“You’re back,” Lewis said.
“That I am. What a night it’s been.”
“The girl you took?”
“I brought her to her home.”
“Why did you take her, Mally?”
The wild girl shrugged. “I wanted to show her a thing or two before you filled her head with too much bookish nonsense.”
“Nonsense? You little scamp! You’re the one that started me on all those books in the first place.”
“But only because you’d never stop asking questions,” Mally replied with a grin.
Lily laid her hand on Lewis’s arm, calming him. “So Ali’s safe with her family?” she asked. “We heard some gunfire, you see….”
“It had nothing to do with us,” Mally assured her.
“Well, that’s a relief. We were very worried, what with Ali disappearing and those men that came with her being so angry.”
Mally nodded. “Well, I’ve got to go now.”
Movement by the stone caught their attention. Tommy stood up and thrust his pipes into his belt. He looked at them, a grin resembling Mally’s touching his lips before his usual vacuous look came over him and he yawned. Whatever possessed him when he piped was gone and he was just plain Tommy Duffin again. He walked slowly by them without a word, Gaffa at his heels. They took the path down to the village.
“How old are you?” Lily asked. Lewis looked over at Mally, very curious as to how she would answer.
“Don’t know,” Mally replied. “I lost count a long time ago.”
“Fifty years old?” Lewis asked. “A hundred?”
Mally laughed. “Oh, much older than that, Lewis!”
It was hard to tell if she were joking or not.
Finally Lily asked, “What sort of being are you?”
“Just me.” Her gaze caught Lily’s. “I’m a secret—that’s all.” She laughed again and stood up. “But I’ll tell you this—tomorrow you’ll see some moon magics and won’t they be fine! Your piper can pipe the whole night long, but tomorrow old Hornie will be jumping a fire of bones and too busy to pay your dancers a call. See you then!”
“Mally!” Lewis cried, but she had already melted into the forest without a sound.
“What did she mean, Lewis?” Lily asked, taking his hand.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I never know what she means. But sometimes I think that if I ever do, I’ll wish I had never wanted to know in the first place.”
“Now what do you mean, Lewis?”
He shook his head. “You know I’ve told you about the mystery and how wild it could get if we didn’t take care of it the way we have for all these years?”
“Yes. But…?”
“I think Mally might be wilder yet.”
He rose to this feet, joints cracking, and helped Lily up. When she seemed as though she were going to talk some more, he laid a finger against her lips and shook his head.
“Let’s just walk,” he said.
A Fire of Bones
Beloved Pan and all ye other gods
who haunt this place, give me
beauty in the inward soul;
and may the outward and
inward man be one.
—Plato,
from Dialogues, Phaedrus, sec. 279
“This is the place of my song-dream,
the place the music played to me,”
whispered the Rat, as if in a trance.
“Here, in this holy place,
here if anywhere,
surely we shall find him!”
—Kenneth Grahame,
from The Wind in the Willows
1
Ali woke early on Tuesday morning. Neither the late night nor the excitement of the past few days could keep her in bed. She felt invigorated and alive. There was so much to do today! The house was quiet as she dressed. By the time she came downstairs though, Valenti was making a pot of coffee in the kitchen.
“Hey, kid,” he said as she took a seat at the kitchen table. “How’s it going?”
“Okay. My mom’s still sleeping.”
“Gives us a chance to talk, then.”
“I guess. Have you heard about Tom yet? Is he okay?”
Valenti shook his head. “I’m still waiting for Mario to call.”
“But he’s going to be okay, isn’t he?”
“I sure hope so, Ali. You want some of this?” Valenti tapped the coffee pot.
“Sure.”
He brought milk and sugar to the table, returning to the stove for the coffee. Ali filled her mug about a third full of milk before pouring her own coffee. Valenti laughed as she began to spoon in her sugar.
“Having a little coffee with your milk and sugar?” he asked.
She stuck out her tongue. Valenti fixed his own coffee and the two of them sat in a companionable silence, sipping the hot liquid and enjoying the moment of peace. It was Valenti who finally spoke.
“So what happened to you last night?”
Ali frowned, playing with her spoon. “It’s sort of hard to explain…” She looked up, caught his gaze for a moment, then looked away. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“Try me.”
She took a quick breath and glanced at him again. He smiled.
“Take your time,” he said.
“Okay. When the stag took off, it didn’t just go into the woods behind the stone. It went…someplace else—maybe even into the stone, for all I know….”
* * *
“So what do you want to do?” Valenti asked when she finally ran out of words.
Ali liked that about him. Unlike most adults, he talked to her as though she might have an idea or two of her own, and he was willing to listen to them.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I feel like I should do what Mally says—or at least call the mystery to me to see if I can get him to talk to me, or communicate what he wants in some way. If it’s what he wants, I guess I’ll do it. I’ll set him free. If I really can. But what if Lewis is right? What if letting him go really would be a danger?”
“I guess it comes down to which of them you trust the most,” Valenti said.
“I suppose. Lewis makes sense because everything he says is pretty well based on what we know the world to be. The mystery’s the only magic thing with him. It’s different with Mally—everything’s magic around her. I mean, jeez. Just look at her. But I don’t know if I really trust either of them. I get the feeling that they’re both looking for something for themselves out of all this. Lewis wants everything to fit into a neat little box and he wants to control when to open it and when not to.”
“And Mally?”
“I’m not really sure what she wants. She’s so different. Sometimes she acts just like another kid, but sometimes she acts like she’s a thousand years old.”
“Maybe she is,” Valenti said. “Considering what she told you.”
Ali regarded him sharply. “You don’t really think that, do you?”
“I guess not,” he said with a laugh, but he didn’t sound all that sure.
“What would you do, Tony?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “That’s not for me to say. You and me, we come from two different directions, you know what I’m saying? If Mally wanted my decision, I figure she’d have come to me. I think this is something you got to decide for yourself.” Just like your momma’s got her own things to work out for herself, he thought. “But I’ll tell you this, Ali. Whatever you decide, I’ll back you all the way.”
“Even though I’m just a kid?” She couldn’t help asking that. She was happy that he treated her like an equal, but she still couldn’t shake that little nagging doubt that maybe she was too young for some things.
“Just a kid, just a kid. Fercrissakes, Ali! Don’t lay that on me. You got more smarts than most adults—understand? Don’t you ever let nobody tell you different. Stuff you’ve gone through—most people I know would’ve just folded a long time ago.”
“I’m not that brave,” Ali said. “And it wasn’t really scary.”
“Bullshit it wasn’t.”
“Well, maybe a little at first…”
“So I’ll say it again: What are you going to do?”
Ali sighed. She put off the moment by fixing herself a new mug of coffee. Valenti didn’t push, but she knew he wasn’t going to let her leave the room without a decision.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Here’s what I’m going to do. First I’ll try to get hold of Mally—talk to her some more. But while I’m doing that, I’m going to go see Lewis again. I’ve got a little more background now and I think I’ll be able to make more sense out of what he means than I could before.”
“What about the mystery?”
“I’ll call him with the bonfire. But it’s got to be up to him what happens from there on.”
“What if he can’t tell you? You know, what if he’s mute or something?”
“I don’t know, Tony. Maybe I’ll have made a decision after talking to Mally and Lewis, so I’ll know what to do if that happens.”
“That makes sense,” Valenti said. “You talk to your momma about this yet?”
Ali shook her head. “And there’s no time to now, Tony. I’ve got to go right away if I’m going to get everything done by tonight.”
“I can’t let you go by yourself.”
She met his gaze and held it. “You can’t stop me, Tony.”
“Your momma—”
“Look,” she said. “Mom’s going to need someone around her in case my—” she stumbled over the word “—in case my father comes back. He’ll look for her at our house, and maybe up here, but there’s no way he’ll be tramping through the bush looking for me. I mean, get real. So she’ll be safe with you, and I’ll be safe in the woods.”
“Why don’t you just wait for her to get up—or go wake her and talk it over now.”
“She’d never believe me. I hardly believe any of this myself, and I’ve seen Mally and the mystery. Besides, I think she needs to sleep, Tony. You’ve seen how rough things’ve been for her. I’ll talk to her when I get back.”
“She’s going to kill me.”
“She doesn’t have to know. Just tell her that I’ve gone for a walk in the woods—along the trail, you know? Tell her that it’s perfectly safe.”
Valenti sighed. “Okay. But I don’t think this is such a good idea.”
“You told me it was something I had to decide for myself,” Ali said, throwing his own words back at him.
“Yeah. I said that all right. So go. But have something to eat before you take off.”
“I’ll make a sandwich that I can eat on the way.”
Valenti shook his head and smiled. “You got an answer for everything, don’t you?”
Ali grinned back at him. “Somebody’s got to, right?”
“Right.”
Valenti thought about giving her a gun—one of the small automatics—but in her inexperienced hands it would be more dangerous than helpful. People who didn’t know weapons figured that a gun could solve any problem, but sometimes it made people too cocky. Ali would be better off hiding her ass if trouble came. He wondered about a knife, then knew what he could give her.
“I want you to take one of my canes with you,” he said. “The Alpine one with the spike on the end. It’s got a good solid handle, too.”
Ali looked at him. “You’re joking, right?”
“I’m serious.”
“Come on, Tony. What am I going to do with a cane? Whack somebody with it?”
“Maybe. Just let me get it.”
“Yeah, but—”
“As a favor, Ali, okay? I let you go and get into all kinds of mischief—you take my cane. Fair trade. Deal?”
Ali shrugged. “Deal.”
She made herself a peanut butter and onion sandwich while he fetched the cane. He looked at the sandwich just before she closed the halves together.
“You’re going to eat that?”
“Sure.”
“It’s your stomach. Here.”
Ali liked the cane. It had a T-shaped handle, a wicked-looking four-inch spike on the end, and a number of small silver crests nailed into the wood near the handle. She looked more closely at them and saw that they were little engravings of castles and cottages with the names of German-sounding places written underneath them.
“I got this from a friend in Austria,” Valenti said. “They use these for climbing mountains or something—I don’t know.”
“I like it,” Ali said, thinking, it’ll be great for whacking weeds with, if nothing else.
Valenti walked her to the back door and waved her off. He watched her until she reached the forest, then the phone rang and he went back inside. Ali paused, looking back at the house. She swung the walking stick experimentally and sent a satisfying cloud of dandelion seeds into the air. Whack. Whack. Then she entered the forest and started off down the path at a jaunty clip, swinging the stick with one hand while taking bites out of the sandwich that was in her other.
She had the forest to herself today and enjoyed the feeling. It was so nice out compared to yesterday’s overcast skies, the sunlight descending through the overhead boughs in bright beams. She listened to squirrels scolding her and each other; finches, sparrows and robins in the trees; red-winged blackbirds as she got near the stream. A perfect day, she thought. She wasn’t really surprised to find Mally sitting on the stones by the water, waiting for her.
“‘Lo, Ali,” the wild girl said. “Looking for bones?”
“Maybe. I’m going to talk to Lewis first.”
“Lewis knows books,” Mally said, “not mystery stuff.”
“I still want to talk to him.”
Mally shrugged. “Okay. Let’s go. I’ll show you a shortcut right through the forest that’ll drop us out almost on top of Lewis’s cabin.”
“You don’t mind my talking to him first?” Ali asked.
“Mind?” Mally shook her head. “I like Lewis, Ali. He’s my friend. Just like you are, though I’ve known him longer.”
“But…”
“Friends don’t always have to be right,” Mally said with a grin. “C’mon, now. I’ll race you to that birch tree.”
“No fair. You’re quicker than me.”
“I’ll just hop then, on one leg.”
Before Ali could answer, the wild girl lifted a leg behind her, caught its ankle and started hopping madly for the tree. Laughing, Ali set off in pursuit, but even with the handicap, Mally got there first.
* * *
Valenti was just hanging up when Frankie came downstairs. Her hair was all tousled and she had a sleepy look in her eyes, but she still found a smile for him. She was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and a pair of loose cotton tie pants. To Valenti, she looked like a million dollars.
“Is there any coffee left?” she asked. “I could smell it in my sleep.”
“Plenty,” Valenti assured her. “How’re you feeling?”
She thought about that for a moment. “Good,” she said finally. “Surprisingly good, all things considered. Is Ali up yet?”
“Yeah. She just went for a walk in the woods back of the house.”
“Will she be safe?”
“Oh, sure. She’s a smart kid—she’ll keep her eyes open. If something comes up, she’ll come running back.”
“I wish she hadn’t gone.”
“She’ll be fine.”
Frankie nodded. “Well, I’m glad we’ve got a few moments. I wanted to ask you a favor, Tony.”
“What’s that?”
“I want you to give me that gun you took from the man who shot Tom last night. I want you to teach me how to use it.”
Valenti hadn’t known what to expect from her, but this hadn’t been it. “You want a gun?”
“Is that so surprising after all I’ve been through?”
“But you can’t use it—you’re not licensed to carry one. If you’d shot that
guy who attacked you last night, you’d be up shit creek right now.”
“Look at me,” Frankie said. “I’m not a physical match for either Earl or that man. But I am not going to be a victim anymore. What other choice do I have?”
“Yeah, but the law—”
“Don’t tell me about the law, Tony. I wasn’t so out of it last night that I didn’t see what you were carrying. That was some kind of machine gun, wasn’t it? I suppose you’ve got a license to carry it?”
“Well, now…”
“So what’s the difference, Tony?”
Valenti thought about how he’d considered giving Ali a gun earlier in the morning. The same rules applied here, but when he thought of what Frankie’d already been through…
“Okay,” he said finally. “But I’ll tell you straight off that a gun’s not going to solve anything. It’s just a tool. Don’t think you’re going to be a different, or tougher, or better person just because you’ve got one in your hand. If you pull it out, you got to be prepared to use it. If you use it, you got to be prepared to hit somebody—you know what I’m saying? And you can’t let yourself get cocky because—especially when we’re dealing with your ex—he’s going to be carrying a piece, too. You got to be prepared for the fact that whoever you’re shooting at is going to be shooting back.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Frankie said. “Believe me. I’ve gone over and over it. This isn’t something I’m looking forward to. I don’t want to be some gun-toting moll like you used to investigate. But I’ve got to do something. I won’t be a victim anymore. And I’ve got Ali to think of. I can’t expect you to stand guard over us twenty-four hours a day. I don’t want somebody doing that. I appreciate the help you’ve been so far, Tony, but I have to be able to stand up for myself.”
“Yeah,” Valenti said. “That’s what you moved back here for.”
“As soon as this is over—one way or another—I’ll get rid of that gun so fast it’ll make your head spin.”