The Singing Bone (8 page)

She knows now that what Allegra taught as Mr. Wyck's wisdom wasn't really Mr. Wyck's at all. It was a cobbled-together potpourri of crackpot and quasi-mystical schools of thought—the kinds of ideas that garnered attention back then
. We are ethereal beings. Time has a plasticity. It is nonlinear. If something happened in the past, it doesn't mean it is over; somewhere, it is still happening.
And Mr. Wyck. Mr. Wyck was in contact with higher beings—God or angels or the devil. All of them.
Satan was still an angel, wasn't he? Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law. Man is made of two sides of the same coin. Here, let me see your palm. You don't know that you're special. You don't know how loved you are. I love you.

Alice covers herself with a cotton blanket and closes her eyes. She opens her palms. The teacher is reading something from a little notebook—a poem—is it a Rilke poem? Alice listens for a moment and then loses the thread. Her pulse slows. And then she's off to the strange state she so often avoids: the half-sleep of lying on the floor, the pleasant sensation of floating, the dreamlike way images dart in and out of her mind. Roses are floating on a pond. Look how they're scattered. The water is bright with sunlight, but the sky above is dark. The flowers ebb and push their way downstream, clogging against the rocks. The stems break away from the petals. The petals scatter and sink. The petals are sticking to her skin—no, not my skin, Alice thinks. Whose? The rose's stems are wedged into rocks. A girl floats, facedown. Her body touches the rocks. Her hair spans out over the water. The water laps at her body. Her skin is white, is blue, is cold to the touch.

When the teacher rouses them, Alice curls into herself and pulls her knees to her chest. She sits up quickly and her head spins.
Careful
, she hears Allegra say.
Don't move too fast. You'll get dizzy
. But Alice is up and out of the room while everyone else is exhaling
om
. She can hear them in the hallway. The voices follow her like an echo. She finds her coat where she left it hanging in the foyer with the others. She puts her shoes on without bothering with socks, then runs through the rain to her car.

Once inside, she sits with her hands on the steering wheel, not starting the engine, letting fog creep up the windows until she can't see outside. She stares at nothing, her eyes wide, unblinking.
Little girl, where do you go? Where are you hiding?
She can hear Mr. Wyck's voice, the rasp and the honey. The rasp from the shouts, the all-night parties, the cigarettes, the pot, but always the honey, too. Always a finger on her cheek, a hand in her hair. Alice Pearson. Traitor. She starts the car and watches as the fogged windshield becomes clear again. Outside, in front of her, a figure emerges; a boy in a black-hooded sweatshirt stands there, gesturing. He comes to the car and leans over the hood. He hits the hood with both hands at once. Alice jumps. She can't see the white face beneath the black hood. She can't catch the yelled words over the sound of the engine, the click of the windshield wipers—and then he is gone, running across the parking lot, dodging between the cars that honk at him as he goes.

I found you.
Is that what he said? She can still feel the reverberation of the car being hit. It can't be. That's what Mr. Wyck told her:
I found you
.

Hans wonders how dangerous the Wyckians might be. Right now, there is no immediate threat to their group or to Jack Wyck. Being a Wyckian is still just a hobby for most of them, something they think about when they've slipped from behind the counter job and back into the world, while waiting for a red light to change, the click of the turn signal lulling like a metronome.

Hans keeps the cardboard office boxes of court transcripts in the trunk of his car. When he and Ariel arrived at the diner six hours ago, he placed one of the boxes on the table, and when the waitress came over, she looked at the stacks of papers and overstuffed binders and said, “Lucky for you we're open twenty-four hours.”

They've spent their days and nights like this, camped out with documents. At the hotel, Hans hangs his clothes up in the shower because they smell of bleach and hamburger grease. In the early hours of the morning, he dreams of snakes, of birds. They surround a house. Human faces appear where birds' heads should be.

“Chills,” Ariel says.

Hans looks up, expecting to see Ariel peering over the transcripts, but she's not. She's looking instead at the pages Jack Wyck sent Hans. Ariel lifts a paper chain, holding it with one finger and turning it. The chain is made up of figures and is cut from copies of newspaper articles. The faces of the figures are drawn in black ink. Alice, Trina, Molly, Stover, Allegra, Lee, and of course Jack Wyck. His figure has wings. In his arms, he's cradling a child.

Ariel folds the paper chain and tucks it back into a taped-together envelope. She picks up a new page and reads, “Nothing ever really ends. If you fully inhabited a moment, you inhabit it forever. If you remember it, it exists in time and space, and if you close your eyes and let yourself go, you can relive it. Not everyone can do this. It takes a free and open mind, which I have. We like to hold on to the present, and that is where we stop ourselves from our full experiences, our beautiful lives.” Ariel bites her lip. The diner is almost empty, and the piped music—the songs Hans remembers from the car radio on his long-ago trips—has gone quiet.

Hans goes back to Stuart Malloy's testimony. Midway through, he stops and pulls a photo of an eleven-year-old Stuart out from a pile of pictures.

“Sweet face,” Ariel says, looking up. “Let me look at it for a while. It's so much nicer than what I'm doing.”

Hans puts his glasses on and studies the photo of Stuart. “Certainly a face you'd believe.” It's a class photo. Stuart's wearing a tie, a blue shirt with an enormous pointed collar. His smile is slightly crooked and his hair is parted on the side.

“Do you think he lied about something?”

Hans passes her the photo, shaking his head. “I'm not sure.” He rubs his brow. Something is bothering him. He'd really like to talk to Alice, but she won't return his calls. He needs to hear her voice, to look in her eyes. He won't know who she is until he can do so.

“There's something odd here. Alice changed her story,” Hans finally says. “She told the police one thing and then something else. It's all in the files. It just seems everyone ignored it.”

“I figured they chalked it up to her state of mind.”

“Yes.” Hans lifts his shoulders and lets them drop. “But . . .” He doesn't finish. He doesn't know what comes after “but.”

Ariel is studying the picture of Stuart. Her hair is pulled back, but little copper curls spring out here and there. Hans never pays much attention to the changeability of hair, but there's something about Ariel's that's caught his imagination. Sometimes her hair is straight and other days, like today, it looks like it's been wrapped tightly around millions of tiny screws and then let loose. He almost asks her but changes her mind.

“It should be easy enough to find Stuart,” she says. “We'll need to interview him.” Hans looks at the waitress, trying to imagine her as a teenager. She's about the same age as Alice. He wonders who remembers what, and thinks he should go back and try to find the people who might recall Alice at that time, who might reveal something to him—whatever it is that comes after
but—

“I'll find Stuart Malloy.” Ariel puts the picture down.

“I can't think of a reason he would have lied.” Hans moves his empty coffee cup in circles on its saucer. “But at the same time, I feel uncertain about what really happened that night.”

Hans looks at the waitress again. She's at the table next to theirs, slowly wiping the ketchup bottles down. He wonders if she's listening to their conversation. “Excuse me,” he says to the waitress. “Could I have some more water, please?” She smiles and nods.
Yes
, he thinks. She was definitely listening.

“What about Wyck?” Ariel wants to know.

Hans takes Jack Wyck's latest letter out of the inside pocket of his jacket and passes it to Ariel. When she's finished, she folds the letter and passes it back to Hans. “He's threatening to reveal Alice's identity to the world—but more important, to his Wyckians.”

“If the Wyckians are anything like The Doing, she's in for it. Who do you think told him her new name?”

“Not me,” Hans says. “Not you. There must be someone else who knows.”

“Probably Doug Ramsey.” Ariel shakes her head. “But Alice wasn't hard to find.”

“I'd bet on Doug Ramsey as well.” Hans opens the letter and reads:
She was a puzzle of a girl, I'll tell you that. A real riddle. You can't trust a word she says. Ask her what happened. She'll tell you a story. It is a failure of the system that she is allowed freedom. If she doesn't come see me, she won't be free for long.
Hans sets the letter down. “A threat,” he says.

“A threat for sure.” Ariel nods. “Alice should definitely know about this. I wonder if Jack Wyck ever tells the truth about anything.”

“Doubtful,” Hans says. Extremely doubtful, he thinks, taking his glasses off and rubbing his eyes.

Before they leave, Hans takes the bill to the cash register. “I'll take care of it,” the waitress calls out. It's past midnight, and there are only a few customers.

“Sorry to eavesdrop,” the waitress says as she takes the bill. “But I couldn't help but overhear. I heard there was someone in town doing a movie about that terrible Jack Wyck stuff.”

He extends his hand to her. “Hans Loomis,” he says. “I'm the one making the movie, but we're really gathering information, talking to people who might remember something.”

“I remember those girls,” she says. “We all knew about his house and the parties. I went to school with them. It could've been any of us up there.”

“Tell me what Alice was like.” Hans smiles at her.

“Well, she was real smart. She went with a boy. Dan Crew. We couldn't figure it out. He was popular, you know? And she was, well . . . Looking back, we thought she was a little strange, a little dark.”

“So you weren't friends?”

“No. She was only tight with those other kids—Trina Malik, Jason Stover, and Molly—” She stops and shakes her head. “I guess I don't really remember that much. But it haunted me my whole life—what happened up there.”

“As it would.” Hans knows his face is sympathetic, his eyes soft. “Did you ever go to the parties?”

“No. My parents wouldn't let me. We tried to sneak out there once, but we got scared.”

“Why were you scared?”

“There were rumors. They were practicing witchcraft. They were devil worshippers. Most kids were afraid of Jack Wyck.”

“You were right to be afraid,” Hans says, taking his change. “You were absolutely right.” He hands her his business card. “If you remember anything—”

“Oh, no,” she says. “That's all I remember. That's all I know.”

He watches her walk back into the kitchen. She shakes her head a little as she goes, as if trying to get rid of something. Hans turns and leaves the diner. He waits for Ariel outside. The sun will be up in a few hours. He puts his hand in his coat pocket and wraps his fingers around the cool stone he keeps there. The pebble is from a fountain in front of the theater that premiered
Death Christ
. It is smooth and white and round. When the police talked to him that night, he'd kept staring into the fountain, feeling vertiginous, slightly nauseous. He kept thinking of the fountain as a well that he was falling into, and it was only later that it occurred to him:

Some people might throw a stone into a well to test its depth, and when they can't hear it touch bottom, they turn away—the well's too deep, too empty—but then there are others who, wondering
why
they couldn't hear the stone hit, throw a rope over the edge and begin to descend. Hans knows he is the sort who goes down the well, the oval light above getting smaller, farther away. It's easy to go down. The trick is coming back up.

Alice had only seen Trina once since the trip to Mr. Wyck's, but when she did, in the hallway between classes, Trina turned to her and waved, rushing over, hugging her as if nothing had happened. “Didn't we have a good time the other night?” she asked. “Isn't Mr. Wyck cool?” Trina hung on Alice's arm and whispered into her ear, “Lee is amazing.” Her breath was hot, and Alice pulled back a little.

“I thought you were mad at me?”

“Mad?” Trina smiled her enormous, radiant smile. To Alice, Trina always looked like some kind of princess—like how she imagined Scheherazade from
The Arabian Nights
, or like one you'd see a picture of in the newspaper with an article about a royal jewel or visit.

When Alice showed her mother pictures of her and Trina, Molly, and Stover at the beach, her mother said. “This one got really great bone structure. Look at those high cheekbones. Lucky girl. She'll age well.” It was Alice's birthday, and Alice had cleared two spots of collections so the two could sit and eat pancakes together. Alice asked her mother if she, too, had good bone structure, and her mother looked at her and lifted Alice's chin with one finger. “You'll do all right,” she said. “You got like me. You got okay bones—not like Trina, though. We can't all have that. Where'd she get that? Must be her mother.” Alice's mother shook her head but kept her eyes on the photo. “Why is Jason wearing his hair like this?” she asked, and for a moment Alice didn't know who she was talking about, but of course. She meant Stover. No one ever called Jason Stover
Jason
. They called him Stover—or Stoner, or Hendrix. Of course her mother still called him Jason.