The Last Nightingale (19 page)

With that, Vignette the master spy took off at a trot. Her mission for the day had been fairly easy, so far. However, the following, the spying, even stealing the food—none of that was the most difficult part. And now there was no way to avoid it any longer. It was time to face the real challenge: to find Shane and tell him what she had run away from St. Adrian’s to reveal.

It was shortly after Shane had been adopted out of St. Adrian’s by the Nightingale family when Vignette, in disguise as Mary Kathleen, was poking around the Headmaster’s office. She spotted Shane’s name on one of the files that Friar John was careless about locking up. That was when she learned the truth about how and why Shane wound up there as a four-year-old, and why his existence there was officially erased as soon as the Nightingales took him in.

But she had no intention of telling him that. She had a story that she was certain would be far better for both of them.

It took her nearly an hour to cover the distance from Sergeant Blackburn’s place to the Mission Dolores. There she hurried past the wrecked remains of the newer brick church and the solid front doors of the unharmed old Mission. She stopped at the cemetery gate. The strenuous walk had kept her tension at bay so far, but when she lifted the latch and opened the gate, the screech of its rusting hinges nearly knocked her backward. Vignette had reached the moment to put all of her experience to the test. The goal today was to use her ability for something much more challenging than the little tricks she employed to make life better for herself around

St. Adrian’s. Now, if only she could get Shane to believe what she intended to tell him, she would completely change her life.

Inside the gate, she squinted through the midnight blackness to the back of the cemetery. There was a toolshed back there, with a glow of lantern light coming from inside. She quietly moved into the darkened graveyard and slipped through the shadows hovering between twisted tree branches and grave markers.

She drew close enough to the shed to hear a boy’s voice. Moments later she recognized it as Shane’s. He was speaking at a rapid clip, but she didn’t hear any replies from whoever he was talking to. Vignette tiptoed up to the door of the shed. She spotted Shane inside, pacing back and forth with a newspaper folded in one hand and a lantern in the other. Now she could see that he wasn’t having a conversation, he was reading the paper out loud.

Dozens of tiny memories flooded through her, glimpses of Shane over the past several years, while they lived out their lives among a changing group of strangers. She would recognize Shane’s quietly confident demeanor anywhere in the world. Now while she listened to him read with easy confidence, she could not help comparing his refined skill with her own struggles to read and write. Neither was her strong suit. She instantly admired him for it.

Somebody who could read like
that,
Vignette figured, could probably accomplish anything that she needed to get done.

“S
HANE
?”

It was a girl’s voice. Whispering. Shane dropped the paper and stumbled back until he hit the wall and nearly broke the lamp. He stared toward the door, but the lantern made everything outside dissolve in blackness. Then the voice came again, from close by.

“Sorry if I startled you. You all right?” The girl stepped forward and stopped just before the doorway. She was nearly his height. Skinny as a post.

Shane recognized her as one of the girls from St. Adrian’s. He couldn’t think of her name, and he also couldn’t think of a good reason why any of the kids from that place would be here at the Mission, well after midnight. She appeared to be by herself, but who could say whether anybody else waited for him out there?

“Who are you?” he asked her. “Who—who—who . . . ah—ah— are . . . yeh—yuh—you?”

She stared at him in surprise. “Are you all right?” She glanced down at the paper lying on the dirt floor. Shane reflexively stepped over to it and picked it up. But he didn’t answer her.

“Since you asked, everybody calls me Vignette, and I’m a master spy.” She gave him a “tah-dah” grin, as if that explained everything.

Shane could manage no other reply but to stare at her.

“All right, that’s not what they call me at St. Adrian’s. You don’t remember my name, do you? That’s all right. Actually, it’s good. They used to call me Mary Kathleen, so that I would grow up to be a fat housewife. But now I’m Vignette—a vignette is a little story, you see?

“I ran away, Shane. Today. I’m gonna sneak back in tonight and steal my stuff, and then I’m gone from there for good.”

“So nobody else sent you?” Shane tried to ask. “Suh-suh-suh-so nobuh-nobuh-nobody else seh-seh-sent you?” He felt his heartbeat beginning to slow down. If others were out there, they would have stormed in by now.

He thought that a look of sadness flashed across her face. “Shane, you didn’t used to talk like that. I mean, you always got your words out just fine. And it’s funny, but when you were reading just now, you didn’t stutter at all. It sounded just like you. The real you. What happened?”

He gave her a look of frustration.

“Never mind, then. Too many words.” She pointed at the paper. “So when you read out loud, you can talk without a problem. Is that right?”

Shane nodded, wondering why he was the one answering questions.

“Read me something.”

Shane scowled at her.

“No, really. I know you can. I heard you! Come on, just a line or two.”

Shane had the definite feeling that he should be insisting that she get out before one of the priests spotted her and he got into trouble. But she was a familiar face from the first place he had lived since he could remember. She knew his name. He never paid much attention to her, since she was a couple of years younger. But he remembered that whenever she passed by, there always seemed to be somebody yelling for her.

He picked up the article and began to read. “ ‘Police have finally put an end to the practice of looting by chasing down a secret list of suspected perpetrators—’ ”

“That’s it!” she shouted with glee. “That’s how you sound! I recognize that voice!”

He had to smile at her reaction. So he nodded and mimicked her “tah-dah” grin. He struck a mock formal pose and repeated her new name. “Vign-” He stopped himself, took a deep breath, and started again. “Vignette,” he said, mimicking a stage actor.

She laughed in delight and clapped her hands. He started to laugh with her, but suddenly realized that they could easily be overheard. He jumped up, startling her as he lurched past her and grabbed the door to the shed. He pulled the door closed, turned to her, and pointed outside.

“All right,” she whispered. “We’ll keep it quiet here.”

He nodded and sat down on the dirt floor again.

What he remembered about Vignette from when she was Mary Kathleen was that she seemed to flutter about the place like a butterfly. Once in a while, she had engaged him in conversation or some little game. He would generally play along, but he never did anything to encourage her attention. Male and female fraternization was heavily discouraged by Friar John and his Helpers. In that place, it would only draw the wrong kind of attention.

“Um, well,” Vignette began, “I might as well just come out and tell you, right? I mean you must be wondering exactly why I’m here. I would be, if I were you. So here it is. I’m not, my name isn’t really Mary Kathleen. I told you that, right?
They
named me that.
I
never told them to. They’re not my parents. They can’t name me. That’s all. So I’m Vignette because I like that name and I picked it myself.”

She leaned toward him. “Vignette is a master spy. I mean it. She can do things. I can, I mean. And one of the things I used to do at St. Adrian’s is to get in trouble on purpose so that I would be forced to clean Friar John’s office.

“That’s where you can really learn things, if you pay attention.

He never tried to look at me in the shower, so I couldn’t get him to give me money. Did they do that to you? Instead, sometimes I would read things that he left lying out on his desk. I’m not such a good reader, but you know, I get the gist of it.

“They know a lot about some of us, Shane. About what happened to us, I mean. Things like why we were put there, or who our families were. Did you know that?”

Shane had never asked himself whether Friar John might know anything else about him that he had not revealed. Suddenly, he couldn’t imagine why he never had.

Vignette went on, “So I had what you might call a hobby, where I tried to find out where some of us came from. You know, what our stories were. And even though most of us are just found on doorways or something, sometimes the Helpers know things that they don’t let on.
Extremely
interesting things.”

Shane was starting to get impatient for her to get to the point. It must have shown on his face, because she sped up.

“Shane, you don’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t around St. Adrian’s, do you? ’Cause I don’t remember when you weren’t there. I was only about two years old when they found me. And you were four, right?”

He nodded, wondering how she knew that.

“They didn’t get us at the same time, but it was pretty close. A few days.” Vignette steeled herself, then she leaped into her plan, unhesitating.
Just do it like you mean it,
she reminded herself.
The key is to talk too fast to let them think.

“And so the file said that the notes that got left with us were done in the same handwriting. You hear me? They were done on the same sort of paper. And they think that we came from the same people! But they never tell the kids things like that, because they don’t want you to know if you have a brother or a sister. It’s easier to adopt everyone out, one at a time.”

She looked at him with an expression of grim, cold truth. Then she made the “tah-dah” smile.

Shane’s need to speak was so strong that he felt as if he would explode. He started once, and got nothing out. He stopped and gritted his teeth in frustration, then tried again. No good.

Vignette watched him in concern until he gave up and shook his head. At that point she chimed in. “Wait a minute!” She picked up Shane’s notebook and handed it to him. “Here, take this. Now, just write down what you want to say, here.” She giggled again with anticipation, then went on. “Okay, first write down, ‘My name is Shane.’ ”

He had no desire for games at this hour, but he cooperated and wrote down “My name is Shane,” just to make her happy.

“Good!” she whispered. “Next, if somebody asks you where you live, you might say ‘I live in San Francisco,’ right?”

He nodded.

“Good!” She cried out in excitement. “So write that down! You live in San Francisco!”

He cooperated, resigned to playing along. She was irritating but his loneliness had disappeared. Just as he finished that sentence, she added the last one.

“Yes! Now, just write this,” she began to dictate, “ ‘I would never leave my sister all alone on the streets.’ ”

He looked up at her.

“Just write it down! I swear, I don’t recall you being slow like this. ‘I would never leave my sister all alone on the streets.’ ”

He couldn’t keep from grinning while he shook his head, but he complied and wrote out the words.

“That’s perfect!” she exclaimed, leaning around to look at his work. “Now, I’m going to ask you three questions, and all you have to do is read the answers right there off of your page, get it?”

Shane looked skeptical.

“No really. Try it! Here we go: What is your name?” She tapped her fingertip on the paper. He looked down at it and read—

“Shane Nightingale.” His voice was clear and strong and the words came out with no effort at all. He stopped with a jolt and
looked at her. When their eyes met, he laughed with astonishment before he could stop himself.

Vignette grinned from ear to ear and continued. “Okay then, and where do you live?”

Shane looked at the next words on the page and read them out loud. “I live in San Francisco.”

His voice had never been stronger. He laughed out loud in sheer delight. Vignette laughed along with him, then popped up to take an exaggerated bow.

“All right,
now,”
she went on with a twinkle in her eyes. “Tell me what you have to say about your sister?” She pointed at the page.

While Shane read the words, he could feel the wry smile stretching his lips. “I would never leave my sister all alone on the streets.”

Vignette grinned even bigger. “I didn’t think you would.” She stood up, took a deep breath and brushed herself off. Shane was so dulled by amazement that she reached over and easily snatched the tablet out of his hand. She tossed it back onto the shelf and turned to him, glowing with mischievous delight.

“Now,” she began, “your memory is good enough that you can still picture that page in your mind, can’t you?”

In his mind’s eye, he could still see the page with the three little statements written out, one by one. He nodded.

She giggled in anticipation and rubbed her hands together. “So I’m going to ask you three questions, now. And all you’re going to do is
read
what you can see there on the page in your memory. Don’t try to
talk,
just
read.

“Hi. My name is Vignette. What’s your name?”

“Shane Nightingale.”

They both laughed to hear it work so well again.

“My, what a perfect voice you have, Mr. Nightingale. So tell me, where do you live?”

“I live in San Francisco!” he said triumphantly.

“And now, what do you have to say about your sister?”

Shane found it impossible to suppress the smile pulling at both
sides of his face. “I would never leave my sister all alone on the streets.”

In that moment, Shane decided that as strange as it was, it was no more strange than so many other things in recent days. But here, now, what could such a thing even mean? What did it mean, to have a sister? And what did it mean to be an older brother, knowing what he knew about himself?

At least he felt convinced that she didn’t mean any harm. She was bossy, but she was so playful about it that it made him want to play along with her.