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such a...coherent, I suppose, fashion as Mr.
Lambert. I thought I was in the depths of the ocean, but my body
wasn’t off having conversations and looking at maps in the
meantime.”
    “No.” It wasn’t one of my fonder memories.
“You didn’t behave rationally, whereas Mr. Lambert did. Still, it
might be worth investigating.” I added more sugar to my coffee.
“Assuming Mr. Lambert wasn’t simply the victim of some sort of
strange fit or mental disorder, someone chose him in particular to
steal the map.”
    “Assuming it was stolen in the first place,”
Whyborne pointed out. “Remember the evening we came home to find
Saul had dragged out your case notes and shredded them?”
    I eyed our cat, currently enjoying his
breakfast as well. “I couldn’t forget. So you think a cat, in some
fit of kittenish excitement, came in through the open window and
made off with the map?”
    “Well, it doesn’t sound quite so likely when
you put it that way.” Whyborne muttered. “But the window was open,
and if the electric fan was on, the map may have simply blown
away.”
    “And the fact Mr. Lambert’s strange attack
took place in the same span of time?” I arched a brow at him. “That
seems a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?”
    “Yes, well. You can hardly blame me for
hoping for an explanation that doesn’t involved sorcery, can
you?”
    “That seems a bit hypocritical coming from a
sorcerer,” I said, but I winked to show I was joking.
    Whyborne shook his head. “Jest all you like,
but you know as well as I that cases involving sorcery tend to end
with a great deal of screaming and blood. Often ours.”
    “The screams or the blood?”
    “Both.” He sipped his coffee. “Has the
morning paper come yet?”
    “Let me check.” I rose to my feet. “Don’t
look so glum, my dear. Perhaps we’ll have some luck, and someone
was merely playing a cruel prank on Mr. Lambert. No blood or death
involved.”
    “I hope you’re right.”
    I retrieved the newspaper from the porch. My
heart sank as soon as I read the headline.
    My face must have betrayed me as I walked
back to the kitchen, because Whyborne set aside his spoon.
“Griffin? Is something wrong?”
    “I fear your hopes have been dashed,” I
said, and laid the paper on the table.
    Horrible murder of a city
clerk! blared the headline. And beneath, in
smaller type: Mr. Dewey Lambert arrested
for bloody crime.

Chapter 9
    Griffin
     
    An hour later, a policeman led me to Mr.
Lambert’s cell.
    The jail was as dreary as I remembered it,
having been held here briefly myself on murder charges. That day
had been one of utter misery. First Whyborne had broken off our
nascent relationship thanks to my own foolishness. Then I’d been
arrested for the murder of Madam Rosa, one of my informants who had
died horribly. At the time, I’d made no true friends in Widdershins
save for Whyborne, and all of my old friends from my Pinkerton days
had abandoned me when I went to the madhouse.
    I’d sat here alone and afraid, every
remembered terror from my confinement in the asylum playing itself
out over and over again in my mind. Until Whyborne’s godfather,
Addison Somerby, came to pay my bail and take me away from here.
I’d felt a moment of hope.
    And then things had gotten exponentially
worse.
    My heart raced with remembered fear, and I
took a deep breath to calm it. I wasn’t a prisoner. I was no longer
the stranger in town, friendless save for the cat that had shown up
starving in my back yard. I was here as a free man and would leave
the same way.
    Unlike poor Mr. Lambert.
    “Mr. Flaherty!” He rose to his feet as I
stopped outside his cell. His face was drawn and pale, his mustache
chewed to tatters. His drab appearance looked even more out of
place amidst the iron bars and moisture-stained brick walls. The
smell of mildew and piss filled the air, and I recalled how it had
infiltrated my clothing and hair when I’d been held here.
    I glanced at the