Four

Abby was already preparing breakfast when I came into the kitchen the next morning. She always slept deeply and awoke refreshed, whereas I always had trouble dropping off, and thus awakened like a man who’d been chased all night by wild animals, my face each morning a scary reminder of the Old Man’s, with the same oddly ravaged eyes.

“Did somebody call last night?” she asked.

I glanced out the window to where Patty waited for her bus. The twin white cords of her iPod slithered up from the pocket of her jacket to the tiny speakers nestled in her ears.

“Yes,” I answered.

Abby brought over a cup of coffee and set it down on the table in front of me. “Who was it?”

“Diana. She was telling me about Cheddar Man, this .  .  . fossil, I guess.” I took a quick sip of coffee. ” She said the bones showed that he’d been eaten by other people.”

Abby looked puzzled. “Why would she be reading about something like that?”

“Because this singer, the one on that CD she gave Patty, there’s a song on it about this Cheddar Man character. She mentioned that Jason was listening to this same CD before he left the house that morning.”

I wondered in what way Diana might now be going back over the painful facts of Jason’s death, perhaps even her last glimpse of him, which must have been in the family room where the audio equipment rested on metal shelves, perhaps as he sat on the dark red sofa, his back to the window, Dolphin Pond shimmering in the late-morning sunlight beyond it, the voice of Kinsetta Tabu circling in the air around him, his head cocked slightly to the right, listening.

Abby took a nip of toast and washed it down with coffee. “Well, maybe the new job will help her get over it.”

I imagined Diana in the library, curled over a table and peering down at a book. I had seen her in just this pose many times when she was a child, legs tucked under her, long hair hanging in a curtain of pure gold.

“The bus is coming,” Abby said.

I glanced out to where Patty stood at the road. There were others around her now, clumped together in small knots of animated conversation. Patty stood apart from them, as I noticed, facing the bus as it closed in upon her, head cocked slightly to the right at just the angle I’d previously imagined for Jason on the day he died, like him alone, like him listening.

I got to my office a few minutes later. Dorothy, the receptionist, greeted me with her usual smile. “Lily’s out today.”

Lily was my secretary.

“And Charlie’s waiting for you,” Dorothy added.

Charlie was my partner in the firm, father of Nina, whom I suddenly imagined in a thicket of shadows, a girl who clearly had much to hide.

“Thanks,” I said, then headed down the corridor to where Charlie stood at my office door.

“Morning, Charlie.”

He held a photograph in his right hand. “This came in as a fax with your name on it,” he said as he lifted it toward me. “Got any idea who sent it?”

I looked at the photograph, and the answer was obvious. “My sister,” I told him.

He looked at me oddly. “Your sister?”

“A new interest of hers,” I explained, then walked into my office, sat down at my desk, and looked at the picture.

In the photograph, Cheddar Man lay on his back, with legs folded under him. There was a large wound on the skull, one that might have been associated with a violent death, though such a gash could just as easily have been the result of any number of less malevolent causes. The empty sockets were large and round and I could almost feel Cheddar Man peering back at me from the dark well of his missing eyes.

Kinsetta Tabu’s whispery chant filtered through my mind, World of whirl is whorl of world, and for no clear reason, I recalled Jason on the day he was born, delivered by C-section and placed in an incubator. He lay naked under the glass, on his back, with one shoulder slightly raised and his legs drawn up beneath him, a position that eerily seemed to mirror Cheddar Man’s. Mark had stepped up to the window beside me, and at that precise moment, as I remembered now, a loud announcement had blasted over the hospital intercom. In response to it, Jason had started fiercely, kicking his legs, jerking his arms, crying out so loudly and with such helpless panic, I could hear his scream through the glass. How frightened he must be, I’d thought at that moment, alone in the dark, unable to interpret the sound that had startled him or even guess the direction from which it had come, life itself scary and unknowable, with its weird lights and noises, everything from outside, everything threatening, World of whirl is whorl of world. I’d looked at Mark, knowing that he must feel the same as I did, seized with an urge to rush in, comfort his newborn son, hold him in his arms and assure him that in the end he would become familiar with all these strange, frightening sensations. But Mark gave no sense of having such an impulse. Instead, his face broke into a broad smile.

“Did you see how quick his reflexes are?” he asked proudly.

I looked at the small naked infant behind the glass. He had a great mass of curly hair, but that was less noticeable than the expression on his tiny face, how frozen in dread it seemed to be, dread and a strange sadness, as if he already knew that he was damaged goods, incapable of meeting his father’s exalted expectations.

Now, as I glanced back down at the photograph of Cheddar Man, his awful nakedness, the testimony of his bare bones, I wondered if, even in his primitiveness, this ancient creature might have felt embarrassment at not having been quick enough to outrun those who pursued him, or smart enough to have eluded them in some other way. Had he felt the sting of his own inadequacy, the brutal disappointment of his relatives and peers, painfully understood the fatal consequences of his own terrible failure to comprehend the danger before it was too late?

I opened my desk drawer, put the photograph inside, and closed it with an unsettling sense of our distant but still common heritage, how naked to the elements we remained, how helpless before chance, a weird sense of entrapment and powerlessness passing through me as I pressed Cheddar Man back into a darkness he would never leave.

A few minutes later Dorothy announced that my first appointment of the day had arrived.

“Send him in,” I told her.

Ed Leary came into my office a few seconds later. He was fifty-five, the owner of our town’s only monument business, and he was currently ensnarled in a bitter wrangle over his modest worldly goods, mostly the stock of granite tombstones upon which he carved the names and dates of the dead, along with the final sentiments of those who’d either loved or claimed to love them.

His wife had filed for divorce three months before, and Ed had come to me for representation. “Ethel wants everything,” he cried at our first conference. “Everything I’ve worked for all my life. And what’s she done? Nothing.”

“Domestic duties count,” I reminded him gently.

“What domestic duties?” Ed yelped, this time with a lifted fist. “She never kept a clean house. She never had a meal on the table when I got home at night.”

He had raged on in a similar manner in all our subsequent meetings, the process of discovery, offers and counteroffers, moving toward the dissolution of his twenty-nine-year marriage like a great lumbering beast, dazed, furious, weary, but more than anything profoundly puzzled by the sheer vindictiveness of his wife. “I wouldn’t hate a snake the way she hates me,” he once said disconsolately, “and what did I ever do to her but marry her?”

“Maybe that’s it,” I told him. “Maybe she thinks that marrying you wasn’t just a mistake, but the mistake of her life. I see that all the time. It’s not the husband the woman hates, it’s the life she ended up with because she married him.”

Ed pondered this a moment, then said, “Well, why didn’t she divorce me sooner then? I mean, how does a woman live with the man she thinks ruined her life, turned the whole thing into a waste?”

“I don’t know how they do it, Ed,” I admitted. “I just know they do.”

He shook his large head despairingly. “She wants me homeless. So that I got to start over. Build everything up again from scratch. But who has time for that? I’m not a young man, Dave.”

On this particular morning, he was wearing gray khaki pants and a flannel shirt that was vaguely olive. There were small crescents of sweat beneath his arms, and he drew his breath in short spurts, like a runner. Fifty-five and counting, I thought. Fifty-five, with the wolf at the door.

“So, no change, I guess?” he asked as he sank into the chair before my desk. “She still won’t settle.” He shifted uncomfortably. “All she wants to leave me with is a little tombstone with my own name on it. She wants to see me on welfare. Ruin me. But tell me this, what does anyone get out of ruining somebody else?” He eased backward and released a weary sigh. “Hell of a thing we got here, Dave.”

There was no direct point to argue, so I added nothing to Ed’s remark.

Ed got to his feet. “Hell of a thing we got here,” he repeated as he turned toward the door.

I had no idea what Ed meant, or any real wish to know. There was business to attend to. I opened my drawer and reached for yet another case. Ed turned back to me, as if he’d been called by some voice I couldn’t hear, and as he turned, he glanced toward my desk, and I saw his eyes register the photograph he glimpsed there, Cheddar Man with his cracked skull, the empty sockets of his eyes.

“What’s that?” Ed asked.

“Nothing,” I said with a shrug. “Just a picture my sister sent me.”

“Your sister,” Ed repeated. “I read about her.”

“You read about Diana?”

His tone turned melancholy. “Lost her son.”

So that was what he’d read, one of the local news items about Jason’s death.

“Yes, she did,” I told him.

He shook his head. “Hell of a thing we got here, Dave,” he said.

I nodded.

“This world,” he added softly. He gazed at the photograph a moment longer, then lifted his large careworn eyes back up to me. “She knows,” he added, “your sister.” Then he turned and walked out of my office, down the corridor, and across the parking lot. From my office window, I watched him climb into his truck and drive away. She knows, I heard him say again, as if he and Diana shared a secret, sorrowful and arcane, a map not of treasures hidden but of unknown tragic shores.

At noon I met Charlie for lunch at Sara’s Diner on Main Street. We’d been partners for fifteen years in what Charlie jokingly called “our distinguished firm of two.” He was an easygoing man who’d always been pleasantly lacking in ambition. We’d attended the same mediocre college, graduated from the same mediocre law school. Like me, Charlie had never tortured his mind with grave issues. He was personable and competent, but he’d long ago quenched whatever small fire, if any, had ever burned in his now substantial belly.

As usual, Charlie ordered the burger deluxe with a large Pepsi. I settled for a salad and a cup of coffee.

“So, you have it out with Ed?” he asked.

“I brought him up to date.”

Charlie laughed. “Funny, I was sure as hell he sent you that skeleton.”

“Why would you think that?”

Charlie took a bite of the burger and chewed it slowly. “Figured it was our turn. A couple days ago, Bill Carnegie got a rock in a shoe box.”

“A rock?”

“With weird scratches on it, he said. It shook him up a little. Like it was a threat. Like, next time this will come through your window. There are weird people out there, you know.”

I thought of Nina, his daughter, dressed in Gothic black, her hair an iridescent blue or green or pink, bent over a toilet, purging, and wondered if he ever feared some deeper weirdness, this same pale girl slinking down a dark corridor, moving toward his bedroom with a knife.

“Bill figured it might be Ed who sent it to him,” Charlie added. He dabbed a red spill of ketchup from the side of his mouth. “You know, because he’s representing Ethel.” He shrugged, then added absently, “Of course, he might just as easily have suspected your sister.”

“Diana?” I held my fork motionlessly in the air. “Why on earth would he suspect her of something like that?”

“Oh, he wouldn’t really,” Charlie said, dismissing the idea. “It’s just that Bill mentioned that they’d had a bit of a disagreement.” He took another bite of his burger. “Over lawyer-client privilege, I’d guess you could say.”

“Lawyer-client privilege? How would that come up?”

“Because she wanted Bill to tell her what Mark said to him.”

“About what?”

“About Jason.”

“You mean his death?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. He took a sip of Pepsi. “He’s some kind of egghead, isn’t he? Mark?”

“He’s a biochemist. A brilliant one, evidently. Close to a breakthrough, he says.”

“Breakthrough.” Charlie laughed. “Eggheads,” he said derisively. “I wouldn’t have one for a client. That whole field, intellectual property. What a headache. Some egghead comes up with some theory and right away he thinks the whole world’s out to steal it. Paranoid as hell, those guys.”

I leaned forward. “So tell me, what exactly was Diana after?”

Charlie forked a french fried potato into his mouth. “It wouldn’t have mattered. You know Bill, strictly by the book. He wouldn’t tell Diana. That’s what made him think maybe she sent him that rock. Mad at him because he wouldn’t tell her anything.”

“Diana would never do anything like that,” I told him.

Charlie took a final sip of soda. “Anyway, Bill got it all off his hands. Told Mark to see Stewart Grace.”

“Stewart Grace?” I asked.

Charlie wiped his mouth. “Yep.”

“But Grace handles criminal cases,” I said quietly. “Serious stuff.”

Charlie glanced out the window, toward the little town whose people we knew all too well, the countless petty dissolutions that afflicted them. “Yeah, he doesn’t bother with the little shit we handle.” His eyes swept over to me. “With Stewart, it’s usually murder.”

Murder.

You see the word register in Petrie’s eyes, the deaths it is now his duty to explore, each of which you suddenly envision in fundamental images of cloth, water; iron, wood. You have no doubt that entirely different images of violence swirl about in Petrie’s mind—guns, knives, rope, the grim stage props of slaughter.

“What did you think when you heard that Bill Carnegie had referred Mark to Stewart Grace?” Petrie asks.

You recall Grace the day you went to him, how open his face was, how little veiled in treachery. You remember how small you’d felt as you stood before him, how stained by mediocrity, the dreadful and ineradicable blotch the Old Man had always called “the true mark of Cain.”

The Old Man’s voice flares in your mind. So tell me, my young Daedalus, what divides Hades from the world of the Living?

A river.

Only one?

No .  .  . four .  .  . two .  .  . no .  .  . five.

Name them.

Acheron.

Which is?

The river of woe.

Next?

Cocytus .  .  . the river of .  .  . lamentation.

Next?

Phlegethon. The river of .  .  . fire?

Is or is not Phlegethon the river of fire?

I think .  .  . it is .  .  . but .  .  .

Uncertainty is death.

Yes .  .  . yes, it is.

Next?

Lethe.

Which is?

The river of forgetfulness.

And last?

“ Mr. Sears?”

You return to the room, look at Petrie, and wonder if he now sees them glimmering in your eyes, the little fires that flicker on the far side of the Styx, the river of hate.

You remember Petrie’s original question and quickly answer it.

“I wasn’t really thinking about Stewart Grace at the time,” you tell him.

“Who then?”

“Bill Carnegie. I wanted to know why Diana had gone to him in the first place. I was trying to sort things through.”

You remember Diana in the courthouse, the odd look in her eyes as she’d spotted Bill Carnegie. Or was it odd? You can no longer be sure, and in that uncertainty you are suddenly standing in the terrible space where she labored, staring at the medieval quotation she’d printed in bold black letters and hung like an anthem on the wall behind her desk: Send out a beam of ghostly light, and pierce this cloud of unknowing.

“I didn’t know what any of it meant,” you tell Petrie. “So I went to see him. Bill. I’m sure you already know that.”

Petrie nods softly. “Yes.”

In your mind you see Bill Carnegie come through the door of the courthouse, reaching for a pack of cigarettes as he trots down the stairs toward you. His first words had surprised and strangely alarmed you. You look a little tense, Dave.

You imagine that you looked exactly that, tense, unsure, perhaps even at that early stage already fearful of the road ahead, that first step that leads from twist to twist, until, at last, you reach the precipice.