Shattered Silence

by Ron C. Nieto

  “I'm glad at least one of us has brains.” I tried to return her smile and only half-succeeded in producing a grimace.

  “Don't worry. This will work out. You'll see. And I'll tell you tomorrow after we've checked whether my idea actually works.”

  She kissed me good night and went inside. I stood there for a little bit longer, waiting until I saw her room's light flickering on, and then I started the walk back home.

  I tried very, very hard not to think about what we would do if her plan didn't work.

  Chapter 15

  The librarian didn't remember us from our last newspaper-reading binge. Or if she did, she didn't ban us. This time we knew our way around, so we just made ourselves comfortable and began our search.

  “Right,” Alice said, dumping her things without bothering to search for the cleanest spot. “We have three hours and a half before they kick us out. Let's make it count.”

  “Should we start reading where we left off or something?”

  Her only response involved rescuing a slip of paper from her jeans´ back pocket.

  “You have a list.”

  “I have two, actually. This one is yours. Those are the important events that went on in the timeline between the Nightray family coming to this place and the end of the bloodline. There should be articles referencing the events, and if something out of the ordinary went on, the reporters would have brought it up.”

  “Like... inaugural ball of Clensington theater? What kind of weird should I be looking for again?”

  “Don't be silly. A maniac wouldn't have showed up and died in the middle of the ball, but if there had been any maniac at all dying or going batshit crazy, and this maniac were to be an acquaintance of some attendee...”

  “Then the papers would talk about it just because it's something to gossip about,” I said, catching on.

  “Exactly.” She was already pulling out binders that referenced other events.

  “And what exactly are you looking for?” I asked, noting that her binders were more recent than mine.

  “The same thing as you. Now start working. It's not getting any earlier!” she chided me with a small smile.

  I rolled my eyes but sank down to my knees to work. The list she had given me had dates and names of places or social happenings, and then two blank columns labeled “corpse” and “relationship.” The top entries were the stories we had found not that long ago, the links that gave us our tenuous knowledge of Beatrice, and I checked those first because it felt easier.

  It took me a moment to recall how the papers were stored, but then it was a matter of minutes to find more bits of news that mattered. I wrote dutifully each name and what those persons had represented to the Nightray family. In a bout of inspiration, I added which particular family member they'd been attached to and the issue and page where the info could be found in the archive.

  Fran Beckenridge, attorney, Jeremy.

  Diane Garnett, friend and singer, Caroline.

  Harrison Linwood, friend and musician, Conway.

  Randall Hughes-Davies, betrothed, businessman and musician, Helen.

  There was something of a routine to the job. And though the subject might have been disgusting and macabre, I genuinely enjoyed working with Alice. The companionship, just knowing we were together doing something as mundane as checking library records—even if we were trying to find some not-mundane stuff—was relaxing and lulling.

  If I was very, very lucky, I could get a whole life of relaxing, mundane moments like this with her.

  With a sigh, I tried not to keep thinking along those lines and to get back to work. Those facts would not cross-reference themselves, and our happiness had become too entangled with those old papers for comfort.

  Lennon Read, assistant, Conway.

  Isaiah Bray, friend and playwright, Caroline.

  Denise Courtenay, acquaintance and ballet dancer, Elizabeth.

  Patrice Jeffries, lover and writer, Jeremy.

  Penny Christianson, nanny, Conway.

  Quincy Davies, friend and poet, Jeremy.

  Victor Hargrave, doctor, Hubert.

  Hayden Martell, acquaintance and musician, Caroline.

  Sometime later, I don't know how long, Alice hugged me from behind, breaking my concentration, and I almost jumped out of my skin. I tried to cover it, but I felt her grin against the side of my neck. In spite of that show of amusement, though, I felt her unease humming through her whole body.

  “I'm done here, but I want to check some facts on the computer before we go,” she said. “Come get me when you're done?”

  “Sure. Hey, Alice?” I called after her, craning my neck around to study her retreating form. “You okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. I'm great,” she said with a smile.

  There was a hard glint to her eyes, though. Nerves, and a dose of anger shining in there, along with something else I couldn't see. She was gone too fast.

  This time around, I knew what I was looking for, so I managed to wrap up the research with time to spare before closing time. Picking up my things, I left everything where it was supposed to be and went off in search of Alice.

  I found her sitting in front of a computer, the screen turned off and her nails tapping a metronome rhythm against the tabletop.

  “Are you ready to update me?” I asked softly, sitting on the chair next to her.

  She took a moment to look around and make sure we were alone—of course we were, what kind of students actually use the library to study when not under duress?—before nodding.

  “I think so. But you go first. What did you find?”

  I showed her my list. All in all, twelve people died in strange circumstances in a little over fifty years, every single one of them with some sort of link to the Nightrays. Enough numbers to build a legend around the family, but not big enough that the authorities—or even most of their neighbors—would catch on and suspect anything.

  “So, we were right in the first place,” she whispered.

  “About what?” A little bit of impatience crept into my voice without my consent.

  “You haven't found a single strange death not related to the Nightrays. Not one of them. So, as we suspected at first, that bloody family has something to do with their pet ghost and those in relation to them are always the victims.”

  “We went over that. I have no secret liaison with a long-dead bloodline. Plus, remember how the vase broke and the portrait disappeared? That was our link.”

  “That's the thing,” Alice said, pushing her own checklist toward me. “You do know a member of a long-dead bloodline.”

  I scanned the piece of paper. Like me, she had a list of events, names and then a link to someone else. The name in the “relationship” column changed on occasion, but there were scrawled notes in the margin: married to, daughter of... It was another family line with a pattern of disgraces very similar to the Nightrays—starting exactly in the decade where the Nightrays let off, and tapering into...

  “What does this mean?” I breathed.

  “That means,” Alice said, her voice almost a hiss, “that on top of being a bitch, Lena's a murdering bastard.”

  Chapter 16

  “You should've, at least, called home,” I told Alice at some point later. The library had closed a good while earlier and we were making our way, on foot, to a suburban, exclusive neighborhood where no one in their right mind would attempt to live without a car.

  “I don't see you calling.”

  “My dad's working. He won't be home until later. I'll call then if we're still traipsing around in poshland.”

  Alice giggled. “Poshland. I like that one.”

  “What can I say? Walking deserted roads in the middle of a weekday night awakens my sense of humor.”

  “See? This escapade had some bright side to it.”

  I didn't ask whether she knew the meaning of sarcasm. I knew she did, better than I probably, but
she was letting my words slide on purpose. It was easier than stopping to think about where we were, where we were headed, and what we would do once we got there.

  The answers to those questions were, in order: the middle of nowhere, the house of a little murderess, and no fucking idea, so the prospect wasn't nice to dwell on.

  “How much farther?” I asked, just to break the silence.

  “Not much.” She pointed to a fork in the road barely visible because of its one lighted traffic sign. “We take that path and walk another ten minutes or so and we'll be there.”

  Except that when we took the road, we came face to face with a ten-foot security wall.

  “This puts a kink in our plans,” she said, stepping back and trying to be inconspicuous while examining the wall and the gate—with its assigned guard.

  “Can't you just tell the guy we're here to visit Lena and have him wave us through?”

  “Security has that name for a reason,” she said, giving me a look. “He'll call their house to check on us and then we'll be busted.”

  “So... we do this the Hollywood way?” I asked, eyeing her in the dark. The winter had cut back on most of her fashion displays, and I knew she wore a simple cream pull under her trench, but the skinny jeans and high heels were a mandatory companion. She looked as hot as ever... but not exactly fit to jump a wall.

  “Unless you have some other—” Then, she screamed. It wasn't an angry scream, or even a normal scream. It was the kind of scream you'd hear in a terror flick. I didn't have time to react. She had jumped nearly on top of me, her fight-or-flight instincts deciding that clinging to the one lanky guy was as far as she could make it, and then she froze, her fingers digging into my shoulders like claws.

  There was movement up ahead, in the guard's house, and a guy came running toward us with a flashlight.

  “Alice? Hey, talk to me. What happened, what's wrong?”

  “You there!” the guard's voice boomed from behind his blinding light. “What was that?”

  I turned my head to look at Alice. She was shaking, still holding on to me with as much strength as she could muster, and there were tears threatening her mascara.

  “It touched me. Something touched me,” she whispered.

  The guard flashed his light in my face and I had to squint. “Miss? Who touched you?” the man said, suspicion creeping into his tone.

  It took me a few moments to realize that he was giving me the hairy eyeball. Didn't he realize that if the girl was clinging to me, then obviously I had not been the cause of her blood-curling screech?

  But this lack of insight—or overabundance of prejudices, I couldn't say which—gave me an idea. I hugged Alice tight to my chest, silently asking forgiveness for using her like that.

  “I didn't see him coming,” I said, trying to keep my lying tells in check. “It's too dark. There was just this rushing noise and then... he was off.”

  “Did he steal something?”

  Alice still had her bag slung over one shoulder, so I shook my head. “No, he just...” I fumbled around for words and hoped it could be blamed on the situation, “hit her.”

  “Miss?”

  Alice didn't even turn away from me, but her voice was a bit firmer when she replied. “Bumped me.”

  There was a moment of silence. I couldn't see the guard's reaction, because he kept shining his flashlight in my eyes—the man was going to blind me for real—but then he gestured for us to move. Toward the gate.

  “It's not safe to wander around at this time,” he said gruffly. “Get inside, and wait while I check for this person. It's probably harmless, but we must investigate all possible threats.”

  It sounded like he was parroting some kind of guard-for-rich-people manual. I didn't care, because this was our chance. Slowly, I walked Alice toward the gate until the guard and his light moved beyond the tree line. Then, carefully extricating myself from her death grip, I trotted as fast as I dared to pull her, weaving between the houses and getting away from the control point.

  The guard didn't come running or calling for us, and so we were in. I stopped in the thicker shadow offered by a magnolia tree and turned to Alice. Her eyes were still a little too wide, and I could practically see her pulse racing in her throat, but she seemed to be under control again.

  “Good move,” she said. “That was some fast thinking on your part.”

  “Thanks. But how are you?”

  “Fine. Just... fine.”

  “You didn't scream just to get the guard out,” I said, pulling her close and cupping her face. “You were truly terrified back there. What happened?”

  “Something touched me,” she repeated, taking a shallow breath. “It bumped my shins, hard. We were alone, and all this ghostly murdering stuff has me on edge, so I... Yeah. I was scared.”

  “Do you think it was Beatrice?” I murmured, too uncomfortable with the idea to speak it aloud.

  “No. Oh, no. It wasn't.” I gave her a look, trying to understand where the fear had gone and why the annoyance had replaced it. “If it weren't too impossible to be true, I'd say it was a stupid cat… A really big, stupid cat.”

  Sparrow? Here?

  I looked around. We were surrounded by darkness, and it was only too easy to imagine blacker blotches detaching themselves from the black shadows.

  “It can't be,” I whispered, half expecting to see luminescent green eyes peering at us in contempt. “We're miles from home.”

  “I know. I know, but... Never mind. Let's just make the most of being here and find Lena's.”

  She began to walk and, after a few moments of indecision and doubling back once or twice, we hit the correct street.

  “I've been to some parties here before...” Alice gestured vaguely between us so that I could fill in the blank. Before we got together and her life changed. “The place's big, so that should make it easy to avoid her parents. Plus, her mom is never really home... travels a lot. So does her dad, but at least his company is in the city. Hers is regional stuff.”

  “And her lack of family life is important… how?”

  “Because I might have to beat their daughter, and it'd be inconvenient to do it while they're around.”

  “Let's try to keep the beating to a minimum, okay? If she starts screaming and calling us on it, we'll end up in juvie and then your dad will be right about me.”

  “Idiot,” she told me, leaning in to give me a small peck anyway.

  The trash was already out, a neat, clean dumpster sitting by the curve in the most stereotypical image of perfection, so any hope we had of ambushing her—in the rare event she deigned to take it out herself in the first place—died a quick and painless death.

  “Texting her to come out won't work, right?” I asked, more because I wanted to delay taking the only choice I saw as remotely possible than because I thought the question to be appropriate.

  “‘We know who you are, come out and face us' kind of text? Honestly, Keith, would you come out?”

  “No. But she looks dumb enough.”

  She smirked. “Don't be deceived by blondes. Anna can probably outsmart all of us any given day.”

  “It's not the hair. It's the popularity. No queen bee can hold the position for as long as she has without her brain suffering serious damage.”

  “Hello, princess here? Remember that?”

  “But you turned your back on the traps just in time.” I smiled, pushing her bangs to the side as an excuse to cup her face and feel her close. She snorted, giving me a “yeah, right” eye roll, but then she focused her attention in the house again.

  “We could just use the back door, go up to her room,” she said pensively.

  I tried to judge whether she was joking. I couldn't tell. “We're not doing a B&E here.” That was a line we couldn't afford to cross... not in this kind of neighborhood, at least.

  “Then, the only choice is to do it the old-fashioned way.” She bent down, gr
abbed a small, ornamental stone from under the rose bushes growing in the backyard's flower beds and heaved a picture-perfect throw that very nearly smashed the glass of an upper-floor balcony.

  I stared at her, mouth agape. I had thought I knew every facet of hers, but this little vandal was completely new to me. Admittedly, there was something primal and attractive in there, but I shook the thought when I saw her grab a second stone and crack it against the plaster by the balcony doors right the moment those doors pulled open.

  I'd never have dreamed of what Lena would look like in the private confines of her home. With Alice, once you took out the make-up, the glitter, and the clothes, you were left with the face of a younger-looking girl, sweet and mischievous, quick to smile, and cuddly as a kitten. Lena, on the other hand, had that distinct celeb-behind-the-cameras look. She looked like a bird with ruffled feathers, and instead of sleepy playfulness, her tangled hair and casual clothes gave her an air of untidiness. There wasn't anything sweet in her eyes when she saw us after nearly being hit with a stone, either.

  “Get out of my yard,” she said, loud enough for us to hear but not for the whole street to come and see what was going on.

  “We're out,” Alice told her right back, pointing at how our feet stood in the precise border of her backyard. “And you're going to join us out here.”

  Lena regained some composure and I'd say she snorted, if it weren't so undignified a sound for her to make. “Or what?”

  There wasn't much in the way of threats we could offer, not really—who would believe us if we started sprouting tales of ghosts and major family conspiracies?

  “Come on, Nightray,” Alice taunted instead. “Isn't it already clear you won't win by just knifing us in the back? You'll have to face us sometime.”

  We might have surprised her, but she wouldn't be played like that. I thought I saw her turn with a dismissive gesture and so I spoke up.

  “You know we'll destroy her, right?” I don't know why I said that. It wasn't much in the way of threats and it wasn't very convincing. It was just a statement. But it worked.