The Diviner's Tale (37 page)

"What worked?"

"We—" said Morgan, reddening.

"The divining rod worked," Jonah answered, catching his breath and staring at Laura. "Hello again."

She stared back, said, "Hello there," and for a singular instant it seemed like she was a long-lost daughter, that all three of these children were mine.

"Laura, this is Jonah's brother, Morgan."

"Hey," they said to one another.

Jonah said, "If you were talking about something important we can head back out."

"That's all right," Laura said. "I don't mean to push you out of your own house."

For the first time since moving into Mendes Road we ate with the shades drawn. It was warm out and the air inside was close as a crypt, but I was afraid enough on Laura's behalf that I'd trained the two fans we owned on the table and pulled down the window sashes in case someone outside got it in his head to prowl. None of us bothered to remark on these precautions, probably because Laura was as nervous as I, and the twins sensed it was better not to ask. Still, we managed to talk all over the map, in dribs and drabs, about baseball, poetry, math, soldering, the Cocteau Twins, whether I should continue to wear makeup, and the art of divination—my abandonment of it, Jonah's and now Morgan's fascination with it—all at one sitting. It didn't take a diviner to see that in another life, on another Earth, if the world were different, these three could be the closest of friends. We might well have carried on for many more hours, so familial was the mood, had the phone not rung. My phone that rarely rang on any given day.

Charley's voice on my outmoded answering machine. I heard his first few words and picked up in part because I didn't want the others to eavesdrop whatever message he might leave, in part because it dawned on me that Charley, of anyone, might be my sounding board. Even my possible pillar. He had been in times past. For privacy I took the call in my study, which was nothing more than a small room choked with books, drawings by the twins, a file cabinet filled with teaching notes and client invoices, a huge map of ancient Greece, some empty shelves where I used to store rolled geodetic surveys—now exiled to the attic—and assorted other stuff.

He called to say he was finished with packing his mother's belongings and that he was about to wrap everything up. The house closing was scheduled for the beginning of the next week, after which she'd be headed to warmer climes and he would return to Wiscasset. "Before," as he put it, "the summer people spend all their money elsewhere and I wind up in some boatyard scraping barnacles off the bottom of hulls for a living."

"I doubt that's your fate, Charley."

Hesitant, voice lowered, he asked, "Are you all right?"

Masking my anxiety seemed impossible anymore. Besides, I didn't harbor any desire to hide myself from Charley. I said, "No, not really."

"Do you want to talk?"

"I can't."

"Can't or won't or shouldn't?"

"All the above," understanding that Charley knew me far too well to bother with any sort of obfuscation, that he carried strong memories of how Cassie Brooks thought and acted as a girl and, in some ways, as a woman. It occurred to me that Charley was the one person who might, long ago, have acted as my trusted confidant, the one with whom I could have shared the secrets about Emily's death and Roy's violation. How I wanted to share with him now what was happening, lean into him a little for strength. But I had made my promise to Laura. I was the confidante now. I was the one who needed to be the rock.

So here was the great hurdle, I understood, while I sat talking with Charley and watching the window-framed stars begin to appear. As simple as the first equation Jonah ever learned or when Morgan discovered that the best way to catch a ball was to watch it straight into his glove. Laura was silenced and so was I because we never learned to speak about these most important things. We weren't illiterates, weren't mad, or fools. We each loved the idea of our lives enough. Just we didn't know how to say we were afraid or why. We didn't know how to say ourselves. It was high time that I, for one, learned.

"Charley," I said, "I do want to talk with you."

"Any time, right now if you like."

"I can't right now. There's someone here," hoping not to sound too mysterious. "But tomorrow should work. I need to talk with somebody first."

"Something is up, isn't it."

"Yes and no."

"'Yes and no' means yes. But look, I'm here for you whenever you like. Just give a call when it's good for you."

"Thanks, Charley."

We said our good nights and I sat quiet in the study for a few minutes before rejoining the others, whom I could hear talking away, even laughing, in the kitchen. My eye ran from island to island on the map of Greece. Naxos, Rhodes, Samothrace. Icaria, where Daedalus's son was buried after flying too close to the sun and plunging into the sea—no more fortunate a child than Martine de Berthereau's in Vincennes. All that the map finally stood for were stories upon stories upon stories. Paris and his golden apple, Helen of Troy. The oracle at Delphi whose shrine was inscribed with the most simple yet impossible advice ever offered,
Know thyself.
And yes, my story, too. All we had ever been were stories, and saying ourselves, unveiling our stories, was the best, the only, chance at divining ourselves.

L
AURA SLEPT
in my room that night and I made up a bed on the sofa. Once the lights were out, I opened the living room windows, and the plentiful music of crickets and tree frogs that lived in the nearby wetland filled the air. The ticking clock and its loud chiming made it hard to sleep, so I got up and stopped the pendulum. The warmth of the room was stifling, despite the nighttime air that wafted languorously through the windows. I lay there dressed only in an oversized white shirt that Nep had passed down to me years ago. Didn't draw the sheet over me. In my tired mind floated the image of my father there on the porch that afternoon, tranquil in his failing body. Next morning, as I knew he would have advised me if he could, I had to convince Laura to call her mother and Niles.

It wasn't cigarette smoke filtering through the window that awakened me with a jolt this night but the rank, wet breath of the smoking man murmuring in my ear. Nor could I speak or shriek or move, though I tried. My mouth was stuffed with the sheet, and my hands were caught together in the garrote of his strong hand, pinned behind my head. It wouldn't have taken much to asphyxiate me, so I breathed deeply through my nostrils and ceased kicking my legs when he tightened his grip even harder and got his free arm around my neck. I have the boys, he said—Roy said. His voice was that of the boy I had known, not a grown man, yet it was unmistakably his. But it's the girl I want—

Then heard a scream outside in the dark and woke again, this time for real, on the sofa and drenched in sweat, all alone.

Taking the stairs two at a time, I ran first to Morgan's bedroom and snapped on the light. He was gone. Maybe he was with Jonah. I rushed down the hall, grabbed in the dark for his doorknob but soon realized the door was wide open and when I switched on the light saw that Jonah's bed, too, was empty. Shouting their names, I scrambled back along the hallway and burst into my room to find Laura sitting up in bed, blinking, yawning, a haze of sleepy confusion on her face.

"Do you know where the boys are?"

"No, what's—?"

"Laura, I want you to stay right here"—slipping on jeans and shoes—"and not breathe a word or answer anybody if they call your name, unless it's me. You hear me?"

"Yes," she said. Her face was drained of all color.

"I'll be right back."

"Don't go," she pleaded, feebly, shaking her head.

"I'll be right back. Just don't move."

As I lurched downstairs, skidding on the last steps, grasping the newel post to keep from falling, I continued to shout their names, and though I sensed the effort was pointless I went through the house turning on every light in the place, including the quartz porch lamps. The flashlight we kept under the sink was missing, so I bounded out into the night without it. Standing in the middle of Mendes, I squinted both ways in the black. Warm wind gentled the treetops. A ways up the road, a car I didn't recognize, a van rather, was parked on the shoulder half-hidden by bushes. I jogged toward it and looked in the windows as best I could in the sloe murk. Trying a door, unlocked, I opened it, called Morgan's name, even climbed in and blindly patted around. Maybe somebody had simply broken down and left it here until morning for the wrecker to tow it into the shop. Wishful thinking.

Back behind the house I could now see, in the strong light thrown from the blazing windows, that the shed door hung open. There was no sign of the boys anywhere, though. For a moment, I simply stood and felt the drumming of my heart in my chest, heard my labored breath, and scanned the surrounding gloom. I soon caught sight of a subtle pinprick of white, floating up and down, rhythmical out there in the obscure chaos of woods beyond the shed. As if ensnared by it, or implicated, I was drawn away from the yard and into the confusion of bushes and prickly brambles toward the eye of light. I held up my hands and arms as I walked to shield me a little from the invisible branches and rough-leaved shoots and barbed multiflora that whipped about my face. "Jonah? Morgan?" I asked, the light much closer now.

"Cass?" I heard. Jonah's voice.

He held the lamp of the flashlight to his chin, the beam directed upward. It cast grotesque shadows that bore an awful resemblance to the death mask he had playfully held over his face in the Bryants' library.

"Give me that," I said, taking the flashlight and pulling him to me in a tight embrace. "Where's Morgan?"

"He went up the road looking."

"For what?"

"For one of the Skoler kids, is what we thought. He was in the backyard. Threw some rocks at our windows to wake us up."

Jonah and I started immediately back toward the house. "For god-sakes, why didn't you come downstairs and tell me?"

"Morgan wanted to show him what's what, that's why. But when we got outside we saw it wasn't a kid. We chased after him up the road, but I couldn't keep up. I saw them cut over into the marsh, and I—I was looking for them out back. That's where I heard him scream."

The very idea of Morgan screaming left me in a state of blank despair. We reemerged from the woods into the yard. The house, which I had never seen in the middle of the night with every last one of its lights on, looked like a squat, square, brilliantly illuminated ship, a steamer all lit up in its midnight mooring, readied for a predawn voyage somewhere. The shadows thrown by tree trunks and the shed stretched all the way to the edge of the grayed lawn, and out into the darkness beyond.

"I've got to call Niles," I told Jonah as I unlocked the back door and we went inside. The kitchen was warm and close and unforgivingly bright. "Then I'll go look for him while you stay here with Laura."

"That's whose name we heard him say when he woke us up, you know."

The dispatcher told me he would send a patrol car over. I asked was it possible for him to contact Niles Hubert and, hearing him demur, assuring me the officer would be able to determine if that was necessary, I hung up, took a deep breath, and telephoned Niles at home. We weren't on for more than a few fast words. He was going to be angrier with me than I imagined he already was when I didn't follow his instruction to remain indoors with Jonah and Laura, not to venture outside. But no way was I going to leave Morgan out there by himself.

Next came a flurry of compressed moments the most prescient diviner might never have visioned. A series of actions that seemed to occur simultaneously—paradoxically—in both slow motion and at breakneck speed. Just as I was about to head back outside and call my son's name until he answered me, he pounded on the front door, shouting my name instead. Although his face was cut from running through brambles and his bare feet were muddy up past the ankles from wading through brackish swampland, he wasn't as injured as that scream had compelled me to believe. I threw my arms around him, pulled him inside, and relocked the door. Then, as Jonah and Morgan talked wildly about what they had seen and done, I turned, unthinking, and ran tripping up the stairs, only to find that Laura was gone. Another search of the house, all three of us crying out her name. But she had vanished.

Of course. The whole exercise had been a trap, a setup. He needed to lure all three of us away from her and did so flawlessly. Even that scream had been a sham, part of his program to draw me out in search of my boys so he might get to Laura undeterred. It wasn't as if he didn't know the inside of our house. He would have had plenty of time while we were on Covey to learn its rooms. I hardly needed to walk up the road to confirm that the van was gone, but I did, and it was.

The diviner in me, the sometime forevisioner, had been betrayed by herself. I had betrayed the mother in me, and the daughter. I had betrayed not just Laura but the friend I had tried to be to her, the supposed friend to whom she had come to for help.

Niles arrived even before Bledsoe and Shaver and, quite abruptly, several converging others, the spinning cherry and silver lights on their cars filling the branches of the trees and clapboard siding with a surreal, gaudy stream of color. It was like Henderson's all over again, but rather than a pristine blue-skied afternoon, it was a waning crow-black night. Niles and I went inside while the others set off, some on foot, some in their vehicles, in search of the missing girl and her abductor. Niles sat at the kitchen table, looking haggard there and strange in his civvies with the holstered gun, the badge, the noisy two-way. The twins hovered at the periphery. He needn't have said a word for me to know what was running through his mind, nor did he much bother. He said, simply, "So?"

"Yes, I admit she was here."

"And?"

"And she disappeared again—she was taken—within the last half-hour."

"You saw her leave with somebody?"