The Singing Bone (25 page)

Stu inched his way to the back door and pushed gently. His feet felt light, his forehead hot. He pushed again and the door swung open. In a moment, he was in the kitchen. The room was dark, airtight, cool. Dried plants and flowers were strung from one end of the room to another. A half-eaten apple pie, covered with cheesecloth, sat on the counter next to the sink where dishes sat out to dry. The room smelled good, like the little stiff pillows of dried flowers his mother kept in the closets—but not as sweet. The odor had a depth, like the fallen and rotted apples outside in the orchard—an undertone. Stu lifted the corner of the cheesecloth and ran a finger over the bottom of the glass dish. He sucked, letting the syrup soften on his tongue, waiting for his eyes adjust.

He walked to the dining room, where a big round wooden table, stained with candle wax and the circles of sweating glasses, stood. The windows were opened, but the curtains were closed and they hung heavily in the August heat. He sat down at one of the chairs. He counted. Molly, Alice, Trina, Stover, Mr. Wyck, the woman, and another chair. That was Trina's boyfriend—the tall boy with the curly black hair. An ashtray. He lifted a half-smoked cigarette, sniffed at it, and put it in his pocket, vaguely wondering why half-smoked cigarettes always smelled worse than all other cigarettes. He stood and went to the window. A gray cat sauntered down the dirt drive.

In the living room, he looked through a pile of papers that didn't mean anything to him. They looked like a contract—something about POWs and Vietnam. Mr. Wyck's signature was on one, and just across from it, someone named Smith's. He was interested in the amount of money the contract showed, over six thousand dollars. Stu read on, but the legal language was like an unsolvable math problem on a wall. He put the papers down and looked around. He lifted a half-empty glass of wine to his lips and when he reached the staircase, he found another glass of wine on the first step. He drank that as he went up, leaving it on the landing. The wine was heavy and sour, but Stu sipped anyway. It made him light-headed.

The first room to the right was filled with recordings and musical instruments. He found cassette tapes marked in black ink: Alice 6/79; Alice 7/79; Alice, Molly, Trina 7/79; Group 8/79. He took the tapes out of their cases and shoved two in each back pocket. He ran his fingers over a guitar's strings, fighting an urge to pluck them. He found a guitar pick on the floor and put that in his pocket, too. He left that room and walked slowly down the hall, dragging his fingertips along the wall as he went.

In a bedroom at the end of the hallway, he found women's clothing strewn about, an unmade bed. The window's pale yellow curtains stirred. Stuart turned. He thought he heard something. He went back out into the hallway and crouched to remove his tennis shoes. In his socks, he went up the next flight of stairs. In a bedroom on the top floor, he recognized a T-shirt that belonged to his sister, her sandals. He lifted the shirt to his face. He could smell Molly there. He imagined her lifting him up, the way she had when he was a baby—not such a baby that he couldn't remember. Maybe he was four or five. But he could see Molly laughing.

He put the shirt down and looked around. Unlike the other room, this room was fairly neat. This was Molly's room. He thought of Molly's room at home, the pink walls, her clothes folded, the spines of her books organized by height. But it was someone else's, too. A man's clothes hung in the closet, and on the tall dresser he found an old-fashioned watch. He brought it to his ear and shook it, but it didn't tick. He put it in his pocket and then changed his mind.

Stu opened another door, expecting a closet, but instead he found a set of steep and narrow steps that led to the attic. He began a hesitant ascent. The steps creaked. The air grew denser. At the top of the steps, the air was so heavy that he wanted to turn and climb down, but he wanted to see what was there, too. Drawings were tacked to the walls—ink drawings of snakes, of winding trees. A woman's face in profile, like an old-fashioned silhouette—but the details were there: a plump mouth, a turned-up nose, small eyes, the eyebrows drawn like a cartoon villain's. In another drawing, a wolf crept past pine trees; an intricate star, a broken vase. There were photos of men and women with tattoos, and a stand with needles and paintbrushes and jars of ink.

Stu went to the little window at the end of the room and lifted the curtain to see better, pushing it back behind a nail in the wall. He stood in front of a drawing table, idly picking up pens and brushes and putting them down. He took one of the drawings—a small boat with set sails—folded it and put it in his pocket. He reached for another—an open palm with its lines deeply etched—but he stopped. His hand hovered over the table. There was someone behind him.

“What are you doing here?”

He turned, his mouth open. It was the woman with the tangled black hair. “I thought this was—” he began, but he couldn't think of a lie, so he let the words hang in the air between them.

“He will
kill
you.” She caught his arm as he began to move past her. “No.” She shook her head. “Don't run. He'll see you. He's coming. Follow me,” she said. “Quick!” she hissed. At the door to the attic, she turned to look at him. “Shh.” She put a finger to her lips. Her eyes were serious. Her eyes scared him.

“My shoes—”

“Where?”

“Downstairs.”

She shrugged, putting her hand to her mouth and shaking her head. “Not a word.”

Stu nodded. They went down the way he'd come up, but more softly, carefully. She pointed to steps that creaked and she helped him balance so that he would not touch them. She brought him to the basement. It smelled of old things, of spiderwebs and damp. Above, he heard the front door open, footsteps, voices, his sister's laugh. Allegra sat him down in the corner behind a stack of old newspapers. A spider crawled on his arm. She pointed to a narrow set of wooden steps that led to a cellar door on the side of the house. “I'll bring your shoes down when it's safe,” she said. “Stay here. If he sees you—” She was holding her stomach with both hands like she was going to be sick. Her hands were pale against her dark dress. Her eyes were round. She put her hand on the top of his head and closed her eyes. He closed his eyes, too, and when he opened them again, she was gone.

Upstairs, he could hear them moving around. Stover was playing the guitar. He could tell because Stover was good. He could play all of “Stairway to Heaven.” There was another guitar, a tambourine. And singing. Alice could sing. He tried to find her voice among the others, but it was useless. The song was a murmur, the voices too distant to understand. It seemed to go on forever or maybe it slipped into another song and then vanished and was picked up again. He was falling asleep. All the light of the day had crept out of the basement. Stu folded himself into the newspapers, the old paper giving way to his body. He fell into fragile dreams: a mouse nibbled at his fingers, Mr. Wyck peered at him from behind the newspaper at his feet, Molly walked away through the woods. She said she was never going to talk to him again. The mouse turned to a cat. The cat licked his face. Its eyes were so bright that Stuart had to open his eyes, to wake up. “Wake up,” the woman said. He couldn't see her because the flashlight was so bright. He put his hands up to his eyes. She shifted the beam of light so that it fell onto his shoes. “Quickly!” She handed him the flashlight.

And Stu had his shoes on and was climbing out of the cellar. He heard Mr. Wyck calling for the woman with the black hair. “Allegra! Where the fuck are you?” Allegra answered, but Stuart didn't hear what she said. He was off and running through the woods.

Alice is waiting to talk with Dr. Alfred Lowry, the head of the folklore department. The point of the meeting is vague. The semester is ending, and though Alice has missed several lectures, she's always given plenty of notice and provided work for her students. She looks up and down the hallway. She's sure she was followed here. On the way in, a group of students walked too closely behind her and then they swarmed past her like birds, making a
vee
-shape, chattering the whole while, shouting and laughing.

At home, her phone keeps ringing and when the machine picks up, it records tinny music, ragged breathing. She imagines a sweaty upper lip, acrid breath, chapped winter lips, a face shadowed beneath a black hood. But there is something familiar about the background music. It was Doug, the hooded hobgoblin, who stole her notebook—who else? It must have been the day that she went to the listening library. Afterwards, she stopped at a coffee shop. Alice sat at the window and she was sure she saw him—his overstuffed parka, his baggy jeans, his pale face.

She took the long way to the university and drove past the shooting range slowly, like she was casing it. There is a gun shop at the shooting range, but Alice has avoided violence for twenty years. Now she wonders about guns, and she wonders about running. She wonders about Hans, too. She wonders, in fact, if he has a girlfriend, a wife, but it doesn't seem like it. She doesn't think he's gay. There are too many thoughts in Alice's head. Her next is to wonder again what Alfred Lowry wants.

If I could rest my head for just fifteen minutes
, she thinks. She knows she'd feel better. On her way back, she'll pick up papers that need to be marked. She must write a final exam. There are student conferences to set up. She taps her fingers nervously against her leg. Every night she turns on the news, and in the morning she snaps open the paper, scanning the headlines. Then she drifts. She's missed her morning swim twice this week. Her research has gaps. There is a tale that she wants in Faroese, but it's yet to be translated. From what she can tell, this is her next step. She needs help with the translation and for whatever reason, she hasn't reached out to anyone in Languages. There are over one hundred and fifty versions of the tale in Swedish alone, none of which are quite right. She's not sure what she's looking for, but she's still searching for magical corpses.

“Professor Wood?” Alfred Lowry opens his office door, smiling. “You can come in now.”

She stands, straightening. “It's good to see you again,” she says. “Oh—” She fumbles with her sunglasses, putting them in her bag. She'd forgotten they were still on.

Alfred Lowry is responsible for Alice's recruitment and position. She met him at a conference in Ohio. He said his request for the new department had been granted—and the school where he'd been teaching cultural anthropology for years would now have a folklore department as well. Would she be interested? Yes. And here she was. In his wood- paneled office, his rare book collection set in a barrister's bookcase. His neat hair and tortoiseshell glasses. He is holding his pen like a cigarette. She thinks of Jack Wyck, the tattoos of snakes on his arms. She wonders briefly if there's anything tawdry in Alfred Lowry's past and decides it's unlikely. Or maybe there was something—but it wouldn't have anything on Alice Wood's past.

“I've had a strange visitor,” he says.

“Oh?”

“Yes. It was a young man who wouldn't give me his name. He says he knows you.”

“Oh.” Alice can see the trajectory of this.

“Yes. He gave me this.” He puts a folder on the desk between them. “Forgive me for being abrupt, Alice. It's just that—I don't quite know what to make of any of this.”

She stares at the folder. What's in it? She looks up at him. His face is kind. He's the sort of man she stays away from—he expects the truth, like Abe did. She wouldn't get involved with him, anyway. He's married, and when he talks about the trips he takes with his wife, it's easy to see that he adores her. Alice even knows his wife's name: Hester. Hester is lucky.

But Alice, no, Alice is not lucky. She squares her shoulders. She breathes evenly and holds his gaze. “And?” she says. “What does it have to do with me?”

“He said—he says you're Alice Pearson.”

She keeps her expression blank. “Who?” she manages, and when she hears her voice, she knows it's not convincing.

“Alice Pearson. The woman who—”

“The girl,” Alice corrects.

“The girl, yes, the girl who was involved with Jack Wyck. Bogey Jack, they called him. You remember?” He says this last part without expecting an answer. It's barely a question.

She pulls the folder towards her and opens it. There are several photos of her inside. Why couldn't she be two different people? She thinks wildly. That girl and this woman? Alice looks again at her own photo. Can she persuade him that she's not Alice Pearson? That she's never known or heard of an Alice Pearson? That she looks nothing like this girl with the hollowed eyes, the pale skin, the thin line of a mouth? She could pretend she's offended and get up and leave. Or she could plead with him not to tell anyone. In a fraction of a second, a hundred plans are hatched and then dismissed. Obviously he knows. Obviously he's figured it out. “I remember,” she says, closing the file. “Yes. That's me.”

Alfred leans his elbows on the table, and Alice can tell he wants to ask her questions—the same ones that Hans has. But Alice waits. She waits for him to ask, to say something, anything. She sits back in her chair. Her breathing is even. Her mind has stopped racing. “Alice—” he begins, but stops.

“I'm happy to take a break until this is all sorted,” she says quickly. “If that's what you'd like.”

“I'm not letting you go,” he says. “I want you to stay here.”

“I have nowhere to go.” She lifts her shoulders. Nowhere to go.
You've got nowhere else to go, baby.

“We can make up an excuse—we can say there's an illness in the family.”

No one misses you. I'm the only one who misses you. I love you.