The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  The hatchery valley was all tans and browns. Looked like an old sepia-toned photograph of itself instead of the real thing. Skinny, gulping trout in their long pools were crowded in thin, slow water. Made me sick to think of them poaching in their earth-bermed tanks. I saw I had to make this work, somehow. Given the direness of the conditions, it would be unethical to stall. So, my heart pounding in my throat, I began the search. Would that my Y-rod were some magic wishbone which if broken over my knee might bring me luck.

  I knew I was wasting Partridge's, my, everybody's time, but I couldn't think what to do except fare forward. The hatchery man, who'd forever scoffed at us Brookses, had already exhausted conventional means of trying to locate sources, and his budget was getting tapped out. My services were nowhere near as expensive as the excavators', who would have been content to dig his place until it looked like an open-pit mine. If I hadn't known this before, the talus from failed test drillings that I literally stumbled on in the nearer fields would have tipped me off to the frustrations earlier contractors had met with.

  So I started thinking counterintuitively. Where was the most unlikely place to strike water here? Where would wily water, water with shrewd savvy and maybe a sense of humor, lay itself up? I climbed due east toward a prominent rise in the valley, far above what would be considered the water level of a given terrain. My rod held before me, more security blanket than dowser's tool, I began crisscrossing, back and forth, weaving the land as is the custom, up this knotty little rise.

  Partridge, whose huge brown coveralls and lobsterman muttonchop sideburns were a sight to behold, lagged behind. He insisted on watching my progress, even though I told him I worked best when left to my own devices. A relief that he'd dropped back, since I didn't want the man to witness my growing desperation.

  Then it happened. Just like that. My forked stick without warning bent down hard and leaped cleanly out of my hands. I managed to stifle what would have been a most unprofessional scream and woke right up from my petit malaise. The moment was surely comparable to the shock newborns experience when grabbing that essential, painful first breath of air. It is not too much to describe it as a birth. A part of me was born, right there. An essential part I don't to this day fully understand and may never.

  I picked up the rod and got to work, having many times seen this phenomenon manifest itself for Nep. Believing he had always been the genuine article, having as yet no reason to question him, I was just following learned behaviors. I marked the spot with the heel of my hiking boot and climbed east away from the location twenty or so paces. Here I began diagramming a circle around it, as if I were tethered to the divot by an invisible string. Nothing, nothing, and now again the witching stick yanked down and I swear I had not a thing to do with it. Again I heel-kicked the spot. I continued circumnavigating the central mark until I discovered—or my stick, or some force of nature did—another live vein, and another. By this time, Ben Partridge had caught up with me, sweating enough to half fill one of his evaporated trout cisterns without my help.

  — What's going on? he asked, wiping his considerable brow with a red handkerchief.

  — You have two rich veins running northeast to southwest there and over there that merge right here, pointing to my original strike. —Give me a minute and I'll tell you how far down.

  I had never tried this before, at least not without knowledge of what maps had proposed my result was to be, but put into use a technique Nep said went back to my great-great-grandfather. Standing at the center of the circle, I held my switch before me and began to count. Five feet, ten feet, twenty, thirty, at which point the tip of my stick began moving. When I hit thirty-three, it dove downward. At thirty-four, the tip of the rod eased back up again. Was I somehow making this happen?

  — Good news, I said, containing my astonishment. —You don't have to go deep, either. Thirty-three feet along here, I suspect forty or thereabouts at most down there.

  He sat both fists on his big square hips. A cedar waxwing, looking for all the world like the beautiful feathered dinosaur that it, in fact, was, perched atop a white pine as if to observe this moment of curious grace. —That's all?

  — By the way, I added, pulling out my pendulum to dowse the strength of the flow, —you've got a regular river down there. Even fifty gallons a minute wouldn't surprise me.

  A weak breeze rustled the skeletal and naked raspberry bushes and small bleak pines that made their homes up here as Partridge and I gazed back down the hill and across the long field toward his house and siloed barn and collection of outbuildings that surrounded the hatchery. This was going to cost him a bundle in aqueducting, if he decided to believe me.

  — You're sure about this? he asked.

  That breeze, as if on diabolical cue, calmed.

  — Let's see what the water says.

  7

  WE CLIMBED BACK out of the valley for a second time in as many days, the birds curiously trilling again. Niles called headquarters with information and instructions while I leaned against the trunk of his car, wishing I'd never heard of George Henderson or his land. It wasn't long before several more cars pulled up along the road at intervals. Some police. Some plainclothes. Detectives, I assumed, but I know little or nothing about that world. Niles spoke with them. I couldn't hear what he was saying but don't recollect at any time in the past seeing him more grave or focused. Half a dozen men and a uniformed woman fanned out along the stretch of asphalt and vanished into the woods. Niles afterward went with them, having left me once more with pony-faced Shaver. I could hear the dispatcher's voice and the distorted voices of others coming from Niles's radio unit in the car. The moment was dense. I might describe it as clotted. As we all have sometimes done when dreaming, I wondered if I wasn't awake inside a nightmare. Even occurred to me to pinch myself, try to shake it off. But there was no waking up.

  Now another car came at a clip from the opposite direction. Two more men got out and spoke with Shaver before themselves heading down through the trees. Their radio unit was left on, too, and between it and the crackling choppy voices on Niles's, the former tranquillity along this isolated reach of road was shattered.

  "How're you doing today?" Shaver asked, a look of concern on his pale face.

  "All right," I told him, offering a smile meant to let him know he needn't worry about me. What else could I say? Yet it dawned on me that my life, for the foreseeable future, was categorically changed. No, what I had witnessed meant things were very much not all right. Nothing was going to be the same whether they found my hanged girl or not. I was invested in her in ways I couldn't yet appreciate. Much as I tried not to acknowledge it, she had already begun to haunt me.

  "You have any idea how long the sheriff wants me here?"

  "Just long enough for them to make a preliminary sweep. He didn't want to keep you a minute more than necessary."

  "Necessary for what?"

  Shaver flashed me a look, as I was missing the obvious. "To identify the body as the same one you saw. If they find it."

  "Don't you think that if they find a dead girl it's bound to be my same girl?"

  "Maybe, probably. Not how it works, though."

  "Isn't there a morgue where I could do it?"

  "That's what will happen if they don't make a pretty immediate find."

  Fact was, no one was available to drive me back home. Niles hadn't anticipated any of this and he was improvising. My getting home was understandably the least of his concerns. I took a slow, long breath. What a lovely agate sky hovered above, punctuated by fluffy silver-gray clouds that hinted of spring rain rather than snow. The earth awakening after its long icebound sleep. It was flat-out insane, I thought, that such natural beauty should preside over a world bent on fostering such viciousness.

  "Is it all right if I sit in the sheriff's car?"

  "Sure. Smoke?" he said, offering me a cigarette.

  He was trying to be kind—"No thanks," I said—but I had to be by myself.

&nbs
p; In the car I heard the dispatcher in conversation with someone who was on the way with a dog. Said it would take them an hour to get her boots on the ground, was how he put it. For a while I just ranged in and out of listening to the communications. Found myself marveling at how these people could actually understand what was being said, the distortion so thick and the beginnings and ends of words seemingly snipped off and bleeding into thin air. A dialect, like all dialects, with eccentricities and rules all its own. I'd traveled overseas only once—to visit Greece and Rome, see the places I had read about in Homer and Virgil (who was considered a wizard in medieval times because his name was wrongly linked with the virgula)—and this was like that: hearing foreign tongues and sensing you can almost comprehend what they're saying. Just not quite. I heard my name come crackling over the radio, too, which gave me a jolt. Didn't catch the context.

  What caused me to feel her near me again, I don't know. I could no longer hear the dispatchers' voices, or anything else. The girl was looking at me, I knew it, sitting in the back seat of the car. I dreaded turning around. Couldn't bear to see her again, whether she was somehow truly there or a figment of fantasy. I remained motionless, unbreathing, caught in a kind of suspended animation. Once again I hoped I might have fallen asleep and was dreaming. Then a soft musical laughter, far away, began to emanate behind me. The gentle laughter, or perhaps weeping—they can sometimes sound uncannily alike—of a girl, insinuating itself as if through a small tear in the fabric of a wall of silence. No, it was more than one voice, I now realized, and not laughter or crying at all, but several voices talking at once, a melody of questioning. I couldn't help myself and glanced in the rearview mirror. Three girls, their faces floating in the narrow glass.

  No closing my eyes this time, no spelling patience backward. I turned, whispering a shrill "What?" but no girls were there. Relief shot through me followed by a fresh terror that I had now passed into a realm for which there were no logical words. Tried to revive my breathing, wiped my cold and beaded forehead with my jacket sleeve. About this one, I knew at once, I would not tell a soul.

  Niles had left the cap and Styrofoam cup on the seat there, objectively real things, without a doubt, and curiously comforting for the fact. The length of rope lay beside them, too, preserved like the others in its own plastic bag. Looked as if they were archaeologist's treasures destined for a museum. As I turned and slumped in the seat, defeated, I was left once more with a mounting panic that all this activity was in vain. By the end of the day I would look more the fool for having been the impetus for all these earnest people to leave behind whatever they had been doing this morning to come up to a lonely expanse of forest and tramp around, only to find what Niles and Bledsoe had already found, and what I myself seemed to keep finding—nothing. Niles would catch some pretty merciless flak from his colleagues, I imagined. Behind his back if not to his face. And as for myself, I would become a fully confirmed pariah.

  Now another vehicle, a dark blue SUV, materialized over the long rise up ahead. A hyper-alert female German shepherd with a gleaming coat of brown and black fur arrived with her handler. Shaver opened the back door of Niles's car and grabbed the bags that safeguarded the rope and cap, handing them to the man who restrained the tracker dog on a long leather leash. He opened the plastic pouches, not touching their contents, and offered each to her wet nose. After she scented the things, the pair disappeared into the curtain of green like the others. Minutes piled upon minutes with nothing to fill them.

  Impatient and drained, I decided to walk up the road to stretch my legs, distance myself from this latest misperception. Shaver said he preferred I didn't venture out of sight. Made me feel like Morgan and Jonah must sometimes have felt when I issued them similar edicts. But whereas the twins would have bristled and openly revolted, their mother just shook her head, unspeaking, and began to walk, hands slung deep into her pockets and eyes fastened to the shoulder of the road, studying its pebbles and bits of debris as some geomancer might. But unlike a geomancer who could read such stones, I didn't understand what had brought me here, headed toward what I was increasingly convinced would be the confirmation of just another dead end.

  The sun was high now. Well past midday. I strolled up far past the end of the forsythia hedge. The road was straight and I was within sight of Shaver, so my withdrawal from the immediate scene didn't go against his request. Today I should have been doing a thousand things at home—laundry, reading, helping Jonah and Morgan with their weekend homework—instead of biding time here waiting for something awful to happen.

  As I walked I tried to block out where I was and why. My mind was rarely as adrift as it was this morning, but I weighed its anchor, imagining what the twins were up to, and found myself in my parents' living room. My father was there and the boys were there with him playing cards, poker I expect since that was what he and I used to play. Count Basie grooving on the turntable. Rosalie asked me if I'd had anything to eat all day, and I told her no, just some water this man Shaver had given me, but that was about it.

  That's not eating, that's drinking. Here, let me get you something.

  I followed her into the white kitchen and, answering another of her questions—she somehow knew the story I'd refrained from telling her this morning—said Niles hadn't really taken me back to the site with any expectation of discovery. That he did it more as a way for me to find closure.

  She asked me what Niles was possibly thinking. How was I to find closure by not locating what I was sure I had seen?

  Her point was well taken, but I reminded her that she more than once got down on all fours to shine a flashlight under the front porch to confirm when Chris and I were young the fact no ogre lived there.

  Not quite the same.

  Exactly the same.

  You were little kids.

  Niles isn't treating me like a child, if that's what you're getting at.

  I switched back to my father and the boys. They were watching a baseball game on television. Yankees, their favorite poison. Nep used to know every Bronx Bombers player stat going back to the twenties and listened to games on the radio in his workshop all season long. More and more pieces of that great puzzle were getting lost now, except for times when vivid pockets of memorized information came back with a vengeance. Both boys, especially Jonah, who carried a sea of numbers within him, had gotten it into their heads to pick up where their grandfather was being forced to leave off. A great deal of baseball talk, career numbers even for obscure players, filled our house, especially when Nep was around. Jonah was showing off his prodigious math skills, adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, even squaring players' uniform numbers with the same elegant ease with which Joe DiMaggio ran bases after swatting one into the distant bleachers. What does DiMaggio's jersey number plus the Babe's plus Yogi's times Mantle minus Stengel less Guidry divided by Jeter equal?

  A-Rod, said Jonah, with unearthly calm.

  What's Lou Gehrig times the square root of Whitey Ford?

  Easy. That's Whitey himself.

  Then I was back in the kitchen with my mother, who asked me, straightforward and disarming, Are you and Niles still, is there still something going on between you two?

  While I had anticipated her question, saw it on her wary face, it nonetheless came as a disappointment even in this imagined conversation.

  How could you say such a thing?

  There's still something there between you.

  There will always be. Sentimental as it sounds, first love makes its own special stamp on people's hearts. But he has his family and life. And I have mine.

  She handed me a plate with a ham and Swiss sandwich on it sliced in half, some chips, and a garlic pickle. I was so hungry I felt faint. As we made to go back into the other room to join Nep and the twins, my mother offered the simple, sane kind of apology only lifetime intimates can make—Cass, I'm sorry, I just worry about you so—and I was seized abruptly from my fantasy and drawn cascading hard back into this oth
er, waking life and the hand on my shoulder was not Shaver's but rather that of Niles, who was saying my name.

  "What?" I asked, looking past him down the road and seeing I had managed to walk quite a distance from the cars. "What's happened?" It was clear from his eyes that they'd come up with more than nothing this time. "You found her, didn't you."

  "No, listen, Cassandra."

  "Well, what? What's that look mean?"

  "We found a small encampment partway up the far slope. In an old hunter's cabin, looks like. Some canned food, water, a blanket. I thought no one lived on this land."

  "Was anybody there?"

  "Not a soul. We figure it must be a squatter or some illegal hunter but couldn't find a blind in the trees anywhere. I'm not sure what we got."

  "So now what happens?"

  "Couple investigators are taking pictures, making an inventory, see if they can't start putting together an idea of what's going on."

  "I guess you'll have more questions for Statlmeyer and Henderson."

  "For you, too, maybe."

  We had started walking back down the long gradual hill toward the cars. I felt my chest compress.

  "Is it all right that we talk like this if I'm going to be questioned again? Tampering with a witness or along those lines?"

  "Look, Cass. I hate to tell you, but you're not considered a witness to anything, as such," he said, then went on in a softer voice, "There aren't real grounds to bring charges of making a false report, but it is a crime, you know."

  That took me by surprise. I tried not to let it show, but Niles knew me too well.