“In court,” I answered. I lifted my hand and, raising one finger at a time, stated the obvious facts of the case. “As far as Mark is concerned, there will be no indictment. There will be no trial. There will be no sentence. Do you know why? Because there is not a shred of evidence against him.”

  Patty glared at me with a clear sense of confidence that my last points meant nothing. “There are other forms of proof, Dad,” she said. “It’s not all about law and trials and stuff like that.”

  I saw the great library of our jurisprudence, all our ancient declarations and honored constitutions, from Magna Carta to the most recent legal brief, all of it catch fire and turn to ash in my daughter’s eyes.

  “Patty,” I said softly. “There is only human justice. It’s a flawed thing, I know, imperfect, but …”

  The laugh that broke from her had the chilling tenor of a witch’s cackle. “That’s exactly what I expected you to say,” she blurted scornfully. “It isn’t perfect, but it’s all there is.” Her smile was pure mockery. “What bullshit.”

  “Patty!” Abby cried. She looked at me. “I want this to stop, Dave.” But there was no stopping it.

  My anger spiked. I leaned forward and planted my elbows on the table. “Then what do you propose?” I snapped. “What justice are you going to carry out?”

  Patty rose in a smoking column of righteous ire. “I’m going to my room.”

  “And you’re going to stay there, too,” I bawled. “You’re going to go to school, and then you’re going to come directly home, and you’re going to do that and nothing but that until all of this is over.”

  She stared at me in angry challenge. “And when will that be, Dad?” she demanded. “When Mark marries again and has another family?”

  “What are you talking about, Patty?”

  She smiled, but it was a cold smile, like the one I suddenly imagined on the lips of Waltraud Wagner. “You can’t stop Diana,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” I repeated.

  Her eyes blazed. “You can’t stop Diana,” she cried in a voice filled with seething vehemence. “No one can.” Then she whirled around, marched to her room, and slammed the door.

  In the echoing void, Abby murmured, “What are you going to do now?” And I thought, Something. Something soon. But I did not know what.

  “So I began with research,” you tell Petrie. “Just like Diana.”

  “What did you research?” he asks.

  “First, Waltraud Wagner.”

  Petrie carefully takes down the name. “That night, I looked her up,” you continue.

  You tell him the results of your inquiry, that Waltraud Wagner was not a character in a book, but an Austrian woman who’d been convicted of fifteen murders, and who had led three other women to commit at least eight more. She had used the drowning method Patty mentioned. She’d also killed by denying insulin to diabetic patients and by overdosing others with a drug called Rohypnol, which had the very convenient characteristic of being undetectable by the standard tests used in autopsies.

  “But it was the function of Rohypnol that captured my attention,” you add. “It was an anesthetic whose primary use was in calming down mental patients.”

  The blue pen halts its flight across the page.

  “Like your father?” Petrie asks. “It might have been prescribed for him?”

  “I asked myself the same question,” you tell him.

  You go no farther, because you have no evidence that Diana had ever had access to those tiny tablets, colorless and tasteless, no evidence that they had ever been housed in the medicine chest that hung above the rust-rimmed sink in the Old Man’s bathroom. And yet there it was, a grim suspicion, because your mind had become entirely reflexive, a force you could neither will nor control, a collector of disparate facts: the Old Man’s madness, Diana’s long and no doubt dreary custodianship, the ligature marks found on his wrists and ankles, an Austrian murderess Diana had read about, the powerful drug she’d used for murder fifteen times.

  “To entertain a dreadful notion is itself a dreadful thing,” you say now. “But I didn’t stop there.”

  Petrie’s pen does not move, and you notice that his eyes are no less still.

  “I played back the whole conversation I’d had with Diana outside her apartment,” you continue. “Then I thought of Waltraud Wagner again, of the way she’d recruited others for murder. That led me back to Hypatia, which led me back to Douglas Price. And from there, I went to Gaia.”

  “Gaia?” Petrie asks.

  “The living earth. Price had told me that Diana found the concept very interesting.”

  You see that Petrie doesn’t need to flip back through his notes to refresh his recollection of what you’ve previously told him.

  “So I looked it up,” you tell him now. “Gaia.”

  Then you tell him what you found. You recall it verbatim, using the very skill you’d buried so long ago, a power of memory, photographic and otherwise.

  “Gaia,” you begin in a tone of recitation, “known as Earth, was a goddess half risen from the earth, and so unable to separate from it. She was the daughter of Chaos, and bore the burden of his disorder. In time, she took a husband, Uranus, and by him bore Cyclops. Uranus was revolted by the monstrousness of his son, and wished to return him to the bowels of Gaia, wished, that is, that he had never been born, and thus by implication, wished that he were dead. To protect Cyclops, Gaia hid him within herself, and despite the pain did not release him to his father. At last, in agony, Gaia enlisted the aid of Cronus and fashioned the adamantine knife which he used to cut off Uranus’s genitals. The blood of that wound fell to earth and from its red drops rose the Erinyes, which we know as The Furies, and from whom sprang justice and retribution.”

  Petrie stares at you, clearly impressed. “You have quite a memory.”

  You repeat the line that lingered like an acrid smoke in your mind. “At last, in agony, Gaia enlisted the aid of Cronus.”

  Petrie watches you edgily, like a man on the front row of an execution gallery.

  “Reading that, who could Cronus be but Patty,” you tell him.

  In a kind of horror-movie scenario, you see a glistening blade rise and fall in Patty’s pale hand.

  “Not that Diana would do something violent,” Petrie says, “but that Patty would.”

  You remember Patty’s angry eyes and see the abyss that yawns before each of us at a certain point, and from which we are saved not by the slow accretion of experience and understanding, but by the mechanics of pure luck, that silent, invisible machine whose tiny gears are always turning, so that missing this bus or catching that one makes all the difference, our long labor to control our lives cancelled in an instant.

  “And so?” Petrie asks.

  “And so I had to cut Patty off from Diana.” You look at Petrie, appeal to the common urge of fatherhood, its most primitive impulse. “I had to,” you repeat emphatically. You feel the rain on your face, see it dropping from a length of black wrought iron. “At any cost.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Charlie noticed the edgy state I was in the next morning, but he said nothing about it. Perhaps by then he’d grown accustomed to the frayed rope I had become. Certainly nothing had happened in the last few days to allay the doubts he had about me, the erratic work, the tense look, the river of fear that carried me along, and which, by then, had merged with the river of anger.

  “Hello, Dave,” he said cautiously as I swept by his office. I only nodded and fled into my own.

  The phone rang on Lily’s desk at precisely 9:13, and I should have known how fateful that call was because an old literary image suddenly returned to me, Satan stepping off the rim of heaven and into the cheerless void.

  “Stewart Grace for you,” she said.

  I picked up the phone. “Good morning, Stewart.”

  “I think you should come over to my office right away,” Grace said. I heard it in his voice, distant, ominous, the foghorn of the Titanic. “What is it?” I asked.

  “Mark’s on his way, too,” Grace said. There was a brief pause, then he added, “Things have gotten worse, Dave.”

  I told him I’d be right there, then put down the phone and headed for my car, my mind now entering a fantasy of its own, a vision of Diana leaning against the hood of my car, eating an apple. As I approach she smiles as brightly as when she was a little girl. Then she tosses the apple and it rises in a wide arc, unraveling the dark weave of her groundless suspicion as it soars, so that by the time it touches earth again, she is free of it entirely, all the hellhounds of her mind brought to heel at last.

  It was the last image I had of her salvation. I brushed it easily from my mind.

  Grace was seated behind his desk when I came in. He rose immediately and offered his hand. “Thanks for coming right over, Dave,” he said. His tone was more grave and solemn than I had ever heard it, so that he no longer seemed entirely confident that he knew his way out of the bramble. “Mark will be here in a few minutes.” He sat back down and nodded to one of the two chairs that faced his desk. “Please.”

  I took my seat and waited, now reviewing all the many steps I’d taken, the decisions I’d made, the observations they’d been based upon, signs glimpsed, signs missed, the whole sorry scheme of things entire.

  “As I said, things have gotten worse,” Grace told me.

  As if on cue, Mark burst through the door. He was dressed in a white shirt and black pants, both neatly pressed, but some part of him, his hair, his eyes, struck me as peculiarly in disarray.

  “Dave,” he said with a quick nod. “Stewart.”

  Grace rose from his desk and they shook hands. Then Mark turned to me. “Has Stewart told you?”

  I shook my head.

  Mark sat down in the chair next to mine but seemed hardly able to stay in his seat, his manner jumpy and alert, as if, at any moment, he expected to be attacked. With a shaky hand he took a thin stack of photographs from his jacket pocket. “She’s done it again,” he said. “Just what I was afraid of.”

  “And at his workplace,” Grace added grimly.

  “She must have come to the center last night,” Mark said. There was something frantic in his voice. He looked truly frightened. “I was pretty much alone there. Working late.” He thrust the photographs toward me. “Look what she did.”

  There were four photographs, each of Mark’s car, but from different angles, one from each side of the car, one of the front, one of the rear. The car rested in Mark’s reserved space at the research center. It was a black sedan and the dark red letters of the word that had been painted the full length of each side and across the hood and trunk were as visible as blood on black velvet: MURDERER.

  “Terrible,” Mark muttered. “Scary.”

  Which was true. Because in the photographs the word appeared larger and more grotesque than I would have thought possible, so that the car looked like a huge black animal that had been flayed open, with dripping streams of red flowing down its wounded flanks. In such a state, the translucent headlights appeared pale and lifeless, the dead eyes of a dead thing. I could not imagine the car ever moving again, or making even the slightest sound. Nothing came from it but death.

  “It’s obvious how serious this is,” Grace said.

  Mark took the pictures from me and handed them to Stewart, who looked at them only briefly, then placed them on his desk and settled his gaze on me. “Well, Dave?” he said.

  I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know what to say, or what I was expected to say, save that Diana had clearly gone over the edge, that she was now hurtling forward in a wild, whitewater madness.

  “Surely you see how this is escalating,” Stewart said. “Diana’s actions, I mean.”

  I felt that I could do nothing but offer, however briefly, a meek, legalistic defense. “Is it absolutely certain that Diana did this?”

  Mark sprang to his feet. “Oh, come on, Dave. Who else could it be?”

  Again, I dodged the issue, though by a move I knew to be a feint. “Before … when we talked before … you mentioned a man at work who—”

  “Gillespie?” Mark interrupted. “No way. He wouldn’t do something like this.

  Besides, he’s in Toronto.” He snapped the pictures from Stewart’s desk and thrust them toward me. “This is Diana’s work, and you know it.”

  “Mark,” Stewart cautioned. He nodded toward the chair. “Please.”

  Mark sat down, but again he seemed barely able to remain in place. “I’m a busy man, Dave,” he said. “You know that. I can’t let this go on. I told you that.”

  “And we won’t let it go on,” Grace added calmly. He looked at me for assurance. “Will we, Dave?”

  “No,” I said quietly, “but—”

  “But what?” Mark snapped. “I can’t believe you’re defending her, Dave.”

  “I’m not defending her,” I said.

  He looked at me, thunderstruck. “Surely you don’t believe a word of what

  …” He stopped. “Maybe you do,” he cried. He began searching through his pockets, one after the other, in a kind of frantic quest. Then he found what he sought and pressed it toward me. “The badge,” he said.

  It rested in his open hand, made of tin, a five-pointed star with faded letters inscribed in the middle, badly rusted, impossible to identify.

  “Go ahead, take it,” Mark said. “Give it to the cops. Put it through the lab. See if you can find some kind of evidence on it.”

  I left the badge in Mark’s hand. “It’s not evidence, Mark. I know that.”

  Mark returned the badge to his pocket. “Diana thought I used a badge to murder my son,” he told Grace. “Crazy. And now my car. She’s ruined my car.” His eyes snapped over to me. “I had to drive that car over here, Dave. Through the town. The whole fucking town. With MURDERER written all over it in big red letters.”

  “Mark,” Grace cautioned again. “I’m sure this is as worrisome to Dave as it is to you.”

  “I wish I could be sure of that, Stewart,” Mark said. His gaze bore into me. “Can I be sure of that, Dave?”

  Before I could answer, Grace said, “We all have certain options here, and I think we all agree that something has to be done. We know this can’t continue, and we know that if it does, it will get worse.” He looked at me pointedly. “And certainly no one knows this better than you, Dave, that a condition like this only deepens.”

  As my father’s had, which was precisely what Grace was getting at. He’d started with the mildest of suspicions, with a short enemies list, then descended into a near total paranoia, firing off letters to newspapers, along with various threatening ones to scores of momentarily addled critics, colleagues, even former students. Mark had no doubt told Grace all of this, and now it was to be used as evidence against Diana, proof of her tainted blood.

  “Perhaps we should explore this situation clinically for a moment,” Grace said.

  “Clinically?” Mark asked, clearly somewhat exasperated by the pace of the proceedings.

  “She’s never received any kind of treatment, isn’t that true, Dave?” Grace asked.

  I nodded.

  “But you mentioned it to her, didn’t you? The possibility of her getting help?

  You told me that you would, and I assume you did?”

  “Yes. I told her she needed to see someone.”

  “What was her reaction?”

  “Not good.”

  “I see.” Grace nodded toward the photographs Mark still held. “This is destruction of property, Dave, a clear escalation in Diana’s behavior. I’m sure you remember our last conversation. About having to act if things appear to get worse. Well, things have gotten worse, don’t you agree?”

  “Yes.”

  Grace leaned forward and folded his arms on his desk. “So, Dave, what do you want us to do? Do you think a restraining order would have any effect on Diana’s behavior?”

  “No,” I said.

  “A talk with you? Or with me?”

  “She wouldn’t listen to either one of us.”

  “What then can we do?” Grace asked.

  I thought only of Patty, how, step by step, Diana had stolen her from me. I reviewed all I’d done in the last few weeks, all the conversations I’d had with Diana and others, the treatment I’d offered for her steadily increasing derangement, a failure that stoked a fire in me that seemed even more fierce than the one I’d felt the night before.

  “Diana has to be stopped,” I said, my voice suddenly as hard as a hammer on a nail.

  Grace looked relieved by the bluntness and determination. “For her own good,” I added.

  Grace and Mark nodded. Then Grace said, “How can that be done, Dave?”

  “The police can do it,” I answered. “They can arrest her.”

  Grace appeared surprised by the extremity of the action I’d just proposed. “You mean have Mark file a complaint with the police?” he asked. “Yes.”

  Grace didn’t seem convinced that such was the proper action. “But we don’t really have any actual evidence that Diana did it.”

  “No,” I agreed, “but we have plenty of evidence for suspicion.” Then I made the case against my sister, her puny evidence, the weird faxes and e-mails, her freakish “research,” the accusation she’d left on Mark’s car, followed by a series of threatening quotations. I nodded toward the photographs Mark still held in his right hand, the butchered car, dripping with bloodred paint. “Now this.”

  It was a convincing argument. I could see how successful it was; perhaps, in all my life, my first success.

  “So we have to take this step,” Grace said. “You see no less … dramatic … way of intervening with Diana?”

  “No,” I answered crisply. “Diana won’t listen to me. She won’t listen to anyone. She needs help. It has to be imposed upon her.” I drew in a long breath. “Like Dad.”