The Singing Bone (20 page)

“What do you want?” she asks with as little expression as possible. She's tamped down, stone upon stone. Lock upon lock. And while she planned to ask him to leave her alone, she can't bring herself to be kind to him. She must
tell
him to leave her alone.

“I wanted to
see
you!” he says, smiling, every inch the magnanimous uncle, she the favorite niece. “You and I—we were once very close. Me and my girl genius, Alice.”

She stares. “I hope they're treating you poorly here,” she says.

He laughs. “Did you hear Hans Loomis is making a documentary about us?”

She stares at him and waits.

“Genie, the movie is about our family. Allegra, you, me, Trina, and Lee. Stover. Molly. All my animals.” He watches her face for a reaction, and then she's glad for the pill. She doesn't like to hear their names. She doesn't want him to say their names. “He's found everyone! Well, almost. Some are too far away to be physically found.” He takes a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his sleeve and shakes it, whispering
tsk
and shaking his head. He offers a cigarette to Alice. “No?” he says, shaking it again, like a treat for a dog. “You used to love to smoke, Genes.” He holds the cigarette between his yellow teeth and lights a match. “Soon I'll have to quit, too. Right, Lenny?” he yells to the guard. “No more smoking.” Lenny laughs. Alice doesn't say anything. He sits back in his chair, exhaling. “Did they find old Allegra yet?”

  •  •  •  

On the night of Alice's arrest and interrogation, the police asked Alice about Allegra—
Do you know where she is? When did she leave?
—but Alice didn't know. She guessed a month. The truth was, she'd lost track of time. Some time at the end of the summer, time changed into something different. Whatever it was Mr. Wyck and Allegra said they were trying to do to influence time and the universe, Alice believed it had started to work, for she no longer knew the day or the hour. Even if she looked at a clock, she didn't quite believe the hands. She didn't believe anything by then. The police wanted to know if there were other women at the house. They had a list of women's names. They showed her pictures. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I don't know them.”

“Look again,” the officer said, so Alice said one or two did seem familiar, but she was so tired she couldn't really be sure.

“Who are they?” she asked. She put her finger on the corner of a photo.

“Let us worry about it,” the police officer said, pulling the photo away from her.

  •  •  •  

Alice folds her arms and cocks her head to one side. “I always assumed you killed Allegra,” she says.

He looks angry. His brow wrinkles. The corners of his mouth stiffen and edge down.

She smiles.

“Allegra was like a mother to you.”

“You're fucking kidding me,” she says. She stands. “Allegra almost killed me.”

“Don't go yet, darling. We haven't finished.” When he says this, he doesn't look up at her as most people would. His eyes are on her midsection. She would like to hit him. The hair at the top of his head is all but gone. “I just want you to hear me out.” He looks up at her, winking. “Then I promise. You will never have to see old Jack Wyck again. Nope.” He exhales smoke, licking his lips.

“Tell me what you want,” she says, sitting. “Then I'll go.”

“When two people are as close as we were, they become one. They can never truly be separated.” He brings his palms together in a position of prayer.

She can tell that he earnestly, madly believes this and though she knows it's not so, she almost believes it, too. She thinks of Tristan and Iseult, the vines that grew around their graves to unite them in death, the metamorphosis of the body, of the mind, the course of her life.

“Genie,” he says in the honey voice. “Isn't that why you're here? Because no matter how much you'd like to deny it, part of you still loves me.” He doesn't look at her. He gazes down at the table. “You feel it.” The air is dense, humid. “Remember how you came to me that night? You were full of fire then. Such a creature.” She closes her eyes. “You brought me into the forest,” he says, and she can remember the damp grass beneath her bare feet, the stars, the smell of the trees.

Alice shakes her head as if to cast off a net that's been placed there, a hood. She opens her eyes and looks at him. She puts her hand up as if warding him off and shakes her head. “Not this shit again. Not this time.” She sits still and waits, but he doesn't say anything.

He begins to hum instead—and the tune is familiar—though she can't quite place it, and he smokes and smiles at her. “Do you know this song?” he asks.

“Is that why I'm here?”

He doesn't answer, but he keeps humming, and after a while, he leans forward and whispers, “Whose DNA do you think they'll find?”

Alice doesn't say anything. She looks at a crack that runs down the length of the concrete wall behind Mr. Wyck. She makes eye contact with the guard, who is watching them but not watching them. She studies the crack again. Stone upon stone, she thinks. “Yours,” she says simply, her voice flat, her eyes blank. “They will find your DNA. Or no one's.”

“Will they, Genie?” Mr. Wyck smiles and lifts his chin at her—a challenge. She can just make out the birds' wings tattooed on his neck above the collar of his prison garb—sharp black triangles.

“You are boring me.” Alice raises her eyebrows.

Mr. Wyck looks down at the notebook in her lap. “You keep notes,” he says.

“Yes. It's what I do.”

“Do you know how your story ends?”

“What story?”

“The ballad.”

She's too surprised to answer him. And then he begins to sing: “
Oh, the miller, he came and he drew up his dam. And there he saw the drowned woman. He laid her down on the bank to dry . . .
” He stops singing and looks at her. “Is this familiar?” he asks, smiling. “Maybe just a few more lines, then:
When the King's own harper, he passed by, oh, he made a harp of her breastbone whose sounds would melt a heart of stone. And the strings he formed of her yellow hair, whose notes made sad the listening ear . . .
” He skips a stanza and goes right to the end, his voice rising, and then the guard really does look at them. “
And the third tune it played was, me false sister Jean—so slyly she pushed me into the stream, oh, and then up spoke her false sister Jean, says, ‘we'll pay this harper and have him be gone.' Oh, but up then spoke her father the King, says, ‘we'll have the tune played over again!' Well, they built a fire that would burn any stone . . .
” He stops and looks at her. Alice opens her mouth to speak, but he opens his mouth and yells, “And in it they threw her false sister Jean!”

Alice is on her feet. “How did you—”

“I know who kills the maiden.” He jumps to his feet. He's almost dancing, hopping.
Rumplestiltskin
, Alice thinks, and she'd laugh because it really is comical the way he's moving, this emaciated little man in his dirty gray suit, but Mr. Wyck yells, “It's not the miller. It's not me!”

Lenny the guard is upon him now, fastening the chain at his feet. Mr. Wyck spits as he speaks, his eyes are small and black. Alice is backing towards the door. “Genie killed her!” Mr. Wyck yells as the guard pulls him away. “You killed her, you liar! Traitor!” The guard forces Mr. Wyck through a metal door. Another guard locks it behind them, but Alice can still hear him, and when she can't hear his voice anymore, she can still hear the echo of his words:
And soon everyone will know it.

Drawings of birds fill the page. Hans admires the deft line, the crosshatched shadows. He turns the page and the birds are readying for flight, lifting their wings. On the next page, they have taken off, their wings moving together, their bodies melding. In the next drawing, the birds are nesting into a single shape, losing their definition. And when he turns the page once more, an enormous black raven has taken their place. Hans doesn't like the drawing—not because it isn't done well—it is. He doesn't like the idea that the raven has absorbed the other birds. He stares at the drawing, pondering the knife-shaped beak, the shining black eyes, the solid body. He picks up the phone and dials Alice's number once more, but again there is no answer. He considers going to her apartment but decides against it.

Hans puts the lid on the manuscript box. He thinks of something Alice told him—that when she was arrested, the police showed her photos of girls and asked if she'd seen them. “How many photos were there?” he asked.

“Oh—a lot. I don't recall, exactly. Maybe twenty,” she said.

They were in her apartment, filming. Alice sat on one of the two low couches in her living room and Hans sat on the other. Ariel stood behind Hans, her camera on a tripod.

“Had you ever seen any of the girls?” Hans asked.

Alice took a sip of water. She shook her head. “No.”

“Had you ever heard anything about missing girls?”

“Never—or not that I remember.”

“Was there anything in the house that indicated—”

“Everything indicated that something was terribly wrong,” she said. “But I didn't know what to pay attention to. Oh, wait.” She looked up at him. “There was something. There were tons of clothes in the house that didn't seem to belong to anyone.”

“What kinds of clothes?”

She shook her head. “Dresses. I don't remember what else. Shoes, I think. Nice things.”

  •  •  •  

Hans opens the manuscript box and looks again at the first drawing.
Maybe twenty photos
— Alice said. Hans counts nineteen birds. He thinks of the tattooed chain of flapping wings around Jack Wyck's neck.

  •  •  •  

“But the clothes could have come from anywhere, really,” Alice said. “We used to go trash picking. We tried to find things to sell—anything that seemed of value—and sometimes you just liked something and brought it home.”

“Where was the money coming from in the house?”

“The Smiths, but that was later. We went through trash, collected bottles. Maybe drugs. Nothing would surprise me, really. But I never saw the money. Mr. Wyck kept the money—and maybe Lee and Allegra.”

“Do you remember the last time you saw Allegra?”

Alice shook her head. “Not really. I think she just left one day, but I probably thought she was coming back and didn't pay attention. I thought I saw her once—later—but she'd been gone for a while by then. It may not have been Allegra. There were so many people at the house all the time.”

  •  •  •  

Hans looks at the first drawing, the one of the tree. Allegra's hair flows into the tree's roots. Her arms are extended at her sides, as if she is sleeping, her palms up, her feet slightly turned out. Her eyes are closed. He remembers that Allegra did yoga. Hans had taken a few classes in the seventies with a man who'd studied in India. The teacher kept his hair in a dark braid down his back. There were so many seekers then, Hans thinks. Everyone was looking into the well, not for its darkness, but for the possible reflection of light in the water at its base. Hans studies the drawing of Allegra.
Savasana,
Hans thinks. Corpse pose.

Mr. Wyck said the women should put on dresses when they went to visit the Smiths. Allegra kept the dresses in a different closet in the upstairs hallway, separate from their other clothes. The closet was a prep's daydream: Topsiders and khaki trousers, cloth purses with reversible covers and wooden handles, skirts with turtles stitched into them. Alice asked about the closet, but no one gave her a real answer. Since Molly had arrived on the same day that Alice did, she couldn't know, and Lee said he had no idea. Mr. Wyck simply didn't answer, but Allegra said, “Discards,” and waved dismissively, adding, “Someone who needed to shed her skin.” Alice tried to imagine ridding herself of her own skin. She thought she would start with the head, pulling the translucent tissue back from the face, making a thin line that ran from the part in her hair over the tip of her nose and down to her chin. After that, she could work it around her neck and over her shoulders, past her torso—finally stepping out of it, flushed and tender, like a baby mouse before it grows fur.

“I need a haircut,” Mr. Wyck said, so Allegra filled a dented tin bowl with warm water and went out to the porch. Alice brought a chair out from the kitchen, and Mr. Wyck made a show of twirling a brown towel around his shoulders like a bullfighter's cape before sitting down. Alice sat on the porch steps, just above the broken stair. She hummed, watching as Allegra worked. Mr. Wyck winked at Alice. “My mane,” he said as the golden strands fell around him. “Will you miss it?” He pushed Allegra's hands away and shook what was left of his hair that had grown long that summer. Alice got up and stood behind him with Allegra, who stepped away. Alice brought her fingers through Mr. Wyck's wet hair. She took the scissors from Allegra and cut a lock of the hair herself and sat back down on the steps. She brushed it back and forth over her lips, smiling.

When Allegra finished, Mr. Wyck stood and lifted the tin bowl, tilting it so the water ran over his face, down the tattoos of birds on his shoulders, flowing over the words etched across his chest:
I am that I am
. His skin shone in the sunlight. When he was dry, he dressed in a crisply pressed, light blue Oxford cloth shirt. He shaved. Alice and Molly followed him into the bedroom, lay down on their stomachs on the bed, and propped their chins in their hands. Mr. Wyck studied himself in the bedroom mirror. He smiled and nodded at his reflection, practicing his salute until he was satisfied. He looked at them in the mirror. “My animals,” he said, and then, “Go get dressed.”