The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  "What suicide note?"

  "Everybody thought you wrote a suicide note before you disappeared."

  She recoiled. "That's what he was typing? So when I do wind up in the river it'll be my fault?" She closed her eyes, opened them. "I can't believe it. He was even wearing those kind of gloves, the yellow stretchy ones."

  "Surgical gloves?"

  "That's the kind. And when he was done writing my suicide note, what did he do but look out the window right at me, like he knew I was there the whole time. This is what happened," holding her hurt hand up and pointing at her bruised, abraded cheek, "when I slipped and fell trying to get down from the tree house so fast. I still can't believe I got away. It was like he knew every other move I made before I made it."

  "Every move except the ones that got you safely here," I said, staggered by her story. "You must be starving," I went on, at a complete loss. "Let's get you something to eat."

  I walked with Laura back to the kitchen, where with trembling hands I made us both sandwiches. Laura silently paced around the room, picking up things off counters and shelves, looking at them with unusual care, as if they were objets d'art like those her parents collected. It was disturbing yet mesmerizing to watch her scrutiny of each and every little random bottle of vinegar or salt shaker or juice-stained glass left over from breakfast. As if she had been deposited into my everyday cosmos from some other world and was doing her best to get the lay of the land. She was the same girl I had once been, I realized, Laura like the young Cass dragged kicking out of childhood into the tempestuous universe of adults without willing or wanting it.

  "Why were you so upset about his name?" she asked, breaking the silence.

  "Christopher was my brother's name."

  "I thought you said he was dead."

  "He is. Here's your sandwich," I said, reluctant to explain because I feared my explanation would create more confusion, and my instincts told me Laura didn't need more confusion just now.

  We sat down at the table. She was so famished, devouring her food like some starved little animal, that I gave her my sandwich, too.

  "I think, Laura, that once you've finished eating we ought to call Sheriff Hubert. You remember him, my friend Niles? It's not fair to let people go on thinking you might have committed suicide. Niles needs to hear about this. You can trust him."

  "I liked him and probably he's somebody you can trust, but you can't call."

  "Why not?"

  Here Laura hesitated, stared out the kitchen window at a rose-breasted grosbeak on the feeder there with its bright red splotch on the chest like a fresh bloodstain, before saying, "It was hard enough for me to get here, find you. Please don't make me run away again. I don't want to wind up with the rest of them."

  "The rest of them?"

  "He said there were others, lots of them."

  That silenced me.

  "You just can't tell anybody I'm here and that's that. No one but you can know."

  "Jonah thinks he saw you last night."

  "Tell him he was wrong."

  "Not that simple, Laura. You didn't spend much time with him, but Jonah's not that easily thrown off. If you need to stay here for a day while we sort things out, both Jonah and my other son, Morgan, are going to have to know."

  "I can't talk about this right now. What kind of bird is that?" she asked, pointing at the window feeder, and launched into a description of the birdhouse she once made in her father's basement workshop and hung in the tree where she could watch the sparrows coming and going. I listened as she talked, though a part of me couldn't help being deeply troubled by the moral dilemma her appearance at Mendes Road posed. It made perfect sense to her to insist that I not take her to the hospital; that I not call Niles to inform him she was here with me, undrowned and alive; that no one, including Jonah and Morgan, was to know about her. But I couldn't reconcile her desires with what the larger world, that of Niles and her parents, not to mention Rosalie and Matt Newburg and probably even Charley, would dictate.

  "Why did you come here?" I gently asked.

  "Because I don't trust anybody else."

  "Is that why you ran away those other times? Because you didn't trust people?"

  "They called it running away, but all I was doing was trying to find my brother. I always came home after a day or two, no crime in that. Everybody else gave up on him a long time ago, so why should I trust them to find him?"

  "Don't you trust your parents? Your mother seemed like a good person."

  "She is, but she doesn't understand me. I tried to tell her and she didn't believe me. And my father's a disappearing act. He might as well live in his office in the city."

  I couldn't help but be reminded of James Boyd. Made me feel still more protective of Laura. "Why trust me?"

  "Because you divined me that first time and nobody believed you, but I knew it was true."

  "Laura, I still don't know what happened that day."

  "You don't have to," she said, attempting a smile that was at odds with those intense, dispirited eyes of hers. "What about you? You trust me, you believe me?"

  "Yes," I said.

  We talked more, as if the wall clock weren't chiming away hours. Turned out she had enough money to live on for a while if she could get away with it. She had stashed it in her bag along with a few poetry books, a journal, change of clothes, even eyeliner, blush, hair dye—a vagabond's tools for disguise—and other incidentals. That she was sitting in my kitchen, undisguised and unequivocal, made it clear she was compelled not so much to run from what threatened her as to seek resolution.

  "Let's make a pact," I said. "At least for the rest of today and tonight. I'll promise not to turn you in if you promise to work with me to straighten everything out."

  She agreed, which I took as a great stride forward. My thought was, simply, to convince Laura that to trust me was to trust Niles, and thereby thread the way out of this labyrinth. What I said was that the time had come for me to go pick up Morgan and Jonah, but she should wait here and would stay tonight with us.

  "You're not going to disappear on me now? We'll make things right," thinking what a foolish confidence I hoped to project with my smile, my arm over her shoulder as I showed her to my room and told her she could sleep there for a couple of hours if she liked. "We have books in every room if you haven't noticed. Take down any you like. It goes unsaid to lock the doors behind me and not answer if anybody knocks."

  Driving away, I glanced over my shoulder at the house there on Mendes with only our voluminous chestnut standing sentry, trying to ignore the fear that churned my stomach, and was more than ever torn about the actions I was taking and not taking. Nothing prevented Laura from being seized by second thoughts and deciding to up and run. At the same time, little or nothing prevented Niles from descending on the house to find her inside and save her from herself. Or even Roy Skoler from breaking in, if he knew where she was.

  As so often in the past, how I wished I could sound Nep out on what to do. I wasn't about to hand Laura over without knowing she would be truly protected this time, but every intuitive bone in my body said that was not possible. Calling Niles meant sending Laura back to her parents all over again. Or else meant her entering a maze of accusations, denials, counter-accusations, depositions, lawyers, witnesses expert and not, a trial, publicity. One more nightmare to fill some newspaper columns for a day or week, perhaps give local news networks some temporary grist. Though I hoped she would be safe for the night, we both knew she couldn't hide with me for long. Laura was caught between dire impossibilities and, by extension and default, so was I. It was as if we were walking a tightrope in tandem as the knots at both ends were coming undone.

  Maybe nothing I was doing was right.

  No slouch, Morgan was on to me within minutes of getting into the truck. "What's the problem?" he asked out of the blue.

  "I have no problem."

  "You'd be a terrible base stealer, Cass. Eyes, face, hands—too easy to read."


  The sun dazzled as we drove toward my parents' and I fumbled my sunglasses off the dashboard, slid them on.

  "You broke up with that guy, is that it?" he persisted.

  "We're not even a couple, how could we break up?"

  "Got fired again?"

  "Morgan."

  "I know. You were walking around behind the house and found another ghost."

  That was so close to right, my decision to tell him made itself. No way should I even try to deceive the boys about Laura, especially if she was staying with us, so I told Morgan everything. Including an apology for having discussed with Jonah the possibility of keeping the secret from him. "We three don't have secrets. They have a way of festering. Grow like tumors until they eat away at the heart of a family."

  True as this was, the statement bothered me, standing on the farmhouse porch with Nep and Rosalie. Who was I to talk about the dangers of secrecy? My mother was still savoring Independence Day, the compliments she'd received from this person and that, thanking all us Brookses for the lovely time. Nep was staring at me. Not with one of his comalike looks such as when we crossed the Delaware, but vigilant as a falcon tending its brood. I did my best not to return his steady gaze with one of trepidation. It is not impossible that, in memory, I may have misconstrued his expression. But I swear I didn't. He was looking at his daughter with his usual depth of affection and was also divining her. Then, reminding me of the first times I ventured out with him in the field, he made that small unconscious sighing moan that presaged a find. A mature music of knowing. As Jonah came stomping up the steps, calling out, "Look what I made," Nep slightly raised his hand in a kind of secular blessing and said to me, very plainly, "You're right. Do what you're right," and I thanked him with all the gratitude I could summon.

  Jonah's show-and-tell was altogether unexpected.

  "Look, Nep taught me how to solder. So I made these elbow rods out of a bunch of brass tubing." He held them in front of him and began walking the length of the porch.

  "Most excellent, dude," Morgan approved.

  "We don't do that anymore, Jonah," I said.

  "Sure we do. Let me try that, how's it work?"

  I realized this might be a strange moment for Morgan, seeing his brother for the first time in the role of apprentice diviner. If so, he betrayed no discomfiture and threw himself into his own apprenticeship then and there.

  "You hold them like this," instructed Jonah, walking beside his brother, scrutinizing the tips of the L-rods, explaining the sketchy rudiments of how it worked. Nep watched me watch them before looking down to study his hands in his lap. This is my final clear image of him, as I noticed my mother's uneasiness, not to mention my own, and brought the lesson to an end. We needed, I said, to get home.

  I breathed a sigh of relief at finding Laura asleep upstairs in my bed. Despite the July heat, she had pulled a blanket over herself but then partially kicked it away. She lay clothed in a pale green camisole and jeans with both hands tucked under the pillow as if to protect them from any further harm. Millicent was cradled in the crook of her arms. She's only a child, I thought. A tired, timeworn child. I saw that she had folded her shirt neatly and set it on a chair by the dresser. Her sneakers were set side by side, socks balled inside each opening. Her blue leather knapsack stashed under the chair. A spare, self-minimizing person, I thought, whose goal it seemed was to take up as little space in the world as possible, perhaps even make herself so compact she might vanish into one of its niches. Seeing her there inevitably reminded me, too, of myself in that shallow cave. Except no Roy Skoler was going to get to her again, to pretend to save her or otherwise, nor was she left to share secrets with a river stone. Quietly as I could, I backed away and left the room, closing the door in silence.

  Understandably, the twins wondered why she had run away again. Why was always a most dangerous question, I advised them, because often as not, the answer turned out to be something you didn't want to hear.

  "She knows what she's doing," I said. "At least as much as anybody can. Our job is to take care of her until she has a chance to catch her breath, figure out what's best for her."

  Though they were curious about our stowaway, Jonah and Morgan were also sharp enough to hear through my words and see it was I who needed to catch my breath, figure out what best to do. They went out back and practiced using Jonah's new dowsing instrument while the late-day sun began its descent. The monkshoods, not in blossom yet but seven feet high beside the shed, wagged in the baking air. A moth drifted along, blind as it was lost, its flight helplessly clumsy, as if it were a dead leaf blown on capricious breezes. I sat at the kitchen table and folded my hands into a tight ball, feeling every bit as lost as that poor moth outside and nervous about what the night would bring.

  "Cassandra?"

  I jumped in my seat. "You've got to stop materializing out of thin air like that, Laura."

  "Sorry. Didn't hear you come back."

  I let her know that my boys were aware she was here, knew nothing more about her circumstances, and it was best it stayed that way. Did she like stuffed eggplant? Because I made enough last night to feed the whole county. I hoped she didn't mind leftovers for dinner. She said leftovers were heaven compared to the junk she ate from bus stop vending machines and gas station deli-marts on the way here.

  The meeting of Morgan, Laura, and Jonah, which was as unmanaged and weirdly upbeat as I might ever have thought possible, happened all in a jumble with Morgan crashing, as he often did, through the back screened door which slapped into its jamb like dropped planks, Jonah right on his heels, shouting, "Cass, it worked, we—"

  "What worked?"

  "We—" said Morgan, reddening.

  "The divining rod worked," Jonah answered, catching his breath and staring at Laura. "Hello again."

  She stared back, said, "Hello there," and for a singular instant it seemed like she was a long-lost daughter, that all three of these children were mine.

  "Laura, this is Jonah's brother, Morgan."

  "Hey," they said to one another.

  Jonah said, "If you were talking about something important we can head back out."

  "That's all right," Laura said. "I don't mean to push you out of your own house."

  For the first time since moving into Mendes Road we ate with the shades drawn. It was warm out and the air inside was close as a crypt, but I was afraid enough on Laura's behalf that I'd trained the two fans we owned on the table and pulled down the window sashes in case someone outside got it in his head to prowl. None of us bothered to remark on these precautions, probably because Laura was as nervous as I, and the twins sensed it was better not to ask. Still, we managed to talk all over the map, in dribs and drabs, about baseball, poetry, math, soldering, the Cocteau Twins, whether I should continue to wear makeup, and the art of divination—my abandonment of it, Jonah's and now Morgan's fascination with it—all at one sitting. It didn't take a diviner to see that in another life, on another Earth, if the world were different, these three could be the closest of friends. We might well have carried on for many more hours, so familial was the mood, had the phone not rung. My phone that rarely rang on any given day.

  Charley's voice on my outmoded answering machine. I heard his first few words and picked up in part because I didn't want the others to eavesdrop whatever message he might leave, in part because it dawned on me that Charley, of anyone, might be my sounding board. Even my possible pillar. He had been in times past. For privacy I took the call in my study, which was nothing more than a small room choked with books, drawings by the twins, a file cabinet filled with teaching notes and client invoices, a huge map of ancient Greece, some empty shelves where I used to store rolled geodetic surveys—now exiled to the attic—and assorted other stuff.

  He called to say he was finished with packing his mother's belongings and that he was about to wrap everything up. The house closing was scheduled for the beginning of the next week, after which she'd be headed to warmer c
limes and he would return to Wiscasset. "Before," as he put it, "the summer people spend all their money elsewhere and I wind up in some boatyard scraping barnacles off the bottom of hulls for a living."

  "I doubt that's your fate, Charley."

  Hesitant, voice lowered, he asked, "Are you all right?"

  Masking my anxiety seemed impossible anymore. Besides, I didn't harbor any desire to hide myself from Charley. I said, "No, not really."

  "Do you want to talk?"

  "I can't."

  "Can't or won't or shouldn't?"

  "All the above," understanding that Charley knew me far too well to bother with any sort of obfuscation, that he carried strong memories of how Cassie Brooks thought and acted as a girl and, in some ways, as a woman. It occurred to me that Charley was the one person who might, long ago, have acted as my trusted confidant, the one with whom I could have shared the secrets about Emily's death and Roy's violation. How I wanted to share with him now what was happening, lean into him a little for strength. But I had made my promise to Laura. I was the confidante now. I was the one who needed to be the rock.

  So here was the great hurdle, I understood, while I sat talking with Charley and watching the window-framed stars begin to appear. As simple as the first equation Jonah ever learned or when Morgan discovered that the best way to catch a ball was to watch it straight into his glove. Laura was silenced and so was I because we never learned to speak about these most important things. We weren't illiterates, weren't mad, or fools. We each loved the idea of our lives enough. Just we didn't know how to say we were afraid or why. We didn't know how to say ourselves. It was high time that I, for one, learned.

  "Charley," I said, "I do want to talk with you."

  "Any time, right now if you like."

  "I can't right now. There's someone here," hoping not to sound too mysterious. "But tomorrow should work. I need to talk with somebody first."

  "Something is up, isn't it."

  "Yes and no."

  "'Yes and no' means yes. But look, I'm here for you whenever you like. Just give a call when it's good for you."