Obviously, showing a bunch of people some random fingerprints wouldn’t get us anywhere. To start, we would search for a literate child with a sick mother. We’d use the fingerprints to determine whether someone fit the bill.
Noela, Elaine, and I asked around the town square, searching for leads, but we had no luck.
“Do you think perhaps they don’t live in town?” Elaine asked.
“Hard to say. Hey, Elaine…is there a doctor in Kalta?” I’d always found it strange, but first-timers at Kirio Drugs often did think I was a physician.
“Not right now. When someone gets sick, they have to visit the next town over.”
“No wonder people keep treating me like a doctor.”
I didn’t practice medicine, so even if someone consulted me about symptoms, I couldn’t really treat them. At most, I’d suggest a product like cold or stomach medicine; I couldn’t hand them a miracle cure or anything. But if I found this sick woman, I didn’t want to tell her, “Well, nothing I can do!”
We eventually bumped into the traveling merchant Vin, and I explained the situation to him.
“The fact that you don’t remember this child and their mother suggests it’s possible that they aren’t from Kalta,” Vin said. “Folks who don’t normally come to town… A merchant family with a young child and a sick mother…” He seemed to have someone in mind. “You must be looking for Mr. Hautbeaux from the next town over.”
“Mr. Hautbeaux?”
“Yup. His wife fell terribly sick not long ago. They’ve got a baby and a little girl who can write.”
“That must be them!” Elaine said.
“Must! Must!” Noela echoed.
I calmed the pair down. “Hold your horses, girls. We don’t know for sure yet.”
“Yup. That’s all gossip,” Vin agreed. “Mrs. Hautbeaux may have recovered.”
Either way, we had our first clue. Time to go confirm this. I thanked Vin, and then Elaine, Noela, and I took Elaine’s carriage to the neighboring town.
✦ ✦ ✦
Truth be told, our destination wasn’t much bigger than Kalta. It wasn’t a one-horse town, but it wasn’t bustling either.
According to Vin, the Hautbeaux family ran multiple shops—a greengrocer, a general store, and even a weapon shop. To use my old world’s terminology, they were a conglomerate.
We drove Elaine’s carriage to the Hautbeauxs’ residence. It wasn’t big enough to call a mansion, but it was still larger than average. I spotted a little girl playing by the front gate. Is she the one?
Hopping out of the carriage, I cautiously called out to her. “Good day! I run a pharmacy in Kalta called Kirio Drugs.”
“Kirio Drugs?” she repeated.
I showed her the note. “Did you write this?” She looked at me and then the note. “Is your mommy sick?” I asked.
“The doctor said so.”
To identify the girl for sure, I handed her a bottle I’d brought and then applied lesseeit to it. Noela and Elaine popped up to compare the prints on the bottle to those on the note.
“Mazes same.”
“Yes, the mazes are the same!”
Fingerprints, people. Let’s work on our vocabularies. Anyway, that means…
Having seen Elaine’s lavish carriage, a plump man in his late thirties exited the house and approached us. “What business do you have with my daughter?”
This guy must be Mr. Hautbeaux. “I’m a pharmacist from Kalta. I received this note in my request box, so I’m looking into it. May I have a moment of your time?”
Mr. Hautbeaux looked at the note, nodded, and led us into his home.
In the reception room, we listened as he somberly explained the note. “I’ve brought my daughter along to Kalta during several business trips. On top of that, we’ve been to your drugstore. She must’ve written that request during one of those visits.”
Mr. Hautbeaux and his wife had stopped by Kirio Drugs after hearing rumors of my skill, hoping to purchase medicine that would cure her, but to no avail. “She’s visited our town doctor several times,” Mr. Hautbeaux continued. “He says he can’t do any more to help her.”
“Is that so?”
“My wife’s stable, but she doesn’t have long. At any rate, thank you for reading my daughter’s note and visiting us.”
He must be in immense pain, yet here he is, thanking me. My heart ached. If the town doctor says his wife’s dying, it might be true. And I don’t have any medicine that could heal her. At least, I didn’t right then.
I wound up visiting Mr. Hautbeaux’s wife with him and his daughter Aisha. Mrs. Hautbeaux looked tremendously kind, but her skin had a sickly pallor. Strangely, my medicine-making skill reacted before I’d even seen her.
What the heck? Once I realized what my skill was suggesting, however, it made sense.
“I have an idea, Mr. Hautbeaux,” I told him. “I’m going to create a treatment for your wife’s illness.”
“You can do that?”
“I can.” My medicine-making skill was telling me everything I needed to know about the product: ingredients, purpose, dosage, and the steps to create it.
After talking to Mrs. Hautbeaux for a while, asking her how she felt, I promised her that I’d make her a treatment. I also explained that I couldn’t guarantee its effects.