Thirteen

During the next few days, I thought of nothing but Diana, though only of her recent past, her talks with Bill Carnegie, and her trip to the morgue, along with the maze of bizarre associations that seemed equally part of her investigation, Cheddar Man, Yde Girl, even the eerie lyrics of Kinsetta Tabu. It seemed to me that her inquiry into Jason’s death had become a pseudoscientific enterprise, a concoction made up of scraps from anthropology, forensics, mysticism, a badge. Together, these elements composed a mad witch’s brew that was no more based on real evidence than some cauldron swill of pig’s snout and bat’s wing.

The question was what to do about all this. I’d already talked to Mark, Bill Carnegie, Detective Petrie. I’d even talked to Patty, a conversation that chilled me as I replayed it, the challenge she’d presented to me.

And so it seemed to me there were no further “witnesses” to question, not a single person who might shed light on what Diana was thinking or might do next. Not a single living witness.

Then I thought, Save one.

Douglas Price wasn’t difficult to find. A quick people search brought his name and address onto the screen, though without an accompanying phone number. I wrote down the address, then called Abby and told her that I’d be late for dinner.

The tone of her voice was clearly apprehensive, like someone who no longer felt safe in her own house. “Where will you be?” she asked.

“There’s this man I need to see,” I told her. “Diana spoke to him. I want to know what she said.”

“When will you be home?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

To my surprise, she said, “I’ll wait up.” Another silence, then she added, “Be careful, Dave.”

For the next few hours, I worked at my profession, the one the Old Man thought “common as a fly.” Diana had had a different opinion. You deal in dissolutions, she’d once said to me. Which was an altogether accurate appraisal, since my law practice primarily dealt with marriages and businesses that had to be dissolved. Perhaps, at least in that way, I had always been a student of crack-up and collapse, the still smoldering ashes of bad deals and relationships. Like Mephistopheles, as Diana had gone on to point out, the air is always smoky where I am.

Nor was there any doubt that this air had grown more acrid in recent days, I thought, as I made my way to my car after work that afternoon.

“Going home to kith and kin,” Charlie said when he saw me at the door.

“Not right away,” I told him.

He eyed me with mock suspicion. “You don’t have something on the side, do you, Dave?” He grinned. “Some dangerous woman?”

I recalled my dead father’s wide-open mouth, felt again the unexpected moisture, then saw Diana and Patty as I’d last glimpsed them together, strolling into the darkness. Only my sister, I thought.

The drive to Price’s house took a short fifteen minutes. The road meandered among rolling hills and over scenic wooden bridges, and I let myself enjoy the small pleasures of the countryside, its soft curves and simple planes. The farmhouses I passed along the way were neat and orderly, and in their uncomplicated contours the surrounding fields seemed to take life on its own terms and in that way reveal the saving balance of acceptance.

Price’s house turned out to be quite the opposite of the farmhouses that surrounded it. The grounds were overgrown, with large untended shrubs standing raggedly alongside the house. The yard was bordered by a low wooden fence that had long ago been given over to patches of flaked paint. The house itself was no better, with sloping drains and loosely hung wooden shutters that hadn’t been painted in years. An old Chevy sat in a garage that was little more than a tin roof held up by wrought-iron posts. Sagging gray screens covered the windows, and beyond them, thick brown shades were tightly pulled down, as if light were an enemy against which Price had fortified his dilapidated castle.

A narrow footpath led to the front door, though even this path appeared more or less unused, a fact that indicated that Price rarely left the house and that few if anyone ever visited it.

The door opened before I had a chance to knock, and behind a rusty screen I saw a face that appeared infinitely old.

“Douglas Price?” I asked.

“Yes.”

His voice was weak and rather wheezy, so it didn’t surprise me when I glanced down and saw a plastic yellow oxygen mask dangling from Price’s neck. A tube connected the mask to a red tank strapped to a chrome dolly he grasped with his other free hand.

“I’m David Sears,” I told him.

He looked at me blankly, through watery blue eyes. His skin had a tallow shade to it and his hair was more or less uncombed so that overall he seemed like his house and yard, ruinously abandoned.

“I think my sister may have contacted you recently,” I added. “Diana Sears?”

“Ah, yes,” Price said. A bony hand stretched into the evening light and flipped up the four primitive eyebolt latches that secured the screen door. “The door bangs in the wind,” he explained. “I don’t like the noise.” He eased himself out farther into the light, and I saw white, shoulder-length hair that on a professor might have given off a sense of aged wisdom, but only made Price look more neglected. “Come in,” he said.

I stepped inside the house and followed Price down the dimly lighted hallway and into an unexpectedly tidy room, lined with bookshelves, and furnished with a large wooden table and a few wildly unmatched chairs, some heavily padded, some bare wood, and which included both a rocker and badly worn recliner.

“I shift around a lot,” Price explained. “Restless legs syndrome.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s mental or physical,” he added. He chose the recliner for himself and indicated that the rocker was for me. “Make yourself comfortable.”

The rocker emitted a high, painful cry as I sat down. I leaned back in the chair and the crying stopped.

Price eyed me closely for a moment and I knew that he’d noticed that I was somewhat anxious.

“She’s a woman on a mission,” Price said. “Your sister.”

The word “mission” struck me as decidedly romanticized in its description of Diana’s current effort, but I let it stand without comment.

“I was quite impressed with her,” Price added.

I leaned forward and cupped one hand in another. “Diana read me what you wrote about what happened at Dover Gorge,” I said.

Price lifted the mask to his face and took a quick inhalation, then withdrew it. “She had it with her, my little pamphlet,” he said. “She asked if I’d really heard those things I’d claimed to hear, and I told her that I had.”

I offered no argument to this because I knew that Price had “heard” something, though I also knew that it had come from inside him, as all things of that sort must.

“I told her that the things I’d heard had seemed real to me at the time,” Price continued. “I’m not a whole person, you see. I wasn’t then, and I never have been. What I wrote about Dover Gorge was written by a shattered man.” He smiled. “I said the same thing to Diana. Her response was very sweet. She said, ‘Light passes best through shattered things. ’”

“That’s a quote,” I told him. “From our father.”

Price smiled. “Is it? I’m not surprised. She said her father was a poet.”

And as if summoned like Hamlet’s ghost, the Old Man suddenly appeared before me, spouting four lines of his own poor doggerel, lines I’d unknowingly memorized and buried all these years:

Through life’s dim light
This much I see:
If Sorrow bettered us,
We would better be

“Not much of one, I’m afraid,” I said. “Did she mention her son?”

“Yes,” Price answered. “Jason, I believe?”

“That’s right. What did she tell you about him?”

“That he’d drowned,” Price answered. “She said she took it very hard. She didn’t believe in anything. God. Heaven. So there was no comfort or solace for her, no place to go.”

“She had a brother she could go to,” I said quietly. “She still does.”

Price looked at me intently. “There is such a thing as metaphysical loneliness,” he said. “It’s a place where there is no one else, and never can be.” Something in his gaze was almost tangible. “You’ve been there, too, I think.”

I waved my hand, cutting off what I expected to be a warm tide of psychobabble.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” I told him. “But I came to find out about Diana.”

“What about her?”

“What she said to you.”

“She didn’t say much at all,” Price informed me. “She’s more of a listener, your sister. She struck me as passionately curious. I told her that, and she said she’d gotten it from her father.”

I thought of the Old Man’s crazed searching, desperate, panicked, forever in mad pursuit of some elusive truth.

“Did Diana tell you her father was crazy as well?” I asked.

“Yes, she did,” Price said.

“It scares me,” I added. “What she might have ‘gotten’ from him.”

I suddenly saw the Old Man as a figure of terrible malevolence, giving Diana orders from the grave, directing her research into ancient murders, feeding an appetite for posing unanswerable questions, an appetite he’d quickened and nurtured by his own mad search, Diana now as much the fruit of that deranged garden as the poisoned daughter in the Hawthorne story he’d so often read and discussed with her.

“Which is why I came here,” I added. “I need to know what you talked about.”

“My little pamphlet,” Price said with an idle shrug. “Not the whole thing. Just something I wrote about a man I met at Brigham. Pendergast was his name. Ray Pendergast. He wasn’t a patient. He worked as an orderly. Very nice man, gentle.”

“What did you write about him?”

“I wrote about the voice he heard,” Price answered.

Diana had not mentioned any part of Price’s pamphlet other than the one she’d read-recited that evening at Dover Gorge.

“What voice?”

“The one that spoke to him the day his brother died.” Price paused and took another long inhalation from the mask. “Ray lived with his father on a small farm outside New Haven. He had a brother who was, well, not gifted, shall we say. His name was Dennis, and he had to be watched because he sometimes wandered off and Ray and his father would have to go looking for him. One day, the father sent Ray into town to get supplies. He’d already started down the road when he heard it. The voice. It said, ‘Don’t go.’ According to Ray, it was so clear he thought his father might have called him, so he went back to the house. Dennis was in the father’s workroom. Ray didn’t see his father, but he heard him walking around upstairs. So he ignored the voice, and went on to town. When he got back, Dennis was missing. They found him in the well.”

“Drowned?” I asked.

“It looked like an accident,” Price said. “But Ray didn’t think it was.”

“Why?”

“Because Dennis had always been afraid of the well, wouldn’t go near it.” Price returned the mask to his mouth and took in a long, ragged breath. “He thought the boy had been murdered.”

I thought of the morning Jason disappeared, how Diana had gone shopping, left her son with Mark.

“Diana asked lots of questions about Pendergast,” Price said. “What I knew about his childhood, what happened to him later, if he’d ever heard that voice again.” He shrugged. “I didn’t know the answer to any of her questions.”

“Did she tell you why she was asking them?”

“No,” Price answered. He smiled. “So I only know one thing about your sister. She’s a seeker.”

A wave of irritation swept over me at the vast speculative literature these “seekers” both produced and devoured, books about pyramids, crystals, pentagrams, the whole sorry archive of their crazed and fruitless searching.

“What, exactly, do you think she’s seeking?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Price said. He held me in suspense a moment, no doubt trying to gauge what my reaction might be. “I told her about Gaia,” he said finally. “Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“It comes from the Greek,” Price told me. “It’s the belief that the world is a living organism, that it sees and hears. I have always been interested in its auditory aspects. Particularly in stones.”

“Stones,” I said dryly. “Because you heard something in those stones in Dover Gorge?”

“Yes,” Price said.

I shook my head, and in that gesture Price correctly saw how baseless and nonsensical I believed such ideas to be.

“Don’t be so sure,” Price said. “After all, many people rely far more on what they hear than what they see. The Umeda people, for example .  .  .”

As Price continued to speak, relating the various practices of the Umeda, I realized exactly why Diana had come to him.

“The Umeda have certain ritual sites that—” Price went on.

“Diana’s looking for a partner,” I interrupted. It had come to me in a series of images, my father dead, a moist pillow, a funeral pyre, all of these visions spiraling through my mind to the accompaniment of Mark’s chanting voice, She enlists aid. She can be very seductive.

“That’s why she came to you,” I added. “She’s looking for an .  .  .” I stopped because the word that came to me was so dire. “.  .  . an accomplice.”

“An accomplice?” Price asked. He shook his head. “No, no. She already has someone like that.”

“Who?”

“Her daughter,” Price answered casually.

“Diana doesn’t have a daughter,” I told him.

“Oh,” Price said. “I just assumed she was her daughter. The girl who was with her.”

“Patty?” I asked.

Price nodded. “That might be her nickname, yes.”

“What do you mean, nickname?”

“It wasn’t the name the girl used when she introduced herself.”

“What name did she use?”

Price seemed to see the apprehension and urgency with which I waited for his answer, both of which spiked upward when he gave the name.

“Hypatia,” he said.

You think the words, but do not say them. Two deaths.

Petrie rolls up the sleeves of his shirt, his gaze focused on you intently as he does so. “Patty,” he says. “You had no doubt it was Patty?”

You recall the image that came to you at that moment, two faces melting into each other becoming one in thought and purpose. “No doubt,” you tell Petrie. “I had no doubt that Patty was part of it now. That she was being seduced.”

“But into what?” Petrie asks.

“Diana’s ‘research. ’”

“But you still didn’t know what that was, did you?”

“No,” you admit. “But there were clues.”

“Clues?”

“What she’d talked to Price about. That stuff in his book. Pendergast’s story. A father who kills his son. All of that was somehow poisoning Diana’s mind, and she was pouring that same poison into Patty’s mind.” You hear the beat of your voice accelerate, the rapid fire of your words, something frantic in them. “Diana was making nutty connections, I knew that much. She was going in the wrong direction.”

“What direction was that?”

The word that occurs to you is “downward,” but you know that if you say it, it will lead your story in the wrong direction, too.

“What direction?” Petrie repeats.

His tone is neither threatening nor insistent. He is deep in the mystery now, its murky water rising around him as it rises around you. He holds to the form of the interrogation like a floating log, speaks to you coaxingly, so that you think of a careful surgeon, one who uses his probe cautiously, easing the cold gray bullet from the brightly glistening flesh.

“Toward death,” you answer, and with those words you come to a full stop.

In the following interval of silence, you recognize the long fall you have made in that direction, from death to death, the terrible slant of things. You wonder how many of these deaths you might have prevented.

“Things weren’t clear to me,” you tell Petrie.

You hear Abby’s voice, urgent, frightening. You have to do something, Dave.

“I didn’t know what to do.”

You have to do something.

“I needed help. I needed advice. But I’d spoken to everyone I could about Diana. My wife. Patty. Bill Carnegie. Mark. You. Even Douglas Price. I didn’t think there was anyone else I could go to. I was desperate. I would have talked to anybody.” You see her not as she really appeared, but as some phantom version of herself, eerily transparent. “In fact, I did.”

“Talked to someone?”

“Yes.”

Petrie leans forward. “Who?”

In remembrance, she turns toward you, a child locked in inexpressible oddity.

“Nina,” you tell him, and feel the old order of your mind explode, fall back to earth in smoldering bits, a lethal disarray. “I talked to Nina.”