Diana peered at me intently. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Nothing really,” I said. I could see that something in what I’d just said had raised a dark antenna. “It was all in context,” I explained. “He mentioned that Bill Carnegie had gotten this weird rock in the mail.”

  Diana looked unsettled, her manner now curiously edged in fear. “And, well, you’d talked to Bill, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Her fear seemed to be building, as if, step by step, I was pressing her toward the edge of a precipice.

  “Bill didn’t accuse you of anything, Diana,” I said quickly.

  Her gaze took on a piercing clarity, pure as death rays. “I have to go,” she told me.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  She turned immediately and headed off toward the library. Within a moment she was gone, but as I made my way toward home, I realized that the arid look in her eyes remained with me, dry and floating, like dust motes in the air.

  “What were you afraid of at that moment?” Petrie asks.

  “I’m not sure,” you answer; “I guess fear is like …” You surprise yourself with a literary image. “… Medusa’s head. All those flapping tentacles. Maybe love is like that, too. Hatred. Maybe all the really big emotions are.”

  “Are what?”

  “Shifting. Entangling. They wrap around each other.”

  Petrie looks like a man unexpectedly adrift in a river of unmapped twists and turns, depths and shallows he cannot fathom, or even know whether it is Acheron or Lethe that bears him away, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Styx, or the yet murkier stream they form when they meet in some mythical lake and begin to flow together.

  You sense that he will now paddle furiously to shore, return to solid ground.

  And you are right. He does.

  “Of course, you weren’t the only one who was beginning to fear Diana,” he says.

  He means Mark, the fact that I’d already learned that he’d been referred to Stewart Grace. This is the terra firma Petrie relies upon, the hard rock of the case. Or is it the cases? He has deaths to explain, perhaps murders to solve. But how many? One? Two? Three? Four?

  “No, not the only one,” you confess.

  “All right,” Petrie says. “Let me ask you this: At this point, precisely at this point, what were you thinking?”

  “Only about Diana.”

  Petrie is clearly relieved to be back on track, rooted in a world where crimes leap like fish from crystal streams of motivation. He is himself the streamlined creature of this world, efficient, exact, focused on the evidence.

  “All right. Fine,” Petrie continues. “What about Diana?”

  “I was thinking that she’d taken a second step,” you answer. “First she’d refused to accept Jason’s death as an accident. Now she was thinking about that morning, about what happened that morning. Things were coming to her.” You see a flash of light in high grass. “Things no one else knew about, or would have ever known.”

  “Like what?”

  “The fact that Mark stayed home that day,” you answer. “Because he wanted to give Diana a break.” You see Diana pause at the door before leaving. She looks back to where Jason sits on the sofa, his back to the large bay window, Dolphin Pond in the distance.

  “Why would that have aroused her suspicion?” Petrie asks. “Because he’d never done it before.”

  “Stayed home from work?”

  “Not in the last five years.”

  “That’s not real evidence,” Petrie says. “What is?”

  “Something admissible,” Petrie answers. “A footprint. A weapon.”

  “A witness?”

  “Yes,” Petrie says softly.

  You know he is thinking about it now, the closing circle of your fate, what you took for “evidence,” how much, in the end, you may be “like Dad.”

  “I’m not crazy,” you tell him. Then you quote Diana, “‘You’re only crazy when you don’t know what you do.’”

  Petrie falls silent for a moment, as if to regroup, put everything he’s learned so far in order.

  “All right,” he begins again. “Let’s get back to your meeting with Diana.

  The one outside the library.” He sits back. “The things you’d learned so far. The things Bill Carnegie had told you. The things Diana had told you. Had they aroused your own suspicion?”

  “Yes,” you answer.

  Aroused it easily, as you know now, because the threat had not yet moved to you.

  “What did you do about it?” Petrie asks. “I began to … investigate.”

  Petrie is clearly pleased by your answer. “How?” he asks.

  “I started where you would, I guess.”

  This pleases him even more. “And where is that?” he asks.

  “The scene of the crime,” you answer, though you know now that there was more than one scene, more than one crime.

  But Petrie doesn’t ask which crime, and so you lead him along the path you took yourself, the one you still cannot imagine has led you to this place.

  SEVEN

  I reached my office at the usual time the next morning, but I didn’t turn into its small gravel parking lot as I had every other weekday morning for over fifteen years. Instead, I continued down Main Street, and on out of town until I reached Old Farmhouse Road. Then I turned and followed it until the pavement gave way to reddish clay.

  As I continued down the road it struck me in an unexpectedly disturbing way just how remote my sister’s house really had been. The nearest neighbor was several miles away and the surrounding area was densely forested, a thick wood of towering trees and thick undergrowth that broke only when I reached the narrow dirt driveway of the house itself. It also occurred to me just how easy it would be to read something terribly sinister into the place itself, to find even the choice of it, which had been Mark’s, darkly premeditated, the trees, the pond, even the large gray stone at the water’s edge, all of them pieces of a plot whose true design could only be seen after it had been carried out.

  There was a FOR RENT sign on the front lawn, otherwise the place looked empty and so I pulled directly into the driveway. The flower garden where Diana had spent hours with Jason contained nothing but a few arid stalks, and the surrounding yard had grown high and weedy, both of which gave the place a look of immemorial abandonment. The whole place appeared strangely dead, the structure no more than the desiccated bones of a house, its gray windows as empty and unlighted, it seemed to me suddenly, as the eyes of Cheddar Man.

  I got out of my car and walked around to the back of the house, moving slowly along the high storm fence that bordered the yard. Beyond the fence, the high grass rippled in a slight breeze, then immediately came to rest, as if an invisible hand had first roused then abruptly stilled it. Nothing remained of the people who’d lived here only a few short months before. Everything had been completely cleared away; no sign of Jason’s toys, Mark’s elaborately geared mountain bike, or even the wooden picnic table where we’d often gathered for a summer cookout, Mark at the grill, flipping burgers, Diana pacing about with Jason in her arms, I strolling along beside her while Abby led Patty through the gate and toward the pond.

  The pond.

  I turned and followed the narrow trail I thought Jason might have taken on the day of his death. It led through a cove of trees, then passed the large stone that stood like a centurion at the edge of the pond. For a moment I paused on the bank and looked out over the pond’s shimmering surface, listening as tiny waves beat softly, rhythmically, like a watery heart.

  I’d been en route to a distant part of the county the day Jason drowned, so that by the time I got to the house, the police had already arrived, searched the surrounding area, then hauled a boat to the water’s edge. Divers were in gear, and the boat was being carried toward the center of the pond where it suddenly deepened at a distance of perhaps fifty yards from shore.

  Diana stood at the edge of the water, cradled under Mark’s arm, the two of them staring out over the pond, watching the divers as they climbed into the boat and paddled out to deeper water. Mark tightened his arm around her when he saw me, his eyes very dark and sad, at least so they’d seemed at the time.

  Diana’s eyes were wet and red, and there was an animal terror in them, as if she, herself, were being drawn underwater.

  “Jason,” she said softly when I reached her.

  “He must have undone the latch,” Mark told me. “At the back gate.”

  “They’ve searched the woods,” Diana added. Her eyes drifted over to me.

  “He’s in the water, Davey.”

  “Let’s go inside, Diana,” Mark said quietly. He drew her back toward the house. “Just wait here, will you, Dave?”

  I did as he asked, remained there at the edge of the pond while the divers did their work. I don’t know how long I stood in that terrible silence until a voice broke it.

  “Mind if I get your name?”

  I turned toward a tall man dressed in a navy blue suit with a white shirt and red tie. It was mid-June, very hot, but he’d not taken off his jacket, and so held an air of unassailable professionalism.

  “My name is Dave Sears,” I told him.

  He gave me a close look. “Diana’s brother.”

  Then I recognized him. I’d never known his name, but he’d come to the house the day the Old Man died, a young detective then, but with the same coolly knowing air.

  “I remember you, too,” I told him. “Not your name, but—”

  “My name is Petrie,” he said. “Samuel Petrie. Do you still live around here?”

  “Still in the area, yes,” I answered. “I guess you do, too.”

  “A couple towns over,” Petrie said. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out his ID. “I still work for the county. And you?”

  “Lawyer,” I said.

  “You must not do criminal work,” Petrie said. “Otherwise we’d have run into each other.”

  “No, it’s all civil litigation,” I said. “Divorces, mostly.”

  He fell silent for a moment, but his eyes remained on me with an unsettling stillness. “I remember that day. Your father was some … person of note.”

  “He’d done a little writing, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “Poems.” Petrie glanced out over the pond, then brought his attention back to me. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Jason.”

  I expected him to take out a notebook as cops did in movies, but he didn’t. “Did he ever wander off or run away?”

  “No.”

  “In general, what can you tell me about him?”

  I suddenly felt a piercing sense of failure. For the terrible truth was that I had very little to tell Detective Petrie. I didn’t know Jason. I had been present at the hour of his birth, watched him grow over the years, but who he was, what he felt, and, least of all, what might have led him into the pond, were all part of an inner world I knew no way to explore, the habitat of dragons.

  “He was … is …” I shook my head. “I …”

  Petrie appeared to understand my dilemma, and in that understanding he struck me as quite sturdy and experienced, a man who’d been in such situations many times before, dealt with other people through the long, heartrending ambiguity of missing persons.

  “Mr. Regan says that Jason has a few problems,” Petrie said. “How would you describe them?”

  “Mark didn’t tell you?”

  “I prefer to approach certain matters from different angles,” Petrie said. “Would you say that Jason is retarded?”

  “No,” I said. “Well, not exactly. I think there’ve been a few different diagnoses since it was first noticed.”

  “Since what was first noticed?”

  “His behavior.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well, when he’s in a room with other kids, he doesn’t really interact with them.”

  Now Petrie did what I’d originally expected him to do. He drew a small notebook from his jacket pocket, along with a plain blue pen.

  “Has he always been this way?” he asked. “Yes.”

  “So this condition wasn’t something that just came upon him at some point?”

  I wondered if Petrie were looking for abuse, for some cruel damage that had been inflicted upon Jason, a kind so serious it had unhinged him, cut him off from others. I had no doubt that Petrie had seen such cases in his career because I could see the afterimage of that long record briefly mirrored in his gaze.

  “It happens, you know,” he said. “People suddenly—”

  “Not Jason,” I assured him. “Jason was born with this problem.”

  “You said there have been different diagnoses? Like what?”

  I rattled them off in the order they’d been made. “Autism. Asperger’s syndrome. The last one was schizophrenia.”

  “That word casts a wide net.”

  “It was what his father first suspected.”

  “Why?”

  I heard myself repeat Diana’s earlier words. “Because it is in us.

  Schizophrenia. In our family.”

  Petrie’s pen whispered across the page. “But about Jason. Was he on any drugs?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted quietly. “He was at one time, I think.”

  “Do you know when?”

  It was at that moment I realized that these were all questions Petrie had surely already asked Mark or Diana, and that he was not actually seeking information, but contradiction. He was looking for a lie.

  “Where do you think Jason is?” I asked flatly.

  Petrie looked up from the pad. “I …” he began softly, then stopped as if at an unspoken, but formal command. “I only know things when I know them, Mr.

  Sears,” he said. “It’s dangerous country, beyond the facts.”

  Diana and Mark had still been in the house, and I still beside the pond, when one of the divers surfaced and pointed toward the bottom of the lake. He’d nodded slowly, and in the heaviness of that gesture, the weight of the discovery it acknowledged, I knew that Jason had been found.

  Petrie saw the same signal, and walked back over to me from where he’d been standing with a couple of other officials.

  “Do you want me to tell them?” he asked. “No, I will.”

  To my surprise he accompanied me back into the house. Diana and Mark were in the small living room, Mark seated beside the empty fireplace, Diana at the front window, her back to me as we came into the room. She didn’t turn until she heard my voice.

  “Jason was …” I began quietly. “He was.”

  “In the pond,” Diana said flatly.

  I expected her to break down, perhaps even drop to her knees, wail like women in movies, their faces lifted toward the sky, demanding another result or railing against one that cannot be changed. But instead, her body stiffened, then she turned smoothly, as if on a slowly revolving wheel, and walked silently up the stairs.

  Mark got to his feet wearily, a man weighted down, so that he appeared to sink even as he rose.

  “Thank you,” he said to Detective Petrie. “Please thank your people for all they’ve done.” He offered his hand, and for an odd moment the detective appeared reluctant to take it. Then he did, and shook it slowly.

  “We’ll need a positive identification,” he said.

  “I can do that,” I told Mark. “I mean, if you prefer.”

  “Would you, Dave? Thank you.”

  “And there’ll have to be an autopsy,” Petrie added. “I understand,” Mark told him.

  Then Petrie left, so that only Mark and I were in the room. “I don’t know what to say, Mark,” I told him.

  Mark returned to his chair. “There’s nothing to say.”

  I glanced toward the stairs. “You think you should check in on Diana?” He shook his head. “She’ll respond in her own way.”

  It was almost at that instant that an awesome groan came from the upstairs bedroom, a long primitive wail that finally resolved into a low, animal moan.

  “Now she has,” Mark said.

  Diana’s final moan seemed to hang in the trees as I stood once again beside the pond, peering out to where, as exactly as I could recall, the diver had surfaced, then pointed straight down. They’d brought up Jason’s body right away, then hustled it off to a nearby funeral parlor, where it would later undergo autopsy, a report duly generated, one the judge had later relied upon in determining that Jason had died by “misadventure.”

  I remembered the way Diana’s body had gone rigid the instant the judge handed down his ruling, and it struck me as the same sudden tightening that had followed the news of Jason’s death, as if her flesh had abruptly hardened, holding everything inside, steeling her long enough to make it up the stairs, where, in what must have seemed to her an absolute solitude, she’d released her wail.

  I heard it again now, only instead of coming from a few feet above me, it seemed to drift down from the sky itself, sound as substance, cold and wet, falling forever in a dark eternal rain.

  The chair across from you is empty now. Petrie stands at the window, his back to you. You know that he is recalling the day you have just described, the two of you on the banks of Dolphin Pond, talking quietly as the divers do their work, watching as they lift themselves over the gunwale of the boat and sink into the water, remembering, as you remembered the day you returned to the pond, that the boat had been near the center of the lake, where the water abruptly deepened, how far it was before this happened, and thus how far Jason would have had to walk before it reached his waist, then his shoulders.

  “Shallow,” you say quietly.

  You watch as Petrie’s shoulders tighten almost imperceptibly, as if in response to a tiny pinch of pain.