Beneath Ceaseless Skies #100

by Richard Parks

  I wasn’t sure how much I minded. I had developed my own fascination with Brandon, the kind of idol worship that is specifically set aside for eight-year-olds to do with as they please. I never truly suspected we’d catch him at anything. Aside from his unorthodox arrival, he had never done anything the least bit criminal.

  One morning, just as Mother was leaving to do her work with the Women’s League, two men approached the door. One of them showed a badge that was not local police but some higher-up authority in the government. They introduced themselves as Inspectors Loughton and Lee, and they were looking for a particular young man.

  Mother said she had not seen anyone of that sort. But that night, after I was meant to be in bed, I sneaked down the hall for a glass of water, only to find that Mother and Aunt Lily were awake, sitting at the kitchen table with a lamp lit between them. “They’ll come back to ask me, if they think of it,” I heard Aunt Lily say, “when their other leads run dry. I say, send him along.”

  “Where?” Mother asked. I heard the soft, dry sound of her hands wringing with worry.

  Aunt Lily sighed. “You’re the one who can lie, Justine. Not me.”

  I realized then what I should have known from the outset. There are plenty of thieves in the world who come to steal silver, but they steal silver because, for some reason, they need it.

  Brandon had come to us with neatly trimmed hair and a shirt whose only damage came from climbing through the sitting room window. He just wasn’t the sort to become a burglar.

  After that night, I began to notice other things, like Aunt Lily, and how she wasn’t saying anything about our lack of new boarders. I noticed the small things that Brandon did every day: how Mother had given him a room at the back of the house, how he would stay slightly away from the front windows, how he never went outside. Brandon was a criminal, but we weren’t letting him stay simply because of Mother’s kindness or because everyone thought I needed looking after. Maybe his arrival hadn’t been an attempted burglary at all. We weren’t sheltering a clumsy thief. We were harboring a fugitive. Someone who had done something worse than stealing.

  In a way, Aunt Lily might have had a point in her sermons about gothic novels leading to a depraved mind. The conversation I had overheard led me not to fear and nerves, but to a kind of romantic fascination with this figure in our household who had taken on a new air of mystery. Now, I became a willing partner in Aunt Victoria’s game of Let’s Spy on Brandon—more than that, I would instigate it. I wanted to know what he had done.

  The morning we found out, it was because of me. I pulled Aunt Victoria into the backyard to spy with me through the window. It was relatively early, but Brandon was already awake.

  He didn’t notice us; he was looking in the mirror on his wall, performing a routine in which he would run his fingers through his hair, and then scowl and repeat the exercise. Aunt Victoria was unimpressed. For me, I hadn’t realized that looking like a charming rake was something one had to work at.

  Then, quite casually, he unfastened his pendant and laid it on the bedside table.

  I expected Aunt Victoria to fly at him, flinging silent insults and possibly small objects, but she didn’t.

  She dropped down onto the grass with no mind for her skirts. I protested without a sound that she was twisting my arm, until she abruptly let me go and my voice rang out into the morning.

  “—toria, why hasn’t he got—”

  I gasped and ducked beneath the window, but it was too late. We’d been seen.

  Brandon leaned out the window, not even bothering to replace his fake pendant. “You two can now have me put in prison for years, did you know?” He was trying to be his usual self, but his voice had a tension in it that belied the attempt at lightness.

  This was, I thought, because he was not really a charming person at all; he had not gone to his coming-of-age ceremony and was still a child, carrying his worst flaw uncorrected. I couldn’t even formulate words to describe the magnitude of this deception. “You lied,” I said at last.

  Aunt Victoria stared off across the yard, biting her lip.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Brandon said quietly.

  “We already knew you were a criminal,” I said. “So, don’t worry, it’s not—”

  “It’s not your fault,” he told Aunt Victoria. “I had my parents’ help; I was fourteen—you couldn’t have done anything to prevent—”

  She shook her head. Everything she’d ever cared about had been taken from her, and now she knew that if she’d been someone else, somewhere else, she might have had a choice.

  * * *

  The inspectors returned, just like Aunt Lily said they would. This time, they came into the house without asking permission. “We have reason to believe that you’re sheltering a criminal, ma’am,” said Inspector Loughton, while Inspector Lee handed her the search warrant. “We won’t trouble you far. We’d just like to ask one question of Miss Lily Howell. If she answers to our satisfaction, we needn’t even bother following up on the warrant.”

  Mother’s reply was cool and reasonable. “If there is a question to be asked, you may just as well ask it of me. I am the owner of this house, as your warrant should show.” She turned to me; I was frozen in place at the foot of the stairs, having come down when I heard the knock at the door. “Rose, go upstairs and fetch your aunt Lily.”

  “But—”

  She interrupted me, and Mother never interrupted me. “Go, Rose.”

  Aunt Lily was not upstairs. She was in the pantry, making the list for the week’s shopping, like she always did on Sunday evenings.

  I bumped into Brandon at the top of the stairs. He had been telling me one of his stories when the knock had come at the door, but he knew better than to go down with me. He had heard everything, though, and he knew as well as I did what they were going to ask Aunt Lily, and Aunt Lily couldn’t lie. “Upstairs,” I whispered. “Go hide with Aunt Victoria.”

  He looked warily up at the stowed ladder that led to her attic bedroom. It was the only place I could think of. I hoped Aunt Victoria was still awake.

  I ran dutifully to Aunt Lily’s bedroom, checking under the bed and in the closet so I could tell Mother and the inspectors that I couldn’t find her. “I looked everywhere,” I said.

  “Where could she be?” Mother said, but the inspectors were on to her.

  I didn’t like the look of them at all, so much taller than even Mother and dressed in suits of black. I tore back up the stairs and followed Brandon into the attic, clambering up the ladder as fast as I could to slip in before either of them lowered the trapdoor.

  Aunt Victoria closed the door behind us and gestured for help moving a trunk over it. A brief, silent argument ensued wherein Brandon maintained that this would only get everyone into more trouble when they found him. She suggested the window, but there was a third inspector outside, waiting with the carriage they had come in.

  For a moment, the silence was so loud that I understood why my aunt would break plates to escape it. Brandon sat down heavily on the floor next to Aunt Victoria’s bed. I scrambled over to sit next to him, not knowing what else to do. There was nowhere else to hide.

  Brandon suddenly began to speak—under his breath; he already knew how dangerous it was, but something in or beyond this moment seemed to compel him. “I was fourteen when my parents sent me away,” he said. “I lived with my grandparents for two years, and they pretended I was younger—I was small for my age; it was easily done—and when my father came to fetch me back, he’d had the false pendant made. We told everyone I had come of age out in the country, which was true, and everyone simply assumed.... I made a mistake, telling someone; I thought she... but she didn’t. They wanted me to go through the ceremony the next year. I couldn’t stand the thought of that weight around my neck, never being able to take it off.... And I’m sorry, to both of you—”

  Though I tried to be quiet, I was still at the age where I was too small to help crying, a
nd Aunt Victoria wrapped her arms around me so that I didn’t have to. Brandon fell silent as well, and for a little while, the only sound was his breath in the darkness.

  The stairs creaked, just once, and then— “That is my sister’s room!” Aunt Lily cried. “Gentlemen, I ask you, just what are you implying?”

  Aunt Victoria let go of me and leapt toward her writing desk, where she scrawled something in pencil, following it with one vehement mark, an underline. She shoved the scrap of paper into Brandon’s hand. He read it, and as the trapdoor swung open, he squeezed his eyes shut.

  The paper fell to the floor. I read it later:

  It does not determine who you are.

  The arrest was quiet. Brandon went down the stairs between the two men, and he left the house in front of them. As they rode away, none of us said anything, not even Aunt Lily, though it was perhaps an opportunity for a word about morals.

  Soon after that, Aunt Victoria disappeared. She took a single bag with her, leaving behind most of her things and a cryptic note for Mother, about not letting what she’d said be a lie. One of our neighbors later claimed to have seen her at the train station, carpet bag at her feet, notepaper and pencil in hand.

  Aunt Lily was the first to notice, on Sunday, that the silver candlesticks were missing.

  Copyright © 2012 Amanda M. Olson

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Amanda M. Olson is a St. Olaf College graduate who has recently taken up residence in Wisconsin. She is a former student of Alpha Writer’s Workshop. This is her first published story.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  COVER ART

  “Knight’s Journey,” by Raphael Lacoste

  Raphael Lacoste is a Senior Art Director on videogames and cinematics. He was the Art Director at Ubisoft on such titles as Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed. Raphael stepped away from the game industry to work as a Matte Painter and Senior Concept Artist on such feature films as: Terminator: Salvation, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Repo Men. Raphael now works as a Senior Art Director for Electronic Arts and now Ubisoft. His artwork “Chinese Steampunk Village” was the cover art for BCS in winter 2010. View his gallery at www.raphael-lacoste.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press

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