The Silenced Tale

spare for them to borrow, or any leads on where the lost one is. No one’s tried to ransom it back to him.
“We’re very sorry,” the curator says again when he calls her back, juggling his carry-on, his house keys as he unlocks his front door, and his wheelie suitcase. “We just have no idea what happened.”
Elgar jams his cell phone between his ear and shoulder as he sheds his dripping coat and muddy boots. He leaves his suitcase and carry-on by the front door, only half-listening to the curator bumble her way through more apologies as he sifts through the mail that’s waiting on the table in his front hall. His assistant, Juan, has been in to feed Linux and drop off the correspondence needing his attention. In pride of place on the top of the pile is the latest in what feels like an unending, torturous series of contracts to read and sign back to Flageolet Entertainment. Elgar sets it back down in disgust.
Outside, the mushy gray of a late Seattle winter drizzles on. Elgar paces over to the window as the curator works her way up, verbally, to whatever it is she wants to add to “your typewriter’s been stolen.” That information should have been the climax of the scene, and he can’t think of what might be more important than theft. Poor narrative structure. If the curator was one of his MFA students, he would dock marks for rambling. Being circuitous. Wordy. Loquacious. Palaverous.
He stares out the window at the slush-flakes falling onto the quiet muddy mess of his backyard as he muses on synonyms. The curator keeps talking. Elgar blinks and frowns. “Wait, back up. What did you just say?” he asks, checking back in to the conversation.
“It disappeared,” the curator mutters, clearly ashamed to have to say it out loud a second time.
Weird things are just a part of Elgar’s life now. And while a theft like this might be par for the course for an internationally best-selling author, what she’d said is . . . well, new. No, not new. It’s . . . neoteric.
Any other time, Elgar might have assumed it was just an overzealous fan. That happened sometimes. Quite a lot, actually. Elgar’s old apartment in the co-op housing complex he’d been living in with his aunty when he began writing The Tales of Kintyre Turn in the late seventies had been broken into enough that the landlord of the unit had put bars across the windows and doors. He uses the place as storage now, instead of renting it out.
But this is really neoteric.
“It just disappeared,” the curator repeats a third time, distraught and desperate to fill the empty air when Elgar remains silent.
Right. There are crazy fans, and then there’s . . . this.
This right here is a completely different brand of crazy. The new kind of crazy he’s still trying to get his head around, a year after he’d been introduced to it in a hotel bar in Toronto. This is the kind of crazy he thought he’d just left behind in Victoria after a week-long visit with the Piper family—his family, in a way that goes much deeper than blood.
“We reviewed the security camera logs,” the curator promises. “But there was no indication of who committed the crime. Or . . . or how, actually. It just sort of . . . vanished?” she finishes. “Kinda just blinked out of existence on the footage, really.”
“Poof kind of vanished?”
“No, no poof. No explosion. Just . . . blink. In one frame of the footage, not in the next. The police think it might have been a fancy digital splice-job.”
“Huh,” Elgar says, a strange sort of displacing numbness settling in his fingers and toes, crawling up his limbs. “And, uh, when did this happen?”
The curator makes a distressed sound. “December twenty-ninth,” she admits, and it sounds like she’s saying it through her teeth. “We only waited so long to tell you because we thought . . . well, we thought we would have figured it out by now. I mean, about how it happened.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Elgar says, trying to sound warm and soothing when every short hair he possesses is standing upright with a frightful chill. “I understand. Is there, uh, is there anything you need from me?”
“Not at this time, Mr. Reed. I just, ah, I just felt that it was about time you knew.” She sounds shamed and small. “And I apologize, again.”
“Okay. Thanks for calling,” Elgar says, and then stares in blank horror at his smartphone as she disconnects. He sets it down on the windowsill and rubs his arms through his thick sweater. A brush against his leg, sudden and unexpected, makes him yelp and step back. An indignant feline howl replies. Elgar catches sight of an angry marmalade blur as it streaks out of the living room and into the kitchen.
“Linux!” he calls after the cat, guilt instantly surging up to squeeze his still-frantic heart. “Aw, sorry, buddy! You scared the crap out of me.”
Linux meows angrily. Elgar finds him sitting primly on the counter, where he knows he isn’t allowed to be, licking his tail.
“Did I step on you, buddy? Sorry, I’m a dick.”
He reaches out, grabs Linux carefully by his scruff to keep the cat from bolting, and runs his fingers across the cat’s tail, checking for swelling or breaks. Linux protests with hisses, laid-back ears, and a harsh rake of claws against Elgar’s inner wrist.
“Right, I know, I deserved that,” Elgar says with a wince. “But I’m a big guy, Linux. There’s an awful lot of me to come down on you. Let me just check, okay—ow! Shit! Ungrateful little asshole!”
He lets Linux go, satisfied that the cat is whole, if supremely pissed off at him, and washes out his new battle wounds. Linux yowls at him again and speeds away toward Elgar’s office. Probably to sit on his laptop and glare.
Elgar had bought one of those kitty-friendly desks,