The Diviner's Tale (34 page)

"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.

T
HE 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 carpeted 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.

When I reached the periphery of the thick scrub flats, I was startled by a jarringly bright yellow intrusion some hundred yards ahead, looming large, obscured by the tangle of vegetation. Without thinking twice, I made my way through the snarl and mesh of brambles toward this unnatural presence. Not until I reached one of Earl Klat's enormous bulldozers, standing there in its vainglorious bulk like some mindless metal behemoth, did I realize what was going on. Henderson's excavations had indeed begun, and before me was the dreary, heartbreaking sight of once-pristine woods now shockingly effaced. Towering mature trees felled by saws or uprooted by dozers, their chainsawed stumps skidded into massive heaps. Bluestone unearthed and pulverized without recourse. Ferns and flowers and the habitats of countless creatures expunged. I never felt more ashamed in my life for having been party to such devastation.

I stumbled around the site—for it was a site now, not a forest any longer—and saw where roads had been roughed out. Disoriented by all the upheaval, I tried my best to find the tree where I had witnessed the hanged girl, but it appeared to have been dispatched, along with native stands of blueberry, serviceberry, and everything else in sight. In its place, Klat's crew had begun to shallow out where I presumed the accursed lake was to go. Much like some wartime child wandering in circles after the bombing of her home, I moved in a daze, my purpose in coming here in the first place undermined by all the construction.

Construction, I thought. Misnomer if there ever was one.

Fortunately, no one was working on the long holiday weekend, so nobody saw the profoundly discouraged trespasser who finally left, having realized there was nothing to find. As I started back, I did notice that Laura Bryant's shanty had been left unscathed. Peeking inside, I saw that the workers were using it as a kind of canteen, storage out of the weather for gas cans and coolers. It obviously saw a lot of use now. There was a well-trodden path to the door that even bore some fairly fresh footprints—not those of workers' boots but rather of dress shoes. Odd, but perhaps Klat had come up in the world.

Impossible to imagine Laura living in this forlorn hovel. The tenable terror her kidnapper instilled in the girl—assuming she had been kidnapped, and I believed she had—must have been overwhelming. Why else would she stay put while he decided what next to do with her?

My ascent up the mountain went more quickly. I badly needed to get home. Be back among things comforting and familiar. See my boys, be done with this fool's errand. Other than my personal remorse and shock over Henderson's development, I had sensed nothing amiss in the caves or down in the valley. Memories were one thing, forevisioning quite another. Indeed I had to wonder whether my renunciation of divining hadn't taken hold—an oddly dismaying thought.

It was only when I reached the caves that I realized I hadn't eaten all day. I hauled the knapsack off my shoulder, undid the leather drawstring, and sat down on a wide cool boulder to have a drink of the now-warm water and eat my apple. Finishing most of it, I tossed it aside and lay back to close my eyes and rest briefly before walking back to the truck. I might even have dozed off for a few minutes.