by Peter Manus
I creep up to porch level, pausing a lot but feeling pretty covered by the noise of the rain and the endlessly banging door somewhere behind me. From the wet trail, looks like Agnès walked in there in her stocking feet while Brewster’s in canvas shoes with grooved soles. I work myself forward at a near crouch, my service revolver out and ready. When I get about five feet from the French doors, I can hear their voices. Brewster is saying, “the Beast to your Beauty, the Caliban to your Ariel…” Sheesh.
Then I see Agnès. She’s been sitting in a chair with her back to me, but she suddenly stands. I see her hair, plastered against her skull, and a vivid flowered shawl that she holds tight round her shoulders. She says something like, “you harbor the delusion that you will escape.” Her voice is low, her intonation even and unaffected, her accent faint, but definitely French. It occurs to me from the way she carries her back and arm that she may be holding a gun on Brewster. I also occurs to me that she must be facing Harry, and if I know H.P., he’s figured out a way to get a gander at the scene in front of him. If it is a gun she’s holding, Harry will have the best take on whether and when she might decide to use it.
They exchange barbs for a while. I can’t catch a lot of it—too much wind. At one point, Brewster raises his voice, and I catch some stuff about Neva having killed Terence D’Amante. Can’t say this hadn’t occurred to me, but it’s not why we’re there, so I park it in the back of my mind. Finally, he says, “Simple is best.” Harry must realize it’s time to move. The swinging door some yards behind Brewster gets kicked hard. I’m ready to spring, and I do. And that’s exactly when the French doors fly open and slam me in the face. Mother effing wind. Nature’s just totally with Agnès and against me tonight.
I recover, more or less, and propel myself around the door and into the room, yelling for everyone to freeze. I hear Harry and Granger yelling as well, and someone’s gun goes off once, which doesn’t stop any of the yelling, so it comes off as more random than deadly. Can’t see, of course, because the gust killed the candles, but one of those suckers must have fallen over because there’s a sudden flare-up by the back wall. I’m down low, of course, and manage to look up in time to see Agnès backing into me, fast. If she had a gun a moment ago, she doesn’t have one now. I go to stand, hoping to catch her as she falls, but it’s all too slippery, and her skull cracks me in the face. We ricochet off one another, and I sprawl in a bunch of broken glass from when the French doors blew, while she kind of cascades out onto the porch. I scramble after her, leaving the men to handle Brewster and the fire. I’d have sworn that Agnès would be splayed on her back across the porch, feet on my side of the doorsill, but she’s nowhere. I stare at the spot where she should, by all laws of physics, be lying. The dust isn’t even unsettled, except where my own scrabbling footprints made a mess. I stumble outside and stand, baffled by the rain and wind. Then I see her. She’s not running. She’s out there, facing me, her arms wrapped around her, her back to the cliff. The shawl flaps and snaps in the wind. There’s a grey-white glow, just beginning to tint the skyline behind her. Soon she’ll be in silhouette; right now I can just make out her face.
“Agnès,” I yell.
She seems to be waiting for me.
“Agnès, you’ll want to come away from the edge,” I yell. “Ground’s not stable.” I step forward, bending at the knees to slide my gun aside very visibly so she can see I’m unarmed. “We need to talk, you and me.”
She reaches up and takes a swipe at her eyes, as if clearing her lashes of rain. “Some day,” she says.
“Agnès, I get that you didn’t kill them,” I call out to her. “Brewster was trailing you all along. They’ve got him, inside.”
She looks off into the sky, maybe distracted by the distant pulse of yellow from the lighthouse, maybe considering my words. “I killed them,” she says.
“Trying isn’t the same thing as doing it—not to us law and order folk.”
She whips her head across and looks off in the other direction. I realize, somehow, that I’m actually insulting her, or agitating her, anyway. “They are dead,” she insists.
“Yeah, they’re dead,” I yell across in agreement. “Like you needed.”
She looks directly at me in an odd piercing way. “So you know. You read it in my head?”
Involuntarily, I duck and shield my forehead with a hand. “Hey, no, don’t,” I yell. She hasn’t, or at least I can’t feel anything like what I went through back at Simon’s place. I look up at her, and she’s staring across at me through the rain. Her mouth is open. She looks far more curious than hostile.
“Look, it hurt like hell when you did that. I would ask that you not,” I say. Of course, I’m begging, here—not too cop-like, all told—but I try to sound authoritative.
“It does not hurt the men,” she says simply. “They feel nothing.”
“Yeah, well, stick to poking them in the brain, then,” I say. “And to answer your question, no, I didn’t read anything in your mind. I don’t do that. I don’t even know how that would work.” I step off the porch, blinking in the rain.
She almost smiles. “I think that maybe you do.”
“I don’t,” I insist. Then I relent, just a bit. “I never explored it. I don’t want it.”
She considers this and nods across at me. “Some day. When you have a reason.”
I shake my head, and then, as she stares me down, I shrug. “Don’t think so.”
“I would as soon have done my own killings. You know that,” she says.
“Yes, I do know,” I say, stepping forward through the knee-high grass that seems to twist around my legs as if working frantically to obstruct my movements. “Love will do that, I know,” I say over the wind. “But they’re all dead now, and the last one will be in Walpole for many years, if only for murdering the man who worked for him. I can promise you that.”
“Donc il est fini.”
I can’t understand, but I get it. “Yeah, exactly. It’s finished. So step away from the edge, would you, Agnès?”
“Aucun plus de meurtre. Aucune plus de planification. Aucune plus de douleur.”
“Right,” I assure her, no idea how I get what she’s saying. “All the deaths, all the scheming, plus all the pain. It’s over, Agnès. Time to mourn. Let me help with that.”
She eyes me, and I think I’ve got her. I can see her eyes in the light from behind me as the flames start to spread along the underside of the porch roof. “Please,” I say. “Come in from the edge, and we can talk about it.”
She looks into my eyes and almost smiles. “I will send to you a memoir of all of this. I will hide nothing, I promise. They will promote you, if that is what you want.”
“I don’t,” I say honestly. “What I want is for you to reach out your hand and give it to me.” I edge forward, holding out my arm to her, stretching my hand wide.
The sun, such that it is, begins to rise behind her, a vague spread of grey haze throbbing behind the rain. I sense more than see that she begins to lean away, shoulders first.
“Dammit, Agnès!” I say forcefully. “Don’t do this!”
“I am not afraid,” she assures me. “Do not search for me.”
I lunge at her just as she allows herself to fall backwards off the edge. I slide through the grass and then find myself scrambling to put on the brakes, only stopping after I slither over the edge with a hoarse shriek to find myself gripping some ancient wood steps that seem to fritter out only a few yards down the cliff. If I’d seen myself on vid I probably would have caught something comical about it. I crawl back gingerly, and only stand when I’m a good foot from the edge. I can’t see her body on the cliff’s sand face.
Harry and I tramp the beach for well over an hour, joined by a bunch of Nantucket cops in uniform. The cliff rises like some apocalyptic thing, humbling in its disregard. We come across Brewster’s dinghy and watch as some of the cops clamber around on the Jane Guy, then signal to us that there’s no sign of Agnès on
the boat. We shine our lights into crevices and poke around down some vast manmade tunnel in the beach—an experimental tide return system, we learn later, constructed to retard the beach erosion. There is no possibility that anyone could have squirmed away through that thing. We walk a mile up the rocky sand until we are directly under the massive lighthouse and can stand and watch its rotating light weaken against the grey-white sky. The ocean breaks against the base of the cliff here. Passing beyond will be impossible for quite some time.
She should be dead, her body broken, heavy with sand that it collected in its violent tumble down the cliff just under the Van Ness place. There is no mark we can discern on the face of the cliff. No spot where a body could have hit and then, miraculously, raised itself to walk or swim away. We squint up at the back of the Van Ness shed, sagging down at us, and also the remnants of the cliff stairs, and so we can mark exactly the spot where she disappeared from my sight, between these two items. There is no question about it, Zoey. Agnès—Nightingale—is simply gone.
Eventually we do the unthinkable—we give up. We work with Granger to arrange for Brewster’s transfer to Boston, where he will face murder charges even as he recovers from his nonvital flesh wound. Brewster should end up in Walpole for a good long time, but making that happen is not my jurisdiction. We add our names to the report on the fire that partially—nonvitally—destroyed the Van Ness place. I get some preliminary treatment for my nose. Another nonvital injury, although it doesn’t feel all that non-anything. We accept the offer to hitch a ride back to Boston on the hospital shuttle helicopter. Every moment of that flight sucks. By the time we arrive at New England Medical, I thoroughly hate helicopters.
Harry gets me to my car in Cambridge—they take one look at my badge and then my face, and the gate rises with the charge of zero dollars and zero cents. I’m actually sincerely grateful to the point of near-mistiness. It’s the small favors, huh?
I drive home. I clean up. I check my texts and there’s one from Malloy: Rossignol = Nightingale in French lang. So which name do I track? I say a tiny prayer that he did not send that fun fact to H.P. as well, as he will not share my view that it may show a sliver of hope for Malloy. I turn off the phone and rest a little. Okay, I can’t rest so I cry a few emo tears for no reason I can put my finger on. And then I write this journal entry. I can’t even think about Agnès Rossignol…Nightingale…Jeanne Moreau’s biggest fan.
And look who it is, trudging up the porch stairs and dumping her knives on the kitchen table, ducking to one side for a fruitless peek out into the living room and then doing a double-take at the sight of my bright white nose bandage.
Zoey, cripes. TODAY you decided to cut it baby short and go platinum with streaks? Are you, like, trying to give me a heart attack? Somehow I just earned myself a super-sized batch of much needed, much appreciated, much demanded and much returned home-style TLC. And when I say to stop, Zoey? Just keep the TLC coming. Keep that happy stuff coming.
Signing off.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Massachusetts Department of Correction, MCI – Cedar Junction
Division of Human Resources, Food and Nutritional Services Program
South Walpole, Massachusetts
Dear Prison Food Services Program Manager,
I write in inquiry about employment in your food preparation and services operation, as I note a job posting in the employment opportunity section of your website. As my attached résumé indicates, I have worked in the prison food service industry for one year at this point, and am versed in the areas of cycle menu preparation, sanitation, inventory, tool control, and security, along with the more typical cafeteria work skills not particular to prison food service operations. I am a former long-term home health aide, and as such pride myself on being a clean, steady worker who believes in the virtue of providing domestic services for those in need. I keenly understand the key role that reliable, on-schedule food service plays in maintaining a healthy prison environment. As my current overseer so often observes, “a hungry inmate is a problem inmate, while one who is satisfied with his meals will consider himself treated with dignity—and dignity is the touchstone of a healthy prison environment.” I wholeheartedly agree with these sentiments. They are indeed a compact statement of my work philosophy.
As you will discern from that which precedes, my current position suits me well, but I am a single mother with a son of three months, and as I have family in the Boston area, I would like to relocate so as to allow young Simon to know his relatives as he grows up. Naturally, I am more than happy to provide specific references upon your request.
With every hope of hearing from you,
Jeanne M. Nightingale
Acknowledgments
A number of people were incredibly generous with their time and creativity as I wrote and rewrote The Dorchester Five. My agent, John Silbersack of Trident Media Group, is the consummate literary world professional. My wife Deb spends countless hours working with me on how I might extract my poor characters from the labyrinthine burrows I manage to write them into. The top-notch people at Diversion Books, primarily Publisher Jaime Levine, Production and Art Director Sarah Masterson Hally, and Acquisitions Editor Lia Ottaviano, have all been encouraging, accommodating, practical, and patient during the entire publication process. My sister Nancy G., mother-in-law Kathryn “Mom-Cat” T., and great friend Allison D.—three insightful and articulate readers—all offered valuable advice and encouragement after reading early drafts of The Dorchester Five. Finally, I don’t possess the facility with language to express my heartfelt thanks and appreciation to Randall Klein, author, editor, and founder of Randall Klein Books. Randall discovered this book years ago and remained dedicated to its achieving its potential and getting published until he made both happen. Randall’s sensitivity to tone, plot, and all the subtle nuances that make a novel the best story it can be cannot be learned—it’s a gift, and he uses it masterfully.
The distance between what you see and what you believe can be the distance between life and death.
On a winter night in Boston, a man falls to his death in front of a subway train. The sole witness, a shaken young woman, explains to the police how the man shoved her aside as he made his way to the tracks. But when her blog turns up on the dead man's computer, the cops begin to look for other connections. Was the man a cyber-stalker, charmed to the point of desperation by the irreverent musings of a noir-obsessed blogger? Or are the connections between subway jumper and innocent bystander more complicated?
This dark and intricate tale of obsession and deception is told in the form of a blog written by an elusive narrator known only by her online name, "l.g. fickel." Deep into the night, every night, fickel blogs about "Mr. Suicide" and the ensuing police investigation with an eerie prescience. She is joined in her blog chats by a loyal group of obsessives, all of whom share with fickel a passion for the dark art of noir. Is fickel's tale that of an innocent woman frantically trying to figure out how her blogging has enmeshed her in a murder spree, or is she a manipulator, playing the part of sexy, hip, young thing as she grinds out her revenge on those she feels have betrayed her?
“…Noir fans should enjoy the twists and turns that echo such genre classics such as Double Indemnity and The Asphalt Jungle.” —Publishers Weekly
“An incredibly daring novel and a complete success.” —Booklist (starred review)
Fickle is available now!
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