The The Name of the Star (26 page)

Callum just stared at me.

“It's not her fault,” Stephen said.

“I know that,” Callum replied, but he wasn't acting like he knew that. “Please tell me she got him. Please tell me that. Please let that be the upshot of all this . . .”

“It sounds like she tried,” Stephen said. “But no.”

“It was a mistake to send her in alone,” Callum snapped. “I told you it was a mistake. I told you we should have just stayed at the school.”

“We needed to investigate—”

“Investigate what? What exactly have we come up with so far?”

“He spoke to Rory,” Stephen said, his voice rising. “We learned a few things. We learned he had the sight when he was alive. That's probably why he's been trailing Rory. That's probably why he killed at Wexford. He found someone who could see him, who could hear him.”

“Oh, good,” Callum said. “Well, then. Sounds like we've solved it.”

“Callum!” Stephen's voice went deep when he yelled. I could feel the sonic boom in my stomach. “You aren't helping. So either stop it now or go outside and walk it off.”

For a moment, I thought they were going to have a fight—a real, physical one. Callum stood up, straightened, and stormed out of the room. I heard a door slam somewhere else in the apartment.

“Sorry,” Stephen said quietly. “He'll calm down in a moment.”

I could hear things being thrown around in the other room. Then the door opened again and Callum joined us, rattling the table and spilling our tea with the force of sitting down.

“So what do we know?” he asked.

“Someone is clearing up the red tape. He'll tell me when it's all right for me to take Rory back to Wexford. Until then, we should stay here with her.”

“We should be out there, dealing with him.”

“I'd like that too,” Stephen said, “but we have no idea where he's gone. But in the meantime, we can work with what he's said this evening. He's been communicating.”

Stephen quickly brought Callum up to speed on the various messages while I drank some tea and kept my head down. I was a little frightened of both of them at the moment. Boo was hurt because of me.

“There was something written on a wall after one of the Ripper killings in 1888,” Stephen said. “After the fourth murder—a bit of anti-Semitic graffiti. Most people think it was a false lead, that it wasn't written by the Ripper at all—or if it was, it was probably written to lead the police down the wrong path. This message feels wrong . . .”

“Maybe he just wanted to turn up at that Rippercon thing,” Callum said. “Do a signing for the fans.”

“Possibly,” Stephen said. “Everything he's done so far has been about attracting an audience. The very act of imitating Jack the Ripper is an attempt to get attention and cause fear. He commits murders in full view of CCTV cameras. He sent a message to the BBC to be read aloud on television. Tonight, he pulled Rory aside. And then he wrote a message right in front of half the world's press, directing us to a phrase from the Bible. It's all been very, very specific and theatrical.”

“But everyone's going to think this Richard Eakles guy wrote that,” Callum said. “Apart from us, no one's going to believe his story that an invisible man knocked him aside to write some weird, possibly Bible-related message. At least the one about Rory was clear.”

“What
one about Rory
?” I said.

Callum backed away from the table a little and played with the edge of the plastic tablecloth. Stephen exhaled long and slow.

“There's one part of this we haven't mentioned,” Stephen said, staring at Callum. “We didn't want you to be unduly alarmed. It's all under control—”

“What message about Rory?” I said again.

“The James Goode letter,” he said. “There was one final sentence that confirmed in our minds that what you had seen was real. It wasn't read on the air. It said . . .
I look forward to visiting the one with the sight to know me and plucking out her eyes
.”

Both of them remained silent while I took this in. I stared into the depths of the teacup. I was from Louisiana. Bénouville, Louisiana. Not from here. I was from the land of hot weather and storms and big box stores, of freaks and crawfish and unstable McMansions. Home. I needed home.

“You are the only lead,” Stephen said. “Every other avenue has been tried. The paper and the package that was sent to the BBC . . . analyzed over and over. Paper and box and wrapping from Ryman's stationers—one of thousands they sell every year. Not particularly helpful, as he obviously didn't buy it—an invisible man can't walk into a shop and buy a box—so we couldn't trace it at the point of sale. CCTV turned up nothing, as is now well-known. No physical evidence at any crime scene to tie back to the killer—again, obvious to us, baffling to the lab. We only had you. From you, we at least knew he wasn't the original Jack the Ripper, because of his appearance . . .”

I think he saw that none of this was helping, so he shut up.

“The plan is simple,” he said. “You stay at Wexford, and we stay near you. Very near you. If he comes anywhere near you—”

“He came near me tonight,” I said.

“So we double our protection,” Stephen said. “It won't happen again. But now you know, and you have to listen to us, and you have to trust us.”

“What can you do?” I said, my voice shaking. “If he comes near me, what can you do about it?”

Callum opened his mouth to speak, but Stephen shook his head.

“We take care of it,” Stephen said. “The details are covered under the Official Secrets Act. You can be angry. You can be upset. You can be whatever you want. But the truth is, we're the only people who can keep you safe. And we will keep you safe. It's not only our job, but now he's hurt our friend, and that happens to bother us quite a lot.”

“I could go home,” I said.

“Running away won't help. Going home probably wouldn't even deter him, if he's serious. The ghosts we've encountered operate basically in the same manner as humans in terms of general locomotion. While most tend to haunt one place, there are plenty that have much larger territories. The Ripper seems comfortable moving around the East End. There's no reason I can think of that he wouldn't be able to travel.”

He didn't sugarcoat it. The bluntness was oddly calming.

“So you stay where we can do something about it,” he went on. “And you try to live your life as normally as you can.”

“Like you two?” I asked.

It was a bit of a low blow, but Callum laughed.

“I think she's getting it,” he said.

26

I
T WAS ALMOST THREE IN THE MORNING WHEN STEPHEN dropped me off at Wexford, but there were lots of lights on in the windows. I saw people looking out as I stepped from the police car.

“For the next few days, Callum and I will be keeping an eye on you,” he said. “One of us will always be around. And remember, you have to say she stepped out into the road and didn't see the car.”

Claudia threw open the door before Stephen hit the buzzer. I never thought I'd be happy to see her, but there was something reassuring about her indomitable presence. She checked me over with what seemed like genuine concern, then sent me upstairs while she spoke to Stephen. I gave him a final nod of good night from the steps.

Jazza was awake. Every light in our room was on, including my bedside light. The moment I stepped in the door, she sprang up and threw her arms around me.

“Is she okay?”

“I think so,” I said. “Well, she's awake. She has some broken bones.”

“What happened? You went to the toilet, and you never came back.”

“I was just feeling a little sick,” I said. “I went out for some air. I walked around the block. And . . . she followed me. She was on the phone. I guess she . . . she just didn't see the car.”

“God, I feel so terrible. All those things I said about her. But she really is sweet. Oh, God, but she really doesn't pay attention, does she? Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I lied. I mean, I was physically intact, but inside, I was quaking.

“I warmed your cheese for you,” she said, pointing at the radiator.

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

I was in no shape to eat any Cheez Whiz, so I went right to my bureau to get out my pajamas.

“Where did you get those clothes?” Jazza asked.

“Oh . . . they lent them to me.”

I quickly removed the Eton sweats and shoved them into my laundry bag.

“The police lent you clothes from Eton?”

“I guess they had them around or something.”

“Rory . . . you leave the party and Boo follows, then Boo gets hit by a car . . . I don't know. I don't want to pry, but . . . what's going on?”

For just a second, I thought about telling her. I wanted her to know. I imagined all the words coming out of my mouth, the whole ridiculous story.

But I couldn't do that.

“It's all just . . . a lot of bad luck.”

Jazza slumped a bit. I wasn't sure if it was relief or disappointment. Luckily, we didn't have to talk about this anymore, because there was a knock and pretty much everyone from the hall came in to get the news.

 

When I closed my eyes that night, two things ran through my mind: the image of Boo on the street, and the Ripper himself.

No one understood. Not my classmates. Not my teachers. Not the police.

Jazza slept. I didn't.

They probably would have let me skip class the next morning, but there was no point. I'd been in my bed for hours, doing nothing but staring at the ceiling and listening to Jazza breathe and trying to distract myself from the endless, terrifying thoughts. At six, I got up and showered. I was sticky with sweat, a sweat that had nothing to do with being hot and everything to do with being awake so long. I yanked my uniform from the end of the bed, pulled a shirt from a hanger. I couldn't bother putting my hair up, or even brushing it. I just smacked it down with my hands.

I skipped breakfast and went right to art history. No one hid their interest when I walked into the room. I'm not sure if it was the news about Boo or my general appearance. At home, people would have asked. People would have been crawling all over me for information. At Wexford, they seemed to extract what they wanted to know by covert staring.

Mark, a Wexford outsider, was oblivious to the drama of the night before. “Today,” he said cheerfully, “I thought we'd cover something topical. We're going to talk about depictions of violence in art. And where I'd like to start is by taking a look at an artist called Walter Sickert. Sickert was an English impressionist who painted urban scenes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sickert is often brought up when discussing Jack the Ripper. There are a number of reasons for this . . .”

I rubbed my head. There was no escaping the Ripper. He was everywhere.

“Sickert was obsessed with the Jack the Ripper crimes. He believed he had rented a room formerly occupied by Jack the Ripper, and he made a painting of it entitled
Jack the Ripper's Bedroom.
Some people even believe that Sickert was Jack the Ripper, but I'm not sure those claims have much to do with reality.”

A painting appeared on the screen. It was a dark room, a bed in the middle. Plain, brooding, dark.

“Another reason,” Mark said, “was the fact that in 1908, Sickert painted a series of paintings based on a real-life murder, the Camden Town Murder. The murder had taken place the year before, and the scene was similar to that of the last murder victim in the Jack the Ripper murders, Mary Kelly—certainly in the setting.”

A click. A new painting. A woman lying on a bed, naked, her head turned away. A man sitting on the edge of the bed, mourning over what he had done.

“Art of a murder scene,” Mark said. “Death is a common theme in painting. The Crucifixion has been painted thousands of times. The executions of kings. The killings of saints. But this painting is more about the murderer than the victim. It even encourages us to feel mercy for him. This painting from the series is called
What Shall We Do for the Rent ?
”

Mark went on, telling us all about English impressionists and the brushstrokes and the light. I just kept staring straight ahead at the still figure on the bed—the shaded, almost forgotten figure of the woman.

I didn't have any mercy for the killer.

 

An hour and a half into class, we had a bathroom break. I was the first one out the door.

“I'm not going back in there,” I said to Jerome. “I don't know if you can . . . prefect-arrest me or something. But I'm not going back.”

“I'm not going to prefect-arrest you,” he said. “But I should walk you back to your building. I'll tell Mark you were ill.”

So Jerome walked me the thirty or so feet back to Hawthorne. We had just about reached the door when he stopped.

“Only a few more days,” he said. “It's almost over.”

Jerome hesitated, then put his hand on the side of my head, leaned down, and kissed me.

When I looked up, I just caught sight of Stephen. He was sitting on a bench in the square, pretending to read. He wore a sweater and jeans and a scarf, no uniform. He immediately removed and played with his glasses, turning away from the sight of the kissing. But he had seen it, and that felt weird. I stepped away from Jerome.

“Thanks,” I said. I meant for the walk back to the building, but it sounded like I meant the kiss.