Ten

That night, as I drove toward the little restaurant where Mark and I were to meet, I thought of the movies again, Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction, and it seemed to me that they were only the most recent renderings of an old nightmare. For how long really, and from what ancient seat, had men dreaded and been awestruck by the passions that rock women and drive them to action? I wondered how many of the men I’d represented had warily turned away from their irate wives or girlfriends, hoping only to make it to the door without hearing the click of a pistol hammer or the rattle of knives in the nearby kitchen drawer, fearing a violence that also baffled them. Can’t you just accept it? seemed forever the male question. No, the female answer men had never understood.

…

Mark arrived a little late, stopped just inside the door, peered about until he caught sight of me in the back booth, then made his way toward me in long, determined strides. At the table, he offered his hand, and I didn’t hesitate to take it, though at the instant our hands touched, I wondered if Diana had imagined that same hand leading Jason into the water, then pressing him down and holding him below its surface, waiting while Jason thrust and wriggled and flapped his arms until the terrible stillness finally came.

“Good to see you again, Dave,” Mark said. He pulled himself into the booth opposite me. “It’s been a while since we talked.”

“How are you doing, Mark?”

“As well as can be expected.” He shrugged. “Mostly, I keep myself busy. I’ve rented a small apartment not far from the research center. Just a short drive, really. Very convenient.” He smiled sadly. “But I miss the other house. The pond. Even that big rock at the edge of it.” He allowed himself a small, oddly restrained laugh. “The ear of earth. That’s what Diana called it. Jason used to like going there. With Diana, I mean. Then suddenly he didn’t.”

“Why the change?”

“Who knows?” Mark answered with a slight shrug. “Maybe he saw something that scared him. Something in the water. A fish. You know what he was like, always afraid.” He appeared to revisit a particular episode in his life, and I wondered if it was the instant he’d glimpsed something scary in my sister’s eyes. “Not a good thing, fear,” he added.

The waitress stepped over and we each ordered a beer.

When she’d gone, Mark picked up the small, glass salt-shaker and rolled it between his open hands. “I read a study not long ago. About mentally ill people. They can be totally swamped with delusions of one kind or another. Totally crazy. But the last thing they lose, the last perception, is of danger.” He returned the saltshaker to its place. “It’s a brain mechanism, evidently. Very primitive. It explains why the crazy people you see on the streets, the ones who scream at women and kids, why these same people never scream at big guys. They’re crazy, but the last vestiges of sanity remain, and because of that they see something and they say, ‘bigger than I am, stronger,’ and so they steer clear.”

I nodded. “So fear is the last thing to go.”

“Yeah,” Mark said quietly. “I guess it reduces to that.”

The beer came and he took a long pull, then set the glass down hard, like a hammer against the wood. “So, what’s this about Diana?” he asked. “You said she’s been acting strange?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have used that word.”

“Well, you must have had a reason for using it, Dave.”

Rather than give a direct answer, I said, “I heard you’ve retained Stewart Grace.”

“That’s right,” Mark answered, though distantly, clearly reluctant to give any further detail.

“He’s a criminal lawyer. Big time.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Expensive.”

“It’s just a retainer for now.”

“Still not cheap, I’ll bet.”

“What are you getting at, Dave?”

“Just curious as to why you’d need a lawyer like that.”

“I hired him as a precaution,” Mark answered. “If I ever had to defend myself.”

“You mean, against Diana?”

He looked shocked by such a notion. “Of course not,” he said emphatically. “There’s this fellow at the research center. Gillespie is his name. He’s gotten more and more unstable. I’m sure the center will get rid of him eventually, but in the meantime I was afraid he might make accusations. That I stole his ideas, something like that. It could be anything. He’s that unstable.” He laughed dryly. “He sent a rock to Bill Carnegie. Can you imagine? With some kind of voodoo symbol on it. He’s probably got a doll of me he sticks pins in.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I decided to retain Stewart just in case.” He laughed again. “You thought talking to Stewart had to do with Diana?”

“I thought it might, yes.”

“Why would it?”

When I hesitated, Mark leaned forward. “Let me ask you something, Dave. Do you think Diana needs help? Professional, I mean?” He seemed to see the dark cloud that formed in my mind. “She had terrible dreams, you know. After Jason died. That’s when I began to suspect that she might have a mental problem.” He looked at me pointedly. “It’s not like there’s no history of this. In the family, I mean.”

The whole grim chronicle of the Old Man’s derangement unfolded in my mind, and as it did so, I knew precisely how Mark saw us, Diana, me, Jason, each a separate stream of DNA, but fouled by the same debris.

“Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about,” Mark went on. “One night Diana walked all the way to the pond. She was in her nightclothes, just like an actress in a horror movie. She really looked like that, standing by that big rock. The ‘ear of earth.’ She was facing the pond, with her hair down over her shoulders and the moon on the water. I’m telling you, Dave, it was just like a scene in a movie. For a minute I thought I must be the one dreaming.” He stopped, and I could tell that he was trying to find his next words. He looked for several seconds before he found them. “When I got to her, she was still in a daze.”

“Did she say anything to you?”

“No,” Mark answered. “She must have heard me come up behind her. She whirled around, and there was this look in her eyes. Scary.”

“Why scary?” I asked.

“Because she looked like she hated me.”

“Did she say that?” I asked like a lawyer questioning a witness.

“She didn’t say anything,” Mark answered. “Not one word. She walked back to the house, but she wouldn’t come up to bed. She slept downstairs on the sofa. The next morning she told me to leave. So I did. I mean, the soul of wisdom is to know when something doesn’t work, right?”

I’d never attempted to discover the “soul of wisdom,” so I offered no answer to Mark’s question.

“Why would Diana feel that way toward you?” I asked. “Hatred, I mean.”

“I really didn’t know at the time, but since then I figure it has to do with Jason,” Mark answered. ” She came to see Bill Carnegie. She wanted to know what I’d said about Jason.” He shook his head. ” Poor Jason. He used to stare at the wall for hours, Dave. Some little scratch on the wall, a smudge, anything.” He drew in a slow breath. ” I once asked Diana what she thought he was thinking about all that time. She said he wasn’t thinking about anything, that he was just suffering, and that this suffering was pure. Like a drug at full strength.” He released the glass and drew his hands under the counter. ” So when he died I told her that maybe it was for the best.” Even now, he looked vaguely addled by the violence of her reaction. ” She just exploded, Dave. I really thought she was going to attack me.”

“But she didn’t,” I said.

“No,” Mark said. “Diana would wait. She would plot. Maybe even get someone else to do it for her.”

“Someone else?”

“You know, murder for hire, that sort of thing.”

“Do you really believe that?”

He shook his head. “Of course not,” he said. “I only mean that Diana wouldn’t let her emotions run away with her.”

I remembered the day the Old Man died, how she’d not shed a single tear, but only quickly gathered up his things, the pajamas he’d been wearing, his house shoes, bathrobe, the shawl that had been draped around his shoulders. She’d handed me the green pillow that had propped up his head, said only, “Let’s build a pyre, Davey. He’d like that.” Then we’d gone into the backyard and despite the rain managed to burn all of it in a pile. The fire had still been smoldering when she’d finally called to report the Old Man’s death to the authorities, after which we’d both gone back to his study and waited for them to arrive. I could still remember her eyes, how dry they were, though they’d been no drier than the words she’d said, It was time for him to die.

When I returned to the present, Mark seemed deep in thought.

“She’s a loner,” he said, as if in conclusion. “Always alone. In that little room she used at the house. Anytime she wasn’t with Jason, that’s where she was. Never at the neighbors. No friends, really. Just alone in that little room, tapping away at that old typewriter she got from her father.”

I remembered the Old Man at work, hunched over his ancient black Royal, typing endless streams of notes and quotations, along with scores and scores of accusatory letters.

“Even at night, when sane people are in bed,” Mark added. “Tap, tap, tap.” He took a sip of beer and returned the glass to the table. “What’s she up to, Dave?”

Rather than answer him directly, I asked a question of my own. “Have you gotten any communications from Diana?”

“What do you mean, ‘communications’?”

“Faxes. E-mails.”

He shook his head. “But you have, I take it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Patty, too.”

“Patty?” he asked. The mention of my daughter’s name appeared to strike him in a way I couldn’t quite decipher. “She’s ‘communicating’ with Patty?”

I nodded. “She gave her a CD. Kinsetta Tabu.”

Mark gave no indication that he’d ever heard the name.

“And stuff she seems to be studying. Prehistory. The Iron Age.” I paused, then added, “Old murders.”

Mark sat back slightly. “Old murders?”

It was the moment to ask him outright if Diana had ever mentioned that Jason’s death might not be accidental, warn him about what I feared she might be thinking. But I was afraid that he might take Diana’s suspicions as evidence that she was truly unhinged, scary, and that driven by his own fear, he might act against her in some way.

And so I simply watched silently as he slid his empty glass to the right, folded one hand in the other, then looked up and warned me instead.

“Be careful, Dave,” he said. “Patty, too. She enlists aid, Diana. And she can be very seductive.”

I recalled all the times she’d drawn me into games and plots, used secret signs and code words to create an insular and oddly unreal world, and wondered if she were doing it again.

“Yes,” I said. “She can.”

It was evidence enough of my growing dread that I waited outside the library until eight, when the lights flickered out.

A few seconds later Diana came out the rear entrance, her arms full of books. She didn’t see me standing by her car at first, but when she did, she stopped dead, and I noticed an unmistakable tension claim her face, so that she briefly looked like a woman who’d been spotted not in the actual commission of a crime, but at some stage in the planning of it.

“Hello, Diana,” I said as she came toward me.

“Hello,” she said softly, and with the odd gesture of hugging the books more closely to her chest, like a child with a toy she feared some other child might take away.

As she drew near, I could see that she was studying each aspect of my face, gauging the set of my mouth, the squint of my eyes, trying to determine the reason I’d come, have an answer already prepared for any questions I might ask.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Has something happened?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing’s happened. I just wanted to talk to you.”

She motioned me over to a small wooden bench and placed the books like a wall between us. “What is it?” She eyed me closely, and under her gaze I felt like a specimen pinned to a cork, desperately squirming.

“Well, I just wanted to .  .  .”

“You’ve talked with Mark,” she said suddenly.

She had always been this way, inhumanly prescient, able to read vast texts between the tiniest of lines.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“And that’s why you came here,” Diana said softly. “To see if I’m making any ‘progress. ’”

I knew then that “progress” was a word Mark had used with Diana, that he’d no doubt measured it and found it wanting and lectured her on the very acceptance that seemed even further from her now.

“Did he come up with an analysis?” Diana asked. “Am I schizophrenic, too? Like Jason? Like Dad?”

I didn’t answer, but my hesitation only made her more determined to find the answer I refused to give.

“Tell me, Davey,” she said insistently. “What’s the learned diagnosis?”

“I wouldn’t call it a diagnosis,” I told her.

She cocked her head. “I’m unstable then? Just generally unstable?” She looked at me pointedly. “Does he think I should be locked up? Like Dad, at Brigham?”

“Of course not.”

Her gaze turned icy. “He wanted to lock Jason up, you know.”

I’d never heard this before. Diana had earlier told me that she expected Mark to want Jason hospitalized, but she’d never indicated that he’d actually proposed such a thing.

“Put everyone away, that’s his philosophy,” Diana added. “Get rid of all life’s inconveniences, the ones who cause us trouble, who demand attention, who block us from ‘progress. ’” She sat back, almost violently. “I know what Mark’s doing, Davey. And I know why. It’s because he knows I have questions about Jason.”

I looked at her silently, waiting, but she said nothing else until I pressed her.

“Questions about his death?” I asked. “You think it wasn’t an accident?”

Diana nodded, but very softly, reluctantly, like someone admitting to a thought that was not so much wrong in itself, as incomprehensible to others.

“And you think Mark had something to do with it?” I asked.

She answered with the same nod, only more reluctantly, but that didn’t matter. Facts were facts, and even the most ten uous admission proved that Abby had been right all along about Diana’s suspicions. In the face of that admission, I saw no other course but to put myself in the place of her interrogator.

“What evidence do you have, Diana?” I asked.

She seemed to find the question abrupt and unexpected, but knew she had to answer it. I could see her scrambling to find an answer, but at the same time fully aware that she didn’t have a satisfactory one. She was like someone required to produce a diamond she did not possess, and so reached for a rhinestone and hoped that it would do.

“The badge,” she said.

I had no idea what she meant.

“Mark’s father was a policeman,” Diana said. “He had a badge. When he died, it went to Mark. It was the only thing he kept from his father.” She placed her right hand on the stack of books like someone giving sworn testimony. “I found it by the pond.”

“When?”

“The day after Jason died,” she answered. “It was at night. I went for a walk. That’s when I found it.”

I had no doubt that this was the same night Mark had found Diana near the “ear of earth.”

“Mark used that badge to control Jason,” Diana continued. “When he wanted Jason to do something, he’d get the badge and put it right in front of Jason’s face. Then he’d tell him what he wanted. It might be for Jason to stay in his seat, or finish his dinner. It could be anything. But Jason would do it if Mark had the badge. He used it like a charm.”

“Where’s the badge now?”

“Mark has it,” Diana answered. “He took it when he came to get the rest of his things.”

“Well, why shouldn’t he have taken it?” I asked. “It’s a keepsake, isn’t it? A reminder of his father.”

She looked at me stonily. “You don’t believe me,” she said.

“I believe you found the badge,” I said. “I just don’t see that it’s evidence against Mark.”

“Because it’s circumstantial?”

“To say the least.”

“But isn’t most evidence circumstantial?” Diana asked.

“Yes, but—”

“And what is evidence, really?” she demanded.

She was like the Old Man now, peering at me with the same stern eyes, and under her gaze I suddenly felt outmatched, certain that I would stumble, fumble, fall.

“You mean of a crime?” I asked, stalling.

“No, not of a crime,” Diana answered as if the question itself were strangely shallow. “Before you have evidence for a crime, what must you have evidence for, Davey?”

I looked at her, unable to answer with any more speed or accuracy than I’d been able to answer the Old Man.

“You must first have evidence for suspicion, isn’t that right?” Diana demanded.

I nodded reluctantly.

“So, in any investigation, the evidence for suspicion comes first,” Diana said. “Take an apartment in which a woman and two children are found bludgeoned to death. The husband survives and claims to have been attacked by intruders. Chairs are overturned in the dining room. But despite all this evidence for an intruder, a struggle, there is other evidence. It is the Christmas season, and the Christmas cards on the dining room table have not been tipped over. They are standing upright. What is that evidence of, Davey? A crime? Of course not.” She looked at me pointedly, then asked in a slow, measured voice, ”But it is evidence for suspicion that there was no struggle with intruders that night, isn’t it?”

I could find no response to this, at least not one Diana wouldn’t immediately tear apart. I could say that evidence for a crime and the suspicion of that crime were in actuality the same, but I knew that in some way they were not, and that Diana would turn that fine distinction into a raging river of caustic argument. For that reason, I also knew that no matter how odd and unconvincing I found her suspicion of Mark, she would make my lack of suspicion yet more so, defend conviction by attacking naïveté. The only tactic I found available was to move the conversation to another place.

“It must hurt,” I said, “to feel this kind of suspicion.”

Her eyes took on a fathomless sympathy that struck me as very odd, because it could not have been for Mark.

“Yes, it hurts,” she said.

“Diana, look. All I want to know is .  .  .”

She lifted her hand to silence me. “No more for now,” she said. “She’s here.”

For a frozen instant, I went the whole route, assumed this “she” to be nonexistent, without reality of any kind, my sister’s dark hallucination. I glanced to where she indicated, and, to my surprise, saw a very real young girl walking toward us through the evening shade, a figure I could see but partially, a bit of skirt, a glint of hair, but still enough for me to know exactly who it was.

“Patty,” I whispered.

Diana rose to her feet as Patty neared, and all the stormy aspects of her features dissolved into a wholly sunny smile.

“Hi, Patty,” she said, and waved her arm.

Patty reached us a few seconds later.

“Hi, Dad,” she said with both surprise and wariness, as if she’d been caught in the midst of a secret mission.

I nodded. “Hi.”

She was dressed in a long-sleeved, ivory-colored blouse and long pleated skirt, an attire that reminded me of forties femme fatales, women who had small, pearl-handled pistols in their rhinestone-studded bags.

“Patty and I are going to dinner,” Diana announced.

“Mom knows,” Patty added.

“Okay,” I said.

Diana looked at me pointedly. “So, we’ll talk later,” she said.

“Yes, fine,” I said. “Later.”

She took Patty’s arm and the two of them turned and walked away, strolling slowly toward my sister’s car, alternately caught in lamplight and lost in shadow, until they grew small in the far distance, and at last seemed to fade into the dead of night.

For a moment, Petrie’s face is faintly obscured by a vaporous cloud of steam. It rises from the cup of coffee he has just poured, and as you watch it curl sinuously upward, you think, It was like that, a moment of cloudiness, and then stark clarity. And when the world flashed back into focus, you saw their bodies in a row, faceup on the embankment, the river of fear flowing past them.

The cloud vanishes as quickly as it appears, and with its vanishing Petrie’s features are clear again, though they now seem slightly older and more worn, his eyes just a bit more shrunken, so that you imagine him as he eventually will be, fleshless and unanimated, indistinguishable from Cheddar Man.

Petrie lifts the cup. “Sure you don’t want a cup?”

You shake your head.

“Okay,” he says softly. His voice is like his features, older, more frazzled, as if it has been dragged over rough ground. He seems oddly weathered by your tale, but determined to go on, see it through to the ending you know he has not guessed.

“At this point, what did you feel about Diana?” he asks.

You see her almost like an apparition, floating in the air, trees beneath her; and a pond glistening far in the distance. The terror of her own imaginings at that awful moment, how like the Old Man’s they must have been, leaves you momentarily speechless.

“I’m talking about when you left her that night at the library,” Petrie adds.

“Apprehensive,” you answer. “I felt apprehensive.”

But what could you have done in response to this apprehension? You’re not sure that any particular action would have been right or wrong. Death has taught you that we are utterly powerless to see where any given direction will ultimately lead, its consequences, good or bad, small or dire, and that it is this profound inadequacy that delineates the essential tragedy. You know that we all understand this, and yet we don’t. Because the darkest things we know remain a storm at sea, its true destructiveness unknown until it finally comes ashore.

“What were you apprehensive about?” Petrie asks.

You consider the question, amazed at how reluctant you are to give a truthful answer.

And so you stall.

“There were lots of things going through my mind,” you tell Petrie.

“Like what?”

“What to do about Diana.”

“Meaning what?”

“Her suspicion of Mark. What she might do about it.”

“Did you think she might do something violent?”

“I didn’t know what she might do. I was in a cloud. That’s what it felt like. A cloud.”

“But it wasn’t primarily Mark you were worried about as far as Diana was concerned?” Petrie asks. His gaze grows more intense, like a cat on the prowl, sniffing the ground, closing the distance.

“No, not Mark,” you answer. You allow a small part of the cloud that conceals you to dissipate, and thus reveal a tiny corner of the awesome truth. “No, it was Patty.”