Wildalone

by Krassi Zourkova

  After a late lunch in Forbes, Mom’s headache forced her to take a nap in my room while Dad and I sat for a cup of coffee on the porch outside. He took in the landscape and, for the first time that day, grew quiet.

  “Dad, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong, quite the opposite. It’s great to see you settled so nicely here. You seem happier than I’ve ever seen you.”

  “Happiness is a complicated thing.”

  “Even at eighteen?” He shook his head, smiling. “Wait until you reach my age. That’s when things start to get really complicated.”

  I looked at him, more carefully than ever before. My wise, humble, bighearted dad. Even now, when he was content and at peace, his face seemed resigned to its permanent sadness. I wondered if I should show him Elza’s paper. She was his child; he had the right to see it. But what good would it do? His wasn’t the kind of sadness that could be lifted by an old memento. He wanted answers. The belated truth. And in the best of worlds—some form of justice.

  “Thea, remember back when you were leaving home you promised me not to dig into the past?”

  “Of course I do.” And I had kept my promise. Mostly. “Why do you ask?”

  “Your Greek Art class, for one. Is this how you stay away from the past, by taking the same courses as your sister?”

  “I swear I had no idea.”

  A pause, as his frown deepened. “And what’s the deal with that professor of yours?”

  “You mean Giles?”

  “Yes, Giles. The weird Greek scholar who came out clean in the end because he had no motive. They never have a motive, do they?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Giles might have been a suspect. Yet, given the vanishing of Elza’s body, the list of suspects probably included all who had known her.

  “Dad, just teaching that class doesn’t mean he—” Then I sensed his hostility toward my professor again. “Or is there anything you aren’t telling me?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Only what you already know.”

  He pulled out his wallet, and from it—two newspaper cutouts, folded to the size of a dollar bill. When he handed them to me, I recognized the articles I had seen many times over the summer, published in the Daily Princetonian three days apart, in December of 1992.

  Friday’s headline—STUDENT FOUND DEAD, CAUSE UNKNOWN—preceded a brief entry, barely more than an obituary. A girl’s body had been found the day before by a jogger, on a hiking trail south of campus. There were no indications of violence, no grounds for alarm in the student community. A memorial service was to be announced shortly. In the meantime the body would remain at Harriet’s Funeral Home, until the family made the necessary arrangements.

  The second article had a very different tone, and although the weekend had delayed the news from seeing print, the urgency hit you from the start: BODY OF DEAD STUDENT DISAPPEARS, CAMPUS SECURITY ON HIGH ALERT. A staffer had found the empty casket on Friday morning, after unlocking Harriet’s premises. This time there was scandal. An implied possibility of a crime. Drugged on fresh gossip, the reporter had dished out the details over several columns, peppered with reports of past death incidents, lists of security measures, and even a critique of the way Harriet’s ran its business.

  Then there was a name—innocuous, mentioned in passing. A name that had meant nothing to me back in Bulgaria, when I hadn’t arrived at Princeton yet:

  Numerous students and faculty members paid their respects on Thursday afternoon. According to the funeral home’s records, the last one to see the body was Vincent A. Giles, professor of the deceased, who signed in with the receptionist at six o’clock and exited the main lobby at six twenty-five, concluding the long list of visits. For the time being, no suspects have been identified. University officials urge the entire campus community to observe an early curfew until the authorities have concluded the case.

  I sat back and stared at the page. Giles. All this scholarly chase of cat and mouse over my sister’s paper, and not a word to me about his visit to the funeral home. Were there other things he had chosen to keep to himself?

  My father stroked my arm. “Don’t look so preoccupied. I just want you to be careful, that’s all.”

  “Careful about what, Dad? Of course Giles would go to the funeral home; Elza was his student. That doesn’t make him a criminal.”

  “I’m not saying he is a criminal.”

  “Then what exactly are you saying?”

  “A lot of things were left unexplained, Thea. Including at that funeral home. The day your sister was brought there, someone sent dozens of flowers, in a single delivery.”

  “What do you mean someone? The police didn’t track down who it was?”

  “They tried. The order had been placed earlier that day, at a local flower shop, by a middle-aged man who asked that the delivery remain anonymous. He paid in cash, so there was no way to trace him.”

  “And you think it was Giles? Sorry, but I don’t see him obsessing over a student that way. Or sending loads of flowers.”

  “Well, luckily for your dear professor, the man from the flower shop was described as shorter and more formally dressed.”

  “Then why are you telling me this? And why now, all of a sudden?”

  “Your mother and I . . . we’ve gone back and forth on whether and how much to tell you. At first we thought the less you knew, the better. Maybe it was wishful thinking, to imagine you could come to this school and not have brushes with the past. But seeing Giles at your concert was a reality check. Which is not to say that by now Princeton hasn’t become a safe place, it’s just . . . I don’t think fifteen years is all that long, Thea. Many of the same people are probably still around. So all I’m saying is . . . don’t trust anyone, okay?”

  AFTER MY PARENTS WENT TO bed, I should have done the same. But this was the post-Thanksgiving party night; I didn’t want to be the only person missing.

  Tiger Inn was the eating club next to Colonial and clashed with it completely: a white façade crisscrossed with dark brown beams, to evoke the holiday cookie effect of German houses. Rita had texted me earlier that my name would be on a guest list at the door. Luckily, it was.

  “Tesh, finally! Are you all right? I haven’t heard from you all day.”

  I said something about showing my parents around, and how I would probably fail at least half my classes.

  “You mean Giles isn’t cutting you slack after Carnegie? I bet you rock in his class. The man couldn’t stop raving about you at the reception.”

  “He’s had better students.”

  “Really? Some mad archaeologist rubbing genies out of those ancient pots?”

  As always, she was spot-on. It gave me a shudder. “The genie would be A Thousand and One Nights, not the Greek legends.”

  “Whatever, that’s why I’m a science major. But enough about school. When did you and Rhys break up?”

  “What makes you think we did?” She had probably assumed it, after seeing me at Carnegie with someone else. “The guy last night was his brother.”

  “I figured as much. But if the two of you are still together, how come he wasn’t at the concert?”

  Or better yet: Why was he there and no one knew about it?

  “He’s out of town this weekend.”

  “Did he tell you this himself?”

  “Yes, why?”

  The answer took a second, but it was enough for the first signs of pity to show on my friend’s face.

  “He is in town, Tesh.”

  “He is?”

  “Dev saw him last night. That’s why he had to be back by eleven, remember? The swimmers were having that thing I was telling you about, their monthly . . . well, anyway. But first they partied at Ivy.”

  “And?”

  “Rhys was there with two women, in front of everyone. Apparently, it got pretty bad.”

  The floor began to slip from under me. She tried to take my hand.

  “Tesh, I’m so sorry. Dev didn’t want me t
o tell you but I thought you should know.”

  I could see Dev across the room, looking at us and then away. “Is he certain it was Rhys?”

  “Yes. And also . . .” She decided not to finish. I had never seen Rita change her mind when she spoke.

  “Please, just say it.”

  “Rhys is on the Street right now. At Ivy, with the others.”

  The rest was noise—noise and heat—as I tried to figure out what to do, how not to break down in front of everyone. Part of me refused to believe it. Although why would my friend be lying to me?

  “Rita, I need a favor. Can you ask Dev to take me to Ivy?”

  She said something about going back to Forbes, but I wasn’t listening.

  “Please ask him, if you really are my friend. I have to see with my own eyes, and it will be much easier to get into Ivy if Dev is with me.”

  None of us said anything as we left Tiger Inn. Ivy was literally across the street: a massive rectangle of sooted brick, thudding with music. Dev knocked. The heavy door opened an inch. Then his face must have been recognized because the door gave in a bit more, just enough to let us slide past a security guard dressed in black.

  A few steps was all it took. The room was crowded—mostly men, mostly drunk, and a few strikingly beautiful women—but it wasn’t crowded enough to block him from my eyes. He was in the center, bent over a woman, face buried in her neck, the rest of him weighing down on her until her long hair almost swept the floor. He lifted her back up, slipped his hand behind her knee—the same hand holding a beer bottle—and pulled her bare leg up, rubbing his hipbone against the inside of her thigh. She opened his shirt. Traced her nails all over him. He didn’t stop her, poured the beer into his throat, spilling the rest of it down his chin—his chest—his stomach—until the empty bottle flew at the wall and shattered against it. Finally free, his fingers snatched her hair and pulled it back, just long enough for him to take one last look at her face before he pushed it forward, forcing her mouth into his wet skin—

  EVERYTHING IN MY ROOM WAS distinctly visible, strangely alive under the full moon that had invaded my world through the window. I didn’t want to stay in. I needed to walk. On grass. Among trees. To walk endlessly and disappear.

  In the distance, disfigured like a badly lit stage prop, Cleveland Tower dominated the entire sky. I took the gravel path in the opposite direction—past a toolshed, through hills where I had never gone before.

  The golf course was drenched in moonlight. Ravenous streams of silver poured over it, flooding the grass, the trees, and any creature that had moved until then on its surface. Now everything lay frozen. Wounded. Ready for a shriek. The night had burst, ruptured like a black pomegranate, and it bled silence. The same astonishing, delirious silence as the one from another night, two months ago—

  The night in whose dawn I had met Rhys.

  It was then that the lies had started. His open shirt in the fog that morning. The messy hair. The flush of those cheeks. His hand, probably still warm from another girl’s skin when he had first touched me.

  Not exactly a one-woman guy . . .

  I lay down on the grass. The gravel path had ended and I stayed there, letting the moonlight curve around my body and take its shape—a last blueprint from which to re-create me and bring me back, on some future night like this, if I decided to pay those hills another visit. I would be a different creature then. Untamed. Ethereal. Affected by nothing except the moon.

  Now I was just a human girl. I felt lost. Scattered. Poisoned by Rhys and everything I had seen at Ivy. Here, far from the crowd, I could sense his breath carried to my skin by the wind, his hand brushing my cheek, as it had done that first morning . . . then the silence of the hills again. And with it—his absence.

  By the time I headed back to Forbes, it must have been past midnight. Most of the lights had gone out in the distance, yet a few still glimmered through the trees and I kept my eyes on them as I walked. The outline of something angular startled me. Then I recognized it and kept walking: just the toolshed, clashing with the round shapes of hills and trees. Until a sound nailed my feet to the ground. A voice. Coming from an old pine tree next to me—

  Rhys!

  It spilled under the branches, too low for any words to come through. Hushed briefly. Spilled out again. Then another voice followed—a laugh—and cut into me. Clear, unmistakable: the voice of a woman.

  I turned. Took a few steps toward that tree—

  The ragged branches hid nothing, but I saw her first. Her bare back moved slowly, without a single blemish, curving its arc under cascades of golden hair, the shoulders white, ablaze with moon. He was sitting on the ground. Naked. Abandoned to her. Spine pressed against the tree, rubbing hard into the ridges of the bark. His arms were reaching back, gripping the trunk for balance, flexing their muscles each time he pushed inside her . . .

  I didn’t dare move. But his eyes opened and crashed directly into mine.

  A disbelief.

  Then fear.

  Dread.

  Yet he wouldn’t stop. His body kept moving, caught in the rhythm of the one above it.

  Her porcelain fingers took his chin. Lifted his face. Opened his lips for her impatient mouth. And his eyes—the eyes that had held my world for so long—simply closed, having said their farewell to me.

  I ran away.

  Back to what? Where?

  The grass stifled each sound, but I knew that mine were the only steps on it—he hadn’t bothered to come after me.

  Then I stopped, terrified. Something else was already happening on that golf course. It was coming from the pond, and I was afraid to look at it, at what my eyes had detected there briefly, in passing:

  Ripples. Ripe at first, then slowly thinning. Expanding their dark circles along the surface as the fountain splashed its incessant rhythm out into the night—

  But not a sound came from it. Or from anything else.

  Like concentric rings on the water . . .

  I knew this stillness, and the wild creature about to appear in it.

  “Anyone born with the blood of the samodivi can summon them,” a man who was himself related to me by blood had once warned me. “Just think of these witches at night, and here they come!”

  Back by that church in Bulgaria, I had thought of Elza. And she had come—a frail girl in white, ready to dance under the moon. This time I wasn’t going to run in fear. I wanted to talk to her, tell her everything. How Rhys had broken my heart, twice in one night. And how all I wanted now was to become like her—a witch, a wildalone—and never be hurt by a man again.

  But the hills were empty. Of course they were. Elza was gone, had been for years, and all I would ever have from her were a few faded pages about an old legend and a ritual.

  Then I realized I no longer had even this much. To satisfy one of Rhys’s many whims, I had grabbed her paper by mistake, with my music scores, and left the whole stack on his piano. The scores were easy to replace. But I needed to get that paper back. And unless I wanted another encounter with him, I had to do it quickly, while I still knew for sure that he wasn’t home.

  Without wasting more time, I turned my back on Forbes and headed out—toward Cleveland Tower and everything that lay beyond it, waiting for me in the night.

  CHAPTER 12

  Friend of the Estlins

  THE MOON POURED in through the French doors and illuminated everything—every place in the room where he had spoken to me, sat with me, held me.

  I knew as soon as I walked in: there was nothing on either of the pianos. But I walked up to the one on the left—his—and glided my fingers over the keys without pressing them.

  “Miss Thea?”

  The voice nearly gave me a heart attack, until I realized who it was. Elegantly clad, as always, the butler stood at the hallway entrance. Solemn face. Unreadable expression. Just like the first time I had shown up on a whim.

  “Good evening, Ferry. I let myself in through the lawn. One of the
French doors was unlocked.”

  He had probably figured as much, but was too discreet to ask about the reason for my untimely drop-in.

  “I’m afraid Master Rhys is not in at the moment.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  The relentless eyes inspected my face. I knew that Rhys wasn’t home and yet had shown up at the house anyway? Unannounced. In the middle of the night.

  “Can I be of any help, Miss Thea?”

  “I left some music scores on this piano.” The word this brought relief into the air, as if the piano belonged to no one. “Do you happen to know where they are?”

  He nodded but showed no intent to retrieve them. Loyal like a well-trained watchdog, he wouldn’t let me take anything from the house until his master returned home.

  “I am sorry for disturbing you so late, Ferry. This is my last visit here, and I have no doubt Rhys would be glad to know it as well. I just need my music back before I leave, that’s all.”

  “Leaving at this hour is perhaps rather . . . inadvisable? I can arrange for a taxi, of course, but I suggest you remain here until Master Rhys comes back.”

  I had to leave, advisable or not. “May I have my music, please?”

  He opened the piano bench and took out the scores (in a pile, as I had left them). I checked if Elza’s paper was still there. It was.

  “Master Rhys cares for you very deeply.” His voice had become unexpectedly warm, no longer the voice of a butler. “It may not be too apparent at times. But he does. You might be able to see it, if only—”

  “I saw enough for a lifetime tonight, Ferry.”

  Once again that evening, there was dread in someone’s eyes. And this time it didn’t dissipate behind closed eyelids.

  “Miss Thea, if I may . . .” The sound of him taking a breath filled the room. “I must give you something, if you can spare me a moment.”

  “Thank you, but I really need to leave.”