The Last Nightingale (20 page)

“I’m going to go back and get my stuff,” she said while she teased the door open and peeked outside. She looked back at him and nodded, confirming that it was all clear out there. But before she could step out, Shane reached over to her and took her arm.

“Ah-ah-ah-are yuh-yuh-yuhhh-you—”

“Write it down!” she urged.

He scribbled his question and thrust the tablet at her.

“No, don’t hand it to me—read it. Read it out loud!”

“Are you really my sister?” He read the words with ease.

She paused for a moment to look into his eyes, though she kept her thoughts away from him.
This is the test that always comes. You pass it by sticking to your story.
Light as a feather, she stepped up to him and kissed him on the cheek.

“They just didn’t want us to know,” she whispered. She turned and started out the door.

And then she was gone.

Shane sat quietly for a few moments, trying to digest what had happened. Someone from the orphanage had finally come looking for him, but it was not as he had feared. Nobody wanted to drag him back, or make trouble for him. The fact was, he had a real sister, a flesh and blood little sister, and she wanted to be with him.

That’s perfect,
he said to himself, in the voice that never stuttered. His life was broken into dozens of pieces. He lived in a

toolshed in a cemetery. And now his younger sister had manifested out of the midnight fog and just wanted to “leave her stuff” with him.

What happens when she returns? The padres wouldn’t let them live there together. Does she go off somewhere else to sleep every day and then drop by here for tea and cookies? How much could she be seen around the place before the padres began to ask questions? How much longer after that until they became concerned?

Once they became concerned, what reason would they have to tolerate his presence any longer? Was she there to doom them both?

But the main thing, no matter how he might try to twist and turn it, was the promise she’d had him make.

I would never leave my sister all alone on the streets.

Whether the idea came from her or from him, he knew that he could never turn his back on her. Not now. If she had only discovered that they were brother and sister earlier, maybe the two of them could have even been adopted into the Nightingale home together.

Except that if they had, then it would mean that she would be dead now, too.

Because of him.

So if this was his sister, then the timing of her discovery was lucky for them both. Knowing that he had a family member alive was the one bit of news that he had never prepared himself to hear. He sat under the weight of it.

Then it hit him with a leaden thud: How would he protect her from the secret load that he carried after his failure in the Nightingale house? He would have to make up a complete story to cover the family’s deaths. Then for the rest of their lives he would have to remember to never slip, never drop his story. He could never allow her to hear a word about the source of all his nightmares, or about the knowledge that he possessed regarding things a human crea-
ture will sometimes do—things that it is best not to know too much about.

Tommie Kimbrough lay on an expensive area rug purchased on credit from the Nightingale Dry Goods Emporium, fondly gazing at his experiment. After nearly twenty-four hours, not a single dark speck showed on the pristine white interior of the glass-topped box. But the rat had feasted on the body at the morgue, which meant that it had to be filled with the plague now. Tommie rolled slightly to get a better look at the sophisticated medical book he had purchased by mail from Great Britain for one hundred pounds sterling. He found the listing for “Bubonic Plague” and skipped down to the part that concerned him.

Reverberations went through him in powerful waves.

One hundred percent fatal.

And they die in a day . . .

It was the manifestation of a dream. Septicemic plague. A term worthy of poetry.

Tommie’s furry black guest inside the stark white box did not appear sickly in any way, and yet it suddenly was so much more than an unusual personal pet.

It was Death on four little legs.
And best of all,
Tommie mused,
this little creature works for me like the Grim Reaper works for God.

R
ANDALL
B
LACKBURN
STOOD
at the entrance to the narrow service alley behind the Dash Theater on Pacific Street, one of the Barbary Coast brothels that came through the disaster without any serious problems. He had just been pulled by the theater manager to that very spot, where he now stood staring down at the body of The Surgeon’s latest victim. What was the total? Fourteen? He was losing count.

Blackburn didn’t have to make a close examination to see that the man was dead; the body lay in a pool of blood too large for anyone to lose and survive. The familiar wound was there at the back of his neck. This victim was young, twenty to twenty-five, and his body was massive. Blackburn took him for one of the dockside stevedores. The victim’s pants were still fastened and there was no sign of castration, but if this killing was indeed done by The Surgeon, she would surely have placed a note on the body, leaving her individual stamp on the crime.

He paused there, steeling himself to read some taunting diatribe. Blackburn’s heart was grim and heavy and he could feel his jaw set hard. There was nothing else to do but go through the pockets for identification.

Just at that moment, he felt a passing wave of embarrassment regarding the way he earned his livelihood. His mother would have
a heart attack if she could see how he spent his time, and his father would be astounded that their quiet and tentative boy had grown up to fight on a daily basis with monstrous people who sometimes compared badly to wild animals. He was glad that his parents preferred to avoid the city and liked for him to come up north to visit them.

He exhaled more heavily than he had intended and stepped over to the sprawled form. And there was the note. This time it was rolled into a tiny tube and tucked between the man’s lips, like a cigarette. Blackburn plucked up the tube and unrolled the slip of paper.

Blackburn shook his head in disgust. The words themselves were meaningless to him and would probably prove to be useless to the investigation, but no doubt their private meaning gave The Surgeon some special thrill.

He rerolled the note and put it back exactly as it was, then stood up. There was nothing else to do here but call for a coroner’s wagon and begin all the routine procedures. He saw nothing new in this crime scene to help him.

This newest murder underscored the feeling that seemed to grip most of the city now, the feeling that everything was out of control and might never get better. Since the disaster, life on the rougher side of San Francisco’s streets had gone completely downhill. Nearly every time Blackburn had to arrest someone, their story of despair poured out of them. The survivors’ shock and pain were so universal, and their vague charge of guilt was so pervasive, that many felt their faith shaken to the core. And some, instead of clinging to their beliefs, gave up all pretense of morality.

Like this living mockery of a “surgeon.”

He hated to think of Shane Nightingale wandering around these streets alone, with no one to assure his safety. For an instant, he wondered what would happen if the boy ever ran into a monster like this one. He started to push the thought out of his head. Then it occurred to him that there was another possibility: If the boy’s unusual display of deductive talent in the Sullivan case could be repeated here, he might be the only person who could help Blackburn find The Surgeon.

Vignette figured that most of the people who were up and around after midnight were not the type who would rush to her aid if something bad happened, so she moved at a constant, dogged trot all the way back to St. Adrian’s. She was less than half a block from the front entrance and already looking around for an open window to crawl into, when she heard the big front door open and saw lantern light in the doorway. She pulled against a large tree trunk that was shadowed from the moon and melded her body to its dark form. An instant later, she recognized Friar John as the man carrying the lantern. He was accompanied by a scrawny and ragged-looking boy, a street urchin by the look of him.

Her heart jumped when she realized they were going to walk directly past her. There was no time for her to run off without being spotted, and outside of the shadows there was enough moonlight for Friar John to recognize her. She pushed herself tighter against the tree and willed herself to fade into the night’s background. She even took a deep breath and held it while they passed.

“All right, we’re on our way,” she heard Friar John saying to the boy. “Now you can tell me why Mr. Kimbrough has this ‘emergency’ at this hour.”

“No sir, I can’t.”

“He always comes
here
to see me. He must have told you something about why he wasn’t coming this time?”

“Nope. Don’t know nothing and that’s the truth,” the boy assured him, perhaps eager for a tip. “Mr. Kimbrough said something about a newspaper. Don’t know what he meant by it.”

The name “Kimbrough” didn’t mean anything to Vignette at first, but when she heard the boy mention a newspaper, the connection clicked into place. She had struggled through the article on Shane after she heard a couple of the Helpers talking about it. They were too busy swapping reminiscences of Shane at St. Adrian’s to notice when she swiped the newspaper and sounded out enough of the wording to get the general idea, and then replaced it before it was missed.

And when the word “newspaper” brought Shane to mind, the rest was plain enough. This Mr. Kimbrough was a slight man with a wiry build whom she had spotted visiting Friar John on more than one occasion over the past years. They always made such a point of meeting in private behind closed doors that she made sure to push her mop close to Friar John’s door one day and watched them through the keyhole. She learned only enough to know that Mr. Kimbrough was there about Shane. It made her curious enough to peek in Shane’s file when Friar John was out, sounding out a few of the words until she got the main idea.

Mr. Tommie Kimbrough was Shane’s older half brother. Shane was a bastard son of the father and some other woman. They just weren’t letting Shane know about it. He had never even heard his own last name. When he arrived as a small boy, he had already been beaten up so badly that he was completely disoriented. He had to relearn the most basic skills. This Mr. Kimbrough made sure that Shane remained at St. Adrian’s with no knowledge of his family and no contact with his brother. Something about that cruel fact twisted her insides.

He doesn’t even know that he has a brother, let alone one who visits in secret.
She had stored it for future use, but Shane was suddenly adopted out, one day—whisked away before she could tell him anything at all.

So Mr. Kimbrough had sent a messenger boy to order Friar John to come to him at this hour. Vignette decided that if he was not bringing any Helpers along with him, he must be going in secret. To her it was clear that this had something to do with Shane.

She would follow Friar John. But first she needed to get inside and grab her stuff, and do it quickly enough to get back out and catch up to them before she lost them. She spotted a well-located ground-floor window in the office section. It appeared to be closed, but she knew that they were seldom locked. It never seemed to occur to anyone there to protect against kids trying to get in.

Once she was out in the main hallway, which was darkened for the night, she started toward her end of the girl’s dorm. But her soft leather shoes, so perfect for running along the streets, were too noisy now. She slipped them off and carried them while she tiptoed down the long row of sleeping girls to her bed.

She had left her small cigar box that held her special mementos right out on the nightstand by her bed. It was perfectly safe out in the open like that, and had been ever since the word spread around about the two black eyes she put on a girl who tried to steal it. Vignette’s Helper had searched around for it and found it in the girl’s things, so the girl also got in trouble with the Headmaster. After that, she could have left her box in the middle of the hall and nobody would have touched it.

But in return, she had to bathe after dinner every night for a week, using the bath area during the empty hours when no one else wanted to, so that she did not have to rush. Her Helper did not like it when she rushed. Vignette silently picked up the small cigar box that held her special mementos and set it on the bed. She removed her other pair of long pants from the hook on the wall and slipped them on right over her own, then took down her only coat and put it on. She had one dress, but she left it hanging on its peg. Instead, she picked up her shoes and the box, slipped back down the row of beds, and hurried into the main hallway. Her plan was to go out the front door at a full sprint and disappear into the night. Since she
would never be back, there would be no punishment, this time, this one time.

As soon as she reached the heavy front door, she bent to slip her shoes back on and quickly tied up the laces just right for running. It was when she stood back up to reach for the door latch that she felt a huge hand close around the back of her neck.