The tiny black salamander with the yellow spots looked up at the boy with large trusting eyes.
“Such a pretty little thing,” thought the boy, as he shut the lid on the tobacco box.
He’d attached a bit of rubber tubing to a hole he’d pierced in the end of the box, to let in air. Didn’t want the thing to suffocate. What would be the point of that?
The boy walked around all week with his secret hidden away where no one else could find it; in a box, under the ground in the garden, there was a little animal starving to death.
• • •
Since he could remember, Halick had collected secrets, the way children collected stamps or someone like, say, Thomas Hast, collected books of British fairy tales.
Halick knew Thomas’s secrets too, of course. Knew he had kissed a boy when he was at school, up at the abbey.
Thomas Hast wrote this down in his diary, which was a foolish thing to do. What’s the point of having a secret if other people could find out about it? And people were so careless. They left their private things lying about for anyone with half a brain to stumble across.
He knew all about Cook having been in Clairvaux Prison for five years. Knew about Uncle Marcel and the very young woman he kept in Strasbourg. He knew everything about anyone in the household worth knowing.
Halick would have liked to know his mother’s secrets, but she was very good at keeping them. He could learn a lot from his mother. She lied better than anyone he knew.
Particularly, he would have liked to have known about his father.
Halick couldn’t remember when he’d realized that his mother was making up all those stories about the man. It would have helped if she’d been foolhardy enough to have a diary or keep letters. But there was nothing like that. She just told the stories, over and over again; how handsome and kind he was; how he had died saving those children in the burning house. Saving children. A nice touch.
Though honestly, he wasn’t sure that his mother didn’t actually believe the stories she told. It might well be he would never know how his father had died. Not that it mattered. Not that he cared.
Halick never wrote anything down or told anyone his secrets. No one knew about the animals. Or the girls.
In his fourteenth year, as Halick changed from a boy to a strapping young man, it didn’t take him long to turn his attention from small creatures to larger ones.
I mean, who could tell if a lizard or a mouse was really suffering? Could you be sure what any dumb animal was feeling?
A couple of years ago, on his mother’s birthday, he’d talked the daughter of one of the hired maids into going to play in the old groundskeeper’s house. He didn’t have a plan; it all just fell into place.
Now, she was frightened. One didn’t have to imagine it. It was right there in her eyes. She would have told him anything. Not that she had anything to tell.
The beautiful part was that they’d still not found the body. Hers or the little gypsy girl that he’d picked up on the road and given a ride. He had discovered the perfect place to put them.
He came to know about the lake in the mountains from a teacher, a man, who filled in briefly for his history professor who had taken ill. He didn’t remember the man’s name but he still had the old picture postcard from Lake Kore that the man had taken from his pocket and given him. He didn’t give any of the other students postcards. Only Halick. Clearly, he didn’t think less of him for not having a father.
So now, almost his mother’s birthday again, here was this girl, this Adi. No shoes and no voice. It was hard not to wonder what secrets she might be keeping behind those pretty pretty eyes of green. He didn’t believe for a second that she couldn’t talk. She just needed the proper motivation.