Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  The image made me want to vomit. I knew from conversations with Jack that tarring and feathering was a form of torture popular during the Revolutionary War.

  “Next thing I knew, someone wrapped a hand around my mouth. She forced me to stare at my poor dead Wally and rasped into my ear, ‘This is what happens when you interfere with history.’ Then she made me sit down and write out the riddle Jack had shown me as best as I could remember.”

  “By chance was this cretin high as a satellite and sporting a pair of metal horns?” I asked.

  The professor nodded. “I could only remember a few phrases, and the bitch did kill my cat, so I fabricated some lines, enough to keep her walking around in circles in the museum for a few days. When it was all written out, I figured I was a goner, but she said I would stay alive as long as I was useful to her boss. That I’d be a ‘historical consultant.’ And if I went to the police or tried to flee the city, she would—how did she put it?—personally flay me and pin my hide to the State House steps.”

  The professor was lucky she’d believed Aries. Detective Grimshaw had ears everywhere.

  Something she’d said earlier had been troubling me. “Why did you say that searching for the Sapphire is a fool’s errand?”

  “Oh, come on,” she muttered. “The Sapphire is a hoax—an elaborate and impressive one to be sure, but a ruse nonetheless.”

  While I was committed to this quest, I knew very little about the journal’s origins. “Convince me,” I challenged her.

  “For starters, the riddles were added over a century after the journal was originally written.”

  “What?” Anyone could see that the riddles and the journal entries had been written by two different hands. Was it possible that the authors had existed a lifetime apart?

  “The journal itself originally came into the possession of the Boston Athenaeum library in the early 1900s,” the professor continued. “Historians authenticated the existence of Cumberland Warwick, but only the most superstitious zealots believed the story to be anything but a folktale. A Confederate deserter helping an African tea farmer transport a magical plant to heal his enslaved son’s sickle cell anemia—seriously? Still, it was kept on display beneath a glass case in the Athenaeum for many decades, until one night in the 1970s, when a thief broke into the library and stole it.”

  So that theft couldn’t have been Nox, unless he’d been a really enterprising fetus.

  “The Athenaeum assumed it would never see the manuscript again, that it had been pawned on the black market. One morning, a curator came to work and discovered something peculiar: the first page of the journal, torn from its bindings and stowed back in the glass case as though it had never left. Even stranger, someone had scribbled a poem on the reverse side, which had previously been blank.”

  My soul sank into despair. If this was all true, then the riddles could be nothing more than forgeries, the graffiti of some historically inclined trickster. Part of me had truly believed that the quest had been left by Cumberland Warwick himself, or at least someone close to him who might have kept the Sapphire alive all these years.

  The rest of the story seemed pretty obvious to me. At some point, Nox had stolen that first riddle from the Athenaeum and started following the clues. My brother had caught wind of this and hijacked the quest. We know how that journey ended.

  I’d been so lost in my distress that I didn’t notice Professor Shepherd turn around. She closed her hand gently around the tube of lipstick in my hand. I expected anger from her, but her expression had softened. “Who’s dying?”

  So Jack had omitted that part when he enlisted her help. “My sister. She’s not doing so well. Cancer in her lymph nodes.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Charlotte said, and despite all her showboating and panache, I believed her. “Here’s the best advice I can give you: Go spend time with your sister. Make every day count. Don’t waste it chasing after white whales.”

  Her words cut deep because they echoed the excruciating questions that had been haunting me. What if I was wasting time I could be sharing with Echo? What if this quest was total bullshit, a dead end that was stealing memories I could be creating with my sister? What if Echo blamed me for running out on her and she took a turn for the worse while I was away? What if her last impression of me was that I had abandoned her during her time of need?

  But it would be even worse to turn back empty-handed now.

  And as long as Nox, Grimshaw, and Aries were still alive, they would stop at nothing to “contain” me, which meant that I would be putting Echo and Mom in grave danger every time I set foot in that hospital.

  “Can I trust you?” I asked quietly.

  In response, Charlotte folded down the car’s sun visor. There were a series of photographs there, all of the professor with the same woman. In the last picture, the woman lay in a hospital bed, her face gaunter, her hair shorn, her smile duller, with Charlotte’s lips pressed to her forehead. A prayer card accompanied the final picture, along with a string of rosary beads.

  Charlotte touched her fingers to a faded picture, back when the two women couldn’t have been much older than me. “I’ve lived a mostly selfish existence. But when you lose someone that your world revolved around, you realize we’re all in this together.”

  I pulled out my phone and showed her a screenshot of the latest riddle’s first eight lines. It was a risk to show her even this much, but with Echo’s health on the decline, time was a luxury I didn’t have.

  Professor Shepherd’s eyes darted across the screen, absorbing each line. When she reached the end of the second stanza, a smile played over her lips.

  “Dana,” she said. “Dana, Massachusetts.”

  An entire town was a dispiritingly large target, but hopefully Atlas could decode the final four lines into something more specific. “You’re absolutely sure this time? You didn’t exactly ace the first riddle.”

  “Far more certain than I was before. Besides”—She tapped my hand— “this time I know what’s at stake.”

  After thanking her for the lead and apologizing for pretending to hold her at gunpoint, I stood on the curb, watching her BMW speed away. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to put as much distance between us as possible. I dialed Atlas and he picked up on the first ring, immediately launching into a frustrated rant about all the dead ends he’d reached at the library.

  I cut him off. “What do you know about Dana, Massachusetts?”

  There was a long silence on the other end. I could practically hear the cogs click as they turned in his head. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “Put on a coat. I’ll pick you up at the condo in ten.”

  I winced, glancing at the street sign above me. “Actually …”

  Fifteen minutes later, Atlas’s pickup careened around the corner and screeched to a halt next to me. As I climbed into the passenger seat, he nodded toward the Bunker Hill Monument. “Do I want to know?”

  I shook my head. I reached for the GPS on his dashboard and started to type the letters “D-A-N-A.”

  Atlas chuckled and pulled the truck away from the curb, heading back toward the interstate. “Don’t bother. You won’t find it in there.”

  Sure enough, the GPS returned with zero results. Even though I knew he was absolutely dying to tell me, I asked, “And why, oh wise King Nerd, does the magical black dashboard box not know the route to Dana?”

  His eyes flashed with excitement. “Because Dana doesn’t exist!”

  Meanwhile, in the North End

  Charlotte Shepherd navigated the tightly packed tables of the restaurant Ombra. Around her, couples flirted and clumsily mispronounced the Italian dishes on the menu, to the disdain of their black-tied waiters. They were all having a great old time, unaware that the woman solemnly walking past them was about to do a truly deplorable thing.

  When the professor parted a curtain and stepped out onto Ombra’s private outdoor grotto, she found herself alone with the one man she’d hoped she would ne
ver see again. Horace Nox sat at a wrought-iron table, a small feast laid out before him. Two gaslit torches cast a bubble of heat onto the patio, warding off the autumn chill, but Charlotte felt no warmth as she took the seat across from him.

  Horace didn’t look up as her chair’s metal feet grated over the bricks. He twirled the fork in his hand and speared a slab of salami off the antipasti plate. She watched, disgusted, as he chewed, his teeth stained magenta from the half-empty bottle of wine on the table.

  Eventually, he picked up a bright red lobster off a plate and dangled it in front of her. “You look famished, Charlotte. How about some surf and turf?” He brandished the crustacean’s red claws, a child playing with his food.

  The professor wrinkled her nose and leaned away. “I’m allergic, so I think I’ll pass.”

  “A shellfish allergy, in a city built on the blood and sweat of fishermen?” He wagged a finger. “Now that should be a crime.”

  Charlotte was sick of Nox’s cat-and-mouse conversations. It was time to cut the bullshit. “I want some guarantees,” she demanded. “You tell your minions to stay away from my daughter’s dorm, especially that psycho with the horns. I don’t ever want them within a square mile of her again.”

  He finally made eye contact. “Done. If your information pans out of course.”

  So she told him every detail from Sabra’s visit, including the destination that the poor girl was probably headed at this very moment. And when Charlotte was done, she could only think: God forgive me.

  Nox regarded her coolly as he poured two glasses of red wine. When he slid one of them across the table, she didn’t lift a finger to touch it. She wasn’t going to break bread with this monster.

  The crime lord shook his head. “You call yourself a historian, yet you reject the opportunity to taste history when it’s put right in front of you?” He held up the scuffed bottle. “This Syrah comes from a vineyard in Tunisia that’s over two thousand years old. That means it’s older than Jesus, for Christ’s sake—literally! The Phoenicians planted grapes outside Carthage, on the banks of the Bagradas. When the Romans destroyed the city during the Punic Wars, the vineyard miraculously survived and flourished as the wind scattered Carthage’s ashes over the river valley. So to ingest this wine is to taste the ruin of an entire empire.”

  Nox picked up a piece of focaccia and swabbed it in a saucer of green liquid, drawing lazy circles while the porous bread soaked it in. “Then there’s this olive oil. It’s squeezed from the olives of one of the oldest trees in the world, an Olea europaea that has refused to die, even as civilizations rose and fell around it.”

  “If I wanted a history lesson,” Charlotte said, “I would read one of my own books.” Still, parched from the stress of condemning a young girl to die, she absently picked up her glass and took a long gulp, as though she were chugging a beer instead of a priceless wine that sold for a thousand dollars an ounce.

  “The point is,” Nox went on, “that if you want to live to be three thousand years old, you have to be able to thrive in the midst of destruction, to stonily watch the world crumble around you. That’s why, in another three millennia, that vineyard will still be producing wine, and that olive tree will still be making oil, and I’ll still be sitting on a gilded throne.”

  Charlotte had started sweating profusely under the gas lamps. “You’ve got the narrative all twisted around. Those plants have lived as long as they have because they’re fucking plants. They don’t make enemies and they don’t start wars.” She swallowed hard and tugged at the neck of her cardigan to let in more air. “You want to sit at the top of the world, Horace? If there’s one lesson you should take a way from seven thousand years of human history, it’s that every throne is a death sentence. And the bigger the throne, the bigger the …” The professor cleared her throat once, twice. “The bigger the …” The word ‘fall’ never left her lips because her throat had completely closed up.

  Horace’s taut face didn’t even twitch as she futilely gasped for air. “You look feverish,” he said. “Maybe it’s the gas lamps. Or maybe I swabbed the inside of your wine glass with oyster juice before you sat down.”

  Charlotte’s eyes bulged. She desperately fumbled for the clasp of her pants pocket, where she kept an epinephrine pen in case of emergencies.

  In a flash, Nox was out of his seat and kneeling next to her. His hands fastened down on hers, clamping them to her thighs. She wriggled to free herself. The EpiPen, her ticket to oxygen, was so tantalizingly close.

  Nox brought his sallow face up to hers, until the enlarged pores on his nose looked deep as wishing wells. If she’d been able to breathe, she could have smelled the sickness on him. “My men will never go near your daughter again,” he promised. “But unfortunately, neither will you.”

  The professor’s eyes rolled back into her head. After a minute of convulsions, after her brain starved for air that would never come, neurons screaming and dying, her body finally went still and her head drooped. When Nox released her hands, her arms unfolded limply to either side of her.

  Nox straightened his tie. On his way back through the restaurant, he found his waiter, Armando. “Some vagrant crashed my dinner, but I’m not one to turn away a hungry soul. You should have seen her eyes light up when she tried the oysters!” Nox slipped a crisp twenty into the waiter’s breast pocket. “Check on her again in fifteen minutes, and if she wants anything else, put it on my tab.”

  “Absolutely, sir.” Armando bowed with a chipper smile.

  When Nox reached the street, his livery driver rolled the Cadillac up to the curb. As soon as he was in the privacy of the backseat, Nox speed-dialed Louis Grimshaw. “Good evening, detective,” he said. “I’m going to need you to drop whatever you’re doing and visit an imaginary town.”

  It began to snow on our drive west, a gift from New England’s notoriously temperamental weather. With the flurries whirling around Atlas’s truck, I felt strangely safe for once. Even back at the Dollhouse, I experienced a low, steady hum of anxiety, that instinct that if I stayed still for one second too long, Nox would batter down the doors and slaughter us both.

  But for now, as the world rushed by our sixty-mile-an-hour snow globe, it felt like maybe, just maybe, this quest had the possibility of coming to a safe and happy conclusion.

  Atlas gave me a crash course on the history of Dana as he drove. His statement about the town being imaginary had been slightly misleading. While it was true that Dana no longer existed, eighty years ago it had been very real.

  In the decades following the Civil War, the population of Massachusetts boomed, increasing the demand for drinking water. Fearing an inevitable shortage, the state had conceived an extraordinary plan: They would divert the Swift River into a nearby valley to create a manmade reservoir vastly bigger than New England had ever seen.

  To do it, they would have to flood four towns.

  The townships of Prescott, Enfield, Greenwich, and Dana were all condemned to be swallowed by the river in April of 1938. People evacuated the houses their families had inhabited for generations. Graveyards were disinterred, the bodies reburied elsewhere. Churches, schoolhouses, hotels, roads, and railroad tracks—over the seven years it took for the Quabbin Reservoir to fill the valley, all of these were drowned beneath more than four hundred billion gallons of water.

  In my seventeen years as a Boston resident, I’d never wondered where the water that I used every day to drink, brush my teeth, and shower originated.

  Atlas’s history lesson raised one alarming question. “If Dana is at the bottom of the reservoir, then what are we going to do? Scuba dive to find the next riddle?”

  “I rented a submersible,” Atlas replied. When he got no laugh from me, he sighed. “Part of the town highlands are still above water, on a peninsula that juts out into the reservoir. The foundations of the buildings are all that remain of Dana, but if we’re interpreting the riddle correctly, I’m banking on there being a little something more than history
buried within the town limits.”

  Eventually, Atlas pulled the truck off the highway onto a woodsy backroad. Modern-day Petersham, Massachusetts, had absorbed Dana’s remnants. It was practically a ghost town itself, though a beautiful one. The houses on the “main road” were few and far between, separated by long stretches of woods. Having grown up in Dorchester, where the streets were so densely packed that you could reach out your window and touch your neighbor’s house, it was hard to believe that a place like this existed only an hour away. Ten minutes driving through this town and I could already feel time itself slowing down.

  Atlas launched into yet another impromptu history lesson when we passed the town green. Shortly after the Revolutionary War, in the 1780s, a rebel band of subsistence farmers had struck out against the state, taking up arms to protest the oppressive tax and debt collection that threatened their way of life. After a failed attempt to seize the local armory, Shay’s Rebellion set up camp in Petersham, only to be ambushed and defeated by the militia.

  “It’s funny,” I said after he finished the story. “It’s been two hundred and fifty years, and the have-nots are still protesting against the haves.”

  Atlas grunted in agreement. “The only difference is that now we do it with strongly worded Facebook posts instead of muskets and cannon fire.”

  Atlas pulled over onto a dirt road and parked the car. A series of metal rods obstructed the path ahead to automobile traffic, so our journey would have to continue on foot.

  After raiding the bed of his pickup, Atlas found what he was looking for: two shovels, one of which he tossed to me.

  I caught the wooden handle and gazed skeptically at Atlas. “So you just happen to keep a collection of shovels in your truck? Is this the part where I ask where the bodies are buried?”