The Diviner's Tale (12 page)

Even my phone call with Rosalie was charged. When I told her my plan and asked her blessing to use the cottage as an escape, she said fine, but made her own request. She and Nep wanted to join us the following week, after we had opened the house and got settled a bit. Nep's health being what it was, she thought it wise to move our annual August vacation forward this year. Given all that had been going on, time together seemed imperative.

"Wonderful," I agreed, before getting off the phone. But I knew what it meant. Knew she was traveling here to talk. To hike with me the craggy hard-going shore of the island, picking our way along while she detailed everything that was wrong with my life that I already knew was wrong with my life. No doubt she intended to warn me—to protect me from myself, as she would have put it—that when the monster was near, I needed to be especially mindful not to speak about matters best left buried in the past. My mother had mapped all the chinks in my tinfoil-thin armor. The thought crossed my mind, as we said our goodbyes, that I ought to tell her I didn't want to discuss Christopher or any of his, and by turn our, long-dead secrets while we were at Covey—a place he had never known—but decided against saying anything. Perhaps once Rosalie arrived and breathed in the purifying ocean air, her worries would disappear much as I hoped mine would.

For his part, Niles assured me I shouldn't worry about the garbage that was written in the papers or what people were saying, insisting I shouldn't be ashamed or distressed. He met me nearly every day after the encounter, during his lunch break or whenever he could get away. Out of public view, we walked together along the outskirts of the local firemen's park, or around the far side of a nearby lake. During the drives through the green, anonymous hills to meet him I sometimes felt like a discreet lover hooking up with her married boyfriend. My nerves were so jangled and thoughts so given to shadowy feelings of guilt that I might as well have been up to something adulterous like that. Instead, I tried to heed his advice to stay proud, calm, strong, not to worry. But I knew his voice too well, and the look on his face proposed he himself was worried. When I asked what Melanie thought, he pulled a frown and said, "Doesn't matter," which was easily interpretable. She no doubt warned Niles he risked hurting his reputation by continuing to associate with his crazy childhood friend.

Niles, though, didn't treat me as crazy. He treated me with respect, cutting through the nonsense in the news reports and telling me the truth about the found girl's story. Her name turned out to be Laura Bryant. No feral child, no dryad, the girl had been missing for some two weeks. She disappeared at a train terminal on an early May morning. Laura and her mother had gone to a riverfront station to meet her father, who was returning from a business trip. His train was running behind schedule because of track work down the line. Wind coming off the river was stiff, and though any ice floes had long since melted away, it was chilly. She told her mother she wanted to go to the car and get the coat and cap she'd left behind. The parking lot was plainly visible, right on the other side of the tracks, and her mother said no problem, just hurry back since he's arriving any minute now. So Laura, shivering a bit, paced down the platform and up the stairs to the enclosed overpass, a glass and girder affair, and while a southbound train rumbled into the station, temporarily blinding her mother's view and distracting her, the girl vanished, as many children do, into the awaiting void.

The whole scenario was so simple. The southbound pulled out soon enough. Laura's mother glanced toward where she had parked but she didn't see her daughter. Dawdling, most likely, or maybe she was in the overpass that straddled the tracks, looking out its windows. Well, she would get a talking-to, Mrs. Bryant was thinking. Laura's father's train arrived, greetings were exchanged, a welcome-back kiss. Then he asked, Where is Laura? The woman explained what had happened and together they walked to the car. The coat and cap that Laura had gone to fetch, because it really was quite cold with that wind coming off the water, were missing, and so was she. They began looking around for her. Began asking people in the lot if anyone had seen a girl with brownish-blond hair, fifteen years old, wearing a new dark blue dress, the color of a violet. They canvassed shop owners to ask if a girl had come in, maybe used the restroom. Rang doorbells of houses by the station. No one had seen her. No one could help. Their day descended into chaos.

Niles continued to tell me about Laura's recovery as he learned more about her. Said he wanted to keep me current and keep current with me. Whenever he called me
Casper,
however, I couldn't help but think of myself in cartoonish terms.
Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Within several days of being found, Laura overcame her diffident muteness and asked what was going on? Who are you people? Where am I? She made tentative eye contact with those who were looking after her, though it appeared she had been traumatized into a kind of inconsolable shyness. She did finally express interest in food, and when a plate was set before her, she ate heartily. She seemed to answer questions to the best of her ability, but Niles couldn't tell whether she was groping for information she couldn't express, or holding back what she didn't want to reveal.

When he visited her in the facility, she recognized and acknowledged him. Asked if Renee, the female officer, was coming again. Still, during those first long days it was as if she was in reversion, had backtracked a few years and was thinking with the mind of a younger, terrified self. Or else she was some sort of bravura actress, coy as a chameleon.

"Damned confounding," he said.

Apropos of nothing, she announced after breakfast one morning that her name was Laura. Said she knew that was only part of her name but claimed not to remember more. She apologized about this, since the people trying to comfort her wanted so badly to know.

"At least she knew she was Laura," I told Niles, who was relating all this to me. "Names are doors to ideas."

Laura went on to say she lived by a river that was very wide and there was an old church by this river she remembered quite distinctly—Niles said he racked his brain trying to recall anything up or down the Delaware that matched this. The river changed color all the time, from brown to blue to white, and across the river was a mountain. Before she was here, she said, she lived in a house. She was sorry she couldn't describe it further. No, she couldn't make a drawing for them because she would be inventing and what good would that be? They wanted her to draw it anyway? She made several, all different. She pushed aside the paper and colored pencils. Didn't want to draw anymore. The pictures were a waste of time. Besides, she wasn't some baby and she'd had enough of this childishness.

No, she answered another question put to her. No, she didn't know anybody in the forest. She hated the forest. She hated the filthy hunter's cabin. The roof leaked and it was cold at night and her fire kept going out whenever she fell asleep. She hated the guy in the long car who came and went but mostly left her alone there, locking her in the shanty with a bar through a latch. No, she didn't know who he was. No, he didn't tell her why he took her there and warned her to stay, or else. He had said horrible things to her while he touched himself, threatened to kill her if she didn't behave. Said he could make bad girls disappear right out of this world. No, she didn't know anything else now. That was all she knew. And the next day claimed not to have meant a single word of any of it.

At the same time Laura was recovering physically, while offering her confusing, contradictory, and questionable stories, I gathered from Niles that discovering her identity wasn't finally that difficult. A matter of circulating the girl's image and a basic description of her for other departments to check against their missing-persons databases.

It all transpired within the week. A match, a positive ID. The river turned out to be the Hudson, not the Delaware. The mountain across from it was Bear. She lived in the village of Cold Spring, where the train station was but a block from the river. The church proved to be the Chapel of Our Lady Restoration, perched on the water's edge, a Greek Revival temple with Doric columns that might as well have been facing the Aegean as the Hudson. A place where people used to pray for the safe return of mariners.

Reuniting Laura with her family was most important both to Niles and to the child welfare services people, but when Renee told Laura her parents were very excited that she was safe and were driving here to be with her, the girl's response was a crosscurrent of enthusiasm and alarm. Under the circumstances, not an unexpected reaction. A background check on the parents turned up clean—no records, no warrants, no traffic tickets even, just an upstanding family of comfortable means—and so Laura would be released into their custody and that would more or less be that, although child services would recommend individual as well as family counseling.

The attention turned for a time to investigating her purported abduction. In light of her failure to provide any further workable description of this man and his car, other than that the latter was long, there was little to work with beyond the possible pretensions of a scared girl. No fingerprints other than hers were traced on any of the small cache of supplies at her makeshift camp, and the only footprints they found, largely erased by the rain, were the size of a girl's Laura's age. No one had come forward to claim having witnessed her being abducted, or accompanied by anyone on the road. The investigation edged forward into a vacuum. Nothing supported her claim of having been the victim of kidnap, while everything pointed to her being a frightened runaway.

I hadn't seen Laura since the day she was found; it wouldn't have been useful to her or healthy for me—and now that her situation seemed settled, I told Niles I was taking the boys and escaping to Maine for a while.

"No reason not to. You know that by leaving you're giving some people more reason to talk. 'What's she skipping town for?' Not that they should stop you."

"Don't worry, they won't," I said.

"If I need to reach you—"

"Don't forget you got to push pretty hard on the numbers to dial me up there, since the island has no phone service, land, cell, or otherwise. The mailboat still swings by whenever there's something to deliver, so you can get me a message that way, over sea waves instead of airwaves."

Which was what brought me back to the present in my sun-drenched room. Those sea waves were shoving against the nearby shore, washing away what was left of the nightmare. They had fascinated me from the first time I came here, how unpredictable were their rhythms. Never set a metronome by waves, it occurred to me, unless you want to play the music of the spheres. I could hear the scuttle and scraping of stones as the water withdrew, and the deep thrumming of some fishing vessels out there in the distance. Could also hear the boys downstairs now, banging around. Smelled the bacon they were frying, savory against the brined air. I rose, dressed, sat by the window looking out at the ocean for a few more quiet minutes before I heard Jonah calling me down to breakfast. As I descended the steps I felt a surge of pity for Laura Bryant. Pity, and a kind of solidarity. After all, neither of us had convinced anyone of anything, had we?

F
OREVISIONS. IT HAD BEEN
a good long stretch since they had visited themselves upon me. In the wake of intuiting that my brother was in grave danger, I experienced what could be described as an unholy string of these forevisionings. My mother certainly thought of them that way—unholy.

None were as monumental or significant as the one about Christopher. But I seemed, for whatever reason, to be able to know what was going to happen around me. I could and did predict the number of kittens Hodge Gilchrist's pregnant tabby would bear. Hodge was poor Ben Gilchrist's younger brother, and we were thrown together by our grieving parents after the accident that took both our older brothers, the idea being that our playing together would be healthy. I foretold the genders of all five kittens—two males, three females. And their colorings—three more tabbies, one marmalade, one chestnut. Hodge wrote down what I predicted, sealed it in an envelope, and gave it to his mother for safekeeping. At the time, the woman commented on how cute our game was. But when the litter matched what I had imagined, Mrs. Gilchrist, who must have heard the rumors about how I had foreseen my brother's death, and therefore possibly her husband's and son's, maybe even hex-murdered them both, didn't like me hanging around with Hodge quite as much as before.

There were other things, small things that in themselves mattered not one whit, but that I'm sure drove my poor mother to distraction and provoked prayers this odd phase would soon pass. I knew who was calling when the phone rang. That's Griselda, Griselda from the school board, on the line. There's Margaret Driscoll, probably wants to know if we have plans to drive to the city so she can catch a ride with us. I'll get it, it's going to be Niles anyhow. I knew what time it was, within five minutes either way, day or night, whenever anyone asked. Sensed the bluebirds weren't going to nest in the box atop the wooden corner post of the kitchen garden this season, though they had every year for as far back as we could remember. And when they didn't, I silently predicted my mother would say, as she did, —So the birds took this year off.

Equally easy to predict was Nep's proclaiming, —That's my daughter, the witch.

Life went along like that.

Yet much of what I could see, or foresee, had to do with death. These forevisionings—Nep's coinage, too big a word for me at the time, but it stuck—made me the most uneasy. I felt relief only when circumstances proved me wrong, and I felt none whatsoever, not even in some appeased private dark corner of my ego, when I wasn't. One could make an educated guess as to the size of a cat litter. Even predict genders and colors. But when I went over to the Gilchrists' house to visit the newborns after school, I didn't dare say that the chestnut kitten, who was rushing about and playing with every bit as much vivacity as the others, and who had such a healthy coat and winning personality, wouldn't live very long. I didn't say it and didn't want to think it. Her name was Lucy. I spent as much time as I was allowed, doting on her, giving her treats. Looking back, I wonder if Hodge's mother didn't insist he stay away from me after my little Lucy—Cassie's favorite kitty—was found lifeless one morning. It didn't seem fair that I could be seen as somehow responsible. In retrospect, though, it makes a kind of awful sense.