “You’re undoing all my efforts to antagonize him.”
“Oh, no,” Edwin said. “She’s not.”
Crystal crossed her arms and walked up to Edwin. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you irritate me in a way that only family could, so…”
Perhaps Crystal knew that Edwin needed to hear those words. Perhaps it was because she, too, needed to hear them.
It did not matter. Because when his eyes surveyed the room – Charles, the person he loved most, digging through his bag of tricks, Niko with her laughing eyes and bright humor, and even bloody Crystal – he felt comfortable.
He felt like perhaps he did not need to hide anymore.
He felt, oddly, like he had the family that his mother could not be for him.
And that was enough.