“It means ‘I accuse,’” I said a few minutes later as I handed the small yellow square of paper to Abby. “It was meant for Mark. I found it tucked beneath his windshield wiper.”
Abby stared at the paper as if it were a blood-stained knife.
“There’s no doubt that Diana put it there,” I added. “It’s her handwriting. She uses the same kind of paper to make notes in the library. She doesn’t work there, by the way.”
For a moment, Abby remained silent but I could see a terrible ferment behind her eyes, burning fuses, thousands of them. Then she said, “I saw those same yellow slips in Patty’s room. On her desk. Tucked in books. I thought it was school-work. Research for some paper.”
“Is she in her room now?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I turned and headed for the stairs, but Abby’s voice stopped me.
“What are you going to do, Dave?” she asked.
“I’m going to find out what she’s ‘researching,’” I said firmly.
Seconds later, I knocked at Patty’s door, then waited until it opened.
“Hi,” Patty said softly.
I held up the yellow paper.
Her eyes went oddly dark, but also curiously steady, as if she had been expecting my visit.
“Did you know about this?”
She gave no answer, but only stepped back, drawing the door open, so that even before I entered the room, I noticed the large poster she’d added to her wall, the same one I’d seen at the shop in town, Kinsetta Tabu sprawled across what I now saw to be a blood-spattered carpet.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“Diana gave it to me,” Patty said.
I stepped into the room. A drawing had been taped to the wall just to the right of the poster. It was very crude, and though it appeared to be somewhat representational, it was impossible to tell exactly what the figures represented.
“It’s Diana’s test,” Patty explained.
“A test for what?”
“Imagination,” Patty answered. She stepped over to my side. “Tell me what you see,” she said.
“Nothing,” I answered. “Lines and squiggles, a little color.”
She laughed. “You don’t have much imagination, Dad.”
“What do you see then?”
“That was the test,” Patty said. She looked at the drawing with a subdued but unmistakable pride, as one might look at some framed certificate of achievement. “I saw a fence.”
“A fence?”
“Diana thought that was great,” Patty told me. “Very imaginative, she said. Because I made it a human thing.”
“A human thing? What does that mean?”
“Human action,” Patty answered. “I saw insecurity, the way we’re always threatened, and so we draw protective walls around ourselves. Particularly around our minds.”
I knew that every word of this had come from Diana, but I avoided saying it.
“In a painting like this, anyone can see anything,” I told her.
“Yes,” Patty said. “It’s the voice that tells you what to see. That’s what imagination is, Dad. A voice. Only sometimes it’s even more than that.”
“In what way is it more?”
Rather than answer directly, she asked a question of her own.
“Did you know that Dostoyevsky said he didn’t write The Brothers Karamazov ?”
“Then he shouldn’t have put his name on it,” I said dryly.
“He said the brothers themselves wrote it.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t,” I replied evenly. “Because they were characters, Patty. They were characters in a book. They didn’t write anything because they didn’t exist.”
“But they did exist,” Patty argued. “They were voices. Others have heard them, too. Lots of great writers have heard them.”
Patty’s own voice was less lifted in challenge now than in steadfast conviction.
“Like Harriet Beecher Stowe,” she added. “Poets, too. William Blake, for example, and—”
“I’m not talking about poetry,” I broke in. I waved the yellow slip before her unmoving gaze. “I want to talk about this note,” I said in a voice I labored to keep calm. “I found it on the windshield of Mark’s car.” I pressed it toward her. “Read it, Patty.”
She didn’t take it from me. “I know what it says,” she told me.
“You do?”
“Yes,” she said lightly, as if she were acknowledging nothing more than the current state of the weather.
“Then maybe you can tell me why Diana would do something like this,” I said.
Patty lifted her head like someone before the judge’s bench, convinced that what she’d done was not a crime despite what the statutes read. “Because she’s doesn’t want Mark to get away with it, Dad.”
“Get away with what?”
A look of absolute disbelief swam into Patty’s face. “Don’t act like you don’t know what Mark did,” she said as if she were correcting the worldview of a child. “I know you know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I protested.
“I’m talking about Mark,” Patty said. “That he’s evil.”
In my hand, the small square of yellow paper suddenly took on the full weight of the world, the great pull of the earth pressing down with the accumulated burden of all our vast misguidedness.
I shook my head. “Patty, there is not one tiny piece of evidence that Mark is . . . ‘evil,’ as you put it.”
Patty watched me from the high aerie of her certainty, a god looking down on a poor, benighted mortal. “There’s more than one kind of evidence, Dad.” She walked to her desk, drew a thin book from the disordered pile she had there, and handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked irritably.
“Just read it,” Patty replied.
I glanced at the title. “I already have,” I told her. “As a matter of fact, I’ve also spoken with the author.” I tossed Douglas Price’s pamphlet back onto her desk. “As you have, too, evidently.”
She picked up the pamphlet and with a reverence I’d never seen her display toward books of any kind, returned it to its place with the other books on her desk. Then she turned back toward me, and had I not known better, I’d have sworn that her eyes were made of cold blue ice. “You’re spying on us,” she said.
“I’m trying to figure out what you’re doing, Patty,” I said. “What Diana is doing . . . to you.”
“Doing to me?” Patty asked sharply.
“Yes,” I answered. “Drawing you into this . . . I don’t even know what to call it.”
“Drawing me in because she can, right?” Patty asked. “Because I’d believe anything she told me. Like some kid believing in Santa Claus.”
It was precisely at that moment I saw just how deep the danger was, the dark, toxic water that was rising around my daughter.
“Patty,” I said softly. “I want you to understand something. There is a difference between sense and nonsense, and that difference is very large.”
Patty peered at me from what seemed a planetary distance. “Diana knows things, Dad.”
I could see the pure admiration Patty felt for Diana, which, it seemed to me, only deepened the danger.
“Patty . . .” I began.
Patty lifted her hand in a gesture borrowed from her mother. “I don’t want to hear any bad things about Diana.” She placed her hands over her ears. “No more, Dad.”
I knew that even had I more to say, not a word of it would actually have been heard. My voice had been banished from her head, and at that moment, I could find no way to make it audible again.
And yet I tried.
“Patty, listen to me,” I said. I reached for her hands, tried to pry them from her ears. “Patty, Diana is . . .”
She jerked away from me, strode to the CD player on the shelf beneath her window, and turned up the volume.
“Patty,” I said, “listen . . .”
But the volume was too loud, drowning out all other sound, so that neither of us could hear anything but the macabre, malevolent hiss of Kinsetta Tabu’s coldly threatening voice:
Father/Sister
Twister.
Father/Daughter
Slaughter.
Abby was sitting tensely at the kitchen table when I came back into the kitchen.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Patty’s convinced that Diana’s right about Mark,” I said wearily. “That he’s ‘evil.’ That was the word she used.”
I vainly hoped that Abby might downplay this dread idea, recapture the lost lightness of her being, but she only took a quick sip of coffee, then said, “So what were those yellow pieces of paper in Patty’s room?”
“Bookmarks,” I answered. “At least that’s what they looked like. She’s studying the same stuff as Diana.” I recalled the three notes Adele had shown me in the library, the only evidence I had. “Stuff about stones. Sound.” I drew in a long, troubled breath. “But whatever it is, Patty’s studying it with her. They meet at the library.”
“How do you know that?”
“I went to the library after that meeting in New Braddock. I was going to talk to Diana, but she wasn’t there. When I asked where she was, I found out that she doesn’t have a job at the library at all. She just spends all her time there.” There was no point in holding anything back, and so I didn’t. ”Patty also went with Diana to meet this guy who wrote a little essay about Dover Gorge. He thought she was Diana’s daughter, and that her name was Hypatia.”
“Hypatia,” Abby repeated darkly. She shook her head, and with that gesture seemed to shake away the last of those little particles of sunlight she’d so carefully stored in her brain. “I was always afraid of this.” She added nothing else for a moment, then she looked at me and I saw the depth of her fear. “You have to do something, Dave,” she said in a tone of stern command. “Before it’s too late.”
I thought of the stack of books I’d seen on Patty’s desk and imagined my hand resting upon them like a man taking an oath. “I will, Abby,” I said. “I swear.”
That night, as I lay sleeplessly in bed, I wondered if perhaps in every life a moment comes when you realize just how little you have actually escaped from whatever it was you’d fled. Before then, I thought I had escaped the Old Man’s terrible legacy, and that Diana had as well, that his long derangement had died with him and been buried in the ground.
Mark thinks it is in us, I heard my sister say.
And he was right to think it, I decided now, though I could only guess with what terrible fatality he’d watched this same illness settle over Jason, found his own paternal voice drowned out by the other voices in his son’s head, drowned out as mine was now drowned out by Diana’s, drowned out as fully as it had been silenced by Kinsetta Tabu’s mad chant only a short time before, the voice of my fatherhood now merely a weak, ineffective murmur against my sister’s wall of sound.
Petrie’s eyes widen somewhat, like one who has just found a shimmering nugget in a pile of dark earth.
“So you were afraid?” he asks. “You were afraid of Diana?” that the dark engine that propelled you, you wonder now. Fear You feel the plot materialize, recall the grim joy of its implementation.
“No, not fear;” you answer.
“Anger?” Petrie asks.
A bitter truth breaks the surface of your mind with all the fearful clarity of a shark’s fin. “I think I’ve always been angry,” you tell him.
“Why?”
“Because I never live up to expectations,” you answer.
“Who does?” Petrie asks.
You note the sudden, oddly broken tone of your interrogator’s voice, and in his eyes you glimpse a world of recognized but still festering inadequacies—the times and ways he has let down people, late arrivals, dinners grown cold on the family table, the school plays he didn’t attend, the softball games he missed, the flowers he didn’t buy, or even think of buying, the long gray line of little things that mattered only in the grim accumulation of them.
“We are all spectacularly flawed,” you tell him.
Petrie rises, and in that gesture you sense a man who does not wish to have this conversation.
But you press the issue anyway. “Everyone,” you add emphatically.
You watch as Petrie silently crosses the room, and in the slump of his body you recall something the Old Man once said: Self-esteem is only possible for a man who is lost in illusions, or who has none of them at all. How starkly lucid he was, your father, when he was lucid at all.
Petrie walks to the coffee machine, examines the urn, then slowly turns, walks back to the table, and resumes his seat across from you.
“Okay,” he says, determined to regain the surety and balance you know he briefly lost. He picks up the blue pen, holds it above the paper of his notepad. “What then?”
Fear, you think. You are a river of fear.
“I was afraid,” you answer.
“What were you afraid of?”
You give the true answer. “That I was right in everything I feared. That Diana had to be stopped. And that I couldn’t stop her.”
Petrie stares at you evenly. “But someone else could?”
“Yes.”
Petrie’s pen doesn’t move, and so you know that he is after dates, names.
You give him both.
“October 14. Robert K. Santori.”