“If you can’t think of me as real,” he said, “why would you want me to come back to you? Would you love me for myself, or for what you thought you’d made me to be?”
It was Kathy’s story all over again, Isabelle realized. Secret lives that weren’t really secret at all.
They only seemed like a secret when you weren’t paying any attention to them. When you couldn’t accept the difference between who you thought someone was and who they really were. You could hang onto your misperceptions all you wanted, but that didn’t make them real.
John wasn’t who she or anybody else decided he was. That wasn’t the way the story went, whether Kathy wrote it or it took place in the real world. John was who he was. It was as simple, as basic as that, and she knew it. In her mind, in her heart. So why was it so hard for her to accept that he was as real as she?
“Think about it,” John said.
She nodded.
“I always know where you are,” he said. “I always know when you want me. That hasn’t changed.
That will never change.”
“Then why has it taken you so long to come and see me?” Isabelle asked. “God knows I’ve wanted to see you, if only to apologize for the mess I went and made of everything.”
John shook his head. “We could have this conversation forever, Izzy, but it all boils down to one thing: first you have to change the way you think of me. Until you manage to do that, each time we try to talk to each other we’re doomed to an endless replay of what happened that night in the park.”
He turned away once more, but this time she didn’t call him back.
V
As soon as they reached the Crowsea Precinct, the two detectives hustled Alan into their lieutenant’s office, leaving Marisa out in the hall. Waiting inside the office were the lieutenant—Peter Kent, according to the name plate on his desk—and a woman introduced as Sharon Hooper, who proved to be an assistant DA. Neither of them stood up when Alan was brought in. By the grim looks on their faces, Alan realized that whatever the detectives had told him in his apartment, he hadn’t been brought in to answer some routine questions.
Kent had the look of a man who rarely smiled anyway—and considering all he would have seen after his years on the force, that didn’t particularly surprise Alan. He appeared to be in his late forties, a lean dark-haired man, greying at the temples. Obviously a career officer. The ADA was another matter. From the laugh lines around her eyes, Alan assumed Hooper was normally a cheerful woman. The grim set to her features seemed more out of place and only served to increase the nervousness that had begun when the two detectives showed up at his door.
A tape recorder was produced and turned on. After he waived his right to counsel at this point, the interrogation began.
Two hours later, they were still at it. At one point the larger of the two detectives left the room to speak with Marisa. He returned, confirming that Marisa could corroborate his story. Then they made him go through it all again. Finally, Lieutenant Kent sighed. He looked resigned, if no less grim.
Hooper pushed her blonde hair back from her temples before leaning across the lieutenant’s desk to hit the Off button on the tape recorder.
“That ... is that it?” Alan asked.
“You’re free to go, Mr. Grant,” Kent told him. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
They were letting him go, Alan realized, but they didn’t believe him. The only reason he could walk out that door behind him was that they couldn’t prove anything against him. At least not yet—that message was plain from the tense atmosphere in the office. He could go, but they weren’t finished with him. They’d be watching him, pushing and prodding, waiting for him to make a mistake. But he didn’t have any mistakes to make. He hadn’t done anything.
“Why won’t you believe me?” he asked.
“No one said anything about not believing you,” the ADA replied. “But you don’t.”
“We have to keep our options open,” the lieutenant said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Grant, but going on all the information we have to date, you’re the only one with a plausible motive.”
“I ... I understand. It’s just, I’ve never been in any kind of trouble like this before and I ...”
His voice trailed off. Why was he even bothering to explain? The only person in this office who cared about what he was going through was himself. He had no allies here.
The lieutenant leaned forward, a brief look of sympathy crossing his features. “We’re certainly taking that into consideration, Mr. Grant. But look at it from our point of view. If you didn’t kill her, then who did?”
Not me, Alan thought as he finally stepped out of the Crowsea Precinct with Marisa holding his arm.
He was surprised to find it was still daylight outside. It felt as though he’d been in that office the whole day, but it was still early afternoon. He blinked in the bright September sunshine. It was a perfect autumn day, the air crisp, the sky a startling blue. Up and down the street, the maples and oaks were bright with color. None of it really registered for Alan.
“What did they want?” Marisa asked.
She’d asked him that same question when he joined her outside the lieutenant’s office, but he’d shaken his head, a wordless “not yet, wait until we’re outside.” No one offered to drive them back to his apartment. No one had apologized for what they’d put him through.
“Margaret Mully was killed last night,” he told Marisa now as they stood there on the precinct steps.
“They think I did it.”
Marisa’s eyes widened with shock. “No.” She gripped his arm. “How can they even think that?”
“I’m the only one they’ve got with a motive,” Alan said.
“But they let you go, so they’re not accusing you anymore, are they?”
“They just haven’t got anything to hold me on.”
“But—”
Alan turned to her. “I won’t say I’m sorry that she’s dead, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her, Marisa.”
“I know that, Alan. I would never believe that of you.”
He put his arm around her and held her too tightly, but Marisa didn’t flinch. “The way things are shaping up at the moment,” he said, “you’re the only one.”
Alan thought he’d gotten through the worst, back there in the lieutenant’s office. But then he saw them, gathered there at the bottom of the precinct’s steps like a pack of vultures. The reporters. More tape recorders. Photographers. Live feeds back to the studio.
“Mr. Grant, can we have a word with you?”
“Why did the police want to speak to you?”
“How do you feel about Margaret Mully being out of the picture?”
“Do you still intend to go ahead with the book?”
Oddly enough, all Alan could think of at that moment was that anyone watching the news was going to see him standing here on the steps of the Crowsea Precinct with his arm around Marisa Banning, a married woman who wasn’t his wife. Her husband George could see it. Or Isabelle. Anyone at all. And he didn’t care. He didn’t care at all.
“No comment,” he said over and over again as they made their way through the crowd.
He held on to Marisa’s hand until they managed to flag down a cab and he didn’t let go of it the whole way home.
VI
Nobody could run as fast as her, that was for sure, Cosette thought as she sped away from the Newford Children’s Foundation. Nobody at all. Maybe that was what happened when you had a red crow beating its wings inside your chest. Maybe it slowed you down. People like her new friend Rolanda and Isabelle never seemed to want to run and dance and skip and simply toss themselves about for the sheer fun of it. The whole body could make a music that they so seldom played. Handclap, the stampa-stamp of feet on a wooden floor. Click and clack, whistle up a wind, cheeks puffed out, expelled air tickling the lips. Or the tip-tappa-tappa-tip of Paddyjack playing wooden fingers against his wooden limbs.
She p
aused in her headlong flight to think about that. Up she perched on a low wall and watched the slow parade of pedestrians go by. The day was perfect, perfect, perfect, but so few of them were smiling. Maybe having a red crow inside you took too much energy and you didn’t have enough left over for fun. Maybe it made you so tired that you couldn’t even see how perfect a day it was and how much it deserved a smile and a laugh and a dance in return for the gift of it.
And dreams, too. Did you have to think them up, or did they just come to you? How much energy did they take?
But being real was important—not just the real that Rosalind claimed they were, but the kind of real that made everyone you happened to bump into pay attention to you, the kind of real that said, yes, you had a red crow beating its wings inside of you, too. Most people only saw her when she wanted them to.
Otherwise she was no more than a vague flicker of movement caught out of the corner of an eye, something that seemed more likely to be a flutter of leaves or debris tossed up by the wind.
Sometimes she liked the surprise of popping up out of nowhere and the silly looks on people’s faces when they couldn’t help but notice her. Like back at Rolanda’s house, where her gateway hung. That had been fun. It didn’t matter where she was in all this world, it took only a thought and she could find herself standing in front of it. Usually she was careful that no one saw her—Rosalind was always saying, be careful, be careful, be careful, so Cosette was. But not always. She didn’t endanger her gateway, but she liked to pop in there from the island and then make her way back home, secreting her way, peeping into houses, listening to the lives lived by those who could dream and bleed, appearing and disappearing right in front of people’s eyes and then didn’t they look foolish.
But sometimes she would stand for hours in front of her painting and wonder if the gateway opened both ways. Could she go back through it into the before the way she’d come across? Nobody knew.
Not Rosalind or Paddyjack or Annie Nin. Not even Solemn John, who was the cleverest of them all, even more clever than Rosalind, though much too serious, that was for sure. Nobody knew and nobody wanted to try. Nobody dared. It was probably so awful—why else would they have come across the way they all had instead of staying there?
But still and still, she had to ask, her curiosity an itch that simply had to be scratched. What had it been like, truly? Why couldn’t they remember what it had been like? And always it came back so unsatisfactorily: because it must’ve been bad. Which made perfect sense, Cosette supposed. Nobody liked to remember bad things. She never had. She’d learned how to forget the bad things from when she used to watch the dead girl. And from Isabelle.
Like the night of the fire ...
Cosette shivered and hugged herself. No, no, no. That had never happened.
Except it had, it had, and everybody had died. Almost everybody. Died and gone away forever. But where? When you had a red crow in your chest, it took you up and away when you died, up into the sky into an even better place. But if you didn’t, if you weren’t real, there was nothing left of you when you died. Nothing left at all.
She watched the passersby, but no one paid the least bit of attention to her. No one saw her because she wasn’t concentrating on letting them see her. Because she wasn’t real.
Don’t be sad, she told herself. Everything’s going to change, you’ll see.
Isabelle would paint the fairy and she’d do the good deeds and then the fairy would make her real, very and truly real, just the way Rolanda had promised.
Casette brightened up at the thought of that. She kicked her heels against the wall she was sitting on and tried to think of just what sort of good deeds would be required. Rosalind would know. And so would Solemn John. But she didn’t want to ask them. She wanted to do this on her own, to show everyone that she, too, could be clever and wise. She grinned to think of the looks of surprise that they’d wear when they realized that she had a red crow beating its wings inside her. They would look at her and know that she was filled with red blood and dreams and then she would tell them how they could become real, too, and everyone would have to remark on just how clever she really was, even Solemn John, and then ...
Her thoughts trailed off as an uneasy prickling sensation crept up the back of her neck. Someone, she realized, was watching her. Which was impossible because she hadn’t chosen to be seen. But the feeling wouldn’t go away.
She looked about herself, pretending a disinterest that she didn’t really feel, her gaze traveling from one end of the street to the other. When she finally did notice the girl leaning by the door of a shop across the street, she couldn’t figure out how she could ever have missed spotting her straightaway since she seemed more like a black-and-white cutout that had been propped up in the doorway than a real person: alabaster skin, short black hair, midnight eyes ringed with dark smudges, black lipstick. Black leather vest, black jeans torn at the knees, black motorcycle boots. There was no color to her at all.
How can she see me when I don’t want to be seen? Cosette wondered. But she already knew. The black-and-white girl must have crossed over from the before just as she had herself. Someone had brought her over. Only who? Not Isabelle. There was only one other person Cosette could think of and she didn’t like the idea of that at all.
At that moment, the girl smiled, but it wasn’t so much a pleasant expression as spiteful—feral and hungry. When she saw that she had Cosette’s attention, the black-and-white girl slowly drew a finger across her throat. Then she pushed herself away from the doorway and sauntered off down the street.
Cosette sat frozen on her perch on the wall, unable to do anything but watch her go.
I’m not scared of her, she lied to herself. I’m not scared at all.
But she was unable to stop shivering. Long after the stranger had disappeared from sight, all she could do was hug her knees and wish she were back on the island, or in Solemn John’s company, or anywhere at all that might be safe. She remembered what Rosalind had said to her just before she left the island.
Promise me you’ll be careful. Promise me you won’t let that dark man find you.
That promise had been easy to make but, she realized unhappily, probably impossible to keep.
She knew she should go looking for Solemn John, right now, but she didn’t seem able to move. All she could feel was the feral look in the black-and-white girl’s eyes and wonder how many more just like her had been brought across from the before.
VII
Rushkin has put a piece of himself inside you.
Isabelle thought about that as she locked up her studio and slowly made her way down the two flights of stairs that would take her out into the central court on the ground floor of Joli Coeur. John had that much right, but she wasn’t sure if he understood the many levels that simple statement held for her.
Her love/ hate relationship with Rushkin was far more complex than she could begin to explain—even to herself. At the same time as she dreaded a new encounter with her old mentor, a part of her still couldn’t hate him.
She didn’t know who she’d be today if she had never met him on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral all those years ago. The abstract expressionism that was so much a part of her work since the fire still owed a debt to all she’d learned from Rushkin. His techniques, his views on art, the ability to call up the numena ... they all lived on inside her, along with an affection for him that she knew was as perverse as it was irrefutable. She understood he was a monster, but he had saved her from a life of prosaic ignorance, both as an artist and a person. Without the fire that he had woken in her, she might have put her art aside long ago and be working in some office right now. It had happened to so many of her contemporaries from university days; how could she be so certain it wouldn’t have happened to her? Rushkin had found the butterfly confused into thinking it was a moth and nurtured it so that instead of being drawn to the flame, she had become the flame. For that, for everything he had done for her, ho
w could she not be grateful toward him?
She pushed open the door that led out of the stairwell and stepped out into the bustle of the courtyard. How could she explain any of this to John when she didn’t understand it herself? John would simply
She paused in the doorway, gaze caught by a familiar figure crossing the courtyard toward her. It was as though she had conjured him up by thinking about him, but she knew that this time that wasn’t the case. His returning to her now gave her a new sense of hope. This was what she wanted from John, she realized as she waited for him to reach her. She didn’t want a confrontation. She didn’t just want him to show up only because she had called him to her, but because he wanted to come.
It wasn’t until it was too late to retreat, until he was right upon her, that she noticed that the braided cloth bracelet he’d been wearing only minutes ago was no longer on his wrist. The doppelganger looked so much like her own John that for long moments all she could do was stare at him. She was struck with the same immobilizing shock as when she’d first seen her John’s face and realized that he was an exact double of the figure she’d painted in The Spirit Is Strong.
The courtyard’s crowded, she told herself. He can’t hurt me with all these people around. Maybe he doesn’t even want to hurt me.
Neither thought brought her any comfort as she looked into the dark wells of his eyes and saw not her John’s gentle warmth, but a feral quality and promise of cruelty that the man she knew couldn’t even have mustered in anger.
“Who ... who are you?” she asked.
“A friend.”
The voice was John’s, too, soft-spoken and firm. But the eyes mocked her, giving up the lie that his looks and voice so easily disguised.
“No,” Isabelle said, shaking her head. “You’re no friend of mine.”
“So quick to judge.”
Isabelle looked for help, but no one was paying any attention to their exchange. And what would it look like to an outsider anyway? John’s double hadn’t attacked her. He’d made no menacing gesture.
There was nothing in what he’d said that could be found threatening in the least. There was only the feral glitter in his eyes.
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