Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  And I was going to chase it down.

  I crossed the street and shouldered through the nightclub’s heavy doors.

  The entrance to the Nightingale opened into a long, dark foyer, indulgently decorated in crimson draperies and espresso wood. Ahead of me, an imposing, broad-shouldered bouncer guarded a curtain that led into the nightclub beyond, from which the melancholy song of a trumpet echoed out.

  I tried to look nonchalant as I approached, even though my stomach felt like a soggy dish towel being tied into knots. When I reached the enormous man, I handed him my ID, a fake driver’s license I’d acquired through one of Rufus’s shady contacts that afternoon. It had cost me 150 dollars and a trip to a dodgy attic apartment in Andrew Square, where the windows were covered in tie-dye quilts and the air reeked of something herbal that definitely wasn’t incense.

  I tried to keep my hand steady as I passed the ID to the bouncer. The picture on it was my own, but the rest of the information had been fabricated. For tonight, I was twenty-three-year-old Sherry DuPont of Acorn Street.

  The bouncer’s gaze alternated between the license and my face. “When’s your birthday?” he quizzed me. He crossed his arms over his barrel chest, his pectorals bulging out of his shirt.

  I casually recited the date that I’d memorized on the ride over. “April fourteenth. Why, you going to bake me a cake?”

  The bouncer’s threatening scowl endured for a moment longer, before his face broke out into a broad grin. “Nah, always been more of a brownie man, myself.” He drew aside the curtain.

  As soon as I passed through to the other side, I felt like I’d been transported eighty years into the past.

  The Nightingale was no dive bar—it was a gauche, cavernous space, more of a grand ballroom than a hole-in-the-wall. The crown jewel of the vaulted ceiling was a silver chandelier the size of a compact car. The room itself was shaped like a bowl, with tiers of leather booths terraced down toward the dance floor and stage, where a ten-piece brass band launched into an old Billie Holiday standard. The lighting was dim, bright enough that you could see the man or woman you were flirting with, but dark enough to mask all of his or her imperfections. With the workday over, the booths were filling up with cuddling couples and sharply dressed traders who’d wandered over from the Financial District.

  It was like something straight out of an old gangster film, where men in zoot suits and fedoras smoked cigars, leering at “dames” in flapper dresses. Where uniformed soldiers danced the jitterbug with the fiancées they were leaving behind as they hopped on a boat to Normandy.

  I reached the oak bar on the far side of the room and slid into a leather stool. The sole bartender was dressed in a tuxedo vest and a white collared shirt cuffed at the elbows. He sported an impressive handlebar mustache the same carrot color as his slicked back hair.

  Although he wasn’t wearing a name tag, I felt fairly certain that the quirky, mustached ginger standing in front of me was Smitty.

  “What can I get you, stranger?” the bartender asked without looking up. He busied himself polishing one of the numerous vodka bottles that lined the long mirror behind the bar. I had tried vodka once at a friend’s house party and found it to be perfectly dreadful. Why a bar would stock forty varieties of something that tasted like nail polish was beyond me.

  Since I didn’t drink, I panicked and blurted out something I remembered a character ordering in a movie I’d watched recently. “I’ll have a whiskey, neat.”

  For the first time, Smitty looked at me, with a quizzical expression that told me I’d ordered something completely out of character. “You trying to grow some hair on your chest?”

  “It’s been a rough week,” I replied.

  “In that case, we better bust out the big guns.” Smitty reached for a bottle of brown liquid on the top shelf. “My favorite eighteen-year scotch. First round’s on the house. Just don’t tell my boss.” His eyes flicked up toward a series of tinted windows overlooking the orchestra pit, some sort of VIP room.

  Smitty expertly poured a healthy dose into two tumblers, then held up one. Instinctively, I picked up the other, clinked glasses with his, and took a sip. It tasted horrible—smoky like a cigar, bitter like gasoline, and it burned the whole way down. Smitty was clearly observing me, so it was all I could do to hide my displeasure as the acrid liquid spiraled down my esophagus and ignited a small brushfire in my belly. “Good stuff,” I said hoarsely as I set the tumbler down.

  Smitty withdrew a few limes from beneath the counter and began slicing them into wedges with a paring knife. “So why the rough week?” he asked. “You get fired? You working a shit job where you wish they’d fire you?” When I didn’t reply, he rattled off more suggestions. “Got your heart broken? Broke somebody else’s heart? Your cat ran away? TV broke right before the Patriots game on Sunday?”

  “Death in the family,” I said finally.

  Those four words derailed whatever banter Smitty was trying to drum up with me. His knife paused mid-stroke. “Shit, I’m sorry,” he said. I scrutinized his face to see if there was any recognition at all, but found none. I didn’t resemble Jack as much as Atlas had suggested—you had to be looking for it to see the same cherubic curve of our jaws and the swatch of Irish freckles beneath our eyes.

  “You’re sorry?” I echoed. “What are you sorry for?”

  “It’s just an expression,” Smitty mumbled, noticeably unnerved. He glanced toward the end of the bar, looking for another customer he could serve. Unfortunately for him, the only patrons to be found were sitting in booths, watching the band. He wiped his brow and carved up another lime.

  “You know,” I said, my gaze sweeping over the Nightingale. “My brother would have hated a place like this. He loved real history, not garish imitations of it.” Smitty’s face twitched and his knife strokes picked up pace. “Not to mention that my brother was a straight-edge dork who probably wouldn’t drink a beer unless you convinced him that it had been brewed by George Washington himself.” My hand slid the scotch glass aside as I leaned over the bar. “That’s why it boggles my mind why some random bartender would fabricate a bullshit story for the police about how the night that Jack died, he got belligerently drunk here and tore up the place.” I narrowed my eyes. “So I’ll ask again: What exactly are you sorry for, Smitty?”

  As I said the bartender’s name, he brought his knife down too hard. The lime split in two with such force that both halves skittered away.

  When Smitty lifted his gaze to meet mine, there was no warmth left in it. “You should leave,” he said. His hand had tightened around the handle of the knife. Lime juice dripped off the tip of the blade—drip, drip, drip.

  “You gonna stab me?” I asked. “I thought poison, beatings, and vehicular homicide were more your people’s style.”

  “You got no idea what you’re talking about, little girl.” Smitty glanced up at the tinted windows over the stage again.

  With one look of fear, he’d told me more than he’d probably intended. “Why are you so afraid of your boss? Did he pay you to lie? Was he involved in my brother’s—?”

  “Enough,” Smitty rasped sharply. “I may not have recognized you, but someone here will before long. Then we’re both toast.” He relaxed his hand around the knife and began to skirt his way down the counter, away from me.

  “This can go down one of two ways,” I said, before Smitty could get out of earshot. “You can tell me everything—and I mean everything—that I want to know. About what my brother was doing here. About why somebody wanted him dead. About why you’re covering it up. Or,” I continued, “I make a scene. Maybe I start flipping barstools. Maybe I go pound on the door to that sleazy VIP room and find out who you’re so afraid of. But when I come face-to-face with whoever it is you’re lying to protect, I’m going to tell him that I know everything, and that you sold him out faster than a two-brownie bake sale to save your own ass.”

  I had made no effort to keep my voice down, and Smitty look
ed so terrified that I thought he might take off running for the door, never to return. Part of me had initially wondered if he played a more active role in my brother’s death. My gut said that the squirming mess of a man in front of me, who looked like he might soil himself, was no killer.

  Smitty came back. His face had regained some element of composure, but his hand shook as he picked up his tumbler of scotch and pounded it in one gulp. Then he reached across the counter and did the same with mine, without even so much as a grimace. His eyes lingered closed, and when they reopened, his pupils looked dull and resigned. “Two a.m. Windward Bluffs Country Club in Rockport, eleventh green. I will feel only relief if you don’t show. But if you’re your brother’s sister, you’ll be there.”

  “Count on it,” I said. Eight hours was a long time to wait when the curiosity was burning my insides like battery acid, but I knew that I’d learn nothing more from Smitty as long as he was under this roof. I stood up and headed for the exit.

  I only made it two steps when I heard him say quietly, guiltily, “I always liked your brother.”

  I said nothing, but I thought to myself: Somebody sure didn’t.

  My tongue still tingled with the bitter taste of scotch when I stopped by the hospital to see Echo. Visiting hours would soon end for the night, but I knew the halls well enough at this point to sneak in if I ever needed to.

  Echo was asleep when I arrived. Mom, too, appeared to be napping in the chair next to the bed, with her head resting in the crook of her elbow.

  The gentle click of the door behind me was enough to wake my mother, who bristled, blinked rapidly, and turned to Echo in a motherly panic. But my sister remained fast asleep, her breath whistling reassuringly through the gap between her two front teeth.

  Mom flashed me an ephemeral smile, more an unsure twitch of the lips than anything else. For the entire time that Echo had been sick, smiles in the Tides family always felt like a patch of thin ice. Either you treaded softly, or you’d plunge right through, only to watch the ice seal back up over you, trapping you in a dark, airless abyss.

  Now the ice had thawed even more.

  “What have you been up to?” Mom asked, a yawn muddling the end of her sentence.

  Just sneaking into a seedy nightclub and interrogating the bartender who’s lying to the police about the circumstances surrounding Jack’s death. “Working,” I said.

  “Well, my shift starts in twenty, so you’re right on time for the changing of the guard.” Mom stood up—only to nearly collapse back into the chair. I caught her by the arm as she swayed precariously on one foot. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she mumbled, her eyes glazed. Only then did I notice that my mother was slurring her words.

  I glanced down at her pocket book. The childproof cap of a bottle of anti-anxiety medication poked out between the zippers.

  I considered telling her to call out from work, but in all honesty, I knew she needed the distraction. Everyone upstairs was well aware of her recent loss, and she had been relegated to desk duty for the foreseeable future. No one was going to fault her for dropping a few Xanax to get through the night. I planted a kiss on her cheek and said, “I’ll hang out for a while and sneak out later.” If I wanted to catch the last train out of Boston to meet Smitty, I would need to get to North Station by midnight.

  “My daughter, the renegade,” Mom said, though it sounded soulless. As the door closed behind her, I realized that our relationship over the last year boiled down to a few words here and there. It was as though we had boarded separate boats sailing in opposite directions, and we were always trying to hold a conversation as our ships passed each other in the night.

  At the foot of the chair, a stack of mail came up to my knees. Mom must have finally gone home, a task that she’d avoided since the funeral by sleeping in the spare cot here in Echo’s room.

  The thought of reading one more bereavement card made me want to throw up. I picked up the hefty stack. So this was the weight of the people we touched: When you die, you leave an immeasurable, crushing burden on the shoulders of the few people closest to you. Everyone else sends Hallmark.

  Among the mix of uniform, off-white sympathy cards and letter envelopes containing past-due reminders for utility bills Mom had neglected to pay, I spotted a single splash of color toward the bottom. Curious, I pried out the postcard and held it up to the light.

  The picture on the front was of an old oil painting. On first impression, the ocean scene depicted a beautiful chaos of orange, copper, red, and muted blues. In the distance, in front of the setting sun, a magnificent ship sailed into the churning, frothing waters of an approaching storm. Its sails and masts glowed red, beneath the dark umbra of the squall that was bearing down on it.

  It was only when my gaze gravitated to the foreground that I noticed the horrific scene that was unfolding: men, dying men. Their faces weren’t visible—they were all in the process of drowning in the stormy sea—but their shackled hands reached out of the violent waves one last time. A partial leg was visible in the surf, bound in iron chains, while fish surrounded the limb, preparing for their next meal. Sea gulls descended on the water where it was tinged with the first brushes of crimson blood.

  I shuddered at the macabre image and flipped the postcard over. According to the caption, the painting was called Slave Ship by an artist named J. M. W. Turner, and it currently resided at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, only a few blocks from here. But it was the short message scrawled on the postcard that took me by surprise.

  It was addressed to me.

  The name under the signature was someone I didn’t know.

  But the handwriting, without a doubt, belonged to my dearly departed brother.

  And it was dated the night that he died.

  Dear Sabra,

  Greetings from your old summer camp bunkmate.

  Hard to believe it was nine years ago that you rode with me to the hospital when my appendix burst out on the trail.

  Don’t hit the books too hard senior year.

  I miss you dearly …

  Love,

  Aedon Philomel

  The postcard trembled in my hands. This might have been the last thing Jack had ever written, and it was even more nonsensical than our cryptic phone conversation right before the deadly hit-and-run on the bridge. It wasn’t until my tears dropped onto the messy scrawl of the postcard, causing the ink to run, that I realized I was crying.

  I miss you dearly, he’d written.

  Had he known the end was so close?

  While my second instinct was to experience an updraft of frustration—here I was trying to put the pieces of Jack’s death together, and he had yet to leave me any straightforward answers—I remembered back to when I was in elementary school, before Echo was even born. Every year, on my birthday, Jack would hide my presents around the house, and write me rhyming clues on scraps of notepaper to guide me from one location to the next. Back then, my parents were struggling to make mortgage payments, so birthday gifts were never anything extravagant, but I didn’t care. It was Jack’s riddles and treasure hunt that I looked forward to, not the loot at the end.

  Jack had done this every year, right up until my most recent birthday, which is one of the reasons I had instantly recognized his handwriting. As I got older, he’d expanded the area of the gift hunt to the entire neighborhood, and made the clues harder as well, since “I bet you five bucks / that the next clue’s beneath some rubber ducks” didn’t really pose the same intellectual challenge at age seventeen that it had at age seven.

  The more I reread the postcard, the more I grew confident that it was another of his riddles.

  I started with the basics. The postcard was in my brother’s handwriting, but it was even sloppier and more illegible than usual, as though he had written the note in a hurry. The letters T and I were respectively crossed and dotted in haphazard places, a sign that my brother might have been writing in near darkness, possibly in hiding. That he’d signed the lette
r from a strange name could mean that he thought whoever was after him might be on the lookout for a message sent to his family. The idea of some goon at my childhood home, rifling through my mailbox, gave me the willies.

  Then there was the message itself. On face value, it was nonsense. I’d never been to summer camp. I’d never ridden in an ambulance with any friend after her appendix burst. And I had no friends named Aedon.

  I plucked a pen from the nightstand and began to underline the keywords in the note that jumped out. Camp. Bunkmate. Nine years. Hospital. Appendix. Books.

  None of those words immediately meant anything to me, so I turned to the name. When I typed Aedon Philomel into the web browser on my phone, the search results informed me that Aedon and Philomel were actually two different women.

  But not real ones. They were figures from Greek mythology.

  In both myths, they had been transformed into nightingales.

  I revisited the words I’d underlined in Jack’s message, and watched them magically fall into order in my mind. Book. Hospital bunk. Appendix.

  And nine years ago, back when I would have been eight years old … just like Echo.

  I turned to Echo’s bed. The Greek mythology text that Jack was reading to her that fateful night was right there, lying half-tangled in her blankets by her elbow. She must have fallen asleep reading or looking at the pictures.

  Careful not to wake my sister, I picked up the book and immediately flipped to the very end—the appendix. Nothing stood out to me as I fanned through the index pages. But when I came to where the red endpaper was glued to the back cover, I saw that Jack had lightly penciled a tiny sketch in the corner.

  A bird that might have been a nightingale.

  I fumbled through my clutch until I found the Swiss-army knife attachment on my keychain. I flicked out the blade and carefully carved the endpaper away from the back cover, like I was opening an envelope.

  As I undid the bottom, a single piece of paper, ragged and yellowed with age, dropped out and landed at my feet.