“I’m not sure I want to be.”
Neither of them dared say another word. They sat quietly, relying on each other. Malcolm slowly became aware of how cold the crate felt against his back. As chilly as it already was inside the baggage car, the wood of the crate was colder.
He began to hear a sound quite out of place in the baggage car, a soft tinkling as if a trunk or suitcase contained glass that chimed with the rocking of the train. Or perhaps not glass. It seemed more to Malcolm like muffled, distant notes plucked out on a piano keyboard.
Familiar notes in the key ofF, played bright and clear.
With the rumble of the train and the way the tinkling came and went, he might have been so exhausted that he was imagining the whole thing—linking those sounds together and turning them into music. A piece by Sammy Fain, made famous by Billie Holiday, beloved during the Second World War.
“I’ll Be Seeing You.” Maggie Wise’s favorite.
Malcolm closed his eyes, drained by grief and fear and exertion. Sleep waited for him with open arms and an offer of brief comfort. The way Violet’s breathing had deepened, he thought she might already have fallen asleep. The music continued, those notes he refused to believe actually amounted to “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
As he began to surrender to sleep, he wondered if it might be a music box jostled by the train’s motion. It might be inside any of the trunks or cases in the car around them. Any one of them.
He allowed himself to be satisfied by this thought.
But he didn’t put his ear against the outside of the crate that held his mother’s body.
No, he wouldn’t do that. There were enough mysteries this morning.
As he thought of mysteries, he remembered the cream envelope Paxson Keates had given him. He reached into his jacket, assured himself the envelope remained folded into his inside pocket, where he’d placed it during the moments he believed the raven was about to catch up to them.
The last words his mother would ever give him were in that envelope, but he couldn’t open it now. This task she’d set before him was enough for the moment. His eyes were so heavy, his thoughts so fuzzy. He would sleep for an hour, and then he’d open that envelope and figure out how far this train would take them, where they had to change, and how soon they could reach their destination so he could put his mother into the ground.
He dreamt of a piano, of thin fingers playing familiar notes, and of a man with the head of a raven. In his dream, it was not a mask.
8
Violet Wise had been born Violet Temple, once referred to by her mother asan excitable little scamp. The smile that accompanied those words was the only memory she retained of her mother, who’d died in a fire that had also killed her father, but only on the inside. He still breathed and walked and spoke, though rarely, but his eyes were dead, which left her with Aunt Esther.
She didn’t like to think about living with Aunt Esther, preferred to imagine her life had begun when the woman had thrown her out. Violet spent a lot of time in Chicago nightspots, got to know all the bartenders and hostesses of the most famous clubs in the city. She liked the glitz and the glamorous people, and she envied the attention commanded by the dancing girls. But the singers, the chanteuses… those girls had the real power.
Or so a fifteen-year-old orphan had believed.
By 1951, at eighteen, she’d long since learned about men and women and drink and drugs. She had a job singing at a nightclub called Aleixo’s, where she met a handsome blue-eyed young poker player always in need of a shave and haircut. He had a scar on his chin and a twinkle in his eye that she feared from the moment she spotted him. This was the kind of guy she could get stuck on, with charisma to spare and the kind of reckless luck at the betting table that felt dangerous.
She’d married Elias Wise because he won a bet.
Violet would have married him anyway, but somehow, it had to be a game with him or he wouldn’t take it seriously. So they’dbet, and she’d lost, and somehow that meant she had to marry him. He’d taken her home to Elkhart, Indiana, like some kind of prize, and left her there to collect dust while he carried on with a life of gambling and nightclubs and pretty girls in baubles and gowns. “Songbird” he’d called her when he’d been trying to seduce her. But there were other Songbirds back in Chicago, and Elias found them a lot more interesting than the one he’d put in a cage back home.
It had been another life in Elkhart. A very different chapter.
Now that chapter had come to a close.
Violet laughed softly to herself, there in the baggage car. She’d built a sort of throne out of suitcases and duffels, and while no illusion could make it appear luxurious, she believed her makeshift chair was as comfortable as a seat in a first-class compartment.
“I guess I didn’t expect laughter,” Malcolm said.
“My mouth sometimes has a mind of its own.”
Malcolm gave her a look that she’d come to recognize, a quirk of the eye that suggested he’d just had an absolutely filthy thought about her but had been too well raised to speak it into the world. Violet felt her cheeks flush pink and wondered what the hell had become of the songbird Elias brought home. Back then, she’d been sultry on the surface and proper in private. In the years since her wedding, those two parts of her had switched places. She’d learned kindness and consideration while living with her mother-in-law and her husband’s brother, but she’d also learned an interior freedom she had never imagined possible.
“You going to tell me what’s funny?” Malcolm asked.
“Just that I’m here at all.” Violet decided on complete honesty. “I wouldn’t sit in the baggage car like a secondhand goat for just anyone.”
Malcolm gazed at her, so much unspoken. She wouldn’t have liked most men looking at her that way, but coming from Malcolm, it did something to her. Maybe it was because she knew hewouldn’t look at other women so boldly—the hunger he had was just for her.
