At noon I met Charlie for lunch at Sara’s Diner on Main Street. We’d been partners for fifteen years in what Charlie jokingly called “our distinguished firm of two.” He was an easygoing man who’d always been pleasantly lacking in ambition. We’d attended the same mediocre college, graduated from the same mediocre law school. Like me, Charlie had never tortured his mind with grave issues. He was personable and competent, but he’d long ago quenched whatever small fire, if any, had ever burned in his now substantial belly.

  As usual, Charlie ordered the burger deluxe with a large Pepsi. I settled for a salad and a cup of coffee.

  “So, you have it out with Ed?” he asked. “I brought him up to date.”

  Charlie laughed. “Funny, I was sure as hell he sent you that skeleton.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  Charlie took a bite of the burger and chewed it slowly. “Figured it was our turn. A couple days ago, Bill Carnegie got a rock in a shoe box.”

  “A rock?”

  “With weird scratches on it, he said. It shook him up a little. Like it was a threat. Like, next time this will come through your window. There are weird people out there, you know.”

  I thought of Nina, his daughter, dressed in Gothic black, her hair an iridescent blue or green or pink, bent over a toilet, purging, and wondered if he ever feared some deeper weirdness, this same pale girl slinking down a dark corridor, moving toward his bedroom with a knife.

  “Bill figured it might be Ed who sent it to him,” Charlie added. He dabbed a red spill of ketchup from the side of his mouth. “You know, because he’s representing Ethel.” He shrugged, then added absently, “Of course, he might just as easily have suspected your sister.”

  “Diana?” I held my fork motionlessly in the air. “Why on earth would he suspect her of something like that?”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t really,” Charlie said, dismissing the idea. “It’s just that Bill mentioned that they’d had a bit of a disagreement.” He took another bite of his burger. “Over lawyer-client privilege, I’d guess you could say.”

  “Lawyer-client privilege? How would that come up?”

  “Because she wanted Bill to tell her what Mark said to him.”

  “About what?”

  “About Jason.”

  “You mean his death?”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. He took a sip of Pepsi. “He’s some kind of egghead, isn’t he? Mark?”

  “He’s a biochemist. A brilliant one, evidently. Close to a breakthrough, he says.”

  “Breakthrough.” Charlie laughed. “Eggheads,” he said derisively. “I wouldn’t have one for a client. That whole field, intellectual property. What a headache.

  Some egghead comes up with some theory and right away he thinks the whole world’s out to steal it. Paranoid as hell, those guys.”

  I leaned forward. “So tell me, what exactly was Diana after?”

  Charlie forked a french fried potato into his mouth. “It wouldn’t have mattered. You know Bill, strictly by the book. He wouldn’t tell Diana. That’s what made him think maybe she sent him that rock. Mad at him because he wouldn’t tell her anything.”

  “Diana would never do anything like that,” I told him.

  Charlie took a final sip of soda. “Anyway, Bill got it all off his hands. Told Mark to see Stewart Grace.”

  “Stewart Grace?” I asked. Charlie wiped his mouth. “Yep.”

  “But Grace handles criminal cases,” I said quietly. “Serious stuff.”

  Charlie glanced out the window, toward the little town whose people we knew all too well, the countless petty dissolutions that afflicted them. “Yeah, he doesn’t bother with the little shit we handle.” His eyes swept over to me. “With Stewart, it’s usually murder.”

  Murder.

  You see the word register in Petrie’s eyes, the deaths it is now his duty to explore, each of which you suddenly envision in fundamental images of cloth, water; iron, wood. You have no doubt that entirely different images of violence swirl about in Petrie’s mind—guns, knives, rope, the grim stage props of slaughter.

  “What did you think when you heard that Bill Carnegie had referred Mark to Stewart Grace?” Petrie asks.

  You recall Grace the day you went to him, how open his face was, how little veiled in treachery. You remember how small you’d felt as you stood before him, how stained by mediocrity, the dreadful and ineradicable blotch the Old Man had always called “the true mark of Cain.”

  The Old Man’s voice flares in your mind. So tell me, my young Daedalus, what divides Hades from the world of the Living?

  A river. Only one?

  No … four … two … no … five. Name them.

  Acheron. Which is?

  The river of woe. Next?

  Cocytus … the river of … lamentation. Next?

  Phlegethon. The river of … fire?

  Is or is not Phlegethon the river of fire? I think … it is … but …

  Uncertainty is death. Yes … yes, it is.

  Next? Lethe. Which is?

  The river of forgetfulness. And last?

  “Mr. Sears?”

  You return to the room, look at Petrie, and wonder if he now sees them glimmering in your eyes, the little fires that flicker on the far side of the Styx, the river of hate.

  You remember Petrie’s original question and quickly answer it.

  “I wasn’t really thinking about Stewart Grace at the time,” you tell him. “Who then?”

  “Bill Carnegie. I wanted to know why Diana had gone to him in the first place. I was trying to sort things through.”

  You remember Diana in the courthouse, the odd look in her eyes as she’d spotted Bill Carnegie. Or was it odd? You can no longer be sure, and in that uncertainty you are suddenly standing in the terrible space where she labored, staring at the medieval quotation she’d printed in bold black letters and hung like an anthem on the wall behind her desk: Send out a beam of ghostly light, and pierce this cloud of unknowing.

  “I didn’t know what any of it meant,” you tell Petrie. “So I went to see him. Bill. I’m sure you already know that.”

  Petrie nods softly. “Yes.”

  In your mind you see Bill Carnegie come through the door of the courthouse, reaching for a pack of cigarettes as he trots down the stairs toward you. His first words had surprised and strangely alarmed you. You look a little tense, Dave.

  You imagine that you looked exactly that, tense, unsure, perhaps even at that early stage already fearful of the road ahead, that first step that leads from twist to twist, until, at last, you reach the precipice.

  FIVE

  Over the phone, Bill Carnegie made no bones about his professional obligations. “I can’t talk about Mark,” he warned. “Only your sister.”

  “Diana is all I want to talk about,” I assured him.

  We met outside the courthouse early in the afternoon, standing together as a troubled stream of litigants flowed up and down the long cement steps.

  “You look a little tense, Dave,” Bill said. “I do?”

  “Troubled, maybe that’s a better word,” Bill said. He lit a cigarette with a silver lighter, flipped the top into place, and returned it to the jacket pocket of his suit. “Nasty habit, I know,” he said. “You should see the looks I get. You’d think I was a child molester.” He took a long draw and blew out a thin column of smoke. “So, Diana.”

  “Like I said on the phone, I was surprised to hear that she came to see you.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’d just like to know why she did that.”

  Rather than answer, Bill took his customarily cautious approach. “If you don’t mind, what exactly is your reason for asking, Dave?”

  “I’m worried about her.”

  “Why?”

  I realized that until that moment, the actual posing of the question, I hadn’t clearly known the reason myself. Then, in an instant, it was all too clear.

  “My father,” I answered. “He had a problem.”

  Bill took another draw on the cigarette and waited.

  “A mental problem,” I added. “He was paranoid. A paranoid schizophrenic.” All the terrors of my boyhood flashed through my mind for a moment, the Old

  Man storming from room to room, throwing books, yelling for Diana while I cowered in some dark corner of my own vast upheaval.

  Bill dropped the cigarette and crushed it with the toe of his shoe. “Just a few quick puffs, that’s all I allow myself,” he explained. “So, you think Diana may have this problem, too?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out what’s on her mind,” I said. “What she’s thinking.”

  “She’s thinking about Jason.”

  “What about him?”

  Carnegie glanced to the right, nodded to a passing attorney. “I don’t have a lot to tell you. It was a short meeting.”

  “Anything might help.”

  “She wanted to know what Mark had said about that morning,” Bill told me.

  That morning.

  I went back over its few events, Mark home from work, Diana out shopping, Jason in the family room, listening to a CD, then rising, walking to the door, then through it and across the lawn to where a storm fence stopped him for a time, then didn’t.

  “She seemed to be after facts,” Bill added. “What kind of facts?”

  “Where he was at any point.”

  “Who?”

  “Mark.”

  “You mean, like a timeline?”

  “That sort of thing, yes,” Bill said. “She asked if I’d recorded any of our conversations. I told her no, but it wouldn’t matter anyway, because they were private. Attorney-client privilege. She argued with me about it a little, but I didn’t get the idea that she meant it. It was more like a show, like she knew from the beginning that I wouldn’t tell her anything Mark had said to me.”

  “So why did she ask you about it?”

  Bill shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe she wanted to know if there was some kind of record of our conversation. Notes. Tapes. Whatever. Other people have tried that one on me.”

  “Why would that matter to Diana?”

  “It wouldn’t unless she planned to break into my office.” He laughed at so absurd a prospect, a woman with a burglar’s tool kit, jimmying the lock to his office door then taking a crowbar to the cabinet in which he stored his most secret information. “But even if there was a full record of my conversations with Mark, it wouldn’t help her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Mark never mentioned Jason, or anything about what happened to him.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not once in all our conversations,” Bill said. “We talked about the divorce, the settlement. That was it.”

  “Did you tell Diana that?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “How did she react?”

  Something in Bill’s eyes shrank inward. “That was the weird thing,” he said. “She didn’t seem surprised. As a matter of fact, I got the idea this was what she’d come to find out, maybe even confirm what she already suspected—not something Mark might have said about Jason, but the fact that he hadn’t said anything at all.”

  “Patty won’t be home for dinner,” Abby told me when I arrived home later that evening. “She’s working on some sort of project.”

  “How’s she getting home?”

  “Nina’s driving her,” Abby answered.

  “I didn’t know she was friends with Nina.”

  “I don’t think she is,” Abby said. “They just happened to be working on this project together, and Nina has a license.”

  I didn’t like the idea of Nina driving Patty home, but kept it to myself since I knew it was based not on any sense that Nina was a bad driver, for which I had no evidence, but that she was an unstable person, immature for someone on the verge of womanhood, not at all a healthy influence. Charlie, himself, often referred to her as “the freak,” and seemed anxious for her to graduate from high school and go to college. “Believe me, Dave,” he’d said. “I won’t feel a twinge of empty-nest syndrome.”

  “When did Patty say she’d be in?” I asked. “Later,” Abby answered casually.

  “Where is she, exactly?”

  “The library.”

  “The school library?”

  “I don’t know, Dave,” Abby answered. She looked at me quizzically. “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged, and changed the subject. “Diana went to see Bill Carnegie a couple of days ago. She wanted to know if Mark had said anything about Jason.”

  I saw that this did not strike Abby as news.

  “She’s been acting a little weird,” she said. She gazed at me indulgently, as if to say, I’m sorry to tell you this. “People talk, Dave,” she said. “I met Leonora Gault in the grocery store. She lives just across from that little apartment complex where Diana moved. She’s seen her walking around at night. Really early. Two, three in the morning.”

  I recalled the Old Man’s late-night wandering, the sound of the door as he left, then later, that same sound, more quiet, and which alerted me that Diana had set off in search of him. But because we survive as much by denying a thing as by confronting it, I said, “I wouldn’t call that ‘weird.’ She has a lot on her mind. Her whole future. Not long ago she had a family. Husband. Son. Now all she has is me.”

  None of this changed Abby’s opinion, or more than briefly interrupted her narrative.

  “Leonora went over, knocked on the door,” she continued. “Diana came to the door but she didn’t invite Leonora in. She came out instead. Closed the door behind her.”

  “So?”

  “It just seemed strange, that’s all,” Abby said. “Like Diana didn’t want Leonora to get a peek inside her apartment. Leonora thought it was spooky.”

  “Spooky?”

  I thought of Diana’s visit to Bill Carnegie. “If you were Mark, would you be spooked by Diana?” I asked.

  I saw one of Abby’s thousand little lights go out. “Yes,” she said, as if acknowledging it for the first time, “I would.”

  After dinner I went to my small study to review a few of the cases that were approaching the calendar. I was still at work when Patty came home. She peeped in, smiling.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hi.”

  She said nothing else, but only drew back out of the doorway and headed down the corridor to her room.

  Normally I would have continued with my work, and later gone to bed, with no need to see Patty again before morning. But after a few moments, I found myself returning to my childhood, the long hours I’d spent in my room, fearing to go out, listening to the Old Man’s movements, knowing that when they became frantic, Diana’s voice would accompany them, soft, soothing, reciting the verses and passages that slowed him down and finally settled him into sleep. It was that long-ago fear I felt now, deep and pure, and which seemed to return to me like a chronic ache whose severity time had masked, but which was now emerging again.

  And so I rose from my desk, walked down the hallway, and knocked on Patty’s door.

  After a brief flurry of activity, the door opened and she looked at me with an uncharacteristically wary expression.

  “I just thought I’d check in,” I said.

  She peered at me like a creature whose shape had slightly altered. “Check in?” She squinted. “What’s going on, Dad?”

  I nodded toward the inside of the room. “May I come in?” She was clearly surprised by my request.

  “My room?” she asked. “If you don’t mind.”

  She shrugged, then stepped back into a room that struck me as vaguely more disordered than it had been in the past, with her iPod balanced at the corner of her desk, its thin cords dangling like small white vines toward a short stack of books that leaned unsteadily to the right.

  “Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?” Patty asked.

  “I’m not looking for anything,” I told her. My tone struck me as strangely defensive. “I mean, what would I be looking for?”

  “Drugs, maybe,” Patty answered crisply. “Nina’s dad is always searching her room for drugs.”

  “You’re not Nina,” I said. “And besides, I’m sure if Nina had drugs, they’d be well hidden from her dad.” I glanced to the right where, to my surprise, Patty had placed an old photograph of Diana.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked.

  “I found it in some stuff I was going through,” Patty answered.

  I walked over to the desk for a closer look. In the photograph, Diana sat in the park near the old house on Victor Hugo Street, her legs drawn under her, Indian style. With the long hair and flowery skirt, she might have been a sixties hippie, one of those girls at Woodstock, sliding in the mud or swimming naked in the nearby river. Films of all that—the dancing in circles, the peasant dresses, even the wildly idealistic slogans, All You Need Is Love, Give Peace a Chance—had always struck me as sad, almost heartrending, not a snapshot of some moment in our social history, but of that instant within each life when making something happen seems within our grasp.

  Suddenly I remembered Diana the year she’d left for college. She’d been only seventeen, on full scholarship at Yale, and, as always, relentlessly inquisitive.

  She’d never had a boyfriend before then, but on visits home she sometimes mentioned this or that boy from Yale, or some equally Ivy League fellow blown in from Boston or New York. None had ever made much of an impression, which made it all the more remarkable that she’d later been taken with Mark so suddenly and with such force. I guessed that it was his brilliance that had attracted her. On the night of our first meeting, he’d talked about the cleansing of the gene pool, the possibility that one day there might be almost wholly engineered human beings, genetically bred for maximum physical, intellectual, and even emotional strength. “At some point we may actually be able to take the bad stuff out,” he’d said emphatically, “like debris from a stream.”