“But Eh-nim, this is not time, yes? We should go after Jeck.”
“Look at it, Ilona, please!”
“But I am not understanding –”
“I’m losing my mind!” I said, grasping my hair and trying to yank it out. “I’m – I’m thinking things that aren’t right, Ilona, and I’m getting confused again, and I need you to look at this and tell me what it means or else I’ll – I’ll come to my own conclusions and they’ll be wrong and –”
“Oh-kay, oh-kay,” she said, forcing her voice to be low in an attempt at straining calm. “I look at this, yes? I look.”
She pulled the papers towards her and scanned over them, her brow furrowing as she read through the first page, and I clutched my arms around my legs as I waited for her to make sense of it all again, snapping me back into reality like Beringer’s voice had done back at the hotel room when I had thought that she was a rusalka and tried to strangle her.
“This is about cancer of teacher, yes?” she asked. “This is what upsets you, Eh-nim? That he will die?”
“No. Just keep reading.”
She lowered her eyes again and flipped to the second page. As she reached the halfway mark, a definite stillness came over her form.
“Tumor in amygdala,” she said, pronouncing the word both slowly and incorrectly. “May experience sudden loss of impulse control …”
She looked up at me quickly.
“But Eh-nim, you are not thinking that it is him, yes?” she said. “Latin teacher?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t know, Ilona – that’s what I’m telling you. I don’t – I just don’t know.”
“But is this making sense?” she asked. “He is nice person, yes? And then tumor makes him kill people?”
And it didn’t make sense, because someone surely would have noticed if Albertson had begun to have violent outbursts. He wouldn’t have been so calm every time that I had failed an exam, or when someone acted out in class, or during stressful meetings with the other foreign language teachers as they debated who would fill Miss Mercier’s spot in class after her death. So it wasn’t him – I was just losing my grip on my mind again –
“No, it’s not right,” I said. “He wouldn’t – someone would have noticed. He was never violent at school.”
“But maybe trigger is not at school,” Ilona said. “Maybe there is something about young girl, yes? And this is why no one has seen it? Girl sets him off, and he throws body from cliff.”
I pushed my face into my hands and didn’t answer. It was too much to consider on top of everything else, and I couldn’t allow it to be true. I would have rather gone without the answer forever than for this to be it, or to be wrong again, and the walls in the room were sinking inwards as they crushed the air from the area around me to leave me without space to breathe.
“But this is good, Eh-nim – you have found it,” Ilona said. “He is teacher, yes? Close to Miss Merci-ae – this is why she does not report it. And he retires last school year, and he is too sick to kill girls now, and –”
“But it can’t be him,” I moaned. “It can’t be.”
Because it wasn't right, and it wasn't fair. Albertson was so kind, and so compassionate, and he would have never done anything like what we were suggesting for any other reason than the mass growing in his brain, and that – it seemed – was no reason at all, and certainly no reason to blame him.
“But it is! This is right – this is answer!"
“But it can’t be.”
And she didn't understand that I had been through all of this before – I had seen it, I had heard it, and I had finished it because so – and I wouldn't go through it again. I could accept responsibility for what I had done to Beringer, allowing it to press against my chest until the organ beneath it was forced to lie flat and in waiting before I let it beat properly again, but I would never forgive myself and I would never be able to live with myself if I knowingly did the same thing to Albertson.
“Eh-nim,” Ilona said, crouching down beside me and nudging me so that I would look into her face. “You do not think with emotion now, you think with mind. Albertson has tumor, yes? It makes him violent – makes him kill girls. Miss Merci-ae finds this, and she will not tell because they are friend, yes? So she speaks to him, and he gets angry –”
“No.” I shook my head again, sick from the thoughts that were tangling in my skull. “No, it doesn't make sense – it never makes sense –”
I shook my head and slumped down, burying my face in my hands. It was impossible that it could end like this – that Albertson could have been twisted in such a way and destroyed of everything that he was until all that remained was a marred memory of who he had once been, and that after everything and everyone that I had tried to be, that this would be who I really was, and it was someone that no one – least of all me – would ever understand.
“You are uncertain, maybe, yes?” Ilona tried, pulling my hands from my face. “You are not thinking it is him?”
“No, I … I'm just not sure, Ilona.”
“But we will make sure, yes?” she said. “We will get Jeck – he will look through it, too, and we will see what he is thinking.”
“No – no, we can’t, Ilona,” I said, suddenly certain of everything but that fact. “We can’t tell him.”
I dug my fingers into my head and grasped at my hair, wishing to pull the skin away so that I could see into my mind properly, but the skull was firmly locked tight. Ilona reached up and eased my fingers away.
“Eh-nim, why do we not tell him?” she asked. “This is answer – real answer. This is what you have been looking for.”
“No, it’s not. It’s not what I was looking for at all.”
“But Eh-nim, you are not meaning this,” she said. She paused and looked over at me, her eyes squinting as she tried to see past my expression, and a frown came to her mouth. “You do not want to tell him, maybe, because of sickness?”
“Yes.”
Because Jack wouldn’t understand. His mind was clear, and his reasons were set and unyielding, and he would finish what we had started without another thought as to why Albertson had done what he had. It wouldn’t matter to him that the old man couldn’t have helped it – that something had gone wrong inside of his head that had caused him to turn so drastically – and no amount of reasoning would alter his own, because he had no idea what it was like to be uncertain, and to be afraid, and to not know his purpose other than to think that there might not be one.
And I had so willingly followed him for all the times that we had been friends, blindly getting into trouble and seeing things his way, because I had known that there was no harm in it outside of the frequent reprimands and slaps on the wrists, and because I had wanted to be an extension of the carefreeness that he brought to the world. And he was the only type of disconnect that I had ever sought, because he was a detachment from the one that I felt about the rest of the world around me, and the only person who had stuck with me without feeling obliged to or being paid to, and yet I couldn’t offer him anything – least of all this – in return.
“I killed someone,” I said. “I killed my doctor because I wasn't thinking – because I was confused. I get things wrong, Ilona. I get things mixed up and warped, and I can't stop myself from thinking them –”
“But this is not wrong, Eh-nim. I see it here as clearly as you. You are not confused – not about this.”
“But we can’t punish him for this,” I said, willing her to understand. “We can’t – someone can’t be blamed for something they didn’t mean. For something they didn’t know that they were doing.”
Because if Albertson could be blamed for what he had done, then that would mean that I would be blamed for what I had done, and he was no more at fault than I was. He had killed those girls because something unstoppable had gone wrong inside of his head, and there was nothing that could trick the brain into knowing anything different than what the thoughts tol
d it, and no way that the body could stop from following the orders that presented themselves so clearly and so unimaginably correct, and if it was as right inside of his head as it had been inside of mine when I had killed Beringer, then we both deserved whatever punishment was coming, and he was right to think that death wasn’t it, because death would be a reprieve – it would be welcome – if it could take us away from what we had done wrong.
Ilona sat down beside me and pulled an arm around me, and the touch eased away the cold that had chilled the air. Her sharp features were softened as she looked at me, and she was so strange and strangled-looking with her unkempt hair and narrowed eyes, but she was mesmerizing all the same, and I was certain that if the water did rise up from the ocean, that she would be the one who was chosen to be saved, because despite what she said that she had done wrong, she was every bit of goodness that was left in the world.
“Eh-nim, Albertson is very old, and very sick, yes?” she said. “So we are not needing to do anything – tell police or turn him in. He can die on own. I am sure that Jeck will agree.”
She leaned in closer as I remained silent, the tips of her fingers lingering on my arm, but the warmth of them disappeared as a sudden unease came over my skin.
“Ilona, where did Jack go?” I said quietly.
She looked around.
“He is … he is outside, yes? He goes to dock.”
I slowly stood up, aware that my entire form was shaking. I might not have known anything else, but I did know Jack regardless of what everyone else thought, and I knew that he hadn’t gone to the ferry like I had suggested when I had told him to leave. He didn’t want to go back to France, and he didn’t want to shove the responsibility of finding the killer onto us: he wanted to find out who had done it more than anything, and there was only one place that he could in order to do so: Albertson's.
“Fuck.”
Ch. 21
I ran from the house so quickly that it was a moment or two before I registered the pain searing through my leg, and I stumbled out onto the street. The sky was darkening as the sun lowered behind the trees, and the sparse street lamps had not turned on yet. Hurrying up the pavement, I wrapped around the corner and continued forward, dragging my leg behind me.
He had gone to Albertson's.
The idea wouldn't quite register in my mind no matter how many times I repeated it to myself, and though a definite arrest had overtaken my form, I couldn't place if it was because I was afraid of what he was planning to do when he got there, or of what Albertson would do to him.
“Jack!” I called up the street when I turned onto School Road and found it empty. “Jack! Wait!”
He was nowhere in sight, but the house at the end of the street was eerily silent. Though the lights in the neighboring houses had been turned on to light up the windows in patches of yellow, Albertson's were completely dark. When I reached the front gate, it had been swung open and gotten caught in a pile of leaves that had wedged beneath it in a telltale sign that someone had roughly pushed it open before me.
I clambered up the steps and grasped the door handle, turning it wildly to get it to open. I had taken off so quickly that Ilona hadn't seen which street I had turned down, and without knowing which way I had gone or what the address was, I didn’t think she would find it.
Falling over the threshold, I caught myself before landing on the floor and grasped at the kitchen chair to pull myself upright again. The living room was vacant but for the book lying open on the coffee table and the untouched mug sitting beside it, and the tea kettle was whistling loudly from the burner. As I looked over at where the steam was rising, the hint of a worn sweatshirt came into my view. Jack was standing at the counter.
“Jack – quick, we have to get out of here,” I said, my breathing hitching as I forced the words out. There wasn’t enough time to explain it all to him in the moment, and I couldn’t risk having him react before I could properly explain to him that Albertson had done it as a result of the tumor. “Come on, before he comes out –”
“I can’t do that, Nim.”
“No, Jack, you don’t understand – we can’t ask him.”
Jack looked at me from across the linoleum, and there was such a blank expression on his face that it took me a moment to realize what was wrong. His arms were bent oddly behind him so that his shoulders stuck up at an unnatural angle, and his wrists were bound to the handle of the stove with thick wires. He shook his head.
“I already did.”
My breaths rattled in the too-still air and my leg throbbed horribly beneath me from the run, and when I tried to lift it in order to get over to him, I found that I couldn’t move.
“Where is he?” I said slowly.
Jack nodded to a room with a closed door, the movement jerky from the way he was tied. I tried again to move my leg, but it had cramped too firmly from overuse and my knee wouldn’t unlock. It would give out completely at any moment.
“It’s the tumor, Jack. It spread to his brain – he – it’s making him do this.”
“Yeah. He told me.”
“But how did he manage to tie you up?” I said, glancing between him and the door. “He’s – did he really overpower you?”
“He said he needed help,” Jack said lowly, his lips barely moving as he spoke. “I asked him about the girls, and he got a bit shaky – I figured it was normal enough. But then he asked me to get him some tea, and I came over here …”
“So that’s how he got the girls, do you think?” I said. “He’d ask for help, then grab them when they weren’t expecting it?”
“I don’t know – probably.” He glanced at the door again; it was still shut. “Nim, he’ll be out any second. Run.”
“I can’t.”
“You’ll need wire cutters to get me out,” he hissed. “Don’t bother – just run.”
“No, Jack, I can’t.” I looked at him and shook my head, the realization coming with a deadened feeling that pressed into my throat. “My leg. I can’t.”
“Fuck.”
“Do watch your language, Mr. Hadler.”
We both turned as the raised voice joined our whispered ones. Albertson had come out of the other room and was shuffling forward, his slippered feet scraping on the hardwood and a worn robe wrapped about his withering form. There were metal pruning shears his hands.
“Oh, Enim, I see that you know, as well.”
My teeth clenched unexpectedly, and for a moment I felt as though I was back in his classroom receiving one of his gentle lectures about another failed exam. He looked every bit as calm as he had been then, but it had never kept me from knowing that he was disappointed in my actions. I dropped my eyes to the floor.
“We know about the tumor, Mr. Albertson,” I said. “We know that – we know that you couldn’t help this.”
“No, unfortunately not. But the mind has always been rather stronger than the body, I’m afraid – even in youth. We know this.”
He laid the shears on the countertop before him. In the last light of the day, the reddish rust could still be seen on the worn metal.
“And you don’t have to do this, either,” I continued lowly.
He hummed quietly to himself.
“No, I’m not certain that that’s correct, Enim. I may not want to do it – I certainly didn’t want to do it to Émilie – but I feel that I do.”
“But we won’t tell anyone,” I went on quickly, throwing a glance at Jack. “We know why you did it, and we know that the cancer’s – that you don’t have much time left – so you don’t – you don’t have to –”
“Enim,” Albertson chided softly, “I can’t give you a second chance on this one.”
“But –” I looked at Jack again. “But you – you’re going to die, Mr. Albertson. It won’t … it won’t matter if anyone knows, anyhow.”
“Oh, it matters,” he said. “It always matters. I have so little time left, and I’d rather like to use it the way that I please.”
He nodded to the notebook on the coffee table where he had been writing.
“My memoirs,” he explained. “I have a few chapters left to translate. And thanks to all this, I believe that I had a story for the ages; I’ll be a poet, after all.”
He picked up the shears again; they were heavy in his thinning arms.
“Why’d you cut Miss Mercier up?” Jack said, finally breaking his silence. “Why not throw her from the cliffs?”
“That’s a good question, Mr. Hadler – perhaps Enim knows the answer?” He turned to me with the soft smile that he used in his classroom.
“I … I don’t know, Mr. Albertson.”
“No? You don’t know why I beheaded her?”
I swallowed.
“I guess … I guess decapitation is a Roman ritual,” I said. “It’s … It was used as a punishment for – for wrongdoers who were allowed to have honorable deaths.”
“Ah, correct,” he said with a nod. “That was a history lesson in our third year together, if I’m not mistaken.”
I didn’t answer. Jack was still staring at the shears.
“But you cut her to pieces,” he said. “That’s not decapitation.”
“True, true. I wanted to give her an honorable death, but then … It would have been a waste to be found out. I rather thought that if I dismembered her, the animals would go after her body and carry the pieces away more easily. It seems that that was not the case. But no matter – the reports suggested it was a bear anyhow.”
He chuckled a bit as he thought it.
“Curre, ante ursos manducare vobis. I suppose the school motto had a point, after all.”
“Why’d you kill those girls?” Jack said, grappling for questions to buy us more time. He kept glancing at the pruning shears as though hoping that Albertson might drop them, but as he was tied up and my leg had rendered me immobile, I wasn’t sure that there was much use in doing so.
“I thought that we already established that, Mr. Hadler.”
Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2) Page 33
