The Diviner's Tale (38 page)

"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 loved 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.

G
ABRIEL 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.

A slab of bluestone from the land was chiseled with his name, his dates, and
Husband, Father, Grandfather, Diviner
on its face and placed flat on the ground down by the pond dock, where we planted a large bed of magenta campions around the memorial.

Just as I had done when I was pregnant, I moved back in with my mother for a while, along with the boys this time, so she would not be forced to suffer through a difficult season all by herself. Truth be told, I needed to recover along with her. She had taken me in while I awaited a birth—I would now take care of her while she adjusted to this death. Morgan was stunned by Nep's sudden absence and threw himself into his ballplaying as a means of getting through his grief. Jonah all but moved into his grandfather's barn, if not his life, spending productive hours out there fixing things from Mendes Road he deemed broken, that lawn mower for one. Rosalie gave Jonah full run of the workshop with the sole admonition he not hurt himself. If I didn't go fetch him to eat lunch and dinner, and to extinguish the overhead fluorescents at night, we might not have seen the boy at all. As for Rosalie, she relied on her prayers, her pastor, and her iron-strong belief in God and an afterlife to ease her through her mourning.

"He's in heaven now," she said, in an unexpected, gratifying judgment of his final reward. The godless man she had always insisted was headed into infernal flames now rested his weary head on a silken pillow in heaven?

"You think he's surprised to be up there?" I asked.

We were alone, hanging his washed clothes on the line, readying them to be donated to the church thrift shop at his request, also in that letter, an olive branch extended to his wife, I imagined, as affirmation he respected her faith.

"He's surprised, all right, surprised it's there at all. I can picture him looking around right now saying, This isn't so bad. Why didn't I believe sooner?"

"If there's a heaven, Nep is in it."

"There is and he is," she said, and this was the last time we ever discussed my father's fate beyond life. I admired her hardheadedness and softheartedness. I admired her, period.

My own response to Nep's death was slow and sure as an orchid's blooming. I may have had a year to prepare myself for this eventuality, but the hard, pitiless fact of death was nothing that discipline or anticipation could curb. Preparation was as futile as hoping to avoid death itself. And yet, what I had learned from the man was permanent enough that, other than our not being able to add fresh experiences together, he was as alive as ever. It was like he simply happened to be in another room, out of sight and hearing. That said, I wasn't quite as consoled by my own life's activities or faith as my mother and children were. Many were the days when I found myself wishing he'd come out of that other room and speak with me about any little mundane thing. My aching for him to walk through the door and say something would abate in time, I knew, but never finally go away.

Astronomers have a word for the uncommon occurrence of planets aligning in the sky. Syzygy, they call it. I've never seen one, though Rosalie and Nep did once when they were young. Newlyweds, they had come up to Covey to visit Henry Metcalf for the first time. Henry never traveled much farther afield than Ellsworth but wanted to meet his niece's man. One night during their stay, three planets lined up in the expansive starry sky. They saw it together from the balsam grove at the highest point on Covey not far from the family cemetery, the very grove where I now sit, a peaceful place which on a clear night is like a planetarium without walls.

What Rosalie witnessed was an astronomical event she would tell entranced science students about for years. For his part, Nep said that in their audacious symmetry, where the rest of the universe of stars and worlds was reveling in pure disarray (—Like joy incarnate, as he put it, according to Rosalie), the row of silver planets seemed courageous to him, if a bit unnatural. A line, he said, like a person's life, only finds its value when plunged into the great whirl and movement of things.

My mother told me about this syzygy sighting of theirs when we first arrived on the island last week, while we made our traditional mother-daughter hike around the island. She confided she was pretty sure that was the night Christopher was conceived.

"Why didn't you ever tell me before?"

"You never asked," she said. "Besides, maybe it's just another one of my myths."

"A lovely one, if it is," I said, thinking about how Laura and Nep had formed two parts of a syzygy with me.

Nep stood at the farthest end of our fragile lifeline, our throughline. Fading off the grid now. Laura was nearer its beginning. And I—who wept on Charley's shoulder while he whispered how sorry he was, how he had hoped good pilgrim Nep had a marathon of years left—was the link between them. I, the diviner who learned from her father and began to find herself by divining a stolen girl. The ancient Greeks, as ever, had it right all along. We understand our character by measuring it against and within the character of others.