Murder.

You see the word register in Petrie’s eyes, the deaths it is now his duty to explore, each of which you suddenly envision in fundamental images of cloth, water; iron, wood. You have no doubt that entirely different images of violence swirl about in Petrie’s mind—guns, knives, rope, the grim stage props of slaughter.

“What did you think when you heard that Bill Carnegie had referred Mark to Stewart Grace?” Petrie asks.

You recall Grace the day you went to him, how open his face was, how little veiled in treachery. You remember how small you’d felt as you stood before him, how stained by mediocrity, the dreadful and ineradicable blotch the Old Man had always called “the true mark of Cain.”

The Old Man’s voice flares in your mind. So tell me, my young Daedalus, what divides Hades from the world of the Living?

A river. Only one?

No … four … two … no … five. Name them.

Acheron. Which is?

The river of woe. Next?

Cocytus … the river of … lamentation. Next?

Phlegethon. The river of … fire?

Is or is not Phlegethon the river of fire? I think … it is … but …

Uncertainty is death. Yes … yes, it is.

Next? Lethe. Which is?

The river of forgetfulness. And last?

“Mr. Sears?”

You return to the room, look at Petrie, and wonder if he now sees them glimmering in your eyes, the little fires that flicker on the far side of the Styx, the river of hate.

You remember Petrie’s original question and quickly answer it.

“I wasn’t really thinking about Stewart Grace at the time,” you tell him. “Who then?”

“Bill Carnegie. I wanted to know why Diana had gone to him in the first place. I was trying to sort things through.”

You remember Diana in the courthouse, the odd look in her eyes as she’d spotted Bill Carnegie. Or was it odd? You can no longer be sure, and in that uncertainty you are suddenly standing in the terrible space where she labored, staring at the medieval quotation she’d printed in bold black letters and hung like an anthem on the wall behind her desk: Send out a beam of ghostly light, and pierce this cloud of unknowing.

“I didn’t know what any of it meant,” you tell Petrie. “So I went to see him. Bill. I’m sure you already know that.”

Petrie nods softly. “Yes.”

In your mind you see Bill Carnegie come through the door of the courthouse, reaching for a pack of cigarettes as he trots down the stairs toward you. His first words had surprised and strangely alarmed you. You look a little tense, Dave.

You imagine that you looked exactly that, tense, unsure, perhaps even at that early stage already fearful of the road ahead, that first step that leads from twist to twist, until, at last, you reach the precipice.