This Eternity of Masks and Shadows

by Karsten Knight

  Nook lowered his voice. “Here’s the deal: from this moment on, you are a second-year graduate student in the criminal forensics program at Northeastern University, and you are shadowing me as part of your thesis. With any luck, you’ll look jaded enough to pass for twenty-four instead of eighteen.”

  Before she could sneak in a retort, one of the officers approached. His chest puffed out with self-importance, but his suave entrance was ruined when he stumbled over a cranberry vine.

  Nook tapped the badge clipped to his belt. “Detective Nook Bedard, State Police.”

  The policeman regained his footing and eagerly seized Nook’s hand. “Sheriff Mitch Ramapo. I was first to arrive.”

  Cairn cleared her throat. “And I’m Jodie, a second-year graduate student in the criminal forensics program at Northeastern University. I’m shadowing Detective Bedard for my thesis.”

  Both officers eyed Cairn for an awkward pause, Nook with a glower that said, You smart-ass.

  The sheriff clapped his hands together. “Let me walk you through the scene.” He led them toward the dead man, who lay face-down in the mud.

  The first detail Cairn noticed: the victim’s wings.

  Initially, she wondered if they might be real. In a world where the gods coexisted with humans, he wouldn’t be the first to grow magical appendages.

  But these were just chintzy costuming, feathers glued over mesh wiring strapped under his arms. Beneath the wings, he wore suit pants and a white dress shirt speckled with blood. When Cairn peered closer, she covered her mouth to silence a scream.

  She’d been so distracted by the wings, she’d missed the archipelago of lumps protruding through the back of his shirt.

  Broken bones.

  Cairn was vaguely aware that Sheriff Ramapo was speaking. “Elliott found him this morning as he was prepping for the wet harvest. If you spend any time examining the body, it’s pretty obvious the man died of blunt force trauma from a long fall—hence why his back looks like a damn stegosaurus.” The sheriff looked meaningfully up at the clouds, imagining the man’s final agonizing minute as he plummeted from the sky.

  “You identify the vic?” Nook asked.

  “Nothing in his pockets. But I bet you’re probably wondering how a man who obviously can’t fly ends up in a cranberry bog when the terrain is flat as a pancake and there’s no standing structure around for miles.” Ramapo’s voice fluttered with excitement. “And I—”

  “And you have a theory,” Nook muttered under his breath.

  “—Have a theory.” The sheriff leaned in. “See, several skydiving companies operate across the Cape. This guy wants to go out with a bang, so he signs up for a jump, trades his parachute for a pair of fairy wings at the last second, and takes a two-mile cannonball back to Earth.” The sheriff mouthed boom and mimed a mushroom cloud with his hands. “All we have to do now is look up all the flight paths that crossed over this area in the last twenty-four hours and cross-reference the passenger manifests.”

  “Good detective work,” Nook replied with false enthusiasm that Ramapo must have missed, because he beamed with pride. “I’m going to need you to return to the station ASAP, get those lists, and start calling passengers to rule out anyone still among the living.”

  “I’m on it.” The sheriff scurried off to his patrol car, nearly face-planting in the mud again as he raced away.

  He was hardly out of earshot before Nook grumbled, “Worthless.”

  “Why so harsh?” Cairn asked. “His theory sounded plausible enough.”

  Nook put on a pair of rubber gloves. “Because there is no way this man fell here—which means that he died somewhere else, which in turn means someone relocated and staged him here posthumously, which in turn suggests: this was probably a homicide.”

  Cairn peered at the bloody lump of a man, trying to see what Nook had seen. “How did you deduce all that, Sherlock?”

  Nook slipped his hands under the victim’s mangled body. “For starters, if a two-hundred-pound man landed in soft peat like this at terminal velocity, I imagine he would have made a small crater, Looney Tunes–style, with some blood splatter nearby. At the very least”—with a groan, Nook rolled the man over onto his side—“he would have crushed these cranberries.”

  Nook was right. Most of the juicy red spheres on the vines beneath the victim’s body remained intact.

  Someone had carefully lain the body there.

  “Staged,” Nook repeated. He stiffened partway through wiping mud from the man’s face.

  “You recognize him,” Cairn said, not a question.

  “His name is Tane Makoa.” Nook waited a beat. “He’s the Suffolk County district attorney.”

  Cairn whistled. “He landed a far cry from city limits.”

  Nook frowned at the body. “He might not have fallen out of the sky, but given this level of trauma, he must have at least taken a dive off a tall structure.” He speed-dialed a number on his phone and stepped away. “Jerry, it’s Nook. I need you to check the logs and see if we have any unsolved jumpers, or maybe a John Doe that might have vanished from the morgue.” A pause. “Yes, you heard me right.”

  While he was busy, Cairn crouched beside the victim, transfixed by his face. For all the damage to the rest of his body, his head remained miraculously unscathed. And even though mud covered half his face, she suddenly realized why he looked so familiar.

  The man had been in the photo with her mother that Themis had shown her—twenty years older now, but still recognizable as the Polynesian student from the picture, face frozen in laughter as he draped one of his muscular, tattooed arms across Ahna’s shoulders.

  Carefree, as if he wouldn’t one day drop out of the sky.

  “You better not be touching that body without gloves,” Nook growled. She hadn’t heard him wrap up his phone call.

  “I wouldn’t be a very convincing forensics graduate student if I didn’t examine the body.” She pointed to a cluster of rock fragments embedded in the victim’s brow. “So he’s half-buried in bog peat, yet he’s also got a crown of dry gravel that doesn’t belong here. Why do you think that is?”

  For a moment, Cairn thought Nook was about to acknowledge her contribution to the investigation. But then his gaze drifted past her and he bellowed, “What did I tell you about trespassing on my crime scenes?”

  A brunette woman in square-rimmed glasses stood knee-deep in the bog as if she had materialized out of thin air. She had a camera raised to her eye, busily snapping away footage of the body. Cairn wondered how long she’d been there filming.

  “It’s a free country.” The newcomer, who Cairn guessed was in her mid-twenties, lowered the Nikon and nonchalantly scrolled through the images. “Can’t a girl go for a leisurely morning stroll through her favorite cranberry bog without being harassed by law enforcement?”

  “You say ‘leisurely stroll,’ I say ‘trespassing on a private farm, tampering with evidence, interfering with an ongoing investigation …” Nook paused. “Do you want me to keep enumerating, Quinn?”

  “Always with the dramatics, Detective Bedard. I’ll take that as a ‘no comment.’” Quinn’s gaze landed on Cairn. “Who’s the apprentice? Has Batman finally hired a Robin?”

  Cairn narrowed her eyes. “I’m a second-year graduate student in the forensics—”

  “How do you want to leave this bog?” Nook asked. “In the driver’s seat of your Mercedes …” He dangled a pair of cuffs in front of him. “… or the back seat of my Dodge?”

  Quinn fanned herself. “Golly, take a girl to dinner first,” she said coquettishly. Nook took another threatening step in her direction, and she held up her hands. “I’ll go, I’ll go. But you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think ‘District Attorney Found Dead in Bog’ won’t make the nightly news.” With that, she retreated toward the access road, but not before saying over her shoulder, “Pleasure to meet you, sidekick.”

  “Who was that?” Cairn asked, watching her go.

  �
��The worst kind of bottom-feeding scavenger,” Nook muttered. “She’s a glorified tabloid junkie who used to run a blog outing gods. For reasons beyond me, Channel 7 signed her as a correspondent. Now she thinks she’s Diane Fucking Sawyer.”

  With the journalist gone, Nook knelt beside the body again. He pulled a pen from his pocket and dipped the point into the amber-colored substance that had been sprinkled over the wings and the ground immediately around the body. He cautiously touched the soft material with his finger. “Candle wax? Why the hell would someone go to the trouble of staging all this, then dribble wax all over a man who was already extremely dead?” He asked in such a distant way that Cairn was positive he was talking to himself, not asking for her hypothesis.

  But he was about to get it anyway—because the mention of wax dislodged a memory that had been tugging at Cairn since she first saw the victim’s wings. It was a story her mother once told her, one of the thousands of world myths Sedna had read to her before bed over the years. “Icarus,” she whispered.

  Nook lowered his aviators with one finger. “Pardon?”

  Cairn tried to remember the legend as best as she could. “It’s a Greek myth I’m sure you’ve heard at some time or another. The brilliant Athenian inventor Daedalus and his son, Icarus, were imprisoned at the top of a tall tower. To escape, Daedalus caught birds from the windowsill and siphoned wax from the dungeon’s candles and fashioned two pairs of wings. Before they took flight, Daedalus cautioned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, because the heat would melt the wax. But Icarus didn’t listen, and as he soared higher, his wings disintegrated. The boy plunged to his death in the sea.”

  She expected Nook to shoot down her theory, but he nodded thoughtfully. “So a real-life Māori god murdered then staged to resemble a Greek myth, in such an elaborate fashion that his killer had to know we’d never rule this a suicide.”

  “But why all the theatrics?” Cairn asked.

  Nook straightened up and gazed back to the entrance where the coroner had arrived in a white jumpsuit. “Same reason a baby cries in a supermarket.” He stripped off his gloves. “For attention.”

  His phone chimed and he answered with a terse, “What do you got for me?” He listened intently then hung up without another word. “Back to Boston we go.”

  “Really?” Cairn trudged after him. “But we just got here!”

  “We need to let the real forensics expert do her work. Besides, I just got a tip to follow up on. A maid at the Custom House building called 9-1-1 last night.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “She said she saw an angel fall from heaven.”

  Ninety minutes later, they were driving through the towering labyrinth of downtown Boston. As they parked, Cairn gazed up at the imposing clocktower. Originally built to oversee the import and export of goods passing through Boston Harbor, the Custom House had been converted into a luxury hotel at the turn of the 21st century. Two years ago, her mother had taken Cairn and Delphine there for a surprise sixteenth birthday present, a girls night in the city, complete with a fancy seafood dinner overlooking the harbor before they got dolled up to attend the symphony.

  Those were better days.

  They walked around the base of the building from State Street, which bustled with taxis, to the quieter India Street side. “A maid called 9-1-1 in hysterics last night. When the operator finally calmed her down, she explained that she’d been cleaning a room on the 27th floor when she saw a ‘winged man’ plummet past the window. In theory, the body should have landed somewhere on this side.”

  “Spoiler alert: He landed an hour southeast,” Cairn said.

  “That’s the thing—officers responded in five minutes, expecting a gruesome scene. Instead …” He gestured to the pristine cobblestones beneath their feet. There were no signs of the blood splatter and carnage Cairn would imagine from a body tumbling five hundred feet and coming to an abrupt stop.

  “When they didn’t find a body, they figured the maid had been dipping into the sauce.” He made a chugging motion with his prosthetic hand. “Turns out she wasn’t so crazy after all.”

  Cairn knelt and pressed a hand to the road. A film of dark gravel clung to her palms, the same that had been lodged in Tane’s face.

  But how the hell would someone have time to shove a man off a building, take the elevator down, move the body, and hose down the road in the five minutes before the cops got there?

  After Nook snapped photographs of the street, they entered the clocktower through the regal lobby and took the elevator up to the observation deck. A sign indicated that the skywalk was closed to the public for renovation while they installed new safety bars around the ledge.

  A fierce wind enveloped the building, blowing Cairn’s hair around. She never thought of herself as afraid of heights, but thirty-two stories above the streets, she felt an aura of dread. Something sinister had happened here.

  Nook lingered over a pile of broken glass. He picked up a shard with tweezers and sniffed. “Tane always had a weakness for scotch.”

  Cairn cautiously edged toward the open railing and leaned over. After the initial wave of vertigo passed, she was overcome with awe watching the city from this arresting birds-eye view.

  It was when she turned her attention down to the street below that she saw the pattern. Standing in the plaza earlier, the loose gravel hadn’t seemed suspect, just another dirty alley in need of sweeping.

  From this vantage point, however, the dark stones formed a large ellipse against the road—with a pristine rectangle hollowed out, untouched, at its center.

  “Nook.” Cairn beckoned him over. “I think I know why there’s no sign of our Icarus landing in the street. It’s because he didn’t.”

  The detective joined her at the railing. When he saw the ring of gravel below, he just said, “Oh.”

  Five minutes later, after a call with his tech, Nook received a video file to the surveillance camera down on India Street. She watched over his shoulder as he fast-forwarded through hours of footage until the streetlamps bloomed on at nightfall. He slowed the footage to regular speed when a large dump truck entered the frame. It parked itself at the base of the building.

  “Wait,” Cairn said. “Right there—back it up ten seconds.”

  It happened so fast it was easy to miss. One second, the truck idled motionlessly. Then there was a fleeting blur at the top of the screen, and the truck briefly rocked back and forth, sagging on its suspension.

  At the same time, a dark cloud of gravel erupted out of the cargo bay and littered the road around it. Moments later, the driver threw the truck into gear and casually drove off.

  Nook rewound once more, this time pausing on a single frame. A winged humanoid blur lingered fatefully over the truck bed.

  “That’s a hell of a way to hitchhike,” Cairn said.

  Nook touched the shadowy interior of the truck on the screen. “Not a hitchhiker—I think this chauffeur was expecting his dearly departed passenger.”

  Fallen Angels

  Back at Themis’s mansion, Cairn burst through the office doors, strode up to the doctor’s desk, and slapped the faded photo down on top of the braille book Themis had been reading. “What are you not telling me?” After a moment, Cairn clarified, “For visual context, I just dramatically flattened a photo of the Pantheon on your desk.”

  Themis stiffened. “You identified the victim,” she said, not a question. “Who was it?”

  “The district attorney—or Tane as you probably knew him.” Until now, Cairn had seen Themis express little emotion, but the wave of pain on the doctor’s face was unmistakable. “I’m sorry,” she added.

  “He was the calm one who always kept the team sane,” Themis said. “Before the split. Before the trip to that godforsaken island.”

  Frustration rippled through Cairn. One photograph. Two deaths in as many months. If Nook’s hunch was correct, Tane had been murdered and staged as a suicide.

  On the other hand, Cairn had watched her mother step
off the back of the boat with that anchor, intentionally drowning herself. But the dreamy glaze in her eyes, her cryptic final words—none of it added up.

  Cairn leaned against the desk. “These days, I don’t have trouble believing in much. Reincarnation, gods with supernatural abilities, a mother who can communicate with whales—all that I can swallow. The one thing I don’t believe in? Coincidence. Not one this big. Not one this personal. What aren’t you telling me? Why am I here?”

  Themis visibly deflated in her chair. “There’s … something you need to see. Since you first came to me, I have agonized over whether to show it to you.”

  With some reluctance, Themis wandered across the office to one of its many bookcases. She reached up to the top shelf and ran her fingers along the spines until she found the volume she was looking for.

  She pulled down a thick hardcover copy of The Odyssey. “I have a confession,” Themis said, her voice choked with emotion. “I was supposed to give this to you in the event that your mother ever passed away. She made me promise, and I agreed, thinking that horrible day would never come, that your mother would outlive me by decades. But when the worst happened, and when I found out what was inside, I couldn’t bring myself to reach out to you. The thought that this might add even more to your already unfathomable pain, while you grieved for your mother, was just too much to bear. So a week passed. Then a month, and another month. Then you showed up at my doorstep and I knew I had run out of excuses to shield you from the truth.” Reluctantly, Themis held out the book.

  Cairn snatched it from her. Why would her mother possibly leave her a copy of an old Greek epic, and why had it gotten under Themis’s skin so bad?

  When she opened the volume, she discovered that the pages within had been hollowed out to form a makeshift treasure box. Inside, it contained three items:

  An empty glass vial.

  A tiny silver bell.

  And a leather-bound journal.

  Cairn shook as her confusion boiled over to anger. “You’re just giving this to me now? For two months, I’ve been lying in the dark, staring at my ceiling, praying for clarity, when those answers could all be in here? What gave you the right?”