The Singing Bone (42 page)

“Stuart,” Alice said when he finally reached her. “I'm so sorry this happened.”

Alice's mother passed her a tissue. “There, there, honey,” she said. She touched Alice on the back. She'd traced her lips with a dark liner and the tissue was edged with the color. Alice brought it to her nose anyway and looked up at Stuart.

“It's not your fault,” Stuart said. “It's not your fault, Alice. It's
his
fault.”

“It's unspeakable,” Alice's mother said. “Unspeakable. If we still used the death penalty—” But then she looked at her daughter and closed her mouth. She was clutching a white purse. Small creases of dirt edged the bag's detailing. “You have a big job today,” Alice's mother said to Stuart. “So much for a young man.”

“It's for my sister,” he said. He lifted his chin and stood straight. He seemed too formal in his crisp blue shirt and dark tie, his hair clipped and combed. Freckles dotted his nose. His cheeks were flushed.

The courtroom door opened. “Mr. Malloy?” the clerk said. “We're ready for you.”

“Well, Alice,” Stuart said, holding his hand out to her. “Goodbye.”

She looked up at him. “Thank you, Stuart,” she said, taking his hand, and Alice wondered what he'd seen. Did she just
feel
like she'd killed Molly? Did Mr. Wyck tell her she'd done it? Had she, as everyone insisted, only followed Molly into the woods? “Goodbye, Stu,” she said, and after a moment, “Goodbye, Stuart-Stuart.”

“Goodbye, Alice-Alice.”

Alice's mother fanned herself with a
Time
magazine, and Alice got up and went to the window at the end of the hall and stood where Stu had. Storm clouds had started to gather and the wind picked up, but the wind felt good on Alice's hot face. She wore the same thing she'd worn to Trina's trial: a white skirt with small blue flowers, clogs with wooden heels, a delicate linen blouse. She'd found it at Goodwill and soaked it in bleach and water until the yellow stains had come out from beneath the arms.

When it was Alice's turn to testify, the door opened, the clerk called her, and Alice turned and walked down the hallway—
clop, clop, clop
—swore to tell the truth, and sat at the witness stand once more.

The gallery was full. The sketch artist worked furiously. No cameras. And the stenographer looked bored. It was Alice's job to describe living in the house with Mr. Wyck. The district attorney was polite, asking Alice questions that she could easily answer, and questions that implicated Mr. Wyck and told the jury what sort of character he had. The drugs, the parties, the fraud, the theft; the withholding of food and money—and was it true? The boys that Mr. Wyck brought to the house to replace Robert Smith—wasn't that prostitution?

When Mr. Wyck's lawyer cross-examined Alice, he stood in a spot that made it impossible for Alice to continue avoiding eye contact with Mr. Wyck. If Alice looked at the lawyer, she looked at Jack Wyck. She sat up straight and cleared her throat. Her palms began to sweat. She bit her lower lip.

“Miss Pearson,” Mr. Wyck's attorney began. “What was your state of mind when you were living with Jack Wyck?”

“My state of mind?” Alice said. Mr. Wyck's hair was cut short. He was intent on Alice; he squinted at her and lifted one corner of his mouth in a smile.

“Did you think you were acting in a play?”

“Yes.”

“Were you, then, disconnected from reality?”

“Yes, but—”

“Just answer the question with a yes or a no. Were you disconnected from reality?”

“Yes.”

“If things were so bad in the house, why did you stay?”

“I felt I had to.”

“Is it because, as other witnesses have testified, you wanted to see ‘how the play ended'?”

“That was part of it.”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Wyck smiled at her.

“When you were disconnected from reality, did you hallucinate?”

“No.”

“How can one be disconnected, believe they're in a play, and not hallucinate?” He laughed and turned to the jury, shaking his head. “How is that possible?”

Mr. Wyck rubbed his hands together and leaned forward, smiling at Alice.

“I know what happened. I was present. I am a witness.” Alice's voice broke.

Mr. Wyck's lawyer shrugged and looked at the jury. “You thought you were in a play.”

“I did.”

“No further questions.”

At closing, Mr. Wyck's attorney talked about Alice's play. He talked about the play more than the crime. He talked about everyone like Alice had—as characters. He told the jury that probably the actress Alice had murdered Molly. In the end, the deliberations took two days. The jury gave Mr. Wyck twenty-five years to life.

  •  •  •  

Alice spent one last night at her mother's house. Her mother gave her a little money—she didn't really have any to give—but she gave her daughter bus fare for the trip across the country. “One of these days,” her mother said, “I'll find something valuable and we'll both be rich.”

“Mom,” Alice said, thanking her, “I'd stay, but—”

Her mother waved a hand at her dismissively. “How can you stay with all these people around?”

It was true. Every day, there were newspaper reporters outside her mother's small house. The unkempt lawn became a patchy brown square. Some reporters stayed all night, waiting for a glimpse of Alice. Her mother kept the phone off the hook.

Alice packed a bag. She packed the flowered skirt and the white shirt. She had a few other things to take: a pair of trousers, socks and underwear, a plaid shirt—acceptable things she'd foraged from her mother's hoard. Pajamas. A toothbrush.

The day before she left, Alice went to the courthouse. “I need to change my name,” she said. They gave her papers to fill out. Her lawyer said it would be fast—that the judge had agreed to expedite the name change. When she got to the part that asked for her new name, she put her finger on the line and thought. She looked up at the wall in front of her that showed a mural of a forest, of a body of water. In a clearing of the forest, men cut wood, and on the banks of the river, they built ships; the forest was dotted with small log cabins and scenes of domesticity: a woman hanging clothes, four children playing a game of blindman's bluff. Alice thought of Molly and Trina and Stover.
Wood
, she wrote, in capital letters. Alice Wood.

The trip, with all stops, would take eight days. She went to the store and bought two loaves of bread, peanut butter, and twelve apples.
This was better than what had been
, she told herself.
It has to be.
She brought a blanket. She went to the Greyhound station on her own, just after dawn, and climbed aboard the stale-smelling bus. People got on, got off. They passed through towns that Alice had never heard of. A few people pointed at her and whispered. She turned away from them and looked out the window.

At one of the stops, Alice bought a pair of sunglasses. She bought a pair of scissors and a hair frosting kit—the kind that Molly had shown her in the store one long-ago spring afternoon. In the bathroom of a shopping center, Alice lightened her hair. She sat on a trash can, waiting the allotted time, chewing gum, and looking at the smiling woman on the box of dye. Women came into the bathroom and left, but no one bothered Alice Wood. When she emerged, her hair was an orange brown and cut to her chin. Even on the bus, she kept the dark sunglasses on.

When Alice finally got to San Francisco, she checked into a hostel. Down the street, she saw a sign in a diner window:
Waitress Wanted
.
She could do that.

At the end of the year, Alice applied to Berkeley. She got in and began undergraduate work in anthropology. She liked to feel far away and lost in her studies. She spent most of her time in the library. She kept her job at the diner. She didn't want to have a roommate or live on campus. Alice was wary of strangers. When Alice saw Hari Krishnas on the quad, she pulled students away from them. “It's dangerous,” she said. “Read about it first.”

Alice chose a PhD program in folklore at Penn and found an apartment in New Jersey almost exactly halfway between school and her mother's house. Alice wanted to see her mother, but she was too frightened to visit the old neighborhood. People would remember. She called her mother, inviting her on weekend trips to the ocean, but there was something Alice wanted to say and couldn't. There were things her mother might have asked her, but whenever she tried, Alice changed the topic. By the end of the weekend, a sadness so potent would settle over them that it was almost unbearable, and then Alice left off calling for a while and her mother did the same. Alice loved her mother. It was simple. It could be that simple.

  •  •  •  

When the news of her mother's death reached Alice, she was in her office. She held the telephone tightly, nodding, listening to the doctor, asking a few questions. “All right,” she said. “Yes. That's what she wanted.” When she hung up the telephone, she closed the office door and sat on the floor, her face in her hands. Since Alice hardly ever cried, it struck her that there was terrible physical pain in crying. Her face hurt, her jaw ached. Her eyes were swollen. She was so tired. She tried to stifle her cries of grief, but soon a concerned colleague arrived. Alice doesn't remember what she said, but
Go away
was part of it.

Then there was work to do, and those who didn't know any better marveled at Alice's composure. After the funeral, which was not large, Alice drove around the neighborhood. She passed Stover's old house and Trina's. She wondered if their parents still lived in there. The houses looked the same from the outside. She knew the Malloys had left. Her mother had told her.

“They always asked about you,” her mother had said.

She parked her car at a spot reserved for fishermen and began walking through the woods. Before long, she became nervous. The sun was low on the horizon. She stood in the woods and turned in one direction and then the other. And then she knew why: she'd reached the spot where Molly had drowned. Alice stood on the small incline and looked around. It was a beautiful spot, really. What she must not do, she told herself, was walk up the hill and look at Mr. Wyck's house. She leaned over and picked up some trash that was on the ground and put it into a stray plastic bag. She didn't like this place to be dirty.

When Alice straightened, she was sure someone was nearby. She turned and saw Molly—just for a moment—Molly as she had been that night. Crying, wandering in circles. But it wasn't Molly. It was four ­teenagers—three girls and a boy. They were laughing about something and as they passed her, one of the girls put up a hand in a friendly wave. They whispered together and then turned and looked back at her. She thought one of them said her name—her old name. Alice turned and ran through the woods, dropping the bag of trash she'd collected and tripping over branches.

When she got into her car, she locked all the doors and put her face on the steering wheel. “Never come here again,” she said aloud. “Never.”

On her way out, she passed the teenagers again. They were walking up the road towards Alice's old neighborhood. She waved to them, but this time they just stared at her, open-mouthed, unbelieving. This time, it was they who'd seen the ghost.

Hans hears the ragtag band coming—the boom of the drum echoes amid the office buildings, then the trombone, the clash of the cymbals. Soon the Wyckians are all around them, swarming up the courthouse steps, rambunctious and proud with license. The sun, which has been so warm on Hans's face all day, so appreciated after the snow of February and the rain of March, is beginning to recede behind a bank of clouds. Hans puts his jacket back on. A girl squats on the sidewalk below, drawing triskelions with thick colorful chalks, the endless spirals circling in on one another.

Ariel films a reporter, who in turn is being filmed by his news station. “It's just been confirmed that Jack Wyck will be released,” the reporter says. “Any minute now, he'll come through those doors.” He turns, pointing two fingers at the courthouse.

That news makes its way through the crowd and the Wyckians cheer. Hans looks around. He hopes the Malloys aren't there. He imagines Mrs. Malloy holding a faded photo of Molly, worrying the edges with her fingers.

Then it happens: Jack Wyck comes out. He's wearing a brown suit. His long white hair is combed back and pulled into a ponytail. He lifts his fists when the Wyckians cheer for him. He holds his arms up like a boxer who's just won a match. When he sees Hans and Ariel, he calls out, “Well, hello, Mr. Loomis! Hello, beautiful ginger girl! It's a beautiful day to be alive!” He looks up at the sky and laughs—a wretched, hacking caw—and then he is gone, moving down the steps, opening his arms wide to the Wyckians.

And then Jack Wyck is absorbed into the glare of photographers' flashes, carried away by the sweep of news camera lights. Smiling the whole time, he cuts a stiff path through upheld microphones, shouted questions, and disappears into a waiting black car—driven by Doug Ramsey, no doubt, a courtier and his king.

Hans and Ariel linger until the crowd begins to disperse. “The diner?” Ariel says, packing her camera. Hans nods. The wind is blowing. A man is making his way towards him—climbing the courthouse steps—the visor of a baseball hat pulled low over the brow. Hans steps back. He puts an arm out to Ariel. But then the man lifts his face towards Hans, and he realizes who it is: It's Stuart Malloy.

“I came here today—” Stuart begins. “I came here to—well, I thought maybe I'd kill him.” Stuart looks at the sky. “But I quickly realized I was outnumbered.”