by Kelly Powell
Jude pushes up from the table. He braces himself with one hand on the chair back, looking like he might keel over without it. I glare at Peter. “Fine? Fine, is he? Tell me, how was he supposed to get home like this?”
“He told us you’d show up eventually,” Flint breaks in. He tilts his glass toward me. “And here you are.”
Jude lets out a giggle before biting down on his hand to stifle it. I take him by the arm, and he sweeps his cap off the table, holding it in his fist. “Gentlemen.” He moves to bow, but I jerk him away, pulling him toward the door.
“Moira,” he says, “I know you’re cross. I know, all right?”
I swallow hard. We get out onto the street, and at this hour Dunmore has settled for the night. The sound from inside the pub is shut out as the door swings closed, and I’m left to study Jude under the lamplight.
He puts on his cap, glancing back at the door. He smells of whiskey and smoke. We make it a little ways down the cobbles before he says, “I’d like to sit. May we sit? I’m so dizzy.” And he sits right there on the sidewalk.
“Jude.” I’ve no hope of pulling him up without his help.
He squints. “I think if I were not so drunk, I’d know what to say to make you not so cross.” He pats the ground next to him, smiling like he can’t help it. “Come, Moira. Come sit by me.”
I rub my eyes. Taking a seat on the curb, I ask, “Why did you go off like that?”
His smile slips as a shadow passes over his face. “I couldn’t stand it—being in that house.” Ducking his head, he presses his forehead to his knee. “It’s my fault,” he whispers. “It’s my fault he’s dead.”
“Connor?”
“I’m meant to watch the shoreline. I’m meant to—if I just…”
I press my fingers into the fabric of his coat. “You can’t blame yourself for his death. It’s the murderer’s fault, no one else’s.”
Jude scrapes a hand over his face. “Oh, Moira.” He looks up into the night, openmouthed. “I didn’t mean to get like this,” he says, edging into a whine. “They kept buying me drinks. It was so kind, I couldn’t—”
My eyes narrow. “Who did?”
He grins, lopsided. “I like very much that you came to get me.” He flattens a hand on the pavement. “I like—Moira, you know, I’ve missed you so much.”
“I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“You know what I mean.” He lists forward, as though we’re sharing secrets. “You stopped coming to visit. You’re still—you still feel far away sometimes.”
My pulse goes tap-tap-tap like rain against a rooftop.
His mouth twists. “I oughtn’t talk. I don’t know—I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Come on.” I reach out, taking his hand. “Let’s get you home.”
Jude picks himself up, staggering, and grips my hand tight. I lead him from the streetlights and cobblestones to the well-trodden path over the moors. His balance is completely shot; I imagine whoever plied him with alcohol thought it amusing. Jude isn’t in that pub every night like the rest of them. They probably made a game of it. Once more I ask, “Who bought you drinks?”
“Oh, they all did.” He grins wide. “ ‘Keep up, Keeper.’ That’s what they said to me.”
I grimace. “What did you talk about?”
He rubs at his eyes. “They kept asking me things. About… about being in jail and Connor and…”
“What?” My pulse jumps. “What about Connor?”
Jude makes a face. “They wanted to know how I found him. Why the police reopened the case.” Wavering on the path, he claps a hand over his eyes. He says again, “I oughtn’t talk!”
Irritation touches the top of my lip as I steer him straight. “Jude Osric,” I growl, “what did you say?”
I imagine Jude rambling on about our suspicions for anyone to hear, too drunk to keep his mouth shut. Losing patience, I take him by the collar. “Who was it?” I say, yanking him down. “Who asked after Connor?”
He stares back at me. “I don’t—” He stops. A little crease appears between his brows as he considers. “I mean, it was everyone but—Flint, I think. He started it.”
I press my lips into a hard line. “Right.”
Jude swallows. Our faces are very close now, his shirt soft beneath my fingers. I release him, step back, and reach up once more to fix his wrinkled collar.
In the stretch of grass behind him, I spot a light in the distance. Someone else crossing the moors toward us, lantern swinging in the dark. I let my hands fall from Jude’s collar, eyeing the light. The slow sway of it is almost hypnotic, the glow strengthening as the person nears. Then a curious thing happens—the light goes out.
My heart stutters in my chest.
“Jude,” I whisper. “Jude, we need to get off the path.”
“Hmm?”
He looks over his shoulder. I seize him by the hand, pulling him after me. We stumble down the hillside, through the wet grass and heather, tripping on loose shale. Blood rushes in my ears as I tug Jude down, the two of us lying still along the dark slope. “What on earth—” he starts, but I clap a hand over his mouth.
“I think someone may be following us.” I lift my head a little, trying to see over the hill. “They just put out their light.”
I’m abruptly glad we haven’t a lantern of our own. I wait, willing Jude to keep quiet, listening for the sound of footsteps. Above us, the stranger draws close, and I turn my face into Jude’s shoulder, my hand still pressed to his mouth. The person continues on for several paces, before I hear them pause and turn back around. I dare not move until long after their footfalls have receded.
I roll away from Jude, sitting up. Thoroughly unnerved, I brush dirt from my coat with trembling hands. When I look back, Jude is still lying in the grass, watching me through half-lidded eyes.
“You know…” I realize I’m raising my voice and lower it. “You know, I imagine you’d be a touch more concerned right now if you weren’t in such a state.”
He smiles sleepily. I wonder what might have happened had I left Jude to stagger back to the lighthouse alone. It would’ve been quite easy to come up behind him, to draw a knife and slit his throat. Reaching over, he pats my arm in a clumsy manner and says, “It’s all right, Moira.”
I shake my head. There’s no telling who the stranger was. It could’ve been no one of consequence and I’ve dragged Jude halfway down a hillside for nothing.
Caution over carelessness, I suppose.
“Come on, then,” I say, offering my hand. “Almost there.”
We start back up the hill, walking the rest of the way to the lighthouse without incident. At the door to the keeper’s cottage, I turn to Jude. “Where’s your key?”
There’s a long pause, while Jude no doubt has to piece together the word “key” before attempting to locate one on his person. He pulls the old skeleton key from his coat pocket and passes it to me. It feels like a heavy weight in my palm. I twist the key inside the lock, but it won’t catch.
“It’s—you need to lean on it,” Jude tells me.
“You have a shoddy door,” I reply, but it works, creaking open into the entryway.
I light an oil lamp, and the sudden brightness offers me a better view of him. Burst capillaries thread the whites of his eyes, the circles beneath them dark as bruises. I pull off his cap, gently, his hair looking unkempt in the hall light.
“Oh, Jude.”
He smiles, uncertain. “Yes?”
But there are no words, I think, for what I want to say. “Nothing,” I murmur. “Come, let’s get you to bed.”
“Tired,” Jude agrees with a nod.
We take the stairs up to his bedroom. I push open the door, settling him on the narrow bed against the far wall. The space is plainly furnished and has a vacant feel to it. Jude probably falls asleep in the watch room more often than here. I slip off his coat and boots and pull the blankets over him.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
“You’re welcome.”
Just as I move away, he catches at my wrist. “Stay.”
“Jude…”
“Please,” he says, his voice heavy with sleep. “Moira, please stay.” His eyes are already beginning to close.
I kneel, the hem of my dress brushing the floorboards. Jude’s hold on my wrist turns slack as sleep takes him. I comb my fingers through his hair, and he sighs, pressing his face into the pillow.
“Good night, Jude.”
When I leave, I close the door behind me, starting on the pathway home.
I sneak into my house as quietly as possible, but my mother waits in the drawing room. She sets her knitting down, and I come to a standstill, unable to meet her eye.
“Moira,” she says. It’s a great deal different from the way Jude said my name not a half hour ago.
“Mother,” I say, imitating her tone.
Moonlight seeps through a slit in the curtains, and the room is made colorless, somber, and drab. I take off my coat and hang it on the rack.
My mother says, “Where have you been all day?”
“Visiting the Sheahans,” I reply, thinking it’s the safest answer.
She picks up her knitting again. “With Mr. Osric in tow, no doubt. I heard you were by the harbor when the alarms went off.”
My hands curl into fists, but my voice comes out as nothing more than a whisper. “Russell killed two of them.” I take a breath, trying not to remember the shape of his grin. “Someone gave him siren poison.”
“Yes, I heard that, too.”
I rest a palm against the doorway. “The police took him away.”
“Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”
I don’t have an answer for her, and the soft click of her needles fills the silence. I think back on Jude Osric, asleep in the lighthouse, how he clutched my wrist and asked me to stay.
I need my violin. I want the certainty of my grip on the bow, to play until my fingers are raw. I need the sound of the sea at night, its white-capped waves like a string of pearls in the blackness. As I head down the hall, all I can see in my mind’s eye is the lantern light out on the moors. The haunting sway of it—and the moment it went dark.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IN THE EARLY-MORNING HOURS, Dunmore is a pocket of inertia. I walk through backstreets even more worn down than the main ones, finding comfort in the stillness. Pale sunlight shines over the terraced houses, lace curtains still drawn and shutters closed up.
Tucked away among the winding streets lies Dunmore’s abandoned church. It’s a small structure, lonely and forgotten, both very dark and very old.
The stone exterior has weathered over the years. I suppose it had once been beautiful, when its painted murals—now colorless and cracked—gleamed in the light, and its tower bell rung the hour. The bell tower still stands, but the bell itself was removed a long while ago, to its new home in St. Cecilia’s.
This church has no name, or if it did no one can remember it.
I stare up at the tympanum above the arched doorway. Carved into the rough stone are a pair of angels, drowning in the sea, faces eroded by time. Their wings are bent in odd ways, spread wide across the arch.
I open the door.
Brendan’s promise to meet me is one I clung to last night. As I enter the nave of the church, I find him there already, sitting in the front pew opposite the altar. Light spills into the building through broken windows and cracks in the stone. It makes the shadows darker somehow, and I shiver walking up the aisle.
Brendan Sheahan inclines his head in greeting as I sit down beside him. “Morning, Moira.”
“Hello.”
He looks at the dusty pulpit, and I follow his gaze to a large wood carving set into the wall. Two engraved sirens stare back at us. They stand on the shoreline, their eyes wide and teeth bared, as a ship sails unsuspecting in their direction. It makes me wonder just how long sirens have dwelt in Twillengyle waters and how abandoned places always seem to hold more magic than others.
Brendan says, “Bit cloak-and-dagger, meeting like this.” And despite us being inside a church, he begins to smoke, striking a match and slouching back against the wooden pew. The tip of his cigarette is the brightest thing in the room.
“Thank you, though,” I say. “For coming.”
He breathes out a cloud of smoke into the already stale air. He wears a cable-knit sweater, like Jude’s, yet instead of his cuffs being frayed, they are covered in dark stains. Oil or ash. Also like Jude, Brendan is nineteen, but I remember him from back when he played his frame drum at the summer dances, before he gave it up for fishing, smoking, and the sea.
“What do you want, Moira?” he asks.
“To talk about Connor.”
“Ah.” He smiles, too sharp to be taken as kind. “Of course.”
“I am sorry. Everything you’re going through…”
Brendan waves away my apology. “Don’t be,” he says. “It wasn’t you that killed him.”
I look down at my hands, folded together in my lap. “Please, Brendan. I just want to understand what happened.”
The old pew creaks as Brendan leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Cigarette smoke drifts toward the crumbled altar. In a soft voice, he asks, “Did you see him? On the beach. Were you there?”
I don’t have the heart to lie, not about that. He glances back at me. I nod.
“I saw him afterward. When they—in his coffin.” He swallows. With the back of one hand, he scrubs at his eyes. “What did he look like on the sand?”
I press my lips together. The sea takes what it wants, and some say that those who are taken by sirens are those who are wanted by the sea. Connor was left to bleed out in the shadow of the cliff. His blood had soaked his shirt, colored the surf, stained the foam red.
It wasn’t sirens who took Connor from us.
Brendan makes a small, choked sound and tosses his still-burning cigarette to the ground. He crushes it with the toe of his boot, immediately lighting another. “What do you want to know?”
I let out a shaky sigh. “Why was Connor down on the beach?”
“Haven’t the faintest,” he says. “Might’ve been heading back to the docks for some reason and got turned around in the rain.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
Brendan exhales a breath of smoke. “No. Our Connor knew the way from the harbor like the back of his hand. He could’ve made it in the dark.”
I nod in understanding. Islanders need compasses for our hills and paths little more than one might need a compass in one’s own house.
“Do you think he could’ve been meeting anyone? Or that someone brought him there?”
“Careful, Moira.” Brendan smirks. “You’re beginning to sound like your father.”
My brow furrows. I stare at the carved sirens on the church wall. Their mouths are open wide, revealing teeth of jagged wood splinters. Brendan clears his throat, and his voice is rough as he continues. “People always thought he had one foot in the sea. They’ll say the same of you if you carry on like this.”
I look at him: another dark shadow amid the rubble of the church. “Do not patronize me, Brendan Sheahan.”
“Then don’t interrogate me.” His cigarette burns red in the dimness, and I watch more ash flutter to the ground. “You’re looking for something that isn’t there. This—this is sirens, through and through.” A pause. Quieter, he says, “This is just the way of things.”
I feel a sudden loneliness, sitting beside Brendan, in the pews of a long-forgotten church. My heart aches for things beyond my grasp, for something I could not even name. I simply want.
Straightening up, I smooth a hand over the front of my coat. “Thank you again,” I say, though I don’t know what I’m thanking him for. Talking with Brendan has made me more uncertain than assured.
He smiles. “I’ve nothing else to do. Haven’t even been back to the docks yet.”
His voice sounds stra
nge in this place, echoing off the stone walls. The air here is thick with smoke and dust, magic and time.
I take a step toward him, hand outstretched, and hesitate. I don’t know what I can say to this boy. Brendan Sheahan, who spoke as if his own words did not hurt him.
“I only want to help,” I say finally. Without waiting for a reply, I start back through the shadowed nave. Just as I come to the door, I hear the strike of a match in the darkness.
There are times, brief moments, when I think of Twillengyle as a balancing scale, poised carefully between kindness and cruelty. But now—perhaps for the first time—I find myself wondering if the scales ever tipped.
And if they did, which side is tipping now.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I MEAN TO HEAD for the lighthouse after meeting Brendan, but somehow I end up at the old well. It’s in a little courtyard by St. Cecilia’s, away from the shops and stalls cluttering the main road.
No one ever comes here.
Most say it’s haunted by long-dead spirits, but I know the real reason why everyone avoids the well is because of the siren story attached to it. The tale is told to children at bedtime, or whispered among a circle of friends on the verge of a dare.
It’s said that decades ago an islander came to this well to fetch some water. Sometimes he is named Ian, other times it’s Isaac, but by all accounts he is dirt poor and lonely, a ragged soul cast out on the fringes.
So he arrives at this well, drops down his bucket, and begins to hoist it back up. Only when he does, he hears a voice, beautiful and echoing, coming from the depths below. He thinks it’s someone trapped, but it is not—everyone knows it is not—and the man peers over the side.
He calls back to the voice, and the voice answers in song. It’s the most gorgeous sound he’s ever heard; the man barely even notices when the siren rises from the darkness and drags her claws across his skin. She steals him away into the well, and neither are seen again.
