Twenty

At the dinner table I was very quiet, but it was a volcanic quiet as I continued to think about my conversation with Diana, silently turning over what we’d said to each other until it all became too much for me and I suddenly blurted, “Diana’s getting worse. She’s absolutely convinced that Mark killed Jason.” I looked at Patty. “But what motive would he have had for doing that?” I asked.

Patty answered immediately, firmly, with no hint of doubt. “Jason was too much of a distraction. Mark needed time for his research. He didn’t want to have to think about Jason.”

“Is that Diana’s theory?” I asked.

“No,” Patty answered. “It’s mine.”

“But you’ve been discussing it?” I asked. “Mark’s motive?”

She looked at me squarely. “Yes.”

“And so she’s told you about her ‘evidence’?” I asked. “The badge she found by the pond. Mark’s badge? The one he supposedly used to lure Jason into the water.”

“Actually, there’s an easier way to do it,” Patty said in a tone that struck me as astonishingly offhanded.

“Do what?”

“Drown a person.” Her gaze floated toward me slowly, as if carried on a strange, invisible ooze. “If the person is restrained, all you have to do is press down the tongue and drip water into the mouth,” she added as if she were informing me about some shortcut in food preparation. “That’s the way Waltraud Wagner did it.”

Abby shuddered. “Okay, I think we’ve gone far enough with this,” she said like a woman making a final effort to keep back awful news.

“No, wait,” I said. “Who is this Wagner character? Somebody in a book?”

“No, she was real,” Patty answered. “She confessed to killing forty-nine people in a German hospital. The ‘water cure’ is what she called dripping water into them. She had other methods, too.”

“Where did you learn about this?” I asked.

“From Diana,” Patty answered without the slightest sense that I might find this exchange alarming.

“What else did Diana tell you about this woman?” I asked.

“Oh, not much,” Patty said. “Except that she got other people to help her. Other nurses.”

“She was a nurse?”

“Yes. She killed her patients. I mean, some of them. She and the other nurses she got to do it, too.”

“This woman recruited other nurses to kill patients?” I asked unbelievingly.

“Can we please stop this,” Abby said before Patty could answer.

But Patty went on undeterred. “Yeah, she recruited them. She trained them, too. Showed them how to do it.”

“How to commit murder?”

“Yes,” Patty said.

“Waltraud Wagner,” I repeated, now forcing myself to doubt the whole story. After all, it had come from Diana. “She still sounds like a character in a book to me.”

“No, she’s real,” Patty insisted. “They called her ‘The Angel of Death. ’”

I leaned forward. “And Diana is studying this sort of thing, murder methods?”

“Not now,” Patty answered. “But back then she did. When she was younger.”

“You mean when she was in high school?” I asked. “I never saw her studying this kind of thing.”

“It was after she left college.”

“When she was living with our father?”

“Yeah,” Patty said. “She read all about murders back then. She said it helped her pass the time.” She snatched up her napkin and wiped her mouth with a quick swipe. “Gotta go.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m meeting Diana at the library.”

I shook my head, and by that movement made the final decision. “No, you’re not,” I said evenly.

Patty looked at me wonderingly. “What?”

“I said no, Patty.”

Abby stared at me, no doubt astonished by the resolution she heard in my voice.

“No, what?” Patty asked.

“You’re not meeting Diana.”

“Why not?”

What might I dare tell her, I wondered? That her aunt, who had recently taken such an interest in her, carried a dark stain in her blood, one that had flowed down to her from her father, and been passed down to Jason, and was even now blooming darkly within the circle of our family life.

“Why not, Dad?” Patty demanded.

“For all the reasons we’ve already talked about.”

“What reasons?”

“Lots of reasons,” I answered. “We’ve had this discussion before, Patty.”

“No, we haven’t,” Patty said. “Not like this. Not like you telling me I can’t see her.” She glanced toward Abby, found absolutely no support there, then shot her gaze back to me. “You said Diana had strange ideas, that’s all. So what? A lot of people have strange ideas.” She sat back and glared at me. “Besides, it isn’t really all that strange, what she believes.”

“About Mark, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Because you believe it too,” I said. “Which is exactly why I don’t want you seeing her again until—”

“Until what?” Patty snapped.

“Until you come back to your senses.”

“Which means until I agree with you, right?”

“Oh, come on, Patty.”

“You’re not being fair to Diana,” Patty said, suddenly more angry and rebellious than I had ever seen her. “You’re not really listening to her.”

“This is not about me,” I said. “This is about Diana, the fact that she’s sick right now.” I paused, then added, “And very seductive.”

“Seductive?” Patty cried. “You think I’m being seduced?”

I thought of Patty in her full vulnerability. She was inexperienced and more or less uneducated, with not a whit of training in the rudimentary skills of critical thinking. I imagined her mind awash in feelings of inadequacy and disconnection from which she fled into the whorl-of-the-world-awhirl nonsense of Kinsetta Tabu. I had no doubt that by now Diana had added yet other layers of fatuous mumbo jumbo to all this, a circumstance I could do nothing about save prevent her from sinking deeper into the mire.

“Yes, I do, Patty,” I said. “I do believe that.” I knew that I couldn’t reach her with an anger of my own, and so I paused, steadied myself, and calmed my voice. “Patty, listen to me,” I said. “This stuff Diana’s looking for, this ‘evidence’ she’s trying to find, it won’t stand up.”

“What do you mean, ‘stand up’?”

“In court,” I answered. I lifted my hand and, raising one finger at a time, stated the obvious facts of the case. “As far as Mark is concerned, there will be no indictment. There will be no trial. There will be no sentence. Do you know why? Because there is not a shred of evidence against him.”

Patty glared at me with a clear sense of confidence that my last points meant nothing. “There are other forms of proof, Dad,” she said. “It’s not all about law and trials and stuff like that.”

I saw the great library of our jurisprudence, all our ancient declarations and honored constitutions, from Magna Carta to the most recent legal brief, all of it catch fire and turn to ash in my daughter’s eyes.

“Patty,” I said softly. “There is only human justice. It’s a flawed thing, I know, imperfect, but .  .  .”

The laugh that broke from her had the chilling tenor of a witch’s cackle. “That’s exactly what I expected you to say,” she blurted scornfully. “It isn’t perfect, but it’s all there is.” Her smile was pure mockery. “What bullshit.”

“Patty!” Abby cried. She looked at me. “I want this to stop, Dave.”

But there was no stopping it.

My anger spiked. I leaned forward and planted my elbows on the table. “Then what do you propose?” I snapped. “What justice are you going to carry out?”

Patty rose in a smoking column of righteous ire. “I’m going to my room.”

“And you’re going to stay there, too,” I bawled. “You’re going to go to school, and then you’re going to come directly home, and you’re going to do that and nothing but that until all of this is over.”

She stared at me in angry challenge. “And when will that be, Dad?” she demanded. “When Mark marries again and has another family?”

“What are you talking about, Patty?”

She smiled, but it was a cold smile, like the one I suddenly imagined on the lips of Waltraud Wagner. “You can’t stop Diana,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” I repeated.

Her eyes blazed. “You can’t stop Diana,” she cried in a voice filled with seething vehemence. “No one can.” Then she whirled around, marched to her room, and slammed the door.

In the echoing void, Abby murmured, “What are you going to do now?”

And I thought, Something. Something soon. But I did not know what.

“So I began with research,” you tell Petrie. “Just like Diana.”

“What did you research?” he asks.

“First, Waltraud Wagner.”

Petrie carefully takes down the name.

“That night, I looked her up,” you continue.

You tell him the results of your inquiry, that Waltraud Wagner was not a character in a book, but an Austrian woman who’d been convicted of fifteen murders, and who had led three other women to commit at least eight more. She had used the drowning method Patty mentioned. She’d also killed by denying insulin to diabetic patients and by overdosing others with a drug called Rohypnol, which had the very convenient characteristic of being undetectable by the standard tests used in autopsies.

“But it was the function of Rohypnol that captured my attention,” you add. “It was an anesthetic whose primary use was in calming down mental patients.”

The blue pen halts its flight across the page.

“Like your father?” Petrie asks. “It might have been prescribed for him?”

“I asked myself the same question,” you tell him.

You go no farther, because you have no evidence that Diana had ever had access to those tiny tablets, colorless and tasteless, no evidence that they had ever been housed in the medicine chest that hung above the rust-rimmed sink in the Old Man’s bathroom. And yet there it was, a grim suspicion, because your mind had become entirely reflexive, a force you could neither will nor control, a collector of disparate facts: the Old Man’s madness, Diana’s long and no doubt dreary custodianship, the ligature marks found on his wrists and ankles, an Austrian murderess Diana had read about, the powerful drug she’d used for murder fifteen times.

“To entertain a dreadful notion is itself a dreadful thing,” you say now. “But I didn’t stop there.”

Petrie’s pen does not move, and you notice that his eyes are no less still.

“I played back the whole conversation I’d had with Diana outside her apartment,” you continue. “Then I thought of Waltraud Wagner again, of the way she’d recruited others for murder. That led me back to Hypatia, which led me back to Douglas Price. And from there, I went to Gaia.”

“Gaia?” Petrie asks.

“The living earth. Price had told me that Diana found the concept very interesting.”

You see that Petrie doesn’t need to flip back through his notes to refresh his recollection of what you’ve previously told him.

“So I looked it up,” you tell him now. “Gaia.”

Then you tell him what you found. You recall it verbatim, using the very skill you’d buried so long ago, a power of memory, photographic and otherwise.

“Gaia,” you begin in a tone of recitation, “known as Earth, was a goddess half risen from the earth, and so unable to separate from it. She was the daughter of Chaos, and bore the burden of his disorder. In time, she took a husband, Uranus, and by him bore Cyclops. Uranus was revolted by the monstrousness of his son, and wished to return him to the bowels of Gaia, wished, that is, that he had never been born, and thus by implication, wished that he were dead. To protect Cyclops, Gaia hid him within herself, and despite the pain did not release him to his father. At last, in agony, Gaia enlisted the aid of Cronus and fashioned the adamantine knife which he used to cut off Uranus’s genitals. The blood of that wound fell to earth and from its red drops rose the Erinyes, which we know as The Furies, and from whom sprang justice and retribution.”

Petrie stares at you, clearly impressed. “You have quite a memory.”

You repeat the line that lingered like an acrid smoke in your mind. “At last, in agony, Gaia enlisted the aid of Cronus.”

Petrie watches you edgily, like a man on the front row of an execution gallery.

“Reading that, who could Cronus be but Patty,” you tell him.

In a kind of horror-movie scenario, you see a glistening blade rise and fall in Patty’s pale hand.

“Not that Diana would do something violent,” Petrie says, “but that Patty would.”

You remember Patty’s angry eyes and see the abyss that yawns before each of us at a certain point, and from which we are saved not by the slow accretion of experience and understanding, but by the mechanics of pure luck, that silent, invisible machine whose tiny gears are always turning, so that missing this bus or catching that one makes all the difference, our long labor to control our lives cancelled in an instant.

“And so?” Petrie asks.

“And so I had to cut Patty off from Diana.” You look at Petrie, appeal to the common urge of fatherhood, its most primitive impulse. “I had to,” you repeat emphatically. You feel the rain on your face, see it dropping from a length of black wrought iron. “At any cost.”