After I left the pond, I returned to my office and tried to distract myself with work. Lily had returned to her post, and I dictated the usual legal correspondence. Later, I went over various papers, made a few phone calls. Later still, I reviewed my correspondence on Ed Leary’s behalf, the offers he’d made, Ethel’s refusals to accept any of them. The final letter had come only the day before. It bore Bill Carnegie’s distinctive letterhead, complete with a somewhat overlarge illustration of blind justice. The message was succinct: “It is my duty to inform you that my client cannot accept Mr. Leary’s offer and will therefore press her demand in court.”
I’d duly informed Ed that his wife had rejected his last offer. I’d also assured him that in my opinion he’d done everything he could to reach a just settlement, and that, also in my opinion, no subsequent offer, no matter how generous, would ever be accepted.
It was the last line of my letter to Ed that grabbed my attention now. It came only after several paragraphs of my characteristically correct and lawyerly language, a sentence that suddenly took a turn, one might even call it a dive, into the intransigent, irreconcilable, and profoundly unreasoning nature of the situation, and which even then struck me as oddly prophetic: As in ancient times, it would appear that some settlements require blood.
And then, as if on cue, it came.
The envelope was addressed to me, but with no return address, and yet from the tiny, fractured script, I knew it was from Diana.
There was no accompanying letter inside the envelope, no explanatory note, but only the photograph of what appeared to be a teenaged girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, with smooth pinkish skin and a great curly mass of radiant red hair. In bold black letters the heading declared YDE GIRL. Below the heading there was a single question: Was She Murdered?
The girl’s face looked completely contemporary, with the healthy flush of a Midwestern farm girl, a far cry from the naked bones of Cheddar Man, and so for a moment I reasoned that Diana’s “research” had unaccountably shifted forward to some more recent crime, the murder of a teenaged girl from “Yde,” perhaps, though it was not a place I’d ever heard of.
I looked at the face again, the calm expression, the small, sweet smile. The girl’s eyes were open, but she didn’t appear focused on anything in particular, like a person listening to music, but with nothing more than vague interest. The photograph gave no hint of violence or even the fear of violence. So why the question about murder?
I remembered a game Diana and I had played when we were children. She’d called it “Find Me,” and in the game we’d taken turns giving each other one fact at a time. On Diana’s side, it was more often a fate, usually tragic or macabre.
For Charles Francis Hall, the doomed arctic explorer, her first clue had been icy end. For Marat, it had been bloody bath.
I wondered if Diana were playing some version of that childhood game with me now. Of course times had changed since we’d first played it, at least in terms of retrieving information. There was no need for me to rush to the library for a reference book. I simply went online and typed the words “Yde Girl” in the search engine.
And there she was, the same photograph Diana had sent me, only this time the colors were more vivid, the flesh tones more varied, highlights in her hair.
Beneath the face there was a line of text that said simply, “Medical Reconstruction.”
So the picture Diana had sent me was not the actual face of Yde Girl at all, but a model created on the basis of no doubt far less pristine remains. The accompanying text told me more. Yde Girl had been found in a peat bog in Yde, the Netherlands. A woolen cord had been wound around her neck and fitted with a slipknot. The cord had been pulled so tightly that it had left a visible pattern in the dead girl’s throat. The question then was not whether Yde Girl had died violently, but whether she had been executed, sacrificed, or simply murdered.
There would be no answer to this question, for Yde Girl had died nearly two thousand years before.
I held the photograph Diana had sent me up to the light and stared intently at the carefully molded face with its glass eyes and clean, shiny hair. Now it looked like the head of a doll rather than a human being, and I could see a jagged line of script that ran across the undamaged forehead, two words Diana had written, and which I recognized as just the sort of subtle hint she’d often given me when we’d played Find Me years before, clues that had never failed to draw me ever more helplessly into the pursuit. I flipped over the photograph with the same childlike eagerness I’d done as a little boy and read what Diana had written there.
Original sin.
“Original sin,” I repeated softly, now recalling the specific way Diana had played the game in the past, how her clues had tended to be oblique combinations of references, sometimes comic, sometimes ironic. For example, her opening clue for Roscoe Arbuckle had been fat chance, a hint that pointed both to the actor’s obesity and the fact that by sheer accident he’d been accused of rape and murder.
Original sin, I thought. By the word sin, she could only mean the murder. But what was original about murder? Nothing, of course. So what could possibly be “original” about Yde Girl? The answer came to me the way it often had when we’d played the game as children, simply out of the blue, as if it had been whispered wordlessly into my mind. The only thing original I might find about Yde Girl would be her corpse, the remains from which the decidedly unoriginal reconstruction had been made. These remains surely would be the “original” evidence of the “sin” that had been her murder.
I turned back to the article on my computer screen, ran the cursor down to the bottom of the Web page, and found a lighted reference entitled “Initial Discovery.”
I clicked on it and once again she was there. Yde Girl.
Hardly anything of the grotesque image that immediately flashed onto the screen gave any sense of that lovely, painted face. The abundant red hair now sprouted in a hideously frazzled ponytail from an otherwise bald skull. The rosy cheeks were gone, along with the little doll eyes. In fact, the “original” remains of Yde Girl revealed almost no face at all, or at least not one with discernible features. Her “skin,” if it could be called that, was ash gray. Her nose was entirely flattened, and her cheek and cheekbones looked as if they’d been beaten into a featureless mass, so that the “face” of Yde Girl appeared more or less melted, her eyes mere drooping slits, her mouth little more than a hole gouged into a lump of clay.
Find me.
It was Diana’s voice. She wasn’t there, of course, but the vacant space where I imagined her lips at my ear seemed oddly electrified, as if some presence had briefly taken form, then vanished, leaving only its tingling imprint in the empty air. I got to my feet, as if yanked by an invisible hand, then walked to the window, steadied myself, and looked out onto a brilliant, and profoundly ordinary, autumn day.
Find me.
Suddenly it was no longer what actually existed beyond the window that I saw, but a narrow trail through a field of tall, gently swaying reeds, my gaze moving like an invisible camera, following a teenaged girl as she closes in upon the bog, catching her only in glimpses of her flaming red hair as she swims in and out of an early morning mist. Then, in a no less sudden shift, it was Jason I trailed behind, moving with him toward the pond, his shadow drifting over the summer grass, into the darkness visible, as I abruptly saw it, of his approaching death.
And I instantly knew that this had been Diana’s design all along, to bring me back to Jason, a murder she clearly thought no less painfully unresolved.
As if summoned by some weird telepathy, Diana was waiting beside my car when I left work that evening, leaning against the rear bumper, eating an apple. She was wearing a dark red shirt, with the collar lifted, so that its tips gave the appearance of small wings at her throat. I half expected them to flutter.
“Hi, Davey,” she said. “Did you get what I sent you?”
“You mean, Yde Girl?” I answered. “Yes, I got it.” I gave no hint that I felt certain that I’d uncovered the design. “What interests you about that … murder?”
“I don’t know,” Diana answered. “It’s just something Dad used to do. Read about old crimes.”
“I don’t remember him doing that.”
“Oh, yes,” Diana said. “William Roughead, for example. Thomas de Quincey’s ‘On Murder.’ He said reading about old crimes taught him something about justice.”
“And what was that?” I asked pointedly. “That it was hard to achieve … but worth it.” I chuckled dryly. “I could have told him that.”
“He loved a particular thought of De Quincey’s,” Diana added with a sense of studied nostalgia, as if she were researching her past rather than simply recalling it. “That a man doesn’t need to keep his eyes in his breeches when he confronts murder.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“That faced with a murderer, you know what you know,” Diana answered. I smiled. “Opinion is not admissible in court.”
“If it’s only that,” Diana said.
She added nothing more about the Old Man or De Quincey or murder or her vague concept of knowing “what you know,” but instead reached far back and gave the apple a hard throw, sending it arching across the driveway and into the wooded area at the other side.
“Let’s go for a ride,” she said. “Where to?” I asked.
“Dover Gorge,” she answered.
“Why there?”
“Because that’s where Dad and I had our last good talk, Davey,” Diana said. “And I want to have another one, but this time with you.”
We drove toward Dover Gorge through a landscape that was, to say the least, multicolored, and on the way I recalled the trips we’d taken there as children, the Old Man at the wheel, windows down in all weather, wind whipping through his wildly disheveled hair. We’d had a small car, and he’d never liked being physically crowded. Because of that I’d been relegated to the backseat, Diana up front, the two of them talking about whatever Great Idea the Old Man had chosen for the day’s subject, death, the afterlife, the lessons of history, conversations to which I no longer attempted to contribute.
“Lascaux,” Diana said after a moment. “Have you heard of it?”
“It’s a cave, isn’t it?” I asked, reaching back to some reference I remembered from a travel magazine.
“In France,” Diana said with a nod. “It has around fifteen hundred prehistoric drawings. Some are beautifully colored. They used vegetable pigments and ocher, the first painters.”
She smiled and I recalled all the many times we’d sat in the Old Man’s library, she beneath the light, explaining this new interest or that one, transforming the most ordinary things, a bird’s nest, a pinecone, into objects of unearthly fascination.
“They drew animals, mostly,” she added. “No human beings, but that’s not unusual in prehistoric art.” She faced ahead, as if searching for the first glimpse of Dover Gorge. “The unusual thing about Lascaux is that the cave floor was covered with thousands of reindeer bones.” She paused, as she often had in her younger days, to intensify interest, create dramatic emphasis, add a beat of intellectual suspense.
“But there’s not a single drawing of a reindeer in Lascaux,” Diana said. “Why do you suppose that is, Davey?”
“I have no idea,” I answered.
For a moment I thought she was going to attempt an answer to her own question, but instead, she shrugged. “Neither do I,” she said. “But it’s something to think about.”
“And you’ve been thinking about it, I suppose?” I asked cautiously. “Yes.”
“About Lascaux in particular?”
“No,” Diana answered. “But that whole business of no reindeer bones.”
“And concluded what?”
“No conclusion,” Diana said. “Just a notion that maybe they didn’t paint the animals they ate because they had to separate themselves from them.”
“Why would they need to do that?”
Her eyes sparkled oddly, like one caught in dark conjecture. “Because you have to separate yourself from something before you can kill it,” she said.
We reached Dover Gorge in a bluish twilight that gave the whole area a ghostly feel, or if not that, then the timelessness of unfeeling things. The granite walls were very high and appeared to lean forward like great stone giants looking down at the tiny, frightened creatures over whom they asserted a terrible dominion.
We parked in a nearly deserted lot, got out of the car, and stood facing the nearest of the cliffs.
“There’s a crevice over there,” Diana said with certainty, so that it was clear that she had a map of the gorge in her mind. She raised her arm and indicated a path that led into the woods. “That little trail goes to it,” she added. “The crevice is very narrow, barely big enough for a human being to get through.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked. “From something I read,” Diana answered.
With that we moved across the lot and into the woods, walking together down a path that grew increasingly narrow as we approached the stone wall. At the wall, Diana glanced left and right, then with a quick nod, led me to a second trail, this one unused and untended, so that we walked more slowly, plowing through the thickening undergrowth until we reached a jagged breach that ran upward from the base to the full height of the wall.
“Here,” she said. “Here is where he heard it.”
“Heard what?” I asked.
For a moment she seemed unsure of an answer. Then she said, “A murmur of stones.” She took a small square pamphlet from the pocket of her blouse. It was very old, with yellow pages, and looked as if, at any moment, it might turn to dust.
“Douglas Price,” she added. “He came here in 1947.” She opened the pamphlet and delicately began turning the pages. “He’d been an airman in the war. Thirty-seven sorties.”
I’d seen enough war movies to know what that meant, thirty-seven takeoffs, the skyward thrust, then the leveling out, the long flight over lakes and farmland, to where the target waited with its network of defending guns.
“He had trouble with loud noises after that,” Diana added. “He found them ‘alarming.’”
I imagined Price as a young man in a wildly shaking plane, the fuselage rattling so loudly in midair he must have thought it would surely tear apart, the noise of exploding shells finally drowning out the inhuman shuddering of the plane, so that the world must have become in those few moments he soared above the target little more than an unbearably deafening roar.
“He got a job at Brigham,” Diana said.
Brigham, I thought, where the Old Man had twice been taken, first when I was five, then a second time, years later, so that he might have died there had Diana not left college and brought him home.
“There were quite a few soldiers in Brigham in 1947,” Diana added. She appeared to retreat to that era just after the war, when the debris had come floating back in waves of wounded bodies and damaged minds. “Price listened to their stories.” She glanced down at the pamphlet, turned to a page she’d already marked, studied what was written there a moment, then looked up at me. “One day he went for a walk and ended up here at Dover Gorge.”
Now she was with him, as I could clearly see, walking along beside him as he drifted up the steadily narrowing trail to where the great stone split.
“It was a bright summer day,” she said. “Green, dotted with white flowers.”
This sounded like a quotation, so it didn’t surprise me when she lifted the pamphlet slightly. “His writing is pretty bad, actually,” she said. “Very mannered, I mean.”
Then she read:
The simple lushness of the scene served to avert my thoughts from life’s pervasive acrimonies, so that I felt myself transported into a fantastical world of sweetness and harmony, before the first branch had been in anger lifted, the first stone hurled.
She looked up and smiled. “See what I mean about the writing?”
Then she resumed reading, and as she read I felt her wizardry again, how easily she could pull you into the deep water of whatever subject commanded her attention.
Now I joined her at Price’s side, the three of us moving “along a dense, verdant path with rivulets of white flowers on both sides.” Together we drifted deeper and deeper into the woods, then along the side of the cliff until we reached a jagged fissure that Price somehow saw as “tragic, a broken heart of stone.”
“This is where he stopped,” Diana said. “Right at this spot where we’re standing.” She lowered the pamphlet and let her eyes drift up the cruelly jagged rift in the granite wall. “This is where he heard them. Voices.”
She had memorized Price’s words, and now recited them. “‘A rustling in the undergrowth, along with numerous faint cries.’” She drew her gaze back to me and continued her recitation in the same soft voice she’d used as a child, and which once again, after all these years, I found utterly mesmerizing:
I cannot describe the sensation that settled upon me, save as a visitation, a haunting. And yet, I saw no floating apparition, heard no wailing, as of a child in the wood or at the end of a corridor. The ghostliness gave no visual clue as to its nature or identity. It spoke only, and this in soft cries and a low, unbroken wail which translated to me a feeling of abandonment, of helplessness in the face of grave affliction, of ancient wounds unhealed and ancient wrongs unavenged and thus condemned forever to cry out from the hard eternal grit of immemorial stone.
She closed the pamphlet slowly, like a priest at the end of a homily. “Douglas Price is still alive, you know,” she said. “I’m going to talk to him.”
“Why?”
She turned toward the granite wall we stood beside and with a strange, impossible grace, reached out and raked her fingers down the jagged fissure in exactly the way I’d seen her touch the side of Jason’s face. “To find out what he knows,” she said.