Wildalone

by Krassi Zourkova

  I could tell he was disappointed. Once again, like a big tasty bite, the elusive truth had been snatched from right under the cat’s nose.

  “Do you play Scrabble, Professor Giles?”

  Half surprised and half skeptical, he watched me take a small velvet pouch out of my bag and empty it on his desk: seven wooden blocks, borrowed earlier from the Forbes game room. I turned the letters so they faced him and formed the first word, DAEMON. A spare A was left on the side.

  “Now, if we remove the Omega and let the Alpha take its place—” I pulled out the O and pushed the other six letters toward him. “Can you guess the new word?”

  I wished I had a camera: Giles and his jaw dropping, as he spelled out MAENAD. His mouth extended to an oval, the gray mustache drooping over it, curved up at the tips—a perfect Omega of his own.

  “How extraordinary! Although it would mean that . . .”

  “That my sister wasn’t referring to the Bible, but to something else. You said a similar statement was attributed to Dionysus?”

  He nodded, looking at the letters while the sentence probably still flashed through his mind:

  I AM THE MAENAD AND THE DAEMΩN,

  THE BEGINNING AND THE END

  “Professor Giles, what if Elza included this because it wasn’t just a quote but the ritual itself?”

  He looked up, slowly. “Beg your pardon?”

  “You know, some sort of chant. The secret words one would repeat, to summon Dionysus. A woman whose lover has just died, let’s say. She goes through the ritual and turns into a maenad. The man comes back to life as a daemon. Exactly as you were describing it to me: two lovers possessed by the god, united in him forever. No beginning and no end.”

  He didn’t move, didn’t even blink—an oddly scared man, who suddenly seemed desperate for our discussion to stop right there. “How did you come up with all this?”

  “Forbes had a Scrabble night; I pulled seven letters and had to play a turn. It happened to be the alternative spelling, with AI, but the words were still anagrams—except for the A and O.”

  “I see. A perfectly rational explanation.”

  “Do you think everything has to be explained rationally?”

  A pen began to revolve under his fingers, hitting the desk consecutively with each of its ends. “It is hardly a matter of what I think.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Miss Slavin, what anyone thinks is beyond the point. With all due respect to your late sister, if there is indeed an explanation that defies rationality, I don’t advise getting involved in any of it.”

  “Elza is my family. Was, at least. Which makes me involved, whether I like it or not.”

  “Involvement and curiosity aren’t the same thing. For your sake, I sincerely hope you are confusing the two.”

  I wasn’t confusing them, not anymore. “By the way, funny you should say this.”

  “How so?”

  “Back in September, when you asked me to depart from the syllabus, I assumed you were just curious. Now it turns out you were actually involved.”

  The pen stopped. I handed him a copy of the second article from the Daily Princetonian and his eyes scanned the page quickly—he already knew what was on it. His name, printed there all those years ago, had linked him to his dead student for good.

  “I was wondering when you would bring that up. As a matter of fact, I’m surprised it took you this long.”

  “Me too. I came to Princeton determined to find out what happened to Elza, but ended up sidetracked by . . . by everything else at school.”

  “It was probably the wiser choice.”

  “Not so much a choice as a mistake—to believe that the past is just a past and I have nothing to do with it. When, in fact, on this campus past and present seem dangerously close to being the same thing. Don’t they?”

  He stared at me, absolutely still.

  “Would you please tell me what happened at the funeral home that day?”

  “If you mean what happened to your sister, I am not sure I can be of much help.”

  “You are the last person who saw her.”

  “That’s what the newspapers claimed, yes.”

  “Are you saying that someone came to Harriet’s after you?”

  “She was there when I left. So someone must have come after me.”

  He could very well be telling the truth. But what if he wasn’t? It wouldn’t be the first time in the history of crime that a culprit looked like a normal person. Respectable member of society. College professor, even. For all I knew, Giles might have been obsessed with the Greek rituals, eager to enact what he believed to be the greatest mystery of the ancient world. And a unique opportunity had presented itself, fifteen years back, with a student from his class. She had been the ideal target: a gullible foreigner, with a predilection for myth and a subtle unrest in the blood. Now, in an almost exact repeat of events, he had come across her equally unsuspecting sister.

  “Professor Giles, I need to know what happened.”

  “Very well, then. I can tell you, if you insist. But, first of all, I have strong doubts that you’d be better off hearing it.”

  I assured him I could handle my own well-being.

  “And second, you must promise me that it will never leave this room.” He rose from the chair: a tall and skinny Don Quixote, fired up for a fencing duel with an invisible windmill. “So do I have your word or not?”

  “You do.”

  “Good.” A cautious smile, under the mustache. “I think keeping your promise would, ultimately, benefit us both.”

  He walked over to the window and stood there, looking out at the campus where life followed its usual, undisturbed agenda.

  “I was shocked by the news, like everybody else. We hadn’t lost a student for many years, and in the whole history of the school there had never been a case where violence was involved or even implied. So the police went to great lengths—very discreetly, of course—but came up with nothing. Or at least nothing that seemed significant on its face.”

  He paused, as if I was to draw some brilliant conclusion from his last words.

  “Naturally, the school conducted its own investigation. Requested full records, all her academic work—which wasn’t much, she had been here just a couple of months. The only item in my possession was her paper and I turned in a copy of it. But a unanimous decision was made not to stir up scandal, so I was instructed to neither raise nor answer any questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “From the police, the embassy, the press. As you can imagine, the university could not afford a rumor that a class assignment might have led to the death of a student.”

  “But your class didn’t lead to my sister’s death. Or . . . did it?”

  “Not technically. Yet there is plenty on these pages, don’t you think, that would strike one as odd when, all of a sudden, the author dies mysteriously—and disappears even more mysteriously—shortly after they were written?”

  “You mean she wrote about things she was already doing in real life?”

  “Already doing. Or about to do. You see, Miss Slavin, I was convinced that your sister’s fascination with the Dionysian mysteries was the key to her death and its . . . bizarre circumstances. I regret to say this, but your board game discovery is one more proof that I may have been right.”

  “In other words, she killed herself, didn’t she? By the time Elza wrote that paper, she needed a psychiatrist, badly.”

  “Mental disease and suicide—that’s what I thought as well. Until I went to the funeral home.”

  “Something changed your mind there?”

  “It provided a new . . . angle, shall we say.”

  “Meaning that it wasn’t suicide?”

  “It may very well have been. Although someone who has already killed herself doesn’t sneak back into town to steal her own body from the coffin, does she?”

  “No. But neither does a killer
leave the victim’s body by a hiking trail, only to bother with breaking into a funeral home later.”

  “Ah, the break-in theory. I agree with you, a kill-and-kidnap scenario is a bit far-fetched. More likely, it was an unrelated act of vandalism. Not aimed at your sister in particular, her body just happened to be in that room at the time. But tell me, Miss Slavin, why would a thief make sure to lock the doors on the way out?”

  “I can’t think of a reason.”

  “Exactly. Yet that article went on and on about outdated security measures, which in the end cost Harriet’s its business. It’s a funeral home, for God’s sake, not a bank vault! But one thing the place certainly lacked was discretion.”

  “About its visitors?”

  “Not only. The receptionist—the one who landed me on the front page of the Princetonian—was an extraordinarily chatty lady. What was worse, she had taken the whole case to heart, ‘being that girls should never be destined for such a frightful fate.’” He rolled his eyes, still indignant that the woman had compromised him. “The only redeeming quality of such a compulsive talker is that, occasionally, something useful would slip out. I was given a tour of the premises, a lecture on the prudence of advance funeral arrangements, even statistics of the mortality rates in New Jersey. By the time she took me to your sister, I had blocked the yapping out completely. My God, what a propensity for verbiage! But then it finally paid off. For, you see, there was something in that casket I normally wouldn’t have recognized as peculiar.”

  “Something related to the rituals?” I was already imagining ancient sacrificial paraphernalia. Amulets. Talismans. Poison rings and folding daggers.

  “Your sister lay there in a white dress, like a child after First Communion.”

  “Isn’t this typical in America?”

  “I don’t know about typical, but it certainly fit the mood. There was something so tragic about being in that room, something so . . . theatrical (for lack of a better word), that the outfit happened to blend in. Apparently, though, she was found dead wearing an identical ensemble. According to the well-informed receptionist, your sister kept a few of those in her closet. White sleeveless summer dresses, neatly folded on top of her other clothes. In the middle of December.”

  “The woman just blurted this out? She didn’t find it strange?”

  “Finding anything strange would have required a brake on the mouth and a demand on the brain. I guess she figured this was exactly the type of outfit someone ‘destined for a frightful fate’ would wear on a daily basis. And if so, then why not have several? But, to my dismay, the police didn’t connect the dots either.”

  “They knew what was in Elza’s closet?”

  “Of course. Where do you think the receptionist obtained all her information from? Yet your sister’s paper hadn’t mentioned a dress code, so the link to the rituals was lost on everyone. When no plausible explanation presented itself, the odd choice of clothing was attributed to cultural heritage—because Bulgaria is full of young women who walk around in long white dresses, as I’m sure you know.”

  I ignored the sarcasm. “It makes sense, though, to bury her dressed like that.”

  “This part does make sense. What doesn’t is the anonymous flower delivery. You are aware of it, I presume?”

  I nodded, seeing no need to tell him that I was also aware of who had placed the order.

  “Strange then, isn’t it? Your sister had no relatives in the United States, no particularly close friends, no boyfriend of record—yet someone clearly cared enough for her to fill the room with rose arrangements, dozens of them. And I say ‘cared’ only because I’d rather not imply things that are better left unsaid.”

  “Things?” I wondered if the butler had been completely honest with me the night before. Being Jake’s piano tutor certainly justified some form of condolences. But to drown a funeral home in flowers? “Are you suggesting that this anonymous sender might have . . . that he might have been the one who . . .”

  “Stole your sister’s body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Slavin, this is what I would much rather believe.”

  “Rather than what?” His provocative pauses were starting to get to me. “You think he murdered her?”

  “I never said she was murdered.”

  “But there were no signs of an accident, according to the article.”

  “I never said it was an accident, either.”

  “Sorry, I don’t follow. If her death was not an accident, and not a suicide or a murder, then I really don’t understand.”

  “That’s because you are finding it difficult to make a leap from the rational.” He smiled, affording me a beat to digest the concept. “Understandably so. Making that leap took me a long time too. Even now, after fifteen years, I can’t say in all honesty that I have fully succeeded.”

  “What leap are you talking about? And why—” I remembered another girl in a white dress, in a churchyard by the sea. “Why would either of us have to make it?”

  “Because, to answer your earlier question: yes, I do think there should be a rational explanation for everything. But my wishful thinking doesn’t mean there always is. You see, before I left that room, once my effusive tour guide had finally allowed me some privacy, I walked up to the casket to pay my last respects to a student whose rare intelligence and unusual vision of the world I had come to admire. There was so much white in that coffin. The lining, the pillow, your sister’s outfit. But there was also a single red spot on her dress, about the size of a penny, under her left index finger. Whoever had folded her hands above the rose bouquet must have pressed them over a thorn.”

  “That’s not possible. The dead don’t bleed.”

  “I know they don’t. But I assure you, the stain was very fresh. In fact, a tiny drop had gathered and fell off right in front of me.”

  My mind took the thought and held it. Not a leap. Just a child dipping a toe in, to check if the water might be warm enough for a swim: When Giles last saw her, my sister was still alive.

  So . . . no one had come to Harriet’s after him. No one had stolen Elza’s body and walked out with it, locking doors. She had simply regained consciousness—all alone, in a funeral home. Terrified, she must have found a way out and was probably still alive, in some obscure corner of the world.

  My heart began to beat so fast I felt dizzy. I had heard such stories before. Wrong diagnoses. People thought to be dead. Getting buried—in tombs, in coffins—only to be found in a changed position later, if for whatever reason the body had to be exhumed. Chopin himself had feared this, and in the last days of his life scribbled one final wish on a notepad: “If the cough suffocates me, I implore you to have my body opened so I may not be buried alive.”

  But that was all from past centuries. Modern medicine knew better than to play inadvertent jokes with death. Or did it? Was it possible, even to this day, to pronounce a girl dead and prepare her for burial with her finger still bleeding?

  “Professor Giles, I want to believe you. But what did the doctors say?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The doctors. How did they react to what you saw in that casket?”

  “There were no doctors, Miss Slavin.”

  “Then the police, or whoever else you told about it.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “You just . . . left?”

  Suddenly, everything about that man filled me with dread. His words. His voice. The unshaken calm in his eyes. All these years, the school’s mandate for silence had shielded him. But if he had done something to my sister—in the funeral home or afterward—who would have suspected him, given that everyone thought she was already dead?

  “Are you all right? You seem a bit—”

  “Why did you leave without telling anyone, if you knew she was still alive?”

  “I did leave, oh yes. I left as quickly as I could. But, Miss Slavin, alive was one thing your sister definitely wasn’t.” For a moment, he seemed
to enjoy the fright on my face. “An autopsy had been performed that same morning. I saw the report with my own eyes, when I took her paper to the dean earlier that day.”

  I must have stared at him for some time. He even handed me a glass of water.

  “I hope now you understand why I didn’t mention anything to the police. Not that I haven’t had my moments of doubt, since then. That entire night, I racked my brain how to present the world with a story of bleeding cadavers. I questioned everything, even my own sanity. What if I had hallucinated the whole blood-dripping episode? Not only would I lose my job, but I would also face criminal charges or, at best, psychiatric tests. Of course there was always the possibility, however small, that the coroner’s office might have made an error, reporting an autopsy that was never carried out. By morning, I had managed to convince myself that this was most likely the case and your sister was still alive—until I heard the news that her body was missing. It was then that I promised myself never to tell a single soul, a promise I had kept until now.”

  Neither of us said anything else. Or maybe we did. I was already at the door, pressing the handle down, when a question dropped from my lips almost automatically: “What color were they?”

  “They . . . ?”

  “The roses.”

  “Oh, white. Everything in that room was white.”

  “All of them?”

  “Every last one. Why?”

  “I just . . . I wondered if this may have been her favorite flower.” Then I turned to open the door.

  “Miss Slavin . . . Thea . . .” He had never called me by my first name. “Should anything happen—anything at all—that seems out of the ordinary or makes you feel unsafe in any way, will you call me immediately, please?”

  Unsafe. As in Jake obstinately giving me the same flower with which his butler had flooded the funeral home back then.

  “Will you?”

  I nodded, promising him a phone call for which it was already way too late.

  CHAPTER 14

  Ultimatum

  I SKIPPED SCHOOL on Monday and stayed in bed, going over everything a thousand times. Telling my parents was out of the question, at least for now. First I had to make sure Giles wasn’t lying or imagining things. And assuming he wasn’t, how would I go about tracking down a girl who was neither human nor, strictly speaking, alive? Watch vampire films? Read about witch hunts?