Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  Atlas rubbed my back. “You know, Thomas Jefferson once wrote, ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ These people who are after the Serengeti Sapphire—after you—will not hesitate to erase you from the equation. If that guy infringed on your right to live, then he deserved what he got.” He grabbed the clicker and turned off the television.

  I closed my eyes and listened to Atlas’s heartbeat, willing my own to slow down in tandem with his. “Tell me a story,” I said, desperate for a distraction. “Even a nerdy historical one.”

  “Why tell you a story when I can show you one.” From his back pocket, Atlas produced a felt-covered jewelry box.

  I feigned a smile. “Two days, and not only did you ask me to move in with you, but now you’re trying to put a ring on it?”

  “A different kind of ring.” He popped open the box, revealing a tiny silver bell not much bigger than a marble, hanging on the end of a simple chain. The year 1792 was etched into the metal. “Paul Revere cast this bell,” Atlas explained.

  “The Paul Revere?” I blinked in surprise. “The same one who rode through the countryside warning the American colonists that the British were coming?”

  Atlas nodded. “He was a silversmith by trade before he was a patriot. Once the Revolutionary War was over, he opened a foundry to cast bells for churches and shipyards. Some of them are still in service two centuries later. While he was skilled at forging large bells, some weighing thousands of pounds, he never quite mastered casting them on the smaller scale.”

  To test this theory, I rattled the bell. Instead of the high-pitched peel that I expected to hear, the clapper inside made only a dull clack. “It’s broken?”

  “Well, I couldn’t exactly give a bell that rings properly to a girl who needs to stealthily break into historical landmarks. May I?” As Atlas slipped the chain around my neck and fastened it in the back, I could tell he was avoiding eye contact. “More than anything, I think it’s a good reminder that even the tasks we expect to be easiest come with unexpected complications.”

  “You were an unexpected complication,” I said. “Unexpected, but not unwelcome.”

  Atlas’s hand lingered on the tiny bell as it found a home in the hollow of my neck.

  Before the tension between us could reach critical mass, I averted my gaze and tapped the newest riddle. “So—any idea where our enigmatic friend is pointing to this time?”

  “Yeah,” he said without even looking at it. “Straight to bed. I know that you’re never supposed to say this to a woman, but with all due respect: You look like hell.”

  “But Pop, I’m not even tired,” I said, though a yawn betrayed me. As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t stomach the thought of being alone right now, awake or in slumber. I sat upright, folding the blanket over my lap. “Come on, let’s burn the midnight oil and solve this tricky bastard.”

  Atlas looked equally drained, but that nerdy, fiery spark rekindled in his eyes. I couldn’t help but smile at how easily my companion was manipulated at the promise of reliving history. Sucker.

  “Before I passed out, I think I had a lead.” I pointed to the words great flood in the first stanza. “Now, I’m not exactly a practicing Christian, but I did learn a few things before I dropped out of Sunday parochial classes. One of those stories was about Noah’s Ark.”

  Atlas made an intrigued humming noise. “A reference to the flood narrative in Genesis.” He snapped his fingers. “So all we have to do now is find the wreckage of the Ark. Don’t worry, I bet Noah crash-landed it in Boston.”

  I slugged him on the arm. “Not the real ark, doofus—just something related to it. It could be a monument, a painting, maybe even a piece of wood that’s allegedly from the hull?”

  “Not a bad start,” Atlas said. “There’s just one problem.” On his phone, he pulled up the Museum of Fine Arts web page.

  When he searched for “ark” the system retrieved more than fifty items in the museum’s collections. Lithographs, oil paintings, wood engravings. And that was just one museum in one city.

  “We’re talking about one of the most popularly depicted episodes from the Bible. Its image appears in everything from picture books to the Sistine Chapel.”

  My spirit deflated. “Well, I figured out the first line. You get to narrow down our choices with the other eleven.”

  He patted my knee. “The king of nerds accepts your challenge. But first, we need some riddle-solving ambience.”

  And so it was that we curled up on the couch together, sipping hot cocoa and sharing a wool blanket. The Nightmare Before Christmas played in the background while we pored over the yellowed journal page. I had every intention of staying up until we solved the riddle, but bathed in the warmth of both the fireplace and Atlas’s body next to me, I lost the fight to keep my eyes open. One minute, Jack Skellington was saving Halloweentown on the television, and the next I’d fallen into my first dreamless sleep in weeks.

  When I awoke, I was in motion, suspended over the floor. Atlas cradled me in his arms, carrying me to the bedroom. Through the darkness, I glimpsed his square jaw in profile as he lowered me carefully into my bed. I closed my eyes again, feigning sleep, while he drew the covers up to my neck. A few seconds later, I heard his footsteps recede across the hardwood toward the door.

  Without my permission, three words escaped my mouth, half-whispered into my pillow. “Stay with me …” Then another. “Please?”

  His silhouette lingered in the doorway. A longing that I hadn’t anticipated coursed through my body in the seconds that followed. It was agonizing.

  Maybe he hadn’t heard me. Maybe he had. But then the door creaked closed, and Atlas was gone.

  ______

  I emerged from my bedroom the next morning to find a stack of banana pancakes on the kitchen counter, powdered with sugar and a square of butter melting on top. Beside them, Atlas had left me a laptop, with a note that read, “Tarzan go to library. Jane stay here, use glowy-book thing.”

  “Dork,” I muttered, though I was swallowed by the memory of the previous night, drifting in and out of sleep nearly until dawn, hoping he’d reappear in my doorway.

  What followed was an hour of fruitless searches on the web, combining language from the riddle with keywords like “Boston” and “Massachusetts.” When none of those results panned out, I scrolled endlessly through the artwork on various museum pages, searching for details that mirrored anything encoded in the riddle.

  By the time the Dollhouse’s grandfather clock tolled noon, I was ready to hurl the laptop against the wall and piss on its useless electronic remains.

  In my frustration, I stuffed my hands into my hoodie and yelped as something paper-cut my finger. It was the business card Jack had left for me at the museum, now stamped with my bloody fingerprint.

  With no other leads to follow, I typed the name on the card into the search engine. Professor Charlotte Shepherd had an impressive résumé. Eight published works on the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, speeches delivered at White House events, collaborations on PBS documentaries. She had led the kind of industrious career as a historian that Jack would have achieved one day, if he’d been given the chance to survive past eighteen.

  If Professor Shepherd had been some sort of mentor to him in his final months, she might have information crucial to his quest. And if he’d left this business card for me, he must have trusted her enough not to betray his sister.

  Under the website’s “Events” page, I discovered something even more promising: Professor Shepherd was hosting a public launch party for her latest book in Charlestown today.

  One hour from now.

  On a new sticky note, I left Atlas a short message and adhered it to the laptop screen:

  Jane gone to smart woman lecture;

  Tarzan can give Jane his own lecture later.

  Charlotte Shepherd had decided to host her launch party in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument, a 220-foot-tall
granite obelisk that perched over the community of Charlestown. The towering pillar commemorated one of the first major battles during the Revolutionary War, and it immediately summoned one of my earliest memories of Jack’s inexhaustible dorkiness.

  Ten years ago, we had gone on a tour of the historical Freedom Trail with our dad, during one of Buck’s rare attempts to do something fatherly with his children. Throughout the course of the tour, eight-year-old Jack had corrected our guide—an underemployed actor dressed as Benjamin Franklin—no fewer than seventeen times. Our father, already at his boiling point because of the summer heat and the length of time that had passed since his last beer, threatened to cut our tour short if Jack opened his mouth again. Still, as we stood on the edge of the hilltop green, craning our heads to look at the monument, Jack couldn’t help himself.

  “Imagine that you’re a member of the colonial militia,” the guide said, “outnumbered and staring down your musket as a wave of redcoats storms up Bunker Hill.”

  Jack had cleared his throat. “Sir—I mean, Mr. Franklin—this is Breed’s Hill.” He pointed north. “Bunker Hill is actually over there.” An awkward silence followed, which Jack misinterpreted as an invitation to continue. “See, the British initially intended to capture Bunker Hill, but the colonial forces decided Breed’s would have a better field position for them to make a stand, so the names of both the battle and the monument are really kind of a misnomer that—”

  Our father had seized Jack by the ear before he could finish and dragged the two of us to Old Sully’s pub. We sat silent as ghosts in the corner, sharing a basket of chicken fingers while Buck ordered a shot of Jameson and two tallboys in order to cool down.

  Some days, I truly hated my father for insinuating himself into otherwise smile-worthy memories of my brother.

  Today a chilly October breeze had descended on the exposed hill. I shivered in my hoodie until I reached the edge of the party and entered an unexpected bubble of warmth, courtesy of several portable space heaters hidden beneath the cocktail tables. So that was why the guests all looked so comfortable.

  I snagged a flute of hot cider off a passing waiter’s tray and scanned the audience. The launch party had drawn an eclectic mix of older history buffs and college students, so at least I didn’t look totally out of place.

  Somewhere closer to the monument, a fork clinked against a glass and the crowd fell silent. A stout African American woman stepped onto a box so that she could be seen over the crowd. Charlotte Shepherd was probably in her forties and clearly eccentric. Between her bomber jacket, flight cap, and goggles, she looked like Amelia Earhart—and it was a week too early for Halloween.

  “Friends and fellow Bostonians,” she began warmly in a Southern accent, her cheeks puffing out like a blowfish when she talked. “Thank you so much for joining me on this joyous day as I give birth”—She held up a copy of her latest book—“to a one-pound, eleven-inch, four-hundred-page bundle of joy. He may not be a human child, but like a real infant, he has certainly kept me up late into the night for the several years.”

  What a cheeseball. I stared judgmentally at the college guy laughing like an idiot next to me. Maybe Professor Shepherd’s students got extra credit for pretending she was funny.

  “Breathe in the world around you.” She wafted the air in front of her nose, then exhaled dramatically. “This city is so rich with history that you can taste it. But there are countless hidden gems in Boston’s rich four-hundred-year legacy that go overlooked every day.”

  A projector whirred on, casting an image onto the granite monument. It depicted a stone bust of a half-woman, half-lion wearing the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. “Is this sphinx from the pyramids of Giza, nestled in the desert sands?” The image zoomed out to reveal green gardens and tombstones around the creature’s elongated body. “Or is it a Civil War memorial a few miles away in Mount Auburn Cemetery?

  “What about this?” The image on screen morphed into a picture of a busy city intersection. “Today it looks like your average street corner in Chinatown. But two hundred and fifty years ago it was the site of the Liberty Tree, a beautiful elm where brave colonial protestors first rallied against the Stamp Act and incited a revolution. A few years later, when the British laid siege to Boston, they cut the tree down and incinerated it to enrage the patriots.”

  Professor Shepherd flew through slide after slide. The thirteenth pew in King’s Church, where death-row prisoners in the 1700s would say their final prayers before they marched to the gallows. An illustration of the Green Dragon Tavern, where the Sons of Liberty met to scheme against the redcoats.

  “These tales only scratch the surface of what I chronicle in my new book, Liberty’s Roots.” She lifted her glass. “I hope you’ll join me in a toast to the centuries of history beneath our very feet, waiting to be excavated. A toast to our city.”

  Everyone raised their drinks. I did as well, although I rolled my eyes at the presumptuousness of someone with a drawl referring to Boston as “our city.”

  Over the next half an hour, I lurked at the party’s fringes as guest after guest converged on Professor Shepherd, the old and young alike kissing her ass and lavishing her with questions about her research. Something about her rubbed me the wrong way, but if Jack had believed her to be an ally, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, too.

  Once the queue of adoring fans had abated, I approached the professor before I could second-guess myself. “Professor Shepherd? My name is … Autumn,” I said, using my middle name at the last minute. “It is such an honor to meet you.”

  She shook my hand and grinned so broadly that I was surprised her makeup didn’t crack. “A lovely name.” She closed her eyes and quoted theatrically, “‘Though she chide as loud as thunder / when the clouds in Autumn crack.’ Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare.”

  “I’ll add it to my Netflix queue. Look, I don’t want to take too much of your time on your big day, so I’ll cut to the chase. I’m here because I think my brother wanted us to meet.”

  The professor hummed thoughtfully. “Oh really? Is he a budding historian?”

  “He was,” I said shortly.

  The corner of her eye twitched. Her perma-smile drooped like someone had dumped a wheelbarrow of rocks on top of it.

  “I think he might have been a student of yours. Jack Tides?”

  Again, that same tick of the eye. “In my sophomore seminar on the American Revolution, I have ninety-seven students—and that’s just one of three courses I teach.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid getting to know all of them on a first-name basis is simply impossible for an aging, unreliable memory like mine. Excuse me.” And just like that, she brusquely sidestepped me, walked to the makeshift bar, and greeted a fan clutching an armful of her books.

  I studied her from a distance, taking in her forced smile. Like Smitty, Charlotte Shepherd had probably been intimidated into silence, but I still swelled with anger at her cowardice. A boy was dead, a student who had probably looked up to her, and she was content to let his memory disperse like smoke in the wind, when information she had could help me avenge his death?

  Well, if Smitty had proved anything, it was that even the most frightened rabbits on Nox’s payroll could be coerced into honesty.

  I downed my glass of cider and strode purposefully through the milling guests. Professor Shepherd was mid-conversation with two students, gesticulating wildly. She didn’t even notice me until I was upon her.

  I leaned in so that we were nearly cheek-to-cheek and whispered into her ear, “You’re a liar.”

  Meanwhile, my fingers stealthily closed around the keychain I’d spotted inside her jacket pocket. Without her noticing, I palmed the keys and exited the party.

  It took me fifteen minutes of wandering through Charlestown, periodically clicking the unlock button on her keychain, before I heard the telltale chirp-chirp in front of me. It was a blue BMW parked on a side street. Its vanity plate read “L1BRTY.” With a
grim smile, I placed her keys on the pavement beneath the driver-side door. Then I tucked myself away in her backseat, hiding beneath a winter pea coat.

  It wasn’t long before I heard someone shuffling around outside, followed by a relieved sigh and the jingling of keys. The door opened and the leather seat crinkled. As Professor Shepherd buckled herself in, I pressed a tube of lipstick into the back of her neck.

  She squealed in fear and instinctively reached for her phone.

  I pressed the lipstick harder into the bumpy flesh over her spine. “Don’t even think about dialing nine-one-one.”

  Her terrified eyes tracked over to the rearview mirror. “You?” she stammered. “What do you want from me?”

  “My brother thought it was so important for us to meet that he risked his life to ensure that we did. I want to know why. Lie to me, and the next owner of this car will need to get it reupholstered.”

  The professor exhaled. Her body visibly sagged under the weight of a memory. “Your brother came to my office two weeks ago. He was stumped on a project he was working on and wanted my historical expertise.”

  “He asked you to help him solve a riddle,” I said. “To help him find the Serengeti Sapphire.”

  She cocked her head, looking surprised that I knew this much. “Yes. I told him that going after the Sapphire was a fool’s errand, but he was obnoxiously persistent. I agreed to assist him merely as an academic exercise. He would only show me the first eight lines of the riddle, so I interpreted as best I could and suggested he try the Museum of Fine Arts.”

  I smirked despite myself. Atlas’s ego would have a field day if he knew he’d solved a riddle in five minutes that had stumped a Pulitzer-winning historian.

  Professor Shepherd’s hands tightened around the leather steering wheel. “A few days later, the day that I found out your brother died, I came home late from a lecture at Tufts. When I walked into my kitchen, I knew something was out of place. There was a black object hanging on my fridge. It …” Her voice broke. “It was my cat, Wally. Someone had dipped him in tar, covered him in feathers, and strung him up by the tail.”