The Cloud of Unknowing, page 8
“He got a job at Brigham,” Diana said.
Brigham, I thought, where the Old Man had twice been taken, first when I was five, then a second time, years later, so that he might have died there had Diana not left college and brought him home.
“There were quite a few soldiers in Brigham in 1947,” Diana added. She appeared to retreat to that era just after the war, when the debris had come floating back in waves of wounded bodies and damaged minds. “Price listened to their stories.” She glanced down at the pamphlet, turned to a page she’d already marked, studied what was written there a moment, then looked up at me. “One day he went for a walk and ended up here at Dover Gorge.”
Now she was with him, as I could clearly see, walking along beside him as he drifted up the steadily narrowing trail to where the great stone split.
“It was a bright summer day,” she said. “Green, dotted with white flowers.”
This sounded like a quotation, so it didn’t surprise me when she lifted the pamphlet slightly. “His writing is pretty bad, actually,” she said. “Very mannered, I mean.”
Then she read:
The simple lushness of the scene served to avert my thoughts from life’s pervasive acrimonies, so that I felt myself transported into a fantastical world of sweetness and harmony, before the first branch had been in anger lifted, the first stone hurled.
She looked up and smiled. “See what I mean about the writing?”
Then she resumed reading, and as she read I felt her wizardry again, how easily she could pull you into the deep water of whatever subject commanded her attention.
Now I joined her at Price’s side, the three of us moving “along a dense, verdant path with rivulets of white flowers on both sides.” Together we drifted deeper and deeper into the woods, then along the side of the cliff until we reached a jagged fissure that Price somehow saw as “tragic, a broken heart of stone.”
“This is where he stopped,” Diana said. “Right at this spot where we’re standing.” She lowered the pamphlet and let her eyes drift up the cruelly jagged rift in the granite wall. “This is where he heard them. Voices.”
She had memorized Price’s words, and now recited them. “‘A rustling in the undergrowth, along with numerous faint cries.’” She drew her gaze back to me and continued her recitation in the same soft voice she’d used as a child, and which once again, after all these years, I found utterly mesmerizing:
I cannot describe the sensation that settled upon me, save as a visitation, a haunting. And yet, I saw no floating apparition, heard no wailing, as of a child in the wood or at the end of a corridor. The ghostliness gave no visual clue as to its nature or identity. It spoke only, and this in soft cries and a low, unbroken wail which translated to me a feeling of abandonment, of helplessness in the face of grave affliction, of ancient wounds unhealed and ancient wrongs unavenged and thus condemned forever to cry out from the hard eternal grit of immemorial stone.
She closed the pamphlet slowly, like a priest at the end of a homily. “Douglas Price is still alive, you know,” she said. “I’m going to talk to him.”
“Why?”
She turned toward the granite wall we stood beside and with a strange, impossible grace, reached out and raked her fingers down the jagged fissure in exactly the way I’d seen her touch the side of Jason’s face. “To find out what he knows,” she said.
Petrie considers the trip to Dover Gorge, and I can see that something in the walk disturbs him.
“So at that time, Diana said nothing about Mark or Jason?” he asks. “No.”
“Just Douglas Price, that pamphlet he wrote.” You nod because you have nothing to add.
“She didn’t say anything about her having any suspicions concerning Jason’s death?” Petrie asks.
“Nothing at all,” you admit, now recalling a line the Old Man often quoted, Emily Dickinson’s notion of telling the truth, but at a slant. Was that Diana’s strategy, you wonder now, another of her gifts, a genius for evasion and misdirection?
“No hint of a plot?” Petrie asks.
You see just how determined Petrie is to keep to the plan he has established for this interrogation, to gather only admissible evidence.
“None at all,” you tell him.
“So you knew no more about what Diana was doing after the walk than before it.”
“That’s right.”
“Nothing gained.”
“Nothing beyond a sense of something ominous,” you tell him, an answer you know Petrie will not like.
It is odd, you think, how stories unfold, particularly this story, how you are about one-third through it now, but can already feel the downward slope, know that from here on the descent will be steady and grow ever more rapid. You sense that Petrie knows this, too, sees the pained crinkle of your eyes and recognizes the indisputable fact that for you it begins here, the true disaster.
“And a sense of failure,” you add. “I felt a sense of failure on the drive back into town.”
A silent drive, you recall, with Diana’s gaze locked on the road ahead, the darkening air, saying nothing so that you suddenly felt that you had disappointed her in the way you’d all your life disappointed the Old Man, been inadequate to the task.
“Did she say anything more about Dover Gorge?” Petrie asks. “Why she’d taken you there?”
“No,” you answer; And yet you’d detected something in her manner. It wasn’t spoken. But it was in her eyes.
“Something made me think that this whole business at Dover Gorge had been a test,” you tell Petrie.
“Of what?”
“Of me. Of whether I could be trusted. I felt a shift away from me.” You see the Old Man and Diana together in his library, talking quietly as you linger at the door, checkers to her chess. “I’d felt it before. But that was with my father, the way he shifted his attention to Diana, focused all of it on her:”
You shrug, as if to unload an invisible burden, and in that instant a truth declares itself, and you know that it isn’t what we lose that haunts us, but what we lose by just a blink. A shudder passes through you, becomes physical, a trembling in your hands, so that you quickly draw them into your lap.
“After leaving Diana, I went home,” you continue. “It was just like every other night.” You see them in their usual seats. Abby at the opposite end of the oval table, Patty between the two of you, an ordinary dinner, meat loaf, green peas, mashed potatoes.
“At dinner I mentioned that I’d just left Diana,” you tell Petrie. “That we’d gone to Dover Gorge. I told them what I told you, that she had this pamphlet some guy wrote after the war, that this man, Douglas Price, that he’d been at Brigham.” You see Abby’s gaze shoot over to you, see the question in her eyes. Isn’t that where your father was? Then it is Patty who speaks, I just got an interesting e-mail from Aunt Diana.
“Patty told me that Diana had sent her something,” you tell Petrie. “She must have sent it to her right after she got home that evening. It was an e-mail. A Web site.”
“What Web site?”
“I asked Patty the same question.”
Petrie’s pen stands at the ready. “And her answer?” he asks.
NINE
“Windeby Girl,” Patty answered. “It’s a Web site about Windeby Girl.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” Patty said. “Just something she’s interested in.”
“And wants to share with you,” I said. “Like Kinsetta Tabu.”
“I guess.”
I couldn’t tell if Patty was being completely open, or if some part of her remained guarded, the Web site Diana had sent her entirely innocent, or if something darker lay behind it.
“She sent me a Web site, too,” I said. “Yde Girl.”
Patty’s eyes glimmered with what seemed to be recognition, but I made nothing of it.
“Ever heard of that?” I asked. Patty shook her head.
And I thought, She’s lying, and suddenly Patty appeared to me not as she was, sitting quietly at dinner, but as some variant of Nina, Charlie’s vampirish daughter, the one I’d earlier envisioned drifting down a shadowy corridor with a knife in her hand.
“She was murdered,” I said. “Yde Girl.” I looked for a reaction in Patty, but she gave no hint of ever having heard of this ancient crime.
“What happened to Windeby Girl?” I asked.
Patty shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. She took a bite of meat loaf and chewed it slowly before she added, “I haven’t looked at the Web site yet. It was just a link.”
To my astonishment, I had no idea if this were false or true, if Patty indeed knew nothing of Windeby Girl, or if, like Diana, she knew everything.
After dinner I went directly to my office, turned on my computer, and typed “Windeby Girl” into the search engine. Several Web sites appeared. I picked the first, and it was there, everything I needed to know, all of it written in an unusual script my computer identified as Monotype Corsiva 20:
The Landesmuseum of the Schloss Gottorf contains five bog bodies and one partially preserved head. One of these bodies, known as Windeby I, is that of a 14 year old girl. Windeby Girl’s body was found in a peat bog in 1952. Although she drowned, her death was not an accident. She had been blind-folded, and her body had been weighted down with a stone and tree branches. Based on this evidence, scholars have determined that Windeby Girls death, 2000 years ago, was a result not of misadventure, but of calculated murder.
Without in the least willing it, I took a deep breath and read the page again, now reliving the murder of Windeby Girl in each of its gruesome stages, a death done step by step, feeling each moment of her murder as it was carried out, first the soft texture of the blindfold, then the cool of the water as her face was pressed into it, and finally the terrible absence of air.
Certain words from the text now flashed up from the page in tiny explosions.
Not an accident. Drowned. Not of misadventure, but of calculated murder.
Those words had no doubt reminded Diana of Jason, I thought, though in what way I could not imagine.
“Dave?”
I looked up to find Abby standing at my door. “What’s wrong?” she asked worriedly.
I motioned her over to my desk. “This is the Web site Diana sent to Patty,” I told her. Then I pointed out the words that had seemed to flash up from the text.
For a moment, Abby said nothing, but her face was veiled in worry. “You have to warn him, Dave,” she said.
I had no idea what she was talking about. “Warn who?” I asked.
Her answer took me completely by surprise. “Mark,” she said, and added nothing else.
I couldn’t get Abby’s warning out of my mind, how certain she was that Mark was somehow in danger. The lightness in her eyes had faded as she spoke, and her voice had drained of all cheer. It was as if she somehow sensed that a great stone had been dislodged and would soon be rolling toward us, inevitably gaining speed as it thundered down the unguarded slope.
But what was I supposed to warn Mark about? Was it the fact that Diana took early morning walks or seemed unwilling to have visitors at her apartment? Was he to be warned that she’d rid herself of everything from her past, or that she was sending e-mails and faxes about prehistoric and Iron Age murders?
For all of this, the fact remained that Diana hadn’t so much as mentioned Mark while we’d been at Dover Gorge. Nor had she connected him to Cheddar Man or Yde Girl or Windeby Girl. As far as I knew, she’d made no accusation against him, to me or to anyone else.
When I got to work the next morning, I checked my fax machine for anything Diana might have sent during the night. I was relieved to find the tray empty, no eyeless skeletons, no leathery remains of murdered girls. There were no e-mails from Diana either.
At a little after ten Lily stepped into my office. “Ed Leary wants to see you,” she said. “He’s here now.”
“Okay, send him in.”
Ed appeared a few seconds later, looking a little less bedraggled than usual. “I’ve had a change of heart,” he announced as he lowered himself into the chair opposite my desk. “I want to make Ethel another offer. I want you to ask her what would put her mind at peace.”
“Peace could get pretty expensive,” I warned him. “She might come back with something quite drastic.”
“I want to know what would put her at rest,” Ed said, his tone a trifle more determined than before. “Peace, that’s what people really want, don’t you think?”
I didn’t find it useful to ponder “what people really want.” The range was too vast to contemplate. Unexpectedly I recalled one of the Old Man’s sonorous pronouncements: A king reduced, had wanted only a horse, while the whole known world was too little for Alexander.
“Why this change of heart?” I asked. “Your sister.”
I felt a dark stirring, felt what I thought Abby had felt the night before, a sense of something malignant growing in our midst, a murky pool, eternally spinning, and into which, by misadventure, we fall and fall and fall.
“You’ve been talking to Diana?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Ed answered brightly, and in an uncharacteristically cheerful tone, as if Diana had become a source of happiness or relief or inspiration, or perhaps all three, a ray of light that had managed to penetrate the gloom into which his life had settled.
I leaned forward. “Where did you meet Diana?”
“My shop is just down the street from the library,” Ed explained. “She came in one evening. On her way home, I guess. She wanted to look at the stones.”
“But Jason has a stone,” I said, remembering the afternoon of the funeral, how silent Diana had remained all that day, uttering not a word at the gravesite, nor during the ride back to the farmhouse. Even then she’d spoken only a few words before she’d wandered out the back door, then through the storm fence that bordered it, farther and farther from the rest of us until she’d finally taken her place beside the large gray stone that stood on the banks of Dolphin Pond.
“Dave?”
Ed’s summons brought me back to the little square office, the short gray filing cabinets and modest desk.
“Yes,” I said. “Diana. You were saying?”
“She wasn’t interested in looking at tombstones,” Ed told me. “The polished stuff, I mean. She was interested in raw stone.”
“Why?”
“She had a picture of a drawing she was interested in. The picture looked like it was drawn on stone.”
“What did the drawing show?” I asked.
“Just some lines drawn in blue. Sort of wavy lines. Running horizontal.” He thought a moment, then added, “And there was a little splash of red in the middle of the blue part.”
“Did she say where this drawing came from?” I asked.
“Nope, just that it was very old,” Ed said. “Thousands of years back, she said.” Then he repeated a phrase I knew he’d gotten from Diana. “That very dawn.” He glanced out the window, then back at me. “Anyway, we got to talking. I knew about her son. I told her what I was going through, and so we talked about that, too. She could see how mad I was at Ethel. She said there were only two things a person could do to get rid of a rage like that. Pay Ethel off and forget it, that was one way.”
“And the other?”
He laughed. “Kill her,” he said.
I eased back slowly, as if pressed by the point of a blade.
Ed massaged his left shoulder, and winced slightly. “So I’ve made up my mind. I want you to make Ethel another offer.” He winked. “Can’t kill her, right?”
I stared at him silently as murder scene after murder scene flashed through my mind: Ethel sprawled across a frayed Oriental carpet, her head in a plastic bag tied at her throat; Ethel floating in a pool of bloody bathwater; Ethel slumped in a chair, a trickle of blood flowing down along the bridge of her nose from the single hole between her eyes; Ethel with a knife in her chest; Ethel bludgeoned, her face beaten into pulp like …
“Yde Girl,” I whispered. “What?” Ed asked.
“Nothing,” I answered, returning to the matter at hand.
But Ed didn’t believe that it was nothing. He had seen something in my eyes. “She didn’t mean it, Dave,” he said. “She didn’t mean I should kill my wife.”
“Of course not,” I told him, but even as I gave him this assurance, my mind raced on, now thinking of Diana, what she’d said to Ed, how extreme they were, the options she’d given him, and how profoundly limited, only two: peace through surrender or a terrible revenge.
Ed guessed none of this, of course. He rose lightly, as if a great burden had been lifted from him. “Just let me know what Ethel says.”
I walked him to his truck, hoping to hear more, gather some detail about Diana that might bring things into clearer focus, give me some hint as to where exactly her mind was tending. For it was her mind that troubled me now, the building fear, one I could not suppress, that she was “like Dad.”
“About Diana,” I said after Ed had gotten into the truck and was about to pull away. “When you saw her last, did she seem okay?”
“Okay?” Ed asked. “What do you mean?” The word leaped from my mouth. “Sane.”
Ed laughed. “Sane? Diana?” He laughed again as he hit the ignition. “Nobody saner, Dave.”
But for all Ed’s assurance, the question continued to circle in my mind. And so, for the next few hours, as I worked at my desk, the meeting with Ed Leary kept returning to me, ominous as a vulture in a clear blue sky. I’d never heard Diana speak of killing someone, of murder being the solution to anything. In fact, I’d only seen true rage once in my life. It had suddenly exploded from the Old Man when he was in the midst of one of his paranoid delusions, and it had remained the most terrifying of all my childhood memories of him. It had happened the day before they’d taken him away. At just after noon, I’d opened the door of his study and found him on the floor, surrounded by stacks of books. He’d looked up at me, and at that instant, I’d seen the full face of his madness, a burning anger that lifted him to his feet. The look in his eyes still held me in a grip of terror, along with the words he’d said, It’s you. Then, as if to cool whatever ire burned inside him, he’d marched up the stairs, where, seconds later, I’d heard him run a bath. What boiling rage must have seized him that day, I wondered now, one he’d rushed to cool in the waters of his bath. And did this rage, fierce and delusional, now burn in Diana, too?
