Puzzle Box

LUKE LEFT HIS GUN with Clare when he came to say goodbye next day. She agreed to look after herself. She agreed to keep an eye on what he now called their excavation site. She agreed to keep on searching for any further clues her uncle might have left, though she knew she wouldn’t look any further. Let him hold onto the dream a little longer, convinced that the key to his ambitions was buttoned in his pocket, the secret weapon that might also save his job.

The night before, she’d only just managed to catch up with him

as he was heading for the car park. He would have dropped her off at her place without a further word, but she couldn’t let him go away to London like that. All the way back, she’d been telling herself that she should be honest, break this off. But there was this other huge thing about him, the crushing complex bulk of him, essential though it took her nowhere, a negating satisfaction beyond the physical.

When he’d gone, she picked up the shawl she’d thrown off the night before. She found the place where the crystal beads had come away in Nikki’s hand, a ragged tear which had pulled away a piece of the fabric. Would the beads end up on the shelf in Nikki’s attic cupboard? She pictured those black, ink-gloved hands placing the scrap of cloth near the candle, by the millefiori petal, then heaping the beads on top. Nikki, artist of the “magic of reconstruction,” as she’d put it. What did she imagine she might reconstruct out of these torn-away bits and pieces of Clare’s life?

Clare draped the shawl around herself, drawn to the mirror to stare at this woman who had seen one good man off to London carrying a pocketful of hope, when all she wanted was a chance to slip back into the moment when she’d first put on this beautiful thing for the other one — the one she had irrevocably sent from her life, last night, with her ugly words.

She fingered the gap where the beads had been torn away, picturing the arrangement in Nikki’s cupboard, a shrine. Then she imagined the black hands detaching themselves. They were lying there as well, votive objects, like the little reproductions of hands and feet and sex parts found in the healing sanctuary on Poggio Selvaggio. The silk of the shawl whispered around her shoulders. She heard Nikki’s voice: “Are we beyond the fringe or what?” For a moment she imagined herself kneeling and telling that pair of black disembodied hands, Here is what I need to reconstruct … She closed her eyes, willing herself back to the day of the wedding pageant when she’d come in late from painting and seen that the sky foretold rain, how in a moment of inspiration she’d crossed the room to free the shawl, pushed back the big chair, shifted the bronze she-wolf to the side.

And something happened. What?

What had happened that she’d overlooked before?

No.

She opened her eyes and stared into the mirror. No. Life wasn’t like that. Things didn’t fall into place like that.

Okay, so the top of the table had tipped, and then slapped back on its box-shaped base. But if she went now and looked, it would still be just a table top. If the box opened she would find a scorpion or a nest of spiders.

Better not to know.

IT WAS LIKE THE wooden puzzle from her childhood, a box-joint box, though much enlarged. Its corners were intricately mortised so that the entire cube seemed solid and impenetrable, top, bottom and sides.

Had she secretly understood this since the night she’d first glimpsed it, but been determined to concentrate on distractions, good or bad, that might keep her from her life’s true core?

Eight moves.

The remembered instruction. Force is never needed. If a piece does not move with gentle persuasion, it is not its time to be moved.

Like so much else. Like the clues that had led her to this moment when she was finally able to lift the mortised lid. A course that now seemed obvious and foretold.

THE SUITCASE WAS SHOVED in diagonally, upended. The case he’d carried when he left the farm. He’d taken almost nothing, a few clothes, a few books. Now this same case held reams of pages scribbled, typed, underlined, crumpled and then re-smoothed. Photos. Black and white, taken with his old Zeiss Ikon.

Little Clare. In the haymow, on the swing, riding the saddle blanket on the porch rail, little Clare and bigger Clare. The smile is rapturous and greedy for attention in the centre of squares of uneven exposure, face radiant with the conscious illicit-feeling joy of being the centre, observed, the light of someone’s life. Chiara.

There were newspaper clippings. He must have started collecting almost immediately after leaving.

SKAGIT TEEN FEARED MISSING …

BOYFRIEND OF MISSING TEEN REPORTED MISSING

“He was a home boy,” the mother of a seventeen-year-old basketball star Eric Klassen told this reporter. “He never would have been the one to get this idea.”

TRAIL GOES COLD ON MISSING TEENS

MISSING PAIR SPOTTED CAMPING ON OREGON COAST

CELEBRATION IN SKAGIT HOUSEHOLD: MISSING SON RETURNS

All this Clare herself had never read. Even more surprising were notices of little exhibitions where her early work had been included, when she was living in Vancouver. Then one mentioning the inclusion of her Dicentra Formosa in a volume published by the university. How did he do it? By this time, he’d have been working in Rome. Then the catalogue of a show at the Smithsonian, which had included two of her pencil drawings.

And then — three reviews of her Amazonia book, including the one in The New York Times. Could that have been the moment when he decided to leave the property to her?

Didn’t all this speak clearly enough? Why leaf through it all again?

THE ENVELOPE, WHEN SHE finally spotted it, was taped inside the lid. Obviously the first thing she had been expected to see, though in her haste to pull out the suitcase she had missed it altogether.

Inside were two hand-drawn maps. The first was clearly of the property here in Tuscany, showing the house, the gate, the stream winding up into the meadow, then cross-hatching to indicate the meadow itself and, more firmly drawn, the horseshoe ring of the cliff behind. No writing.

The other map was puzzling at first, until she realized she was looking at a portion of the Skagit farm, showing the house and the Italian tower and the field below, which she and her uncle had crossed so many times, the field with the bull, with its semicircle of chalky cliffs where once long ago she had dug, and been buried.

She heard his voice. We’ll pretend the cliff is limestone, shall we? Its location would have been ideal for our Etruscan friends — a city of the dead, in view of the habitation of the living! Shall we carve the entrance of a rock-tomb? Clare on his shoulder taking turns with his knife to carve an elaborate house-front into clay. The columen, the pediment, the architrave, Chiara …!

So there it was. She and Luke could have dragged any amount of fancy equipment over the grass, over the mounds, for days, for weeks, for years; they would never have found a thing. If there were tombs, they were carved right into the cliff behind rubble fallen centuries ago.