Nine

“Windeby Girl,” Patty answered. “It’s a Web site about Windeby Girl.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” Patty said. “Just something she’s interested in.”

“And wants to share with you,” I said. “Like Kinsetta Tabu.”

“I guess.”

I couldn’t tell if Patty was being completely open, or if some part of her remained guarded, the Web site Diana had sent her entirely innocent, or if something darker lay behind it.

“She sent me a Web site, too,” I said. “Yde Girl.”

Patty’s eyes glimmered with what seemed to be recognition, but I made nothing of it.

“Ever heard of that?” I asked.

Patty shook her head.

And I thought, She’s lying, and suddenly Patty appeared to me not as she was, sitting quietly at dinner, but as some variant of Nina, Charlie’s vampirish daughter, the one I’d earlier envisioned drifting down a shadowy corridor with a knife in her hand.

“She was murdered,” I said. “Yde Girl.” I looked for a reaction in Patty, but she gave no hint of ever having heard of this ancient crime.

“What happened to Windeby Girl?” I asked.

Patty shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. She took a bite of meat loaf and chewed it slowly before she added, “I haven’t looked at the Web site yet. It was just a link.”

To my astonishment, I had no idea if this were false or true, if Patty indeed knew nothing of Windeby Girl, or if, like Diana, she knew everything.

After dinner I went directly to my office, turned on my computer, and typed “Windeby Girl” into the search engine. Several Web sites appeared. I picked the first, and it was there, everything I needed to know, all of it written in an unusual script my computer identified as Monotype Corsiva 20:

The Landesmuseum of the Schloss Gottorf contains five bog bodies and one partially preserved head. One of these bodies, known as Windeby I, is that of a 14 year old girl. Windeby Girl’s body was found in a peat bog in 1952. Although she drowned, her death was not an accident. She had been blind-folded, and her body had been weighted down with a stone and tree branches. Based on this evidence, scholars have determined that Windeby Girls death, 2000 years ago, was a result not of misadventure, but of calculated murder.

Without in the least willing it, I took a deep breath and read the page again, now reliving the murder of Windeby Girl in each of its gruesome stages, a death done step by step, feeling each moment of her murder as it was carried out, first the soft texture of the blindfold, then the cool of the water as her face was pressed into it, and finally the terrible absence of air.

Certain words from the text now flashed up from the page in tiny explosions.

Not an accident. Drowned. Not of misadventure, but of calculated murder.

Those words had no doubt reminded Diana of Jason, I thought, though in what way I could not imagine.

“Dave?”

I looked up to find Abby standing at my door.

“What’s wrong?” she asked worriedly.

I motioned her over to my desk. “This is the Web site Diana sent to Patty,” I told her. Then I pointed out the words that had seemed to flash up from the text.

For a moment, Abby said nothing, but her face was veiled in worry. “You have to warn him, Dave,” she said.

I had no idea what she was talking about. “Warn who?” I asked.

Her answer took me completely by surprise. “Mark,” she said, and added nothing else.

I couldn’t get Abby’s warning out of my mind, how certain she was that Mark was somehow in danger. The lightness in her eyes had faded as she spoke, and her voice had drained of all cheer. It was as if she somehow sensed that a great stone had been dislodged and would soon be rolling toward us, inevitably gaining speed as it thundered down the unguarded slope.

But what was I supposed to warn Mark about? Was it the fact that Diana took early morning walks or seemed unwilling to have visitors at her apartment? Was he to be warned that she’d rid herself of everything from her past, or that she was sending e-mails and faxes about prehistoric and Iron Age murders?

For all of this, the fact remained that Diana hadn’t so much as mentioned Mark while we’d been at Dover Gorge. Nor had she connected him to Cheddar Man or Yde Girl or Windeby Girl. As far as I knew, she’d made no accusation against him, to me or to anyone else.

When I got to work the next morning, I checked my fax machine for anything Diana might have sent during the night. I was relieved to find the tray empty, no eyeless skeletons, no leathery remains of murdered girls. There were no e-mails from Diana either.

At a little after ten Lily stepped into my office. “Ed Leary wants to see you,” she said. “He’s here now.”

“Okay, send him in.”

Ed appeared a few seconds later, looking a little less bedraggled than usual.

“I’ve had a change of heart,” he announced as he lowered himself into the chair opposite my desk. “I want to make Ethel another offer. I want you to ask her what would put her mind at peace.”

“Peace could get pretty expensive,” I warned him. “She might come back with something quite drastic.”

“I want to know what would put her at rest,” Ed said, his tone a trifle more determined than before. “Peace, that’s what people really want, don’t you think?”

I didn’t find it useful to ponder “what people really want.” The range was too vast to contemplate. Unexpectedly I recalled one of the Old Man’s sonorous pronouncements: A king reduced, had wanted only a horse, while the whole known world was too little for Alexander.

“Why this change of heart?” I asked.

“Your sister.”

I felt a dark stirring, felt what I thought Abby had felt the night before, a sense of something malignant growing in our midst, a murky pool, eternally spinning, and into which, by misadventure, we fall and fall and fall.

“You’ve been talking to Diana?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Ed answered brightly, and in an uncharacteristically cheerful tone, as if Diana had become a source of happiness or relief or inspiration, or perhaps all three, a ray of light that had managed to penetrate the gloom into which his life had settled.

I leaned forward. “Where did you meet Diana?”

“My shop is just down the street from the library,” Ed explained. “She came in one evening. On her way home, I guess. She wanted to look at the stones.”

“But Jason has a stone,” I said, remembering the afternoon of the funeral, how silent Diana had remained all that day, uttering not a word at the gravesite, nor during the ride back to the farmhouse. Even then she’d spoken only a few words before she’d wandered out the back door, then through the storm fence that bordered it, farther and farther from the rest of us until she’d finally taken her place beside the large gray stone that stood on the banks of Dolphin Pond.

“Dave?”

Ed’s summons brought me back to the little square office, the short gray filing cabinets and modest desk.

“Yes,” I said. “Diana. You were saying?”

“She wasn’t interested in looking at tombstones,” Ed told me. “The polished stuff, I mean. She was interested in raw stone.”

“Why?”

“She had a picture of a drawing she was interested in. The picture looked like it was drawn on stone.”

“What did the drawing show?” I asked.

“Just some lines drawn in blue. Sort of wavy lines. Running horizontal.” He thought a moment, then added, “And there was a little splash of red in the middle of the blue part.”

“Did she say where this drawing came from?” I asked.

“Nope, just that it was very old,” Ed said. “Thousands of years back, she said.” Then he repeated a phrase I knew he’d gotten from Diana. “That very dawn.” He glanced out the window, then back at me. “Anyway, we got to talking. I knew about her son. I told her what I was going through, and so we talked about that, too. She could see how mad I was at Ethel. She said there were only two things a person could do to get rid of a rage like that. Pay Ethel off and forget it, that was one way.”

“And the other?”

He laughed. “Kill her,” he said.

I eased back slowly, as if pressed by the point of a blade.

Ed massaged his left shoulder, and winced slightly. “So I’ve made up my mind. I want you to make Ethel another offer.” He winked. “Can’t kill her, right?”

I stared at him silently as murder scene after murder scene flashed through my mind: Ethel sprawled across a frayed Oriental carpet, her head in a plastic bag tied at her throat; Ethel floating in a pool of bloody bathwater; Ethel slumped in a chair, a trickle of blood flowing down along the bridge of her nose from the single hole between her eyes; Ethel with a knife in her chest; Ethel bludgeoned, her face beaten into pulp like .  .  .

“Yde Girl,” I whispered.

“What?” Ed asked.

“Nothing,” I answered, returning to the matter at hand.

But Ed didn’t believe that it was nothing. He had seen something in my eyes. “She didn’t mean it, Dave,” he said. “She didn’t mean I should kill my wife.”

“Of course not,” I told him, but even as I gave him this assurance, my mind raced on, now thinking of Diana, what she’d said to Ed, how extreme they were, the options she’d given him, and how profoundly limited, only two: peace through surrender or a terrible revenge.

Ed guessed none of this, of course. He rose lightly, as if a great burden had been lifted from him. “Just let me know what Ethel says.”

I walked him to his truck, hoping to hear more, gather some detail about Diana that might bring things into clearer focus, give me some hint as to where exactly her mind was tending. For it was her mind that troubled me now, the building fear, one I could not suppress, that she was “like Dad.”

“About Diana,” I said after Ed had gotten into the truck and was about to pull away. “When you saw her last, did she seem okay?”

“Okay?” Ed asked. “What do you mean?”

The word leaped from my mouth. “Sane.”

Ed laughed. “Sane? Diana?” He laughed again as he hit the ignition. “Nobody saner, Dave.”

But for all Ed’s assurance, the question continued to circle in my mind. And so, for the next few hours, as I worked at my desk, the meeting with Ed Leary kept returning to me, ominous as a vulture in a clear blue sky. I’d never heard Diana speak of killing someone, of murder being the solution to anything. In fact, I’d only seen true rage once in my life. It had suddenly exploded from the Old Man when he was in the midst of one of his paranoid delusions, and it had remained the most terrifying of all my childhood memories of him. It had happened the day before they’d taken him away. At just after noon, I’d opened the door of his study and found him on the floor, surrounded by stacks of books. He’d looked up at me, and at that instant, I’d seen the full face of his madness, a burning anger that lifted him to his feet. The look in his eyes still held me in a grip of terror, along with the words he’d said, It’s you. Then, as if to cool whatever ire burned inside him, he’d marched up the stairs, where, seconds later, I’d heard him run a bath. What boiling rage must have seized him that day, I wondered now, one he’d rushed to cool in the waters of his bath. And did this rage, fierce and delusional, now burn in Diana, too?

If it did, I had no doubt that the subject of her ire was Mark.

And so I made the call.

“Dr. Regan,” Mark answered.

“Mark, it’s Dave.”

Silence.

“I wonder if we could have a talk.”

“About what?”

“Diana,” I answered.

A second silence followed, brief, but undeniably charged, as if the very mention of my sister’s name heated the atmosphere between us.

“I’m worried about her, Mark,” I added in a tone that no doubt alerted him to danger. “She’s seems a little .  .  . strange.”

“It was a euphemism, of course,” you tell Petrie. “I said ‘strange’ because I didn’t want to say ‘crazy. ’”

Petrie writes this comment on his notepad, and you wonder if it will later show up in court, be offered as evidence against you.

“I was always afraid that it was in our blood,” you add. “That one of us would be like Dad.”

“One of you?” Petrie asks.

“Yes.”

“So you were afraid for yourself, as well?”

“Always,” you answer “It’s dangerous, this disease.”

You feel the red rubber ball in your hand, see the front door open, Diana standing there, a little girl with long blond hair, fear in her voice when she speaks to you, Where’s Dad?

“There are things a man is afraid to face,” you tell Petrie, careful that he doesn’t glimpse the exact nature of your fear, or any of the grave derangements that are its dreadful handiwork.

“Yes,” Petrie says. His hand crawls up his already loosened necktie, pulls it down a little more. “What are you afraid of, Dave?”

Four deaths circle in your mind. Somehow, though different, they strike you as the same, mere strands in the web that holds you now.

“Afraid for,” you answer. “That’s a better question. Who was I afraid for?”

Petrie takes a long breath, like a diver before he heaves himself over the gunwale and sinks into the forbidding waters.

“All right,” he says. “Who were you afraid for?”

Though you posed the question yourself, it’s hard for you to give a correct answer. There are too many correct answers. Because you are a river of fear, with branching streams of warning.

“Who for, Dave?” Petrie asks.

“Mark,” you answer; picking a stream. “I was afraid for Mark.” You are standing in Diana’s apartment now, staring from wall to wall. “Of what Diana might be thinking about him.” The myths fly like bats through your mind, ancient names that should mean nothing, but for an instant, meant everything, Gaia, Uranus, Cronus. Horrid images swoop and dodge, a bloody knife, severed genitals. “And of what she might do to him,” you add, almost coolly, holding back the icy shudder in your brain.

“And so you warned him,” Petrie says. “I would have done the same.”

“Would you?”

“Yes.”

You smile quietly, then continue your tale, watching Petrie as he listens, thinking only how completely he has stepped into your cloud.