The Last Nightingale (26 page)

“All right, then. After that, why can’t we both sleep in the shed? They know we’re family, and all.”

She saw Shane stop sweeping for a moment, then he shrugged and said, “No, since they know us now, I think . . .” He paused, then continued. “I think we just show them we’re honest and we work hard.”

Vignette laughed out loud.

“What’s so—”

“You’re talking about how to keep your cleanup job! You just got rich!” She laughed out loud and whirled with the broom, but Shane grabbed her shoulder and brought her to a halt.

“Vignette. We heard a story. That’s all. We don’t have any money yet.”

He held her gaze until she lowered hers. She wanted to argue. It hurt to be rebuked by her own brother. But she also saw that it was foolish to celebrate something before you even know if it is true.

But what if it is true?
the inner voice repeated.
What if it is?

What if there were no monster in the closet, this time? What if shadows were only shadows? What if everything worked out just right? It felt as if every cell in her body wanted to believe that.

“But,” Shane began, smiling, “wouldn’t it be something if that money was really there?”

They both smiled at the sheer joy of the idea. It was enough to break the spell of the job. Shane collected their brooms and went to drop them back inside the Mission’s custodial closet, tactfully leaving Vignette free to go ahead and climb into her sleeping blanket. She stepped into the dark shed, ready to remove her pants and shirt and hang them up. It struck her that everything was working out so much better than she had dared to hope.

A strong forearm snapped around from behind her and caught her around the neck. The arm was thin but had animal strength. Before Vignette could make a sound, she was lifted up by the neck so that her toes barely brushed the floor. She must have done something to infuriate Shane, and he had attacked her. It made no sense, but it fit her experience. Old skills kicked in—the arm was reaching around her over her right shoulder, so she instinctively turned her head to the left to take the pressure off of her windpipe. When she did, she got a peripheral look at her assailant.

It was the woman from the cemetery.

Vignette was so used to having grown-ups mad at her that she wasn’t particularly shocked by the fact that one was attacking her;
she just couldn’t imagine what she had done to make this woman so angry. Both of Vignette’s hands were clasped around the arm, which was wedged under her chin. She struggled for air under the vise grip. Finally she felt the woman place her lips close to Vignette’s ear, just before she spoke in a husky whisper.

“I like turning the boys into girls. But I’ve always done it after they were dead—small courtesy of the trade. In your case, I’m going to float you out to sea, up at the Golden Gate. You’ll still be alive
after
I do it!”

Vignette’s strangled voice came out in a broken rasp, “I’m already a girl!”

She heard a grunt of surprise. The pressure eased on her throat. Then the crazy woman grasped both of Vignette’s shoulders in an iron clutch and turned her face into the light. When the woman spoke this time, there was no more whisper. It sounded more like a man.

“Who the hell are you?” the voice demanded.

“Vignette.”

“Oh . . . Vignette.’ My goodness. Royalty If you’re a girl, why is your hair chopped so short?”

“They always cut it off for punishment.”

“What are you doing!” Shane’s voice boomed from the doorway. He sounded more like a man, too. Not old like a man, but dangerous like one.

Vignette and the intruder both spun around. Shane stood outlined in the doorway, staring at the crazy woman with an intensity that Vignette had never seen before. He looked like he could turn into a wolf. She never wanted anybody to look at her like that.

“I said what do you want?” Shane snarled. His entire body was shivering in fear, but his fists were clenched and his face was red with rage.

“Ah, Shane,” the woman said, as if they were at a tea. She turned to Vignette with an apologetic little grin. “Sorry. It was the short hair. Tsk! You must have really been a bad girl!”

While the woman was talking, Shane hurried over to Vignette and planted himself in front of her, blocking the woman. He dropped his hot gaze onto Vignette and barked a single order. “Run!”

Everything about the way he said it forced Vignette’s muscles into motion. She was out the door and speeding through the graveyard toward the front gate before she even realized that she had decided to obey him. The springs of her legs fully unwound and sent her flying past the tombstones while the growing whoosh of runner’s wind filled her ears. The adrenaline of survival blasted through her. She maintained that speed all the way off of the Mission grounds, across the road, down the block, around the corner, and several more blocks before she grew tired enough to slow to a normal trot.

She thought about looking for a cop, but wondered what she was supposed to tell him that would get him to help Shane and not the crazy woman. Vignette could not remember a time when she had ever thought of adults as being anything other than unpredictable and dangerous. Police could be just as crazy as any other adult, except they also had the power to put you in jail. What then? She had to do something.

She considered going back to the Mission, but everything about that felt wrong, and Shane’s order left no room for it. She needed to trust that he was bigger, older, and as she saw during that moment there in the toolshed doorway, he carried a reservoir of anger that gave him a disturbing kind of power. Surely, she told herself, he could either deal with that nasty woman or outrun her.

It was at that moment when Vignette realized that there was one adult they could trust, and that her feet had been heading in the direction of Sergeant Randall Blackburn’s place ever since she left the Mission.

I
T
TOOK
S
HANE
A WHILE
to wake up. After a long struggle with his senses, he finally realized that he was actually seeing something, but barely. There was general darkness with only faint illumination. He was facing into a broken and jumbled version of what should have been a ceiling. He knew that he must be underneath one of the city’s many collapsed buildings that had not yet been reclaimed.

His attention focused on a long, hard source of pain that was running up the length of his back. He finally realized that he was bound to a wide construction beam by several windings of thick rope. The rope was pulled so tight that it caused the beam to dig into his skin. His feet were just touching the floor, on tiptoe, and his ankles were bound to the beam with another turn of rope.

The pain in his head was intense and unrelenting, impossible to ignore. Something had struck him, propelled by a deathly solid force. The blow could have just as easily killed him. So he was alive, then. Wasn’t he?

He could see that there was a source of faint light coming from the floor, just out of reach of his vision, but he could barely lower his head far enough to look. His line of sight caught just enough to see a workman’s oil lamp perched on the floor, which threw a dim yellow-orange glow and cast a patchwork of jagged shadows over-
head. A few broken pieces of signs with Chinese characters on them were enough to give away the location. Since all of Chinatown was swept by the fires, this artificial dungeon only existed because the building was mostly stone and masonry.

The throbbing in his head was so awful that every heartbeat sent another sharp stab into him. He winced at the worst ones. Something terrible was happening to him. But every time he squeezed his memory for an answer, for details of any kind, he only got deeper pains.

Shane finally became aware of another presence in the room; there was the sound of a slight foot scuff along the broken floor. Somebody nearby took a deep breath. Then he felt somebody’s body warmth loom in close to him, and it felt as if somebody’s face hovered just underneath his chin, right up near his throat. He could feel a slight, hot breath glancing off of his skin.

“Shane.” It was an adult voice, but young. “Do you know me?”

It was with that second phrase that Shane was overwhelmed by a singular stab of fear shooting through him.

That voice . . .

There were only a few words. It was impossible to be sure, but that voice … At that moment, Shane saw the face of a strange-looking woman rise up into his view. Her makeup was badly smeared, and when she brought her eyes close to his, her breath was hot and sour.

“Do you know me?” she asked again. But to Shane’s astonishment, this time the words sounded as if they were spoken by the same young male.

The woman reached both arms upward over her head and grasped handfuls of her own hair, as if to pull it out. But instead, it came off as a wig, which she raised up to arm’s length, instantly becoming a short-haired young man in smeared makeup.

This time he looked Shane directly in the eyes. “I said, do you know me?”

With those six words, Shane did know. His body knew before his
brain did, and his bladder emptied down his pant leg and over his shoes.

“I’ve nev-nev-I’ve never— I’ve never—”

“Stop! In that case, my friend, it seems extraordinary that you tried to club me over the head with a hand shovel this morning, forcing me to defend myself. Because if you don’t know me, then you have no reason to try to kill me, do you?

“No, there’ll be no easy death for you. Because I know what you are now, Shane. I see it clearly. You are sent to torment me in this life. I tried to be rid of you, but then some treasonous bastard arranges for you to be in one of the few places where you could reappear in my life like a stubborn weed.

“So, big things to come for you! Things that work best while you’re still alive, too!” He was pacing while he spoke now, feeling his own rhythm.

Shane tried to recapture the rage he had earlier that day, when he first found this maniac there in the toolshed, menacing his sister Vignette. But the magic power was gone now, like evaporated water. Without Vignette there to give him reason to stand and fight, the power for such a thing felt far beyond his reach.

That icy knot of dread in his stomach began to suck the life from the rest of him. He felt the old powerlessness rapidly coming over him, bringing the same invisible monster that held him so petrified and useless in the Nightingale house.

“Do you remember my name?” asked the man in a dress.

“I don’t— I don’t know your na-na-”

“Oh, I think you do. You used to, Shane. You used to say it.”

“I don’t—”

“The name is Tommie. T-O-M-M-I-E. You can say it.”

“Tommie,” Shane repeated. And that’s when a whiff of the old magic wafted under his nose.

He did not stutter at all in saying the name, because he was only mimicking what he had just heard. So the word came out loud and clear. And a little rush of strength and confidence followed from
the sound of his own voice speaking without faltering. The sense of helplessness over his frustration paled next to his need to strike out at this killer in some way. He concentrated on the next words he wanted to say, so they would also come out strong and clear.

“In the Nightingale house, you never once told them your name. Why? Were you ashamed? Was that it?”

Through the haze of pain that blurred his thinking, Shane saw Tommie snap around to stare at him in shock. Now there was no doubting it, for either of them. Each one was face-to-face with the only other living person who knew what actually happened inside of the Nightingale house.

“Ashamed?” Tommie spoke the word as though he had never heard it before. “I was the living embodiment of Judgment Day! I dished out nothing that this family hadn’t earned! Don’t tell me about them being some sort of innocent family, either. They were willing to take
my house
for themselves.”

He showed Shane a cynical grin. “And shame on you for telling the newspapers that the Nightingales all died in the earthquake . . .”

“I never told the paper anything,” he said in a low, steady voice, imitating someone who is not afraid. “Somebody else told them those things.”

Tommie leaned toward him and stuck his face within inches of Shane’s. “Then where did they
get
the story from, eh, Shane? Somebody got it from you, at some point, didn’t they? Do we
have
to talk to each other as if we are stupid?”

But Shane had already seen it—Tommie was late with his reply. He had faltered. Shane felt another rush of confidence, enough to allow himself to actually feel how much rage was boiling away inside of him. The rage gave him a place to put his fear, and the power of all that fear expanded so quickly that he could feel new strength exploding through him. He moved to build up his confidence a little more by letting Tommie know that he remembered the insanity at the Nightingale house.

“You did every evil thing, to those women,” Shane said. “Except
for—except for—the main thing that—” He fumbled for the right term, but all he had ever heard were the nasty street words. “The thing that men and women do together. That’s the only crime you didn’t do. But it wasn’t because of your conscience, right?”

Shane had the last word out before he realized that he had spoken all those words without a hint of a stammer. Tommie seemed to notice, too; he flashed a nervous glance at Shane. And in that one moment, Tommie Kimbrough looked nothing at all like a cocky killer.

The moment did not last.

Blackburn was a light sleeper under most circumstances, and he could not help but hear the knocking at his front door. But since he was only a couple of hours into sleeping and had a full shift coming that night, he lay still in hopes that the noise would stop.

It did not. A light, rapid set of knocks came, then a slight pause, then another burst. Incessant, like a woodpecker. Who could it be? The idea of a visitor never crossed his mind. Most likely a neighbor, he groused. Some little difficulty that they wanted him to sort out, having heard that a policeman lived there.