Nineteen

On the way back to the office, I glimpsed Diana’s car in the lot beside the library. She was no doubt inside, up in the little cubicle Adele had described, hunched over her books, using her own strange sorcery to build her case against Mark.

I hurtled past, a little meteor determined to avoid the destructive gravity of her madness, now feeling no less threatened by it than Mark, and thus in league with him against her.

Charlie was in court that afternoon, and so, with the exception of Dorothy and Lily, the office was empty. I took advantage of the lull to dive into the mass of paper that weighed down my in-box. I held my focus entirely on that purpose, reading letters and dictating responses.

“This one is to Bill Carnegie,” I told Lily when I finally arrived at Ed’s file. “Dear Bill: Please be advised that my representation of Edward J. Leary in the matter of—”

Dorothy appeared at the door. “This just came for you,” she said. “From your sister.”

She stepped into my office and placed the package on my desk.

I stared at it like a ticking bomb. “We’ll finish this later,” I told my secretary. I waited until she’d safely left the room then opened the package Diana had sent me.

The stack of pages was almost a foot thick, and all written, as I noticed, on the Old Man’s battered Royal, though they were not his ravings. Instead, every word on these hundreds of pages had been written by Diana, essays on scores of famous writers, from the Greek dramatists, through Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, then to the poetry of Milton and Donne, and further on through the Romantics. She’d written on novelists, as well, Trollope and George Sand, Dickens and Melville, Hawthorne and George Eliot.

I had no doubt it had taken Diana years to write these essays, years of rereading the texts and searching references on the Internet, doing all this scholarly work in the little snatches of time she allowed herself while the Old Man, and later Jason and Mark, slept in their separate rooms.

She’d placed a white sheet of paper at the top of the stack, and there typed out her single sentence message: Offered in evidence that I’m not like Dad. These are not the disjointed, paranoid writings of a crazy person. Conclusion? I know what I’m doing, Davey.

I knew that this was Diana’s way of explaining the dreadful quotations she’d e-mailed to Mark. She was saying that she wasn’t “like Dad” because she was perfectly aware of what she’d done, which was to let literature speak for her, and by that means assert the truth, though at a slant. In effect, she’d placed Shakespeare in the witness-box, let him lift his arm, point toward Mark, mouth a timeless truth, For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ, using the Great Bard as her voice, voicing what she knew.

But what did she know? I asked myself as I returned Diana’s writings to the box. Nothing. What real evidence did she have? None.

And yet she’d taken a dangerously crazy step down the accusatory road she’d been following since Jason’s death. I had no doubt that she’d take another one as well, and another and another, maliciously and obsessively focused on the one name she’d placed on her enemies list. For now, only one. But the list would grow, I decided. Like Dad, she would add other names to it, people in league with Mark, people bent upon concealing what he’d done, protecting him from the consequences of it. In my mind I saw her tap, tap, tapping at the Old Man’s Royal, adding name after name, Bill Carnegie, Stewart Grace. It would not take long, I knew, until she added mine.

I knocked at the door of Diana’s apartment a little past eight. There was a rustle behind it, a shuffle of papers, the screech of a chair across bare floor, footsteps. Then the door opened, but cautiously, a single eye staring at me from a narrow slant of light.

“I have to talk to you,” I told her.

Rather than invite me in, she closed the door, turned off the light, then opened the door again, and stepped out into the narrow corridor.

“Did you get my package?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Like I said, we need to talk,” I told her.

She said nothing. Her gaze was utterly still.

“About Mark,” I added. “And about Jason.”

She remained silent, her eyes motionless.

“Did you hear me, Diana?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered quietly.

“Mark has hired a lawyer,” I added. “That little piece of paper you put under his windshield. J’accuse. That would have been enough, but then you sent him those quotations with the loaded words. Murder. Unnatural. ‘One sin I know another doth provoke.’ What’s that particular quotation supposed to mean?”

Diana didn’t answer.

“That one murder provokes another murder, right?” I asked. “Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

Diana didn’t answer, and her silence whipped the horses in me.

“How else could Mark interpret that, Diana?” I demanded. “Except as a threat. And he’d be right. It’s very threatening. More than an accusation. A threat. Do you know how serious that is, to threaten someone like that?”

Still, she said nothing.

“Well let me tell you—as a lawyer, okay? —let me tell you, it’s very, very serious.”

Diana’s lips parted slightly, but she didn’t speak.

I glared at her sternly. “I want you to stay away from Mark, his e-mail, his fax machine, his car, his work, his house, or anything that has to do with him,” I told her firmly. “But I want more than that. I want you to stop this research you’re doing. It’s not healthy, Diana, staying at the library all day. And don’t tell me you have a job there, because I know you don’t.”

She looked surprised by my accusation. “I never told you I had a job at the library,” she said. “I told you I worked there. I do.”

“That’s a very fine distinction, Diana,” I said. “The kind Dad used to make, remember?”

“So I’m like Dad?”

“Not yet.”

“But getting there?”

We had reached the dark heart of the matter much faster than I’d hoped, but there was no way to step around it, come at it from a different slant.

“I want you to see someone,” I told her. “A doctor.”

“So it’s true,” Diana said with a curious sadness. “You think I’m crazy. Patty told me you’d reached that conclusion.”

“Patty?” I asked significantly, “Isn’t her name Hypatia now?”

“By her own choosing.”

“And how did she happen to come up with it?”

“I told her that it was the name her grandfather had wanted for her.”

“Did you add that her grandfather was insane?”

“But he wasn’t,” Diana fired back defensively. “Not all the time.”

“He was a paranoid schizophrenic,” I said determinedly. “He thought he was being persecuted. He had an enemies list. Even you were on it, remember?”

Her eyes probed me in some oblique and indefinable way. I could almost feel the heat of her mental interrogation on my skin. “I remember,” she said softly.

“Hypatia was persecuted,” I continued. “But our father was never persecuted. And for the record, you’re not being persecuted, either.”

“I’ve never said I was.”

“It’s Mark who’s being persecuted,” I told her hotly. “By you, Diana.”

She faced me silently.

“But I’m not here to help Mark,” I added. “I’m here to help you.”

“By sending me to Brigham?” she asked.

“I’m not sending you anywhere.”

“This doctor, you’ve already met this person,” Diana said.

It was not a question. Typically, she had seen it all in my eyes, or in some element of my body language, or perhaps simply by the invisible mental probing that was as much a part of her as the flashing eyes and shining hair.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

“Santori.”

“As in ‘sanitorium’?” she asked rhetorically. “As in sanitary? Is he to clean my mind? Am I to be ‘sanitized’ by this Santori?”

“This is no time for cute wordplay, Diana.”

“Wordplay?” Diana shot back. “Cute?”

“Diana, you’re accusing Mark of murder without the slightest evidence. You’re threatening him.”

“And he’s distracted?”

“Of course, he is.”

“And so he wants you to help him send me to the asylum.” She shook her head determinedly, and a kind of purified anger leaped into her eyes, one that blazed so hotly I could almost feel the heat on my face. “To be strapped down, walled up. Treated like mad Queen Margaret.” Then her voice rose in an unmistakable grandeur, like a madwoman on the stage: “‘If ancient sorrow be most reverent’ .  .  .”

“No more quotes, Diana.”

“‘Give mine the benefit of seniory. ’”

“Enough!” I said sharply.

“‘And let my griefs frown on the upper hand. ’”

“Stop it!”

She looked at me as I thought she must once have looked at Mark, a gaze that seemed raw and primitive and savage.

“Dad was insane, Davey,” she said. “He was insane, but not all the time. Do you know when he was insane, truly insane? When he did things he didn’t remember. When he went blank, and did things, and then came back to reality. It’s when you leave reality and don’t know it that you’re genuinely mad, Davey. And I’ve never done that.”

“I didn’t say you’d—”

“You’re not insane merely because you look for the truth,” Diana declared. “Even when you look for it in unorthodox ways.”

“Yes, but—”

“So what makes me crazy, according to you?” Diana demanded. “Why do you think I need to ‘see someone’? Because I work in the library? Because I read books? Or is it some crazy idea I have? And if so, which crazy idea do you find most obviously mad?”

I felt set upon and pinned down, just as I had felt during the agonized dinners of my boyhood, or facing Stewart Grace’s manifest grandeur, unable to defend myself or even make my position clear, and in that wriggling weakness, I struck back at Diana in the only way that occurred to me.

“How about voices?” I snapped. “Hearing voices. You mentioned them at Dover Gorge. Do you hear voices, Diana?”

To my surprise, the question appeared to throw her into a strange uncertainty, one I took advantage of like a boxer pounding at an open wound.

“Do you hear voices, Diana?” I demanded. “Do you believe what they tell you?”

She shook her head. “There’s more work to be done,” she said, then turned toward the door.

I grabbed her arm and jerked her around.

“What work?” I demanded. “Looking for evidence that Mark murdered Jason? And after you’ve done all this work, found more evidence, what then? Will you be judge and jury, too? Will you carry out the sentence?”

She pulled her arm free and glared at me silently.

“And if the sentence is death?” I demanded. “What then? Will you be the executioner, Diana?”

Her gaze took on an eerie intensity. “What are you talking about, Davey?”

“Oh, don’t look so innocent,” I said. “You’re not above suspicion, you know.”

“Of what?”

“Murder.”

She seemed stunned by the word, how easily it had tripped from my mouth.

“Of Dad,” I added. “Remember how they came to the house after he died? But they didn’t have any evidence. Just some old scars on his wrists and ankles. From Brigham, you told them.”

“They were from Brigham,” Diana said.

“I’m sure they were,” I said. “But I had something else to go on, didn’t I. Other evidence the cops never saw. That green pillow, remember?” I looked at her accusingly. “The one we burned before the cops came. It was wet. Which is strange, because you only used it to prop up the back of his head, right? So why was it wet, Diana? Could it be you put that pillow over the Old Man’s mouth? Is that why it was wet?”

“You can’t possibly believe that,” Diana said.

“But how does it feel?” I asked. I stepped back and glared at her mercilessly. “Do you feel like Mark, now? Wrongly accused? Suppose the cops had asked about that pillow. What would you have said?”

said. “That’s why the pillow was wet.” Then she turned, opened the door, stepped back into the darkness, and closed it once again, firmly and determinedly, as if to seal us in our separate fates.

You remember something the Old Man said, not something he’d madly raved, but spoken softly almost to himself, a truth drawn from the well of his occasional acuity: We are like the earth. The surface temperatures may vary, but at the core, we’re all on fire.

You repeat the Old Man’s words to Petrie.

“Were you on fire that night?” Petrie asks. “When you left Diana?”

The question doesn’t surprise you. It is your answer that startles.

“I’ve always been on fire.”

You watch as he writes your answer down.

“All right,” he says, when he’s finished. He looks up from the pad, stares you directly in the eye.

You’re no longer sure what he sees. A pitiful man? A wounded man? A violent man? All of the above? Without doubt, a man spectacularly flawed.

“The real mystery is Diana,” you tell him.

The statement comes out of nowhere, but you wonder if it sounds planted, like you have something up your sleeve, perhaps laying the groundwork for an insanity defense, or at least one based on diminished capacity, preparing to make the claim that at that terrible instant you were “like Dad,” and so had no idea what you were doing.

“I’m not crazy,” you tell him.

Petrie does not write this down, but instead lifts the blue pen from the paper and stares at the tip, as if hoping it might come alive, fly from his hand to a blank space on the wall, write out what he needs to know.

“‘There’s more work to be done,’” he says.

He is quoting Diana.

“That’s what she said, yes.”

“In terms of gathering evidence? Is that what she meant?”

“What else?”

He draws his gaze from the blue pen. “Unorthodox.”

He is quoting her again, and you imagine him at your side, the two of you together in Diana’s apartment, eyes wide in wonder, lips parted in wonder, hearing the rush of feet behind you.

“It was vast,” you tell him. “Her effort. What she sought. Her hope.”

You are in Diana’s apartment again, alone among the spare furniture. You scan the walls and feel yourself drawn into another sphere of knowledge, part of earth, but still unreachable, like an indecipherable script, faintly sacred, the prayer of a vanished people.

“Much more than ‘unorthodox,’” you add.

Which makes it all the stranger that you missed it, could not, for all its radiance, see it shining through the cloud.