“He said it was better for Jason,” Diana said.

  And it probably had been better for him, I thought, since its seclusion had presented fewer of the distractions that would have otherwise bedeviled him, traffic and the sounds of other children, ordinary in themselves, but which would have filled Jason with foreboding.

  “Are you going to stay in the house?” I asked. She shook her head. “Not without Jason.”

  I saw her son in my mind, a little boy with blond hair and pale complexion like his mother, but with his father’s darkly glittering eyes. Then I thought of my daughter Patty, the life that stretched before her, then again of Jason, how little of life’s bounty he had known, not only because his years had been cut short, but because even those years had been blighted, his world so filled with invading shadows he’d probably glimpsed no light at all.

  Abby was sitting on the porch when Diana and I arrived. She is a tall woman, thin, with brown hair and large green eyes. We’d met in Old Salsbury, where I’d briefly worked at a law firm. She’d been a paralegal in the law office, and I’d found her quiet and self-effacing, not at all prone to challenge. We’d married a year later, and since then built a life based on smoothing the edges, avoiding conflict, a world where father knew best, or someone did, where no line ever blurred or skirted out into infinity.

  Abby rose and came down the walkway as Diana and I got out of the car. “Nice to see you, Diana,” Abby said cheerily.

  “The judge declared Jason’s death accidental,” I told her in order to get the subject out of the way.

  Abby nodded softly. “Well, I guess it’s nice to have closure,” she said. “Closure,” Diana repeated, as if she were going through the word’s various definitions, trying to decide if any of them were relevant to her state of mind. “Diana’s staying for dinner,” I added quickly. “I thought we’d cook out. It’s certainly warm enough.”

  We all went into the kitchen. I poured each of us a glass of wine, then walked out onto the deck to light the grill. A glass door separated the deck from the grill, and through it I could see Abby preparing a salad while Diana sat on a wooden stool a few feet away. Abby was talking in that animated way of hers. Diana listened, but said nothing, her fingers wrapped loosely around the glass, as if such sustaining refreshment, the actual food and drink of life, were no more than an afterthought.

  Our daughter Patty had gotten home by the time the table was set. She was fifteen and could not have been more typical, a member of her high school band, with rows of Bs on her report card, attired in clothes from the Gap or Old Navy, exactly the opposite of Nina, my partner Charlie’s daughter, a teenaged girl who dressed in Gothic black and continually changed the luminescent colors of her hair, and whose sudden presence at the office had never failed to set my mind wondering what she might have tucked in the pocket of her long black coat.

  “Hi, Aunt Diana,” Patty said politely as she lowered herself into a chair.

  Diana looked at her in a way that appeared oddly penetrating, like one stripping plaster from a wall to view the structure beneath.

  “How are you, Patty?” she asked in a tone that was unexpectedly solemn and which appeared to take Patty somewhat off guard.

  “I’m fine,” Patty answered.

  Diana took a sip of wine, but her eyes never left Patty’s.

  “Did you know that apes can never speak?” she asked. Patty shook her head. “I read about it last night,” Diana continued. “Even if an ape had the same intelligence as a human, it wouldn’t be able to speak.”

  “Why not?” Patty asked, her curiosity sparked in a way that surprised me. “Because the tube that goes from the vocal cords to the mouth and nose is too short,” Diana answered. “There’s not enough room for the air to vibrate, and so it can’t make words.” She appeared to retreat to some distant place, remain there a moment, then return, her gaze once again directed toward Patty. “Do you read much?” she asked.

  Patty looked at me quizzically, then turned back to Diana. “Just what they assign.”

  “Dad made us read all the time,” I said.

  Diana looked at me. “Schiller,” she said. “Remember Schiller?”

  I did, but shook my head, claiming that I didn’t, knowing that no matter what I recalled of him, Diana would remember vastly more.

  “He said that before love, we would not have felt the deaths of others,” Diana said. “Not even our own children. We would have been numb.” She shifted her gaze to Patty and raised her glass. “Let’s hope your life is anything but that,” she said.

  Shortly after dinner, I drove Diana back to her house on Old Farmhouse Road. It was a cool, clear night, full of stars, and I recalled the look on Diana’s face the first time she saw Van Gogh’s famous painting of a starry night. The Old Man had taken us to the Modern, one of his “scholarly trips,” as he called them, and which often included nearby battlefields and historic villages. It was our first trip to New York. Diana was twelve years old, clothed in a dark blue dress with black shoes and white socks, beautiful as girls can sometimes be on the brink of adolescence. She kept her hand tucked in the Old Man’s arm, as if to anchor him, though for the last few weeks he’d seemed almost normal, making meals at actual mealtimes and combing the paper for various jobs.

  “The brushstrokes are very deep,” Diana said as she stood before the painting. My father nodded. “Van Gogh died very young,” he said quietly.

  Diana gazed at the deep furrows of circling blue. “Maybe he always knew that,” she said.

  I glanced over at her now, and saw her face almost as it had been that afternoon in the museum, grave and strangely probing, eyes that held you dangling, like hooks.

  “Do you ever talk to Mark?” she asked. “I thought he might have called.”

  “No, he hasn’t called me.”

  She nodded briskly, then got out of the car and waited for me to join her at the end of the walkway.

  When I reached her, she turned and we headed toward the house together. “Why did you think Mark might have called me?” I asked.

  “I thought he might have questions.”

  “About what?”

  “About me,” she answered. “The fact that I scare him.” She looked at me. “That’s the word he used. Like I might pull a knife on him.”

  I laughed at this vision of my sister’s violence, how exaggerated it seemed, no less impossible than her suddenly taking flight.

  “He said my eyes scare him,” she added. “The look in my eyes.”

  Her gaze grew very intent, like someone peering at something either very large or very small. I couldn’t tell which. “Don’t call me for a while, okay?” she said. “I know you want to check on me, but please don’t. I want to think a few things through.” She smiled. “I’ll be okay. I really will. I just want some time alone.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “I’ll call you,” she assured me. “Don’t worry. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

  When I’m ready.

  In the coming days, I often thought of those words, of what they actually meant. At first I supposed no hidden meaning at all, that Diana was simply saying that she was ready to walk the rest of the way to the house, ready to open the door and step inside. She did all those things only a few seconds later. But later I came to believe that she had been declaring a different readiness that night, a readiness to let slip the lines that had bound her for so long, the trusty moorings of her life, and thus set sail toward that place whose dangers the ancient cartographers could not guess, nor act against, save by issuing the dark and futile warning they inscribed upon their maps: Here there be dragons.

  “So she said strange things?” Petrie asks.

  He wants it to be simple, this Q&A, simple questions and simple answers. A constricted inquiry: the color of the car, the caliber of the bullet. You see that his life in rooted in the sturdy matter-of-factness of evidence. He wants identifications that are positive and fingerprints that match. How will you ever be able to show him the cloud and the mist, the view blurred by rain, bad lighting, distance, prints whose whorls spin into the unknowable void?

  You look at the notepad he balances on his lap, the small blue pen with which he has been scribbling notes. One of them says “Bleak House.”

  “Is mentioning a book title strange?” you ask. “You seem to think it is.”

  “Perhaps I do,” you admit. “Did.”

  “Why would you think that?” Petrie asks.

  “I don’t know,” you answer. “It’s just that it was strange, the way Diana was doing it again. Talking in that way. She hadn’t done it since the Old Man died”

  Petrie appears briefly to return to that rainy day ten years earlier, a young detective then, thinner, but only slightly, everything else the same, the self-confidence, trusting his eyes and ears, the testimony of voices that come from moving lips.

  “The weather was dreary,” you add softly. “That day. And cold. We had trouble with the fire.”

  You wonder to what extent Petrie recalls the room’s stark details, the Old Man dead in his chair, eyes closed, mouth open, Diana beside him, cradling him softly, you on the tattered brocade sofa, peering out into the backyard where a mound of ashes still smoldered, the remains of what had once been a bathrobe, a pair of tattered house shoes, a large green pillow.

  “So this manner of speech struck you as some kind of reversion?” Petrie asks.

  Reversion. A technical word. The sort Petrie clearly prefers and may have encountered in one of his criminal psychology classes: Prior to psychotic breaks, certain reversions in behavior may present themselves. These include bed-wetting, infantile speech, and various forms of obsessive nostalgia.

  “Like someone who suddenly starts using an old accent,” Petrie explains, “from the place he’d lived as a child, returning to the past. Did Diana do much of that?”

  “Just using literary references,” you tell him. “No other … reversion.”

  Petrie is obviously disappointed by your answer, would have preferred designated signposts.

  “All right,” he says. “Did you notice any other changes in Diana?” There were so many, you think now, and they had seemed so large.

  But were they? Were they really?

  “Yes,” you answer. “There were other changes.”

  “Like what?”

  The list is long. You pick one randomly.

  “Her music. She’d always listened to a wide range of music. Classical. Folk. Rock. You name it. But a wide range. After Jason’s death it became very narrow, repetitive. Only one singer.”

  “Who?”

  You see the CD pass from Diana’s hand to Patty’s, and in that vision, now so fraught with tragic error, you wonder that you have not made those same hands tremble.

  Petrie’s pen comes to attention. “Who?”

  You feel the name in your mouth like bits of bone in an evil potion. “Kinsetta Tabu.”

  THREE

  Following Diana’s wishes, I made no effort to contact her after that night. And so two weeks passed before I heard from her again. Then it was her voice over the phone. “I’m moving out of the house,” she said.

  “When?”

  “In a few days. I found an apartment in Carey Towers. It’s small, but that’s okay. I don’t need much room.”

  It was good that she was moving, I thought. The house on Old Farmhouse Road was no doubt clogged with loss and grief and pain, a gloomy, mournful place she’d be well served to abandon.

  “I’m having a yard sale on Saturday,” she added. “Mark’s already taken whatever he wanted from the house. I’m selling the rest.”

  “Want some help?”

  “Sure. Come early. We can have breakfast.”

  Abby came with me on that bright Saturday morning, which, of course, I’d fully expected her to do. The surprise was that Patty decided to come along, too.

  “Are you sure you want to spend a whole Saturday piddling around a yard sale?” I asked as she came down the walkway to the car.

  “I don’t have anything else to do,” she answered. “No band practice, and I’ve finished Mr. Donovan’s paper.”

  As we rounded the bend near Diana’s house a few minutes later, I noticed Patty press her face against the window and stare out at the large number of items Diana had spread across the lawn.

  “It’s like she’s purging,” Patty said. She kept her eyes on the lawn. “Vomiting everything out. Like Nina does. In the bathroom after lunch.”

  “Nina purges?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Patty said. She appeared surprised that this was news to me. “Lots of girls do it. It’s a mental thing.”

  I glanced toward Diana’s house, and wondered if Diana had been struck by a similarly weird convulsion, a “mental thing” that had resulted in her spewing the yard with her possessions.

  The evidence seemed to mount as I pulled into Diana’s driveway. She’d spread blankets across the lawn, then covered them with the varied contents of shelves and drawers. She’d dragged out a few bulky items as well, a wooden chest, several spindly bookshelves, and a couple of CD racks, the CDs themselves arranged for easy identification, labels out, in old shoe boxes.

  But she’d gone beyond simply scaling down from a house to an apartment.

  She’d brought out her entire library, for example, along with all her kitchen pots and pans and utensils. There were boxes filled with canned goods, salt, pepper, various spices, some of which had not yet been opened. She’d piled her towels and linens onto one blanket, and all but one pair of shoes on another. Sweaters and skirts and blouses hung from a long gray rope she’d stretched between two trees. All of Jason’s toys were for sale, along with his childhood clothing. Every lamp. Every chair. Every piece of art, whether painting or sculpture. There was an entire table piled high with empty picture frames, another with games and videos and even a couple of audiobooks.

  I glanced from blanket to blanket, all neatly squared on the front lawn, very well ordered, so that it suddenly no longer looked like “purging” at all.

  “She’s starting over,” I said. “Good for her.”

  We walked to the front door and Diana immediately opened it. “There’s not much left to do,” she said.

  Which was true. Because inside, the heavier items—television, stereo, beds, tables, a sofa—had already been tagged with prices so low there was little doubt that by the end of the day my sister would have nothing. In fact, only my father’s clanking old Royal typewriter was marked “Not For Sale,” along with a trio of obviously recent purchases, all three still in their boxes, a laptop computer, a small laser printer, and a fax machine.

  Abby glanced about, then offered her best smile. “Well, you’ve certainly been busy.”

  Diana gave her a look I’d seen before, partly in wonder at my wife’s effort to put a shine on things, partly in admiration for the enormous energy it required, the heavy weight of seeming light.

  “There’s still a place to sit in the kitchen,” she said. She looked at Patty. “You can have anything you want.” She smiled. “Anything at all, Patty.”

  “Thanks,” Patty said. “I’ll look around.” She turned and headed across the lawn, moving from blanket to blanket, before she stopped at the one covered with shoe boxes filled with CDs.

  “I made coffee and bought a box of donuts,” Diana said.

  Abby and I followed her into the house, back to the kitchen, where we sat down at the only table left in the house.

  “I noticed you’re keeping the Old Man’s typewriter,” I said. Diana nodded.

  “Many a false, paranoid accusation came burning out of that thing,” I added.

  Diana took a short sip of coffee, her eyes peering just above the white rim of the cup. “Paranoid, yes,” she said as she drew the cup from her lips. “But one or two were true.”

  By late that afternoon almost everything was gone. A few picture frames lay on an otherwise empty table, and a scattering of clothes still hung from the gray rope between the trees. But the yard was otherwise bare and the house empty.

  “You priced things very low,” Patty said in a voice that suggested more inquiry than statement of fact, a gentle probing.

  “I didn’t want anything left,” Diana said. “Did you find something for yourself?”

  “No,” Patty answered lightly.

  “You can’t leave without something,” Diana said. She walked over to a dark green backpack, unzipped one of its small pouches, and plucked out a CD. “Take this,” she said.

  The CD had a purple cover and Gothic letters I couldn’t quite make out. “Kinsetta Tabu,” Diana said.

  “I’ve never heard of her,” Patty said.

  “She uses ancient instruments,” Diana told her. “Her songs are about the world before people like us came along.”

  “Like us?” Patty asked. “Before our brains fused.”

  Patty looked at her silently, but clearly in search of further explanation. “It’s possible that before the brain fused, one part of it actually spoke to the other,” Diana told her. “So these people, the ones before us, they would have heard their own thoughts as voices outside themselves.” She looked to the right, where Dolphin Pond glimmered softly under the lowering sun. “Like Jason.”

  I imagined those voices coming out of nowhere, invisible mouths floating in the air. How threatening they must have seemed to Jason, issuing bizarre commands, warning him against other children, painting his world in nightmarish hues.

  I wondered if in the end one of those voices had spoken as he’d stood by the storm fence, peering out toward the pond, the large stone that rested heavily, like a gatepost, at the edge of the water. Go there.

  “That must have been very frightening,” Patty said.