Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  “Right, but the fact that there's no sign of being a psycho does,” I replied. “Do you really think this guy could've killed Miss Mercier? He didn't even have a butter-knife in the kitchen.”

  “So maybe he hid them all. Or maybe his wife did because he's prone to violence.”

  I shook my head.

  When we had been searching for over two weeks, we finally split the list in half and decided to look through the houses separately. I wandered through the town to where one of the English teachers lived and stepped over the fence to cross through the garden that led up to the back door. After peeking inside to ensure that there was no one home, I jiggled the lock to find that it was open and stepped inside. An orange cat was sitting on the counter eyeing me suspiciously. Instead of looking through the place, I took a seat at the table and put my head in my hands. The idea was ridiculous; we would never find the killer.

  Thinking as much, I pulled out the list of addresses remaining on the list. I had visited all but four – two history teachers, one English, and one music – but I had no desire to snoop around any of their houses anymore. I ran my eyes back over the ones that I had already checked and inadvertently settled on the one at the top of the list: Kendall Albertson. I stared at it hollowly for a moment, trying to will myself to believe that he really had retired, but couldn't convince myself. Albertson had loved his profession regardless of the fact that the subject was so dry and that students only took it because it looked good on college applications, and I doubted that he would have ever retired for any reason. I tried to think back to the previous year, skimming over the classes when he had let me skirt by with failing grades out of kindness, to try and detect a possible health concern. He had had a cough that would stop him mid-sentence when we were reading The Aeneid, but I had always been too concerned with my own problems to give it much thought.

  Despite knowing that I should have been looking through the house while I was there, I pulled myself up and set off in the direction of the address listed for Albertson instead. It was at the end of School Road where the majority of other teachers lived. The garden was overgrown and withering, and the windows were caked with grime. I pulled my lip in as I bit down on it. I should have told him that I appreciated everything that he had done for me when I had had the chance. I should have told many people that I had appreciated them when I had had the chance.

  I cautiously stepped over the front gate and made my way to the back of the house. The door was locked, but I pulled out the thick wire that Jack had given me when he had showed me how to break in. The lock snapped open and I pushed the door ajar just enough to slip inside.

  The house looked largely uninhabited. Though it had not been cleared out, it was covered with just as much filth as Miss Mercier's was. There were shelves upon shelves of books lining the wall off to my left, and more books were strewn on every surface. The countertops were piled with unwashed dishes and a clock on the wall had stopped working, and the distinctive smell of old smoke had filled the unwashed curtains that masked the air with a putridness too sharp to ignore. Glancing around at it all, I had half a mind to clean the place: it seemed a shame that no one had come to do so yet.

  I stepped into the living room and took a seat on the couch. There was an ashtray still filled with cigarette butts on the coffee table and a book lying open next to it was written in Latin. I flipped to look at the cover and saw that it was Metamorphoses. He must have been reading it before he died. I shook my head as I considered as much; having never completed The Aeneid, I couldn't imagine being so lonely that I would spend the last days of my life translating old texts.

  “Enim?”

  I jumped so quickly that the book in my hand went flying, clattering to the ground off to my side as I stumbled backwards, and I looked wildly around at where the voice had come from. Albertson was standing in the doorway with a cup of tea in his hand, very much alive. If possible, he looked more surprised than I was.

  “Mr. Albertson,” I said quickly. “I – I – I was just –”

  “What are you doing here?”

  His voice was as kind as ever, but my heart was beating erratically as I tried to think of an excuse as to why I was on the island – let alone in his house.

  “I – I was just visiting the school,” I said. “And I – I mean, I noticed that you didn't work there anymore, and I thought –”

  He moved into the room and set the mug down before taking a seat on one of the old chairs.

  “I thought – you retired?” I asked, switching to a question in lieu of a proper excuse.

  “I have,” he said with a nod. “It seems my age has caught up with me.”

  “Right.”

  He indicated for me to sit down, and I did so purely out of an inability to stand for a moment longer. Sinking back to the cushions, I wound my hands around one another to force them to lie still.

  “I didn't think that I'd see you again,” he said. “This is quite a surprise – but a pleasant one, mind you.”

  “Right. I … It's good to see you too, Mr. Albertson.”

  I clutched more firmly at my hands, still in shock to see him there. I had never given much thought as to how he would look outside of his classroom, but the sight of him there in the decrepit house was alarming. He seemed to have aged even further in the last several months – his limbs thin and brittle and his face creased with deeply-ridged wrinkles – but the old milky eyes were still as kind as ever.

  “I had heard what happened,” he said, “about you on the cliffs. I was … so sorry, Enim. I had no idea how much you were dealing with.”

  “Right,” I said again. I looked at the ashtray and wondered if I should ask him about his own health, but it didn't seem appropriate to do so. “I … I went to a lot of therapy.”

  “Well, that's good. I would hate to think that you would choose to try to end it again. It would seem … such a waste, from a young man like you.”

  I lowered my eyes, certain that if he had known what I had done, he wouldn't have said as much.

  “No, I – I don't think I'll try to kill myself again, Mr. Albertson.”

  “I wasn't suggesting that there's any shame in it, Enim,” he said kindly, mistaking my expression. “The Romans, actually, were firm believers in suicide – so long as the cause was just. Citizens could appeal to the Senate and receive hemlock free of charge.”

  “They asked for permission to die?”

  “Yes. It was a way of ensuring that their reasoning was well-placed, and to make sure that people who didn't need to die – or deserve what they found to be a rather nice death – didn't do so.”

  “Who didn't deserve to die?”

  “Oh, thieves, slaves, soldiers … criminals. Anyone who had broken the law, really. It wasn't that they didn't deserve to die, but rather that they didn't deserve to die by their own hand. The Romans, I believe, felt that it was more punishment to be forced to live with one's mistakes, or else to receive dishonorable deaths.”

  I continued to stare at the floor. The book that I had tossed upon seeing him was lying near his foot, and I quickly reached forward to pick it up.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “I – I think I lost your page.”

  “No, that's quite alright; I remember where I was.” He opened it and thumbed through through the pages. “The Sibyl of Cumae. Do you remember her from The Aeneid?”

  I cleared my throat.

  “She was the guide to the underworld, right?” I said, feeling as though I was back in class. “She helped Aeneas find his father.”

  “Yes, that was her role. In Ovid's version, though, he tells more of her story. I think you'd rather enjoy it, actually.”

  He closed the book and looked across at me. I tried to think of a proper answer, but the mention of Aeneas visiting the underworld had only brought back the conversation with Graves in which he had commended me for making amends with my own father. And though I hardly cared about running out on him to find Jack, especially i
n light of the fact that he had told me that Jack had died, it jolted me all the same. The story didn't remind me of going to my father's house but rather of searching for Jack, and though I had found him, it made me miss who had brought me to him.

  “Would you like to borrow it?”

  I looked up at the sound of Albertson's voice and shook myself from my thoughts.

  “Oh, I don't know, Mr. Albertson … I'm really not – I'm sort of – I don't know how long I'll be on the island.”

  “Oh, of course.” He let the book fall back to his lap and stared down at the cover. “There's not enough time.”

  I thanked him and slipped from the house, silently berating myself for being foolish enough to break in but remarkably glad to know that he was still alive. As I walked down the street in the direction of Miss Mercier's house, though, something tugged at me to impel me to turn back regardless of the fact that I knew I should have been keeping my word to Jack about remaining unseen on the island. But Albertson was old, and he was ill, and the idea of leaving him in that house with nothing but his books for company seemed unjustified given all that he had done for me the year before, and I looped around at the corner to go back. If nothing else, I could simply tell Jack that I had been asking him about Miss Mercier; they had been colleagues, after all, and it was Albertson who had told me about the missing key that would have implicated Jack in the crime. He might have even had some information about her private life, though I doubted that I would ever get the courage to ask.

  I knocked twice on the door and waited several minutes for him to answer.

  “Enim, you're back,” he said, stepping back to let me in.

  “I hope I'm not bothering you,” I said.

  “No, no, not at all. It's just me here, so ...”

  I followed him into the living room and sat back down on the edge of the couch.

  “What brings you back?” he asked.

  “Well, I realized I had more time than I thought, and I … I wanted to see you.”

  He reached forward and stirred the mug of tea on the coffee table, his knobbly old fingers bent and warped with age, before tapping it off and laying it down on the wood.

  “I … I also wanted to thank you, Mr. Albertson,” I said, finally getting the words out. “I … I never really got the chance to. You were … I mean, I really appreciate everything that you did for me last year. You didn't have to.”

  Albertson's face had poised in surprise, but after a moment it softened into a smile.

  “Oh, that's very kind of you, Enim,” he said. “There's no need to thank me. I applaud you for doing as well as you did, given the circumstances, and for continuing to do so. People are allowed to make mistakes.”

  “Yeah. I don't know – I guess.”

  “Would you like to read that passage from Metamorphoses now? I think that you would enjoy it.”

  “Oh, no, that's alright,” I said. “I was actually thinking – or wondering – if you'd like me to … clean up a bit for you.”

  “No, you don't have to do that, Enim. I can't say that I get many visitors, and I don't really mind the disorder anymore.”

  “But I don't mind,” I persisted. “I can just do the dishes and whatnot – it wouldn't take long, and I'd stay out of your way while you read.”

  “You're not in my way,” he said, but consented to let me clean all the same.

  I moved the dishes to the sink and washed them before restacking them in the cabinets, then wiped down the counters and cleaned the filth from the sides of the drawers. Having always been a fairly neat person, I was unaccustomed to doing more than general tidying to keep things clean apart from when I had helped my mother organize her studio before my father saw the disarray that it had so constantly been in. As I stooped down to get the crumbs out from beneath the table, scrubbing at the hardwood until the faint imprint of a reflection stared back at me, I felt rather like Karl.

  “I can do the other rooms, too, if you'd like,” I said when I had finished the kitchen and dining area.

  Albertson looked up from his book.

  “No, no … that's quite alright, Enim. You've done more than enough.”

  “I could come back,” I said. I looked around at the living room where dust had gathered over every surface and into every crevice. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

  “But you don't have to do that, Enim. You don't owe me anything.”

  “No, I know that.” I paused and looked down to the book that he had laid upon the table, suddenly realizing that he would have undoubtedly preferred me to sit down and talk with him rather than clean. I cleared my throat. “I could … I mean, I'd like to hear more about that passage – the Sibyl of Cumae. You could tell me about it.”

  “I would like that,” he replied.

  “Alright, I'll see you then.”

  I made to leave but paused at the door and turned back.

  “Mr. Albertson?”

  “Yes, Enim?”

  “I … is it cancer?”

  He chewed the insides of his mouth for a moment, but then gave me a smile.

  “Lung,” he said. He nodded to the ashtray beside him. “Forty-five years of smoking – I can hardly pretend to be surprised.”

  “I'm sorry, Mr. Albertson.”

  “Oh, it's alright, Enim. We can't grow old forever.”

  Ch. 19

  I wandered back to Miss Mercier's house and slid my shoes off at the door. Jack was sitting in the empty living room smoking tirelessly.

  “Anything?” he asked as I stepped into the room.

  “No. You?”

  “Yeah, but nothing good.”

  He waved me over and I took a seat next to him on the cold floor. Though we had bought a few blankets and supplies from the town, they had done little to make the place more comfortable. If anything, Miss Mercier's house seemed to be getting colder and dirtier by the day, and fall had settled over the island in the usual chill brought on by the ocean breeze. As Jack rubbed at his eyes and let out his breath, the frown that he had been wearing since our arrival deepened.

  “I managed to find the newspaper archives in the town hall,” he said. “Don’t worry – I made sure no one was around when I went in. Anyway, there wasn’t much, but there was a mention of two more girls going missing – sorry, running away – last year after we were gone. One was in March, the other early May. After that, there’s been nothing.”

  I frowned.

  “So that means …”

  “It either means that Hambledom keeps an eye on her employees way better than Barker ever did, or that the killer was a student – and he graduated.”

  I shut my eyes.

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said,” he said irritably.

  I paused as something occurred to me.

  “But that’s not so bad, actually,” I said. “I mean, how many people were in our graduating class?”

  “I don’t know, a hundred, give or take.”

  “So that would narrow it down to a hundred people, then.”

  “Right, a hundred people who’ve gone somewhere else,” he snapped. “If we couldn’t find the guy on an island, how’re we supposed to find him somewhere in the country?”

  I rubbed my temples, wishing that I had a cup of coffee.

  “I don’t know, maybe he’s doing the same thing somewhere else,” I said after a moment. “We could … we could look up similar cases, then track where everyone went to college and …”

  “And?”

  “And find him,” I said, beginning to get annoyed at his tone. “If he killed a dozen and a half people, then he’s probably still doing it – I don’t think it was just a phase that he grew out of.”

  “Right, but I’m beginning to think this is a phase that we should be growing out of.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said angrily.

  “I mean that I’m sick of this!” he said. “We’ve been at this for a year already, Nim, and we’re no closer to findi
ng him now than we were when we started!”

  “That’s not true – we’ve narrowed it down. We probably just narrowed it down further –”

  “But that’s what we always think!” he said, the desperation in his tone scratching through. “We always think that we’re getting closer, and we never are – so what’s the point?”

  “The point?”

  I looked at him in disbelief, hearing him but not quite certain that he could be suggesting what he seemed to be. We had gone through the case tirelessly for months on end, looking through files and sorting through information and plodding forward despite everything that had screamed at us to stop, and the thought of stopping now that we were closer than ever was too unimaginable. He seemed to have forgotten what we had gone through to get to where we were – the fights with Trask and Julian Wynne, the numerous threats of expulsion, the countless phone calls from Karl hammering lectures into my mind, the fight in the dorm room that had caused him to leave the country for months on end.

  And he didn’t know that I couldn’t give it up now – not when it was dangling just before my eyes and lingering just out of reach. He didn’t know that it was too similar to what my mother had done with Turandot, and how watching her decline and wither away had depleted every last bit of who I might have been along the way. He didn’t know what I had had to do to get to that point – what I had gone through to find him, and what I had done when it had all been ending. He didn’t know that I had killed Beringer just to give myself an answer, and that I had spent months in a treatment facility because of it, and that I had nearly killed myself and Ilona as well just to get him back there so that we could finish this once and for all.

  “The point is that we have to find who did this!” I said. “The point is that someone killed Miss Mercier, or don’t you care about that anymore?”

  “Of course I care!” he hollered back. “I just didn’t think – I don’t think it’s possible anymore, Nim!”

  “It is – we just need more time –”