Clouds congregated overnight, blotting out the stars. When I woke it was drizzling and the sun was curtained behind roving mists. I knew how disappointed Nep would be if we were forced to cancel the fireworks and hold the festivities indoors. Too bad there wasn't some way to reverse-divine the rain. Rosalie and I exchanged worried calls and drew up contingency plans, but by early afternoon the clouds had shredded away and blue sky returned in promising patches.
Would it be possible for Jonah and Morgan not to torment me about my floral dress? About my hair pulled back into a decent imitation of a French chignon, my modest but unwonted makeup, my silver bracelet plain as a calm sunlit sea that was my sole bequest from Henry Metcalf, and my leather pumps which my sons in all their lives had never seen? The dress and shoes looked new because I had bought them on an impulse after my first encounter with James Boyd, having driven to Middletown, speeding most of the way, just from the sheer thrill of being loved, only to learn there was no use for them. Over a decade later these clothes, the makeup, and all the rest came out, as Morgan might have put it, of left field. My question was quickly answered.
Morgan came up behind his staring brother, recoiled, and said, "What did you do with our mother?"
"That man on Covey must have kidnapped her and left this stranger here," Jonah added.
"That's enough," I warned, retreating toward the back porch door.
"Actually," said Jonah, looking at Morgan, "she looks pretty decent."
"Not half bad for—"
"Stop while you're behind," I cut him off, thinking that, as with all these routines, I was forever getting the last word in way too late. No matter. I noticed they themselves dressed up a little—not a lot, a little—more than usual. Morgan eschewed his baseball jersey for a light blue shirt with buttons, untucked but ironed and clean. And Jonah excavated a pair of chinos from somewhere deep in his dresser. The only change I requested was that he switch his T-shirt, one I hadn't seen before, bought online behind my back, whose chest was boldly emblazoned Dowsers Do It Divinely. We packed the food in picnic baskets and drove over from Mendes a couple of hours before guests would begin arriving.
Nep, in stellar form, helped us carry things in. He gave us wide-smiling hellos and more or less high-fived both twins. Rosalie must have trimmed his flowing silken hair that morning and though she would never admit it—nor would I ask in a million years—maybe even helped him shave. He looked like the father I had always known. Upbeat, unworried. Wearing his usual earthy-colored clothes—shades of wheat and cream, the pale greens of winter grass—he was luminous as the day itself had become.
Had I not known just how far he had wandered away from himself over the past year, I might have been fooled into believing, for a miraculous instant, that here was the same Nep I walked with, conversed with, last Independence Day. The man who assured me he was a fraud, as a way, I now firmly believed, of encouraging me to trust myself in a universe that never gave up its favorite secrets easily. My father was not a fraud. Had never been a fraud. He knew I knew it. I had come to understand it was simply a rite of passage, the traditional confession of fraudulence. The true practitioner avowing falsity as a way of allowing the possible false one a means of respectable escape.
Working together, we lit a fire in the homemade brick grill. We squeezed lemonade from the haphazard pyramid of yellow fruit on the counter. We filled buckets with ice and loaded them with colas, beer, bottles of champagne. Morgan hammered the horseshoe stakes and helped Jonah set up the worse-for-wear badminton set. Soon enough the three wise men arrived with wives and kids and grandchildren, then others, and before the party was supposed to begin it was well under way.
I washed strawberries in the sink, watching out the kitchen window while cars parked on the grass by Nep's barn. The Hubert family, I saw, had just pulled in. Turning off the cold water faucet, I walked to another window where I could spy a little better on everyone before they came bursting in on the quiet of the big kitchen. Niles approached the boys where they were finishing stringing up the cat's cradle of a net. He grabbed Jonah from behind, lifted him off his feet, and swung him back and forth like a clock's pendulum, both of them cracking up. Morgan slugged Niles on the arm, after which Niles set Jonah down and chased his twin around the badminton uprights until he finally caught him—Morgan was faster than Niles may have thought—gently tackling and pinning him on the grass, at which point Jonah jumped on his back, toppling the three together in a heap. Though Niles and I had spoken since our conversation by the lake, once after my visit to Cold Spring and again after Melanie revealed I had been to church—"Are you a convert now?" he baited me on the phone—this was the first time I had seen him since the park. I thought, I'll never not love Niles and he will never stop loving me or my family. The best way to protect that is to be his friend, no more, no less, and leave off pretending there was any other possibility. I hung my apron on a peg by the door and plunged into welcoming the partygoers.
Melanie, whom by chance I encountered first, asked if I needed help in the kitchen. Adrienne had already gotten a game going of sending the shuttlecock high in the air with some of the many kids. Nep and his confreres gathered along the grassy rampart, readying bottle rockets and other fireworks for launching—all very serious stuff. When Charley arrived, I worked to quell my sudden nervousness as he walked straight over with his mother and gave me a kiss on the cheek, introducing me as "Cassandra, my oldest living friend."
"That can't be." I shook my head.
"It's true, I was thinking about it last night. I knew you and Christopher before I met anybody else in that crowd. And I can't think of a soul who dates back before you two. That makes you my oldest friend."
Charley's mother asked to be introduced to Rosalie, or reintroduced, since the two knew each other from the days Charley, Chris, and I were children. I caught Ros studying Charley's closed eye and thought to nudge her. Yet my sense was that he had grown used to such stares and didn't seem to mind. I liked him all the better for his patience.
"Where's the wonderful wizard of Corinth?" he asked.
"I hope you're interested in fireworks, because that's all he's going to want to talk about," she said, sighing.
We left our mothers to their reminiscences and set off across the yard toward the rampart. Several people stopped us along the way with greetings and embraces, Niles among them. "Charley was friends with Christopher," I told him.
"I'm surprised we never met," shaking his hand.
"We might well have, who knows? It was a lifetime ago."
"So you must have known Cassie then."
"I did my best to keep her out of trouble."
I asked Niles if he'd said hello to Nep yet. Told him we were headed that way, would he like to come along? He declined, saying, "I do need to talk to you about something, though, when you get a chance."
"Look," Charley interjected, placing a hand on my shoulder. "I'll wander ahead and introduce myself."
I nodded. "Catch up with you in a minute, if that's all right," and Charley continued up the hill toward Nep's group.
Once we were alone, Niles said, quietly, succinctly as a sharp knife, "Laura Bryant's disappeared again. I got a call from the Cold Spring police just before I left, and another from her mother."
"They're saying she ran away?"
"I hate to tell you this, but she left a suicide note."
I was speechless.
"Typed on her own typewriter. She wrote she was going to drown herself in the river and not to look for her body because they'd never find it, as I understood from the detective I spoke with."
"That's—I don't know what to say. She didn't seem the least suicidal when I met her," I stumbled, mind racing. "Depressed, maybe. Problematic, maybe. But definitely not self-destructive," although it horrified me to think my original hallucination of the hanged girl might turn out to have been a forevisioning of Laura after all.
"Let's hope not."
"Is there something I can do
?"
"Not really. Half the time in situations like this everything is resolved happily within hours. She may just be taking a brooding walk along the Hudson and will be home for dinner late. Happens all the time. But obviously if she gets in touch with you, let me know right away. Find out where she is and persuade her to stay put, if you can."
I nodded yes. Others had joined the festivities meanwhile, and I told Niles I had to get back to helping Rosalie before long but first had a few things of my own to tell him and apologized for not doing so earlier. The travesty up at the lighthouse and the minor but meaningful thievery of Millicent. The latest postcard. The night visitor smoking under my window. Everything except Roy Skoler's history with me, all of which—despite compelling circumstantial evidence that, to me, was so damning—really added up to empty charges that could easily be dismissed as the hysterical accusations of a woman bent on revenge. The last thing I wanted to do was come rushing to Niles with another version of the hanged girl who wasn't there.
"Two questions," Niles said, unusually annoyed. "Why are you playing games with me and what else are you keeping from me?"
"Believe me, I'm not playing games. I find none of this even slightly amusing. I'm doing my best to keep my head above water, look at it that way."
"Fair enough," he said, but I knew it didn't end there for him.
All my instincts led me to want to leave Niles and everybody else and somehow go find Laura. But tonight I needed to resist letting her—or the part of me that was bound to her—edge me out of my life.
Not that I wanted to have the conversation with Melanie about gingerbread recipes. Or the one I had with the pastor about teaching young people the importance of tithing. I tried a distracted joke about "teaching them tithing when they're teething," but it didn't go over very well. I did my level best not to give in to the desire to spend most of my time as near as possible to Charley. He helped me tend to the barbecue after having had a long talk, insofar as it was possible, with Nep. For dinner, we joined Niles and his family on a raft of blankets spread out on the grass beside a virtual hedgerow of black and scarlet hollyhocks below the porch. If anyone spoke behind my back or gave me and my colorful dress second looks, I didn't notice them. Sipping champagne as the fireflies began their mating dances and the daylilies closed their cups for the night, I realized I had managed to let my worries slip for a moment away into the vesper darkness.
Soon the evening star was joined by another planet and another. The connecting dots of constellations punctuated the purple sky, and the moon rose looking like a piece of glowing citron hard candy that had been sucked by some giant child. It was time for us to send up our own brief spray of man-made stars to join them. I saw that Jonah and Morgan flanked their grandfather and his adjutants on the fireworks front, and that Nep was breaking the rules by allowing the boys to light some of the fuses. Maybe I should have been worried. Maybe gone over to warn them it was a little too dangerous. But instead I found myself glancing around to see if Rosalie was anywhere nearby, hoping she wouldn't put the kibosh on their innocent mischief. Some old-time dowsers used body sensations to recognize the nearness of a spring. A knee would ache, for instance, or a knuckle, when they walked close by a live vein. The old-timer in me, divining for possible peril, didn't pick up any such telltale signs as I watched my boys hanging on Nep's every instruction and witnessed the trio of them cheering and laughing as they craned skyward to see the bursting, the booming, the scintillating crowns of light that crowded out the blackness above, almost succeeded in pushing the darkness from every corner in our narrow universe. Not for a moment, however, did it escape me what had to come next.
27
THE BIRDS WERE CLAMOROUS this morning. In my pack, a bag of cashews, an apple, water. Without my usual divining gear, the pack felt feather-light. Laura was on my mind, and Charley also wove in and out of my thoughts as I hiked this terrain I hadn't set foot on since I was a girl. I couldn't recollect whether Charley had ever been escorted by Christopher to the caves. Somehow, I thought not. I found it impossible to imagine him submitting to being blindfolded. He was ever the one boy in the gang who insisted on clarity of vision. What a black irony was that.
If Jonah and Morgan, whom Charley had taken fishing, knew what I was up to here, they would either have tried to dissuade me or insisted on coming along. So would Niles, Charley, or anyone else. But I needed to make this hike alone and hoped the nagging suspicion I harbored was mistaken, a fantastic paranoia, a falsity stirred by the monster in my head. After all, if Roy Skoler was somehow behind Laura's disappearances—an intuition so gossamer and even prejudiced, given my bad history with him, I didn't dare mention it to anyone—there would be no rhyme or reason for him to bring her here again. Yet wasn't it true that Roy had already committed at least two grievous acts in these woods? One when he violated me. The other when he shoved Emily Schaefer to her death. Yes, shoved hard as Christopher grappled with them both, one fatal hand pressing Emily's chest while his other pushed against Roy in a failed attempt to separate them, instead helping propel her over the cliff. The three struggled briefly in what could have been a young lovers' quarrel, could have been an argument about anything, before she lost her footing and fell screaming to the rocks below, her screams echoing until they were blanketed by sudden silence. It was all I could do not to scream, too, as I scrambled away from the boys who looked up, hearing the scrape of kicked pebbles, and saw me in the cliffs above them, watching. I was not supposed to be there that day, shouldn't have followed and spied on them. I wish I hadn't. Though I managed to hide, crouching breathless in a huge thick stand of mountain laurel, eventually I did creep home where Christopher, who got there first, cornered me in the backyard.
— You didn't see what you think, he said, looking at me with ice-cold eyes.
— What do you think I saw?
— She slipped, is all. Nobody's fault.
— You pushed, is what I saw.
— You're just a kid, you don't know what you saw.
I was old enough to see the blanched panic in my brother's face. And young enough to be swayed by his insistence.
Emily's death was, after an investigation, ruled accidental. My hapless conspiratorial silence was sealed when, before the police even questioned Christopher and Roy, my mother took me aside and told me, —There are some things best kept in the family that aren't for others to know.
From time to time over the years I wondered whether Christopher's death wasn't an instance of the universe trying to rebalance itself in the face of our impudent little secrets and accord, in a real way, divine justice on Emily Schaefer's behalf. Wasn't it possible that until Roy met with some form of justice himself, this same wobbling universe would remain imbalanced? Yet for so long he had avoided punishment for what he did, imbalance had begun to feel almost normal.
Given all this, why wouldn't Roy feel most comfortable in the place where he had gotten away with other transgressions? I even found myself wondering whether Roy Skoler wasn't Statlmeyer's distant relative who had been permitted to hunt here in exchange for throwing poachers off the land and giving him some filleted venison. If so, he would have developed a profoundly intimate knowledge of the terrain. Not to mention a deep proprietary bias toward these still-uninhabited woods.
Time had come for me to walk them once more. No more putting it off. Any second thoughts, any small hope of avoiding a return to the cave cliffs and the steep climb down into Henderson's valley below were fruitless. The path this man didn't want me to travel, scattered with lurid sights he placed there yet demanded I not see, had drawn itself right up to my door. He and I now shared this path of his, and the "little girl" he demanded leave him alone had no choice other than not to. I was not unaware that this might be exactly what he wanted, but if so, so be it.
Funny how not just the sense of time but of distances changes after childhood. In my memory, this hike to the caves was long, arduous, a glorious misery of a tramp through tough land car
peted with bracken ferns that tripped you, bracket fungi that colonized the sides of trees and scratched your arms, poison ivy that covered you in a rosy rash. Not that it was now a walk in the park, far from it, yet I came upon the caves—which were fraught with such wonderful and horrifying memories—so suddenly I thought I might be in the wrong place. But no. Here was our Iroquois cavern with its blackened ceiling. Here was the recess in the granite bulwark where Christopher built his fires. The mountain laurel where I hid from Roy and Christopher was still here, but so leggy now it wouldn't shelter a soul with its scraggly leaves and shriveled blossoms. And though I didn't want to linger on it, here was the stone flat where Roy Skoler had assaulted me.
Not knowing what to look for exactly, I searched the caves and scouted the immediate area. A catbird mewled in the distance. A yellow butterfly fluttered around me like an airborne flame. Wind threaded through the needled evergreens. Nothing was out of the ordinary. This was a peaceful place which—if rocks and trees and butterflies were burdened with opinions—was content not to be bothered by people anymore. I began picking my way downward through a series of mammoth stone tables that a glacier of untold strength had toppled and scattered across the face of this declivity thousands of years ago. A descent I had never before made due to its almost impossible geography. Here it was that Emily had met her death. The leviathan rocks all looked the same to my adult eyes, so I was spared the horror of knowing which was the one where her life had left her.
Below, where the steeps graduated into valley flats, the flora changed radically. Cliff hemlocks gave way to hundred-year-old cherries, towering beech, and black walnut. The shadows deepened as I crossed the meandering creek and worked my way into the edges of Henderson's valley. Unlike when I was here in May, the leaves were now full and fat and the canopy was an undulant green roof over my head. Like some land-bound mariner, I used the sun for a compass as I worked my way back toward the flats where all of this began. Every now and again I stopped to listen, half-expecting the birds to desist their singing. They were in clarion voice, however, as if nothing in the world would force them to silence.
The Diviner's Tale Page 26
