I led him from the house the next morning, carefully stepping around the overgrown garden and onto the pavement as he shuffled behind me. Jack and Ilona were waiting somewhere out of sight for us to go; I could feel their eyes prickling my skin. As we made our way back towards the water, Albertson paused as a series of coughs overtook him, and he hunched against a tree until it had passed.
“It’s quite a nuisance, I’m afraid,” he said, wiping his mouth and looking at me apologetically. “Growing old, that is.”
“No, it’s – you can’t help it. It’s not your fault.”
“Oh, we can always help things, Enim,” he replied, continuing down the path. “The solution may not be desirable, of course – but we can do it all the same.”
I shifted beside him, wondering if he somehow knew about the schizophrenia and that I had chosen to stop taking my medication before sharply plucking the thought from my mind. As we retook our seats on the boulder overlooking the water, the bracelet from Ava glared up at me with its backwards beads – mine – and before I pushed my sleeve down to cover it again, I wondered if it was really backwards, or if I was.
“Are you getting treatment, Mr. Albertson?” I asked. “Radiation or – or chemotherapy?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t really see the use, Enim,” he replied. “The doctors informed me that it’s spread to my brain, and I’m just not sure that either would do me enough good at this point.”
“But it might give you more time,” I persisted. “You could move to the mainland while they treat you, or you could just take the ferry back and forth, it wouldn’t be so bad –”
“I think that the only ferry I’m looking forward to is Charon’s, quite truthfully,” Albertson said. “I keep a coin in my pocket at all times now. With any luck, he’ll be ferrying me across the River Styx soon enough.”
His voice was gentle as he made the light remark, but I could find nothing humorous in the allusion. Despite what the Romans might have believed, I could find no truth in the thought that there was a ferryman waiting to take the dead to the underworld or anything other than eternal solitude and darkness waiting for us on the other side.
“Oh, Enim, don’t look so forlorn,” Albertson said, leaning forward to peer into my face. “When you’ve lived as long as I have – and the way I have – you find that death is something of a reprieve, not a punishment.”
“I just … It doesn’t seem very fair, Mr. Albertson.”
“Oh, it’s plenty fair. Believe me. Plenty fair.”
I walked him back to his house and put on the kettle for tea, carefully looking for any sign that Jack and Ilona had been there. The door to one of the rooms normally kept shut was open, but Albertson didn't seem to notice.
“I'll come back tomorrow, Mr. Albertson,” I said. “If you'd like.”
“That would be nice, Enim.”
I returned to Miss Mercier’s house and found Jack and Ilona sitting amongst a pile of papers in the living room, their voices low as the spoke to one another. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought that they were finally beginning to get along. I limped into the room and looked down at the mess they had made on the floor.
“Find anything?”
They startled and looked up at me.
“A bit,” Jack said. “Nothing too useful yet, but it definitely looks like Miss Mercier told him something.”
“Yeah?”
Jack nodded and held something up for me to see. Squinting at it, I could just make out the familiar newspaper clippings that we had gathered the previous year, though his had been neatly cut from the page rather than hastily torn as Jack’s had been.
“He’s got all of the articles on the girls’ disappearances,” he said, “plus the blurb about Miss Mercier dying and her obituary. No sticky-note with the killer’s name on it yet, though.”
“You took all this from his office?” I asked.
“We'll put it back,” he said. “It was tucked away, anyhow – I don't think he'll be looking for it.”
I took a seat and stretched my leg out before leaning forward to take a closer look at what they had taken.
“He had them in an old Bickerby yearbook,” Jack said. “It was from the year he began teaching. Ilona found it.”
“Yeah, this is good,” I said, putting the article back down.
“Here, you can go through these.” Jack slid a third of the pile in my direction. “Just scan them for any notes or something – maybe he wrote something down in Latin.”
I pulled the heap of papers into my lap and began to read through them at a slow pace. My mind was still somewhere else, and the long walk had drained the remainder of my energy. As Ilona and Jack swiftly flipped through pages and tossed them aside, I dropped my head to my hand and reread an instruction pamphlet for a rechargeable flashlight several times before realizing that it bore no importance to what we were doing. Putting it off to the side, I picked up a stapled stack of papers and blinked my eyes several times before they were clear enough to see the words printed on the page.
It appeared to have been sent from a hospital on the mainland; there was a seal in the upper left-hand corner stating the name in blue ink, and the front page was filled with a series of statements concerning his cancer diagnosis. My brow furrowed as I looked down at it and my stomach knotted uncomfortably as I flipped to the next page. Just as he had told me, the cancer had spread to his brain in the form of a walnut-sized tumor in the amygdala, and there was a list of options as to how it could be treated, though none of them offered much promise. A weight pressed against my stomach at the thought of it.
“Is this Latin word?” Ilona asked, bending over to show me something.
I shook my head.
“No, that’s a just a brand name.”
“Ah,” she said, and tossed it aside. “I am thinking it is clue.”
She shuffled through the next stack of papers before coming to another pause, and I waited to see if she had another word for me to look at. As she frowned at something across the room, though, I lifted my head from my hand and asked her what she was thinking.
“I just wonder,” she said, “why do killings start in Feb-rary?”
“Because it’s too cold to leave the campus in January,” Jack said blandly.
Ilona ignored him.
“It is seeming like odd time,” she said.
“I guess he had to start at some point,” I said. “It’s not like … I don’t know. It’s not like he just showed up at Bickerby in the fall and decided it would be a great place to kill people.”
“Even though it is,” Jack said.
“But this is what I am thinking,” Ilona said, addressing me rather than Jack. “If he is killer, he must show early symptoms of this, yes? So there must be sign of violence.”
“Like what?”
“Aggressive behavior, troubled relationships –”
“It’s an all-boys school,” Jack said. “Everyone’s aggressive and troubled.”
“—killing animals.”
Jack threw me a look.
“Great. Now it just sounds even more like we did it,” he muttered. “Good thing we weren’t here when the last two went missing.”
“Could it be Trask?” I said. “He killed Dictionary, remember?”
Jack’s eyes darkened.
“He kills dictionary?” Ilona asked, her brows knotting in confusion.
“It was our cat,” I said.
“This is stupid name for cat –”
“It could’ve been,” Jack said, cutting her off mid-accusation. “I mean, he was pretty fucked in the head as it was, and he definitely loved to fight.”
“But he was also pretty surprised when he found the research in our room,” I said, screwing up my face as I thought back to when the other boys had charged into the dorm to accuse Jack of killing Miss Mercier. “And he didn’t really strike me as a good actor.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean anything,” Jack said. “And maybe he
was surprised – I mean, he saw that we had all that information, and so maybe he thought we were onto him.”
I shrugged half-heartedly and looked back at the medical files in my lap.
“Yeah, but he also hated us. He might’ve just wanted a better reason to.”
“He was ready to beat me to death, Nim. That goes beyond dislike.”
I shook my head again; it just didn’t seem right.
“I don’t know, Jack. It just seems – I don’t know. It seems too obvious.”
“Too obvious? What’s that even mean?”
“It means that it seems too obvious,” I said irritably, not wanting to remind him how we had convinced ourselves that it was Barker solely because we hadn’t liked him. “Why would he throw the girls off a cliff? Didn’t we establish that that was a fairly kind way to kill someone?”
“We didn’t establish anything,” he snapped back. “Except that whoever did this is still running around like a maniac somewhere where we’ll never find him!”
“Oh-kay, oh-kay,” Ilona said, waving the papers in her hands to get us to stop bickering. “Do not fight. This Trask person, he is close to Miss Merci-ae?”
I threw a glance at Jack, who was chewing his lip unhappily.
“Not especially, no,” he said. “I think he took Spanish.”
“So if she is knowing he killed girls, why does she not turn him in?”
Jack crossed his arms.
“I don’t know – maybe she told Albertson first, and he warned her not to.” He gave me a dirty look. “Seeing as he’s so reluctant to get involved.”
“Or smart enough to keep out of it,” I retorted.
“Oh-kay, and this boy has graduated?” Ilona said. “He is out of island now?”
Jack shifted discontentedly.
“No. He’s still got a year left.”
“So it is probably not him then, yes?” Ilona said. “Unless he is having change of heart, which is not sounding possible.”
“Nothing’s sounding possible,” Jack said, throwing down the papers he had been holding. He turned to me with a livid expression that darkened his already-black eyes. “Why can’t we just ask Albertson? It would save us all of this work!”
“No. He’s old and he’s sick –”
“And useful! He’s the only one who might know the answer to this!”
“No.” I couldn’t explain to him why I was so adamant, but I held my stance all the same. Albertson had been through enough already, and the medical documents in my lap only furthered my belief that I couldn’t ruin the little left of his life with thoughts of his dead colleague. His desperation for his life to end was stemming from something unspeakable, and I rather thought that it had everything to do with the fact that he did know who had killed Miss Mercier and those girls and that the guilt he felt over it was tormenting the last bit of life that he had been given to hold onto. And maybe Jack didn’t know what that could feel like, but I did – and I wouldn’t further it for him even if it meant that we had to search through every student at Bickerby in order to find the killer.
“Come on, Nim – this is pointless! All we’re doing is figuring out who it’s not when we should be figuring out who it is!”
“This is part of solving,” Ilona said calmly. “We eliminate candidate one by one.”
“Going through everyone who’s on and was on this island one by one means that we’ll find him ten years from now!” Jack said. “And maybe you two are happy enough to waste all that time, but I’d like to get out of here!”
“Then leave!” I said angrily. “Go back to France for all I care – stay in the fucking lavender fields! We’ll figure it out without you!”
He stood up and kicked through the pile of papers, sending them streaming through the air around us, and stalked towards the door. My heart was pounding in timing with his footsteps, but I couldn’t call him back again despite fearing that he really would go to the dock and catch the next ferry to the mainland. And I didn’t want to be without him, but I didn’t want to be with him, either – not like this. Not when the past year that we had spent together had been nothing more than a constant clinging to one another as we both hoped that the other would solve the problems that would fix one thing but not the other, and not when we didn’t even know who we were anymore outside of each other’s presence.
The door slammed firmly behind him. Ilona jumped slightly at the sound, her eyes shutting momentarily, but the papers falling gracefully down around her head in slow, soft blurs of white seemed to counter the conversation that had just been shouted across from her. She looked over at me cautiously as I glared down at my hands, hating myself for being unable to tell him what I should have said the moment that I had seen him across the fields in Nice.
“Eh-nim?”
“Just keep looking,” I muttered, forcing my eyes back to the papers in my hands to avoid talking to her about it.
I picked a spot on the page and read it through violently, willing myself to focus on the words rather than what had just happened. It would take him several minutes to walk down to the port, and the next ferry wasn’t due to arrive until late afternoon; he would change his mind before it left. But an uncertainty filled me regardless. So much had happened in the time that we had been away from one another, and if he was angry enough – and he always seemed to be angry enough when he had been thinking of Miss Mercier’s death for too long – then he wouldn’t change his mind, and he would leave me there without another thought.
“Eh-nim, we should go after him, yes?” Ilona said. “You say things you are not meaning.”
“I did mean it.”
“You do not; you are frustrated. What do you do if he really goes?”
“He won’t.”
“He might,” Ilona said, nudging me with worry again. “He is too impulsive, I am thinking. And he is upset, too.”
Impulsive. I frowned as the word stuck out in my mind, wondering why it was gnawing at me so steadily, and I returned to the medical documents and paused to read them more carefully. Midway down the page, the doctor had written something concerning the placement of Albertson’s tumor. He stated that because it was growing in a region that was responsible for emotions and decision-making that Albertson might experience certain changes in behavior. The phrase jumped out at me more strongly than before: Patients may experience sudden loss of impulse-control, resulting in bouts of aggression or violence otherwise unusual to their normal behavior …
A sudden disconcertion came over my skin in a prickling of sweat, and I ran my hand along the back of my neck to wipe it away. I was just upset over Jack’s reaction: the medical records meant nothing. Albertson had been completely upfront with me about his illness – he had told me that the cancer had spread to his brain and that he wasn’t seeking treatment for it, and so there was nothing odd about reading it there on the page. Nothing but for the fact that the doctor’s warning was glaring up at me too forcefully to ignore.
I shook my head quickly to displace the thought before it could come, because if I could be certain of anything, it was that Albertson had never been anything other than kind and gentle to anyone who had crossed his path, and that it certainly wasn’t him who had killed those girls and Miss Mercier. The idea was unfathomable, ridiculous, even –
“Eh-nim, I go after him, yes?” Ilona said. “I bring him back and you two speak. You do not fight about this – you do not care about this more than friendship, yes?”
But even as I thought it, the familiar sense of foreboding wore down on me and crept its way into my brain. Albertson was intelligent, he took summers off, he was close to Miss Mercier … I flipped back through the file, my fingers sticky from sweat as Ilona’s concern about the killings starting so suddenly in February crossed back into my mind, and found the date marked on it. It had been sent to him the summer before, and the doctor said that the tumor had been growing for several months. The cancer had spread to his brain at the beginning of the previous year,
right when the girls had started being killed.
And the reason that he had been so understanding of what I had done to Beringer suddenly made more sense, as did his desire not to talk about what had happened to Miss Mercier and his claims that it hadn’t been her fault, and his lack of resentment towards his illness and his longing to die. He had killed her. He had killed those girls, too, only it didn’t make sense – it never made sense –
Because it couldn’t be him. I shook my head so forcefully that my neck cracked, but I kept at it even so. I wouldn’t join in with my thoughts to do the same thing that I had done with Beringer – leading myself to believe that someone who had been nothing but kind to me could be someone so horrifically different – especially now that I was off the medication again. My mind was still clear, and nothing was pressing against it trying to force an unlikely answer out. I knew Albertson, just as I had known Beringer, and had known my mother, and knew Jack. It wasn't him. He wasn't anything different underneath his skin like I so vehemently tried to believe about the best of people, and he wouldn't have killed those girls.
“Eh-nim – Eh-nim, stop!”
Ilona grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me to get me to look at her, and I unwillingly opened my eyes. I was losing my mind again, I was sure of it: it was pulling and twisting the thoughts around until they were something else, yearning to believe things that were impossible solely so that I could have an answer, but it wasn’t the answer, I knew – it couldn’t be the answer –
“What do you do? What is wrong?” she said, clutching the tops of my arms to ensure that I didn’t start shaking again. “Eh-nim, what is wrong?”
I shoved the documents into her hands.
“Look at this.”
“What?”
“Look,” I said, pushing them into her fingers until she consented to take them from me. “Just – just look at it, and tell me what you think.”
Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2) Page 32