“I know I’m a stranger here, and I have no right to anything to do with that girl. I don’t have a right to say her name, if you don’t consent to it.”
“Onishtu,” said one of the men. “You can say it.”
“Dreams are dreams,” said Rigg. “They mean nothing except that’s what was on my mind. Only I do believe that people leave paths in the world, and I do believe those paths enter into my mind sometimes. And I wouldn’t mention it even now, except that I also happened to see the very house I dreamed that she was buried in, and if that was real . . .”
All work stopped. “House?” asked a man.
“One of the empty houses,” said Rigg. “In my dream, it had been built for her.”
“She was too young,” said a man. “Nobody would build a house for her.”
“I know, her father said so last night—I’m sure that’s why it was on my mind. Forget that I said anything. It was just . . . such a vivid dream.”
Silence for a long time. They got back to work. Rigg kept grinding the meat and fat that would go into the sausages—the bloodiest and most menial task, but he didn’t mind.
As Rigg expected, the silence was finally broken by a man asking, “Which house?”
They didn’t leave their task until it was almost time for the noon meal. They would all eat together, so they didn’t have to change out of their bloody clothes. But they had to wash their hands, at least, before putting food into their mouths, and for that they went to one man’s dooryard. And when they were clean, the man said, “Food’s not quite ready. Suppose you point out the house in your dream.”
“No, no,” said Rigg, but they insisted.
On the way, they passed the Cave, and the old men who were spry enough came out and walked with them, and a few curious women joined them, so there were about twenty people when Rigg got to where he had a clear view of the house that was Onishtu’s grave and marker. They were still a good hundred meters from it, but he could point and there would be no ambiguity about the house he meant.
“Let’s go have a look,” said a woman, who had been filled in on what they were doing in quiet conversation along the way.
“Not me,” said Rigg.
“You said she was buried there, in your dream,” said one of the sausagemakers. “Where?”
“Behind the wall under a window,” said Rigg. “The west-facing window.”
“Behind the stone? Not in the floor?”
“That’s right,” said Rigg. “But is that even possible?”
“We’ll see,” said a man. And they went on ahead.
Ram Odin was among the men who had come out of the Cave. He didn’t go into the house, either. “So you decided to tell them your . . . dream.”
“Naming no names,” said Rigg. “They’ll know whose house or they won’t. They’ll accuse him or they won’t. He’ll break down and confess what he did, or not. But her parents will have her body and know she didn’t leave them and run off somewhere. No one carried her off. They’ll know.”
“Small comfort, if they knew how she died.”
“After all these years, I think the comfort will be more than small. But I’m not telling them how she died, or what was done to her first. I’m making the minimal change, and leaving them free to make of it what they will.”
They were a deliberate people—after all, despite years of suspicion, they had never taken any action against the villages they suspected of taking Onishtu. The girl’s parents were given a chance to wail over the body, and they buried the body in a real grave, among her ancestors, with a marker, before anyone started open inquiries about who had built the house.
It took only a few minutes to get past the “nobody knows who builds them” objection, and then it was only a few moments before they had named aloud the man who built it. The murderer kept his silence, except to say, “I’m angry that the killer hid her in the house I was building.”
And they took that at face value for a while.
But finally the question came. “Who did you build it for?”
He would not tell them. “A man doesn’t have to tell. Shouldn’t tell. She chose another.”
They started ticking off the women who had accepted houses during that year. They all agreed—for by now the whole town had assembled—that the man had not shown special attention to any of those women.
“Did you never offer it?” asked a man.