The Diviner's Tale (33 page)

I sat beside her and said, "This illness can be slow, can go for years, and you know there are stretches when he does really well," then waited for Rosalie to say something, but she didn't. "I haven't been much help to you since all this other business happened, but I'm doing better now. You can see that, can't you? And I promise to look out for you and Nep as best I can."

"Thank you, Cassie. Have you talked with Niles about that man?"

"Yes, everything will be fine."

"What about the postcard?"

"Don't worry over it," I said. "Why don't we get lunch ready."

At that, my mother managed to compose herself, pull her public persona back into place. I tossed a salad as she dished cold gazpacho into big cups. By the time Nep and the others joined us, our spoken and unspoken words were gone like the spent sparks of a pyro fountain. I watched her during lunch and thought how admirably strong she was for keeping up appearances in the face of such mortal trouble. On the other hand, neither Rosalie nor anyone in her ken was equal to taking on my memories of Roy Skoler's assault, another piece in this abhorrent puzzle. Nep couldn't do it. Certainly not Jonah or Morgan. Not even Niles. Nor could I burden Charley with such an old nightmare, Charley who had remained at least distantly friendly with Roy. I was as isolated as my father must often have felt during those days of deepening illness. I ate and spoke with the others, but knew I was simply left with what happened. No dowsing my way out of it, no fixing it in Nep's workshop.

Once Rosalie and I had divided up final cooking responsibilities—she would marinate the mixed grill, I would make various salads—I drove the boys back to Mendes to ready things for the next day. Both offered to help in the kitchen and I welcomed their company. In an exchange with Morgan that was as delicate as a water spider dancing across a puddle, he confirmed the Skoler boys had been the troublemakers on the ride down from Binghamton. They kept it up during practice, before and after games, even off the field whenever they could.

"Have you thought about talking with the coach about this? Maybe he'd want to have a word with their father."

"Ratting to the coach would be total death."

"It's no good for me to talk to him either, is it."

"Answered your own question," he said, and continued slicing celery, carrots, and cucumbers, dropping them into a bowl of ice water where they would spend the night in the fridge.

"They said their father told them you'd been a psycho from the day you were born."

"He didn't know me the day I was born. He doesn't know anything about me, as a matter of fact."

"Then why did you run so fast last night when you found out the Skolers were coming?"

"I didn't run. Besides, they were meeting up with Charley, not us."

"You cut out pretty quick."

"Plus you barely said goodbye to Charley," Jonah added.

"I'll call him and apologize. It's just we needed to leave. I knew we had a long day today and tomorrow being the Fourth—"

"Seemed weird to me," said Jonah.

"But we like you weird, Cassandra."

"You're kind of weird yourselves, you know," I said, attempting some of Rosalie's courage.

"Thank God for weirdness," said Morgan, looking heavenward.

"Not him again," groaned Jonah.

"That reminds me. I want you to show extra sensitivity toward your grandmother right now. Not that you haven't been, just she needs your support more than she may be letting on. We may need to go with her to church again. Can you do that?"

They agreed.

"And to finish what we were talking about, Morgan, if I thought any good would come of speaking with the Skoler boys' father, I'd do it. But I know it would make things worse. Besides, you're too smart not to see what's right and who's wrong here. From what I can tell, you're doing everything right."

Morgan kept moving the knife across the butcher-block, proud and embarrassed. His cheeks blossomed a charming warm crimson. Looked like beautiful birthmarks, lovely blotchy flowers.

Later that evening I did speak with Charley. He was kind, even prescient enough not to mention the abrupt rudeness of my departure after the game. My fears that Roy Skoler might have poisoned Charley against me appeared unfounded. Perhaps all this was a little too close for his comfort, too. He asked if I wanted to go out to dinner later in the week, continue our conversation, and I said sure, passing along an invitation to join us at the Independence Day celebration.

After locking the doors and downstairs windows, my new nightly ritual, I undressed. In bed I lay in a darkness softened by the night-light I had lately taken to leaving on and sifted through memories of Charley, in particular how hard he had tried to comfort me after my brother's funeral. Curious to have forgotten until now that he was the only person I had allowed in my room while the otherwise interminable reception went on downstairs. He respected me enough not to interfere with my grief by coddling me with trite clichés about death and love and divine will. He didn't try to coax me off the floor. Unlike the false and twisted sympathy that Roy Skoler would show me a few days hence, Charley's was true caring. Had I been capable of accepting his support, I might not have needed to run away.

As these thoughts began dwindling toward sleep, a dream image of Christopher, Ben, and Roy smoking cigarettes—their supposed calumets at the Indian caves—rose to mind. In the dream, I turned to Emily and asked, "What's that smell?" but now awake realized I had spoken the words aloud. The faintest trace of cigarette smoke hung in the room.

"Who are you?" I asked, the question stuck like a wishbone in my throat. I swung my legs around and put on my robe. In the feeble glow of the night-light I saw that I was alone. On hands and knees, hardly knowing what I was doing, I crawled to the open window and peered down into the front yard. There was a figure under the tree. Leaning against the trunk, looking up in the leaf-shuddering darkness. The tiny burning tip of the cigarette flared orange as the man—I knew it was a man, and I knew who it was—took a drag. "What do you want?" I called down to him and, hearing nothing by response, said, "Leave me alone," echoing the very words he had written on his first postcard. Without saying anything, he filliped his cigarette to the ground, turned, and left in no great hurry. Around a curve on Mendes Road and out of sight, an engine started up and he drove away.

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."