Eleven

Abby was sitting on the front porch, wrapped in a shawl and peering out at the nearly deserted street, when I pulled into the driveway.

“Patty’s not home,” she said. “She’s having dinner with .  .  .”

“Yes, I know.” I sat down in the chair beside her. “I was with Diana at the library when Patty showed up.” I recalled the conversation I’d just had, the absurd “evidence” Diana had offered. “I don’t want Diana to end up like the Old Man,” I said.

The final days of that dreadful end flew past me, dark and swift, as if carried on the wings of a bat. He’d grown more and more desperate, madly plowing through volume after volume, sometimes spouting his own poor verses, sometimes reciting the great ones of others, until he’d finally fallen into a wholly unreachable lunacy, no longer talking directly at all, but through quotations, each duly referenced, which had only made them seem more mad.

“Mark doesn’t know what to make of her,” I added. “He says I should be careful though.”

“Of what?”

“Of getting pulled into whatever Diana’s doing. Getting seduced somehow. That’s the way he put it, that Diana could be very seductive.”

“Does Diana know you talked to Mark?”

“I told her, yes. I don’t want to lie to her or keep things from her. It would only feed her .  .  .” I stopped, briefly unable to say the word. But there was no choice, so I said it. “Paranoia.”

My sudden use of that term, so cold and analytical, surprised me. It felt like a dropping away of hope.

Abby clearly saw the dread in my eyes and I saw that it only deepened her own.

“What did Diana say when you told her you’d spoken with Mark?” she asked.

“She guessed it before I could tell her,” I answered. “And it turns out that you were right about everything. Diana doesn’t think Jason’s death was an accident.”

“But why does she think that?” Abby asked.

“She talked about a badge,” I answered. “It was Mark’s. His father gave it to him. According to Diana, Mark used it to get Jason to do things. Eat. Be quiet. Used it like a charm, she says.”

“A charm?” Abby asked.

“She found it by the pond.”

I drew the only possible conclusion. “So not ‘an accident’ is murder.”

It was around midnight when I heard a car pull into the driveway. Abby lay sound asleep beside me. She didn’t stir when I got out of the bed, walked to the window, and parted the curtain.

Below, Patty was standing on the driver’s side of Diana’s car, leaning forward, talking. Diana was behind the wheel, her short blond hair faintly illuminated by the porch light I’d left on for Patty’s return. For a time they seemed huddled together, their voices far too low for me to hear, though for some reason I imagined them in whispers, two females in dark conclave.

Then Patty pulled herself erect, stepped away from the car, her pale hand in the air, waving good-bye as the car drifted backward into the street, then drove away, its red lights blinking like small mad eyes in the pitch-black air.

I’d thrown on a robe and gone downstairs by the time Patty came through the front door.

“Out late,” I said.

She looked at me as if I’d accused her of bad behavior. “Well, it’s not like I was with a boy or something. It was just Diana.”

Diana. She’d dropped the “Aunt,” and for me that was evidence enough that whatever their relationship had once been, it had altered sufficiently to generate this more familiar form of address.

“Where’d you have dinner?” I asked.

“Some Italian place.” She faked a yawn, then turned and headed for the stairs.

“What did you talk about?” I blurted suddenly.

She stopped and faced me. “Private things.”

“Private? What does that mean?”

“Private, Dad,” Patty answered emphatically.

“Private like .  .  . secret?”

“Private like private,” Patty answered. Her tone was firm, even slightly belligerent, a way of talking to me she’d never used before.

“It’s just that I’m worried about her, Patty,” I said. “Her mind. What she’s thinking. Because I’m not sure it’s altogether .  .  . rational.”

Patty looked at me as if I had created a monster in order to attack it. “What are you afraid of, Dad?”

Rather than answering her directly, I said, “If you know something, Patty, I want you to tell me.”

Patty’s tone now turned exasperated. “Know something about what?”

“About what Diana’s doing.”

“She’s not doing anything, Dad,” Patty said. “She goes to the library, then comes back to her apartment.”

“I don’t mean her routine.”

“What then?”

“This stuff about Windeby Girl, for example. What’s that all about?”

She laughed dismissively. “Diana’s curious about things, Dad,” she said. “Did you know that there’s a whole field called acoustic archaeology? Diana thinks maybe the first people heard things we can’t hear. Their minds might have been different from ours because they couldn’t write and so they had to remember everything. Like the Druids. They had to memorize a huge number of rituals. Nothing could be written down, so they must have had these fantastic brains.”

She continued in this vein a few seconds longer, and in every word she said I heard my sister’s power, the way she infused curiosity with passion.

“Druid means ‘oak tree,’” Patty continued, “but it also means ‘wisdom. ’”

“Patty,” I said, stopping her at last. “You have to be careful with Diana. I know she can be .  .  . very seductive.”

Patty stared at me silently.

“I also know that she’s convinced herself that Jason’s death wasn’t an accident,” I added. “And that Mark had something to do with it.”

Patty didn’t answer immediately, but I could see that she was trying to find the words. Finally, she said, “What if she’s right, Dad?”

“Patty, listen to me,” I said calmly. “Patty, there’s not one bit of evidence that Jason’s death was anything but accidental.”

Patty’s expression was pure challenge. “Then prove that to Diana.”

She’d thrown down a gauntlet I had to pick up. “All right,” I said. “I will.”

But how?

I still hadn’t fallen asleep when dawn broke the next morning, and so, at first light, I went walking among the houses of my slumbering neighbors.

Early morning, more than any other time of day, gives a false sense of harmony. The quiet only adds to the fabrication. Closed doors give the appearance of never having been slammed, and the general lack of movement suggests a similar lack of agitation.

For a long time, I walked in this fantastical quiet, all the while trying to plot a course that would bring everyone to safety.

I replayed the most recent events, first Jason’s death, then the court’s determination that it had been an accident, then Diana’s subsequent rejection of that finding.

If reason had played any part in Diana’s rejection of the court’s decision, then it seemed to me that reason might also play a part in her acceptance of it.

This thought brought me to the question of evidence, what it was and what it wasn’t. Diana might fog the air with talk of “evidence for suspicion,” but it was clear that such evidence only mattered if it could actually be used as evidence for a crime. Mark’s badge, whether found on the banks of Dolphin Pond or not, had no such incriminating potential.

The good news, it seemed to me, was that Diana was still operating in the realm of evidence, however flimsy the evidence she’d found. In that way, I decided, she was not “like Dad,” a distinction I found heartening, and whose slender tendrils I grasped with all my might.

By the time I returned home an hour later, I’d even hit upon a plan.

“And so I came to you.”

You know what Petrie hears in your voice, the hard-won truth that the only feeling more powerful than hope is lost hope.

“It seemed reasonable at the time,” you add.

Petrie has entered the story, and he knows it. You see this knowledge in his face. With his own teeth, he has bitten off a piece of this tale, and it is obvious that, like you, he would prefer to spit it out.

“At the time, yes,” Petrie says.

You glance toward the window, note the wide circles of a distant hawk. “It’s odd, what can seem reasonable.”

Petrie nods silently.

You wonder what he sees, whether he’s making a comparison. You were troubled then, but not yet ravaged. Or is it Diana he sees now, running, running. You recall Stewart Grace’s words, “like a cat on fire.”

Petrie leans forward, runs the tip of his finger around the rim of the now empty Styrofoam cup. “Before we talked, you had no idea?”

“None at all,” you tell him.

“She’d kept it from you?”

You are sitting in the Old Man’s study, watching as Diana closes his eyes with her thumb and forefinger. Lets build a pyre, Davey, she says. It is an absurd notion, homage to the Old Man by means of a pseudo-Viking funeral in small-town Connecticut. But Diana is already gathering up his bathrobe, house shoes, shawl, pajamas, old wool socks, so you decide to go along with the idea, then rise and take the green pillow from behind the Old Man’s head.

“One death,” you whisper now.

“What?” Petrie asks.

You shake your head. “Nothing.”

Petrie flips another page of his notebook. You note that he has used up almost half of them. Pages covered in his neat script flutter briefly, then grow still. At some point he will have to reconstruct this tale, then relate it, answer by answer; from the witness-box. You have been in many courtrooms. You know how it will go:

And you had occasion to interview Mr. Sears, didn’t you, Detective Petrie?

Yes.

And did you record that interview?

Yes, I did.

By what means?

By means of a mechanical recording device.

And you took notes, as well?

Yes, I did.

And are these the notes you took on the occasion of that interview?

Yes, they are.

You look at the notes, the unmoving yellow pages. So that’s what it is, you tell yourself, evidence.

You glance up from the notes and find yourself staring directly into Petrie’s eyes.

“I thought she might respond to evidence,” you tell him. “It was as simple as that.”

Petrie nods, taking his bite from the story, reluctantly acknowledging the hard but inescapable fact of how thin it is, the line between clarity and confusion, correctness and error, and that it is this cloudy, insubstantial thread that alone supports the weighty illusion of control.

“And so you came to me,” he says.

“Yes,” you tell him. “I had no place else to go.”