Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  My phone vibrated. Rufus had come through with the number, which he appended with a final warning: Stay safe, little dingo.

  I clicked Send, even though I knew I could be making a game-ending mistake. I’d assaulted a cop and crammed his body into a state-issued police vehicle, and now I was about to entrust this information with a total stranger. A disreputable stranger no less. In my panic, I contemplated hanging up.

  Georg Tankian, the Armenian racketeer from Watertown, picked up before I could chicken out. “This better be important,” he said in his thick accent, without introduction. “You’re interrupting ninth inning in game seven, and Red Sox are down by two points. It is real nail-biter.”

  I swallowed hard and tried to restore the confident edge to my voice. “The gift I’m about to offer you is better than a World Series ring,” I said.

  I heard the crunch of leather as Georg leaned forward in his seat. “Who is this? Girl Scout? This is private number.”

  No turning back now. “This is the Girl Scout who has a detective named Louis Grimshaw stuffed in the trunk of a car.” I let this sink in. “I’ve heard he’s been a bit of a pain in your ass?”

  Georg made an ambivalent noise. “He has not simply been pain in ass—he is full-blown hemorrhoid. However, his master pays his dues now, so let that North Shore trash keep betting on lame horses. Goodbye, crazy girl stranger.”

  “Wait!” I barked. I had to think fast. What did Georg want that I could offer him? I had researched him after his name came up during my clandestine golf course meeting with Smitty. Georg owned the Mad Raven nightclub, one of the Nightingale’s chief competitors. Nox had won the bidding war for the last slice of waterfront real estate in the Seaport, leaving Georg to build in a less desirable location.

  Which meant that Georg and Nox were rivals.

  I smiled darkly. Atlas, who was leaning against Grimshaw’s car, furrowed his snow-covered brow as if to say Oh, God, what could you possibly be doing now?

  “What if I told you,” I said, “that his master wouldn’t be around to pay his dues in seventy-two hours—which would leave the Nightingale ownerless. Do I have your attention now?”

  A pregnant pause. “Hypothetically.”

  In my research on Georg, I’d learned that he had three daughters, the youngest of whom was Echo’s age. As illegitimate as Georg Tankian’s enterprises in Boston might be, he was still a father. For me to persuade him to help me, I was going to have to play to his more sensitive side.

  “Here’s the story, as concise as I can tell it,” I said. “My eight-year-old sister has cancer. If Horace Nox gets his way, she could die in the very near future.” On the other end, Georg grumbled a string of what must have been Armenian curses, which if translated into English would have probably made even my father say a Hail Mary. “I’m going to take Nox out of the game to make sure that doesn’t happen. But for me to have the freedom to do that, this cop car—along with the detective in its trunk, who very recently tried to murder me—needs to disappear.” I walked him through a rough plan that I’d concocted on the spot, one that would allow Grimshaw to survive, but make him wish he hadn’t. His credibility would be destroyed and his ability to retaliate would be neutralized.

  Georg took an unnerving amount of time to respond, perhaps while he tried to intuit whether I was another cop trying to entrap him. I knew I’d checkmated him when he muted the Red Sox game in the background. “And, again hypothetically, where would this troublesome vehicle be located?”

  I told him.

  “The last time I saw Horace,” Georg said slowly, “I invited him out to brunch at my finest restaurant. I figure, we both have respectable business to run in same town, so why not be civil and bury hatchet. Do you know what that Irish punk called me? Gypsy. Gypsy! That’s not right country. Not even right side of Black Sea.” He sighed. “Well, crazy girl stranger, I am no criminal. That said, sometimes when people forget keys in ignition, cars get stolen. This world we live in is—how you say?—bananas. Have lovely evening.”

  While Georg had, outright, admitted to nothing, he had surreptitiously given me the green light. “Go Sox,” I added.

  As I hung up, a pounding came from the Crown Vic’s trunk. Grimshaw’s muffled screaming followed, but the words came out of his broken jaw as warbling, unintelligible mush, like his mouth was stuffed with cotton balls.

  “Someone sounds happy,” Atlas said.

  I inserted the key into the ignition, then wiped down everything I’d touched. “If you think he’s excited now, just wait until Georg sends an Armenian chauffeur to pick him up.”

  Atlas was clearly ready to book it out of the area, but I crouched at the bumper of the Crown Vic. Grimshaw continued to holler inside the trunk until I pounded on it to shut him up. “Never forget,” I said sharply to the keyhole, “that I showed you mercy when I could have drowned you like the rat you are. And if you ever do anything to jeopardize my sister’s health again, I will make what your bookie is about to do to you feel like a ride on Splash Mountain.”

  Immediately, Grimshaw’s screams resumed, more pleading this time, all vowels and no consonants, beseeching me to spare him from the wrath of Georg Tankian.

  As we walked down the lightless path back to the truck, with the wind stirring the snow around us, Atlas said, “You are one scary-ass chick, Sabra Tides.”

  My hand slipped into his and squeezed until I felt like the lifeline of his palm had been tattooed into my skin. “That’s what he gets for interrupting the best kiss of my life.”

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. CUMBERLAND WARWICK

  Columbia, South Carolina | February 17, 1865

  Dearest Adelaide,

  I write from a bed of ashes. It can only be by divine intervention that I have survived to share my tale, to watch dusk fall upon a city in cinders. Yet if God indeed had a hand in today’s events, I must believe that He is a cruel purveyor of circumstance, doling out miracle and tragedy in equal measure.

  For three days, Malaika and I journeyed tirelessly from Charleston to Columbia. There we would find Magnolia Black, the plantation to which the craven Gold Coast proprietor had sold young Jaro. We traveled fifty miles a day, until our soles grew rife with blisters. We clung to the riverbanks, from the Cooper to the Congaree, using the waters as our guide. At night, Malaika slept with one arm always around the Sapphire. All the while, I prayed that neither illness nor the barbarous cotton fields had prematurely snatched Jaro from this earth.

  On the third day, we emerged from the cypresses to the most disconcerting of visions: Columbia was in flames. Smoke cloaked the sky in curtains. Heavy winds fanned the fire through the heart of the city. By whom it was set, whether by retreating Confederates or Union sabotage, remained unclear, but the magnitude of its rampant destruction was incontestable.

  The chaos intensified as we navigated the city streets. Everywhere, citizens and soldiers alike had erupted in riotous frenzy. Looters smashed windows. Men staggered through the streets, bottles in hand, drunk from tavern raids. The State House burned while a mob darted into the flames to steal from its wealth of luxuries. It was this pandemonium that should have portended the grievous calamity to follow.

  Upon our arrival at Magnolia Black, fire raged ungovernably through the plantation. On the manse’s burning porch, the field supervisor brandished his whip to ward off a cluster of liberated slaves. In time, he was overrun by the men he had long subjugated. I could only watch in macabre stupefaction as they strung him up from the rafters with his own scourge.

  We skirted the scene of the lynching and set a course for the slave quarters, which were in dire straits. The shanty was immersed in an all-devouring inferno, transforming the space beneath the cheap tin roof into an oven and fanning us with an unbearable heat. Malaika bellowed Jaro’s name. His calls were met with no reply through the smoky penumbra.

  Before I could caution him otherwise, my companion thrust the Serengeti Sapphire into my hands and plunged into the conflagration.
For an interminable time, I waited at the shanty’s threshold, praying for Malaika to emerge from the hut. I even contemplated joining him in the furnace, though I’m loathe to admit that my cowardice bested me.

  Deep in the structure’s flickering recesses, I saw a magnificent silhouette materialize through the smoke. It was Malaika, and cradled in his arms was a miracle. Long legs. Spindly arms.

  A boy.

  My triumphant glee proved ephemeral. A soul-rending crack resounded from the rafters. I screamed for my companion to watch out, but pitiless destiny had other plans. Malaika had only time to cast a forlorn look upward before the roof’s flaming timbers caved in, burying father and son, dragging them away into the dark frontier that we all fear to one day explore.

  The first stop for enemies from afar,

  The last for enemies from within,

  Five brazen stone-faced soldiers

  To keep their city sound and safe.

  A widow mourns a lonely walk,

  Her grave mistake, her husband’s ruin,

  And roams the beach eternally

  Grieving in black amongst the gray.

  Her gallows long since rendered tinder,

  The promise of life springs anew

  Where the five petals converge

  On the cinquefoil in bloom.

  In the initial hour after we arrived home at the Dollhouse, Atlas and I made a valiant attempt to interpret the tenth riddle. Unfortunately, with our spiked adrenaline levels bottoming out, we surrendered to our stifled yawns and bleary eyes. I led Atlas by the hand to my bed. The cuffs of our jeans were still wet from our trip to the reservoir, but we climbed under the quilt without changing just the same.

  The yearning I felt for him had only intensified, but with a good night’s rest—and the solution to the latest riddle—of far greater urgency, I took a raincheck on seeing where our snowy union in the woods would lead us. I contented myself to take pleasure in Atlas’s muscular body spooning my own. He imparted one last kiss to the nape of my neck before he fell asleep. My last sensation before I closed my eyes was the steady pulse of his warm breath whispering through my hair.

  I couldn’t have been out for long when a noise in the condo woke me. Dazed, I had trouble immediately placing the strange sound, so I closed my eyes again, listening closely.

  There it was: a rattling, like the patter of rain against a window, repeating in two-second bursts.

  I slipped out from under Atlas’s thick arm. He was a heavy sleeper and didn’t even stir as I walked out into the living room.

  My cell phone, the throwaway that no one outside of Atlas and the two people I’d called tonight should possibly know the number to, was ringing on the glass coffee table. My gut squirmed uneasily as I crossed the room. I hadn’t set up a voicemail, so the phone continued to slowly skitter across the table with each ring, the screen lighting up with a number I didn’t recognize.

  Maybe it was Rufus calling from a hardline. Maybe Georg wanted to update me on the fate of Detective Grimshaw. The illogical part of me feared that it was my mother calling to break bad news about Echo. There was no possible way for her to have this number, but my paranoid imagination misfired just the same.

  When I picked up, I didn’t say anything at first. I held the receiver up to my ear and listened for the caller to chime in.

  While I’d heard the husky female voice on the other end only once before, it was one I’d never forget, just as I’d never forget the haunting sentence Aries spoke next.

  “Do you want to hear the sound your brother made when he died?”

  Her voice was immediately followed by a recording.

  The rumble of a car engine.

  The stick shift moving up a gear.

  The engine’s aggressive crescendo as the car accelerated.

  Thump.

  Crack.

  Tumble-tumble.

  Then a cold, low chuckle.

  My heart rate skyrocketed. My eyes watered. In spite of all my strength these past few days, a pathetic sob escaped my lips, a high-pitched hiccup as that miserable, homicidal junkie forced me to relive the worst moment of my life.

  “I figured I’d record it as a trophy,” Aries said casually. “I made it my ringtone, so I could wake up to it every morning. Really start the day off on a positive note, you know?”

  I was quaking so much that the phone slipped out of my clammy hand. When I picked it up, I held the microphone close to my mouth. “The only trophy is going to be your bloodstained horns nailed over my mantle, you bitch.”

  Aries yawned. “Let’s not resort to petty violence, gatita. Look, I have a race to get to, so I’m going to keep my proposition brief. Our little game of citywide hide-and-seek was fun in the beginning, but I’m getting so bored, and there’s a bonus payday in it for me if I get these silly riddles back for Horace. So this is how it’s going to go down: There’s a gazebo on the far corner of Castle Island. You’re going to surrender the latest riddle to me there at sunrise. If you don’t, then I’m going to pay a visit to Children’s Hospital.”

  A polar vortex swept through my body. “And do what?” I snapped. “Go on, say it. Give me another reason to make you suffer.”

  “How about a demonstration?” Aries asked. “Grimshaw traced your new phone to the South End, but with the signal playing pinball off the sides of all those buildings, we couldn’t triangulate an exact location. Still, look out the nearest window.”

  I crept carefully over to the large floor-to-ceiling panes and parted the curtains an inch.

  An SUV three doors down lit up, the car alarm wailing into the night, the headlights flashing an SOS pulse.

  Then a more intense light emanated from the vehicle’s back seat and it exploded.

  The whole neighborhood shook. The glass windows of the surrounding buildings shattered, and the blast punched a hole in the brick wall of the art gallery behind it, large enough for elephants to comfortably march through. Debris rained down on the nearby cars, before they were swallowed by the smoke billowing down the street. Screams echoed from the condo units above and below me, as people ran to their windows to see the smoldering inferno of the SUV’s remains.

  Aries applauded herself. “Sounds like I was pretty close! That’s what Echo can look forward to if her big sister doesn’t bring me what I want. 6 a.m. Castle Island. No phone calls to the cops or hospital.” Then she hung up.

  The bedroom door burst open. The blast had woken Atlas, who grabbed me by the shoulders. “You okay?” he asked, frantic.

  I nodded dumbly.

  “I need to go out there and see if anyone needs help. Stay here.” He wrapped me in a brief hug and sprinted out of the Dollhouse.

  As I emerged from my shock, I found myself dialing Rufus’s number once more. “It’s your favorite troublemaker,” I said when he picked up. “I need to know where someone is going to be—tonight.” While I didn’t know Aries’s real name, her alias and the metal hardware on her head shouldn’t make her hard to track down.

  Rufus clucked his tongue thoughtfully after I’d dictated everything I knew about Aries. “I know a guy,” he mused. “Dealt Blyss for a few years, until the feds caught a whiff of him, so he quit the game before he got burned. Mostly keeps to himself these days, living in some shithole up in Everett, but with a little financial incentive, his lips might loosen enough to say a thing or two about your charming, antlered acquaintance.”

  “Whatever you need,” I promised him.

  With Rufus on the job, I jacked Atlas’s car keys from the kitchen counter. I traced the outline of a truck on the fridge’s dry-erase board, with a note that said, “Last time. I promise.”

  Then I was in the parking garage, starting the engine to Atlas’s Silverado, and roaring out of the back entrance to avoid the carnage left by the car bomb.

  I hadn’t been on the road long when, bless his heart, Rufus emailed me a full dossier of information. Aries’s full name. Her drug territories on the North Shore. A rough ma
p of the illegal street race she competed in every Tuesday at 3 a.m. without fail.

  The race she would be competing in tonight.

  You’re the most industrious stoner I know, I texted Rufus back, before shutting the phone off altogether, so Aries couldn’t trace my drive north and Atlas wouldn’t try to stop me.

  I sped toward Salem, Massachusetts, the heart of the infamous witch trials over three hundred years ago, which sent nineteen women to the gallows for allegations of sorcery.

  Tonight, a different kind of witch was going to hang.

  Depending on whom you asked, October was either the best or the worst month to visit Salem.

  Eleven months out of the year, it was a typical middle-class suburb, known for its restaurants and ocean views. Before my dad’s mounting debt forced him to sell his boat, a used Catalina that he couldn’t afford in the first place, he kept it moored here. Some of my only good memories of Buck Tides were of that summer when I was nine. Every Tuesday, we’d set sail out of Hawthorne Cove, with my father smiling at the wheel, and Jack, Mom, and me sprawled out in the back of the little fishing boat. My mother was pregnant with Echo then and always kept her hands gently folded over the swell of her belly. She seemed to infinitely glow that summer, like their marriage had entered a renaissance, though that glow would dim every time my father reached into the cooler for another Busch Light. Or when my godfather, Dec, would come along for the ride and drunkenly piss off the side of the boat.

  Two months later, Buck Tides went to prison.

  That was the Salem that I remember. However, for the entire month of October, the town annually embraced its paranormal legacy and transformed into a touristy magnet of haunted houses, graveyard tours, and Wiccan boutiques. Like the eighth biblical plague, hordes of teenagers would descend on Salem in the weeks leading up to Halloween, costumed and invincible, shrieking as they incited mischief in the streets.