The Diviner's Tale (2 page)

I was feeling okay. My twins were in school. They wanted to go to camp this year, where they could play baseball and swim and be free of me, and I was going to let them. For all three of us this was a big deal. Because they were going to the same place, I knew Jonah and Morgan would be fine. Would have family right there to look out for them. Meant an empty house for me, but part of Mama Cass—one of my least favorite nicknames, and I had more than a few, from Andy to Assandra, given most people avoided the mouthful
Cassandra
when addressing me—looked forward to the prospect.

Not that I had a single iota of a plan for what to do with my fancy free, beyond the couple of add-on summer school courses the district administration had agreed to, at my request.

I needed the extra work to pay for the boys' summer away, which wasn't in my budget. Remedial reading for some younger students and a continuing education course in my favorite subject, Greek myth. I could do worse than wander behind Odysseus for a few months with my aging pupils, or discuss with them the twelve tasks of Hercules, the story of Pandora's box. I even proposed to screen that old camp classic,
Jason and the Argonauts,
with its stop-motion animated sword-wielding skeletons, ravenous Cyclops, and serpent-haired monster Medusa.

Then, without warning or any clear reason my mood should change, a black sensation just poured in, over, and through me. It felt as if a spontaneous, malevolent thunderhead had come flying fast over the ridge to instantly eclipse my world. I was, essentially and all of a sudden, deeply depressed. In retrospect, I wonder if I didn't weep. Must have blinked through my tears because I did move forward out of the flat scrub and into the edge of the forest there.

A girl. Maybe in her middle teens. She wore a white sleeveless blouse, bedazzled with large dark violet flowers, fanciful orchids or gardenias, which was knotted just above her navel. A denim skirt came down not quite to her knees. Barefoot. Her feet pointed outward in a kind of loose relevé, like some ballet dancer frozen in the classic first position. Her wavy hair was brushed neatly, elegantly, over her shoulders, as if she were going to a party. She was hanged with a rope about her neck, not swaying in any breeze, but as dead still as a plumb stone. Her face bore an unaccountably serene, unforgiving half-smile. Her pale, quite colorless eyes stared straight ahead. She seemed somehow familiar, but that couldn't be right.

For one last moment of hope I thought, No, this was a doll. A horrific and perfectly wrought wax figurine. Lifelike to a fault. Its martyrdom here was ceremonial. Some sort of devil worship or maybe a terrible practical joke. Prankster drugged-up teens from a nearby town with nothing better to do than hold a sick ritual, a hazing in the middle of nowhere. Then I looked once more at the ashen face. This was no mannequin, no lifelike dummy. She was none other than a girl who was alive probably last week, maybe yesterday, and wasn't alive now.

I couldn't help myself. I wasn't thinking. I should have left her alone. Shouldn't have touched anything. It was a crime scene, after all. Instead, I went and embraced her. She was light as a dried cornstalk. A shed skin. Wasn't cold or warm. I held her in my arms and told her I was sorry, that I wished with all my heart I could have helped her.

Only after a moment of standing there whispering these words did it dawn on me that I myself might be in danger. Averting my eyes from the girl, I backed away from the woods toward the clearing a little. Numb, I studied the shadows shuffling across the ground. The outcroppings of glacial schist that jutted up here and there. The thin pools of standing water left from last night's rain.

Last night's rain. Her clothing was neat and dry, which meant her hanging happened sometime this morning. I was seized by the sickening prospect that someone was nearby taking me in, deciding how to deal with this unexpected, unwelcome intrusion. Like him, or them, I needed to think what to do. Slowly, in a quivering whisper, I began to spell the word
patience
backward. One of Nep's many quaint and sane methods for clearing the mind before beginning to dowse. But this was not a usual divining, and I didn't make it through all the letters before realizing that the immediate world had gone quiet. It would have been comforting to hear some birdcall. No air moved through the trees to rustle their budded limbs and first leaves. Gone were the tree frogs' peepings I had heard. The dark tide of feeling that had engulfed me before now switched into another register. I became alert and focused and oddly unfeeling.

A hasty breeze arose. The highest branches of the trees creaked like rusty harrow tines. I turned in place and looked back the way I had come. A narrow path to the south of the scrub flat, which I hadn't noticed before, led through the thick growth toward a copse of cherries and ironwood beyond. Deer trail, I guessed, nothing to do with this girl. I turned to face her again. What unspeakable terror she must have experienced. Yet it didn't look like she had struggled. She appeared shocked and forlorn, yet so eerily serene. Which was more or less how I felt, though not serene but rather momentarily emptied, blank. Seemed as if I should apologize to her once more, this time for having to leave her here alone. Her feet were only a stool's height from the ground carpeted with last year's dead leaves and long creeping lovely ribbons of staghorn clubmoss. Curious how the ground around her appeared completely undisturbed. As if she'd been put here by some creature with wings.

Without thinking, I asked aloud, "Is anyone there?" My voice sounded smaller than I had ever heard it before. Hollow, reedy, and helpless.

Faint as a half-forgotten memory, I heard a family of chickadees call to one another. Like distant silver bells chiming an hour, their song insisted it was time to leave. My feet began to carry me away from the clearing. I had the distinct sensation of being watched, if not by living eyes, then by her calm and accusing ones. Despite my desire not to, I kept turning, looking behind. I must have run part of the way. No one followed me, so far as I could see.

My truck was still parked on the grass just off the washboard country road. Crazy that the sight of an obsolete Dodge pickup that needed new brakes and rotors and had way over a hundred thousand rough miles on it and no resale value could give me such a feeling of solace. I clambered in and started the engine. Couldn't have gotten a connection even if I owned a cell phone, which I didn't. The original Statlmeyer farm, which ran to thousands of acres when it was first settled, was the very definition of rural. They wouldn't be building any satellite towers around here for a country mile of years, despite how many developers rolled up their sleeves. My pickup jostled and jerked its way down the hill toward the paved road at the foot of the mountain.

I was hyperventilating, nauseated. Had to get to a land line. The old logging trail was not meant to be driven as fast as I did. A ride that had taken half an hour that morning took me no time at all to get back home. Strange how fear works. The farther from any personal danger I got, the less safe I felt.

"Could I get your name, please?" the woman on the other end asked again.

"Is there any way you can reach him wherever he is?"

"I told you Sheriff Hubert is out. Is this an emergency?"

"Yes, it's—"

"Hold on a moment."

Squeezing my eyes shut so tight they hurt, I began
e
and
c
and
n
and
e
and—

"Sergeant Bledsoe speaking," a man said. "You have an emergency to report?"

"Yes, yes. I need to report a girl, there's a dead girl, I—"

Bledsoe asked me questions one on top of the other. Did I know the girl? Could I give him the exact location? When was it that I made the discovery? Would I be willing to take them out there now? Was I all right, did I need medical attention, how soon could they send a patrol car by to pick me up, what was the name of the property owner again? I gulped out answers and he put me on hold for a long minute and came back on the phone to say they had contacted Sheriff Hubert and he'd already left where he was and would meet us at Statlmeyer's—no, Henderson's—within the hour.

I hung up and went to the bathroom. Washed my face with cold water and looked into the mirror. The visage I saw there was so contorted and distraught it seemed like that of a sister I never had who'd led a very hard life filled with chaos, setbacks, and secrets more terrible than my own. I had never before seen myself in such a harsh light. It was as if I had done the hanging.

Bledsoe drove me back out. He grilled me with questions I answered as best I could from within my daze. At least I had the wit to call my mother and ask her if she wouldn't mind dropping over so the boys didn't come home from school to an empty house. I thought it better not to explain what had happened. Other than the fact of that image of the hanged girl, I barely knew what happened myself.

"You're friends with Niles Hubert, I gather. He said to take good care of you."

I nodded. Not that Bledsoe saw me. He was driving fast with his lights flashing, no siren.

"How did you meet Henderson?"

"He was referred to me by Karl Statlmeyer."

"And when was that?"

"Two weeks ago, three."

"And what did he say?"

"He called me up and told me he'd heard good things about me and wanted to hire me to walk his land, dowse it, and give him some proposals about siting a pond and some possible building lots."

"And you do what?"

"I'm a diviner."

"And what does that mean?" His voice was low and flat, as dismissive as a slow flick of the wrist.

I was trying hard not to dislike Dennis Bledsoe with his shaved head and thick black eyebrows, one of which remained raised as if in a state of constant skepticism. Trying hard not to feel crushed by the way he seemed not to believe one word I said, and what he did believe, seemed to scoff at. He was just doing his job, I reminded myself, making necessary inquiries and all. But I had been to a few psychiatrists over the years, attempting to cope with the trauma of my brother's accident, and more than one of them sounded like him. A little unbelieving, and not a little patronizing.

"Did you notice what time it was when you found the body?"

"I don't wear a watch, but it must have been ten-thirty, or a little after that. I left home after my boys went to school, got there and spent a minute cutting myself a witching rod, and started walking." I recalled the angles at which the cloud-softened sun shadowed her face. "Between ten-thirty and -forty."

"You can tell the time that closely without a watch?"

I didn't respond.

"So you only met Henderson that once. What's his first name again?"

"George Henderson. We didn't meet. He called me up out of the blue, offered me the job, and I took it. I can give you his number. I'm sure he's not going to be happy about this."

"No, I guess not."

Niles was there with another man when we arrived. He opened his arms and held me close for so long that if Bledsoe suspected Niles and I had a history it was confirmed. He released me, stepped back still clasping one hand, said, "Of all people for this to happen to."

"Nothing really happened. That is, to me."

Niles finger-combed his hair, an old nervous tic of his. Prematurely streaked white against brown, no doubt because of his stressful work. He gave me one of his cherished frowns—the kind of frown that between friends is really a smile. It was a mute conciliatory scolding, as if to say, Something happened to you all right, who do you think you're kidding?

This was already midafternoon. The many clouds had flown out to sea, it appeared, and the sky was a cool, pristine blue. We walked down the wet declivity, away from the road. A family of finches peeped and bounded in short acrobatic bursts through the air as we left behind the upper field and entered a fairly dense forest of second-growth maples and hemlock. We had to step over and around fallen branches strewn like uninterpretable
I Ching
yarrow sticks tossed at random by snowy winters.

I was trying to keep my mind smooth. Back when Bledsoe first picked me up, I had decided I couldn't afford to see her again. I would escort them as close as possible, get them through that scrub flat to the edge of the stand of trees where she was suspended, and send them ahead by themselves. A lone veery called somewhere above us, sounding for all the world like a diminutive alien transmitting its code name back to the mother ship,
eerie, eerie.
Spring peepers were carrying on in a lowland off to our left. I could hear Niles breathing more heavily than a man his age ought to.

"How much farther you think it is?" he asked.

"Not much."

We hiked down through a kind of amphitheater of bluestone boulders shaped like huge loaves, which opened up into the northern end of the long scrub plain. I told Niles we were almost there now and in his kindness he anticipated me. Said, "I'm going to leave you with Shaver once we're close. No need for you to see this again. Sergeant Bledsoe and I can take it from here."

As we made our way through the thicket of mountain laurel, it occurred to me that here, of course, was Henderson's pond. A respectable lake, in fact, if he wanted to go to the trouble of paying for dozers to displace the earth beneath our feet. I glanced around. The flat was hemmed by impressive hills. Wondered if it mightn't even have been a shallow basin long ago that silted in like many do over time. Such irony. Had I thought of this earlier, I might not have bothered to wander farther. And if I hadn't, well, then what? I realized I had been somehow drawn away from my purpose here. This morning, without knowing it, I left off divining water and instead had begun to divine the girl.

I saw we were near and told Niles this was the place. She was just up ahead. Not even a hundred feet. Right at the curtain of woods. He told John Shaver, a thin, relaxed, kindly young man whose long white face reminded me of a pony I used to ride when I was a kid, to stay here with me. They'd be back in a little while.