The Diviner's Tale (23 page)

He climbed steadily, not saying a word. I trailed close behind him. Some edges of the stone steps had crumbled, and fresh chips and fragments of granite lay loose on them. We both slipped and caught our balance and I again said, "Dad?" But there was no stopping the man. Another door, this one unlocked, opened onto the gallery. From echoing darkness into windy light we emerged. The island spread beneath us. Beyond the roof of the keeper's cottage was an unimpeded view of the ocean. The gnawing, sizzling waves striking the shore were audible. Sea birds flew below us along the coast, the tops of their feathery wings reflecting sunlight.

Nep caught his breath and made his way nimbly around the gallery, clutching the wobbly handrail until he reached the place where a rope was tied to one of the iron palings. Grabbing it, he began to pull hard, hand over hand, much as a fisherman might haul in his line to see what he had caught.

A crude figure, fabricated from old mattress ticking and stuffed sheets, emerged over the railing and flopped like the rag doll it was onto the gallery floor right at my feet. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears were painted in black as if by some child on the oblong and misshapen cloth head. Its arms were open-ended tubes of sackcloth crammed with rags. The face was without any clear expression, but straight lines that curled up at the ends on either side of the head were meant to suggest the hair of a woman. In her arms she clasped another doll, which I recognized at once, my own from childhood. Millicent, looking tatty and wind-bedraggled, had been stitched onto the breast of the grotesque figure which, I now saw, was hung around the neck with the rope. I wanted to scream but swallowed it back.

My father and I looked at each other. There really wasn't anything either of us could say. I tore Millicent free from the mannequin arms that clung to her and held her to my own chest, tears flooding my eyes. If whoever he was, the person who arranged this, wanted me to leave him alone, he wasn't making it easy for me to oblige him.

We discovered in the watch room of the lighthouse, where the broken Fresnel lamp mirrors faced blindly outward toward the four horizons, another cigarette butt and a crumpled piece of waxed paper. He had gone about his business calmly enough that he had even taken time for a smoke and sandwich. How many times had this intruder trespassed Covey?

"Nothing about this to Rosalie and the boys," I rasped more harshly than I meant to.

"Nothing," he said, turning away from the mannequin on the gallery floor and heading back down the tower.

"It's very important that you understand me, Nep. Are you sure you do?" as we reemerged at the bottom of the stairs and padlocked the door again.

"I understand—nothing about this to them. Don't worry."

For a quick, weird blink of time I had to wonder if Nep hadn't done this himself. He possessed a key to the padlock. He'd been caught on his way to Mendes for some inexplicable reason and might have kidnapped Millicent on another foray in which he hadn't been found missing. Nep was the one who drew my attention to the effigy dangling from the railing far above in the first place. Perhaps this was all some practical joke—inept and upsetting, but benevolent in design—that he hoped might give me second thoughts about my original vision of the hanged girl. I could easily discount such poor judgment as impaired mental function over which he had no control. It would be nothing for me to forgive him, I knew. So I asked. "That wasn't your little prank, was it now?"

His confused look put this idea to rest.

After everyone else had gone to bed that night, I told Rosalie it seemed to me a good idea if we all caravanned back to New York together. She reluctantly agreed, saying maybe we could come back to the island in August, if the stars aligned themselves properly. My sense was that she capitulated to leaving so abruptly in the hope I intended to seek the help she'd proposed. I wasn't sure one way or the other what to do. All I knew was that it was time to leave Covey, the sooner the better.

Rosalie did have one request. Said her heart was set on all of us going to the summit of Cadillac Mountain to see the sun rise. This involved getting Jonah and Morgan up at around three in the morning so we could catch a predawn ride with Mr. McEachern over to the island. The twins had been there once before, but that time, through a series of mishaps, stops to rest, to massage leg cramps, to look at a flight of peregrine falcons—false sighting—we missed daybreak by a good half an hour. Cadillac, named for the French explorer who once owned all of Mount Desert and then went on to found Detroit, was the highest point on the eastern seaboard. The place where one could be among the very first in America to glimpse dawn.

After packing our things, we went to bed early on our last night. I didn't catch one wink. The image of Millicent in the crudely fabricated arms of that effigy would not leave my mind, no matter how many times I told myself there was nothing to be done about it. At three we were up and dressed. After closing the cottage, we hiked by flashlight in the bracing ocean air down the path to the dock with our bags.

The sky was loaded with stars. Blizzarded by them. The breeze off the water was crisp and hard. We could hear Mr. McEachern's motor idling even before we could see his boat tied up, all lit like a toppled Christmas tree. When we got to Northeast Harbor, his wife, Loreen, met us at the pier with hot coffee and cocoa, and we crammed into the McEacherns' station wagon and drove the park loop to the mountain. Rosalie drank hot chocolate and the boys and I downed the scalding coffee, trying not to spill it on our laps as the car bounced along in the dark. We parked near the summit. The sky was already brightening. I took Nep's arm and we walked up the path through sleeping tables of pink granite, now and again shouting ahead to the boys, telling them to slow down.

None of us wanted to miss it, and none of us did. Jonah and Morgan were at the bald plateau top waiting impatiently with Loreen McEachern and Ros when Nep, Mr. McEachern, and I finally made the peak. Knotty threads of clouds wound around the horizon like bunting above the Atlantic before us and Frenchman's Bay behind. Some were thin and long, trails of brilliant crystal afloat in the sky at our feet. Others bunched upon themselves, becoming incandescent in the new light.

Speechless, we were literally on top of the immediate world. Then, the first flash fed over the burning lip of the sea.

"Look!" Jonah shouted.

"Here it comes," cried Morgan. "See that, Nep?"

I glimpsed my father's face as light, gold and orange and pink, illuminated its every crag. A sunsetting man watching the sun rise. I wanted to linger in the moment, but it all went by so fast. Now it was dark, now dawn. Glancing at the others, I saw the twins seemed ablaze, as did my mother, who stood between them. The glow caught in Mr. McEachern's beard and Loreen's white hair.

Rosalie pointed. "Look, there's Covey."

The wind began to whip up a little as it often does at sunrise.

"It's wearing a cloud hat," said Nep.

And it was. A shroud of white had settled on our island.

"It's so beautiful," I said, trying not to wonder what other nightmares might be hidden beneath that innocent morning fog.

"
Divine
is the word for it," said Rosalie.

I looked down, then away from her. The pink undulant granite of Cadillac seemed like the brain of some ossified beast, the Earth's brain, dried out where it was exposed here, covered with lime-green and purplish lichen.

"It's just the world, is all. What more do you want?" said Nep.

Rosalie walked over to us and put her arms around her husband's waist and mine. We watched for a time in silence, none of us moving. The sun had become so blindingly golden, such a radiant perfection, that despite my agreement with Nep's thought, I couldn't fairly contradict Rosalie, either, or dismiss that loaded word of hers.

Words, I thought. The word
divine,
in particular. It seemed my life had been locked in a chess match with that one. Nothing about the diviner Cassandra was divine, not when she had access to such private hells. Except for being part of nature. Nature's the only divinity. This was what I told myself as the sun now fully crested the horizon. I couldn't help but wonder, despite being moved by all this beauty, in what mad corner he was hiding down there in that divine expanse.

E
VEN BEFORE NEP
and I discovered the hanged effigy holding Millicent, I knew I couldn't stay on Covey Island forever. The cottage couldn't shelter me. The lighthouse that once guided ships through darkness and peril could not protect me. The absence of a telephone failed to keep voices at bay. As isolated as our beloved island was, my family could not shield me from anyone who wanted to slip ashore. I could no more hide from this taunting and elusive stalker—not to mention from myself—than my patron saint diviner Martine de Berthereau could hide from her nemesis, Cardinal Richelieu.

Not that the house on Mendes Road, which had clearly been broken into sometime after we left for Covey, would feel safer than the island. Quite the opposite. Yet I knew it was imperative that I take a stand, as unbowed and unbothered as I could manage. Also, it seemed essential I make two visits of my own—one by arrangement, the other surreptitious. I needed to go meet Laura Bryant, glean some sense of what caused her to run away, learn if there wasn't more to her story than she offered Niles and the others, perhaps even discover why I divined her in the first place, if that was, in fact, what happened. And casting my wariness to the winds, I had to return to Henderson's valley, too, trespassing this time around rather than dowsing the lonely place on commission. What I hoped to find there was nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. But unless I went, I couldn't silence the forevisioner voice inside that hinted otherwise.

Our family caravan arrived back home in upstate New York by late afternoon. The newly tuned pickup ran like some strong old racehorse, or solid dray horse anyway, that had never lost its feel for the track. I thought, If only there were roadside repair shops where we could drive ourselves in and request a personal tune-up, a spiritual overhaul.

As we pulled off Mendes into the pebble driveway, I asked the twins, "Why don't you two begin unpacking the truck while I go inside and check on the house?"

"We'll go first," said Jonah.

"Right, that man might be in there."

"Or another girl hanging from the rafters in the kitchen."

They were half-mocking, half-serious.

"You can't," I said, adopting the cavalier tones in their voices, even though I felt a queasy churning in the pit of my stomach. Not a feeling I was accustomed to, or one with which I had much patience.

"Why not?" Morgan asked.

"Because I have the key and you don't."

Both laughed. "Since when do you need a key to get into our house?"

"Got that right," Jonah agreed with his brother. "Everybody knows this is the easiest place to break into in Little Eddy."

"I'm still going in and you're still staying out," I said. "And tomorrow we're getting new locks. Now start unpacking already."

Inside, the rooms were preternaturally still. Even the afternoon songs of all the birds were stifled until I raised windows in the kitchen and living room downstairs to get some fresh air through. Nothing seemed tampered with, nothing even minutely disturbed. The creaking stairs—a sound I had always been fond of before, its small music comfortingly familiar—frazzled me as I climbed to the second floor. Treading down the hall toward the bedrooms, indeed now making more noise than I normally would, as if my pathetic racket would frighten anyone hidden in a dark corner, I noticed I was breathing through my mouth in shallow gasps, my tongue dry as stale bread. So ridiculous, I thought. It's not like any real harm, any injury, had come to anyone except in my cruel imagination. Calm down, for crying out loud.

Other than Millicent missing from her usual place—leaning back against the pillows of my bed, legs splayed and arms open, her red hair wildly flying on either side of her button-eyed head—everything appeared just as I had left it. I looked in the boys' rooms, the closets, bathrooms, my small study. Scrutinized every window on both floors. Even checked the attic. Once more it seemed as if a creature with wings had been at work, although this time there was no chance of my having hallucinated. After I told the boys they could bring the luggage in, I furtively put Millicent back on my bed where she belonged. I was relieved, if mildly confused, his intrusion hadn't gone beyond the simple theft of an artifact from my girlhood. That, and the industrious task of spiriting her all the way north to the lighthouse gallery. Whoever did this was not bereft of energy.

The first call I made after we settled in was not to Niles, but to Paul Mosley, the baseball coach. Exhausted though I was from our early morning and long drive, I urgently needed to make as swift a return to normalcy as possible, and the boys—regardless of their laudable, loving impulse to protect me—needed to get back on track. Mosley was something of a Darwinian, I knew. Whatever made the team fittest. The best able to outwit and survive the opposition. And he adored Morgan. Plans for my son to go to sports camp had changed, I told him. Was there any possibility he could still participate in the local summer league, even though he hadn't gone through registration and tryouts?

"Best shortstop in his age division? I think we can dream up a way to get him in."

Morgan was, at first, heroically reluctant. "I thought the idea was we were going to take care of you," he said, putting a stoic face on it while barely containing his excitement at the prospect of playing after all.

"Mr. Mosley's agreed to relax the rules—"

"No way. Moses broke a rule?"

Their nickname for the coach, because he taught them to live religiously by the laws of the game. Called them the
Team Commandments.
Thou shalt not steal anything except bases. Thou shalt covet thy neighbor's score. Thou shalt not bear false witness except when arguing with the umpire. A Christian Darwinian.