by A. L. Knorr
I nodded, not trusting my voice. How was I going to do this? I had no proof, even though I knew for sure that it was Lydia who had stolen the pendant from the museum. Would Antoni think I was trying to drive a wedge between him and his sister? Would he be angry with me? I considered how I would feel if Antoni accused my mother of a crime, asking me to believe him even though he didn’t have any proof. Putting myself in Antoni’s shoes made me feel even more miserable and my courage faltered as we reached my suite door.
“Antoni…” I tried to say it out loud but it came out as a husk of air.
He heard, and looked at me as we entered my suite. “Targa.” His voice was soft, comforting. “You look terrified.” He put his hands on either side of my face, fingertips just touching the back of my neck. “What is it? You can tell me anything, you know that, right?”
My nod was more of a head wobble, because I was agreeing to something that wasn’t true.
“I’m making up all kinds of horrible stories in my mind right now, Targa. Please put me out of my misery.”
He released my face and we sat down on the couch in the sitting room. Antoni took my hand and held it on his knee. His eyes felt like laser-beams boring into my soul.
“I need to ask you for a promise first,” I said.
“Okay, if I can, I will. What is it?”
“I need to tell you something that will be upsetting, and I need you not to ask me how I know this thing. I need you to trust that it’s true.”
His brow wrinkled as he digested this.
“Promise me you won’t ask me how I know,” I repeated.
“I promise,” he replied. He took a deep breath and slowed down his speech. “I won’t ask. Now what is it?”
I took a deep breath, too. “It was Lydia who broke into the museum and stole the pendant.” It came out in a rush.
At first, his face did not change at all, but as the words sank in, he paled and looked as though I’d just hit him in the stomach. His fingers released the slightest amount of pressure on my own and the gesture sent a barb of fear through my heart.
“I’m so sorry, Antoni.”
His eyes never left mine but his voice turned dangerous. “That’s a very serious accusation, Targa.”
“It’s not an accusation, it’s a fact.”
He released my hand and got up, beginning to pace around the small coffee table in the middle of the room. He was no longer looking at me; his focus had gone inward and his eyes had gone hard.
“Whoever stole that pendant didn’t do it for money. If they did, why wouldn’t they take everything else in that showcase?” he asked.
Whoever stole that pendant…
He didn’t believe me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, my hands and feet became cold and clammy. “Antoni…”
“Why would she do such a thing?” he asked, but he wasn’t asking me, he was just thinking out loud, so I kept silent.
My heart gave a little leap of hope—maybe he did believe me. I couldn’t quite follow his line of thinking and desperation to understand how this had changed things between us finally loosened my tongue.
“Do you believe me?” I asked.
His eyes flashed to mine as he raked both hands over his head and rubbed his scalp hard in agitation. “Of course I do. I’m just trying to figure out why she would be so stupid.”
Relief coursed through my limbs, making them tremble. I closed my eyes for a moment and took a steadying breath. When I opened them, Antoni was striding toward the door. I sprang up from the couch.
“Where are you going?”
He halted suddenly and turned around as though he’d forgotten something on his way to a meeting he was already late for. He reached for me and kissed me hard and fast.
Putting his forehead to mine, he said, “Thank you for coming to me first, and not going to the police.” He jerked his head back and his laser-like focus returned to my eyes. “You haven’t told the police?”
I shook my head. “No, of course not. But it’s only a matter of time before they find something linking the break-in to her, Antoni.”
“I know, that’s why I have to find her,” he said.
With another quick kiss he had the door to my suite open and was heading down the stairs, with me trying to keep up.
“What are you going to say?” I asked.
“What else?” Antoni strode purposefully into the parlor and grabbed the jacket he’d thrown over the back of one of the couches. “I’m going to ask her why she did it, and find out what kind of other trouble she’s in.” He thrust his arms into his jacket and zipped it up in one angry motion. “I don’t know why she doesn’t talk to me first when she gets these crazy ideas.”
These crazy ideas? What other stupid things had Lydia done? The siren’s curiosity surged through me, but now wasn’t a good time to ask. Antoni looked like he was on the warpath, and I was reminded of the fierce expression I’d seen through his face protection during the hockey game.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if he wanted me to come with him, but I knew he’d say no, and I agreed. It was going to be a confrontational conversation and it would be better done in private.
With a last, tense kiss on my forehead, Antoni was out the front door and gone.
18
Georjie’s check-in call kept me occupied until late into the evening, but the next morning when I still hadn’t heard anything from Antoni, I sent him a text. Have you spoken with her?
His answer came quickly. No luck yet and she’s avoiding answering her phone, probably because she knows it’s me. Going to take off from work early to try some other places.
I threw myself into my schoolwork for the morning, but the afternoon had me back up in Martinius’s office and staring at the receipt.
I picked up the receiver of the phone sitting on Martinius’s desk and dialed the museum. When I got an answer, I asked: “Could I speak with Mr. Trusilo, please?”
“One moment, please,” returned the voice.
I waited, chewing my lip and considering the almost one-hundred-fifty-year-old proof of transaction sitting on Martinius’s desk. As an afterthought, I opened the top drawer and retrieved a plastic cover, slipping the receipt inside so it was at least a little bit protected. With every fiber of my being I wished Martinius was here so I could ask him about the pendant, and the receipt.
“Hello, Abraham Trusilo speaking.”
“Abraham, it’s Targa. You said to call if I discovered anything about the stolen pendant.” I was talking too fast, I realized, and took a bracing inhale. “Well, I did.”
“Yes?” His voice filled with anticipation. “What did you find?”
I described the receipt to him in detail, and what Sera had translated. “I can send you a photo of it.”
“Please, do, but I would like to ask if you would mind if the police came to pick it up? It is evidence they need.”
I hesitated, but brushed it aside. I was being silly. Of course they needed it. “Absolutely, but I need to know I’ll get it back.”
“Yes, they’ll take a copy of it and return it to you, undamaged of course. What did you say was the amount made out as?”
I told him.
He went silent.
“Abraham?”
“Apologies, I am doing a calculation because that number seems very strange to me.”
I heard papers rustling and the scratching of a pen or pencil through the phone. Impatiently, I waited, shifting my weight from one foot to the other.
“Yes, it is very strange. What Mattis paid for this person, this Rainer Veigel, as you say, to find the pendant, is quite a bit more than the pendant would be worth.”
“And you’ve taken inflation into account?”
“I’ve only done a rough calculation, but I’ll get it checked by one of my historians. To me, it doesn’t make sense that Mattis would pay so much for it. It would have been cheaper to have another made in its likeness.”
“There must be som
ething very special about that particular pendant, then.” I turned to face the window and look at the Baltic in the distance, turning these revelations over in my mind.
“I daresay.”
Movement caught my eye through breaks in the hedges bordering the side yard, near the mostly unused gate and pathway. As far as I knew, I was the only one who used that old gate, but there was someone here. I narrowed my eyes, trying to make out who it was, expecting it was one of the staff.
A pale face appeared over the top of the gate, the angular face of a man with wisps of black hair framing his cheeks. A dark, wine-colored hood was pulled up over his head.
“Abraham,” I interrupted him in the middle of his conjecture. “Did you say that the fellow who was questioning your staff was pale and wearing a maroon hoody?”
“Yes, why?”
“I have to go,” I said. “Sorry.”
I hung up without waiting for his reply and dashed out of Martinius’s office and toward the rear servants stair. Tearing down the stairs, I landed on the final landing in a squat and threw myself out of the narrow rear doorway. Flying down the path to the back corner, I again caught sight of the pale face.
He saw me coming and disappeared behind the hedgerow.
Fear that he would get away hit the back of my throat and spurred me on, hair flying. After tearing open the back gate, I flew through the opening and skid to a halt, eyes darting left.
He was walking fast with his back to me, down the sidewalk following the winding road along the waterline.
My siren voice swelled in my throat and I yelled, “Stop!”
It came out like deep a blast of brass instruments, rolling over him like a blast of thunder.
He froze.
Panting from my mad sprint, I walked toward him, calming my heart and preparing to speak.
Slowly, he turned to face me.
Then I was the one to freeze. His expression was one of deep shock as his eyes found mine and our gazes clashed. I was sure the look on my own face must have matched his. Our eyes darted around one another’s features, to eyes and lips and cheekbones and hair and back again in a baffled mad dash to process the arrangement of features.
We approached one another, staring, and stopped a few feet apart.
When a siren gives a command in her siren voice, the effect on any hapless human within hearing distance is immediate. Their eyes go soft and unfocused, their face blank. This man did not have a blank face, far from it—his face was full of lucid intelligence. His alert if confounded expression was sharpened by a crafty kind of brilliance.
There was only one kind of human who was immune to a siren’s voice, and that was those who had siren blood in their ancestry. I had learned this from my mother when we’d returned to Canada from Poland, and I’d wondered why she hadn’t used her voice on Martinius to make him forget what he knew about our identities. She had explained that it wouldn’t have worked on him anyway, because Sybellen was most certainly a siren.
I knew why I was staring at this man, mind a blur of questions, face a mask of consternation––but why was he looking at me this way?
“Who are you?” I asked, my siren sound gone and my voice a hollow husk as it cracked over the question.
“Who are you?” he replied, and I was shaken by the timbre of his voice. It was beautiful, smooth as cream and deeper than it should be for all his fine features.
White, almost perfectly opaque skin. Bright blue eyes. Black hair. High cheekbones and forehead, expressive wide mouth. I felt like I was looking at my male doppelganger. There were differences—his cheeks and jaw were sharper than mine, his nose longer, and his eyes were deep set, his eyelids large, giving him an intimidating face. But our coloring was the same, even if the blue of his eyes was more intense, almost indigo. Truly, this man was the son of a siren.
“You’re one of us,” he went on, taking another step closer, his eyes locked onto mine. I couldn’t have looked away if I had wanted to. “I heard it in your voice.”
I found my voice again, not without considerable effort. “You were at the museum earlier today?”
He did not deny it. “I was.”
“And now you’re here, at the Novak house, where the pendant used to be. You want it.”
His lips softened and parted at hearing the name ‘Novak’. His eyes now bordered on pleading and something in my heart warmed to him at this vulnerable, achingly human emotion. “Yes, I want it. Very much.”
“Do you know Lydia?”
His brows pinched and the movement was so genuinely confused that I knew he did not. He shook his head. “Who is Lydia?”
I thought it best to leave Lydia out of the conversation and redirected instead. “Why is the pendant so important to you?”
He seemed puzzled at this question, cocking his head and considering me. “You of all people, being what you are, ask me this?”
Now it was my turn to be confused. He thought I should know its value, its importance. “Up until it was stolen, I thought it was just another artifact from the wreck.”
“You truly do not know the powers of that stone?”
These words unlocked a fresh realization––it was not the pendant everyone was after, it was the gem inside, the aquamarine. I shook my head. “I wish you would tell me.”
He studied me, the black slashes of his brows down over those burning oceanic eyes. He stepped closer and we were now within touching distance. I could see the perfection of his skin, the stubble of a few days’ worth of beard growth.
“I need it for my mother.”
“Who is your mother?”
“Her name is Bel. Do you…know her?”
My breath hitched and I whispered, “Sybellen?”
He took in a small, shuddering breath and his eyes grew glassy with moisture as tears lined his lower lids. The blue of his eyes deepened. “Yes.”
How could this be? My mind was reeling, the world around me was tilting and swaying. I clenched my eyes shut, processing what the existence of this flesh and blood person in front of me meant. Warm hands touched my shoulders and I opened my eyes and looked up into his familiar yet completely unfamiliar face, his impossible face.
I lifted trembling hands and put them on his upper arms and we stood there holding one another like that, gently, as though we were afraid the other would break or vanish like a ghost.
“You’re a Novak,” I said, my lower lip trembling. He wasn’t just a Novak, he was a century and a half old Novak, and I had no doubt of his telling the truth about it. He oozed authenticity the way other people oozed perspiration.
He nodded and a tear slipped down his cheek. For the first time since my eyes were glued to his face, he smiled and it was a brilliant, dazzling smile.
My mind tripped over all the things I’d read in Aleksandra’s Diary, latching onto the things she’d written about Sybellen’s sons. She’d had twins. One was very much like her husband, Mattis, and the other…the one who had drowned the night of the wreck, the one who had been lost forever…
“You’re Emun.” Saying the name rose gooseflesh all over my body.
Another tear slipped down his cheek but he was still smiling. He seemed barely able to control his emotion, and that wide expressive mouth trembled at the corners.
“You don’t know how long I have wanted to hear someone call me by my name, my real, given name.” His eyes burned into mine and his hands tightened around my arms. “You know me.”
I nodded, and a droplet of moisture tracked down my own cheek. Every beat of the heart in my chest was a juicy, aching pulse. This was the shock of my young life, never had anything so shaken me to my quick, not even my own salt-birth, when it had finally come.
“How do you know me?”
“I read your grandmother’s diary. She believed you drowned along with all the rest, that night in eighteen-sixty-nine.”
His face broke briefly and he struggled to regain control of it—it seemed as though his heart had been t
orn open by this statement. He nodded and the smile through the tears returned. “Yes, she would have believed that.”
Here was Martinius’s ancestor, the true last living Novak, the one Martinius should have found, rather than me and Mom. My own heart broke a little, wishing Martinius had stayed alive long enough to have met this miracle.
“You’re Emun Novak,” I repeated, and he nodded.
“But I still don’t know who you are. Are you not a Novak, too? Looking at you is like looking at family. Who are we to each other?”
I shook my head. “We aren’t related, at least there is no proof that we are, nothing linking us in my ancestry. I’m a MacAuley, of Canada, and before my mother was a MacAuley, she was a Belshaw.”
“That explains your accent,” he replied with another smile. “But you are a siren.”
I nodded. “And you are the son of a siren.”
He nodded. “I hope you don’t mind me saying I’m a little overcome.” He rubbed his fingers across his forehead, like he had a headache.
He wasn’t alone in that. My temples throbbed to the beat of my heart.
“You’d better come inside,” I said.
19
Emun followed me through the gate and across the yard to the rear door I had come rushing out of mere minutes before, although it felt like a lifetime ago. Stealing a glance at him as we climbed the steps to the main level and passed through the foyer, I noticed his eyes had gone glassy and he was taking in his surroundings with a quiet internal shock on his face.
“Are you okay?”
“I haven’t been here since my brother died.” His voice was thick with emotion. “It has changed a lot, but it still feels like the place of my childhood.”
He paused in the foyer, peering through the archway leading into the large front room.
“Go ahead,” I said quietly.
He went to the archway and stood there, surveying the empty room––the enormous tiled fireplace, the mermaid crest over the lintel, the bookcases filled with classic stories, the wood furniture and sconces from which yellow electric light glowed.
