“But that must have done something,” I said. “I mean, they found one of the girls, so why haven’t they started looking for the other ones?”
“You didn’t let me finish,” Jack said, raising his eyebrows. “They confirmed that her death was from a mixture of blunt-force trauma and drowning. They think that she went jogging too close to the cliffs, slipped down the side and fell into the ocean.”
“What?”
“Her father’s pretty upset. Apparently he warned her all the time not to go jogging on uneven ground, but he was never sure if she listened.”
“So he believes that that’s what happened?”
“Apparently.”
“And what do you think?”
He gave me a dark look.
“I think that she was thrown off of the cliffs. I think all eight of them were thrown off, really, only hers was the only body that floated back to shore.”
I sat down on the floor next to his bed. My legs tingled on the verge of numbness and my head was buzzing with white noise. I slowly thought over everything he had just told me.
“So eight girls are murdered here on the island,” I started slowly, “which means ...”
“That someone around here is murdering them. Exactly.”
“And Miss Mercier realized it …?” I said. “But how? It’s not like Bickerby students were going missing. How would she have made a connection to them?”
“I think I have that figured out, too,” Jack said, plucking up a highlighted clip that he had printed off. “Remember when I told you that the name Alison Hall sounded familiar, and you said Alan Hall lived in our building a few years ago? They were siblings. He was one of the top students here and was given a scholarship for excellence in French.”
“So he said something to her.”
“And she never forgot it,” Jack finished. “He might’ve gone off to college, but she stayed here and kept up with the local news. She used to read the local paper every day, you know, to improve her English. She said she wanted to learn the native colloquialisms, learn to speak like a Mainer … can you imagine?”
He frowned, suddenly looking quite far off, and something forlorn passed behind his eyes.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I think her accent was perfect.”
“No ... what do you think about her finding out about the girls?”
“Right. Well, she obviously started compiling the list of names, and either she tracked down who was behind all of this or vice versa.”
“Vice versa?”
“Yeah, it’s Latin, Nim, you should know what it means.”
“I know what vice versa means,” I said, rolling my eyes. “But what do you mean by it?”
“Well, if she didn’t find out who was behind this, then they certainly found out that she knew,” he said. “I bet that the discovery of the body really shook the guy up … it wasn’t in his plan, you know? He was probably on edge and worried that she was going to say something now that there was some proof that the girls weren’t running away, so he just … did away with her.”
I shook my head, the contents of my stomach rumbling unhappily with every passing thought. He watched me as I tried to mull it all over, but I only shook my head in bewilderment for several long moments.
“Jack ... are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure, Nim.”
“I know, it’s just ... isn’t this a bit far-fetched?”
But even as I said, it, the papers strewn over his bed confirmed that this wasn’t one of his usual crazed theories: the pictures that he had drawn arrows on and scrawled dates in the corner of in his messy handwriting, the maps that showed points of where the girls had been last seen, and the newspaper trimmings and articles he had printed off that were highlighted and marked up with notes were all validating something unexplained.
“But if this was so easy to figure out – I mean, you did it into two weeks – why haven’t the police thought of this?” I said. “They can’t not care that much.”
Jack leaned his head back against the wall.
“It all comes down to the same thing, really,” he said. “Who would do this?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“I can’t be certain but ... I have an idea.”
I tried to imagine who was capable of such a thing: a hermit who lived by himself in the woods, a handful of outcast teenagers, a desk clerk who took too much interest in young girls who visited his store ...
“First, let me say something else,” Jack said. “All of these girls disappeared between this time last year and up until the last girl whose body was found, but the months, specifically, were February, March, April, May, June, September, and October. What does that tell you?”
I frowned.
“That the killer takes summers off?”
“Exactly.” He gave me an intensely energized look. “Now, who takes summers off?”
We stared at each other for a few moments as he waited for me to confirm his theory.
“Everyone at Bickerby,” I said. “But ... how does that relate to what you said before? About how the police don’t care?”
“Remember when the police came up here to search for Miss Mercier? How they looked around here for a bit and then just took off? That’s what got me thinking. If Barker’s in control of everything here at Bickerby and on the island, then who could manage to get something like this past him? Who could make all of these strange disappearances just ... disappear?”
I thought about it for a moment before shrugging my shoulders.
“No one.”
“You’re not thinking hard enough, Nim. Come on: who could get away with anything they want on this island?”
“I don’t know – the police?”
“No. Someone here, at Bickerby, who controls everything ...”
“Not ...?”
Jack raised an eyebrow.
“You got it. Barker.”
“Barker?” I said. “But that’s ... insane.”
“Maybe. But so is all this.”
“But why would Barker kill all those girls? And Miss Mercier?”
“Why does anyone kill a bunch of girls, Nim? They’re sick in the head. And Miss Mercier was just something that got in the way, so he did away with her, too.”
When I only shook my head in disbelief, he picked up a few papers and brought them over for me to see.
“Take a look at this …”
He laid them out in front of me. I glanced over two maps, several printed newspaper articles, and a photograph before picking up the latter. It was a picture of a building situated on the cliffs overlooking the water that I had never seen before. It was larger and grander than the dilapidated homes in the town, with smooth white paint and a tower in the backhand corner. As I looked at it more closely, I realized that the building had been constructed around a lighthouse.
“That’s Barker’s house,” Jack said.
“His house? It looks more like small castle.”
“Doesn’t it? And yet for its size, it’s so well-hidden – over on the opposite side of Bickerby, past the town and forest, and up about a mile’s hike through rocks and trees.”
I tried to picture Barker in his three-piece suit huffing and puffing his way up to the top of the cliffs, a feat that would exhaust me even on one of my most restless days, and shook my head.
“What’s he doing all the way up there?”
“What isn’t he doing, more likely,” Jack said darkly. “A nice private area of the mountain that overlooks the water? Seems like a pretty good place to drag a body and dispose of it. He could just throw the girls out his back door and they’d never be found again.”
“But … could he?” I said, imagining Barker trying to heave a body over to the edge of the cliffs. “Those girls were young and active, and Barker’s –”
“Six times their size,” Jack reminded me. “It doesn’t matter if he’s not up to beating them in a track meet, Nim. All h
e has to do is grab them around the waist and there’d be no way they could get away from him.”
“So you think he lures them in?”
“I’ll tell you what I think: I think he has the perfect house for disposing of bodies. A little too perfect, mind you. I understand that he wants his privacy and all, but you’d think he’d want to live a little closer to the school, wouldn’t you? Seems like a waste of gas to drive back and forth every day when he could have had any other house that was closer and walked. Not to mention it would be better on his health.”
He took the photo out of my hands and pointed me to the newspaper articles. Scanning through them quickly, I saw that they were all about charities that Barker had donated to across the state.
“What’re these?”
“Evidence,” Jack said. “Sort of counter-alibis, really. All of these articles are about various events that Barker’s been to in the past year – since the girls started going missing. Basically, they mention every date that Barker’s left the island for any reason at all.”
“And?”
“And none of them are on the dates that the girls disappeared. Like I said, they’re more of counter-alibis. Barker does quite a bit of traveling. What are the chances that not one of the times a girl disappeared he was off the island?”
I sorted through the papers and noted the dates.
“And what about this?” I said, indicating to the map.
“That’s a chart of the areas where the girls disappeared, or at least where they were last seen. Look at this: two of them never made it home after afterschool activities. This would be the road they would take to get back, and this is the road that anyone leaving Bickerby would take.”
I followed both and saw what he meant: the two roads intersected at an isolated point in the middle of the forest. Assuming that the killer met up with the girls there, no one would ever see or hear anything as he dragged them away.
“And the last girl, remember, was going for a run,” Jack continued. “Her father said that she normally ran through this part of the woods, though the police think that she was nearer to the cliffs and fell off – like that’s the case. And this one …”
As he went through the list of names and pointed out the spot on the map where they had most likely disappeared, I tuned out his voice and stared at the papers numbly. The entire matter seemed as unlikely as a dream, and yet I hadn’t felt so awake or invigorated in a long while. The constant thoughts of my mother that had haunted me so persistently had receded to the back of my mind, and the words that Jack was saying were clearer than the lines from the opera that blared in my ears. Despite the gruesomeness of the crime, I was suddenly at ease searching for a riddle that was answerable rather than one that I would never know.
We stayed up well into the night as he continued to explain what he had found. Finally he piled the papers back into a folder, hid them in the crack behind the desk and the wall, and climbed into bed. I sank beneath the covers of my own bed, as well, but before I could think of everything that he had told me, my eyelids began to flicker shut and I fell asleep without pause for the first time in months.
Ch. 12
Whereas most of the snow in Connecticut had been washed away by rain, the Bickerby campus was still covered in white. On the rare occasion that there was a patch of bare earth, it was always a sheet of ice that no amount of rock salt prevented me from slipping on. After falling to the ground for the fourth time that morning, I swore at myself for not asking Karl for another pair of boat shoes and laid on the ice staring up at the bright white sky. There was no way that I would call and make the request now; I would just wait the winter out.
“Are you all right?”
I was shaken from my thoughts at the voice above me and quickly sat up from my spot in the snow to look at the speaker. Cabail Ibbot was standing above me. His dark, too-large attire was silhouetted against the bright winter sun and I had to squint in order to see him properly.
“I’m fine.”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than I slipped again. The ground was not quite padded enough by the thick snow to cushion my fall, and a dull pain began to throb against my skull. Cabail watched me with his magnified eyes.
“You should get some better shoes.”
“I know.”
I crawled shakily to a less icy patch on the ground and carefully rose to my feet again, thankful that Cabail was the only one there. Anyone else would have turned the situation into something unbearably humiliating.
“You don’t have to wait for me, Cabail. You’ll be late for Physics.”
“So will you,” he said. “Besides, Volkov doesn’t really notice me.”
“Lucky you.”
We made our way to class and took seats at the back of the lecture hall. Just as Cabail had predicted, Volkov’s withering glare was only aimed at me. Cabail’s grades were undoubtedly high enough to warrant some lenience from the reproachful teacher.
He waited until after class to give me a long lecture on how my tardiness disrupted his class, which droned on so long that I ended up being late for Latin. Though Albertson nodded in understanding as I apologized, I had missed the beginning of the translation that he had gone over which would make completing the rest for homework all the more difficult. By the end of the day, though, I had so many other assignments that it would be a wonder if I finished any of them at all.
I tore myself away from the library at a reasonable time to go to dinner, scarfed down the remains of food that didn’t fit in my napkin or milk carton, and returned to the library to finish my homework. I was halfway through feigning answers about Jane Eyre, realizing that I would never have time to actually read the book, when I remembered my appointment with Beringer. Collecting my belongings, I ran across the campus to the Health Center and hurried inside to his office.
“I’m sorry that I’m late, Dr. Beringer.”
“That’s quite alright, Enim.” He indicated for me to sit down and took a moment to survey me. “How have you been?”
“Fine.”
“I was thinking of you over the holidays,” he said. “How were they?”
His voice was so gentle that it was a wonder I could hear him at all, and it reverberated as though we were standing at opposite ends of a tunnel. Any possibility of telling him what I had done with the medication he had prescribed was lost somewhere in between, and there was no chance of raising my voice loudly enough to tell him what I had been prepared to do.
“They ... they weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be.”
“No?”
“No.”
“How so?”
“I mean, it passed faster than I thought it would.”
“Oh? And why do you think that was?”
I shifted as I thought of a way around the truth, all too aware that Beringer’s eyes were watching me carefully as I did so.
“I guess because Karl and I spent most of it arguing.”
“I see. And arguing with Karl is ... gratifying?”
“Maybe. He makes it so easy.”
Beringer frowned thoughtfully.
“Karl is your father’s brother, correct?” When I nodded, he added, “Were you two close before he became your guardian?”
“No.”
“Were he and your mother close?”
I eyed him carefully as my heartbeat increased beneath my sweater, wondering if he had somehow gained knowledge of their affair just by looking at me.
“No. Why would you think that?”
“I just wondered, given that he was never close to either of you, why he would spend a year taking care of you and your mother.”
“A caregiver takes care of my mother.”
“Alright. Why he takes care of you, then.”
“My father makes him.”
“I’m not sure he can make your uncle do anything,” Beringer said quietly.
“You’ve obviously never met my father.”
Beringer smiled.
“No, I have not. In fact, I’m not even sure if we’ve spoken on the phone since he hired me.”
“Lucky you.”
He smiled again at my remark and stared across the desk at me with light flickering in his eyes. As the exchange eased into silence, a separate thought occurred to me from the conversation that I had overheard between Karl and his colleague.
“Dr. Beringer, do you ...”
“Yes?”
“Did anyone tell you, or is it written in my file ... what my mother’s illness was?”
Beringer’s expression didn’t change, though only because his features froze to prevent a reaction.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I want to know.”
He gave me another intent look as he tried to decipher my meaning.
“I’m not sure that I understand, Enim: do you not know what your mother suffered from?” He waited for me to shake my head before his frown deepened. “I ... was not aware of that.”
“I mean, I thought it was depression,” I said. “That’s ... that’s what my father always referred to it as, only something that Karl said over break made me wonder.”
“I see.”
“So is there something else?” I persisted. “Was it just depression?”
Beringer continued to frown as he looked at me, and it occurred to me that it was the first time that I had ever seen him uncomfortable. It changed his appearance unfavorably.
“Would you mind if I waited until next week to give you an answer, Enim? Only ... I’m not certain of the protocol on this matter. Medical records are private, and ...”
“But she’s my mother,” I said. “And it’s written in my file, isn’t it?”
“It’s ...” He glanced down at the file lying between us on the desk. “It is mentioned in here, yes.”
“So you’re not going to tell me? Is it – is it that bad?”
“I’m only hesitating because I have to check procedure, Enim, not because I don’t want to.”
My heart had begun to beat very quickly; it rose up to pound in my throat and made it difficult to speak.
“So there is something else,” I said. “And everyone else knows but me?”
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 21
