"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.
29
LAURA 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 l
earn 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?"
"No."
"So how do you know she didn't leave by herself?"
"Because I just know that isn't what happened."
He asked me to explain and I told Niles everything. He sat listening, writing notes in his pad, neither prompting me with questions nor expressing any opinion about what he heard. "You didn't call me" were his flat first words in response to my account, spoken without looking up after closing his notepad.
"Niles, I made a promise I wouldn't tell anybody she was with me. She would have walked right out the door if I refused."
"I wish you had let me know."
"She came looking to buy time. I owed that much to her and myself, too."
Niles turned that over in his mind. He looked at the boys, each of them one at a time, then back at me. "I know you feel a deep connection to Laura Bryant. Do you have any idea where she might be?"
"You're asking me to divine her?"
"You divined her once."
Although I wasn't going to argue that point again—indeed couldn't, since Niles was no more wrong about this than Laura had been when I denied it to her—I did know where Roy had taken her. I saw them quite clearly on the overgrown, unmarked path to the caves, Laura stumbling behind him as they traipsed through the dense darkness, her hands knotted with rope—no, it was wire—an even crueler version of the garrote I myself experienced in my nightmare vision.
"I know where they are," I said.
Niles rose to his feet, conferred briefly with Shaver, who would stay at Mendes Road with Morgan and Jonah on the off chance Roy Skoler had it in mind to return here, then asked me if I needed to bring a jacket where we were going. Warm as it was, I put on a light Windbreaker if only to be able to offer it to Laura when we found her. I gave each of my sons a kiss, telling Morgan to wash his face and feet, asking Shaver to call a medic if any of his scratches were more than superficial, and left with Niles. Bledsoe and another patrolman followed us, lights flashing but no blaring siren, as we sped along straightaways and a series of switchbacks that led up toward the place where I had parked only the day before. When we got close, Niles doused the overhead lights and two-wayed Bledsoe to follow suit. Now we crept forward as both cars directed their searchlights on the woodland curtain that edged the road. Soon enough we sighted the van—of course, Laura's "long car"—parked with a kind of forlorn overconfidence just off the road, not quite hidden by swaths of rhododendron. Its shiny bumper and back windows winked under the glare of searchlights.
"Stay here, Cass," Niles said, climbing out of the car. He leveled his flashlight in the direction of the van, holding it aloft with one hand, its butt end resting on his shoulder. In his other hand, his drawn gun. The three men fanned out and approached the van from several directions. I knew it was abandoned, so got out and walked around to the front of Niles's car, where I leaned against the hood to wait. Four-thirty. The sky already paling faintly along the eastern horizon of gently rolling mountaintops. The rosy-colored fingers of dawn would be spreading over the ridge in an hour. Rosy-colored fingers—was that how Homer phrased it in The Iliad or The Odyssey? The epic of war, or the epic of homecoming?
Niles returned. "Nobody inside. Where was it from here you thought they went?"
We threaded our way, marching single file through woods I had maneuvered both blindfolded and with eyes wide open, such that the predawn darkness meant nothing to me. The first birds, restless thrushes, had begun fluting away, unseen as always in the highest branches. Underfoot, the grasses and ferns were sopping wet with dew, making the trek slippery wherever the path bent steeply up or down. Niles and the others had apparently silenced their radios and none of the men conversed along the way. "We near yet?" were the only words Niles said to me.
And for myself, what was in my mind? My boys, naturally, along with my lost Laura. As for this overarching instinct that had settled within me, this inward observance, I had to hope it wasn't mere wishful thinking, but rather a true perception. A divining. Nor was it long before I would discover whether what I had pictured turned out to be just some empty, dashed hope, or a vivid forevision.
I was pretty sure I could hear the distant trickle of the creek splashing its way along the crooked, rocky bed. With that, I raised my arm and stepped to the side so Niles could stand next to me. I pointed ahead, indicating we were very near now. Whispered once more what I had outlined to him during the ride over, about the little conclave of recesses in the rocks, the Indian caves.
This was where Roy would have brought Laura, I assured him, and, following his directives, stood away while the three men closed in, their flashlights darting about crazily in the penumbral light. Other than the cracking of broken branches echoing across the forested hogback, the softly shushing creek well below, the calm birdcall, the nearby world had gone mute.
Then, the birds lost their voices and I knew what it meant.
"Roy," I shouted, running ahead of the officers headlong toward a flat apron of granite just past the cave where I had hidden so long ago after Christopher's death. "Roy Skoler," my voice as sharp and furious as I had ever heard it, seeing him standing there, a shadow among shadows. Other voices rang out at the same time, on every side of me it seemed, a surround of wild utterances. As I passed the mouth of my cave, I tripped, fell hard on the hard stone, turned and saw the tenebrous outline of Laura there, reaching out toward me with her hands joined together as if in supplicating prayer. I tore the gag out of her mouth but didn't untie her, in part because there was no time, and also because she was safer, for one more long minute, where she lay.
This final act was not remotely what I had envisioned. Maybe my gift, if such a word obtained after so much dread and discord, had led me here to this place and moment. But it was some other instinct that brought me to my feet and sent me straight toward Roy Skoler, who hovered, then dashed sideways, then backed away nimbly, in a perplexing effort to both thwart and bewilder me. I didn't know what I was doing. This was all accomplished without rational thought intervening or directing my feet. I called his name once more with almost ethereal, unreal calm now. Roy Skoler, those two words, like disembodied curses.
Now so close to the man that I could see his encumbered eyes and hear his thin fast breathing, he rasped at me, "I should have saved you the trouble of turning into such a fool," and dodged to the left with miraculous celerity.
I mirrored his every movement, my eyes locked on the man in the glowering light, still speechless but needing to speak, to say myself.
"Roy Skoler" was all that came out of my mouth, his name for the third time but only in a whisper now. If names were doors to ideas, then Roy Skoler's harbored for me all the ugliness that animated this man.
"But I didn't kill you. I lo
ved you. You owe me your life," he said, trying for the last time to snare me.
"Loved me? Owe you? I owe you nothing, you monster."
"Nothing—" he echoed, and simply stared, almost contemplative in the growing light, while behind me Niles and the others came crashing through the underbrush and right out onto the rocky shelf, shouting at me to move away, firing out his name as if the syllables were bullets, ordering him to get on his knees with hands up, telling him it was all over.
It was not over like that, though. Instead, I witnessed Roy Skoler slowly blink like some antique doll whose mechanism was exhausted, turn on his heel, and begin to flee in a kind of slow motion, only to disappear altogether, hovering for an impossible moment before falling into the shafts of stone below. Before I was quite able to understand what had just happened, I heard a thrush call out, then a chickadee, and then a bird I could not identify, until the air was filled with birdsong, nothing unusual really, the kind that resounded in this remote place every morning, even during the coldest winter.
30
GABRIEL NEPTUNE BROOKS, Nep as he was known, passed away a handful of days after my doppelgänger Laura Bryant had been found alive, shaken but unharmed, in that cave above Henderson's valley. He had gone to the kitchen for a glass of milk. Maybe he thought it would quell the heartburn he was feeling. My mother found him lying on the floor, the carton of milk beside him having drained its contents in a large pool, the refrigerator door still open. A massive coronary chose a more final independence for my father. Independence from losing more of his self to the disease of fading memory. Despite my earlier sense of what was impending, I found myself upended by Rosalie's news. Yet, in a curious way, I understood that he had been a breathing ghost these past, often exquisite weeks. He had already lifted away from the earth just a little. Or, that is, begun melding with it.
My father was cremated, as he had requested in a sealed letter written to Rosalie and me back when he was first informed about his condition. His ashes were broadcast—thrown like seed from our hands—into the pond, again according to his instructions. Dust to dust, water to water, he wrote.
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