“Yes, frightening,” Diana said. She looked at me. “By the way, I’ll be working at the library.”

  I thought of the cluttered rooms of the house on Victor Hugo Street. “Surrounded by books,” I said. “Just like old times.” I glanced about. “What are you going to do with the rest of this stuff?”

  “I’ll take it to the dump,” Diana answered. She looked at her now empty house, then turned her attention toward Abby, and, to my surprise, walked over and drew my wife into her arms. “Davey’s very lucky,” she said.

  Abby peered at me quizzically, her head over Diana’s shoulder. She was clearly surprised by Diana’s unexpected gesture of affection. Even so, she smiled brightly and hugged Diana back.

  Diana released Abby, then turned and drew Patty into a similarly affectionate embrace. “Let’s talk sometime,” she said.

  “I’d like that,” Patty replied.

  Diana took Patty’s hands in hers. “So be it then,” she said.

  It was one of the Old Man’s arch constructions, and he’d always delivered it sonorously, as if he were handing down an ultimatum from the floor of the Roman Senate.

  “I haven’t heard that in a while,” I said. “Heard what?” Diana asked.

  “The Old Man talking.”

  She seemed genuinely surprised. “Really, Davey?” she said. “I hear him all the time.”

  “What was that all about?” Abby asked as she climbed into bed later that night. She propped a pillow behind her back and plucked a small jar of face cream from the nightstand beside the bed. “Giving Patty that weird CD.” She unscrewed the cap from the jar, dipped her finger in, and scooped a small amount of cream into her other hand. “Telling her they should talk sometime.” She rubbed her hands together then began applying the cream to her face. “Do you think she’s lonely, Dave?”

  “Well, she’s lost her son, her husband, too, so—”

  “I mean Patty,” Abby interrupted.

  “What makes you think Patty’s lonely?” I asked.

  Rather than answer, she laughed lightly. “Remember that name your father wanted for her?” she asked. “Hypatia. I don’t remember who she was, but something terrible happened to her.”

  “Hypatia was the last pagan astronomer in Alexandria,” I told her, recalling the details of one of the Old Man’s evening lectures. “A Christian mob scraped her to death with oyster shells.”

  Abby shook her head. “Imagine wanting your granddaughter named for a woman who was killed that way.” She shivered melodramatically. “Your father had such awful things in his mind, Dave. That’s who Diana got it from, I guess.”

  “Got what?”

  Abby drew herself beneath the covers. “Those dark thoughts she has.”

  “What makes you think she has dark thoughts?” I asked. “Dark thoughts about what?”

  “About Jason,” Abby answered. “I noticed it the day she came back from the courthouse, the way she looked when you told me what the judge decided. Like she didn’t believe it was an accident.”

  “How could she not believe it was an accident?” I laughed. “I think you’re the one with dark thoughts.”

  Abby made no further argument, but I felt a peculiar need to strengthen the case.

  “She had a weird childhood, Abby,” I said. “All that reading. Reciting for the Old Man all the time, trying to calm him down. I never thought she’d have a normal life.”

  I went on to talk about my relief that after the Old Man’s death, Diana had married, gotten pregnant, given birth, been a good mother, and in doing all these things managed to come out from under the skewed and nutty course of her upbringing, escaped, as I thought I had, the consequences of our father’s madness.

  “Diana is a triumph,” I said. “A survivor.”

  Abby reached for the lamp. “Whatever you say, Dave.”

  Within seconds she was fast asleep, but I was still going over the whole matter in my mind an hour later when the phone rang. It struck me as strangely coincidental that it was Diana.

  “I’m reading about Cheddar Man,” she said. “The skeleton that was found in Cheddar Gorge, England.”

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “There were animal bones in the cave with him, and they had the same marks on them,” Diana answered. “Scraping marks. So he was eaten. By other people. Using tools.” She paused briefly, then added, “I’m sorry, Davey. I didn’t notice the time. Did I wake you?”

  “No,” I said. “I was still up. Why are you reading about this … Cheddar Man?”

  “Because Kinsetta Tabu has a song about him. Wait. Listen.”

  Another brief pause, then a woman’s voice came on the line chanting to a primitive accompaniment that sounded vaguely like a blade scraping ice or stone, repeating a single eerie phrase, World of whirl is whorl of world.

  Diana came on the line again. “It’s on the CD I gave Patty. I bought another one for myself. I thought she might have questions after she listened to it, so that took me to Cheddar Man.”

  I recalled all the other CDs, boxes of them for sale. “Why did you keep that particular CD?” I asked.

  “Because Jason was listening to it,” Diana answered. “While I was gone.”

  “The day he died?”

  “Yes.”

  There was another brief silence, and I could almost feel my sister thinking, hear the minute firings of her brain.

  “So it was the last voice he heard,” I said. “Kinsetta Tabu’s.”

  Her answer had the effect of a tiny point of steel pressed into my flesh, worrisome but not life threatening.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “‘Maybe,’” Petrie repeats. “That’s all she said?”

  You nod, watch his eyes, looking for any sign that he is not entirely familiar with the terrain into which you are leading him, has the slightest sense that here there be dragons.

  “So you saw no real change in Diana’s behavior?” Petrie asks.

  You realize that Petrie remains in his element, holds to the clipped, no- nonsense pace of movie script interrogations.

  “But I saw a change in mine,” you tell him. “What kind of change?”

  “A hint of fear.”

  “What were you afraid of?”

  “Delving any deeper.”

  Petrie nods, and you know that you share this with him, this hesitance to look. You wonder how many shower curtains he has stood before, silent, frozen, not wanting to see what he knows must lay in bloody sprawl behind them.

  “It’s a common failing in people like us,” you add. “People like us?”

  “People who gather evidence, rely on evidence.”

  You watch as he flips back a page and peers at his notes.

  “But to be precise, it was your wife who first brought it up, isn’t that right?” he asks. “That something was going on in Diana’s mind.”

  Abby’s voice sounds in your head. Like she didn’t believe it was an accident.

  “Suspicion,” Petrie adds, as if to return to that same earlier moment in his notes. “About Jason’s death.”

  You are suddenly standing by the pond. A little blond-haired boy pauses at the water’s edge. He is dressed in a white T-shirt and dark blue shorts, arms at his sides, unblinking eyes peering out over the water that laps at his toes, one tiny, shoeless foot rising to step in.

  “That it might not have been an accident,” Petrie adds.

  What is Petrie seeing now, you wonder, this neat, well-dressed detective. Which suspect in a lineup of faces is the object of his true suspicion? Which crime? Which death? What name will he mention next?

  You wait for him to make his choice. You study his eyes and make a guess. But you are wrong.

  “Cheddar Man,” he says.

  FOUR

  Abby was already preparing breakfast when I came into the kitchen the next morning. She always slept deeply and awoke refreshed, whereas I always had trouble dropping off, and thus awakened like a man who’d been chased all night by wild animals, my face each morning a scary reminder of the Old Man’s, with the same oddly ravaged eyes.

  “Did somebody call last night?” she asked.

  I glanced out the window to where Patty waited for her bus. The twin white cords of her iPod slithered up from the pocket of her jacket to the tiny speakers nestled in her ears.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  Abby brought over a cup of coffee and set it down on the table in front of me. “Who was it?”

  “Diana. She was telling me about Cheddar Man, this … fossil, I guess.” I took a quick sip of coffee. ”She said the bones showed that he’d been eaten by other people.”

  Abby looked puzzled. “Why would she be reading about something like that?”

  “Because this singer, the one on that CD she gave Patty, there’s a song on it about this Cheddar Man character. She mentioned that Jason was listening to this same CD before he left the house that morning.”

  I wondered in what way Diana might now be going back over the painful facts of Jason’s death, perhaps even her last glimpse of him, which must have been in the family room where the audio equipment rested on metal shelves, perhaps as he sat on the dark red sofa, his back to the window, Dolphin Pond shimmering in the late-morning sunlight beyond it, the voice of Kinsetta Tabu circling in the air around him, his head cocked slightly to the right, listening.

  Abby took a nip of toast and washed it down with coffee. “Well, maybe the new job will help her get over it.”

  I imagined Diana in the library, curled over a table and peering down at a book. I had seen her in just this pose many times when she was a child, legs tucked under her, long hair hanging in a curtain of pure gold.

  “The bus is coming,” Abby said.

  I glanced out to where Patty stood at the road. There were others around her now, clumped together in small knots of animated conversation. Patty stood apart from them, as I noticed, facing the bus as it closed in upon her, head cocked slightly to the right at just the angle I’d previously imagined for Jason on the day he died, like him alone, like him listening.

  I got to my office a few minutes later. Dorothy, the receptionist, greeted me with her usual smile. “Lily’s out today.”

  Lily was my secretary.

  “And Charlie’s waiting for you,” Dorothy added.

  Charlie was my partner in the firm, father of Nina, whom I suddenly imagined in a thicket of shadows, a girl who clearly had much to hide.

  “Thanks,” I said, then headed down the corridor to where Charlie stood at my office door.

  “Morning, Charlie.”

  He held a photograph in his right hand. “This came in as a fax with your name on it,” he said as he lifted it toward me. “Got any idea who sent it?”

  I looked at the photograph, and the answer was obvious. “My sister,” I told him.

  He looked at me oddly. “Your sister?”

  “A new interest of hers,” I explained, then walked into my office, sat down at my desk, and looked at the picture.

  In the photograph, Cheddar Man lay on his back, with legs folded under him. There was a large wound on the skull, one that might have been associated with a violent death, though such a gash could just as easily have been the result of any number of less malevolent causes. The empty sockets were large and round and I could almost feel Cheddar Man peering back at me from the dark well of his missing eyes.

  Kinsetta Tabu’s whispery chant filtered through my mind, World of whirl is whorl of world, and for no clear reason, I recalled Jason on the day he was born, delivered by C-section and placed in an incubator. He lay naked under the glass, on his back, with one shoulder slightly raised and his legs drawn up beneath him, a position that eerily seemed to mirror Cheddar Man’s. Mark had stepped up to the window beside me, and at that precise moment, as I remembered now, a loud announcement had blasted over the hospital intercom. In response to it, Jason had started fiercely, kicking his legs, jerking his arms, crying out so loudly and with such helpless panic, I could hear his scream through the glass. How frightened he must be, I’d thought at that moment, alone in the dark, unable to interpret the sound that had startled him or even guess the direction from which it had come, life itself scary and unknowable, with its weird lights and noises, everything from outside, everything threatening, World of whirl is whorl of world. I’d looked at Mark, knowing that he must feel the same as I did, seized with an urge to rush in, comfort his newborn son, hold him in his arms and assure him that in the end he would become familiar with all these strange, frightening sensations. But Mark gave no sense of having such an impulse. Instead, his face broke into a broad smile.

  “Did you see how quick his reflexes are?” he asked proudly.

  I looked at the small naked infant behind the glass. He had a great mass of curly hair, but that was less noticeable than the expression on his tiny face, how frozen in dread it seemed to be, dread and a strange sadness, as if he already knew that he was damaged goods, incapable of meeting his father’s exalted expectations.

  Now, as I glanced back down at the photograph of Cheddar Man, his awful nakedness, the testimony of his bare bones, I wondered if, even in his primitiveness, this ancient creature might have felt embarrassment at not having been quick enough to outrun those who pursued him, or smart enough to have eluded them in some other way. Had he felt the sting of his own inadequacy, the brutal disappointment of his relatives and peers, painfully understood the fatal consequences of his own terrible failure to comprehend the danger before it was too late?

  I opened my desk drawer, put the photograph inside, and closed it with an unsettling sense of our distant but still common heritage, how naked to the elements we remained, how helpless before chance, a weird sense of entrapment and powerlessness passing through me as I pressed Cheddar Man back into a darkness he would never leave.

  A few minutes later Dorothy announced that my first appointment of the day had arrived.

  “Send him in,” I told her.

  Ed Leary came into my office a few seconds later. He was fifty-five, the owner of our town’s only monument business, and he was currently ensnarled in a bitter wrangle over his modest worldly goods, mostly the stock of granite tombstones upon which he carved the names and dates of the dead, along with the final sentiments of those who’d either loved or claimed to love them.

  His wife had filed for divorce three months before, and Ed had come to me for representation. “Ethel wants everything,” he cried at our first conference. “Everything I’ve worked for all my life. And what’s she done? Nothing.”

  “Domestic duties count,” I reminded him gently.

  “What domestic duties?” Ed yelped, this time with a lifted fist. “She never kept a clean house. She never had a meal on the table when I got home at night.”

  He had raged on in a similar manner in all our subsequent meetings, the process of discovery, offers and counteroffers, moving toward the dissolution of his twenty-nine-year marriage like a great lumbering beast, dazed, furious, weary, but more than anything profoundly puzzled by the sheer vindictiveness of his wife. “I wouldn’t hate a snake the way she hates me,” he once said disconsolately, “and what did I ever do to her but marry her?”

  “Maybe that’s it,” I told him. “Maybe she thinks that marrying you wasn’t just a mistake, but the mistake of her life. I see that all the time. It’s not the husband the woman hates, it’s the life she ended up with because she married him.”

  Ed pondered this a moment, then said, “Well, why didn’t she divorce me sooner then? I mean, how does a woman live with the man she thinks ruined her life, turned the whole thing into a waste?”

  “I don’t know how they do it, Ed,” I admitted. “I just know they do.”

  He shook his large head despairingly. “She wants me homeless. So that I got to start over. Build everything up again from scratch. But who has time for that? I’m not a young man, Dave.”

  On this particular morning, he was wearing gray khaki pants and a flannel shirt that was vaguely olive. There were small crescents of sweat beneath his arms, and he drew his breath in short spurts, like a runner. Fifty-five and counting, I thought. Fifty-five, with the wolf at the door.

  “So, no change, I guess?” he asked as he sank into the chair before my desk. “She still won’t settle.” He shifted uncomfortably. “All she wants to leave me with is a little tombstone with my own name on it. She wants to see me on welfare. Ruin me. But tell me this, what does anyone get out of ruining somebody else?” He eased backward and released a weary sigh. “Hell of a thing we got here, Dave.”

  There was no direct point to argue, so I added nothing to Ed’s remark.

  Ed got to his feet. “Hell of a thing we got here,” he repeated as he turned toward the door.

  I had no idea what Ed meant, or any real wish to know. There was business to attend to. I opened my drawer and reached for yet another case. Ed turned back to me, as if he’d been called by some voice I couldn’t hear, and as he turned, he glanced toward my desk, and I saw his eyes register the photograph he glimpsed there, Cheddar Man with his cracked skull, the empty sockets of his eyes.

  “What’s that?” Ed asked.

  “Nothing,” I said with a shrug. “Just a picture my sister sent me.”

  “Your sister,” Ed repeated. “I read about her.”

  “You read about Diana?”

  His tone turned melancholy. “Lost her son.”

  So that was what he’d read, one of the local news items about Jason’s death. “Yes, she did,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “Hell of a thing we got here, Dave,” he said. I nodded.

  “This world,” he added softly. He gazed at the photograph a moment longer, then lifted his large careworn eyes back up to me. “She knows,” he added, “your sister.” Then he turned and walked out of my office, down the corridor, and across the parking lot. From my office window, I watched him climb into his truck and drive away. She knows, I heard him say again, as if he and Diana shared a secret, sorrowful and arcane, a map not of treasures hidden but of unknown tragic shores.