The Cloud of Unknowing, page 13
“Hypatia,” he said.
You think the words, but do not say them. Two deaths.
Petrie rolls up the sleeves of his shirt, his gaze focused on you intently as he does so. “Patty,” he says. “You had no doubt it was Patty?”
You recall the image that came to you at that moment, two faces melting into each other becoming one in thought and purpose. “No doubt,” you tell Petrie. “I had no doubt that Patty was part of it now. That she was being seduced.”
“But into what?” Petrie asks. “Diana’s ‘research.’”
“But you still didn’t know what that was, did you?”
“No,” you admit. “But there were clues.”
“Clues?”
“What she’d talked to Price about. That stuff in his book. Pendergast’s story. A father who kills his son. All of that was somehow poisoning Diana’s mind, and she was pouring that same poison into Patty’s mind.” You hear the beat of your voice accelerate, the rapid fire of your words, something frantic in them. “Diana was making nutty connections, I knew that much. She was going in the wrong direction.”
“What direction was that?”
The word that occurs to you is “downward,” but you know that if you say it, it will lead your story in the wrong direction, too.
“What direction?” Petrie repeats.
His tone is neither threatening nor insistent. He is deep in the mystery now, its murky water rising around him as it rises around you. He holds to the form of the interrogation like a floating log, speaks to you coaxingly, so that you think of a careful surgeon, one who uses his probe cautiously, easing the cold gray bullet from the brightly glistening flesh.
“Toward death,” you answer, and with those words you come to a full stop.
In the following interval of silence, you recognize the long fall you have made in that direction, from death to death, the terrible slant of things.
You wonder how many of these deaths you might have prevented.
“Things weren’t clear to me,” you tell Petrie.
You hear Abby’s voice, urgent, frightening. You have to do something, Dave.
“I didn’t know what to do.”
You have to do something.
“I needed help. I needed advice. But I’d spoken to everyone I could about Diana. My wife. Patty. Bill Carnegie. Mark. You. Even Douglas Price. I didn’t think there was anyone else I could go to. I was desperate. I would have talked to anybody.” You see her not as she really appeared, but as some phantom version of herself, eerily transparent. “In fact, I did.”
“Talked to someone?”
“Yes.”
Petrie leans forward. “Who?”
In remembrance, she turns toward you, a child locked in inexpressible oddity.
“Nina,” you tell him, and feel the old order of your mind explode, fall back to earth in smoldering bits, a lethal disarray. “I talked to Nina.”
FOURTEEN
Night had fallen by the time I got back to town. It was a cool, autumn evening, and on the way through the village I noted the little shops hawking clothes and postcards and felt the awesome stability of uncomplicated things, of people questing after nothing more elusive than what they needed to sustain themselves at whatever level they’d sought that sustenance. The Old Man had found such a life disreputable because, according to him, it existed only on the surface of things. And yet it seemed to me that the surface was where life thrived, the surface that provided the only stability we had. We skated upon this thin layer of ice, and yet it was just thick enough to keep us from the cold and fathomless depths into which we would otherwise inevitably plunge.
Most of the shops were already closed on the town’s main street, the lights out in its shoe stores and bakeries, a darkness that made a single luminous square all the more prominent, so that I glanced toward it as I passed, glimpsed the poster in the window, Kinsetta Tabu nakedly sprawled beneath grotesque little piles of beheaded Barbie dolls.
I recalled the weird lyric Diana had played for me, World of whirl is whorl of world. It struck me as nonsense, of course, but it had clearly spoken to Diana, and evidently she had passed whatever bizarre meaning it had for her on to Patty.
I had already purchased Kinsetta Tabu’s CD and was on my way out of the shop when Nina came through the door. She didn’t see me, and so, invisible, I watched as she turned to the left, walked to a far aisle, her back to me as she began to finger through a group of CDs.
She was a very slender girl, and very pale, dressed in black head to foot.
Silver chains of various size and length hung from every available button and belt loop, and her shimmering blue hair was sprinkled with a fine, bloodred angel dust that sparkled eerily in the shop’s bright light.
I had never felt the slightest need to engage Nina, and to the degree I’d ever thought of her, it was in blessed contrast to Patty. But the distance between them had closed, Patty now under an influence that seemed to me as weird and unpredictable as whatever it was that caused Nina to array herself in chains and sprinkle her hair with flecks of glistening red.
“Nina,” I said.
She turned and looked at me warily, as if I were some creature who’d wandered unexpectedly out of the jungle depths. “Hi,” she said.
I stared at her silently, with no place to go, now wondering what it was I’d hoped to learn from her, what insight into Patty.
“I was just buying a CD,” I continued awkwardly. I drew it from the bag. “Kinsetta Tabu.”
I’d expected her to be surprised by the unexpectedly contemporary nature of my choice, but she seemed to regard it with the same silent disdain she no doubt had for Bob Dylan or Frank Sinatra or any other relic from the indistinguishable bygone eras of the distant past.
“Patty likes her,” I added.
Nina nodded. “Yeah, I know. She mentioned it. It’s like some new craze with her.”
“Craze?”
“You know, always listening to it.”
“But she’s not your thing, I guess,” I said. “Kinsetta Tabu.” Nina shrugged. “She went to the Grammys. She’s a fake.”
“I really haven’t listened to her very much,” I continued. “Like I said, it’s Patty who …” I stopped, and a terrible wave of anxiety swept over me, a vision of my daughter adrift, becoming Hypatia, Diana’s accomplice. “Patty,” I sputtered. “She …”
Nina looked at me as if I’d suddenly become ill, an older man having a heart attack. Then, quite suddenly, she appeared to grasp the nature of my distress.
“You’re worried about her,” she said.
I nodded, still unable to regain my voice.
Nina smiled delicately. “That’s nice,” she said. “That’s a nice thing.” Her eyes miraculously glistened. “A father.”
In an instant, everything changed, identities reversed, along with expectations, life in its full cataclysmic surprise. And in that bright, unclouded flash, I saw Nina not as weirdly adrift, but as rooted in her weirdness, the bizarre dress and flecked hair not as signs of floating character, but as proof of character itself, the weighted hand of her moral compass steady at true north.
“Does Patty talk to you?” I asked quietly. Nina nodded. “She used to … a little.”
“But not now?”
“Now she doesn’t really talk to anybody.” She seemed unsure of what my ancient, cracking heart could bear, hesitant to add anything to its burden. “She reads books all the time,” she added. “She gets them from …”
“Her aunt,” I said. “Diana.”
“Diana,” Nina repeated. She smiled. “The Huntress, right?” She seemed pleased to have stored this small mythological reference.
“The Huntress, yes,” I told her, though in regard to my sister, I still had no idea of the nature of her prey.
The lights were on in the library, but as I turned into the parking lot beside it, I noticed that Diana’s car wasn’t there. I glanced at my watch. It was only six o’clock, well within her working hours. I recalled that once before she’d mentioned having gotten a ride. Perhaps she’d done that again, and was expecting a ride home.
I got out of the car, walked to the front door of the library, and went inside. There were a few people scattered about, mostly older, along with a smattering of young people in the room’s computer section.
“Dave?”
I turned to see Adele Connors, a girl I’d dated for a time during my last year of high school. She’d been very smart and very curious, and I’d been powerfully drawn to her. But it was an attraction I’d avoided, though not because I’d wanted more. More would have been sealike, seething, boundless, and there would have been no foothold in the swell. And so I had wanted less.
“Dave,” she said, clearly surprised to see me. “How long has it been?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered.
“Since I married and moved away,” Adele said. “I only came back last year. I guess you’re not a regular patron of the library.”
“No,” I said. “I’m more of a movie fan.” I noticed the small tag that hung on her blouse. It read, HEAD LIBRARIAN. “So you work here,” I said.
“A widow has to do something.” Her smile was delicate, wistful, like someone gazing at an old photograph, and it struck me how often we see our lives through the prism of other possibilities, a husband who lived, a different place, a different job, and that to do more, look deeper than into the simple, shallow pool in which we swim, is to stare bare-eyed into the unfathomable abyss.
“It seems like a thousand years ago, Dave,” Adele added. Her smile widened. “So, fill me in.”
I shrugged. “Married. One child. A daughter.”
“I have two boys. Twins. Both in college now.”
“I came back here after college,” I told her, a mere afterthought to the family matter that now bore so heavily upon me. “I’m a lawyer.”
“I knew that much at least,” Adele said. “I’ve seen your shingle. Attorney-at- law.” She smiled again, her schoolgirl smile. “It goes so fast, doesn’t it? Life.”
The years of my own small life passed like prisoners before the bar, but the lockstep of time was not a movement I could slow, so I saw no reason to address it. I glanced about. “Where’s Diana?” I asked. “I dropped by to talk to her. But if she’s busy, I can wait until she gets off.”
Adele looked puzzled. “Gets off?”
“Yes,” I said. “Eight o’clock. Isn’t that when the library closes?”
Adele nodded softly. “Yes, that’s when it closes, but …” She stopped, and I saw a strange uneasiness stirring in her eyes.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Diana doesn’t work here, Dave,” Adele said. “She comes here. She stays for hours. But she doesn’t work here. Have an actual job, I mean.”
I felt that little grip of terror that accompanies a sudden bump in midnight, all the steady motion of the plane in an instant undermined. “But Diana, she …”
Adele pressed a single finger to her lips, then motioned for me to follow along and led me to the rear of the library and into a small cramped office.
“It’s a small town,” she explained once she’d closed the door. “I didn’t want people to hear.” She walked behind her desk and sat down. I took the only other chair in the room.
“So Diana just comes here to read?” I asked.
“Yes,” Adele answered. “She goes from section to section, picking books off the shelves. She’ll gather up eight or nine books. Then she’ll take them over to one of the little study carrels we have near the window. She stays there all day.”
It was the way Diana had studied as a child, and it was the way the Old Man had studied, piling books on his desk or spreading them across the floor, flipping from one to the other, amassing a vast store of information.
“And she takes notes,” Adele added. “But not in a notebook, like you’d think. She brings in a bag full of little paper squares. Yellow. Like Post-its. That’s what she writes on.”
“Have you ever read any of these notes?”
Adele suddenly looked hesitant to reveal more, like a woman reluctant to tell someone else’s secret. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Just this afternoon I found a few of them on the floor beneath her desk. I picked them up. I was going to give them to her when she came in tomorrow.”
“May I see them?”
She gave me a long, evaluating look. “I really shouldn’t, Dave,” she said. I leaned forward. “Adele, please. I have to know what Diana’s doing.”
“Is she in trouble?”
“Not yet,” I answered. “But she could be in the future.” Adele still made no move toward the notes.
“You know our history, Adele,” I said. “My father. You know what he was like.”
“Is that the kind of trouble you think Diana may be in?” Adele asked. “Yes.”
With no further protest, Adele opened the drawer of her desk, drew out a small white envelope. “You can’t keep them,” she said. “You can just look at them.”
I opened the envelope, took out the few yellow squares of paper inside and read them, though not without difficulty, because the writing was so tiny I had to squint very hard to bring the words into focus.
The first read: Acoustic affects have been registered in Scandinavian standing stones.
The second bore no connection I could see to the first: Musicogenic epileptics—brain discharges—at 6 Hz.
The third read: Stone tombs resonate at 95 Hz and 112 Hz, a frequency range comparable to the human voice.
I returned Diana’s notes to the envelope and handed it back to Adele. “You said she was here today?”
“Yes. She came in when we opened and didn’t leave until about an hour ago.”
“Was she alone?”
“For a while,” Adele said. “Then I saw someone else sitting with her. A teenage girl. They were studying together.”
“A teenage girl,” I repeated. “With blond hair?”
Adele nodded. “I know Diana’s gone through a terrible tragedy,” she said. “Losing her son.”
But I was thinking only of Patty now, how vulnerable she was, how few defenses she had against my sister.
“Terrible,” Adele said, “to lose a son.” I nodded. Or a daughter, I thought.
I drove directly to Diana’s apartment, but her car wasn’t parked on the street or in the parking area at the rear of her building. Nor could I detect any hint of light beneath the tightly drawn curtains of her apartment. I waited for a long time, checking my watch occasionally, but there was still no sign of Diana, and so I decided to visit various places of interest, locations where I thought she might go on a night of “searching.”
It was a trail that led through her recent past, first down the hill where she’d been seen walking during the wee hours of the morning, then along the main street of the village, past the library, and farther down, past my office, and then out of town. Next I drove to the house on Old Farmhouse Road, where I got out briefly and looked around. The night was clear and the moon was full, so that I could see all the way to where Dolphin Pond glimmered brightly. The ear- shaped stone seemed to erupt from the ground at the water’s edge, and I tried to imagine it as I thought Price might, not simply as a stone obelisk, but as part of an eerily living earth, though exactly how he envisioned so vast an organism was well beyond the powers of my own quite limited imagination. I hoped it was also beyond Diana’s, a volatile element she had not added to the mix already boiling in her mind.
There was no sign of Diana at the house or the pond, and so I continued on, this time to the house where we’d lived as children. I parked there and waited, half expecting the door to open and Diana to step out and wave me in as she had that final rain-drenched day. But the door never opened, and even if it had, someone else would have come through it, some member of a different family, with different problems.
After a while, I headed back toward town, but not before a brief tour of the campus near our house. I drifted by the deserted quadrangle where Diana and I had frolicked as children, the old bell tower where she’d pointed out and named the stars, the little park where we’d sat, Jason only a few yards away, staring blankly at the other children.
Mark wants to put him away, I thought suddenly, the voice in my head almost as clear as Diana’s.
Mark.
I suddenly felt a little bite of fear, and imagined Diana crouched behind a row of bushes, waiting for Mark to leave work.
I pressed down on the accelerator and made my way to where the old campus with its stately Federalist architecture gave way to the modern glass-and-steel facade of the Hamilton Research Institute.
The nearly deserted parking lot was large and well lighted, so it was easy for me to find the spot reserved for “Dr. Mark Regan.”
It didn’t surprise me that Mark’s car was there. He’d rarely returned home until late in the evening, and during all those long nights, Diana had played and talked with Jason, ceaselessly working to connect with him, enter his world as if in hope of chasing away the demonic voices that, like invisible piranha, were eating him alive.
I pulled into the empty spot in front of Mark’s car, got out, looked over the deserted moonlit parking lot, then into the shadowy interior of the car itself.
But what was I looking for?
The answer to that question stunned me.
I was looking for something that might corroborate Diana’s groundless suspicion, glancing into Mark’s car as if I might find a murder weapon lying openly in the backseat. It was an absurd act based upon an absurd notion, but I’d done it anyway. And I thought just how right Mark was, even heard him repeat his warning, She can be very seductive.
