Case MO70

Marshal: Please state your name for the Dictaphone.

Witness: Briar Williams.

Marshal: Somehow you keep coming back to me, Williams.

Witness: Didn’t have to bring me back. Was just travelling back home, not causing any trouble to nobody.

Marshal: There is question about whether to charge you for assault for what happened last year, since your faculties seem to have been recovered.

Witness: I was fixed.

Marshal: Well, yes, that would appear to-

Witness: Fixed like a steer. Skinny girl took the nightmares away but wouldn’t clean out everything. Man who tried to strangle your freedman is locked up inside me, but you talk to me now, and I’ve got no appetite for violence no more.

Marshal: I see. Interesting theory on the continuity of identity you have there.

Witness: What I have is blisters, and ground I’ll have to retread because you dragged me back here in chains.

Marshal: In service of the attorney general, not for my sake. For what it’s worth, it’s unlikely the obstruction of justice charges will stick given the state of the case. The civil lawsuit for abandoning your post without returning your equipment, well…

Witness: You said you’d help if I agreed to talk. What do you want?

Marshal: Just trying to close this case. It looks like you were one of the last people to see Victor Freestone before he left Ohio. I need to know what you saw while you were in Cincinnati. I can offer criminal immunity for anything you tell me, and advise for leniency on any civil charges.

[Silence]

Witness: Can’t talk about everything.

Marshal: If you start hallucinating, you can stop. Now, we know that Marshal 19 sent a telegram to Bean in Columbus before entering the city himself, telling him to meet him in Cincinnati.

Witness: Mhm. Bean got us packed up in a hurry. The Henshaw mayor scared him half to death with that hook to the jaw, so he though he needed the Marshal’s protection. Barely had time to put the girl back in the box.

Marshal: In…an actual box? That’s how you were smuggling Geraldine across state borders, in a box?

Witness: It had air holes. She’s lighter than she looks and curls up easy. Pretty easy to slip her in with the rest of the cargo. Her gear and those cans was harder to sneak out of the evidence lock-up.

[Silence]

Witness: Hang on, they can’t sue me for that, can they?

Marshal: I believe that falls under criminal law, not civil, but I can’t say they won’t try. All the more reason that you continue helping me. What exactly did she have you steal?

Witness: A device like the one you’re using now. Three or four beat-up journals. A box with a bunch of copper wires coming out of it. And a ton of those unmarked cans. Possibly an actual ton, the box was heavy. It was under duress if that means anything. Once she stopped the fear spells I was having, she started making a lot of orders, and threatened to do it herself and risk getting caught if I didn’t help.

Marshal: We thought Matilda was behind those thefts this whole time, my God. And you listened to her?

Witness: Mhm. You know, I used to have an uncle in Tennessee, married Pa’s sister. Drunken, loudmouth fool who lucked into gold when he bought a riverboat. Died when I was nineteen; turned over in his sleep and stopped breathing. Pa told me later that he knew damn well his sister smothered him with a pillow, but that’s what happens when you don’t treat your womenfolk right. I was hiding her where I slept.

Marshal: You thought Geraldine Macy would have killed you.

Witness: I think trying to kill someone after I gave them a knife and fell asleep is un-Christian. Bean complained about her being a little heathen, too into her books and not The Book. But she was acting Christian enough.

Marshal: Fine. This isn’t a referendum on your capacity for morality. So you got to Cincinnati?

Witness: We did. Got halfway through unloading our cargo when we heard gunshots. Bean and three of the other Marshal’s MAs ran ahead, I stayed long enough to unlock the girl’s crate. We rushed through the streets but…

Marshal: You can skip the phantasmagoria. We know what happened there.

Witness: Mhm. Wizards never let well enough alone. Never liked them. Always stuck-up and dainty whenever I met one in the army. Near the end of that nonsense, some new nonsense started: corn.

Marshal: Corn.

Witness: Corn. Just sprouted out of the icy ground quick as anything, twelve feet high and half-dead. More kept growing as the old ones died and in less then a minute, they blocked the road and snared me and just about everybody else.

Marshal: Thorn’s doing, I believe - well, you knew her as Ms. Campbell. We know she separated from the other wizards before the phenomena started; we think she was trying to prevent any reinforcements.

Witness: Well she jumped the gun. Geraldine showed up too late. Thought Bean would go out of his mind the moment he saw her, but he was all civil. Least he was trying to be at first.

Marshal: They had known each other for as long she’d been alive. I’m not surprised they were able to find common ground.

Witness: I said he was being civil. She was livid, called him a murderer, kept saying something about a ‘Josie’, and refused to talk to him after that. She cut me free, and when Bean and the other three wouldn’t stop talking at her, she pulled out this odd device of wires and prongs, odd even for her. She flipped a switch, they all passed out with their eyes open.

Marshal: A…Switch.

Witness: A big one.

Marshal: I’ll have to pass this on to whoever’s still operating in Henshaw. After this, write down as much as you-

Witness: Write?

[Silence]

Marshal: Remember as much as you can about how the device looks and I’ll have someone write it down for you. If you can draw it, even better.

Witness: Whatever means you leave me alone. She cut a way forward through the dead corn; asked her to cut Bean loose so he’d at least be comfortable and she did it. We were heading to the shouting but then she saw a trail of blood heading away from it. She fussed for a bit but decided she couldn’t leave someone who might be hurt, so we followed it and found your Negro in an alley.

Marshal: Considering his performance with the wizards, I hope you weren’t too stunned by his behavior.

Witness: Not sure what you’re talking about. He was more scared then than when I tried to kill him. He was working on another Negro with a missing arm who was passed out and bleeding out. When he saw me I thought he might die of fright, but the girl told him about our deal and got to helping. As far as I was concerned, I’d held up my end of the deal and was free to leave her, but if she got her fool head caught like that, it’d come back on me, so…

Marshal: You seem rather eager to help her whenever the opportunity arises.

[Silence]

Witness: The doctors in that…lunatic house you sent me to in Kentucky, they never treated me like a person. They just wanted to know if I was well enough to get kicked out. She was only helping me because she wanted something out of me, but she at least talked to me. Argued sometimes. Apologized. Macy really was trying her best, same as Bean was, and that meant something.

Marshal: That’s…very respectable. So did you just stay there or help her?

Witness: She left some of her stuff by the train. Too much weight. I brought that over to her in two trips. First time I got back, she was trying to pull something out of his neck - your Negro, not the bleeding one. I think it was a bunch of small bones and metal stuck together in the shape of a collar, said he couldn’t look down properly with it on.

Marshal: A collar…was that his plan? Hide armor inside his neck so he could survive being hanged?

Witness: I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I’ve had enough of that creepy flesh tinkering for a lifetime. But…he did have a few cuts on his face that were…shiny underneath? Didn’t think about it at the time, but…

Marshal: Fascinating. And the second time?

Witness: The second time…that was stunning. I think I almost died. Blue Wench had shown up with a dozen rats at her call, and the bleeding Negro had woken up and was looking at me like there was a bounty on my head that’d feed him for a year. Macy ended up calming them down while those two finished up.

Marshal:

Witness: They were going to head back to an abandoned theater the Negro trusted, before preparing to continue East. I thought about joining them. Wasn’t interested in working for the government forever, and I don’t think you’d have let me. I never liked the circus in the first place. In the end, I realized I’d been thinking a lot about home because those memories was some of the clearest, so I decided I’d take my leave and head home. Don’t think the Negro or Macy really trusted me anyway.

Marshal: And you just left? Without telling anybody?

Witness: I was tired, Marshall. Tired of all this. I just wanted to go home and find a way to live that I could tolerate.

Marshal: Well, I think this was indeed helpful. We did search that theater, but with the understanding that they used it as shelter, we might be able to find something else.

Witness: So can I go?

Marshal: Once you’ve given your description to Okese, and once the AG decides what to do with the criminal charges, and once you’ve provided an address for when the civil trial wants to subpoena you. For what it’s worth, even if you think she didn’t trust you at the end, I think Geraldine did return your respect, enough to defend you against Ms. Walstead and Prince-

Witness: Huh? Oh, my mistake. That was the other Macy. The loud one with the mustache.

[Silence]

Marshal: Macy as in…Roger Macy? Roger Macy was with Victor Freestone on that day?

Witness: Did you not know? I was sure I saw him when they dragged me in for - wait, Prince who? Was that Prince Remus?

Marshal: I…have to go. Thank you for your time, this is over.

Witness: Wait, I talked to Prince Remus? I spent years trying to find him and I was face-to-face with that son of a-

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