The Singing Bone (36 page)

“I imagine that's been difficult.”

“Difficult,” Alice repeats. She gives Detective Torres a half smile and looks around the room. “You could say that. My computer. My work—” There are books pulled from shelves. Truthfully, Alice isn't sure what happened. Or when.

“What are you working on?” Detective Torres is wearing civilian clothes. Her hair is down. No makeup. She's kept her coat on, even though Alice offered to hang it up. Her partner, Detective Simon, reminds Alice of a ventriloquist's dummy. So far he's only nodded at her, worked his jaw silently over a piece of chewing gum, and cleared his throat.

“I've been researching variants of an old Scottish ballad, but I'm on sabbatical until this nightmare is over.”

“That sounds interesting,” Detective Torres says.

Alice waves her hand. “It's mildly interesting.” She smiles. They're not here about the break-in, she can tell, and she already wants them to leave. “You said I could help you with something?”

“We just want to ask you a few questions,” Detective Torres says.

“Go ahead.”

“My partner and I,” Detective Torres begins, but Detective Simon coughs.

“Bad decisions haunt you for the rest of your life,” he explains. He touches his chest. “COPD.”

“Would you like some water?” Alice asks. He nods, and Alice rises and goes to the kitchen. “Would you like anything other than water? Coffee?” she calls out. She checks to see if her espresso maker is still on the counter. It is. “Detective Torres, would you like something?” Alice's eyes rest on Molly's ghost, who sits passively at Alice's kitchen table, gazing out of the window. One hand sits on the table, the other hangs listlessly by her side.

“Water is fine,” Detective Torres calls from the living room.

Alice opens the refrigerator to retrieve the pitcher of cold water; when she closes the door again, Molly is gone. She wonders how long Molly will stay. Forever? She could get used to the company. And she doesn't look as bad as she had the first time Alice saw her. She looks cleaner, more alive.

Alice carries the glasses of water out. “Luckily,” she says, “whoever broke in didn't take everything. I don't know what they think they'll find.”

Detective Simon picks up his water glass and drinks. When he sets it down again, he clears his throat and looks at Alice. “Don't you remember me?”

Alice studies his face and shakes her head. “Should I?”

“You were just a girl the last time I saw you.”

“Were you the one who interviewed me?”

“Yes.”

Alice still doesn't remember. “My memory. Forgive me.”

“You told me you killed Molly.”

She looks carefully at his face. She tries to remove the lines. She has spent the last twenty years trying to forget six months of her life. It's no use.

“When we got you back to New York,” he continues, “you said Molly was dead, but that she would come back at the end. It seemed you really didn't know what was going on, but maybe you did.”

“I told you I killed Molly?” Alice opens her hands. Her wrists are still bandaged. She shakes her head. “I don't remember that.”

“According to the original reports,” Detective Torres says, “you actually said you killed Molly's
character
. What did you mean by that?”

Molly sits down on the couch next to Alice and looks at Detective Torres. She lies down and puts her head in Alice's lap. Alice looks down at her old friend. “I thought we were in a play,” she explains.

“Why did you think you'd killed her character?” Detective Torres isn't looking at Alice but at Alice's books. They line the wall in the living room. Dundes, Zipes, Propp.

“I wasn't—” Alice tries. “I had a breakdown.”

“I remember,” Detective Simon says. “Well—” He looks at Detective Torres. “Who should tell her?”

“Tell me what?”

“You.” Detective Torres nods at Detective Simon. “It was your case.”

“We couldn't find Jack Wyck's DNA on Molly Malloy's clothing or the samples taken from her body.” Detective Simon coughs, sips, stares at Alice. His face reveals nothing.

“Is that unusual?” Alice says. Molly looks up at Alice. She reaches for Alice's hair.

“We found your DNA.” Detective Torres's face is blank.

Alice thinks of the Diane Arbus photo—the famous one of the twins in the hallway. Who would want to be interrogated by those two? Alice almost laughs. “Mine?” she says. “I see. Well, we did live together.” Her palms feel clammy. She wishes Molly would stop pulling at her hair.

“That's true.”

“We can't arrest you,” Detective Torres says.

“Arrest me?” Alice is shocked. Is this what they're doing here? When Molly gets up, Alice crosses her legs and folds her arms. The room is cold. Molly wanders around. She bumps into furniture and then moves through it. “Why would you arrest
me
? You have an eyewitness who says Jack Wyck killed Molly.”

“Eyewitnesses,” Detective Torres says, shaking her head. “Forgive me, but we've found them to be mistaken—especially when they're children.”

Detective Simon smiles. “It's like folklore. You know? Someone in authority changes the story slightly”—he holds up his thumb and index finger—“and the eyewitness begins to remember it that way. A police officer says, ‘You were there. You saw that car go through a stop sign,' when the guy has already said it was a
yield
sign, not a stop sign, but then he remembers the story differently the next time he tells it: ‘I saw the guy go through the stop sign.' You get the picture.”

“Stuart Malloy always said it was Jack Wyck.”

“Apparently it wasn't.”

“Maybe your samples are wrong.” Alice's voice is curt.

“What a sweet kid Stuart Malloy was.” Detective Simon rubs the glass of water with his thumb. “What's he doing now?”

“I have no idea.”

“I'd think you'd send him a Christmas card or something. You and Molly were like sisters.”

“I don't send Christmas cards.”

“No one keeps the old traditions nowadays.” Detective Simon sighs. “I guess I'm getting old. I like a Christmas card.” He looks around Alice's living room. “Well, it was a piece of luck, wasn't it?”

“What was?”

“That Stuart spied on all of you. A regular little guardian angel for you, Professor Pearson.”

“Professor
Wood
.”

“Of course.”

“Why did you change your name?” Detective Torres asks. “You didn't marry, did you?”

“No. I changed it because I didn't want to be connected to any of that.”

Detective Simon nods. “That house—and Wyck still has a following on the Internet. Imagine all those girls still following him. I'm sure they'd love to meet you.”

“They'd love to tear her limb from limb,” Detective Torres says.

“That's what happens when people commit such heinous crimes,” ­Detective Simon says. They're both gazing at her, waiting.

Alice wants them to leave. She's hungry. She's tired. “Not
my
crimes. I've done nothing.”

Molly is looking out the window again, her back to them. Her hair is as golden as ever and falls in perfect ringlets. Detective Torres is staring at the spot where Molly is standing. Alice almost asks,
Do you see her?

Detective Simon takes a new piece of gum out and slowly unwraps it. He makes a tiny ball of the wrapper and places it next to his water glass. “If it hadn't been for that poor girl's little brother, you'd be in jail, too.”

Alice looks for Molly, but she can't see her. She can hear her singing, though. Her voice comes softly from the kitchen.
There came a blind fiddler that way,
she sings,
and he took three strands of her bonnie yellow hair
—“Where did you find my DNA?” Alice looks up at Detective Simon.

“We found your skin under the nails. I guess they got her out of the water in time. They scraped under her nails. Standard. But we didn't have DNA testing then.”

And the first string that he played, it said, “It was my sister threw me in.”

“I can't listen to this,” Alice says, covering her ears.

“We're leaving.” Detective Torres rises, wrapping a scarf around her neck. “I hope your computer is recovered quickly,” she says. “Our work is so important to us.”

“It consumes us,” Detective Simon says. He coughs and buttons his coat. “Things that are important to us—they never really leave us.”

“I always keep a backup,” Alice says, walking to the door with them. She shuts it and stands still, listening to Molly finish her song.

Alice walks to the kitchen to look for Molly, but when she gets there, she can't find her. She looks under the table and in the cupboard that holds the pots and pans. She looks in the pantry and in the refrigerator. She looks in the bathroom and in the bedroom. Alice stands in the hallway and presses her fingers to her temples. “You have to leave,” Alice yells. “
Now
. Don't come back here.”

  •  •  •  

Out in the hallway, Detective Torres pauses. “Did you hear that?” she says as the elevator door opens, but Detective Simon is coughing again and doesn't answer her.

“Alice says that you didn't believe it,” Hans says. “That you thought Jack Wyck was lying about everything.” On this visit, Trina is taciturn. There are circles under her eyes. Hans, Ariel, and Trina are in one of the private visiting rooms this time: a square of white cinder blocks, an anchored steel table at the center, a doorway without a door.

“This is going to be hard for me to talk about,” Trina says. She clasps her hands on the table in front of her and looks down. “I couldn't do it last time.”

Hans is sure she's going to tell them to go away again. She did on the last visit and afterwards, when he tried to contact her, she wouldn't talk to him. When he asked, “Can you tell us what happened on February second?” she couldn't. “No,” she finally said, after opening her mouth to begin, or getting as far as “Alice was in the crawl space,” but she couldn't do it, so this time Hans is working gradually towards it. “Take your time.” Hans's voice is soft, patient. Ariel calls it his
Everything is fine
voice. It's easy enough to read the court transcripts—to piece the story together—but Hans knows that it won't be enough for the film.

Trina exhales. “Alice is right. At first I didn't believe it. We were lying about everything. And I wondered: How could Robert be alive? It seemed impossible. And one night I remember I was trying to sleep and I was just laying there laughing at the prospect. It was absurd, what we were telling them. But they
wanted
to believe it—and that was his secret. He told us all what we wanted to hear.”

Hans waits to see if she'll go on, but she doesn't. Her dark hair hangs around her wide, pale face. Her forest-green sweatshirt is rolled up to the elbows. He looks at the severed finger, the left index. She looks at it, too. “What did he do to make you believe him?” Hans asks.

Trina hangs her head, shaking it slowly. “What happened . . .” she says. She looks up at him and Hans has trouble reading her expression. Her eyes are large and round. One corner of her mouth is turned up. She brings her thumb to her lips and runs her fingernail back and forth.

“If you can,” he says gently.

“I can.” She covers her face with her hands, clears her throat, straightens, and brings her hands back down, clasping them in front of her again. “It was one night when we were at Big John's mother's house with the Smiths. I broke form and left the house. I went outside to smoke while everyone else was inside. I wasn't acting like I was supposed to act when we were around the Smiths. I was acting like I did with my parents sometimes—like
fuck your rules
—and he saw me. But unlike my parents, Jack Wyck—” she breaks off, takes a deep breath. “He is a
psychopath
.” She stops talking and looks at Hans. “You know that, right?”

He nods. “Yes,” he says simply.

“Good,” she says. “I thought so. I just—I wouldn't want to be involved in anything that is sympathetic to him. So on the way home, we went this crazy long way and drove out to Bear Mountain Park.” She runs her finger over the table as if letting it follow an invisible, curving road. “I started to get scared when I saw where we were. We stopped, and he pulled me out of the van and walked me into the woods. He had a gun—” Trina pauses, losing the invisible trail she's drawn on the table. Her hands move to her face and she rubs her forehead, her temples. She brings her hands through her hair and finally to her lap.

“See,” she says. “I thought he was going to kill me. I begged him. He called me a stupid—a stupid cunt. He said, ‘You used to be special and beautiful, but now you're nothing.' He was
whispering,
which terrified me, and all the while he was talking, he was also taking off his shirt. When he was finished berating me, he handed me his shirt and the gun. My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly hold them. He said I had to kill someone. He said I had to kill someone and cover his shirt with the blood and bring it back to him.”

“He denies this, you know.”

“Of course he does. But it's so sick, you know?”

“It is,” Hans agrees. He thinks of Snow White alone with the huntsman, of a painting he's seen of a forest at night, with all the animals' eyes shining from behind the trees, watching. “Did you know how to fire the gun?”

“Lee showed me once. We drove out to a field and shot at cans. I mean, I wasn't an expert, but I knew how to use a gun. I knew how to aim, how to pull the trigger. So I was alone out there in the woods with a gun. I was freaked out. I listened to the van leave. I kept thinking that Molly or Alice would come and find me. They were my best friends. But no one came. I even thought Stover—” She swallows, looks around the room—everywhere but at them—at the flat rectangle of overhead fluorescent lights, at the top of the steel table. “I thought that Stover might come—maybe Molly or Alice would tell him where they left me. But no one came.” She opens her hands. There is a bruise on the inside of her arm. There is a long scar traveling up from the right wrist that he would like to ask her about, but he won't, not today. “I don't know how long I stood in the same spot, listening to the woods around me. I would have done anything—but I sat there all night. Even here I've never been that cold.”