The Singing Bone (18 page)

“Listen,” he said, and they all did. They leaned forward in their chairs, each of them. It was like watching a magician, Alice thought, just before he pulled the white cloth off the cage that held the doves.
Listen,
he said. “That is why I'm helping people now. You know there are POWs still being held in Vietnam, don't you? I get them out.”

“He got me out,” Lee said. “Captured by the Vietcong in '70. Released in '71.”

“Really?” Alice said, leaning forward. “How did you do that?”

“I have people inside,” said Mr. Wyck. “Spies. Soviets.”

“How do you communicate with them?” Stover asked.

“I'm fluent. Polish, Russian.”

“Say something!” Molly cried, excited.

Mr. Wyck looked at her. He gave her a small smile and leaned back. The chair's wooden frame creaked beneath him. “
Niech pamiętajądni ciemności, bo będzie ich wiele
.” No one said anything. Allegra dusted crumbs from the table into her hand. Mr. Wyck repeated it. Alice wrapped her arms around her body.

Finally, Stover said, “What's that?”

Mr. Wyck didn't look at him; instead, he gazed out the window, at the row of trees visible in the moonlight. He sighed. “Let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many.” Everyone was quiet. Mr. Wyck rubbed his chest with one hand; the other was lying on Molly's thigh. “I was almost captured,” he said. “But I was lucky.” Molly looked at Alice and smiled at her—her bright child smile—but Alice did not smile back. “My animals are all here now,” Mr. Wyck said, smoothing the back of Molly's yellow hair, lifting her curls and letting them fall. “We can begin.”

“You can help,” Lee said, but no one asked how; instead, they all lifted their glasses.

“Listen—” Mr. Wyck said. The magician lifted the white cloth from the bird's cage, the cage's door sprung open, and the birds flew out and above them. Beating their wings madly before they disappeared into the night sky.

Stuart Malloy is in his front yard, looking at his roof. “Do you see anything?” Kate calls. She's standing just inside the front door. He shakes his head. “We have to call the exterminator,” she says. “The one that traps the animals and takes them away. Not the one that kills them.” The cat is wending its way around her ankles, so she closes the door and stands behind the glass, watching him.

We
have to call the exterminator. Stuart smiles. He knows what it means:
You
have to call the exterminator. He looks up at the roof again. If the squirrels are getting in somewhere, he can't see it. The exterminator will, though. When mice got into the house last fall, he called the exterminator. They found holes that Stuart never would have and patched them. So far, between the exterminator and the cat, they'd had no more mice. He's sure Violet, their cat, is disappointed.

He walks around to the side of the house, looks at the roof, and decides that the gutters need cleaning. He kicks his shoes against the front steps to rid them of dirt and opens the front door, leaning down to rub Violet's soft black fur. He can hear his mother talking to Kate about the squirrels. “We had them once. Oh, what little devils they can be.” His father grunts in approval. They're having coffee, sitting at the table in the kitchen. Stuart and Kate are expecting their first child, a girl.

Stuart hopes that Ariel won't call again. As a precaution, he's turned the volume on the phone off. As far as he can tell, his parents don't know about the movie yet—or maybe they do and they're protecting him, thinking
he
doesn't know.

Twenty years! He keeps a framed photo of Molly on the fireplace mantel. It's of the two of them. Molly is standing behind Stuart, her hands on his shoulders. It was the year before Jack Wyck—the last year his family was happy. But they didn't know how happy they were. They only found out later.

Kate wanted to call the baby Molly, but Stuart didn't want that. The first time she brought it up, he didn't say anything. He let it go, let it slide away from him, but the second time she said it, they were lying in bed and Kate rolled towards him and said it. Stuart looked at the ceiling. “I know that everyone accepts that a baby is a hope for a different future,” he said, “and that somehow by giving this child the name of my dead sister we are fixing things. But I don't accept that.” He put his hand on Kate's belly. Resting it there. Already trying to protect his child. “This is someone entirely different,” he said. “She'll have her own story.”

“Stuart.” Kate sat up to set the alarm. She tied her hair back and looked down at him. “It's simple. It means we haven't forgotten Molly.”

“Why would I ever forget Molly?”

“I'm sorry, sweetheart.” She lay down. “We can talk about this later if you want.” She reached out and put her hand on his chest.

But Stuart didn't want to talk about it later. He sat up. “Isn't it a burden? To have her name? Doesn't that mean we have to tell our child the story?”

“When she's older. When she's ready.”

“No,” Stuart said. “No one's ever ready for that. I'm sorry, but no.”

“Maybe you're right.” Kate sat up again, too. “Now that you say it, it does sound like an obtuse thing to do.”

“You hate that stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“When a movie or a book ends with a redemptive pregnancy.”

“You're right. I do. It's too easy. It's late. Let's talk about it some other time. We have time.”

  •  •  •  

Stuart picks up Violet and listens to her purr. It's a loud and luxurious sound, the kind that convinces non–cat owners to become the opposite. “Yes,” he whispers into her fur. He sets her down and listens to his parents' talk with Kate. “Trina Malik came up for parole this week,” his mother says.

“Really?” Kate says. “Stuart didn't mention it. I'm sure it will be denied.”

His father clears his throat, coughs. “I doubt she'll ever get out.”

“I don't know that Stuart keeps up with it.” He hears the fragility in his mother's voice, the guilt. “There was so much of it in his childhood.”

But his mother is wrong. Stuart does keep up with it. He gets e-mail alerts. The keywords were hard to type in—Jack Wyck, Trina Malik, Jason Stover, Alice Pearson, Molly Malloy. There seems to be something new every day—the Wyckian Society, Jack Wyck's DNA test. He clicks on links, turning off the images so he doesn't have to see his sister's face—or his own. He had read about Trina's parole hearing that morning. Stuart suspects, like his father, that her parole will always be denied. After what she did? Trina will spend the rest of her life in prison. And Alice. She might not be in jail, but she'll never get away. The Internet makes Stuart nervous. When he searches his name, he finds a work listing. Stuart Malloy, PhD, Neuropsychology, and a number for the lab. But his name is so common, and there are other Stuart Malloys listed, too. Still, he's started looking over his shoulder—especially after Ariel found him. Then he knew it must be easy.

“You know it was Stu's testimony that convinced the jury of Jack ­Wyck's guilt,” his mother says. Stuart steps back to the front door and opens it again, but this time, when he shuts it, he shuts it more loudly so that they'll know he's in the house. His mother and Kate stop talking. “Did you find anything?” Kate calls.

“I didn't see a thing,” he says.

Hans reads randomly from Trina's trial notes. “ ‘Group psychosis,' ” he says. The words are written in her file over and over again. “ ‘
Folie à deux
. Groupthink. Anomie. Drug-induced brain damage.' ” He looks up at Trina. “ ‘Cult member.' ” He studies the pale, wide-featured face in front of him. After reading about her, after watching the footage, he expected someone more forceful, but here is a quiet woman, her hands folded in front of her. “Do you think that's true?”

She sighs. “Absolutely.”

This visit feels more casual than the trip to Sing Sing. It might be the adjoining visitors' room, the one for children's visits, where he can see mothers—dressed in the same forest green uniform as Trina—huddled together with their families at kid-sized tables, working on drawings and playing with colorful toys. Trina follows his gaze. “The mothers don't talk to me,” she says. The two visiting rooms are divided by a wall, with a long window between them. By comparison, the room Trina, Hans, and Ariel sit in is quite bland.

“Why?”

“I've been here for a long time. I guess I'm kind of an unfortunate legend.”

The newer inmates have probably all seen the made-for-TV movie
The Day Before Midnight,
which portrayed Trina as a scandalous Lolita-style ringleader who believed she was in touch with the devil. During the trials, the real Trina Malik didn't help her case by slapping a reporter. She grimaced at the cameras, and in the courtroom, she let her long hair fall in front of her face. When spoken to, she kept her chin down, choosing to stare at people by only lifting her eyes. People were really afraid of her, reporting how glassy and empty her eyes were—how just being in a room with her made the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Hans thought that kind of conversation should have been reserved for Jack Wyck instead of an eighteen-year-old girl, and there was plenty of that as well, but it seemed to Hans that onlookers found a certain glee in painting a pretty girl as a sociopath. And, well, what she'd done merited it.

Hans reads aloud again. “ ‘Delusions. Miss Malik is certain she will soon teleport to the magnetic sphere.' ” Hans looks up from the notes. “What does that mean?”

“I don't really remember—but I think I believed I could rearrange my molecules with the power of my mind.”

“Did Jack Wyck tell you that?”

She gives him a restrained, closed-mouth smile. “He told me all kinds of lies. That was only one of them.”

“How did it begin?” Hans asks. “How did you meet him?” Trina's long black hair is streaked with strands of silver and pulled back in a tight ponytail. The forest green sweatshirt gives her eyes a deeper color. She's watching the children. She turns away and looks in the other direction, out of the double-paned, bulletproof, shatterproof windows. Outside, the day is clear. A warm spell. “Do you see that tree?” Trina says without pointing. Hans follows Trina's gaze and sees the single pine on a hill bending slightly in the wind.

“Yes.”

“I planted it. Ten springs ago.” She turns to him and smiles. “That's my tree.”

“It's thriving.”

She nods. She's proud of the tree. “Do you know what I did? Did the superintendent tell you that story?” She puts her hands on the table in front of her. The index finger of her left hand is missing just at the knuckle.

“She said you had an accident.”

“It wasn't an accident. Not really.” Trina looks away again. She wraps the fingers of her right hand around the left. “I was planting that tree and I was thinking about the horrors of that night. I just—” She motions, holding her right hand above her left. “I was putting the dirt back around the roots and I decided—I decided to cut my finger off. I did it with the tip of a spade.” She splays her fingers on the table in front of her.

“That must have hurt horribly.”

Trina smiles a little. “It should have hurt more.”

“What do you mean?”

“I took so much—” she tries, shaking her head. “I took so much out of the world. I had this idea that I could . . . that I could put something of mine back in,” she says. “And it was all I had to give. I wanted to—I don't know. It doesn't make a lot of sense.” For a moment they sit together without saying anything. Trina's been called an ideal inmate. She's taken horticulture courses. She's finished her undergraduate degree. She trains service dogs. Trina looks at Hans. “I have a window in my room,” she says finally. “I can see the tree.” She gives him a tight smile. “It should have been my right hand. I'm right-handed.”

“But you won't do anything else like that now.” His voice is soft.

She shakes her head, still looking at the tree. “No.” There are tears on her cheeks.

“Do you remember your first encounters with Jack Wyck?”

She nods her head slowly. “I do.”

“Can you tell me?”

“I was Lee's girlfriend.”

“How did you meet Lee?”

“He was coming around to do yard work that year—spring cleanup. He knocked on our door. It seemed official. He had a truck full of lawn equipment. Probably stolen. He was charming. I let him into my house. It was a rare day that my mother was not at home. I don't remember why. I've often thought it was all planned.”

Hans remembers reading that part of the art of a long con is patience, a cool head. Lee must have watched the house, waited for his moment. Hans wants to know where it all began, who saw whom first—if the plan materialized little by little or if it was set from the start. Jack Wyck won't tell him. He wants to know why it was Trina they sought out first—why not Molly or Alice? Hans imagines Lee leaning against the doorframe in his too-clean work clothes, smiling, looking down at Trina.
Do you want something to drink?
she asked.

“He was handsome,” Trina says, “and I had no idea then what people were capable of. Now—” She lifts her hands in the air as if presenting Hans with something. “Now it's all I know about.” She gives him a small, strained smile. “It was spring.”

Hans sees Trina as she appears in some of the old photos: two thick, black braids framing her lovely face—the pronounced features, her wide jaw, the chin lifted in defiance, brown eyes shining, the brow drawn down in anger. “Did he take you to Jack Wyck's house right away?” The public looked at those pictures and judged her—not simply for what she'd done, which was horrible enough, but for being bad when she'd been given such a beautiful face.