The Last Nightingale (21 page)

She smelled his familiar body odor. It identified him so bluntly that she made no attempt to turn and look at his face. His grip was firm, although not as hard as when she was in real trouble.

“You’re supposed to tell me when you want to go out. So I can help cover for you.” His voice was deep and frighteningly gentle.

“I know! I know. I always do. It’s just, tonight I had this emergency, and—”

“Oh, emergency!” He laughed and said in a little girl voice: “She had an emergency, Friar John, that’s all!” Her Helper shook his head. “No, Mary Kathleen. You went and put me in a tough spot this time. ’Cause I’d lose my job for failing to report this. Think of how much risk that is. For me.”

His breath always smelled of sour tobacco and stale coffee. Her stomach lurched when he breathed on her.

“Well, I was hoping that you would do me this favor, this one time, what with the emergency and all—so that I can go on in and take me a long, hot bath. You know, do it now when none of the other kids are in there. So I can take all the time I need to get clean.”

He turned her around to face him and then smiled in appreciation of her negotiating skills. “Hm . . . Maybe this one time,” he cooed as he released her. “You get along to that bath now. It’s good to get clean.”

Her brain raced. How was she to escape, with him nearly on top of her?

Then inspiration struck.

“Uh, okay. I’m just going to go put my stuff away. And take off my clothes. Then it’s off to the bath.”

Her Helper grinned in anticipation, and even as he did so she saw his eyes glaze over and a slack expression cross his face. He turned and headed off toward his office next door to the bathroom, the one with the little hole in the wall behind a flap. He was so eager to get his private performance that he did not mind going ahead and waiting for her to enter. She pretended to head for her bunk area until she saw him turn and step into his office. Then after a count of three, she spun around and ran back to the front door, yanked it open and flung herself through.

Mary Kathleen disappeared at the doorway of St. Adrian of Canterbury’s Home for Delinquents and Orphans, never to be seen there again.

Vignette hit the front walkway at a dead run.

She only had to keep running for a few minutes before she caught sight of Friar John’s lantern bobbing along up the street ahead. Relieved, she fell in half a block behind them and patiently followed until they reached the Russian Hill District. She figured that they had come two miles or more by the time they reached a fancy, three-story house inside one of the areas untouched by the fires. She could see where the flames had split in two and passed around this one particular hilltop. As if somebody had told them to.

She huddled in the cold shadows and watched while Friar John knocked at a door. When it swung open, the inner light revealed Mr. Kimbrough. He gestured for Friar John and the boy to come in, then he threw a cautious glance around the neighborhood. As soon as the door closed again, the entire front of the house went dark. She had clearly seen the lights inside while the door was open, so Mr. Kimbrough must have had heavy curtains that completely concealed any light at all from the windows. Vignette wondered why anybody would do that. A cold shiver ran up her back.

But at least she had accomplished her tasks for the day. Now she knew where Sergeant Blackburn lived and where Shane’s secret brother lived, too.

With that, she tucked her cigar box a little tighter under her arm
and headed off for the Mission Dolores to strengthen her position as Shane’s long-lost sister. She hoped that Shane would be awake when she arrived and that he might have an idea of where they could get something to eat without paying for it. She had already burned through the sourdough loaf, but there had been no chance to check Friar John’s office for spare change. Vignette already knew full well that when your pockets are empty, life runs you around on a short leash.

Tommie waved the friar and the messenger boy into his study. The boy looked nervously around, clearly not happy about being there, but he needed to hang around for his payment. Tommie was confident that the boy’s hope for his coins would keep him silent for a few minutes. That was all the time Tommie needed.

“Sit down, Friar,” he invited.

Friar John perched on the edge of the sofa and impatiently looked back up at him. “Well?”

Tommie could not resist an expression of mock innocence. “What?”

“What?
Never in my life have I been summoned in the middle of the night by any but the sick and dying. I have—”

“Horseshit.” Tommie kept his face blank. “The only time you get up in the middle of the night is when you want to visit one of your kiddies.”

Friar John gasped in shock and jumped to his feet. “What in God’s name do you—”

“Joking! Friar, I’m joking!”

“I see no humor at all in—”

“Perfect! Because I see no humor in this.” He slammed down the newspaper article about Shane onto the table. Friar John leaned over, read briefly, and grew pale.

“You friars don’t see a lot of newspapers, do you?”

“I saw it, as a matter of fact. What could I do?”

“Nothing, now!” Tommie shouted. “You double-crossed me. You were
never
supposed to adopt him out. Never! What the hell have I been paying you for all these years?”

“Your payments don’t keep our doors open, Mr. Kimbrough! And you are actually quite casual about making them. Our expenses are unimaginable! The Nightingales offered a very generous fee for Shane. I have to think of the other children!”

“Not before you think about
me,
you don’t! I had
dealings
with that family, you understand? And I never knew anything about Shane being adopted out! To them? To the Nightingales? Are you crazy?”

“You haven’t been to see us for over a year!”

“So what? The checks keep coming, don’t they?”

“No they do not. You are very irregular about—”

“Everybody gets paid eventually! Everybody! What, you’re a friar with no patience?” He leaned in closer and dropped his voice. “I realize, now, that Mr. Nightingale started pushing me to take things on credit right after you adopted Shane out to him. Lots of things. Expensive things. It was almost as if he knew my weakness. Almost as if someone told him how to ensnare me, create a big debt, win a suit, take my home. Take my home from me. You sold that boy to Nightingale and then told Nightingale how to use my weakness against me to
steal my home.”

Friar John’s face turned pale.

Tommie abruptly turned to the messenger boy. “You don’t need to see what I’m about to do to him,” he said, nodding toward Friar John. And with that, he snatched up a cast-iron statuette and swung it so hard that the top of the boy’s head was crushed under the force of the blow. Bits of brain and blood streaked a flare across the wall behind him. The boy’s limp body fell to one side.

“God Almighty!” Friar John shouted, staggering backward in shock. He did not move far enough away to save himself.

Tommie took two quick steps closer and then swung again. This time he used less force, so that Friar John only fell unconscious, to be saved for later.

“That’s it?” Shane quietly asked, though the words took him longer. He stood looking at the cigar box that she held out to him.

“Well,” she began, then shrugged. Before Shane could react, she unbuttoned her pants and pulled them down, only to reveal another pair underneath. She held out the spare pair along with the box.

Shane exhaled with a smile and took the pants and the box. He stepped to the wall and put the box up on the top shelf. He hung her pants from one of the tool pegs, turned to her, and smiled.

She smiled back. “See? You can keep my stuff here. There’s no way anybody can tell it belongs to me,” she said. “And those pants would probably fit you. You can wear them, if you want. Give them back, though.”

Shane tried to reply, “That’s all right. People donate clothes here. They let me pick from it, sometimes. I can probably get you another shirt.” But he stalled on the third word and bogged down.

“Wait!” Vignette clapped her hands in glee. “This is when you do it. This is when you write it down first, then read it back to me.”

Shane grabbed his writing pad and pencil and quickly scrawled the words, then held up the pad with a self-conscious grin and read out loud:

“That’s all right. People donate clothes here. They let me pick from it, sometimes. I can probably get you another shirt.” He laughed and shook his head. He had not even stumbled.

“Good!” replied Vignette. “Then I can always keep one set of clothes clean. See? It’s good for me to have a brother already.” She thought for a second and quickly added, “And don’t you worry, having a sister out here will be good for you, too.”

He grinned and sat on the dirt floor, made a motion of writing in the air with his finger.

“How?” he asked. The word came out strong and clear.

“I saw that!” she said. “I saw you do that! You wrote inside of your mind and then you read what you could see. Right?”

He gave her a conspiratorial smile and nodded.

“That could work all the time, you know? I mean, if you could learn to make that a habit.” Her face lit up. “Hey! We worked that one out together, didn’t we? So there you have it. You first big blessing from having a sister! Isn’t that right?”

He seemed to concentrate on the air for a moment, and finally answered, “Right. But you still can’t—can’t—stay here. They’ll cah-catch us.”

Her face fell. “I know. You don’t have to tell me that.”

He concentrated again. “Do you know our last name?”

“Uh, no. No. I thought we could just use yours.”

He turned to her in surprise, thought for a moment, then realized that he liked the feel of the idea. He nodded. “But you can’t be alone out—out—here. Where will you lih-live?”

This time her voice was much smaller, nearly a whisper. “Oh, I don’t know yet. They would never let a boy and girl stay together here. Usually, anyway. But what about family? They wouldn’t think that anything was wrong with that, would they? Why would they? Even holy men come from families with girls, don’t they?”

Shane laughed and nodded.

“We could just go straight to them and say we’re long-lost family who just found each other after the Great Earthquake. I can work, you know! I can work like the dickens. All I ever did at that stupid place was work.”

“… Yeah. I know.”

“Besides,” she softly went on, “Catholics really like big families, don’t they? We’re just family, that’s all.”

She studied Shane’s face while he looked back at her with a resigned smile. Finally, he got to his feet, brushed himself off, and picked up one of the two sleeping blankets that were folded on the shelf. He tossed the other to her.

“Tomorrow,” he managed to say. “We can tell them. Tonight, if— if—if they come . . .” He gestured toward the outdoors with his blanket.

“You’ll sleep out there tonight in case anyone would find us before they knew you were my brother?”

Shane nodded, then his face darkened with a strange sort of sadness. He rested one hand on her shoulder, but no words came out.

She whispered, “You would take care of me though, right? They’ll see that it’s only right for you to do that, won’t they?”

Shane concentrated for a moment, then looked Vignette straight in the face. “They will. Or we’ll both leave.”

Shane silently held her gaze. Finally he grinned and pretended to punch her in the arm, then went out to sleep in the open cemetery, leaving her the lantern and his other blanket.

Vignette stood near the doorway and looked out into the darkness. It was as if everything she had ever learned had prepared her for this day. She wrapped herself up in the blanket like a giant woolen hug, and lay down on the cool dirt floor. In her circumstances it was as good as a beautiful feather bed. She fell into the untroubled sleep of victory.

Out in the graveyard, Shane made his way back to the grave next to the Mission wall.

A sister. He had a sister. He was a brother. The strangeness of his life continued to amaze him. Somehow, he was being given some sort of a second chance. Life was asking him if he had learned anything at all from his failure and humiliation. Gratitude and exaltation overwhelmed him. He was ready to dare anyone in the world to ever try to scare him so badly that he would fail to help his sister. Not this time. Never again.

It was the first time since the Nightingale horrors that he allowed himself to fall asleep before it was light outside.

F
RIAR
J
OHN’S
BODY LAY UNCONSCIOUS
,but the pain began to pull him upward, like a drowned body returning to the surface. Part of his awareness tried to keep him from rising any closer, but that same part of him sensed with growing concern that the harder he tried to stay unconscious, the faster he was waking up.

After he opened his eyes, Friar John realized that he was lying stretched out on his back with his hands securely bound behind him and pinned beneath him. He was looking up toward the ceiling. Expensive stamped copper sheets. Where was he?

Then all of his senses became alert, and the pain hit him with such terrible force that Friar John shrieked in agony and terror. He screamed from his bowels to the top of his skull, and only then did he become aware that his mouth was jammed full of cloth and that the gag was tied down. His screams were stifled there, except for a few small bleats that made it through his nose.

He finally raised his head an inch. It was just enough to get a look around, but the pain waves were rolling through him with such ferocious power that he forgot what he was looking for. Panic swept him. Only the feel of the rope around his neck kept him still. He tilted his head just enough to look down at himself. He was rolled up in several layers of heavy fabric, roped shut. It was tied off tightly at his neck, leaving his head sticking out and the rest of him
completely covered. His feet were tied together inside the wrapping, which was pinched tight below the soles of his shoes and tied off. That rope was stretched across the floor to a large eyebolt that appeared to have been sunk into the wooden floor just for that purpose. A few bits of sawdust still lined the hole.