The front door was set far enough off of the street that no one other than Vignette saw when he took a casual look all around, and then rammed his shoulder into the door so hard that the lock immediately gave way and the door swung open. A moment later, they were inside. He pushed the door closed and set it back on the latch to conceal its damage from the other side.
The curtains were drawn and the house was dark. They both stood at the door for a moment to let their eyes adjust. There was a claustrophobic feeling to the air that seemed out of place in the big house until his eyes adjusted well enough for him to see the details.
There was a lot to see.
There was three times as much furniture as the place needed, and several times as many lamps, statues, and wall ornaments. On top of the furnishings themselves was what appeared to be years of accumulation of paper trash of every sort. Years’ worth of newspapers were stacked in bundles and tied with rope. The bundles were piled up to shoulder height all along the walls. The whole place smelled of musty paper.
His eyesight was finally able to resolve thin trails cleared through the piles of junk. Each trail had a specific purpose and led to a chair, a sofa, a shelf. “Wait here,” he told Vignette. Then he moved off down the trash trail that led to the stairway.
“All right,” she replied, following him anyway a few feet behind. He ignored the fact that she disobeyed him, and they moved up the stairs to the third floor, climbing between rows of books and bundles of newspapers that lined both sides. He planned to begin searching from the top down, but the surprise sight on the top floor simplified his task. With the exception of a few storage closets stuffed with linens, most of it was completely bare with plain wood floors. The walls were lined with mirrors. One of those new vacuum sweeping machines was parked in a corner.
There was a horizontal ballet bar mounted on freestanding supports in the middle of the room, obviously designed so that the person using it would get a full view from every angle. Apparently, Mr. Kimbrough thoroughly enjoyed the sight of his own reflection. Blackburn turned and went back down to the second floor with Vignette shadowing him.
The view there was much more like the downstairs area; excessive levels of furnishings and knickknacks stuffed every bit of open space. Trails were carved through the mass to allow access to a bathroom, a sitting room with barely enough space for one person to sit, and a bedroom so stuffed with unnecessary items that even half of the bed was piled high, leaving only the other half for sleeping.
His interest peaked when he tried the knob on the final unopened door on that floor and found it locked. Unlike the other glass knobs throughout the house, this one was made of delicately carved ivory. The doorplate appeared to be gold.
He took a step back and kicked the door open, noticing that Vignette barely flinched.
“Hold it now, what’s all this?” the words popped out of him on their own. He stood in the doorway of what appeared to be the boudoir of a whorehouse madam. Red velvet was draped everywhere, and even the wallpaper was embossed with red-and-gold fleur-de-lis patterns. This room was neither barren nor packed. A single chaise longue occupied one end of the room with a lamp and reading table. On the other end was an elaborate dressing table fit for a Broadway actress and piled with an array of makeup items and half a dozen colorful female wigs. Next to the mirror stood a rack of elaborate dresses and walking outfits, with the appropriate shoes lined up below.
Turn boys into girls . . . And these were, no doubt, the same outfits that would be described by witnesses who saw a “small-boned woman” near the crime scenes around the Barbary Coast. He turned to see Vignette staring up at him.
“All right, now,” he whispered. “You have to see everything? Look around inside of here and meet The Surgeon.”
“I’ve heard about her. You think I don’t know anything? She’s some crazy killer lady.”
“Right. Except it turns out, here, that she’s a man after all. A man who dresses like a woman. That’s what all this is. Right here is where Mr. Tommie Kimbrough has been turning himself into The Surgeon. And whatever it was that he was talking about doing up at the Golden Gate, it looks like he might be already headed out that way.”
“And he’s got Shane,” Vignette quietly added.
CHAPTER TWENTY
AFTER SHANE GAVE HIMSELF up for dead, he was amazed to feel himself gripped by the utter fearlessness of his rage. An absolute transformation began taking place inside of him. Because of it, his fervent wish to reclaim the bold stance that he was able to make for Vignette not only came true, it arrived as a sum multiplied.
All of the anger that he had barely sensed within himself in the past now overflowed and demanded release. His lifelong concern about how anyone else might perceive him receded into his memory and dissolved there. Every part of him that formed while he was playing the good orphan to encourage his adoption out of St. Adrian’s vanished, while the parts of him that were so concerned about being the perfect adoptee for the Nightingale family disappeared.
The shame that caused Shane’s speech to stutter also left him, and the voice that boomed out of him was nothing that he recognized as his own.
“God damn you, you bastard! God damn you into Hell! I swear I’ll kill you! I will kill you!”
Tommie backhanded him across the mouth with such force that Shane was knocked into momentary silence. It left his head ringing.
“Who are you calling a bastard?” Tommie hissed. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” He paused to pace back and forth, practicing his breathing. Finally he made himself calm and continued.
“I’m the real son, you miserable larva! I’m the real heir! You’re just my father’s little ‘oops,’ some son of a whore that Daddy was careless enough to impregnate!”
“There, you see?” Shane shot back. “You are out of your mind! I don’t have anything in common with you! You think that I’m your bro—”
Tommie struck him again. Harder this time. The room swam and Shane’s vision blurred.
“You will not use that word! I do not think you are my brother! That’s the whole point, you stinking idiot! You are a piece of garbage that our father and his slut left behind. She would have kept you in her shitty little world and no harm would have been done! It’s all you ever deserved anyway! What have you ever done to earn anything, any privilege? Who the hell are you?”
Shane just stared at him. He had been forced into silence, but the rage still fueled him, demanding release.
Tommie sneered. “Oh, not feeling so talkative, now? You were quite the little tough guy there for a few seconds, weren’t you? You never would have known anything about this, and I never would have known anything about you, if my parents—my parents— hadn’t found me naked with a couple of the neighborhood boys. Is that justice? Is that the way for me to find out I have a bastard son of a bitch for a half brother, and that I am then completely disinherited in his favor, just because of who I am?”
“You are getting crazier by the minute, mister.”
“My, aren’t we confident? What happened to your stu-stu-stutter, bastard boy?”
“It decided to leave so I could tell you that you are going to rot in Hell.”
“The bastard boy is a fortune-teller! He knows my future!”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t look that powerful, under the circumstances. Hadn’t you noticed?”
“You’re the one who didn’t notice. You didn’t notice me in the Nightingale house. And I heard everything. For a day and a half, I heard it all.”
Tommie’s triumphant look faltered for just an instant, but he quickly restored it. Shane went on anyway.
“So what about our half sister, Vignette? Did she have the same mother as I did?”
Tommie looked at him, puzzled, then just shook his head. “You’ll be glad to know that the father who intended all your life to leave his bastard in poverty is dead. And so is the bitch who was willing to throw me away, her
own son, just because I was different. Different from them. They killed each other.”
“You killed them.”
There was a long pause. Shane could not see what Tommie was doing. Finally, from a corner behind him, he heard Tommie’s voice. “You don’t know that.”
“Oh, I know it. Because I know you. I listened to your pathetic babbling for all that time. And after a while, I could tell that half of the time, you didn’t know whether you were talking out loud or not. Sometimes one of them would answer you when you said something, and it would surprise you. Because you didn’t know that you said anything out loud.”
Tommie focused a stare on him as if he were a lab specimen. “Interesting, you’re still not stuttering.” He gave Shane a pouty smile and a little wink. “Shane, Shane. Were you faking it all along? A fake stu-stu-stutter? Why? To get girls, perhaps?” He whispered conspiratorially “I know you’re at that age . . .”
Shane ignored the question. What difference would the answer make? Despite the fear gnawing at him, his rage still focused his attention like a sunbeam through a magnifying glass. He knew that he had the power to turn that burning ray onto Tommie Kim-brough. And he knew the exact combination of words to make it happen.
Shane took a deep breath and once again squeezed every muscle in his body to keep his voice from faltering. He looked straight into Tommie’s eyes and held his gaze.
“I have to empty you out.”
This time Tommie could not conceal his shock. Shane saw the blood rush to Tommie’s face. And off in the back of Shane’s mind, a part of him wondered how a man who has slaughtered innocent people as a source of joy could still have the ability to blush at all.
Tommie made an incredulous little giggling sound, then asked, “You’re going to do what?”
“You know what it means. I heard you say it. I heard you tell all about it. It’s just something you were thinking out loud. Without even knowing you were talking! But I heard it. Even after they were all dead and I knew for sure that you had nobody to talk to, you kept right on arguing with your demons. I listened. I was inside of your head.”
Tommie leaped forward and flashed his heavy-bladed knife directly under Shane’s nose. “Shut up! Shut the fucking hell up!”
“You started that way with each one. ‘I have to empty you out.’ Three times, I heard you say that. And with Mrs. Nightingale, the first one, you even made her guess what it meant to say ‘I have to empty you out.’ She wasn’t that frightened at first, was she?”
“I didn’t want her frightened at first. I wanted to experience her intact personality. I wanted to hear her speak while she was still thinking that she would bluster her way out of everything. She thought that she still had a life to defend.”
“And you used your knife. Little cuts. Little cuts, hour after hour, until you dissolved her into a babbling, grown-up baby.”
“That’s the part I love. Watching all of their haughty pride dissolve, their opinions, their judgments, their rejections. Everything that makes one a unique creation eventually collapses into the sameness of infantile shrieks and babbling. And that, my friend, is triumph.”
“Over who?”
“Whom,” he corrected. “Over whom. And what do you mean?”
“Well, that’s what confuses me. Because while you were killing Mrs. Nightingale, you kept talking to her like she was your father. Telling her how you’re just as much a man as she is, only you didn’t mean her, you meant your father. And you hate your father for rejecting his only son for some silly little game with a bunch of boys. Only you weren’t killing him this time, because you already killed him the first time.
“And Amy, the older daughter. Did you know that you were talking out loud when you started pretending that she was your mother, and bawling her out for not keeping her husband at home so that he couldn’t sire a bastard son? Did you think that you were just alone and safe inside of your head?”
Tommie did not reply, but he slowly turned to face Shane. All the pretext of civility fell from his face. His eyes seemed to sink back into his head.
“Now I know exactly how I’ll do it. I’ll leave you tied to that beam and haul you out to the Golden Gate before I go to work on you. If I start here, I may not be able to stop myself and you’ll bleed out before we get you into the water.
“And then, just before you and your beam go into the water, I’m going to treat you to exactly one hundred little slices from your head to your toes. Your blood in the water will draw sharks from incredible distances. And there are plenty of them lurking around the mouth of the Bay. I trust they will eat you slowly, because of the beam, you know. Surely it will slow down their rate of consumption so that you can savor the experience of being eaten alive at sea. Eh?”
Shane leveled his gaze. “You killed your mother and father for money.”
“I killed them for throwing my life away!”
“And the younger girl, Carolyn. Even while you were dancing her all around the room, you kept telling her to stay away from you, to stay out of your life. At the time, I didn’t know that you were talking to me. Through her, you’ve killed me once already, haven’t you?”
With that, Tommie paused for a long moment and studied Shane’s face.
“But you killed yourself all those years ago, back when you killed them,” Shane added. “Ever since then, you’ve just been walking around with a dead thing where your soul should be.”
“How poetic,” said Tommie. He snatched up a writing pen, dipped it in an ink bottle, and announced, “I have this custom, just this little thing I do. Sort of a trademark, lately.” He picked up a small notebook, opened it and dictated to himself while he wrote:
“Even if The Last Nightingale could be revived, how would it tolerate the cure? Knowing that Life merely awaits to devour it again …”
He read it over silently two or three times, then happily exclaimed, “It will work perfectly for your suicide note, little bastard brother!” He dropped the notebook into a large section of oilskin. He folded it snugly inside and tied it with thick twine.
“There. Waterproof. Good enough so that the note will still be readable when they find it on your body. In case there’s anything left of you to wash up on shore. Not bloody likely, the sharks and whatnot. A hundred little cuts. So forth.”
Tommie tucked the oilskin envelope into his coat pocket, then reached down into some box that Shane could not see. When he stood, he produced a thick muslin potato sack. He stepped up to Shane and raised the sack overhead, then Tommie let his mask of civilization fall away again. This time his dead-eyed face melted into the expression of a man so nauseated by his own existence that he could never be at peace with the outside world.
A moment later, the bag swooped down over Shane’s head and everything went pitch black. He felt Tommie’s hands pulling the bag all the way down over his shoulders, and a rope was tied around his shoulders and chest, keeping the sack in place. Next he felt the thick board that bashed him across the side of his head, but only for an instant before unconsciousness overtook him.
Twilight was rapidly dropping into darkness while the horse-drawn taxi clipped along at a brisk trot on its way back to the Mission Dolores. Vignette struggled to grasp the rapid turn of events. As usual when she let herself get caught up in the business of grown-ups, she soon found herself stuck between shouting men without being able to figure out what the problem was. Sergeant Blackburn had raced her away from Tommie Kimbrough’s house and back to the station to get more men to go capture him. But everybody was all excited about the fat man in charge who was arrested that day. She stood mute around the angry adults, but felt only disgust for the policemen yelling at the sergeant. Nobody would help him because there was no boss around to give orders.
Now he had her in this cab, forcing her to return to the Mission to wait all alone in that stupid toolshed without Shane—because of course nobody could let a girl go along to catch a murderer. Worst of all, the sergeant seemed to be able
to completely shake off her best attempts to manipulate him by trying to appear too scared to go back alone.
He just smiled at her. “You have to wait where it’s safe, Vignette.”
“Shane’s out there. If he can be there, I can be there!”
The sergeant laughed out loud at that, and he didn’t bother to argue with her. She was glad to see him laugh, since his face seemed so tired and worried. Maybe it was safe to ask him.
“Why wouldn’t the other cops help us?”
“It’s called command confusion.”
“They didn’t seem confused.”
He laughed again, a little. “Well they all seemed crystal clear about not wanting to be of any help.”
This was good, Vignette thought. She had him talking and he seemed to be feeling friendlier at the moment. Maybe if she could keep this up . . .
“If I was with you, I could still wait in the taxi, but if either of you got hurt, then as soon as you got back I could start helping to bandage you up while we run for a doctor! You can’t argue with that!”
“Got me there. I can’t argue.”
“So can I come?”
“No.”
They rounded the corner and pulled up next to the Mission. She flashed him her very best look of betrayal and hurt, but he just put his hand on her shoulder and smiled.
“I want you to wait here so I know you’re safe, because if I have to worry about you I might not be able to do my best to help Shane.”
“If we’re together, we can look in two different directions at the same time!”
“Vignette, this man is madness itself.” He lifted her down and put her at the curb. “I have to go.”
The sense of worry and fear were too much for her. She turned and ran back into the cemetery, to at least be around the place where her brother lived.
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