The Diviner's Tale (6 page)

H
ENDERSON HAD PAID
a hefty freight for the four hundred unlevel acres of wooded and snaking ridges whose jagged cliffs looked like teeth biting down on the valley bowl below, but he sure didn't know much of anything about what he purchased. Niles was able to ascertain that with one call to the phone number I gave him at the station. His only concern was whether he himself was in any kind of legal trouble and, more to the point, if his development had to be curtailed.

— Not if you haven't done anything wrong, Niles said.

— Of course not.

— Well, then there's nothing for you to worry about.

He was given the story in abstract terms, Niles offering him the sketchiest possible version as a way of protecting me from criticism, while at the same time seeing if Henderson knew anything that might shed light on my encounter. Long shot, but he thought it was worth a try. He told Henderson that while doing the work he had contracted me to do, I discovered something unusual on the property. No, there was no need to discuss specifics as it appeared that the matter was nothing more than one of mistaken identity. Still, if he had a moment to answer just a couple questions? Whatever was needed, he was only too happy to cooperate. Niles asked Henderson, had he been out to the acreage recently? He hadn't. Had he granted permission for anyone besides the surveyors and Ms. Brooks to be on his land? He had not. Never authorized anyone else to go out there to hike, hunt, maybe camp? No.

Henderson evidently interrupted to ask about my character. Was I on the up and up? Should he have checked around a little more carefully before sending me, sight unseen, out onto his property? Sheriff Hubert assured him that my integrity wasn't in question. And asked if Henderson happened to have the best number to reach the prior owner, Statlmeyer. That was the same Statlmeyer sold him the four hundred acres, right? Henderson—and this gave Niles a mute laugh, he admitted to me—corrected him. Four hundred and sixteen acres. I mean, at some point, who's counting? Yes, Karl Statlmeyer, Henderson said, after giving Niles the message I needn't bother doing any more work on his behalf and should send him a bill for the hours I had put in. Niles said he would pass the word.

He reached Statlmeyer long distance from home that night and queried him about ways to access the land on foot other than from the logging road we'd been using. Turned out Statlmeyer wasn't any more helpful than Henderson. The acreage had once been part of his family's enormous landstead. He used to let some distant cousin's kid hunt the land in exchange for throwing poachers off and replacing the No Trespassing signs around its boundaries. But that was years ago and he and the boy had fallen out of touch. When Statlmeyer himself finally walked around the place, he told the sheriff, that was enough. The dirt and trees were worth more money than they should ever have been, out in the middle of nowhere. He had been only too happy to dump it on Henderson. Was there anything more? Niles thanked him and said that would probably do it.

My phone rang early the next morning. I asked him what if anything he had learned overnight, and he told me about these conversations with Henderson and Statlmeyer.

"Finally got nowhere," Niles said. "Because there was probably nowhere to go."

He had stayed up late after that, studying a survey map of the area, and in fact there did turn out to be another possible path down to the spot where I saw what I saw. Much tougher trail, if a trail at all. Maybe another approach would render another result. Or, rather, any result. Would it be asking too much of my mother to take the boys again?

"If you don't feel overly upset," he continued, "I think it'd be useful if you walked back in with me."

"You believe me about the girl."

"I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is you might see something I don't."

"I'll call Rosalie right now."

"You'll be waking her?"

"She was up at five, guaranteed. Always is."

The boys were sleepyheaded and grumpy until they found out they were going to spend their Saturday morning with Nep. The affection was mutual. He never failed to brighten and revert at least a little to his old self when the twins came around. For kids their age—turned eleven this eleventh of April, a couple of precocious Aries—they were quite sensitive to his disease. It both fascinated them in a boyishly morbid way—Jonah and Morgan could sit cross-legged side by side and watch a spider methodically anesthetize a web-caught moth until it was ready to devour its prey—while, at the same time, they drew from deep reservoirs in their spirits some profound sense of human mortality. They also held their grandmother in high esteem, despite their sense she was a bit too religious for her own good, and willingly embraced doing any little thing that might help her help him.

"Hurry up," I urged.

One of my worst mothering—or misguided "fathering"—mistakes was when I had allowed them, far too early on, to try a sip of my morning coffee. Now there was no going back. Like little demonic connoisseurs, they objected to the cups of Sanka I made to move things along.

"What's the big rush?" Morgan asked, pushing his long brown hair out of his face. His hair, which he grew out the previous year after many evenings of family debate, was one of the few physical traits that differentiated him from his otherwise identical brother. That and the small acorn-shaped scar on his cheek, a badge of honor received during his one ill-starred season trying and failing to play hockey. Otherwise, both were tall, trim, strong, narrow-shouldered boys, with long hands and knobby fingers, and sharp-boned faces whose kind but keen hazel eyes were arrestingly wide-set—even more so than mine. When one of them looked at you, you knew you were being looked at.

"I've got to be somewhere."

"Somewhere where?"

"Out at the Henderson place."

"I thought that's where you were yesterday."

"Well, I got to go back there this morning."

"Something's not cricket. What's the deal, dude?"

The moment offered me, for the thousandth time, a strong insight into what Nep must have faced when I was their age, although fortunately neither of them had shown the least interest in divining. I had privately concluded last July that I might best be the end of the line in that regard. The future would have no further need for people bent on dialoguing with the earth. In another generation or two, highly advanced versions of our by-then-medieval subterranean magnetometer technologies, our seismic refraction transmitters and VLF receivers, our shrewd machineries of prying and spying, would become so ubiquitous that a diviner might have as much a place in the world as an ostrich-plumed quill pen. Divining was a fading art few cared about anymore. Who could expect them to? Lost arts are by definition just that. Lost as Marcus Terentius Varro's play,
Virgula Divina,
which either satirized or celebrated divining, but because its manuscript disappeared centuries ago we will never know. What responsible mother would push her children to take up an ancient art fated to become another curiosity chucked onto the huge trash heap of outmoded human ideas?

"The deal, dude," I called back from my own bedroom where I was slipping on my sweatshirt and jeans, "is I'll tell you later. And don't call me
dude
. Word?"

"Way not word," said Jonah.

"Yeah, why not?" Morgan asked, crunching pretzels from a bag his grandmother must have given him.

"A dude's a man, that's why not."

"You're wrong, Cassandra. Everybody who's anybody's a dude."

"And while you're at it, don't call me
Cassandra,
either," I said, taking the pretzel bag from Morgan and handing him a peach, which he bit into without a pause.

"You call your mom
Rosalie,
am I right or am I right?" his mouth full.

"Keeping it real," Jonah approved, laughing.

"Just because I do it doesn't mean you have to. What's the matter with
Mom
?"

"What
is
the matter with Mom?" Morgan asked Jonah.

"Got me, dude. Something in the water."

They were dressed, fed, and in their grandmother's car by a little after six. Rosalie gave me a far more afflicted look of questioning what I was about than she might have meant to. I think she was accusing me of a transgression over which she needn't have worried. She never liked the idea of my overnight infatuation with James Boyd, but neither did she like it that I remained a single mother with no clear prospects or much evidence that I was looking. I dated from time to time, out of the human need to hold and be held, to be able to tell myself that I was yet among the living. Still, though I respected Niles too much to pursue him, he and I made my pious mother nervous.

"Thanks for this," I said, kissing her on the cheek before she drove away. "You know I wouldn't ask unless it was important."

"When will you be back?"

"Shouldn't be later than lunchtime, but I don't know for sure."

Niles pulled up not long after they left. This time he was in the cruiser. I couldn't decide whether or not it was peculiar that we didn't say much more than hello to each other while we traveled down Mendes Road, past houses, trailers, horse and cow pastures, out toward the rural county route that would take us back to Henderson's. He seemed preoccupied, so I left him to his thoughts. Besides, I was feeling apprehensive and didn't mind the silence. He was wearing civilian clothes today. Plaid jacket over a blue jean shirt, worn chinos, even more worn hiking boots. Our drive was quiet but for the news station on the radio. Suicide bombing, roadside car bombing. Brutal rape, a murder. Our never-ending catastrophes followed by the weather forecast, traffic, sports. Then the same cycle all over again. By the third repetition that today would be partly cloudy, sixty degrees, with a chance of afternoon showers, I asked Niles if I could switch it off.

"No problem," he said.

We drove past the widened logging road I had taken the previous day that led into the old Statlmeyer farmlands. Continuing up the two-lane for another half-mile, Niles slowed to a crawl.

"Somewhere 'long about in here," he said, and without looking handed me the folded map that'd been nesting in the rubble of paraphernalia—walkie-talkie, notepads, a holstered pistol, sunglasses, handcuffs, the works—between his seat and mine. It occurred to me, and so I said it, "Your cars are such junkyards, Niles."

I side-glanced a sort of acknowledging smile, then spread the map on my legs to study it. Given my own devotion to maps, I was surprised at myself for not having done the same thing he did. But with all that land at my disposal, I hadn't thought I would need to go in with any preliminary homework under my belt. Counted on experience to carry me through. There was the line of dashes on the topo he must have been referring to. Another logging trail, it seemed, although it didn't look like these woods had been timbered since way back when leather tanneries proliferated in the region and razed the hillsides to harvest hemlock bark used in the process of turning cowhides into shoe soles. It was, in fact, a pretty out-of-date map. I mentioned this and he said, rightly, that's what made it valuable.

We drove too far, not having seen the least hint of an access. He pulled a U-turn and crept back along the rough shoulder of the paved road on the wrong side of the median. Not that it mattered on an empty stretch like this. I studied the tangle of roadside foliage, much of it not yet fully leafed, though there was a patch of large leggy aged forsythias all abloom, like a wall of gaudy fire that we passed by, quite lovely even in their decrepitude. We kept going but there was no sign of any former entranceway.

"Maybe the mapmaker made a mistake," Niles suggested.

"Cartographers are mortal, too," I said, and as I did it simply dawned on me. "The forsythias. Turn around."

"What?"

"Let's go back. Those forsythias. They're not native. Telling by their size they must have been planted a pretty long time ago. That's where our other trail's going to be."

He turned around again, drove us back to the bright yellow partition of flowering bushes, and parked. I felt I had now earned my berth. We paced up and down the hedgerow. No gap anywhere. Just a long cheery monolith of odorless blossoms. Only after we'd hiked around the top end where the forsythias petered out and made our way along the far side of the flower wall did we find some hint of what we were looking for. All sorts of trees. Some were native; others were cultivars clearly planted. Tulip poplars, black walnuts, a few stands of white paper birch, dogwood, jack apple, black haw.

"People lived here once," I said.

"Seems like."

We saw it at the same time. About a hundred feet into the woods, a vague but distinct trail. Another hundred feet along the curving path—a human path, much too meandering for deer—was a Styrofoam cup lying on its side, half-hidden by young fiddlehead ferns.

"Could have been Townsend's people," Niles said.

"Surveyors don't get to where they have Townsend's reputation by dumping on the land they're supposed to be measuring and marking. Besides, we haven't crossed the property line yet. No ribbons."

"Still, doesn't necessarily say a thing. You know what, though. I'm having second thoughts about you hiking down in here with me."

"No way. You asked me to come along and I'm coming."

"I made a mistake," he said, then surprised me by pulling a small digital camera out of the shoulder-slung rucksack he'd carried with him, which I assumed had only a bottle of water in it, or an orange, and took a few pictures of the cup. He produced a clear plastic bag and what looked like forceps, knelt, plucked it up by the lip, and looked at it closely before stowing it and marking the position with bright yellow plastic tape, pulled from a spool that was also in the sack, which he tied around a branch above the spot. Methodically, he spent the next minutes circling the area doubled over, looking, he told me, for a cigarette butt. "Tobacco and java are like hell's version of peaches and cream. Anybody who'd be sloppy enough to leave a cup here wouldn't have the horse sense to field-strip their butt. I'm seeing nothing, though." When he stood back upright, he looked me in the eye and asked what struck me as a strange yet obvious question.