In the Shadow of Blackbirds (22 page)

The stabbing behind my eyes worsened.

“God, don’t let it be the flu,” I murmured loud enough for a woman in a maid’s uniform to turn my way with fear in her eyes.

I BLEW THROUGH AUNT EVA’S FRONT DOOR JUST AS
darkness was settling over the house, and I was immediately assaulted with another “Who’s there?” from Oberon. His feathers rustled in his cage, and I could have sworn a pair of wings brushed against my hair. I swiped at the back of my neck, grabbed a candlestick, and ran upstairs to drop off my black bag and sweat-soaked flu mask. My goggles—my steadfast companions during my last moments with Stephen and my lightning death—lay on my bed amid the other treasures I had taken out to make room for books and notes. I fitted the
lenses over my eyes and adjusted the leather straps around my head for old time’s sake.

After making the rounds to light the downstairs lamps, I soothed my parched throat with a cup of cool water in the kitchen. My headache began to ease its firm grip on my skull. I filled the glass again and browsed Aunt Eva’s collection of phonograph records out in the living room, hunting for the musical equivalent of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
She owned several songs from the opera
The Pirates of Penzance,
which would do nicely.

I wound the phonograph’s hand crank and put the needle in place. The record crackled to life. An actor with a dramatic stage voice announced he would live and die a pirate king, and a bouncy harpsichord introduction began. I leaned back in the rickety white rocking chair and listened to the pirate and his harmonious crew fence and sing about how glorious it was to be a pirate king.

Oberon’s big bronze cage was starting to smell like it needed to be cleaned. The magpie swallowed seeds from a metal bowl, but I tried to ignore the movements of his crowlike head by gazing out at the empty street through my snug goggles. The world was still for the moment, unless the sirens of ambulances had become so ingrained in my ears that I no longer heard them. A glowing jack-o’-lantern smiled at me from the porch rail of a bungalow across the way, and I remembered it was Halloween. No one else seemed to be
celebrating a holiday a little too closely associated with death. And nightmares.

I sighed and held the glass to my chest. “Those poor men and their war dreams,” I said to the empty room before taking another sip.

During the song’s second verse, I spied a roadster with shining round headlights cruising into view in front of the house. The Pirate King continued to belt out his piratical joy, while the car’s driver steered his vehicle in a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and bumped the front tire into the curb. He backed up two feet, shifted again, and pulled alongside the pavement. The roadster was a Cadillac. Its sapphire-blue paint glimmered beneath the streetlight.

Julius’s Cadillac.

I sat up straight and stiff.

Aunt Eva was in the passenger seat—I could see the silhouettes of her work cap and flu mask. I tore off my goggles and ran to the front door.

The two of them climbed out of the vehicle and shut the doors. Julius wore the same gray fedora as the night before, and he lugged a crate of oranges under his arm. Aunt Eva laughed and chatted with so much giddy enthusiasm that she didn’t even notice me standing guard in the doorway until they reached the porch steps.

“Mary Shelley!” She grabbed her chest. “You scared me, just standing there. What are you doing without your mask?”

Julius thumped up the porch steps behind her. “Would you look at that? It does have a mouth and a nose.” He gave my chin a flick, but I jerked away.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Julius surprised me at the factory and offered to drive me home.” Aunt Eva gestured for us to hurry inside. “Come in, both of you. Shut the door, Mary Shelley. Julius, please have a seat in the living room.”

Julius sauntered in with his crate.

“Who’s there?” asked Oberon.

I grabbed my aunt by her wrist before she could take two steps up the stairs. “Why is he here?”

“He’s lonely and grieving, so he picked me up from the shipyard. I invited him to supper. Go in and sit with him.”

“Where are you going to be?” I asked.

“Upstairs.”

“Why?”

She yanked me toward her and spoke through gritted teeth: “Because I wasn’t expecting him, and I need to change out of these awful, smelly work clothes. I’m embarrassed beyond words right now. Please be a kind hostess while I make myself presentable.” She pushed me toward the living room and announced in a cheerier voice, “If you’ll both excuse me for a moment …”

She hurried up the rest of the stairs. A smell of grease and perspiration so thick I could almost see it lingered in her wake.

I headed into the living room and plopped myself in the
rocking chair across from Julius. “Why are you here?”

“Why do you sound upset?”

“I just want to know what you want.”

He tossed his hat on a cushion beside him and sank back into Aunt Eva’s flowery ivory sofa—a tiny piece of Victorian doll’s furniture compared to his long body. As usual, he wore no mask, and a pale and worn appearance soured his entire face. His eyes were bloodshot and his pupils pinprick small, as they were the night before.

“You should be nice to me,” he said. “I brought you something.”

I turned my attention to the fruit crate sitting at his feet. “Oranges?”

“No.” He hoisted the crate with a grunt, carted it over to me, and dropped down on one knee by my side. A chalky flavor numbed my tongue—a feeling emanating from Julius that I couldn’t identify.

“I brought you Stephen’s books,” he said.

I opened my mouth to react, but no words found their way to my lips—only a shaky flutter of air.

He placed a leather-bound volume on my lap: Jules Verne’s
Around the World in Eighty Days.
The cover’s rich mahogany scent filled my nose, bringing me back to rain-soaked Oregon afternoons spent with Stephen.

A second book followed:
The Mysterious Island,
the novel Stephen had been reading the day we last saw each other. I touched the embossed title and remembered how the book
had rested on his knee when he sat at the bottom of the staircase. I smelled briny sea air and heard the low thunder of waves crashing against the beach across from his house, as well as the ticking of the grandfather clock with the pockmarked moon face and the swinging brass pendulum.

A tear burned down my cheek. Julius pulled a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and offered it to me.

“Thank you.” I wiped my eyes.

He rose from the floor and sat on the little round end table next to me. “I know how close the two of you were since you were children.” His chilly hand settled around my shoulder. “And I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what you said after last night’s séance. I don’t think you’re crazy.”

I kept my eyes on Stephen’s books.

“Mary Shelley,” said Julius as he moved his fingers to the back of my hand, “will you please help me remove his spirit from my house?”

Those words got me to look straight at him. “Do you see him, too?”

“No, but I hear him. In his room. Sometimes, even in the middle of the day, the floorboards groan, and I know it’s him.”

“Is that what those noises were when I last posed for you—when you and Gracie kept looking up at the ceiling in horror and your mother got hurt?”

“I—yes, I think it was.” His hand trembled against mine. “I can’t even sleep in that house anymore. I want to move, but I need money.”

“Are you planning to sell the house?”

“I can’t. My stepfather left the property to Stephen and my mother.”

“What about all the money from the spirit photographs?”

He snorted. “I’m not a fellow who saves up his nickels and dimes. I have an expensive image to maintain. Customers to impress. Hobbies …”

“Then don’t complain about being stuck there. Maybe if you hadn’t tossed out Stephen’s photographs or hurt him—”

“I told you before, brothers fight. That’s just how it is.”

“You’ve destroyed his work. He called you violent and a fraud.”

“I called him meddlesome and spoiled. It’s all a matter of perspective.”

“I’m going to see if Aunt Eva needs anything—”

He clasped my elbow before I could step past his big feet. “Don’t go. I’m sorry. I just want you to help him. Please, Mary Shelley. Put him to rest.”

“Why do you even care?” I asked. “You were never nice to him.”

“That doesn’t mean I want him to suffer. He was just a kid, for Christ’s sake. He …” Julius’s voice cracked, and grief’s sharp sting overpowered the ice-cold numbness on my tongue. “He did a stupid thing by running off to war when he could barely even put up a fight here at home.” He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw, and I could feel his battle against tears in his squeeze of my arm. “Jesus, look at me.” He shook
his head and let out a pained laugh. “Who knew that little pip-squeak of a brother would ever make me cry?”

I removed his hand from my elbow with a delicate motion. “I am trying to help him. If you have even the smallest inkling why he thinks birds were killing him overseas …”

“Germans shot him. There were no birds.”

“But something terrified and hurt him before he died. And I bet he won’t ever leave this earth until he understands what happened to him.”

“He died in combat. What more does he need to know?” Julius pulled his handkerchief out of my hand and wiped his eyes.

“Maybe he’s like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, needing justice for his murder.” I rubbed my arms to fight off an outbreak of gooseflesh. “I still think he may have been a prisoner of war. He seems mistreated—tortured.”

The taste of Julius’s grief dissolved in my mouth, replaced by numbness again, as if he were retreating from pain.

“What else could possibly help him feel at peace, Julius?” I asked. “You lived with him all his life. What do
you
think I could do to convince him to move on?”

Julius lifted his lashes and regarded me with his deep brown eyes. A strange look of serenity washed over his face, and his breathing softened. “I just heard him.”

“What?” I cocked my head and listened for whispers, but I heard only Aunt Eva’s footsteps bustling around upstairs. “Are you sure you didn’t just—”

“Mary Shelley …” Julius took me by the elbow and guided me down to the rocking chair. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “He said … he knows you threw that photograph into the bay.”

I froze.

Julius leaned close, his forehead a few short inches from mine. “He said he wants another picture of the two of you together. Before he goes. That’s what he needs.”

“How … ?” I swallowed. “How do you know I threw that photo in the bay? Did Aunt Eva—”

“He just told me. You shouldn’t have done that. It upset him. He thinks you don’t want to remember him.”

“No … he doesn’t think that. It’s those birds—”

“He wants a photograph.”

I searched Julius’s face for signs of trickery, but he kept his eyes on mine. His stoic expression showed me nothing.

He gathered both my hands in his freezing palms. “I’ll capture you together one last time. I’ll give you a copy of it to keep somewhere special. And then you can tell him good-bye.”

“But …”

“Mary Shelley.” He smiled in a pitying sort of way. “What did Stephen want more than anything else in the world? What made his heart beat fastest?”

My face flushed. I turned my eyes toward the floorboards. “To be as skilled a photographer as his father.”

“No. You know that’s not the right answer.” Julius nudged his knee against mine. “He wanted you.”

I shut my eyes to stave off more tears.

Julius bent close again, his breath brushing against my cheek. “He doesn’t want you to ever forget him.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Help him. With a photograph. Invite his spirit into another picture with you. Prove you’ll always remember him.”

“But … he hated spirit photography.”

“Please, Mary Shelley.” Julius strengthened his hold on my hands. “I just need one … last … picture.”

I looked him in the eye again, and this time I saw something wild and unstable staring back. “Wait …” I squirmed. “What’s all this about, Julius? Why are you really here?”

“It’s about you helping Stephen and me get out of that godforsaken place.”

“How could one photograph get
you
out of that house?”

“I’m going to send it to a contest. A scientific publication is looking for proof of the existence of spirits.” His eyes gleamed like a child’s on Christmas morning. “And they’re offering a prize of two thousand dollars for solid evidence.”

“No.” I pulled my hands out of his. “I’m not helping you get any money.”

“I’d give you a fair percentage of the prize money if you brought him to me.” He clasped my shoulder. “I bet we could produce solid evidence—a photograph of Stephen that would make the judges’ scientific eyes pop with fear and awe and respect.”

“No!” I shot to my feet. “Absolutely not. Cripes, Julius, I
thought you were here because you truly cared about your brother.”

“I do care. If you turn down this opportunity, you’re the one abandoning him, not me. Why would you do that to him? Why would you let him suffer?”

I drew in my breath to give myself confidence. “I’m sure one of the reasons he’s unsettled inside your house is because he hates what you did to his father’s studio.”

Julius shrank back, so I summoned the courage to go further. “Stephen said your drug abuse and fraudulence probably led to his father’s heart failure. Maybe he wants you to stop lying and to stop doctoring those photographs.”

He absorbed my words for another silent moment. His eyes watered and reddened, and he seemed on the verge of either bawling or erupting with rage. He stood up and towered above me at his full, intimidating height. “I am not a fraud. I do not doctor photographs. I did not drive my stepfather to an early grave.”

“But you’re a drug addict.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I can tell just by being next to you.” I breathed in again, the chalky scent coating my throat like novocaine. “You’re numb. Maybe if you sobered up, you wouldn’t feel the need to prey upon innocent people.”