Twenty-Three

The drive to Brigham took only a few minutes. At the desk I explained that the complaint against Diana had voluntarily withdrawn and that the aggrieved party, namely Mark, had agreed to have her released into my custody.

I already knew what the rather kindly administrator told me, that Stewart Grace had phoned ahead to confirm everything I’d just said, and that the police had done the same, so that no official charges had been pressed against my sister.

She was sitting on her bed when I came into the room, and at the first flash of her eyes, I saw that the earlier sedation had worn off somewhat, though she remained subdued and oddly weakened, like someone at the end of a long journey.

“Davey,” she said.

“We’re leaving now,” I told her. “I’m going to take you home.”

She remained in place, made no effort to rise from the bed. “ The House of Mirth,” she said, almost to herself.

It was the book my father had cradled in his arms the day we’d driven him back to Victor Hugo Street, a cold winter day, with snow covering the lawn and the walkway and outlining the bare trees in white.

“I remember how terrified he was,” I said.

In memory I followed behind as Diana and the Old Man made their slow way down the snow-covered walkway.

Diana seemed to return to that same stark moment. “Because he didn’t know what he’d done to be put in Brigham,” she said.

I walked over to her and drew her to her feet. “I want you to stay with us for a while, okay?”

She nodded.

“Do you need anything from your apartment?”

I saw a sudden, nearly volcanic agitation in her eyes.

“No,” she said. “No.”

She remained silent during the ride home, and when Abby and Patty came out to meet her, she greeted them with a weary nod and a quiet, broken, “Hi.”

“You can stay in the room next to mine,” Patty told her, then, with an unforgiving glance toward me, gathered her aunt protectively beneath her arm.

At dinner a few minutes later, Diana remained distinctly subdued. I didn’t know whether her general unresponsiveness was due to the drugs she’d been given or whether she was still drifting in the shock waves of what had happened to her during the last few hours.

After dinner we all strolled into the den. I draped my jacket on a small peg by the door, slipped into a pair of loafers, then browsed the wall of videos I’d collected over the years. “Let’s make it a comedy,” I said as I scanned the titles. “ Monkey Business. With Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe,” I added brightly. “Is that okay with you, Diana?”

Diana’s eyes had never seemed more intensely focused. I could see that she was working through a complicated matter, but it seemed hardly the time to question her.

“Okay with you, Abby?” I asked.

Abby nodded silently, something oddly stricken in her face. “Fine,” she said.

We played the movie, but after a time, Diana said that she was tired. Patty rose immediately and escorted her to the guest room Abby had prepared. For a time they talked together. I didn’t try to listen, but only made my way down the corridor to my bedroom. Patty’s door was slightly open, and I noticed the books strewn about on her bed and across the floor. Her desk was cluttered with them, too, and over the desk, she’d printed out a fragment and taped it to her wall .  .  . a Web, dark and cold, throughout all the tormented element.

“Diana’s asleep now.”

I turned to find Patty standing beside me. “William Blake,” she said.

I touched her face. “I know,” I told her. Then I went to my bedroom, and, to my surprise, dropped off to sleep almost immediately.

And so I didn’t hear Diana when she got up later that night, didn’t hear her pad down the corridor and turn into the den, didn’t see her close in upon my hanging jacket, reach into its breast pocket, and draw out the photographs of Mark’s car I’d sunk into it, and which she must earlier have glimpsed at some point, but held her fire, and waited until she could see, in solitude and loneliness, exactly what she’d done.

It had begun to rain when I awoke suddenly. Dawn was just breaking, but I made no effort to return to sleep. Instead, I rose and headed for the kitchen. On the way, I noticed that Diana’s door was slightly ajar, then peeped into the room to find her bed unruffled.

A terrible jolt went through me, cold and yet electric, and which froze my nerves and set them aflame at the same time. I didn’t bother to wake Abby or Patty, but simply dressed as fast as I could and bolted out the door. I didn’t know where Diana might have gone, but it was too early for Mark to be at the research center, and so I headed first for Diana’s apartment.

I got there a few minutes later, and, like a well-mannered little boy, knocked at the door. When no one answered, I tried the door, found it unlocked, and stepped into the room.

In the shock of what I saw at that instant, I felt as if some invisible lever had been pulled, and I’d plunged through the gallows floor of this world and dropped into a wholly separate and self-contained reality. The walls were festooned with layers of pages printed from the Internet, photographs of fossils, long passages of ancient script, and hundreds of hieroglyphics. Other pictures depicted what appeared to be sites of ancient ritual, stone altars and stone-lined playing fields. The names of scores of ancient peoples had been written in large block letters and connected to one another in a spidery web of interlacing white strings. Still another wall was dotted with musical notations, along with photographs of stone pillars and prehistoric obelisks. Paintings of Gaia, the Earth Mother, hung all about, along with random pages copied from books about forensic science, studies of everything from fingerprinting to ballistics to the rate bodies decay at various levels of temperature and exposure, and everywhere slips of yellow paper were pinned like dead insects to every available surface, doors and window frames, along the edges of her desk, the lifeless hulls of her once living quest.

I knew that somewhere in all that mass were Cheddar Man and Windeby Girl, but all of that seemed long ago, truly ancient history compared to the immediacy of the moment, my need to find Diana.

And so I dashed to the bathroom, knocked at its closed door. There was no answer, so I eased it open, saw nothing there, and closed it again. Then, as if in a movie, I saw Diana skirt by the still-open door of the apartment, then heard the rapid thud of her feet on the stairs as she rushed up them.

“Diana,” I called.

But she didn’t stop or slow or even glance back to see me in full pursuit. On the fifth floor, I heard the creak of a metal door, then the sound of Diana’s feet pounding across the roof of the building. She had already reached the wrought-iron rail at the edge of the roof when I came through that same door seconds later.

“Diana!” I cried.

She stared at me through a veil of rain, unsure, or so she seemed, both of my voice and my physical presence, unable to trust what she heard and saw.

“Diana,” I said softly. I stretched my hand out to her. “Diana.”

She stared at me brokenly. “I’m like Dad,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” I told her.

“Yes, I am,” she said. “I always have been.”

“That’s not true.”

“Voices,” she said. “Voices, Davey. Always.”

“No,” I told her.

She looked at me indulgently, as if I were an innocent. “Why do you think I came home? Why do you think I took you to the closet?”

The memory rose like a hand from the covering soil, the image of a little girl in a blue dress, easing a red rubber ball from my hand, tugging me from where I sat on the front stairs, then down the corridor and into a small closet where I sat in the darkness, as if it were a game of hide-and-seek, all the time listening to the small, child’s voice that echoed through me now, echoing just as it had so many years before, down the stairs and along the corridor of the house on Victor Hugo Street, and finally into the closet where I huddled in the darkness, a calming, restorative voice, the one she’d always used to cool my father’s crazy ire.

“ Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The shade replied—
“ If you seek for El Dorado.”

“The closet,” I repeated.

I remembered the dry powdery smell of my mother’s old clothes still lingering in the air around me, clothes my father, during his various bouts of delirium, would sometimes retrieve and caress. But it was the voice I’d clung to in that darkness, Diana’s voice, soft and sweet, drawing the deadly point of my father’s paranoid delusion away from me as if it were a knife at my throat.

“Because they told me to,” Diana said. “Because he was going to kill you, Davey.”

Other memories suddenly returned to me with a jarring immediacy and physicality, so that I felt my hand tucked inside Diana’s, her grip firm as she led me out of any room my father entered that afternoon and night, reciting to him as she drew me from his view.

“The voices told me that,” Diana said. “And I believed them.” She turned, grasped the dripping black railing, and looked out over the edge of the building, far in the distance, to where Dolphin Pond lay behind a shroud of mist. “They told me that day, too,” she said. She faced me. “That day with Jason. They said, Don’t go. But I didn’t listen.” She stared at me brokenly. “Because I thought that if I listened, it would mean that I was crazy.”

She reached into the pocket of her coat and withdrew the photographs of Mark’s car she’d taken from my jacket.

“I’m like Dad,” she said.

I took a small step and stretched my arms toward her. “No, you’re not,” I told her.

She drew a tangle of wet hair from her eyes, and eased herself up onto the slippery rail, where she sat, holding on to it with such force her hands seemed like steel claws.

“You didn’t do that!” I cried, desperate to stop her. “I did it, Diana. I painted Mark’s car.”

She looked at me quizzically, and for a moment seemed to believe me. Then something deep within her appeared at once to break and mend.

“Oh, Davey,” she said, “you’re the best brother in the world.”

Then she thrust herself backward at what seemed an impossible speed.

I rushed to the rail and stared down, hoping against all reason that the arms of Gaia might receive her.

But there was only empty air, and so she fell and fell.

Petrie releases a long, weary breath, and you are still enough of a movie fan to recall the priest to whom Salieri confesses in Amadeus, how young and hopeful he is when Salieri begins his tale, how worn and shaken when he finishes it.

“But was it you?” he asks in dark astonishment.

You see the brush, the little can of bloodred paint, feel the weight of them in your hands. The black night into which you carried them sweeps in upon you, and you find yourself again crouched beside the car, splashing the word onto its dark surface, MURDERER. But what you remember most is the demonic glee you felt with each swipe of the brush, the bristling, febrile triumph, how at last you had outsmarted her.

“Yes,” you answer.

To your surprise, Petrie does not walk you through the steps of your rash act, nor seeks any further explanation of it, and in that choice you sense how far he has waded into the fearful river of yourself, grasps the long vigil of your treasured wrong. You are clear to him now, a crystal stream, Diana the sole remaining mystery.

His question does not surprise you.

“What was she looking for?” Petrie asks.

You are in Diana’s apartment now, two days after her death, clearing the walls of the vast array of information she’d gathered around her in a kind of mad cocoon.

“Evidence,” you answer.

You see how wild her search was, the hours and hours of tracing linguistic patterns, the history of sound, the viscosity of stone and wood, bicameral theory, linguistics, primitive ritual, studies of “miraculous” intervention, people warned not to get on planes that later crash, ships that later sink, warned by “voices” as she had been.

“But not specifically for Jason’s murder,” you add.

“For what then?” Petrie asks.

“For trusting what she heard or not trusting it.” You pause, try to bring it all together in your mind, grasp the impossible knowledge Diana sought. “How we know things we can’t know. The difference between madness and intuition. That was part of it, I think. I’ll never know it all.”

Petrie turns this over in his mind. There is nowhere to go with any of it, and so he centers himself in the knowable world again, witnesses he can see, words he can take down, voices whose reality he can trust. “When she believed that Mark murdered Jason, was she crazy?” he asks.

You feel the heft of a fallen limb as you grasp it, primitive, apelike, as if it were the first weapon, you the first to wield it.

“No,” you answer.

Petrie’s eyes draw away from you, as if from the vapors of a witch’s brew. “I see,” he murmurs.

You know what he sees, but say it only in your mind. Four deaths.

He pauses a moment. You know where his imagination has taken him, that he is, in his mind, standing at the gate of Salzburg Garden.

“I didn’t plan it,” you tell him, then think, I only heard the voice.