Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  My ears burned hot. I couldn’t stop shaking. “What was the bartender’s name?” I asked again slowly.

  Grimshaw ignored me. “Focus on your family, Sabra. Go spend some time with your little sister—Echo was it? And most importantly, leave justice up to us. We’ll find the Mustang and its driver soon enough. I promise.”

  I opened my mouth. “I …” My eyes rolled up behind my eyelids and I fainted backwards. Next thing I knew, my chair hit the floor and I spilled limply off the seat onto the hard tiles.

  Grimshaw stooped by my side. “You okay, kid?”

  I blinked dazedly around the room and rubbed the back of my head. “Yes, I—I think I’m just dehydrated.”

  The detective helped me to my feet and carefully lowered me into another chair. “I’ll go get you a glass of water. Stay put.” Then he hurried out of the room.

  As soon as Grimshaw was gone, I dropped the fainting act, walked to the other side of the table, and opened my brother’s file. It took minimal leafing to find the pink carbon copy of a witness report taken in the Seaport two days after Jack’s death.

  The name of the witness was Samuel Smithwick.

  “Bingo,” I whispered.

  I shut the file, and without waiting for Grimshaw to return, I slipped stealthily out of the police station.

  Boston University

  Tempting as it was to head straight to the Nightingale to confront Samuel, I needed time to develop a plan first. I’d get nowhere by crashing through the doors in the middle of the afternoon, tearing up the place, and demanding answers.

  I called the nightclub, pretending to be a regular who’d been doting on Samuel Smithwick from afar. Sam—or “Smitty” as the manager on the phone called him—must not have been much of a looker, because his boss seemed all too amused that he had an admirer. The manager assured me that if I stopped by after five o’clock, I’d catch the object of my affection running the evening shift.

  With several hours to kill, I decided to take care of an unsavory task I’d been putting off since the funeral: visiting Jack’s dorm room to claim the items he’d left behind.

  The Boston University campus was the city-loving student’s dream. It wasn’t the typical sprawling, green-quad, Sesame Street existence of most American universities, but a decidedly urban stretch of buildings that dominated the western edge of Boston proper.

  Smack dab in its center loomed the Warren Towers, three dormitories that rose eighteen stories out of Commonwealth Avenue and cast a tall shadow over the trolley cars below. Side by side, they almost looked as though the tines of a massive trident had been speared through the asphalt.

  I played the grief card with the security officer at the front desk. I didn’t even have to fake the tears in my eyes before he waved me past to go sift through the remnants of my brother’s ill-fated freshman year. Jack’s room was on the thirteenth floor, and the door was protected by a ten-digit keypad lock. This was a setback I had prepared for. On a small note card, I had jotted down a list of every crucial date in early U.S. history that I could find, prioritizing the historical events that Jack blathered on about most frequently. It took a handful of tries, but the door finally popped open after I entered the code 3-1-7-7-6. March 17, 1776 was Evacuation Day, when General Washington had fortified the city of Boston, forcing the British army to retreat north to Canada.

  Jack’s room was a standard double, and I could instantly tell which side had belonged to him.

  The left side was neat and spare. The bed was made so tightly you could bounce a quarter off the sheets. Between the spartan walls—not a poster in sight—and the desk, which was empty save an old lobster trap that was used to store textbooks, it looked as though Jack’s roommate had never fully moved in. However, I noticed that the toothbrush on the bureau looked freshly wet, so it was safe to say that the roommate had recently returned.

  The right side of the room was chaos incarnate. A river of books flowed down off an already overcrowded bookshelf and onto the unmade bed. The makeshift library covered the mattress so completely that I could only see a few patches of my brother’s faded bedspread, which was embroidered with lines from the Gettysburg Address.

  He’d been sleeping under that comforter since the fourth grade.

  I shook off the memory of Jack at age ten and focused on the mountain of library texts. They were mostly history and geography, the intellectual fuel that my brother had voraciously consumed for as long as I could remember. Jack had been insatiable when it came to stories of centuries past. As far as I knew, his obsession could be traced back to the day Dad told him that one of our ancestors had signed the Declaration of Independence.

  That, like so many other things our pathologically lying father said, had turned out to be a total fabrication. A story that was meant to make Buck Tides feel like a hero for a few minutes, as though that would make up for all of his other shortcomings as a father figure.

  As I perused the titles on the spines of the different books, I looked for a common thread between them. The keywords that jumped out at me spanned centuries and continents. Some of Jack’s favorite historical periods were well-represented, from the Jefferson Purchase to the Underground Railroad. But then there were other obscure titles, like:

  The Distance They Journeyed: The Slaves of Tanzania.

  Mount Kilimanjaro: In the Shadows of a Giant.

  Orchids from around the World.

  After a minute of pawing through the books, I had a premonition that I wasn’t alone. Sure enough, when I turned back to the door, a boy stood there watching me.

  He must have come from a workout, given the sweats he was wearing and the gym bag slung over his shoulder. He wasn’t particularly tall, but even his baggy gray hoodie couldn’t conceal his powerful shoulders, which verged on being disproportionately broad for his build.

  The boy broke the silence first. “You look just like him.”

  It was the first time since Jack died that someone had greeted me with something other than how sorry they were. It felt refreshing. “My little sister came out the spitting image of my mother, but both Jack and I were the unwilling recipients of our father’s puffy cheeks.” I sighed. “At least one of us won the genetic coin toss.”

  The boy dropped his duffel onto the neater of the two beds. “I’m adopted,” he explained, “so while I can’t tell you exactly whose features I got in the lottery, my eyelashes did come out suspiciously feminine.” He ran his fingers along his jawline, indicating the three days’ growth of beard. “That’s why I use the stubble to balance it out.”

  “Haven’t you been to the movies lately? The pretty-boy look is in.” I was suddenly self-conscious of the fact that I’d broken into this boy’s room, uninvited. At least he’d put two and two together that I was Jack’s sister. “I’m Sabra, by the way.”

  “Atlas.” He extended a big hand, which I took. Where the sleeve of his hooded sweatshirt bunched up closer to his elbow, I caught a flicker of a tattoo. Before I could read it, he retracted his arm and rolled the sleeve back down.

  I didn’t need Echo’s Greek mythology text to recognize his name. Atlas had been the titan responsible for holding up the celestial heavens, lest they come crashing down to earth. “Atlas, huh?” I said. “Do you have a particularly large burden to bear?” He certainly had the shoulders to support a heavy load or two.

  He smiled. “Atlas is my last name. I just go by it because my first name royally blows.”

  “Oh, give me a break. I have to share my name with a brand of hummus,” I said flatly. “How bad could yours possibly be?”

  “That,” he replied, “is a secret that stays between me and my driver’s license.” He pantomimed zipping his mouth closed and tossing the key into the waste basket.

  My attention drifted back toward the mound of books on Jack’s bed. “How well did you know my brother, Atlas?”

  He considered this. “I was probably his best friend here,” he said, then added, “which is to say I hardly
knew him at all.”

  I frowned. My brother was a bookworm, sure, but not the awkward, social outcast variety. Jack moved fluidly through his teenage years with more social ease than anyone I knew. The guy had an open invitation to any social circle he wanted in high school. He ate lunch with the gamers, played pickup basketball with the jocks, and dated the homecoming queen for an entire year, before she cheated on him and broke his heart.

  So to hear Atlas suggest that Jack was some kind of introvert at a school with thirty thousand students didn’t compute. “You’re telling me that Jack had no real friends here?”

  Atlas must have seen how upset I was getting, because he held up his hands in conciliation. “Hey, maybe I’m wrong. I work a job as the concierge for a luxury condominium complex in the South End, sometimes during the graveyard shift, so our paths mostly crossed in the mornings when I was just getting home. But …”

  I was sick of people tiptoeing around my grief like it was thin ice. “Look. I’ve got a gut feeling the size of a bowling ball that my brother got into something deep before he died, something real bad, and I’m running out of leads to chase. So if you noticed anything suspicious, no matter how small, that might help me understand how a straight-laced kid at the top of his class with a full ride to seven colleges ended up on a bridge in Southie drunk, beaten half-to-death, and then …” My voice broke and tears welled in my eyes. I fixed my pleading gaze on Atlas. “Please,” I whispered. “Tell me everything and don’t hold back.”

  Atlas nodded and sat down on his bed. “For starters, those books?” He pointed to the mountain of texts behind me. “Those subjects don’t match any of the classes on the schedule he taped to his mirror. I figured at first that a bright guy like Jack might be doing a special research project for one of his courses—but I’m not sure he was even going to class. One of his professors left a voicemail on our dorm phone asking where Jack had been the last three seminars.”

  My arms prickled with goose bumps. College wasn’t supposed to be like high school—here, they only checked in on you if they thought you’d been kidnapped or if the FBI issued a warrant for your arrest. “What else?”

  “I wasn’t the only occupant of this room pulling all-nighters. Your brother found himself some job at a shady nightclub in the Seaport. It had a bird in the name.”

  “The Nightingale?” I chimed in.

  Atlas snapped his fingers. “That’s the one. Jack was a bar-back there, I guess, washing dishes, putting clean pint glasses out front, tapping a new keg when one kicked. Guy like that, I figured if he wanted to work for peanuts, he’d get a job in the library or as a research assistant.”

  So Jack had actually worked at the Nightingale—the same bar where he’d allegedly been thrown out of for going on a drunken rampage. How the hell had that slipped through the cracks during Detective Grimshaw’s allegedly thorough investigation?

  Now I had twice as much reason to pay Smitty a visit.

  I could tell that there was something else on Atlas’s mind that he was withholding. His gaze had gone opaque, like he was reliving a memory and its significance was just settling in.

  “Jack said something to you, didn’t he?” I asked.

  Atlas smoothed out a wrinkle in his sheets. “It was the night before he died. The last time I saw him alive, actually. I’d gotten a night off from work and was catching up on sleep. It must have been two, maybe three in the morning, when I woke up to some weird noises. Your brother was standing on his desk and fishing around in the ceiling.”

  I looked up. The ceiling was made up of a series of tiles that looked like they could be moved if necessary. I found myself standing up and walking over to Jack’s desk.

  “It was dark and I was still half-asleep,” Atlas went on, “but I could see Jack come down clutching some sort of old-looking paper, sealed in a plastic laminate. Then he picked up his pea coat and made for the door, like he was about to leave.”

  With one sweep of my arm, I cleared the books off the desk and climbed onto it. It wobbled uncertainly beneath me.

  Atlas jumped up to help steady it and continued his story as he held on. “I was lying there quiet as a rock, but your brother must have sensed me watching him, because he paused at the door. And he turned to speak over his shoulder.”

  Among the tiles over the desk, I spotted one that was turned slightly askew, as though it had recently been disturbed. As I balanced on the desk’s built-in hutch, I pushed aside the misplaced tile and felt around in the rafter space above.

  But my groping hands found only air. Whatever Jack had been stowing away, he must have never returned it in the twenty-four hours before he was killed.

  Atlas helped me down, and I sat, deflated, on the edge of the desk. “What did my brother say?”

  Atlas drew in a deep breath as he tried to recall the words. “He said, ‘She’s going to want to follow me. But you have to stop her. I can’t lose them both.’” Atlas exhaled. “Then he was gone.”

  An arctic chill passed through my veins. She’s going to want to follow me. I felt fairly confident that Jack was referring to me. But follow him where?

  Whatever meaning was behind his ominous final words to Atlas, one thing was crystal clear:

  Jack had sensed that something horrible was about to befall him.

  Somehow, out of the gloom, I found the smallest of smiles for Atlas. “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “For what?” Atlas asked, confused.

  “Because,” I said, “for the first time in over a week, it feels like someone is actually telling me the truth.”

  I gave a final defeated look at the mountain range of books on Jack’s bed. I couldn’t exactly throw them all in the back of my pedicab, so I’d have to leave them here for now.

  Atlas was studying me intently again. “You really believe there was something more to Jack’s death, don’t you?”

  The answer resounded up from my core. “What happened on that bridge was no accident. It was an assassination.”

  Something sparked behind Atlas’s eyes and he walked over to his almost barren desk. He found a marker, but after a quick search through his drawers turned up no paper, he rummaged around in his gym bag and withdrew a white t-shirt. Several flourished scribbles later and he handed the vandalized shirt to me.

  I unfurled the rumpled white T and laughed—my first in over a week—when I saw the ten digits written on it. “You do realize that one of the perks of living in the twenty-first century is that we have magical phones where we can program numbers right in without having to deface innocent gym clothes.”

  “I strive for memorable first impressions.” Atlas’s face turned somber. “Look, I don’t know what your brother was talking about the last time I saw him alive, and maybe it was just crazy babble. But for whatever reason, it sounded like he wanted me to stop you from going down whatever road got him into trouble. I think I owe it to him to see that promise through.”

  This unexpected blast of chivalry was endearing, but ultimately misplaced. “My brother, who was essentially a stranger to you, mumbled three cryptic sentences while you were half-asleep. You’re in no way obligated to him or to me.” Flustered, I avoided eye contact as I stuffed the ratty t-shirt into my knapsack. “I’m under a lot of stress, and given everything that’s happened, I need to look after myself right now. Thanks for your help—seriously,.” I headed for the door, anxious to get back out into the open air of Comm. Ave.

  “I have a sister,” Atlas said firmly

  I stopped in the entryway.

  “She’s fourteen,” he continued. “Next year, she starts high school. All I could think when I walked in and saw you going through your brother’s things—when I see you standing here now—is that if something ever happened to me, I’d hope that someone would be there to watch over her. Even if it was just some crazy final message I left to a roommate I barely knew.” He took a step forward, closing the distance between us. “So you never have to dial that number if you don’t
want. But if you even have the tiniest flicker of a thought that you need my help, no matter how big or how small it might be, don’t you dare hesitate to call.”

  If I were a bridge, then his words would have severed every last one of my supports. I had to hold onto the doorknob tight to keep from caving in on myself. My father was in jail, my mother was attending to my sick sister, and my brother, my rock, was dead. How far had I fallen, how low and pathetic had I become, to cling to the promises of total strangers?

  In my moment of vulnerability, I blurted out a morbid, off-topic question that had been nagging me since I’d walked into the dorm room. “Is it true that if your roommate dies, the school doesn’t try to replace him with another student? That they leave his bed empty for the rest of the school year?” It was stupid, but I mostly needed to know that the world wouldn’t entirely steamroll on as though my brother had never existed.

  Atlas surprised me by smiling softly. “If they try to stick me with a new roommate, I’ll fight them off tooth and nail,” he said. “Some people just can’t be replaced.”

  As I surveyed the the steady stream of patrons entering the Nightingale beneath its gaudy neon marquee, I had an overwhelming suspicion that I stood at a crossroads. It was an ominous sense that my life could take two wildly divergent paths from here on out, and to walk through the nightclub’s metal-studded doors was to irrevocably commit myself to a journey from which I might not come back.

  Down one path, I could willingly bow out now, take the train home, and try to pick up the pieces of my broken family, my tattered life. I wanted answers, but I didn’t even really know what the questions were. Anything I learned now wouldn’t bring my brother back from the dead.

  But then, like I had so many times in the dark this past week, I saw the headlights of that Mustang speeding down the road toward me with murderous purpose. As those twin beams burned into my retinas, I felt the anger grow, and with that fury came certainty:

  Somewhere out there lurked a sinister truth.