He turns to me with a look that betrays the slightest surprise.
I make my way down the hall until I’ve left too little room between us, probably, for being alone in the dark hallway. I could take a step back, but I don’t. Neither does he. Lights are twinkling within his eyes, blooming, fading as he looks at me in the darkness.
“Can I help you with something, Miss Quinn?” he asks formally, his hand still on the doorknob, but his voice is scratched and smoky with whisper, and heat curls beneath my skin.
“Will,” I say quietly. I look up at him, almost close enough to feel him breathe. “Do you think you could you build me a target?”
There are things I have started to notice about Will: things like the smooth grooves that run over his palms like water, the slight scar just above his lip that appears only in a certain light, and how sometimes at breakfast I catch myself staring at his mouth and wondering what it feels like to kiss someone. It is a secret I don’t dare speak to anyone. Even to Cass.
Even to Beas, when I meet her in the back corner of the school library and we sit near the heater, the sky hanging gray and cold just beyond the window. She can actually practice her violin there now while I study or read one of her poetry books. Today she’s lent me Alfred Lord Tennyson. In Memoriam.
I like to watch her over the edge of the pages when she thinks I’m not looking. She refuses to let the Disappearances ripple outward and also rob her of her ability to play, so she perches over her music sheets, her arms furiously moving the bow over the strings, as if she could force the notes out from sheer will.
I startle when, without warning, she suddenly flings her bow and then scatters her sheets of music onto the floor.
I close my book. “Want to talk?”
I move to retrieve her bow and hold it out to her as an offering.
She sighs and takes it from me. “I want music the way I would crave food if I was beginning to starve.”
“Do you ever hear it in other things?” I crouch to gather her music sheets. “Sometimes I think I almost do, in the wind, or a train horn.”
“I hear it in everything,” she says, bending to help. “The rhythm of footsteps. Doors closing. Even flies buzzing and tapping the windows.” Her mouth turns down into a half smile. She hesitates. “Aila, I’ve always wondered. Do stars . . . sound like anything?” Her voice turns almost shy. “I’ve only seen them in pictures.”
“No,” I say. “At least, if they do, we can’t hear it on earth.”
“I wish I could see them.” She sets her violin into its plush velvet case as though she’s tucking in a baby. “Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if there was music in everything. If stars could sing, or shadows scraped along where they fell. Or if the wind made leaves tinkle like wind chimes.”
I clear my throat. Now it is my turn to be shy. “When you’re in love . . . Is—?um. Doesn’t that kind of make everything sing?”
She smiles in a way that is both wide and sad. “Yes,” she says. “And when it’s over, everything gets disjointed, until some days I can hardly find the music in anything anymore.”
She leans over to pick up her violin case, and I think, That is what grief feels like, also.
At dinner that night, Will’s hand is only a whisper away from mine. He catches my eye and smiles.
I want to tell him that I miss the sound of his singing through the wall.
I want to tell him, Sometimes I almost think I can hear the music again, whenever I’m with you.
Beas catches my arm in school the next day as I’m walking out to Mrs. Cliffton’s car. She pulls me into a side classroom and thrusts a book in my hands.
I turn it over.
Shakespeare: A Biography.
I cock an eyebrow at her.
“I know you’re not really looking at Shakespeare anymore,” she says, her voice hushed. “But look at this . . .” She flips to a section called “The Disappeared Years.”
“There are no records of Shakespeare at all during this period of time. No one knows what he was doing then—?he simply vanishes.” She bites on her lower lip. “People think he was searching for something. Do the math, Aila.”
1585 to 1592.
“Seven years?” A smile begins to dawn across my face. “Shakespeare had seven disappeared years?”
I look at her. She looks at me.
“It could be nothing,” she says, taking the book back from me.
“It’s probably nothing,” I agree.
But I slide into Mrs. Cliffton’s car with a new sense of lightness, and before I fall asleep that night, I crouch down on my hands and knees.
Reach through the gauzy cobwebs and pull Mother’s book back out from under my bed. I work through Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Winter’s Tale. My pen nub scratches against the page, transferring Mother’s notes to mine, and I realize how much I want this theory to be true. I want my mother to help solve this mystery from the grave. To not have abandoned the people of Sterling. To redeem their memory of her. And to redeem mine.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Date: December 15, 1942
Bird: Potoo
Known as “ghost birds” for their ability to blend into a dead tree stump. Can remain perfectly motionless. Eyelids feature a slit for the bird to see out, so that whatever the bird is looking at has no idea it is being watched.
Once I know Juliet is dead and the Stone isn’t coming, Phineas’s cough begins to rattle my bones through the walls at night. I take more and more jobs so I won’t have to hear it. I try not to notice the stripe of bone peeking out from his sleeve. How sallow his skin has become.
But I do not stop pursuing the Stone. When Juliet’s husband ignores the letters I send to his house, I decide to pay him a visit in person. No one is at the house when I knock. I snoop around the outside windows, looking for an entry point, until I catch the next-door neighbor spying on me. I leave empty-handed.
Of course Juliet could play games and thwart me like this. Even from the grave.
I return to my cabin in Sheffield with the strangest sense of anticipation trilling over my skin. I slip on my gloves. Tut my tongue. The cage of mice rustles in response.
I move to the darkest corner of the cellar, where I always keep a single mouse in an empty cage. The unlucky mice. Nameless, plucked out by chance, to know little more than cold, starvation, and isolation throughout their short lives. The one in there now has patches of fur missing, a ripped ear. It knows enough to tremble when I come near.
I throw it a piece of rotting celery as I set out my row of instruments. Check my logbook. Retrieve Vala from my quarters and bring her down to the stark cellar. She nestles up into her place under my ear. I push back the small twinge I feel at her warmth; she is nothing but a small sacrifice for a greater good.
“Goodbye, pet.” I cradle my carved wooden bird, switch out the sewing needle for a syringe in two clicks. I fill it with my most promising formula.
I insert the syringe into her body and empty it entirely.