by Kelly Powell
He gives me the slightest nod in return. “Very well.”
My mother turns back to us. She raises her eyebrows, and I say, “I’ve invited Jude over, if that’s all right. We’re going to have a look through Da’s trunk.”
For a moment she regards me, dark eyes searching my face. I can’t tell what she’s thinking, and the obscurity needles me to the point of frustration. But when she glances at Jude, it’s with a smile. “You know you’re always welcome, Mr. Osric.”
Jude inclines his head, cheeks pink. In that instant he is once again the little boy who planted flowers alongside me in our garden, rolled marbles across our kitchen floor. He and my mother maintain a stream of small talk as we head for home. I let their conversation wash over me, distracted as I realize this marks Jude’s first real visit since the day of my father’s funeral. We pass a cluster of trees, and the shingled roof comes into view, then green shutters, spotless white siding. My mother opens the door, and we move into the entryway.
Jude hangs his wool coat and cap on one of the wall hooks. The line of fabric against our wallpaper is quite the picture, Jude’s coat hanging like it belongs there.
My mother disappears into the kitchen, and I lead Jude down the hall, into the drawing room. It’s crowded with furniture: a threadbare sofa and odd chairs, end tables and a dusty old piano. Paintings cover the walls, and a hooked rug obscures the hardwood floor. Jude looks about the space as though it’s new to him—or like he’s trying to find some difference made in the years of his absence—but it’s the same as it always was.
It’s peculiar to think he must have as many memories here as I do in the lighthouse.
My father’s books are kept in a large trunk tucked between the wall and the writing desk. A stamped plaque bears his name: GAVIN ALEXANDER. It’s held together with brass fittings, and I pry up the heavy clasp, lifting the lid back.
Large leather-bound volumes take up most of the space inside, journals and loose bits of paper crammed in the gaps. Jude settles himself on the rug as I start pulling out volumes. Taking the topmost one off the pile, he cracks it open. “Going to take a while to sort through all this,” he says. “What exactly are we looking for?”
I sit back. Numerous parts of this murder don’t make sense to me, but the false blame makes the least of all. The killer could’ve disposed of Connor’s body out at sea, buried him in the remote north of the island. Instead, they orchestrated the whole thing to mirror siren kills.
“They wanted him found.” I look to Jude. “Perhaps it’s not important who was killed but that someone was. The killer could’ve framed the sirens to undermine the ban. It’s likely that same person gave Russell those cans of poison. They may want the Council to crack down on the siren population again.”
Jude swallows. His gaze falls back on the book in his hands. “That’s awful, Moira.” He says it like I didn’t know it was.
“It’s murder,” I reply. “What did you think it would be?”
Jude doesn’t meet my eye. He flips through thick, yellowing pages, but his mind seems elsewhere. “That night in the pub,” he begins, “I said… I told them you thought Connor was murdered. Just not murdered by me.”
I press my fingertips to my father’s trunk. I can hear the blood rushing in my ears. “Did you, now?” I say, voice low.
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I wasn’t in my right mind.”
Gabriel Flint could’ve followed us from the pub that night. I’d seen Warren Knox there as well. I mention this to Jude and watch his brows knit together.
“I don’t know, Moira,” he says finally. “Part of me doesn’t even want to picture it.”
“Would you rather it be someone else?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Lowering my gaze, I pick at a worn thread on the rug. “Eve mentioned another thing.” I look up to meet his eye. “She said Connor wished to speak with you. Did he…?” I falter. “Did he come by the lighthouse?”
A long pause stretches out between us. After what seems like an age, Jude turns over my words as though he doesn’t quite understand them. He says, “Speak with me?”
“Yes.”
His gaze cuts away.
“She said Connor knew something. Something secret.”
At that Jude blanches, but still he says nothing.
“Jude?”
Looking back he asks, “What sort of secret?”
“Eve didn’t know.” I tilt my head to the side. “He could’ve been going to tell whoever he met on the beach. Perhaps that someone didn’t like him knowing what he knew.”
Jude sits very still, the line of his mouth pressed thin. The ticks of the grandfather clock in the corner become the loudest thing in the room.
“He didn’t,” he says at last. His voice is raw and rasping. “He didn’t come to the lighthouse.”
It’s so obvious he’s withholding something, I’m inclined to push him.
Yet his expression keeps me from it.
I haven’t seen Jude look like this since the day he saw the washed-up bodies of his family. He’d stood among the crowd on the beach, ashen and motionless, the same bone-deep terror in his eyes. Back then my father took him by the shoulder, turning him away.
Don’t look.
The only way I can think to remedy it now is to move on entirely.
I say, “All right,” and pretend not to notice the breath of relief that hisses out between his teeth.
Digging a hand into the trunk, I pull out a leather journal. It’s faded, stiff when I open it, my father’s handwriting familiar and comforting. An inscription marks the first page, an old island rhyme.
A flash of silver under sea, where siren song hath taken me. Absent of color, absent of light, absent of all that I knew in life. Bolt the latch and watch the waves, pray sirens do not take me tonight.
My father and Llyr Osric would spread out large maps of Twillengyle, jot things down in notebooks, trek across the moors no matter the weather. I remember watching them, wondering, a small hand pressed to the plate-glass window.
Jude must be following my train of thought. Some color has returned to his cheeks, and he stretches out on the rug. “We’re getting like them,” he says, staring up at the ceiling. “This… This is something they would do.” I study his expression as he speaks, but he seems neither pleased nor disturbed by the notion.
Biting my lip, I pile more books between us. I’m ever so careful not to touch the one Jude mustn’t open, the letter between its pages conveying what he mustn’t know.
I ought to burn it really. I should have years ago, the very moment I found it—but the idea of destroying yet another piece of Jude’s family is a task I can’t easily stomach. I may be heartless in many respects, but my blood doesn’t run that cold.
Jude gets to his feet suddenly, his eyes on the doorway. I turn to follow his gaze. My mother stands there, hand on the frame, her apron dusted with flour. She says, “Just wondering if you’re staying for dinner, Wick.”
“Oh.” Jude looks down at me, wringing his hands. “I don’t…”
“You should,” I say. I’m aware of what Jude’s diet must consist of: fish and porridge and biscuits. It’s probably been ages since he’s eaten a proper meal.
“All right,” he says to me, and to my mother, “Thank you.”
We spend the next few hours poring over the contents of the trunk. A majority of the papers are charts, records of when and where sirens took to shore. There are strange navigational symbols beside paragraphs of description. I point them out to Jude. “Do you know these?”
He squints at a pattern of triangles grouped together. “They’re danger signs. That one’s for riptides.” He taps another near the bottom. “This one is for sunken wrecks.”
“Is there any for sirens?”
Jude studies the page before tapping a symbol in the top corner. It’s a dotted circle around a small s. “For the sirens,” he says.
There are many tal
es of how the sirens came to be. Their origins sway from one theory to another, all of it guesswork. Some think they were once ordinary women—shipwreck survivors, or those pushed off ships to drown—whom the sea took in, fashioning them into sleek and lovely weapons. Most others believe the sirens are creatures unto themselves, like the fair folk, with music as their lure and teeth as their hooks.
Whichever is true, they are like homespun magic: an ingrained part of the island, yet elusive as smoke.
“Moira,” my mother calls from the kitchen, “come set the table for our guest.”
I pick myself up, glancing at Jude. The tips of his ears go pink. He opens his mouth, closes it, before dropping his gaze back to the chart he holds.
It’s been far too long since I last set our table for three. My mother’s friends come to call in the morning hours, usually to whisk her into town. It’s dinner for two, always, at the Alexander household. Yet when Jude sits in the place I’ve prepared for him, I feel that shift. Something changing. Water rising toward high tide.
My mother, for her part, has cooked a considerable amount of food. It’s more extravagant than what we’d normally eat on Sundays, and I know she’s done it only because of Jude. I root around for something derisive to say about it but end up holding my tongue. It wouldn’t be fair of me to put Jude Osric in the middle of an argument. And as dinner progresses, every inane topic under the sun is brought forward and discussed. It’s one of our greatest talents as islanders—to talk about nothing for such a long while.
Jude mentions how the Council plan to have a telephone installed in the lighthouse. My mother says, “Oh, that would be novel, wouldn’t it?”
He nods in agreement.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” I say. “What good is a telephone when no one else on the island has one? Who would you call?”
Jude pushes around the food on his plate, brow creased. “They’ll be putting one in the police station, too. And town hall. It’s for emergencies.”
I wrinkle my nose at him. A grin cracks through his annoyance, and I think he’d laugh if my mother weren’t present.
Once we’re finished, my mother piles all the dishes onto the counter. Jude gets up to help, but my mother just gives him a look. I recognize it as the one she used when we were young and did something that displeased her. He sits back down at the table without a word, only to fidget with the edge of the tablecloth.
And it doesn’t stop her from enlisting my help. As I’m drying plates, I say to Jude, “You can borrow some of those books, if you like.”
He flattens his hand on the tablecloth, smoothing the creases. “All right.”
Back in the drawing room, we tidy the journals and charts left scattered over the rug. Jude gathers a few books into his arms, brings them to the door, and sets them down to put on his coat and cap. My mother comes out from the kitchen, and he nods at her. “Thank you for having me, Mrs. Alexander. It was lovely.”
“Anytime, dear,” she says.
On the front step, he pauses. Curling my fingers around the doorknob, I ask, “Shall I come by tomorrow?”
He nods, shifting his grip on the books he carries. “Yes,” he says. “That is, whenever you like.”
I smile. “Night, Jude.”
“Good night.”
He sets off down the walkway. I close the door and turn to look at my mother.
Under the lamplight, her eyes shine to a dark polish. Bunching a tea towel in her hands, she says, “That boy is getting just like his father.”
It’s an unwitting echo of Jude’s earlier words. We’re getting like them. Though I feel my mother implies something else entirely.
I follow her back into the kitchen. Leaning on the table, I ask, “What do you mean by that?”
“Just an observation, Moira.” She folds up the towel, places it on the counter. “I had hoped some of his sensibleness would rub off on you.”
I glare, hoping she can see the daggers in my eyes. “You think I’m a poor influence?”
She stares out the window at the leaden sky. “That lighthouse was falling into neglect before Llyr Osric died,” she says, voice soft. “There was even talk about removing him from the post. Your father filled his head with fanciful notions of the sirens—made him curious, excitable. The two of them together were more concerned about the past than the present, the magic of Twillengyle over its realities.”
I swallow, not knowing what to say. My mother talks as if the magic and reality of this island are somehow separate. I’ve only ever understood them to be the same.
She continues. “Your father was charming as siren song when it suited him. The way he spoke and smiled and laughed. He could make people forget themselves, their responsibilities.” My mother looks at me then, like she means to see into my soul. “He taught you things most fathers are not wont to teach their daughters. You wanted to know it all, and he loved you for it.”
“Fathers are meant to love their daughters,” I say stiffly.
“He could see himself in you.” She pauses. “And you’re diverting another Osric from his work, just as your father did.”
“You’re wrong,” I say. “That’s not what I’m trying to do.”
“Perhaps you don’t mean to,” she says. “But you are.”
I push away from the table. I feel doubtful and precarious—standing beneath her gaze—things I never felt in Jude’s company, yet they are so quick to resurface with one word from my mother.
There’s a bitter feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Though the sun has not yet set, I tell her, “I’m going to bed,” and escape down the hall before she can say anything further. Once I reach my bedroom, I make a nest of my blankets. I want to remember Jude’s smile at dinner, but instead my mind is packed full of the sound of my mother’s voice, speaking words I’ve no desire to hear.
I know already I’m not fit to be a friend of Jude Osric’s. I’ve lied to him, hid things from him, isolating myself in the process. The past haunts us still, hanging over us like a knife point strung above our heads. I’ve kept my father’s secret, but I do know this: We are not our fathers.
We are Moira and Jude, no more and no less than that.
Whatever decisions we make, they will be ours.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
IN THE NIGHT, I FALL asleep quickly, lulled by the quiet and the dark. When I wake, it’s still dark—but not so quiet. Something knocks against my window, three short raps.
I sit up in bed. Shadows envelop the room, but I can tell by what light there is that it’s close to dawn. I feel sleep-heavy and clouded; perhaps I dreamed the knocking.
Then it comes again. This time the knocks continue past three, adamant, like someone wanting to be let in.
Cautious, I creep out from under the blankets. I shiver in my nightgown as I try to peer through the lace curtains, but all I see are glimpses of my own reflection in the glass. With a sigh, cursing the night, I draw back the curtains, flip the latch, and push open the window.
Jude Osric stands outside of it.
I wonder if this is indeed a dream. Though I don’t believe I’d dream Jude looking like this. He holds a lantern high, casting his face in lamplight. His curls are windblown without his cap, his eyes shadowed by the lantern’s glow. In the murk, there’s something wild about him—an intensity to the lines of his expression.
“I thought about waiting until morning proper,” he says, “but this can’t wait.”
Even his voice is strange. Low and quiet, a hard undercurrent to it.
I whisper back, “What is it?”
He holds out a hand, insistent. “Please, Moira.”
I straighten up from the windowsill, nerves crackling beneath my skin. I am, at once, very much awake. “All right,” I say. “Just let me… let me get dressed.”
I shut the window on him. I head to my wardrobe, tug on stockings and boots, a dress and my knit cardigan. I do up my hair and place an iron ring in my pocket. I’m about to lif
t the window again, when I dash back, grab a pen off my desk, and scribble out a note for my mother.
Jude offers his hand as I climb over the ledge. I don’t think he knows just how many times I’ve done this without his help. I jump down onto the grass, dusting off my palms.
“What’s this about?”
“I’ll show you,” he says. “Come on.”
We start in the direction of the lighthouse, the sky above us a mottled blue-gray. I shiver, hunch my shoulders against the chill, and wait in vain for my pulse to settle.
It’s unlike Jude to keep me in the dark this way. Whatever he wishes to reveal, it must be terrible, to have him at my window before the sunrise. As we walk, he pulls out his pocket watch, checks the time, and rubs his thumb over the face of it before tucking it away.
Reaching the keeper’s cottage, Jude hands me the lantern. His fingers tremble as he unlocks the door, his face pallid as he opens it. I snuff out the lantern light, setting it down on his desk in the hall. When I look back, Jude stands motionless at the door, eyes unfocused like when the police came to arrest him. I draw my lower lip between my teeth. “Jude,” I say softly. “What’s wrong?”
His brow furrows. He doesn’t meet my gaze, but joins me at the desk. Pulling open one of the drawers, he takes out a piece of paper. It’s folded, creased, and in the manner of dreams, I know just what it is.
He offers it to me. “You ought to read this,” he says.
As if I haven’t read it a hundred times over.
I take hold of the paper. The letter is two-sided. It’s like part of a conversation, a section cut from a longer sheet of music. The first is a message from my father, calling Llyr by the name he used to, the one that now belongs to Jude. It reads,
Wick,
I say if you go without iron, you’ll have a better chance. Sirens will be wary of the boat otherwise. I did so only yesterday and it’s quite safe, if you’re thinking of taking Pearl and Emmeline along.
—Gavin
And on the back, Llyr had written his answer:
I’ll take the boat out tomorrow if the weather’s right for it. Jude knows well enough to keep the light for a few hours. He’ll like having the place to himself, but check on him if we’re late back, would you?