Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  “Hey!”

  He had stopped at the base of the next alley and shouted down at someone in the distance. I squinted at the form from which smoke was billowing up from before grabbing his arm to pull him back, certain that he was actually prepared to announce that he was the student who had killed Miss Mercier solely to get the Parliaments from them, when the person turned around. She eyed him with a raised brow and flicked ash to the ground by her side, and even though she was dressed in cargo pants and a cotton shirt rather than the heeled boots and unsightly cardigan, it only took me a moment to realize who she was.

  “Ilona?”

  “What?” Jack said, glancing back at me.

  I ignored him and continued to stare at her. She stuck the cigarette back into her mouth and came forward, her cracked lips still reddened with blood but her face clear of makeup to show the pointed, sharp features more clearly. My arms dropped to my sides.

  “What are you – how did you – you're here?” I stammered.

  “You tell me 'Bardom Island,' I find,” she replied, her tone as careless as ever. “You do not tell me it is so cold. I would have brought jacket, yes?”

  “But you – but – how did you – why did you come?”

  She shrugged.

  “I am thinking you still need me,” she said, tapping the cigarette off again. “You are solving riddle, yes?”

  “I – yes,” I said, too flabbergasted to say anything more.

  “So I help you. This is simple.”

  She smiled at me in her pointed way, her eyebrows tilting upwards at my dumbfounded expression, and I had the sudden urge to reach forward and grasp her in an embrace. She couldn’t have known what it meant to see her there, or to hear that she was every bit as prepared to help us as we had been to give up, but – looking at the knowing look in her dark eyes – I rather thought that she did.

  “This is oh-kay, yes?” she asked, looking between the two of us.

  “Yeah, no, it's great,” I said.

  I looked at Jack, wondering if he would let on the we had as good as made up our minds to stop the search altogether, but his expression was unreadable.

  “Right?” I added.

  He shrugged.

  “Sure,” he said, his tone indifferent. “Now give me a cigarette.”

  Ch. 19

  We brought Ilona back to Miss Mercier's house to fill her in on the details of the crime. As she stood in the center of the living room looking around, her eyes sweeping over the dust and grime and blankets strewn across the floor in lieu of beds, the place suddenly didn't seem as horrid as it had just hours ago.

  “It is cold here; why do you not build fire?” she asked.

  Jack and I looked at one another.

  “I don't know,” he said. “I don't know how. Nim?”

  “I'm from Connecticut,” I said, as though that was reason enough.

  “You cannot light wood on fire?” Ilona said. “It is good that I come. You would freeze to death in night.”

  She wandered outside and collected an armful of twigs and branches to dump in the fireplace before igniting them with her lighter. As a wave of flames rose up to heat the room, the light flickered against the walls and warmed the place. Jack looked over at me.

  “Where'd you find her again?”

  “Red Light District.”

  “And we can trust her?”

  I didn't hesitate.

  “Yes.” I looked at him steadily, wishing that in doing so I could will away the arguments and doubts that we had had. “She can help us, Jack.”

  “I guess we’ll see,” he said.

  He took a piece of bread from the table and brought it over to toast against the flames. As it darkened to his liking, Ilona took a seat on one of the blankets and stretched her legs out.

  “You tell me riddle now, yes?” she said.

  “It's not really a riddle,” Jack said, surveying the blackened bread before taking a bite. “It's a crime.”

  “Crimes are for police,” Ilona said.

  “Not this one. They're not too interested.”

  He dropped down across from her and finished the toast before beginning to explain what had happened, telling her about Miss Mercier in great detail before going into her death and how we had found the list of girls' names in her house, leading us to discover that all of them had vanished from the island. As he spoke, Ilona's brow turned further and further downwards until it was sharpened in a v over her eyes.

  “So someone is killing girls, and nobody has noticed yet?” she asked when he had finished.

  “Yes,” Jack said with a bit more force than necessary. “Why? Do you think it's implausible?”

  “On contrary, I am thinking it is very plausible,” Ilona replied, narrowing her eyes at his tone. “It is happening in Holland, too; nobody looks for those girls, either.”

  “Right,” I said, cutting in as Jack opened his mouth to make a comment back. “So we've narrowed it down – sort of – to someone who's intelligent, takes summers off, and knows how to … disarticulate people.”

  “Disarticulate people? Where is this coming from?”

  “He sort of … cut Miss Mercier up. Neatly.”

  “Oh, this was nice of him,” Ilona said dryly. Jack scowled.

  “The problem is,” I went on, trying to ward off an inevitable argument, “that that still leaves just about every teacher and student at Bickerby, including the ones who’ve graduated.”

  “This is problem.”

  “Go figure.”

  “But this is not making sense,” Ilona continued, ignoring Jack’s comment. “‘Cutting up’ and ‘neatly’ do not go together.”

  “Right, that’s how we figured out that it was more of a scientific thing,” I said. “Dismemberment.”

  “But this is not good reason for thought,” Ilona chided. “Eh-nim is very neat person, I am sure he would not cut someone up nicely. He would kill them other way.”

  “Well, it wasn't Nim, so that's not a good explanation,” Jack snapped.

  “But what you say does not make sense, yes? How someone kills another person tells you much about crime, yes?” She looked between us and noted our uncertain expressions. “Think of this: if person has been killing girls by throwing them from cliff, why does he all-of-sudden change method? Why does he not throw her off cliff, too?”

  Jack and I glanced at one another.

  “I guess … he was really angry, maybe,” Jack said at last. “She found out what he was doing, and he wanted to … make sure she knew.”

  I looked at Ilona. Her face was furrowed as she thought.

  “What're you thinking?” I asked her.

  “Nothing.” She shook her head. “It just seems … like warning, maybe.”

  “If he was trying to warn her, he went overboard,” Jack said.

  “No, not to her, to someone else.”

  There was a pause in which the room went silent but for the light wind tapping at the windowpanes.

  “What're you saying? She told someone else who it was?” Jack said. “Who?”

  “I am not sure of this,” she said, leaning back so that her shoulders pointed upwards to scrape the tips of her hair. “But Miss Merci-ae has list of names, yes? She hides it in house and does not bring to police. Why?”

  “Because she was frightened?” Jack suggested, his tone still one of utmost annoyance.

  “No, if she is frightened she goes to police and leaves island. Instead she hides it and says nothing. This is clue: this is important.”

  “Please feel free to explain how.”

  Ilona shook her hair from her eyes.

  “Two reasons: First, why does someone not go to police? Second: how does killer know that she knows who he is?”

  Jack and I looked at each other.

  “Well, I guess she … she might've ...”

  “She tells him she knows,” Ilona cut in.

  Jack scoffed.

  “Come on – she wasn't stupid.”
>
  “No, I am not thinking this. But you say she is kind, yes? So this is clue. She knows what is happening, but does not say. Why? She must have compassion for this person.”

  “She didn't have compassion for someone who was throwing girls off of a cliff!” Jack exclaimed.

  “No? Oh-kay, then she is frightened of blackmail.”

  “She – that doesn't even – she couldn't've been being blackmailed!” he said. “She was the nicest person! She didn't have anything to be frightened of! She was –”

  “You are very close to her, yes?” Ilona said, her voice calm in utter contrast with his.

  “I – yeah.” He chewed the side of his mouth as he looked at her. “And despite what everyone on this island thinks, no, I didn't kill her, or those girls.”

  “I do not say this. What I say is, she is very close to student. This is … unusual.”

  Jack narrowed his eyes.

  “No, it wasn't. She was just a nice person.”

  “A nice person who was teacher getting close to student. This is inappropriate, yes?”

  I glanced at Jack before quickly turning away and feigning interest in the hem of one of the blankets. Even without hearing Ilona's full implication, I knew what it was. I had often wondered about how close he was to Miss Mercier, especially in light of knowing that he had walked her home on numerous occasions and visited her at her house, but I had never considered that other students might have done the same.

  “There was nothing inappropriate about it,” Jack said, his voice firm and low. “She wasn't like that.”

  “Maybe not with you, but … maybe with other student, yes?”

  “No.” He glared at her with such force that it was a wonder she didn't flinch. “She was nice to me because she knew I was – because she knew that there was never anything inappropriate about it.”

  “But maybe she did not know. Maybe she is hoping for … something more.” Ilona paused and looked at him steadily. “You say that she is lonely. Maybe she was more lonely than you are thinking.”

  Jack crossed his arms.

  “Just because she was lonely doesn't mean she was running around with students,” he said. “People get lonely – it happens. It doesn't make them compromise their morals.”

  “This is not true.”

  “Oh, right, I forgot – you're a prostitute,” he said angrily, “so you would think that.”

  “I do not think this because I am prostitute, I think this because it is true. People are lonely, they look for people to confide in. Maybe she was confiding in wrong person.”

  “But she wasn't – there was only me!”

  “But how do you know? You are with her every second? You know her every move?” Ilona looked at him steadily. “It does not make her bad person, Jeck. It makes her human.”

  “She could be human and be faultless, too!”

  “I am only trying to solve crime,” Ilona said, raising her voice just slightly to counter his. “We need to look at possibility –”

  “Then look at something else! I'm telling you: she wasn't running around with a student!”

  He was fuming more than I had ever seen him do before, and as the knuckles on his hand turned white from clenching them so tightly, I finally broke my silence.

  “Ilona, maybe … Could you give us a second?”

  She looked between us with arched brows, but nodded and stood to leave.

  “I will have cigarette,” she said. “Marlboro, don’t worry.”

  When the door had shut behind her, I cautiously took a step towards Jack. He was staring into the fire with such intent that his eyes lit up with orange.

  “Listen, Jack, about what Ilona said ...”

  “It's not true.”

  I shifted in my spot. My leg was throbbing horribly from standing, but I couldn't bring myself to sit down. He turned and glared at me.

  “So you agree with her?” he said.

  “No, that's not … I just … I just want to make sure that we didn't miss anything. If someone else in our year was – close – to Miss Mercier, then we’d be able to find him a lot easier.”

  “So you are agreeing with her,” he said. His arms dropped to his sides and he shook his head. “I can't believe this.”

  “I know it's weird to think about, but –”

  “No, not about Miss Mercier: about you.”

  “What?”

  “You meet some prostitute, tell her everything about us, and then invite her here?” He paused, momentarily at a loss for words. “This is – how could you?”

  “I didn't – it wasn't like that,” I said. “I mentioned something about it to her when we were trying to find you, and then … I don't know. I thought she could help.”

  “Well, she can't. If we haven’t been able to figure this out in a year, then she won’t be able to do it any faster.”

  “But she's smart, Jack. She's … she's good at this type of thing.”

  “You don't know that,” he snapped. “You've known her for what? A week?”

  “Yeah, a week,” I said, suddenly beginning to feel just as irritated as him. “And it was the longest, worst week of my life, actually, and she was the only one who would help me!”

  “But you didn't need her! You could have shown that brochure to anyone and they would have pointed you to the farm, and then we would've been fine –”

  “But it wouldn't've been, and it wasn't!” I said, grimacing as another bout of pain shot through my leg. “I wasn't even sure that that brochure was from you – I thought that maybe it was just some advertisement that the school had sent out – and then, after I got to the farm, the owner said that you weren't there, so I called my father and he told me that you were dead, and I – I just didn't know!”

  My voice rang around the room and bounded back at us, covering us in the shakiness that had overwhelmed my being for the entirety of the time that we had been apart. And I wanted to tell him everything that had happened – the diagnosis, the treatment facility, the hallucinations, the delusions, the mistakes, the unspeakable – but none of it would come to my tongue, least of all now.

  “She was the only one who thought that I could find you, and she was the only reason that I did,” I said. “And she’s the only one of us now who’s thinking about this any further, and since I’m not about to let this go, yes, I’m agreeing with her – not you.”

  Jack looked at me hollowly.

  “Fine,” he said lowly. “Agree with her about anything you want – whatever. But you’ve known me for seven years, and when I say that I knew Miss Mercier, and that she would have never been sneaking around with her students, I expect you to agree with me.”

  I turned my head from him, biting the insides of my mouth as I tried to think of a way to do so, but I couldn’t find a reason anymore.

  “I … I don't know, Jack. I just – it's just that it doesn't make sense.”

  “And you can't just trust that I know what I'm talking about? Maybe Ilona's onto something – maybe she'll look at things a different way and make some sort of sense out of all of this – but she's not right about this.”

  “But what if she is?”

  “She's not.” The word cut through the air. “She didn't go after students.”

  “Right, and I find it hard to believe, too,” I said, lowering my voice and trying again. “But it’s … she sort of … I mean, you two were pretty close.”

  “That was different, Nim – there was nothing weird about that.”

  “Right, but … she let you eat lunch with her.”

  “So that I could ask her about France. She wasn't like that: she wouldn't have been running about with a student.”

  “I know it doesn’t fit what you think of her, Jack, but just think about it for a second. She didn't know anyone here, she was lonely … you said it yourself.”

  “She wasn't that lonely. She wasn't –

  “She let you come to her house,” I said steadily. “She let you look around her bedr
oom … I know it's weird to think about, but maybe … maybe you weren't the only one.”

  “But I was the only one. Nim – she let me hang around her because – because she knew that there was nothing inappropriate about it.”

  “But what if that wasn't the reason?”

  “It was!”

  “But what if it wasn't? What if it was – inappropriate?”

  Jack looked at me.

  “Nim, she knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  He paused, suddenly unsure of going on.

  “You know what,” he said. “You know why she let me in.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “No, I don't,” I said. “Tell me.”

  He broke off and turned away, fidgeting with the extra branches by the fire rather than looking at me.

  “Just … never mind,” he said. “It doesn't matter.”

  “What doesn't matter?” When he failed to answer, I let my hands fall loosely at my sides and sighed. “It does matter, Jack: we have to know if there's a reason –”

  “And I'm telling you that there isn't: she didn't go after students.”

  “But how do we know? Maybe she was spending time with other guys, too –”

  “She wasn't!”

  “But she was happy enough to let you in her house and show you around –”

  “Because she knew that I didn't like her that way!”

  “But maybe she didn't know –”

  “She did, Nim. She knew that I – that I –”

  “That you what?”

  “That I'm gay.”

  I stopped and stared at him, but by now he had fully turned away to stare at the soot streaking the floor in front of the fireplace. The idea had certainly occurred to me before, but as it was something that neither of us had ever seen fit to discuss, it had never fully settled in my mind.

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  “That's it?” he said. “That's all you have to say?”

  “Well, the whole Miss Mercier thing makes more sense now,” I said.

  I could see his jaw stiffen and I quickly cleared my throat.

  “I'm – I'm sorry,” I said. The word was difficult to say, even to him. “I was wrong. I should have trusted you.”

  He shrugged.

  “I mean it, Jack,” I said. “I was being an idiot. I didn't think – it didn't occur to me. I just … I thought you liked her.”