The Last Nightingale (31 page)

She hugged him back, gripping him hard, as hard as she could, trying to prevent herself from waking up and finding that Shane had turned into her pillow.

At last, he stepped back, put one arm around her shoulder and began to walk her toward the shed. She noticed that he was standing up very straight. He seemed taller.

“Would have got here sooner, but I had to drop off the taxi at the City Hall Station and get bandaged up over this cut on my leg. Sergeant Blackburn looked like he got kicked by a horse. His ribs are wrapped up tight. He’s sleeping at the station. The taxi man drove me here.”

“What the hell happened?”

“I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“In the morning?! Who cut you, Shane? Was it that crazy guy? How did you fight him off?”

“Vignette. I promise. Let me sleep and I’ll tell you tomorrow. We have to go see that lawyer, you know. We should sleep.”

“Do you mean to say that it’s all right to just go in there now and go to sleep? It’s safe to do that?”

He looked her straight in the eye. “That’s what I’m saying. Sergeant Blackburn shot him and he sank into the ocean. Sharks got him.”

He opened the shed and stepped inside. “Even though he got pretty banged up, Sergeant Blackburn’s still coming by tomorrow.” He went inside and lit the oil lantern. “He’s going to stick up for
us.” He grabbed up both sleeping blankets, passed her one and tossed the other over his shoulder.

She unfolded it and wrapped it around herself before lying down. “How are you doing that?”

“What?”

“Talking,
Shane. Are you reading it first? Is that how you’re doing it?”

“Well . . .”

“. . . Well?”

A wide grin spread across his face. “I’m getting faster, aren’t I?”

Late the next afternoon, Randall Blackburn stood ramrod stiff under his rib bindings. From his place on one side of Attorney Tow-els’s massive desk, he watched Shane sign on the dotted line on the final insurance form. Blackburn signed it next, as Shane’s guardian and witness, making the transaction legal. And with that, he watched Shane Nightingale take possession of a bank account totaling close to twenty-eight thousand dollars of the Nightingale family estate.

It struck Blackburn that Shane looked like he would be sick at any moment. He wondered if it were just nerves. Whatever was going on in the boy’s head, he did not look particularly happy or relieved to be taking possession of this money.

Vignette had quietly taken a chair and let everybody go about their business, and it was clear that her reaction was the opposite; she was fighting to control her excitement. The energy of it radiated out from her. Seeing her that way made it all the more strange not to see something like that from Shane.

A few minutes later Blackburn escorted Shane and Vignette out of the building. When he spotted a small café that had reopened a few doors down the street, he guided the kids to it and pulled them inside. He waited until they were seated alone at a small table in
the back, then pulled a folded newspaper from his coat pocket and set it on the table. At first, he left the paper there unopened.

“So,” he began, “I guess nobody can blame you for being overwhelmed.”

“I’m not. Maybe I am. I’m just— I don’t know.”

“Well
I
know!” Vignette chimed in. “You had to fight for your life and you talked a crazy man out of killing you and today you got all this money.” She gave a short laugh. “I’m surprised you didn’t faint yet! We’re getting some food here though, is that right?”

“In a minute,” Blackburn assured her. “Why don’t you look at the menu and pick out what you want?” He picked a menu up off of the table and handed it to her. She took it, but held on to it as if the menu itself could bite.

Blackburn turned to Shane and lowered his voice. “Shane,” he began, “you now have every reason in the world to begin a new life with your sister, and to do it as if you both plan to grow up and make a good accounting of yourselves.”

He opened the paper and pointed to the afternoon’s headline, and there it all was: how the body of Tommie Kimbrough of Rus-sian Hill had only been in the water for a few hours before the tricky currents swirled it up onto a public beach a few miles away. There was very little of Mr. Kimbrough left, but part of the torso seemed to have been protected by the leather coat, which was recovered. He was identified by the wallet in the inside pocket. There was also a note wrapped in oilskin. It was assumed to be the guilty farewell of a killer who could no longer abide his sense of remorse. The identity of The Surgeon was now known.

“That note was supposed to be for me,” Shane said. “He was going to put it in my pocket before he pushed me out into the water, so people would think it was my suicide note.”

“Suits me, the way it turned out. Cuts down on paperwork.” Blackburn stared at him. “This ends it for you. You see?”

“See what?”

“Now you know it for sure. He’s gone and you don’t have to go
around looking over your shoulder. You’re free. So you don’t have to spend any money running from him. You just need to use your money to build a future for both of you.”

Shane looked from Blackburn to Vignette with a rueful smile. “You want to know a secret?” Shane asked. “He said we were half brothers. Me and him. He said we had the same father. He said that he was the one who gave me away to St. Adrian’s after he got away with killing his parents—our parents—my father—the same—”

“Read it back,” Vignette interjected.

He ignored her and added, “Which means that my father was Vignette’s father, too.”

Blackburn thought that Vignette went pale when she heard that, but there was already too much else for him to think about.

Shane put a consoling hand on Vignette’s shoulder. “I asked him to tell me what your real name was back then, but he just looked at me.”

“Oh. You mean my name? I like Vignette. I don’t care what they called me back when I was
born.
It’s not my name
now.
At St. Adrian’s they called me Mary Kathleen but that’s not my name anymore, either. Nope. We can forget all about that one.”

At that moment, a realization hit Blackburn so hard that he whistled through his teeth and clapped his hands together. The other two gawked at him.

“Shane!” he began, “that’s it!” He laughed. “This is amazing! Listen to me—here’s the best way in the world to get back at that maniac. If we can get our hands on the birth records, you and your sister will stand to inherit the Kimbrough estate. Even his house!”

Once again, Shane’s reaction seemed to come out of the blue. “No!” He jumped up from the table, eyes wide. “I don’t want anything of his!”

“That’s right!” Vignette quickly agreed. “Not from anybody like that.”

Blackburn started to object, but Shane cut him off.

“To hell with him,” he said.

“Yeah!” she agreed again.

“Those people weren’t my family. I don’t want anything of theirs.”

“Neither do I,” Vignette nodded. “We would just have to be
reminded
all the time. We don’t even want to look at the birth records!”

“What?” Shane turned to her.

“. . . Why be reminded?”

“Oh. Good point.”

Blackburn felt things slipping out of control. “Shane,” he began, “I know you have a lot of reason to be just as angry as hell about all of this, but I have to stop you for just a second here. We are probably talking about a great deal of money. That amount you have now is enough to get you started in life, it can get you both the right schooling, but it won’t support you.”

“What’s wrong with that? I never wanted to grow up and just sit around, anyway.”

“What’s the right schooling?” Vignette interrupted.

“Oh, you know,” Blackburn smiled, “one where the teachers are so good that you actually learn to read and write without any problem.”

Vignette blushed and closed the menu.

“Shane, how did you get so good with the written word?”

Shane shook his head. “If you stay quiet and read, they leave you alone.”

“Staying quiet hurts too much,” Vignette muttered.

“Well, I don’t know if you were aware that there was a fire at St. Adrian’s. Only in the offices. None of the kids were hurt. But tomorrow, the department’s going to announce that they think Friar John was in there and that the flames consumed him.”

He sat back and gave the kids a moment to react. Neither one said a word. They both sat silently looking forward as if waiting for somebody to speak.

He nodded and spoke under his breath, “All right. No love lost.”

He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “But as for the two of you, this is the thing—you can’t come into this much money without people noticing. And there are plenty of adults who will steal from a kid without hesitating. That’s why I signed off on the forms as your guardian. It wasn’t just so you could get your money. Because I know that unless you’re protected, it will all disappear.”

“We could live with you!” Vignette enthused.

Blackburn and Shane both turned to stare at her. There was an awkward pause.

“Actually, that’s just what I planned to talk to you about. Both of you. I’ve saved most of my salary for a long time, and well—I can get a place big enough for us. You don’t have to stay, you’re not my prisoners or anything, but somebody’s got to look out for things while you two finish growing up. I guess I’m volunteering to do that, here.”

“That sounds great!” Vignette immediately responded.

Shane just stared with his mouth slightly open.

Blackburn went on. “We’ll get you both into a good school.”

“Shane could go to school first, if one of us needs to stay home.”

Blackburn smiled at her and quietly asked, “What’s your favorite thing on the menu?”

Vignette just scowled at him and pushed it aside. Shane snorted at that and said, “You better get used to it. If I’m going, you’re going.”

“And you’ll both have to learn how to cook. We’ll take turns.”

“What if we can’t learn how?” Vignette asked.

“Then I expect that I won’t be able to learn how, either, and the three of us will be eating a lot of garbage.” Shane and Vignette both laughed and groaned.

“All right now, let’s order something to eat.” Blackburn grinned. “Shane, read Vignette the choices. Then I have to get a taxi and lay up at home for a few days. It’ll be a while before I can do all this, let alone walk a beat. If I took a punch now I’d be in trouble.”

“Let us come with you,” Vignette pleaded.

Shane brightened up at that, adding, “We’ll stay and take care of you.”

“We don’t even need to go back there,” Vignette said.

“Well, I have to get my watch.”

“I’ll go! You’re too tired.”

“I can do it, Vignette.”

“Maybe, but so can I. And right now I bet I can run faster than you and get back quicker, too!”

Vignette and Shane played at arguing the point before deciding to go together, while Blackburn smiled and shook his head. The sound of their request had caught him completely off guard, but it felt like the first pass of rain over a desert. Even though he had known that the issue was going to come up, he felt an equal mix of excitement and fear at hearing it. But he was also completely unprepared to feel his heart break open at the beautiful sound of two young voices telling him that his company was something they actually wanted.

“I guess you’re better off there than in a toolshed.” He turned to Shane. “We’ll have time to talk, too. I’ve got some other crimes on the books that you just might see into, like you did with the Sulli-vans. Like the way you handled Kimbrough. The way that you can see certain things, it seems natural for you to do this work.” He grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “You can be my ‘apprentice’ and help me clear some cases.”

Shane’s face darkened. “Maybe. You know, sometime.”

Blackburn let it go. “All right, then. But we’re going to have to fill out a lot more forms to do this. So Vignette, what last name will you be using?”

“Well, I tell you one thing for sure, you can forget Kimbrough. I don’t care what that guy said.”

“Same for me,” Shane agreed.

Vignette turned to Shane. “So you’re keeping Nightingale, then?”

“I think so. I mean, sure.” He thought for a moment, then added, “I need to. I need to carry the name.”

Vignette nodded and turned to Blackburn. “We’ll be using Nightingale, then.”

Shane glanced at her, then smiled and nodded at Blackburn.

Later, on the taxi ride back to the little garden apartment that Ran-dall Blackburn would soon exchange for a house with three bedrooms, he thought back to his late wife Jeanette and the daughter he never got to know. It amazed him to think of how powerfully the heart of a young man can break over the loss of the love of his life. For almost ten years, he had locked his grief inside and hidden in his work, trying to make the need for a family leave him, trying to insulate himself against ever feeling such agony again. He had succeeded in feeling nothing but a lot of isolation and loneliness. In spite of that, it seemed as natural as breathing for him to reverse direction and take these two young ones under his wing. He could already see that there was going to be nothing easy about it, and he could hardly wait to get started.

THE END