by Kelly Powell
“He is,” says Irving, not without sympathy. “I reckon others will too, once I tell folk at the harbor how you’re doing.” He shifts his gaze to me. “Miss Alexander, you’ve been fine company these past few days. Thank you.”
As it turns out, a great deal of people end up visiting. All through the rest of the morning and afternoon, fishermen and dockers come knocking at the door. Jude answers it each time, smiling, reassuring them of his well-being, but as the day wears on, I can tell it tires him. He is not yet fully recovered. He presses a hand to the wall, as if needing the support, and his face pales, his mouth tightening when he thinks no one is looking.
The last pair of visitors take their leave, and Jude sits down, gazing bleary-eyed at the creels of fish and tins of biscuits left on the kitchen table. His dressing gown hangs off the shoulder of his injured arm, the bandages crisp and white alongside the green wool. He folds his right arm on the table and rests his head against it.
“Perhaps you should go upstairs,” I say. I open one of the creels, inspecting the herrings inside. “I can wake you when your uncle arrives.”
“I’m fine,” says Jude, looking up. “Shall I start dinner?”
“I’ll make it.”
I bring the creel over to the counter before Jude can get up. He leans back in his chair, passing a hand over his eyes. “What am I going to say to him, Moira?”
I curl my fingers around the counter’s edge. Any answer I might give seems to lodge in my throat. I look to the window, to the stretch of moors beyond the glass.
Jude continues. “What if he did catch that siren with somebody else? He’s going to… He’s going to notice she’s gone.”
“There’s a meeting tomorrow,” I say quietly. “Your uncle likely wants to be here for it. The Council is thinking about changing the restrictions of the hunting ban.”
“And they’re holding it in Dunmore? I would think Lochlan…”
I turn back to him. “Perhaps the police want to have their say.”
He places his hands flat on the table. “I’m coming.”
“Jude, you’re not well enough.”
He meets my gaze, jaw set. “Do you imagine I’ll go dashing off to the sirens as soon as you open the door?”
“I’m more concerned you’ll collapse after taking a step out of it.”
He swallows, looking elsewhere. “Very well, then,” he says after a pause. “I’ll stay.”
Before I can reply, there’s a knock on the door. The two of us stare at each other, unmoving.
I clear my throat. “Should I…?”
“No.” Jude stands up, one hand gripping the chair back. “He’ll be expecting me to answer.”
We walk to the entryway together. Jude straightens, almost imperceptibly. He unbolts the latch and opens the door wide.
Dylan Osric waits on the front step, in his wool coat and cloth cap, looking much the same as when I last saw him. There’s more gray streaking his brown curls, but he’s still wiry, like Jude, and haggard in a way Jude is not.
“Hello, Uncle.”
Dylan takes off his cap. “Jude,” he says. Then he regards me. “Evening, Miss Alexander. Mr. Irving didn’t mention you were here.”
I fix my gaze on him, offering up a thin smile. “Good evening, Mr. Osric.”
“She wanted to make sure I was all right,” says Jude.
“Hmm.” Dylan turns his attention back to him. “You going to let me in?”
Jude steps aside. In the entryway, Dylan hangs his coat and cap on an empty peg. He turns his head slightly, glancing down the hall.
Jude says, “I can build up a fire in the drawing room. If you’d like—”
“Have there been many people here, then?” Dylan interrupts. His eyes are hard, calculating; I can tell he’s weighing his words, mindful of my presence.
Jude leans back against the wall. He looks ashen and vulnerable in his loose-fitting dressing gown, his exhaustion evident in his posture. I want to reach out for him, to press my hand to his, but I hold myself still. He tells Dylan, “A fair few.”
“Hmm,” Dylan says again. “And what were you doing by the shore? Did that day seem a fine one to be drowned?”
“I was just…”
“Being foolish, that’s what. This is just the way your father was, you know, before he died.”
Jude says nothing. Dylan sets off down the hall, past the staircase, to the storeroom he kept the siren in. He pauses near the door. “Miss Alexander,” he says abruptly, “oughtn’t you be heading home?”
“Moira is welcome to stay as long as she likes,” Jude says. He looks over at me briefly before returning his gaze to his uncle. “Dylan, I—”
Dylan silences him with a raised hand. As he walks back toward us, his eyes do not stray from mine. “Did you send my nephew down there, Miss Alexander? Would he have been on the beach if it weren’t for you?”
And my breath catches with the honesty of it, a chill settling deep in my chest, because Jude wouldn’t have been on the beach if it weren’t for me. Of course he wouldn’t. I’m the one who suggested an investigation in the first place, dragging him alongside me into all of Twillengyle’s dangers and magic.
“All right, that’s quite enough.” This is Jude, his eyes shining bright and fierce. He pulls himself from the wall, leaving my side to catch Dylan by the arm. “I need to speak with you alone.”
Dylan glares back at him. “Very well.” He tugs out of Jude’s grip, turning toward the oak door—heading, presumably, for the watch room.
After he disappears into the tower, Jude comes to place his hands on my shoulders. He gazes down at me and says, voice low, “I’ll deal with him, Moira.” His face is anxious and tired, lovely and sad. “He shouldn’t have spoken to you in that manner.”
I touch his cheek. “Be careful.”
He goes up after Dylan, the door falling shut behind him. I wait a long minute and follow in his footsteps. On the watch room landing, I stop, hearing Dylan and Jude on the other side of the door. I rest a hand against the cool plaster of the tower wall, listening hard.
“Where is she?” says Dylan, so loud and sudden that I start. “I know well enough she’s not in that room. You’ve done something with her.”
Jude mumbles something. A sharp thump resonates from inside the room, and I grit my teeth, digging my nails into my palms.
Then Dylan’s voice, snarling, “You’ve no idea—”
“I do, actually,” Jude cuts in. “I know you only did it for yourself. Were you even thinking of Da when you chained her up? Did you even—”
“You had no business throwing her back. Not now. Not after what I’ve done.”
For the first time in recent memory, I hear ice crystallize in Jude’s voice. “What would you have me do?” he asks. “You tortured her, Dylan, and I’ve spent the past year worried sick over her. If someone found out—”
“Someone did find out,” Dylan growls.
I hear movement, the creak of floorboards. And very softly Jude says, “What?”
“Little wonder how they did. I had dockers asking me why you were stowing supplies out in the shed rather than the storeroom. Hughes thought you were hosting dinner parties with the cuts of meat you kept buying.”
“I didn’t think—”
“Now you have Gavin’s daughter downstairs. Good God, Jude, you’ve got the song in your ears with her, never mind sirens.”
“Dylan,” Jude says, and he’s so quiet I strain to hear him. “Who found out?”
There is a long, long silence. I feel my heartbeat, slow and dreadful, as I wait for something to happen.
“Just—tell me it wasn’t Connor Sheahan. Tell me you didn’t…”
“Now, that was a tragic mishap.”
“Dylan.”
“I wasn’t the one to wield the knife, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Inside the watch room, Jude curses once, and then again. He sounds wrecked, and I’m both thankful and torn I can’
t see his expression.
“When I was here a while back, he started asking all sorts of questions,” says Dylan. “Met me on the dock soon as I was off the boat. Said he’d been meaning to talk to you.” He pauses, but Jude remains silent, and he continues. “You’re lucky he came to me instead. That boy was putting two and two together, nosy as anything. He thought there was something going on up at the light, and I asked him—asked him what made him think so. He went off talking about how you were never much at the harbor these days, wondering why you had that one shuttered window, why you were paying out for so much goddamn meat.
“He said he thought he heard something while he was here in the summer. A strange thing—seeing as he knew you lived alone.”
Through the wall I hear Jude make a sound low in his throat, like Dylan’s words have choked him. I bow my head, close my eyes, and try to breathe through the ache in my chest.
“So I dealt with it.” Dylan’s tone is matter-of-fact. “I reckoned he’d go to the police in time. Wasn’t hard to head him off and find someone who agreed with my line of thinking. Llyr was a stone’s throw away from losing this post before he died—I wasn’t going to let that happen to you.”
My lip curls in a sneer. It’s Dylan alone who’s at fault. He put Jude between the hammer and the anvil—there’s no reason why Jude should be taken to task for it.
Jude says, “He was a child,” and his voice is on the verge of cracking in two.
Dylan doesn’t answer immediately. When he does he says only, “Worse things have come to pass on this island.”
“Get out,” Jude snaps back at him. “Get out. Get out of here.”
I step away from the door. The kitchen is too far below, so I dash upstairs, to the highest door of the lighthouse. I walk out onto the narrow deck set above the gallery. Its railing is rusted, but I curl my hands around it nonetheless; my one barrier from the cliffs beneath, from a long drop into the sea.
Below, the front door of the cottage opens, and I see Dylan Osric strike out toward Dunmore. He’s a figure of sharp edges and shadow against the red evening sky. It takes a few minutes for Jude to join me. He stands beside me, hands resting on the railing. I look up at him. He stares out at the waves rather than his uncle’s retreating figure.
“I heard what Dylan said to you,” I whisper.
Jude swallows hard. With the back of one hand, he wipes his eyes in a perfunctory way, like he means to catch the tears before they fall.
“He’ll be spending the night at Alder’s Inn.” His voice comes out rough as gravel. “He wants to be here for the meeting.”
I place my hand over his. “I’m sorry, Jude.”
Ducking his head, he turns his face away. A pair of gulls swoop above us as he takes several deep breaths. Eventually he says, “Not surprising, is it?”
And it’s true Jude suspected his uncle from the outset. I expect it’s different though, to have that suspicion proven so.
I fix my eyes on the bleeding horizon, on the sea black as spilled ink. A matching darkness coalesces in the chambers of my heart. Anger is a hot hand against my breastbone, and I wonder, just for a moment, what would happen if I set it loose.
Jude, as always, is the one to pull me from the shadows. He taps once against the iron rail. “Do you know why this is called a widow’s walk?”
I do know. Jude had told me years ago. Or my father had. Old island stories all blurring together in my head. But I say nothing.
“The wives of sailors came up here, in times gone past, to watch for their husband’s ships on the horizon. Waiting for someone who would never come back to them.”
His words send an involuntary shiver down my spine. I imagine pretty women wearing white dresses and sad expressions where Jude Osric and I now stand. His voice sounds empty, undone somehow, like he has taken the story and swallowed the heart of it.
“You should rest,” I tell him.
He looks at me. Red traces the whites of his eyes. “Tomorrow,” he says, “at the meeting… you think the killer will be there?”
“Most likely.”
“Be careful, please, Moira.”
I squeeze his fingers, the both of us gazing at the horizon line. We stand there, waiting, until the sun dips into the ocean and disappears.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
A CROWD HAS ALREADY GATHERED in the dance hall by the time my mother and I arrive. Someone has placed a lectern on the edge of the stage and chairs where each of the four Council members sit.
With so many people milling about, my memories of the place feel distant, drowned out by the whispers of those present. In an hour or so the Council may well make a decision regarding the ban. A decision that might not be a favorable one.
I remember little of the hunts, but what I do remember is sitting in the drawing room of my house with Emmeline and Jude, our mothers making cakes in the kitchen. Emmeline was only a child herself then, and she sat with Jude and me by the fire, telling us stories. They were old folktales that changed with each telling, but the heart of them remained the same. I remember how red her hair looked in the firelight, her lovely, musical voice lulling as waves upon the shore.
And the townsfolk drove the woman off the cliff, for she had provoked their ire. She fell into the depths below, where the sea took pity, gifting her sharp teeth and a beguiling song, so that she might exact her revenge…
I survey the islanders around me. Dylan Osric appears out of the crowd, walking over to stand next to my mother. He inclines his head. “Good morning, Lenore. Moira.” His smile is thin as a razor’s edge.
My mother nods back at him. “Morning, Dylan.”
Inside the pocket of my coat, my hand closes in a fist. Placing my other hand on my mother’s arm, I tell her, “I’m going to find a place by the stage.”
I set off through the crowd. I’ve nothing to say to Dylan Osric, nothing that could be said in polite company. The blackhearted part of myself, the part that yearns for siren song, wants to see him locked in his own chains—to see his expression when a knife is pressed against his skin. I feel adrift without Jude by my side.
Brendan Sheahan stands near the stage. He has a cigarette balanced in the crook of his ear and another between his fingers, but neither is lit. I don’t see the rest of his family anywhere.
He glances at me. “Hello, Moira.”
“You’re here alone?” I wonder why he has come at all.
“They didn’t want the attention. So I’ve come to see what happens.” He smiles, close-lipped. “I’m just the messenger.”
I look up toward the stage. Two councilors, Thomas Earl and Calum Bryce, mutter to each other, casting doubtful eyes over the crowd of islanders.
Perhaps I’m projecting my own hopes onto their features.
I say, “What do you think will happen?”
“They’ll drop the ban,” says Brendan, and perhaps he’s projecting his hopes as well. Catching sight of my expression, he adds, “Why do you care for them so much?”
“They have a right to be here. They are part of Twillengyle just as we are.”
“Doesn’t make them good.”
“They do not kill us for sport. Men can go out to sea with harpoons and call it vengeance, but that will hold up only for a time. We needn’t hunt them to protect ourselves—we have iron for that.”
I am like a child in love with something dangerous and desperate for others to love it too. But to sever myself from the sirens would be to sever myself from my past, from my father. I can’t do it—I’ve never wanted to.
Finally I say, “This isn’t the way. I know you might think so, but it isn’t.”
Brendan raises his eyebrows, only half interested in my words. Men from Dunmore’s police department come to stand across the platform from us. I watch Detective Thackery pull Thomas Earl aside, head bent as he speaks, making sharp gestures with one hand.
Anger consumes me.
He put Jude behind bars without a scrap of proof. He was to accompa
ny Nell to the dance the same night she ended up dead.
He could’ve helped Dylan Osric catch that siren.
It could be him. It could be him.
“How’s Wick doing?”
The question catches me off guard. I look back at Brendan. “Better,” I say. “A few more days and he’ll be quite well, I imagine.”
Brendan turns his cigarette over between his fingers. “I’m glad to hear it. He has a good heart, our Wick. What was he doing down there?”
I’m interrupted from answering as Earl steps up to the lectern.
Everyone is silent.
Thomas Earl, Dunmore’s councilor, commands silence easily. Well into his sixties, he has perfect posture and a heavy brow. He says, “Good morning, everyone,” and his voice is a low grind, rusty. “I assume you’re all aware why this meeting was called, so I’ll get straight to it. There has been a steep rise in siren attacks this past month, more locals taken this year compared to the one previous.” Earl leans forward over the wooden lectern. “I realize this is cause for concern. The recent memories of Connor Sheahan and Nell Bracken are still fresh in our minds, and I speak on behalf of the Council when I say that I do not wish for one more islander to be seized from us by a siren’s enchantment.”
The word “death” has not been used yet—for which I am thankful. It helps make the speech formless, insubstantial words that only hint at the true gravity of the situation.
“A number of people, including members of Dunmore Police, have suggested we take another look at the hunting ban that currently protects the siren population.”
The silence of the dance hall dissolves into whispers. I do not dare breathe—every part of me tuned for Earl’s next words.
“How much of the population will be culled?” asks someone from the back, breaking my concentration.
I want to scream at whoever it is. Nothing has been decided yet!
“Well, there are multiple factors to consider,” Earl replies. He folds his hands on the top of the lectern, like a grand delegate. “This ban has been in place for the past ten years. It’s not something to be regarded lightly.”