Asia digested this in silence. She continued to study the painting. “I like the darkening sky,” she said at last. “The cliffs.”
Will peered closely at the cliffs in the background. The image of the bird-woman had grabbed his attention so thoroughly that he hadn’t really noticed them. But there were indeed gray-white cliffs in the distance. And, perched atop the cliffs and executed in minute detail, were three more bird-women calmly watching the scene. Beneath their talons were several skulls. One was not quite picked clean.
Will felt his hands go cold.
“Exactly,” Asia said, watching his face.
“Have you seen the rest of the exhibit?” Will asked suddenly. He wanted to get away from that picture.
Asia seemed to understand his feelings. She moved on, taking an unhurried stroll around the gallery. Will feigned interest in a sculpture of a conch shell that was made of a thousand smaller shells, but really he was watching Asia. There was something about that girl he couldn’t figure out. The way she walked—with such confidence, but no arrogance—stood out in this small town. Will remembered the glance she had given him through the rain-spattered windshield. It had held him in place, the way her voice had the other day. It was better to stand back, watch her from a distance. Asia almost seemed like a visitor from another planet. Most of the paintings and sculptures garnered only a quick glance from Asia. One wall-sized photograph of several campy, smiling mermaids in pink wigs actually got a laugh. Finally she joined Will at the sculpture. She studied the smaller shells and the place where they joined together to swirl into one larger shell.
“The interconnection of the many and the one,” Asia said at last.
“Really?” Will cocked his head. “Because this thing just makes me want some fried clams.”
Asia laughed. It was a pretty sound, like silver bells.
“Hey, listen—do you—do you want to go get something to eat?” Will asked. “Like, some fried clams?”
Asia looked surprised, as if that was the last thing she had expected him to ask. Her voice was slow, like dragging feet, but she said, “All right. Yes.”
They stepped out into the bright sunshine, and Will pointed to the left. “There’s a really good place down near the water.”
“Dave’s?” Asia asked.
Will was surprised. Somehow he hadn’t expected Asia to know about the divey little clam shack haunted by locals. “Yeah.”
They fell into step in silence as they moved up the street. After two blocks, the rich, heady scent of fried food wafted over them. They ordered at the counter, then took their food to a picnic table on an open porch. The waves crashed on nearby rocks, and a friendly breeze blew as they arranged the red plastic baskets full of fried clams and french fries. Across the table from him, Asia seemed out of place in the mundane scene. For a moment he wondered what he was doing, bringing her here. But Asia smiled as she looked out at the sea. She didn’t seem uncomfortable at all.
Will dipped a fry into a small plastic tub of creamy tartar sauce. “So—how’d you end up working at Bella’s?”
Asia took a moment before answering, as if she was considering her words. “I wanted a job where I could get to know people,” she said finally.
“There are a lot of shops where you could have done that,” Will pointed out. “Or you could have been a camp counselor.”
“I wasn’t interested in those people,” Asia said.
“You were interested in the people at Bella’s?”
Asia smiled. “You’re very inquisitive.”
“Not usually,” Will admitted. He fought the urge to ask her about walking into the sea. It wasn’t the moment—not yet.
“I enjoy talking to people,” Asia said. “Is that so strange?”
He wanted to tell her that she didn’t act like someone who enjoyed talking to people. She wasn’t really acting like she wanted to talk to him, for example. But that would be obnoxious, he knew, so he stayed silent.
Two high school girls that Will vaguely knew sat down at a table nearby. They stared at Asia with barely disguised contempt. Will had seen girls give Gretchen that look sometimes, too. “Most people have horrible personalities,” Will said.
Asia nibbled a clam and nodded. “Many people,” she corrected. “Not most.”
“Enough,” Will said. “I see it at our farm stand all the time. People cut in line, they’re rude to each other, they talk on their cell phones and ignore whoever’s behind the counter. It drives me nuts.”
“Well do I know it.”
“Well do I know it,” Will repeated.
Asia’s green eyes lingered on his, reading the amusement on his face. “Was that strangely put?”
“Strangely put?” Will laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Asia asked.
“I don’t know … sometimes some of what you say sounds kind of old-fashioned.”
Asia popped a clam into her mouth and thought it over. “I should watch more TV, I guess.”
“No, no—it’s cool. I like it.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
“There you go again.”
Asia smiled at him, and his heart tripped a little. “So tell me more about you,” Will said.
“What would you like to know?”
Everything, he wanted to say. But, somehow, he didn’t dare. This moment, with the air in his face and the strange, beautiful girl—it was so dreamlike that he was almost afraid to assert himself too much. He didn’t want to wake up. “Tell me anything.”
Asia shrugged.
“Okay … tell me about your family.”
Asia placed her hands on the countertop. Her long white fingers spread like tentacles, then were still. She looked at Will, and suddenly he felt as if he had slipped down a well. He was disoriented, as if he were falling … falling …
“I had a sister,” Asia said at last. Her eyes turned down to the table.
And that was all.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
Silence.
“How did she die?”
Green eyes snapped up, met Will’s face. “In a fire.”
Will winced. He didn’t say that he was sorry again, although he wanted to. It was hard to say the words, but he forced them out: “I had a brother.”
“Yes,” Asia told him. “I know.”
He felt as if he had been stabbed in the heart—cold shock, disorienting pain. “You know?”
“Gretchen told me.”
“Ah.” Will looked to the window that opened onto the street. Someone was singing beneath a tree by the curbside. The kid had stringy hair and a tall, awkward body, and he was singing a sad song—something about the sea. It was Kirk Worstler.
The song seemed to be an old sailor’s song, but it wasn’t one that Will knew:
There’s no sign of canvas upon the blue waves;
You’ll never return home to me.
For the waves beat the shore
Like a knock at the door,
And all things return to the sea.
The song floated over them. Kirk had a surprisingly beautiful tenor voice.
“There’s something about losing a sibling, I think …,” Will said at last.
“It haunts you,” Asia said.
Haunts. Yes, that was the word. Will felt haunted.
The hardest thing for Will to accept was that Tim would never be anything else—never anything else but dead. It didn’t comfort Will to think of him in heaven, waiting for all of his loved ones to die and join him. And it didn’t comfort him to think that God had a plan. If God had a plan, surely it wasn’t a plan to kill off an eighteen-year-old right after his first year of college, to tear him from his mother before his life had even begun. What kind of crappy plan was that? These things that people said to Will—“Everything happens for a purpose,” “He’s with your grandfather now,” “It’s God’s will”—all of these murmurings were just words to Will. He understood that people wanted to
comfort him. But the words were just pitiful attempts to distract him from the fact that Tim was gone, and that nothing in Will’s life—not a wife, not a career, not children—would ever be Tim. People spoke to him of the circle of life. But life isn’t a circle, Will thought. It’s a straight line leading in one direction—like a gangplank.
The only people who really bothered Will were the “cherish the memories” people. They kept insisting that Will should be thankful for the time that he and his brother had shared. They said that Will should always remember the good times and be on the lookout for signs of Tim everywhere. But Will didn’t want to cherish the memories. Will didn’t miss the idea of Tim—he missed Tim. The flesh-and-blood brother who had once busted Will’s nose, and who had blamed Will when he broke a window in the potato barn, and who had cried so hard at the end of Charlotte’s Web that he threw up.
So it was a relief, sort of, to find someone who really knew how he was feeling. It haunts you. “People keep telling me that I’ll get over it, but—”
“You never get over it.” Asia’s voice was a hatchet falling—sharp, fatal.
“No?”
“Never.” Asia’s eyes burned.
At the nearby table, one of the girls leaned over to whisper to the other. They both laughed, casting narrow-eyed glances at Asia. He thought about how stupid it was to envy people you didn’t even know. Sure, Asia was beautiful. But Will was certain that Asia would trade that beauty in a heartbeat to have her sister back. Those girls saw only the outside. They couldn’t possibly guess the reality.
It haunts you. You never get over it.
“That’s what I thought,” Will said at last.
Chapter Six
From the Walfang Gazette
Mystery at the Miller
A mystery donor dropped a four-hundred-year-old gold doubloon in the donation box at the Miller Gallery sometime last week.
“I came across it when I emptied the box,” said Marjorie Willstack, a gallery volunteer. “At first I thought it was a bottlecap. When I realized what it was, I nearly died of shock.”
Jacob Worthington of Worthington’s Fine Antiques, who specializes in rare, collectible coins, estimated that the doubloon could be worth as much as $6,000. “It certainly doesn’t seem like the kind of thing someone would place in the box as a mistake,” he said. “It’s not the sort of object one would carry in a change purse.”
The Miller is grateful for the gift, but asks that the donor come forward.…
Will ran his fingers over the recorder. He sat on his bed with legs crossed, the mussed covers pushed back around him. Guernsey was beside him, her warm chin resting on his knee.
Ever since Will had taken the flute to the antiques store, it had occupied a chunk of his mind. Why hadn’t he ever heard Tim play it? Why would his brother have an ancient recorder, anyway? Why not just a regular flute? Where had it come from? Had Tim found it, or had someone given it to him?
The night air outside was still, cut only by the sound of crickets.
He looked at the smooth bone carefully, wondering what kind of animal it had come from. The recorder was the length of his forearm, so it must have come from something large. A deer, perhaps. Or a sheep.
Will tried to recall the tune of the song Kirk had been singing earlier, but it was hopeless. Tim’s musical gift had passed over Will completely. Between Gretchen—who had a beautiful singing voice—and Tim’s guitar and perfect vocal pitch, Will figured that he should have picked up some talent by osmosis. But he hadn’t. Will had always liked it when Tim and Gretchen sang together. Sometimes Tim would play the guitar, and sometimes Johnny. Gretchen could hold down the melody while Tim carved out the low harmony. Will had always been tone-deaf, even before the accident that stole the hearing from his right ear, and the music had sounded like magic to him. It seemed greater than sound; it was a fabric Gretchen and Tim were weaving together. But it was pleasure mixed with pain. For even though Tim was his brother, not Gretchen’s, and Gretchen was his friend, not Tim’s, when they sang together Will felt the tender pain of exclusion. He knew they didn’t mean to make him feel that way. It was as if they had lost themselves so completely in the music that Will had ceased to exist for them.
He was secretly glad that Gretchen never wanted to sing in public. He was relieved that she wouldn’t join Tim’s band. Will didn’t want the world to hear them together. He knew what they would say. Gretchen with her wild beauty and Tim with the chiseled features of a movie star—everyone would think they were a couple. And even if they weren’t, Will would feel like a child watching his parents drive away, without waving, in the family sedan.
Will placed his lips at the edge of the flute and blew a note. It emerged uneven, but Will was surprised at how sweet it sounded.
“I know, I know, I’m not the brilliant musician,” Will said as Guernsey’s low growl rumbled against his knee. He stroked her soft ears, black flecked with white—evidence of her age—and she nosed his fingers.
Will blew another note, placing his fingers over the holes. He had played the recorder in second-grade music class, but the cheap plastic flutes had sounded flat even in the best hands. This flute, by contrast, sounded crisp and silvery even beneath his clumsy fingers. He didn’t know much about music, though, so he didn’t know a tune to play. “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” maybe, but that didn’t seem like the right kind of song for this instrument. It needed something melancholy, or at least pensive.
As if in answer, a single note came from the open window. Guernsey leaped up, barking madly, making the bed groan and creak beneath her feet.
“Hey, hey, it’s just an echo,” Will said, patting Guernsey’s side with a hearty thunk thunk thunk. She settled down to a low growl, then hopped off the bed. “You’re leaving? You sure?” Will asked as Guernsey looked up at the door expectantly. He got up to let her out, and she trotted stiffly down the hall and down the stairs.
Will looked down at the flute, wondering where Asia had found hers. She had said it was a gift—yet she had sold it. It was strange how thoughts of Asia seemed to sneak up on him. Not in the same way that thoughts of Tim blindsided him. It was more as if thoughts of Asia nibbled at the edges of his mind like the minnows that tickled his leg when he stepped into the bay. Often he wasn’t even conscious that he was thinking of her again. What had she meant when she said she had no family? Where did she come from? Why didn’t he ever see her with anyone—didn’t she have friends? What was it about her that seemed to fill his mind with fog? Was it her speech pattern? Her beauty? Or something else that he couldn’t put his finger on?
Will placed the flute at the back of his bottom drawer and slid it closed. He crossed back to his bed and looked out the window.
He wished he could talk to Tim. It was strange to have your brother, your best friend, disappear overnight. We always shared everything. Right up to the end.
The sand lay spread before her like a vast ocean, and—like the ocean—it felt cool on her feet as she trudged onward. The sun beat down, but it wasn’t hot. A cool wind blew, setting her teeth on edge, making her body rigid with cold. Gretchen kept moving, hoping to get warm.
She had to get to the lake.
She knew it was there, although she couldn’t see it. The sand sloped slightly upward, and her muscles ached as she trudged on. The sand was dewy on her bare feet.
She did not ask herself why she was there. She knew. She had to get to the lake.
The breeze blew again, and this time it carried a gentle strain. It wasn’t quite a song—more like a tone. A single note. Sweet and clear as the jingle of a silver bell on a crisp winter night. It carried her forward, her feet moving more quickly now.
She hurried toward the top of the ridge, but it was farther than she’d thought. Her breath thickened in her throat as she increased her pace. She could see the light fog from her mouth, like a dragon’s snore, hanging on the air.
Another note joined the first, and this was like a golden bell.
Warm and sweet, thick as honey. She could almost taste the music. She wanted to gobble it up.
She paused.
She had reached the height. There, below her, lay a glassy sea. And now she was running, running toward the water. She felt like a rock tumbling forward, the momentum taking over. The music grew louder, and more notes joined the first until it was a symphony of tones. All of them unique as they wove together to form a single strand.
Her toe touched the water’s edge, and she hesitated, stopping to look in the smooth surface. She could tell by the midnight blue of the water that the shore was like a precipice. After only a few inches, there was a sheer drop. In the water, she could see herself, her blue eyes, her long blond hair falling forward so that the tips touched the water.
And beyond the surface, in the deep, there was a flame.
She bent closer to see. It flickered, and Gretchen realized that another flame twinkled near the first. And another. Soon the flames were a night sky of stars. She looked overhead to see their mirror image.
But the sun shone high in the sky.
Gretchen looked down into the water. Two of the stars seemed to burn more brightly than the others. Their light glowed blue, like the hottest stars, then green. Suddenly they seemed like a pair of eyes.
As they glowed brighter still, Gretchen saw a face, pale and smooth. Then, around the face, tendrils of hair floated like seaweed.
Something moved, as if the face was trying to whisper something to her. The music caressed her with its own breeze. She leaned closer—and a hand grabbed her hair.
Her shriek suffocated as the hand pulled her face into the water. She kicked and fought, but it was no use. The thing was stronger. And now she could see that the flames were eyes, and they blazed with a dangerous fire, a fierce hate. The jaws snapped at her with dagger teeth. “Gretchen!” it snarled, and the silver bells turned to iron, ringing her chest with an alarm.