The Singing Bone (10 page)

Mr. Wyck was big on the immigration tale.
My father came from Leningrad. Saint Petersburg. He was a soldier in the Red Army in the war—assigned to guard a factory in Poland.
Alice knew his story as well as her own—how the factory foreman was NKVD and hated the father, had him thrown into a gulag, how he had escaped. But who knew if it was the truth? Nothing else was. Once, he told Alice it was entirely possible for them to transfer bodies. It was late, after one of the parties, and Alice sat across from Mr. Wyck, their knees touching, her palms up with his resting lightly on top. “Breathe like me,” he said. “Close your eyes. ­Visualize getting up and walking around the room. Go farther. Walk around the house. Eventually, come back to us, but see yourself settle in my body, and I'll settle in yours.”

She did what he said, and she saw herself get up and walk around the room. She looked down at Molly, who had fallen asleep on the couch in front of the fire, and she went to the front door and saw Trina and Stover there, sharing a cigarette, waiting for the sun to come up. And finally, she saw Mr. Wyck, sitting on the living room floor across from her, the firelight playing over his features, and instead of going back to her body, she went to Mr. Wyck's, and when she opened her eyes, just for a moment, she didn't see Mr. Wyck across from her, but herself, and in that moment, she met her own gaze, and she heard Mr. Wyck's voice when she opened her mouth and said, “It worked.” And then it was over, and Mr. Wyck leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead and on her cheek, and then she felt his hot breath on her neck, and he whispered into her ear, “I'll never leave you.”

  •  •  •  

Alice bites her lip. Hard. She's taking short, shallow breaths. She opens her bag to take out her notebook, thinking that going over her notes on the folktales will calm her down, give her something to do while she waits, but she can't find it. She looked for it in her apartment, too, on the desk and in the bedroom—the places she likes to work—and when she didn't see it, she assumed it was in her bag. She tries to remember when she last had it—the library?

Alice looks around and realizes the mother and girls have left. She's alone in the park, but then she sees a group of kids—teenagers—they're sitting on the rocks that make a small pier by the water, smoking. One has his back to her—the black hood of his sweatshirt makes a small peak against the gray sky. Is it him? She imagines the boy who hit her car with a distorted face—one half featureless, the other a black hole for an eye, an open gash for a mouth.

She remembers Mr. Wyck's house, the broad wooden staircase, the latched window in her room banging against its frame. The wind will come. The window will open.
Oh, the wind, the wind and the rain,
he sang as he worked. Jack Wyck. His name is tattooed on the inside of her left thigh. When she goes to the beach or makes love, she puts concealer on it—the kind one uses for a birthmark. Dense, opaque.

Now you belong to me
, he said, kissing her thigh.

She could have removed it, but she never did. It was her scar. Her punishment.

I always belonged to you
, she said.
I always will.

  •  •  •  

A man walks towards her. Hans, she sees, when he gives her a wave. He's wearing a heavy wool coat, gray and frayed. She sees him notice the kids on the pier and pick up his pace. She's surprised. She would have expected him to look different, to have the sheen of California, of movie lights. She expected someone who looks expensive. But Hans must keep a low profile. She read about the premiere of
Death Christ
online. He knows, after all, what it's like to be followed, to be exposed.

His eyes are gray, like the coat, like the sky behind him. He smiles at her. “Alice Wood,” he says. “It's a pleasure to finally meet you.” She understands immediately why people tell him things—strangers—he reminds her of an illustration from a fairy tale: the woodsman, the hunter who refused to kill Snow White. He looks suspiciously at the group of kids on the rocks, and one of them stands to look back at him.

“Hello,” Alice says simply, taking his hand. She looks over at the boy, too.

“I brought you something,” he says. He reaches into his bag. For a moment she thinks he's going to pull out a gun, but of course he doesn't. It's a box from the bakery near her house. She recognizes the pink and white stripes.

“Oh,” she says. “You've discovered the bakery.”

“I waited there for a while until it was time to meet you.” He hands her the box and they sit down.

“Thank you.”

“Macaroons,” he says.

“Thank you,” she repeats. She holds the small box in her lap, playing with the prettily tied string. She looks back at the teenagers. It seems there are more of them than before. “I think I'd like to walk,” she says, rising.

“Yes, yes.” He offers to take the macaroons and put them back in his bag so she doesn't have to carry them, and Alice hands them back.

“That bakery is wonderful. I haven't tried the macaroons.”

He laughs. “I find that as I get older I like sweets more than I did when I was a boy.”

He's older than Alice by at least ten years she guesses—maybe more. For a few minutes they walk without talking, but there's no strain in the silence. The path along the water is wide and unpaved.

“This is my favorite time of year,” Hans says. She doesn't answer. She looks out over the water and remembers that it used to be hers, too. A long time ago. It doesn't seem to matter that she doesn't respond. “Alice,” he continues. “On the phone, you said someone's following you?”

This time she does answer. “Yes,” she says. “A boy. Maybe eighteen. Maybe twentysomething. I can't tell. Young.”

“I wonder if it's a Wyckian.”

“I read about them online.”

“There's a boy who calls himself Doug Ramsey—though I don't think that's his real name—”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Not yet, but I've seen him. I'm trying to set something up with him, but I have the feeling Jack Wyck pulls all the strings.”

“How did you find me?”

“Ariel. She's here. She's filming, but she's excellent at research. You'll meet her—I hope. But I think what she does is look at the Social ­Security number. She narrows it down. Sometimes it takes a day, sometimes months.”

“How long did it take her to find me?”

Hans pauses before he answers. He sighs. “About a week.”

“Oh.” She's at a loss. It should be more difficult to find someone who doesn't want to be found. “Does he know where I am?”

“Jack Wyck, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Hans nods slowly, sorrowfully. “He does.”

Alice runs her hands through her hair. “I can't have that.”

“I can tell you everything—everything that I've figured out,” Hans says.

“Who else have you talked to?”

“We've found almost everyone, but I wanted to talk to you first. Do you know what happened to Allegra?”

Sonora, ground snakes. That's where you're from. Allegra from Sonora. Allegra the snake.

Time is doing something strange. How long has it been since they began this conversation?

You can travel through time. I'll show you. You don't want to be some places—

Alice presses her hand to her forehead and closes her eyes. A door swings open. Images spill out: snow, a patchwork quilt, a black dress hanging on a hook on the back of a door. “I don't want anything to do with this,” Alice says, and turns, as if to walk away.

“Alice,” Hans says. “I know. But we'd like your help in finding out what happened, and going public offers you some protection. Believe me.”

“You
know
what happened. It's well documented.”

“I want you to tell me. I want to hear your side of the story. Everyone will.”

Come in
, he said,
I've been waiting for you. Tell me where you've been.

“I was just a child,” Alice says. “There's really nothing for me to tell you—just that I was a child and he was a man. And that's how it started. Two people.”

We're a family, all of us.

“I know.”

I'll be the mother
, Allegra said.
You play the daughter. A family.

Alice looks at the train tracks that run parallel to the river. “Can't you just leave me out of it?”

“Of course. But—”

“But what?”

“You'll want to read this.” He reaches into his bag and takes out the letter from Jack Wyck. As he hands it to her, she glances up at his face. “I'm sorry,” he says. She looks down at the envelope, turning it over.
Sing Sing Correctional Facility
.

“What is this?” She takes out the letter. “I don't want this,” she says, when she recognizes the handwriting—the upper case so much larger than the lower, announcing itself—but she's already reading. Alice presses her thumb and index finger to the bridge of her nose, rubs her forehead. Shakes her head.
No
.

Alice is lost. She's back standing at the edge of the reservoir with Molly, smoking a cigarette, staring at the line of trees on the other side. “It's cold, Molls. We should go home.” But Alice didn't have a home—not really—not the kind Molls did.

You were all alone in the world. But now you have me.

The letter comes back into focus, the bold print. “Is this a joke?”

Hans shakes his head.

I'll never let you go.

Alice lets the letter drop to the ground. “He's going to kill me,” she says, “and he's using you to begin the process. He uses people up until there's nothing left.”

He uses them until they are shucked and gutted
, she might add.
Until they are as hollow and black as he is.

“Will you go?” Hans asks, and Alice thinks she hears eagerness in his voice. She imagines him filming it, anticipating the moment when the murderer and the moll are finally onscreen together. But then she looks at him. His expression is more sympathetic than she expected.

He looks away, and she follows his gaze. There, she sees them again—the teenagers from the rocks. They're climbing the hill that leads away from the river, and when they see Hans and Alice watching, the boy with the black hood turns to face them. He sends a howl into the sky. Likely, he's no one. He's just trying to scare them—and he has. Alice realizes Hans's hand is on her arm—he's ready to pull her along if he begins to run. But the boy turns and begins climbing up the hill again. The boy looks back one more time, and Alice hears him laugh. She wonders how many Wyckians are out there, what sort of threat they pose—
You know what to do
, she hears Mr. Wyck say. It doesn't take an army of Doug Ramseys. It only takes one.

“Yes,” she says, turning to Hans. “Yes. I'll go.”

Hans thought Alice would be different. He doesn't know why—or what he expected. He didn't expect to
like
her—that's it. His only references until their meeting were transcripts and news articles—and Jack ­Wyck's drawings. He looks down at the photos of the expressionless girl, the hollowed eyes, the dark circles. It was a face that made one stop and look again, a face that made one ask
What happened
?

But the woman he met was nothing like that. She was elegant, intelligent. Under any other circumstances, he would have wanted to ask her to dinner. He would not have handed her a letter from a psychopath.

Hans looks across the table at Ariel. The waitress at the diner is different this time, and Hans is relieved. He doesn't want to talk idly about the film or Jack Wyck. He doesn't want to speculate—not with a stranger, anyway. He can speculate with Ariel, who has her head bent over a court transcript. She's reading one of Alice's statements. She looks up at him. “When will I get to meet Alice?”

“Soon,” he says. “We'll do an official interview, but let's give her some time.”

“Did you like her?”

“I do.”

Ariel gives him a sly smile. “Hans likes Alice,” she says. They're both relieved for the joke. Ariel sets the court transcript aside and puts her elbows on the table, leaning towards Hans. “So,” she says. “What's she like?” Ariel is in the habit of pulling her sweater sleeves over her hands and holding them in her fists. The arms of her sweaters are all stretched, Hans has noticed.

“Scared.”

Ariel sighs, sitting back in the booth. “I almost forgot to tell you,” she says. “I've tracked down Stuart.”

“Where is he?”

“Get this. He's a brain doctor. He studies
sociopathy
.”

“What about Allegra?”

She shakes her head. “Zip. Nothing. It's like she just walked off the edge of the earth.”

Hans tries to imagine this. He sees a woman standing on the tip of a jagged overhang, the sky all around her. She steps off, first moving one foot tentatively, then the other, but instead of falling, she simply vanishes.

“What else are you going to do?” Trina asked them. It was right before graduation, on one of those summery, end-of-school half-days when they rolled the car windows down and turned the radio up. They'd driven to the mall to help Molly look for a gift for Stuart, who was about to turn twelve, and were making a slow shuffle through JCPenney. “You can hang at your mom's and work here for the air conditioning,” Trina continued, running her fingers across the department store's jewelry display. She picked a gold chain up with one finger. “Go to the pool, maybe?” Trina looked at Alice. “Field parties? Endlessly make out with Dan Crew but never fuck him?” Alice rolled her eyes. “This is pretty,” Trina said, lifting the chain. “Maybe I'll get it.” She smiled at Alice and looked around. “I'm already living at Mr. Wyck's with Lee,” she said, “but Mr. Wyck says you can all come. You can do stuff around the house. He needs some help with his project.”