The Diviner's Tale (25 page)

As we did, many sentiments convened in my head. The first was shame, because I'd never wanted him to divine. Hadn't I sworn to myself over the years that I would stop this vexing legacy from being passed beyond me? Second was a contradictory pride that he had taken an interest in learning, had allowed me to pass him this unwieldy and all but obsolescent torch. And third was a sense of validation that, yes, this was real. I had witnessed only validity in Jonah's eyes when he looked into mine for explanation. Right here was living proof Nep was not a fraud and I, when not working with the safety net of research spread beneath where I tightroped, was not a fraud, either. How I wished Nep were here to witness Jonah Brooks become himself.

On the other hand, I was glad nobody had seen us and that ours had been a moment of private grace, both substantial in its end result but also duly ephemeral since it would never happen again. With Jonah's help I went ahead and finished siting Partridge's wells, knowing that I would not send him a bill after all. I never got paid for the Henderson job, because for myriad reasons, not the least of which was that I had failed him, I never invoiced the man. Broke as I was, I now thought it better to scrape by on savings or a small loan from the bank using my house as collateral than take any more money from this craft that had left me in such a confused, exasperated state. Jonah had proven himself a diviner and that was going to have to suffice. Just because he landed on his feet this time didn't mean he needed to leap off a ledge twice.

A
S I DROVE
to the park, having left Jonah and his lawn mower at my parents' place so he could work on it with Nep, my thoughts turned to Niles and Melanie. She had no reason to worry about me and her husband, yet I was embarrassedly excited to see him. It dawned on me, as I got out of the truck, there was a fair chance I had always been so distant with other men because I had invented a kind of false marriage for myself with Niles. My request that he be the twins' godfather. Was it a ruse? Had I married Niles in absentia, been an illusory wife? If only I could cut a witching rod and dowse myself for answers.

My problem had always been that I could forevision what others ought to do but was too often blinded when it came to my own life, trainspotting my own future. Don't go to the movies, I could warn Christopher. If you need water, I might advise Partridge and so many others, you'll find it here. There's a girl in dire trouble in these woods, I could report, and even though she hadn't been hanged, hadn't died, she was there nevertheless. No hardy magenta campion like my father wanted me to be, I felt uprooted and more lost than ever. And, as I walked across the macadam parking lot to the well-trodden path around the edge of the lake where Niles and I'd grown accustomed to meeting, I had to admit I was frightened about what I imagined was coming.

Under the gathering clouds and light wind that threatened an afternoon shower, some indifferent swans paddled along the far shore, making soft chevrons in their wakes. A man in an aluminum rowboat was fishing for bass. When rocked by his casting, the sides of the boat caught sporadic sunlight and flashed, as if he were trying to signal me some message but I didn't know the code. The minute I sat on the lakeside bench, I realized I should have brought something for Niles. Blueberries, a seashell from Covey.

He didn't give me much time to worry about it. His car pulled into the lot soon enough, and I watched him stroll the path toward me, hands in his pockets. A family had started a fire in one of the square metal barbecue stands held aloft on a steel rod in the picnic area. I could smell its burning charcoal briquettes downwind and across the water. A girl's laughter floated over with it. Otherwise, the park was vacant this afternoon. Maybe the darkening clouds and breeze kept people away.

I stood and gave him a strong embrace. The relief I felt at being in his presence was overwhelming, as if the lake were filled with warm lavendered water and I had just slipped into it. "How have you been?" I asked as we sat together toward one end of the weathered wooden bench.

"Been all right," he began, then said, "Actually, I've been worried about you, if you want to know the truth. I'm glad to see you got some sun. You look more rested."

Rested was not how I felt, but I thanked Niles anyway. "I know you might have thought I was being a coward to cut out like that—"

"No, I didn't, I thought you were being perfectly sane. Nep do all right?"

"He goes in and out. But some days up there I swear you'd never know he had any problems. He's especially wonderful with the boys."

"I didn't like the sound of that man showing up out of nowhere and harassing them, though. You have any idea what that might have been about?"

Here I hesitated. The postcard was in my jacket pocket, ready to be turned over to Niles. The story about Millicent's theft and the hideous rag effigy—my poor hanged girl brought to life, as it were, on Covey—was fresh as an open wound in my mind. Resurfacing memories of Roy Skoler's past with me and unfounded suspicions about him now simmered, fairly or unfairly, within. Much as I wanted to divulge everything, I knew that if I broached all this with Niles, no matter how hard I begged him to keep it to himself, hoping to avoid another wave of public scrutiny and humiliation, he would inevitably urge me to file an official report. Breaking and entering, petty burglary, unlawful trespass, harassment, who knows what all. An investigation would be launched. None of which I felt I could handle just now.

"They didn't seem overly alarmed by him," I said.

"You were, though."

"Maybe I overreacted."

"Maybe you didn't."

I looked at Niles there beside me and registered his distress. I could swear his hair had grayed even since the last time I saw him and that the green of his eyes was clouded by uneasiness. He looked both exhausted and worried.

"Niles, what do you mean by that?"

His response was punctuated by merry shrieks of the little girl whose brother was now chasing her around the picnic area. "Did he ever show up again while you were there? This man, I mean."

"I never saw him," I hedged.

"Casper, you know my business. When things aren't right, especially when it comes to people closest to me, I get concerned. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad your family had a good vacation. But something's off."

"You've become a diviner now, Niles?"

As on that morning in Henderson's valley, I was compelled to take his hands. They looked like uncomfortable creatures, careworn and very much in need of being held. I stared at them until, to my surprise, one of them reached over and firmly, rather than tenderly, took one of mine.

"Cassandra," he said. "You need to tell me what happened on Covey. Did you know about Mrs. Milgate?"

"What about her?"

Niles explained he had received a call from an investigator on Mount Desert, no big deal, just running a routine background check on any possible witnesses before the death certificate was signed and the file on an accidental death was closed. The Brooks family were apparently the only other people in residence on what was presumed to be her last day. Mrs. Milgate's body was discovered the morning after we left by a boy she'd hired to bring out her supplies from the mainland every week. He found her dead at the foot of her stairs. Clearly, a slip and fall. Been dead for days, the investigator said. Maybe as long as a week. No evidence of foul play but he was just wondering if anyone had seen or spoken with her before her mishap.

"That's horrible," I managed to say, dumbstruck as I was. When standing on her porch, noticing her wet boots and smelling what I'd wrongly thought were burned syrupy beans, if I had only been more forward instead of shyly whispering her name, I might have discovered that she was in need of help. Or no, not help, she was clearly beyond my help by then. But at least the dignity of having her eyelids closed and her body sheeted against creatures that would disturb it. Too, if Rosalie and I had only knocked instead of trekking past, had been willing to bend her hermitage rules a little, we might have found Mrs. Milgate. I hated the idea of her lying there, utterly alone.

Could the man have been behind this? A calling card of sorts, letting me know his postcard was no idle threat? I dismissed the thought. It was one thing to play mind games, quite another to murder a woman just to underscore some point.

"Have you told my mother? She's going to be really upset. Angela Milgate goes all the way back to her childhood."

"I wanted to talk with you first. Did you see her when you were there?"

"Not at all. But that wasn't unusual. She always kept to herself. I never knew her that well." I had always thought of Mrs. Milgate as the guardian angel of Covey, more a legendary hermit than a real person who was old, stubborn, and far too proud to be pushed around by those who might try to save her from herself. Everyone who knew her knew she wouldn't have considered a tumble down the stairs as good a death as passing away in her sleep, but any death was preferable to being taken away from her cottage on Covey by well-meaning relatives and stuck in some nursing home in Ellsworth to rot in an unfamiliar room. Still, it was profoundly disturbing that she most likely made her last misstep while we were on the island, her only neighbors, ourselves cocooned on its far shore.

"Maybe you'd prefer to tell Rosalie yourself," Niles said.

"If that's all right with you."

"It's not a matter of police business, so I think you should."

Was there any other news Niles had to spring on me? I wondered, thinking again of the postcard burning in my pocket. "I'm of two minds about showing you this," I said, pulling it out and studying the faces of the mourners gathered around St. Francis on his bier, trying and failing once more to construe what the fresco could possibly have to do with me, beyond my affinity with birds.

He studied the image after I handed it to him, then flipped it over. "Same man?"

"I don't see who else it would be, but Niles, listen. I'm showing this to you as my dearest and most necessary friend, not as the sheriff of anything. People are allowed to send nasty cards to each other and it's not against the law. I need you to let me sort this out for myself."

"I'll have to think about that."

"Look, even if you found out who it is, there's no way I'd press charges. He hasn't done anything and pressing charges might twist the knife in the wrong direction."

"Is there a right one?"

"Besides, if it becomes a public investigation, I'm fresh out of Coveys to run to."

"One thing I can promise you is that nothing will be public."

"If Bledsoe is involved—"

"He won't be," Niles said, turning the postcard over and over in his restless fingers, and scrutinizing it again as if it were a tarot card whose arcana he couldn't quite interpret. "By the way, who do you know in Massachusetts?"

A few sprinkles of rain began to needle the pewter lake.

"Nobody, why?"

"The postmark on this card's Springfield, is all."

Startled, I took the card back and held it up. I hadn't thought to look myself. Inchoate and wrong-headed as they were, my reasons not to tell Niles about Millicent now seemed stronger than before. I went to him with the hanged girl and look where that got me, I thought. There existed a very delicate balance between this other person and myself. Any disturbing of it, I suspected, threatened a far messier calamity than if I left matters quiet and simply proceeded on my roundabout own. Niles, for all his gifts, would necessarily take a far more direct approach than I proposed to try. Laura was now paramount in my mind. She and I were, through the vision of the hanged girl, bound together in some way and she was my best oblique avenue of approach. Although I told Niles I had no idea what a postmark from Springfield meant, I knew perfectly well that if one were to drive from anywhere in Corinth County up to Mount Desert Island, the route best taken would be through Springfield to Worcester to Lowell and on.

"What can you tell me about Laura, Niles?"

The rain was picking up a little, pinpricking my face. Like it was showering needles.

"I thought you knew she's back with her parents."

"I mean her case."

"There is no case," he said, looking at me with eyes that fathomed I was withholding some of what I knew. Fortunately, he chose not to pressure me right then. But it wasn't as if Niles didn't have his own ways of proceeding with or without me.

"Those cans of food and everything in her camp, she managed to buy all that herself?"

"She admits she stole the food."

"How did she get all the way from Cold Spring to Henderson's?"

"She's a clever kid, tough in her way, bright as can be. She reminds me of you a bit, when you were young," he said. "Turns out she even has, or had, an older brother, too. He went missing years ago, left home without a note and hasn't been heard from since. It's my understanding he would be all grown up now and that the Bryants still hold out hope he'll show up one day. There's never been any indication he met with foul play."

I sat there stunned by the parallel of Laura and me both losing our older brothers and running away. What was more, I was stricken by the black thought of what it must be like to lose a child, an obscene idea that caused in me a moment of unusual empathy toward Rosalie. The disappearance of Morgan or Jonah from my life was even more inconceivable to me than the thought of my own death. I had to wonder, Would I have done any better than she managed to do after Christopher died and I made my brief disappearance? I would not.

Niles said, "You can understand how the Bryants are so relieved to have Laura back, and why they're grateful to you, whether you think you saved her or not."

"But where was Laura going? Did she say?"

"She wasn't really headed in any specific direction. Just wound up where fate took her, is what she insisted in her deposition, stowawayed in the back of somebody's vehicle. We have no reason not to believe her. Point is, she's back home and doing fine."