The Singing Bone (43 page)

Hans can't tell if he means it or not. Stuart has circles under his eyes, the beginnings of a beard, but he can see the boy in the photos that he's become so familiar with—Stuart gives him the half-grin with
outnumbered
. “Well,” Hans says, smiling. “You weren't completely outnumbered. I'm here, too.”

“I hope I didn't startle you just now,” Stuart says. “It's been a strange week.”

“No, it's fine,” Ariel says. “We've met—briefly.”

“In the parking lot at work.” Stuart stands one step below them, his hands in his pockets. “Can we go somewhere? I think it's going to rain.”

“Are you hungry?” Hans asks.

“We know a terrible diner,” Ariel adds.

  •  •  •  

The diner doesn't
look
terrible
, Stuart thinks. He calls Kate from the payphone in the lobby and tells her where he's been, reassures her that he's okay. “I'll be home in a few hours,” he says. “I'm just getting something to eat. I'll bring you something.” He can see the row of cakes under glass just inside the door, the frothy peaks of unnaturally colored frosting. “I'm fine,” he says. He pauses. “I love you.” He hangs up but stays where he is. He could still leave. He doesn't have to talk to them. He doesn't have to tell them.

Then he sees them in a booth by the window and walks over, sliding in next to Ariel. She smiles at him and passes him a menu, winking. “It's all terrible,” she says, laughing.

“No—it's not that bad, Ariel. Don't scare him. We've just been here a million times.” Hans puts his glasses on, but he doesn't look at the menu. He folds his hands on the table. It's as if they've made a silent pact not to talk about what happened that day. Instead, Hans and Ariel tell Stuart about themselves. They tell him about Ariel's father and that it was Hans who gave Ariel her first camera. He thinks of them as belonging to each other, as family. They have each other's mannerisms. He thinks of his soon-to-be daughter, of her small hands and feet that he's seen outlined beneath Kate's flesh. “What's she doing in there?” Kate jokes. “Dancing,” Stuart says. “Can't you tell?”

The waitress looks at Stuart carefully when she takes their orders. He puts his hat back on. “I feel like she recognized me,” he says when the waitress walks away. A television is on behind the diner's counter. The clip of Jack Wyck leaving the courthouse plays again and again. They all watch.

“So it's done,” Stuart says. “Jack Wyck's out.”

“Yes.” Hans shakes his head. “It's hard to believe.”

“How will you end the film? Like this?” Stuart places his hands flat on the table. “I don't think it should end like this.”

“We'll have to see,” Hans says. “Back in the city—with all the footage. I'm not sure yet. It's the risk of making a documentary. You don't really know where the story is going until it's over—”

“And the story's never
really
over,” Ariel interjects. “You have to decide where it ends.”

Stuart imagines, at this point, his addition to the story could spell trouble for the film. Perhaps they'd rather not talk to him, but they must be curious. “I know I've avoided you two, but—” His hands feel slightly damp. He thinks of Molly falling backwards into the ice, of Alice's rock hitting the water, how she wandered around on the shore for a moment with her hands in her hair before climbing back into the woods, and the crunch of the snow beneath her feet. “I should have helped my sister,” Stuart says.

“I doubt there's anything you could have done.” Hans looks at him.

“No.” Stuart wipes his palms on his trousers. “Before. Before she was killed. I was in that house
all the time
. I watched Jack Wyck kill her. Slowly. Do you understand? I want people to know that.”

Stuart remembers sitting on the edge of Jack Wyck's bed one afternoon after he'd watched them leave. The bed was left unmade and when he sat down, he could smell something—like an animal—not exactly unpleasant, but not like the detergent smell his sheets at home had.

It was getting cold out, but Stover was out in the yard, hanging clothes on the line. Stuart took off his tennis shoes and put his feet into Jack Wyck's boots. He curled his toes inside the leather. Stuart could fit his whole foot into a boot without once touching the sides. He got up and walked to the window, so he could see Stover. He checked to make sure he still had laundry. It was weird that Stover stayed at the house. It didn't make any sense.

Stuart walked around the room:
bang, scrape, bang
went Jack Wyck's boots on the wooden floor. He sat down on the bed again. He lined Jack's Wyck's boots back up with another pair of shoes—girl's shoes—a pair of small black boots. Inside one of the black boots, Stuart could see a glimmer of gold. He picked up the boot and shook it. A gold chain snaked out. Stuart lifted it with one finger and let it twirl in the sunlight. He liked the little key charm on the end.

He let the necklace slip back into the boot.

On the bedside table, Stuart found a plastic bag full of brown powder. He opened the bag and sniffed at it. Even then he knew it was a drug, he just didn't know which one. He zipped the bag into the pocket of his parka. He found a pack of cigarettes on the floor, just beneath the bed. He shook one out and put it in his mouth. He found matches and struck one, lighting the tip of the cigarette as he'd seen his mother do, as he'd seen Molly and Alice do.

He coughed and went to the window to watch Stover. He thought of how Stover used to walk next to him with one hand resting on his head. It made them all laugh. It was sort of stupid, but it was also funny. He wished he could talk to Stover. He took another puff on the cigarette. He couldn't inhale. It hurt too much. He lit another match and dropped it on the floor, watching it burn out. He could burn Jack Wyck's house down. Then Molly would
have to
come home. They were like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
now. He thought of Donald Sutherland opening his mouth at the end of the movie and screaming the alien scream. He thought that's what Stover would do if he saw him.

  •  •  •  

“Do you understand?” Stuart says to Hans and Ariel. “I told the truth. Jack Wyck killed my sister.” Stuart doesn't remember how he got out of the house that day or when he left, but he remembers crouching on the bank of the reservoir and letting the brown powder blow out over the water, so he must have left without any trouble, like when he ran into Allegra. He couldn't bring himself to light anything on fire. Now he wishes he had. If he had, the story would have ended in a different place. The story might have ended with Molly alive.

“I wanted to tell you something,” Stuart begins. “I don't know if it matters. I'll let you decide. Maybe you can use it. I think I know what happened to Allegra.” They stare at him. “I don't really know what happened to her—but it might help.” He looks out the window. It's almost dark out. The rain streaks the glass. He tells them about Allegra getting off the train and getting into the car. He tells them the details, the way her hair blew back in the wind, about the brown bag and the green coat.

“Are you sure it was her?” Ariel asks, and he nods.

Two waitresses are standing in the kitchen entrance behind the counter, watching the news. The passage behind them is dark. Stuart thinks of the Sargent painting and looks to the left instinctively. He half expects to see Molly standing there, staring at him, her hands hidden behind her back, an attitude of restless patience.

It's dark out now—the first night of Jack Wyck's release. Stuart imagines him wandering around the house the Wyckians have lovingly restored for him. He imagines him standing in the attic, looking out the window. “Is this how it ends?” Stuart asks, turning to Hans and Ariel.

“No,” Hans says. “It's not how it ends.” Hans looks at Stuart. “You must tell the police that you saw Allegra.”

Alice is standing on a cliff in Nólsoy. She can't see it, but she knows she's looking towards Norway. A fog is rolling in. She watches as a flock of sheep disappears into the fog and then an entire farm vanishes.

The plan to come to Tórshavn was hatched between Alfred Lowry and her in the week just before Jack Wyck was released. She remembers the look on Alfred Lowry's face when she met with him again. “Are you in danger?” he asked.

She sat back in her chair. “Probably.” And then she nodded. “Undoubtedly.”

“Your research—the ballad. You said you needed a translation from Faroe?”

“Yes.” Alice wondered at the sudden turn of topic.

“There's a research grant. You could go to the Faroe Islands. There's a cultural center there. You could—”

“When do I leave?” she said, sitting forward. She could have gotten a plane that afternoon, left his office directly.

She arrived in Tórshavn three weeks later. She rented an apartment and spent her days in the library with Jens Christian Svabo's manuscripts. He was the first to record the Faroe version of the ballad, and she compared his versions to Scandinavian and Scottish variants. The Faroe versions were written down earlier than the English-language variants, and when Alice took her walks along the cliffs, she wondered if the story had originated here, with the Vikings. She could believe it when the mist rolled over the hills, when she came upon a high-piled cairn or one of the brightly painted, grass-roofed fairy houses the locals built to keep the creatures from causing trouble.

Alice met Finn at the Nordic Study Institute, where he was a curator. They were the only two in the cafeteria one day. They smiled at each other across empty tables. Alice lifted a glass of water. He opened his arms in a gesture of confusion, as if he were saying:
Where is everyone?
She laughed, and so he picked up his tray and came over to her. “Can I join you?” he said.

She smiled up at him, taking her notes and putting them in her bag. “Of course.”

Finn lived in Nólsoy, an island to the east. His English was perfect. He'd studied in London. “But I missed home,” he said. He told her about Nólsoy, about the walk to the lighthouse, the way the light looked on the cliffs as the sun broke through the clouds when he took a ferry in every morning. She told him about the ballad and her work.

“How many versions are there?” he wanted to know.

She shook her head. “It's impossible to know. Thousands.”

He asked her to sing it and at first she shook her head, but no one was around to hear her, so she thought and chose the Norwegian version that ends with the girl putting her body back together again, coming back to life. She sang it quietly and he listened, his head tilted. When she finished, she looked at him. He had a surprised expression on his face. “I thought it ended differently,” he said. “But that was lovely, thank you.”

“Differently?”

But he only shook his head. “I can't remember, but I'm sure I've heard that song. It's dark.”

“It's a murder ballad.”

“Those are probably all dark,” he said, laughing.

“Tell me if you remember your version.”

She kept thinking of his description of the light and one day she took the ferry out to Nólsoy and stayed over at an inn so she could linger at the base of a cliff watching the night birds, the storm petrels, who nested during the day and flew in the evening. The birds were gray and as they circled and flew from their nests, they vanished into the sky, their calls like faraway laughter.

The next time she saw Finn in the cafeteria, she told him about them, and he smiled. “You should have called me. I would have shown you around.”

“But I don't have your number.”

He took out a piece of paper and wrote it down and passed it to her. “How long are you staying?” he asked.

“Six months or so—or until I finish my research.”

“Come for lunch this Saturday,” he said, and she agreed.

Finn's house was black with a red door, a tin roof. Portraits of Finn's grandparents hung in the living room. The house had first belonged to them, then to his parents, now to Finn. Alice liked the house. There were handmade, brightly painted toys on the shelves, books lined the walls. The carpets were stitched with red and gold, the windows were small and high. There was a fireplace, and Alice and Finn sat for long evenings in the winter, each with a book, the wind outside. Once, distracted by a sound, Alice looked up. Finn was staring into the fireplace. “Why didn't you ever marry?” she asked, and without looking away from the fire, he simply said, “I did.”

  •  •  •  

Hans's letters arrive on pale blue paper and Alice keeps them at the back of a desk drawer. In one, Hans tells her the police found Allegra buried in a grove of juniper trees on a piece of property that once belonged to Lee Frank's family. When the body was discovered, Lee began to talk and after years of silence, when asked why, he told them simply, “She wanted to die.” Alice read the magazine interview that Hans enclosed.

“Why would she want to die?” the reporter asked.

“She knew that if she came, we'd kill her. We were lovers, so I killed her with my hands.” That was the headline:
We Were Lovers So I Killed Her with My Hands.

The reporter asked Lee about the missing kids, but Lee never said anything about them. He slipped back into silence. The article described Lee as staring at the wall in front of him, working his jaw like he was chewing something. The police kept digging, looking, searching further, going deeper into the earth, but they found nothing more in the grove of juniper trees. Alice remembers Allegra's awkward departure, the way the suitcase looked too heavy to carry. It was the last time she saw her.