The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  "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."

  For reasons I could neither explain nor articulate even to myself, I somehow doubted that. "So why did she leave in the first place?"

  "That's for a family counselor to help the Bryants sort out."

  "And that's that?" I said, incredulous.

  Here he hesitated, glanced away across the lake, then continued, "Well, you're not wrong. Nothing's ever as simple as that's that. I've done some investigating on my own, following some midnight hunches, and I've found out that Henderson's seems to be some kind of epicenter, how else to put it, of vanishings spread out over too many years to make a real discernible pattern."

  "How so?"

  "If you took a pin and stuck it on a map of the area, then tied a string to the pin and transcribed a circle starting all the way over at Cold Spring, you'd find that there have been several missing persons who'd been living inside that circle. All girls about Laura's age, and all with siblings who ran away from home before they did. But it's an epicenter in the middle of nowhere anybody would ever bother to look because there's nothing there to look for, not logically at any rate."

  A numb apprehension, a vague idea just beyond my grasp, poured through me in the wake of Niles's words. Was it possible that Henderson's valley, richly beautiful though it was, would prove to be some hell's playground presided over by its own diminutive devil? Niles continued talking while these thoughts spun through my mind. He spoke of having contacted several colleagues in the towns where these girls had vanished as well as the ViCAP people at the Federal Bureau who live to screen and meld and discover patterns like this. Once more there was nothing really substantial for any of them to work with, and thus his idea would remain just that, a feeling or impression, a nagging if intriguing coincidence. And the world was flooded, as he put it, by nagging if intriguing coincidences.

  "I'd like to see Laura," I told Niles, with a fresh urgency. "Would you give me her number?"

  "She's already asked to speak with you, thank you herself. I gave her your address and phone, so here's hers," and dug a piece of folded paper out of his pants pocket. "Just be careful, Cass. I know you too well."

  After passing me the sheet of paper, a crumpled little origami, he stood up and held out his hand. The rain was light but steady. I'd wanted to tell him about Jonah's dowsing, wanted him to sit with me a while longer without talking about any of this. But it was time to leave. Niles held
my hand tightly, this time more tenderly, all the way back along the lakeshore. The picnicking family had already departed, I saw, and the flames of their fire were reduced to a green-gray smoke that lifted against all odds into the sky.

  21

  JONAH CAME ALONG, having announced with a mock scowl on his face that he didn't trust me on my own. Besides, he wanted to meet the famous Laura Bryant. Her mother had returned my call, invited us to lunch, and given me directions to their house in Cold Spring. Morgan was gone to a tournament in Binghamton, where he would be staying overnight with the team, so this was my window. Not that I knew if I would achieve anything during another encounter with Laura, other than maybe finding some way to begin burying her doppelgänger, the hanged girl, and move on with the business of living.

  For her part, Laura needed to thank me in person, so her mother said. I accepted the invitation, keeping to myself my doubts about having been directly responsible for saving her from peril. I had been a woman hired to do something she didn't finally accomplish, who saw something that wasn't there to see, and who happened in the meantime to stumble upon the whereabouts of someone she wasn't looking for. Hardly the biography of a savior.

  We detoured, before crossing the Hudson, to a sculpture park set on hundreds of rolling green acres, Storm King, where we walked for an hour among towering I-beam cat's cradles, mysterious half-buried black monoliths, and burnished weldings of figures that Jonah compared to the Martians in War of the Worlds. He assured me that most of what we saw was "way copacetic. I wouldn't mind being one of these sculpture guys someday. Get paid to make nothing out of something."

  "I wouldn't call works of art nothing."

  "They don't do anything, do they?"

  "They inspire us to look at the world with different eyes."

  "Math does that, teachers like you do. Diviners, even. But this?"

  "I'm not sure it happens quite the same way."

  "Nep being sick makes us look at the world with different eyes."

  "That's a little closer."

  "So what you're saying is that art and being sick are pretty much the same deal," he said as we walked across the mowed field toward the lot and got back inside the truck. "You don't really want to go, do you."

  "Of course I do. I just thought a little contact with culture might be good for you."

  "I see," he finished, unconvinced.

  We were expected around one and it was already just after noon. Fact was, Jonah had it right. He knew I was stalling, knew that some part of Cassandra Brooks just didn't want to meet Laura Bryant. Wanted instead to climb aboard a fantasy schooner with her twins and sail down the widening Hudson, never looking back, gliding beyond Bear Mountain and under the Tappan Zee, past the red cliffs of the Palisades, Manhattan, and our own personal Statue of Liberty, out to sea laughing, giddy with freedom.

  Instead, we drove across the ugly red-brown girdered bridge to Beacon and along a narrow highway that paralleled the train tracks and the river that bordered them, the sumac not yet blooming and catalpa flowers just past peak, through a tunnel carved out of solid rock and into the village of Cold Spring. Jonah acted as navigator, reading instructions off a piece of paper. It was a picturesque little hamlet of old Victorians, of one-ways and cul-de-sacs, its main street teeming with antique shops. Pedestrians jammed the narrow sidewalks, and some old-timers in suspenders played jazz standards in a tiny gazebo down near the train station where Laura had disappeared not that long ago. A green trolley trundled up the hill, its bell clanging—San Francisco-on-Hudson—while a noisy contingent of motorcyclists garbed in black leather revved in its wake.

  I managed to get all turned around, my son duly snorting at me, but before long we were parked on a quiet residential street lined with oaks, locusts, crimson kings. Here was a neighborhood that, despite a bickersome blue jay perched on a hidden branch overhead, bespoke the deep calm of lives being led in domestic serenity. Not the kind of place, at least on its tranquil surface, one would want to trade for a makeshift hovel.

  Hesitating in the truck, I sat thinking, You know we could just leave, right now, phone with regrets, offer an excuse that an illness in the family—there was one, after all—prevented us from making it over. I felt as unsettled as the vista beyond the windshield was settled. Jonah was already out of the truck, though, and soon enough we walked up the brick path to a stone house dating from the mid-nineteenth century, mansard-roofed with slate shingles, a corner turret covered in ivy, elegant hedgerows, and old plantings. Julia Bryant answered the door even before I rang the bell. I was relieved I hadn't bolted, since she must have watched us pull up, park, and pause.

  "Mrs. Brooks?"

  "So good to meet you," I said, not bothering to correct her, just as Jonah piped up, "There is no Mr. Brooks."

  "And you are?"

  "This is my son Jonah," I said, flashing him a quick smile of warning.

  The entrance hall opened into a high-ceilinged room centered by a staircase. She led us into a library lined with shelves populated less by books than by objects, elegant tchotchkes. Porcelain figurines of pirouetting ballerinas. Scrimshaw, Native American pottery. Nesting babushka dolls, Balinese puppets. Guessing that the Bryants liked traveling, since many of their objects seemed to be from abroad, I commented on a little carved bull, and she confirmed my assumption, saying they had bought it in Lisbon a few summers ago. Jonah browsed the collection, grabbing down a Mexican skull mask and holding it up to his face.

  "Jonah," I said, horrified by its gruesome effect. "Don't touch."

  "That's all right," said Julia Bryant.

  "Please don't drop anything."

  He shrugged me off.

  "You had no problem finding us?"

  "No, your directions were good," I said, hoping Jonah would give me a pass. "We stopped off at Storm King on the way over. Very beautiful."

  "You should see it in the fall when the colors are at their peak."

  What in the world were we supposed to talk about?

  "How is Laura getting along?"

  I swear I detected the shade of a wince but it was so swiftly replaced by a reassuring smile that I had to doubt. I needed to remember this was a woman who knew about loss.

  "Laura's fully back to her old self. She went through quite an experience. We can't thank you enough for having found her. We're so grateful."

  "Well, you know, I didn't exactly find her."

  "Sheriff Hubert explained a bit of what happened, and I can't say I completely understand the situation, but no matter what triggered the search it was because of you that they went out looking. They'd nearly given up on this side of the river."

  "I'm glad she's home."

  Jonah said, "Look at this, Cass." He was holding a ceramic figure of three maroon devils, naked and cadaverous, with outstretched arms, blue tongues dangling from wide-open mouths, and a spiky forest of horns on their heads brashly painted with red and blue blood vessels. The central devil held a toothy skull in his hands, as if offering it with the message, This is your fate.

  "We got that in Oaxaca, same place as the mask. It's a Day of the Dead grotesque meant to ward away evil spirits. Jonah seems to like the skeletons."

  "Best put it back."

  "Don't you think it's cool?"

  Julia Bryant and I exchanged a mother's knowing smile.

  "It is cool," I said. "But put it back."

  As he did, he asked, "So when do we meet this Laura?"

  "Let me go upstairs and get her, and then are you hungry, Jonah?"

  "Definitely."

  After she left the room, I asked Jonah if he was all right.

  "Sure," he said. "The question is, are you?"

  Although I assured him I was, we both knew it wasn't completely true. I needed to hear Laura's story because I was convinced it would open a window into my own, give me insight into who the hanged girl was, or what she meant. But did I really want to see what lay beyond that window?

  Laura and her mother c
ame into the room together from the foyer, Julia Bryant's arm over her daughter's shoulder. "I believe you two have met before," Julia said, smiling first at Laura, who stared down at the oriental runner, then across to me.

  "We have," I said, and walked toward her with my hand outstretched.

  Laura took it and glanced away, not with the fixed unseeing gaze as when she emerged from the woods, but with a kind of avoidance. "Hello again."

  "You look much better than the last time I saw you."

  "I wasn't in such great shape."

  "It must feel good to be back home."

  At this she finally looked me in the eye with what I perceived as gratitude. "I'm glad you're here," she said.

  With that, we were led to the dining room, where Julia Bryant served us a lunch she had clearly spent time preparing—vichyssoise, focaccia, salad Niçoise—and the four of us conversed for a while. Jonah was nonplussed to learn that a fancy word like vichyssoise meant nothing more than cold potato soup garnished with some raw chives. Watching Laura during the course of all our small talk was, I now and then sensed, like watching a chimera. She'd lived some kind of experience I, too, had lived. And we both seemed to know it.

  Little of what was said during lunch registered with me. My hope was that I could politely get a little time alone with Laura afterward. Were the roles reversed, I had to ask myself, would I leave my daughter alone with this woman whose ghoulish vision led rescuers to her by happenstance? But then Mrs. Bryant unexpectedly offered me my opportunity, asking Jonah if he would like to see the tree house in the backyard. "It's quite a production. Laura all but lived in it when she was younger," she said. "This way she and your mother can have a chance to visit more."

  After they left for the backyard, I said, "So," not quite sure where to begin. Light streamed from the bank of French windows behind Laura, illuminating her hair to an almost ethereal glow. She was a pretty girl, I thought, in a haunted kind of way. "You know, without all the leaves in your hair, I didn't quite recognize you at first."

  Laura leveled her gaze at me. A benign, serious, but otherwise unreadable expression.