Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  “I did like her,” he said. “Just not like that.”

  “Right.”

  He turned back around to face me.

  “Come on, Nim, what do you really think?”

  “About what?”

  “About – about me,” he said exasperatedly. “Did you – you really didn't know?”

  I shrugged.

  “I guess I never really thought about it,” I said truthfully.

  “Yeah, well, I wasn't exactly going to bring it up. I figured that having everyone screaming 'faggot' after me would sort of tip you off, though.”

  “I always thought that was because of me,” I said thoughtfully.

  Jack rolled his eyes.

  “You certainly didn't help.”

  I limped forward and sat down on one of the blankets, stretching my leg out in front of me and willing the throbbing in both it and my head to die down, before considering once again to tell him about the schizophrenia. He had just shared something with me, after all, and with everything else that was going on, there was little chance of the opportunity to arise again. But I couldn't tell him, I realized – not about this. It was far different than what he had shared, and the weight of it pressed so sharply against my lungs that the damp air seemed to have seeped into it and leaked from the organs down to my insides and up to my throat, and the words wouldn't come. It wasn't necessary – it was finally alright: I had withdrawn from the medication, and the hallucinations and delusions hadn't crept back yet. There was so little carefreeness that we still had to hold onto, and I didn't need to mar it with the realization of what I was.

  “So she knew?” I said instead. “You told her?”

  “Sort of.” He shrugged half-heartedly and slid down to sit across from me. “It was after some argument in her class a few years back – someone had written pédéraste on my paper or something and we got into it. I think he broke my nose, though I don't really remember. Anyway, she took me down to the nurse and asked me why I was always getting into fights with everyone, so I sort of … I don't know. I told her most of the guys didn't really like me because they suspected it. And she … she was easy to talk to.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking of how easy it had been to tell Albertson about Beringer when I couldn’t speak of it to anyone else.

  “Yeah.” He gave a half-smile. “She actually marched up to Barker's office and demanded that the other kid should be expelled. I don't know what she told him the reason was, but he never came back to class so I guess it worked.”

  He paused for a long moment as he remembered it, a frown tugging his expression down until it was just a mark of devastation, and shut his eyes as he shook his head.

  “She was a good person, Nim,” he said. “She was … That's the real clue here. She was a good person, so how could someone kill her and not feel any remorse?”

  I bit the insides of my mouth.

  “Do you think if she knew who the killer was that she wouldn't tell anyone?” I asked.

  “No, that doesn't … that doesn't make sense,” he said, but there was uncertainty in his tone.

  “If you had done something wrong – really wrong – would she have reported you?”

  “I … Maybe not,” he admitted. “But to not report someone for murder? She wouldn't do that – she'd have wanted to stop him before he continued.”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But then we must be missing something – something about why she would know and tell him that she knew. Maybe – maybe it was a student, and she didn't want him to get into trouble.”

  “But she had a guy suspended for using a homophobic slur,” Jack pointed out. “Why wouldn't she have someone arrested for murder?”

  I shook my head; it was far from making sense. I tried to think of a possible reason as to why she wouldn't want someone to get into trouble, going through all of the reasons that I might not say something if I had discovered that someone was killing people, and my mind fell on Beringer. Despite knowing that I had done it, Karl and my father had gone through every measure necessary to ensure that I wasn't placed at fault by ruling it as an accident.

  “Maybe … maybe it was an accident.”

  “Someone doesn't kill someone once a month for a year on accident, Nim.”

  “No, not the guy who killed them. Maybe Miss Mercier told someone what she'd found, and it turned out to be the killer.”

  “She accidentally told him?” Jack made a face. “How would that work?”

  “Maybe … maybe she did tell the police,” I tried. “Only … the killer is an officer and ...”

  “The killer takes summers off.”

  “Right. Okay, so maybe he's a … a ...”

  “Bickerby administrator?”

  I shrugged. It didn't sound right at all.

  “Maybe.”

  “Yeah,” Jack agreed, but it was clear that the reasoning was getting us nowhere.

  He turned and walked over to the window, his hands deep in his pockets. There was a shout of laughter from outside, and a group of boys in untucked shirts and rolled back sleeves could be seen making their way into town from the Bickerby campus. Jack eyed them with a frown.

  “Remember when we used to be like that?”

  “What – fourteen?” I said.

  “Happy.”

  I gave him a careful look.

  “We'll be happy when this is over,” I said.

  “And when will that be again?” He moved to face me again, his arms crossed and an unlikely expression playing on his face.

  “Soon,” I said. “It's only the first month of school.”

  “It's the second month of school, Nim,” Jack said. October had come before I had realized it, and without a rigid schedule it was difficult to remember what day of the week it was let alone what month. “We're almost midway through, actually. Tomorrow’s the fourteenth.”

  I frowned.

  “What's that got to do with anything?”

  “The fourteenth,” he said, his tone taking on an edge again. “That's when Miss Mercier was killed. A year ago.”

  I fidgeted with the sleeves of my sweater, pulling them down until they covered my hands. It hadn't occurred to me that the anniversary of her death was coming up, just as I hadn't remembered my mother's birthday a few months beforehand. Time seemed to have wriggled from my grasp and escaped somewhere into the air to run rampant, and it was all that I could do to keep up with it. It felt as though every clock had simply stopped and was waiting to restart again, reviving the deadened lives when it did so, and only then would we move forward.

  “Right, of course,” I said. “But … but a year's not so long. Not for this sort of thing.”

  “But what if we never find who did this?” Jack said, his voice hastening. “What if the guy was a student who graduated? Even if Ilona can figure it out, what’ll we do?”

  “We’ll … we’ll ...”

  “We’ll what? Chase him around the country?” He looked at me imploringly. “We can't do that, Nim, and I can't – I can't do this much longer.”

  I lowered my eyes.

  “I know,” I said.

  “So what do we do?”

  I shook my head. I had been through all of this before with my mother, searching for a way to find the answers to questions that she had left behind, and I didn't want to do it again. It had ended with her death as well as it could have – wrapped up and shoved to the back of my mind and replaced with other things. I had let it go only by realizing that the answer was that there was no answer, and we couldn't do the same with whoever had killed Miss Mercier. There was an answer, and there was a resolution, but at the moment it felt every bit as impossible to find as my mother's long-awaited ending to Turandot had been.

  Ilona returned inside nearly an hour later. She dropped the empty pack of cigarettes into the clutter that had gathered on the floor and made her way over to where the fire had burnt down beneath the mantel.

  “I have been thinking,”
she said, “and there is one part that I am not understanding. The killer only throws girls off cliff?”

  “Only?” Jack asked. “Seems like enough.”

  “But I am thinking that this is odd,” she said. “I would think he would be assaulting them, too. This is not true?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “No, the police report for the one girl did an autopsy. They found nothing strange about it – you know, except for the obvious – and said that she died from blunt force trauma or something.”

  “But why does man kill young girls, then?”

  “Because he's a psycho?” Jack suggested.

  Ilona hummed, seemingly not convinced.

  “And what about Miss Merci-ae?” she asked. “She was cut up, yes?”

  “Yeah. Dismembered.”

  “So what is this meaning?”

  I glanced at Jack.

  “Well, he … he cut her head off and then her arms and legs.”

  “But why not throw her off cliff, too? This would be making more sense.”

  “It’s the same person, Ilona,” I said. “We can be sure of that – Miss Mercier had the list of girls’ names. It wasn’t coincidental.”

  “No, I am knowing this, but change in tactic does not make sense to me,” she said. “He has reason for this. He kills girls for one reason, and Miss Merci-ae for other. This is important difference to him.”

  “But he killed them all the same, so does it really matter how?” Jack said.

  “Yes. Throwing body from cliff is seeming kinder: cutting head off is seeming less so.”

  “They both seem pretty fucked up to me,” Jack commented.

  “But I would rather be being thrown from cliff than dismembered,” Ilona said. “I would like to be buried in one piece, yes?”

  “Doesn’t seem like it would matter all that much; you’d still be dead.”

  Ilona ignored him.

  “How would you kill someone?” she asked him.

  “I thought we established that I didn’t do this,” Jack said in annoyance.

  “If I am thinking you are killer, I would not stand in room with you,” Ilona said back. “For record: how would you do it?”

  “I … I don’t know,” Jack said, glancing at me. “I’d probably poison them or something.”

  “What about you, Eh-nim?”

  “He’d beat their head in with an English novel,” Jack said for me, and smirked as I rolled my eyes.

  Ilona hummed to herself again, falling back into thought.

  “Oh-kay: what is first thing you do after you kill them?”

  “Could you try not to ask that as though I’d actually murder someone?” Jack said irritably, but when she continued to stare at him he sighed and added, “I’d hide the evidence.”

  “What is second thing, then?”

  “I … I don’t know. I’d probably be a bit disconcerted – you know, seeing as I’m not a psycho – so I’d … I’d tell Nim.”

  “Don’t implicate me in your crimes,” I deadpanned.

  “You would tell Eh-nim,” Ilona repeated slowly. She frowned as she did so and Jack and I glanced at one another again. “You would tell him most things, yes?”

  Jack glanced at me again, but this time I didn’t meet his eyes. Considering that I hadn’t been able to tell him the large part of the events that had gone on since he had left – or even about the music that I had heard or the details of my mother’s health decline before that – the idea that he was so willing to admit anything to me left an imbalance hanging between us that I couldn’t correct.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You tell him when you find out about Miss Merci-ae’s list?”

  “Well, we were together when we found it, so yeah.”

  “But you tell him when you find other thing, yes? You go to him and say, ‘look at what I find?’”

  “Not with that accent, but sure,” Jack said with a shrug. “What’s it matter?”

  Ilona sat back and tucked her legs up to her chest, her brow still heavy over her dark eyes.

  “Miss Merci-ae finds girls are being killed,” she said. “She may even find who does it, but she does not go to police. This is big secret to not share, yes?”

  “That’s kind of the point of a secret,” Jack said.

  “But to keep it to self? This would weigh on mind, and she keeps it for long time, yes?”

  “So what’re you saying? You think she told someone? Who?”

  “Who is she close to, beside for you?”

  Jack looked momentarily at a loss as he shook his head.

  “No one. I told you – she didn't have any friends.”

  “No other student? No other teacher?”

  He continued to shake his head.

  “No. I mean, everyone liked her, but she wasn't friends with anyone. Some of the teachers who took over for her class might've known her a bit better, but it didn't really seem –”

  “Albertson.”

  I said it before realizing that the name had come to my tongue, and the sound sank into the air around us. Albertson had been especially broken up when she had died, and he had been on edge when I had asked him the details of the crime. He had told me that her death hadn't been her fault right before telling me that the police had found the key that they had thought belonged to the killer. I remembered the way his hands had shook when he clutched at the desk to be upright, but it had never occurred to me that it was not grief, but rather fear, that had caused them to do so.

  “Who is this?” Ilona asked.

  “My Latin teacher,” I said. “He … he and Miss Mercier were friends.”

  “But he died, didn't he?” Jack said. “He wasn't at the school.”

  “No, he's alive.” I shifted in my spot, suddenly aware of what I was admitting. “I … I went to see him.”

  “You what?” Jack said. “Nim, whatever happened to not letting anyone know that we're here?”

  “I ...”

  “But this is good,” Ilona said, saving me from answering. “He is at school?”

  “No, he retired,” I said. “He's sick – he has cancer.”

  Ilona hummed.

  “But this is good, too,” she said. “Cancer is bad? He is dying, maybe?”

  “I – yes,” I stammered. “Though I don't see how that's a good thing.”

  “It is,” Ilona said. “He will not be afraid now.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “To tell us who killer is.”

  Ch. 20

  I stepped back and collided with the doorframe, cracking my head ever so slightly on the wood and sending it spinning further as I looked between the two of them.

  “I can’t ask Albertson if he knows who killed Miss Mercier,” I said incredulously. “What if he says no?”

  “What if he is saying yes?” Ilona countered.

  “I – no, but – you don’t understand,” I said, trying again. “He’s old, he’s really sick …”

  “So he will be dying regardless,” Ilona said. “Before he is frightened that killer will come after him; now he is not so afraid, maybe.”

  “Or maybe not,” I said, defending him even though the conversation we had had about the Sibyl of Cumae was still sounding in my ears. “We can’t ask him.”

  Ilona looked at me patiently for a long moment before finally drawing her eyes away.

  “Oh-kay, then what is alternative?” she asked. “We give up?”

  “We could search his house,” Jack said.

  “For what?” I asked. “A sticky-note with the killer’s name scribbled on it?”

  Jack shrugged.

  “You never know – we found that list of Miss Mercier’s here. You’d be surprised what people will leave lying around.”

  “Not Albertson,” I said. “Besides, you’d never find anything there: his house is a wreck. It took me hours just to clean the kitchen.”

  Jack and Ilona looked at one another.

  “What?” I said. />
  “Nothing,” Ilona said. “But … this is sounding good. You could offer to clean house and … take look around, yes?”

  I stared at each of them in turn, wondering if they had any idea what they were asking me to do. If Albertson hadn’t been willing to say anything about what he knew concerning how Miss Mercier had died, then there must have been a good reason, and I had no intention of ruining the little that was left of his life by dragging him back into it.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I said. “Go through his office and sneak random files out under my sweater, hoping that he doesn’t notice?”

  “You could drop them out the window,” Jack suggested.

  “He’s got cancer, Jack, not cataracts.” I crossed my arms. “I don’t want to go through his things. He’s dying.”

  “So should we wait until he dies and then go through his things?” Jack asked. “How long do you think he’s got?”

  “Jack!”

  “Oh-kay, do not argue,” Ilona said, chiding us with a wave of her hands. “Eh-nim does not want to go through things. Solution is simple: Jeck and I go through things instead.”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “I think he’d notice if you two showed up and started going through his bookcase,” I said plainly.

  “Of course he will be noticing this,” she countered. “This is why you get him from house, yes? Distract him for while.”

  I continued to stare at her at a loss for words, wondering what excuse I could give next to protect him from what they had already decided to do, but couldn’t come up with anything remotely plausible. I shook my head.

  “Eh-nim, we do not bother him this way, yes?” Ilona said, dropping her voice to a more gentle tone. “He will not know we are there, or what we are doing. He can still be peaceful.”

  “I … I guess, I just …”

  “You do not worry: Jeck and I do not disturb him. He will not be knowing anything of this, yes?”

  I finally consented with a nod of agreement despite every part of me protesting to what they were doing. The sense of manipulation that I had felt when I had tricked Ava into helping me get into my father’s office had returned, and it was only the knowledge that that had led to me finding Jack that allowed me to do the same now. But even if we did find who had killed Miss Mercier, I still wasn’t certain that I could keep the guilt from seeping further into my bloodstream if Albertson ever knew what I had done; I wouldn’t allow him to think that I had only sought his company in order to use what had undoubtedly haunted his mind to ease my own.