The Diviner's Tale (15 page)

Arriving early, I did what I might have tried in the first place. Returned to where the original well had been dug and, using a crowbar that I fetched from the truck, I pried away its capstone. A sulfurous iron smell rose forth. I thought I could hear faint movements in the liquid far below. Snakes, or frogs. Never a good sign in a well, because when they die they're not going anywhere. I peered down into the rank darkness, admiring the mason's handiwork of laid-up stones rimming the circular cavity, then dropped a pebble and heard a dull mushy thud when it hit bottom. It occurred to me to use a pendulum—one of Nep's heirlooms, a pyrite hexagon—to see if a vein of unfouled water lay beneath the bedrock of the old-timers' well. Or, if yet another ran nearby that might be asked if it was willing to be moved—there are times and techniques for doing such a thing. What did I have to lose?

The pendulum hovered over the well and made no motion. When I moved it a few yards to the northeast of the mouth, it began gradually to gyrate. This was what I had been looking for. I tried again with a hazel virgula that also belonged to Nep, and, yes, it nosedived at the same spot. I stacked a little cairn of stones right there and sighed, looking at it. What should have been the simplest thing I'd made madly difficult for myself. At least I would have good news for James when he got here.

James. Telling by the sun it was nearly noon. Although we hadn't set an exact time, I supposed he would have arrived by now. Maybe traffic in the city had hung him up.

Before long, misgivings began to set in. Had he gotten back to his loft downtown and decided he'd made a ridiculous mistake? Yet he seemed sincere in word and gesture that night and, too, in the telltale morning, when the ecstasies of evenings often look so barren under the klieg lights of dawn. Our encounter had brimmed with promise, so I had felt. Despite its suddenness, there was nuance and comfort to our touch. Now I had to question all that.

The depressing dread of being stood up began to take over. More from nervousness than hunger I ate one of the sandwiches I had made for us, a little picnic packed in a wicker basket. Drank some warm lemonade and marveled at how strange it was to be sitting here waiting to rendezvous with a man my first instincts had been to dislike and distrust, but who I now believed was capable of breaking my heart. Your common sense, Cass, I warned myself, has flown the coop. Then, like that, his coupe appeared in the drive, leaving behind it a halo of dust, and I had to make some swift attitude adjustments.

When he climbed out of the car, his first words were, —None of this is my fault, please, I'm sorry for being so late. After an embrace and kiss, he added that a work-related matter had held him up, nothing to do for it.

— What makes you think I came here just to see you? I teased, trying to lighten up.

— Well, what else is there around here
to
see?

— Water, for one. Are you hungry?

Yes, he was starving, he said, smiling. Chicken salad with fennel on peasant bread? Perfect, better than Four Seasons. He asked if I was feeling myself again. Said I looked worlds better than before. For all his polite nonchalance and easy elucidations, my paranoia about James Boyd didn't feel entirely misplaced. After he finished eating and we'd filled as many awkward silences as we could with small talk, I showed him the cairn and gave him the good news about my discovery.

— You're sure about this? he asked, echoing nearly every client I'd ever dowsed for.

— Sure as sure can be. The primary source will be in a sidestep pocket, probably not much farther down than the original well was dug. Your family and maybe even people who were here before have been living off a leak from the main fount. Not the strongest source I've ever seen, but more than enough for your needs. Or, I mean, your father's.

— That's something, he said, comprehensively unbelieving. His eyes were on me again, as they had been before.

— Everything okay? I asked.

— Definitely.

— Are you all right about what happened with us? I asked, regretting my words the instant they left my mouth.

— Of course I am.

— Good, because—

— Let's go inside? as if to prove his point.

We did go upstairs and take off our clothes and make love again, and it couldn't have been more manifest to me that the heat of our recent night had, like the heat wave itself, begun to abate. By the time we dressed and he—a mere hour after having shown up—said he had to run back to town without offering any of the expected platitudes as he left, I knew, while I collected my dowsing instruments and disheartening picnic basket by myself, that what had seemed so propitious was instead a one-off bust. Indeed, speaking with Robert Boyd on the phone later that evening, to tell him I had been successful in discovering his water for him, he said, in passing, how delighted James and his wife and little girl were going to be when they heard the news.

—James and his family adore the place, he explained, his weak voice raspy yet full of hope. —This will give them a chance to get it back to where my wife and I had it once upon a time.

I hadn't the heart to inform him his son harbored no other intention than of dumping the Boyd farmhouse to the first person with a line of credit and a cheap lawyer the moment he died. But toward Boyd the elder I had nothing more in me than to wish him the best with everything. I even said, —God bless and good luck to you, because I sensed that would be meaningful to him. Seven weeks later my pregnancy would be confirmed.

M
ORGAN AND JONAH WERE
waiting for me, sitting impatiently in the violet shade of the cottage porch roof when I returned from the little graveyard. Both sprang to their feet when they saw me put the rake away in the stone shed, and came running through the tall speargrass, calling out more or less at the same time, "Hey Cass, you just missed him."

"Missed who?" I asked, half-hoping Niles had gotten it in his head to come to Covey for some reason, Niles who wouldn't flinch at noises made by my prankster sons or a harmless woodland creature that I, who infringed on its domain, had startled into retreat.

"I don't know," said Morgan.

So it had been the boys after all. "You mean the same 'him' I missed in the cemetery a while ago?" I frowned. "Who do you guys think you're kidding."

"You mean you saw him, too?"

"Actually there were two of him and they looked amazingly just like you."

Finally, I thought, turned tables on them for once. But instead of bursting into laughter and conceding that they'd been busted, they stared at me in plain confusion.

"I don't get it," said Jonah.

"Come on, give it up. You were trying to spook me at the cemetery."

"Totally no way," Morgan insisted.

"So who was this man looking for me?"

"We never saw him before."

"Jonah?" I asked, licking my thumb and rubbing some dirt off his cheek, at which he lightly winced.

"That's right, we don't know him. But he knows who you are. He said—"

Morgan interrupted. "He knew our names, too."

"Well, what did he want?"

They looked at each other and back at me, their faces unwontedly blank. My hands were trembling, so I placed them on my hips in the hope the twins wouldn't notice. "Did he at least tell you his name?"

Names are doors to ideas, it occurred to me once more. What idea was eluding me here?

"He didn't say."

"Why didn't you ask?" I demanded, exasperated.

"We just didn't," Morgan answered, now defensive, palming his long hair out of his face where the wind had ruffled it into his eyes.

Must have been someone from Cranberry or Mount Desert, I thought, turning toward the house, or a newspaper journalist from back home who had nothing better to do than follow us up here in search of some continuation of the Henderson story. But no, a journalist would have waited, and besides, my story was already yesterday's news. Anybody who would have taken the trouble to boat over from one of the other islands wouldn't have departed without leaving a name and telling the boys what brought him all the way here.

"Where'd he go?"

Both eagerly pointed down the dock path.

"You two head inside. I'm going to have a look, see if I can't catch up—"

"Look, he did say one thing," Jonah broke in.

"What was that?"

"He said he'd hate to have to come back but would if you forced him to. What did he mean by that, Mother?"

Hearing him call me
Mother
took me aback. Made him sound so vulnerable. I had no idea what to tell him. All I knew was that I was both angry and terrified, and that it was best not to let my boys see it. "I don't know what he's talking about. Did he mean it in a friendly way or threatening?"

"He wasn't friendly or unfriendly," said Jonah.

"He seemed pretty serious, though."

"I need you boys to stay inside while I go find out what this is all about."

"But—"

"Please," I said, more firmly. "Get inside right now. And lock the door."

"Come on—"

"Lock it."

As I ran down the path, stumbling, sliding on loose stones, I couldn't help but think the obvious. James Boyd, after all these reticent years, had read or heard about his sometime lover's recent travails and gotten it in mind to pay her, so to speak, a visit. Judge for himself whether she should be allowed to continue raising these reported sons he never met nor once bothered to contact. Made me furious to imagine him reentering my life. Furious and frightened. Would Jonah and Morgan ever trust a word I said again, if he let them in on what I always assumed was a tacit covenant between myself and their extinct father? I could only hope they would understand and forgive. By the time I reached the dock, out of breath, I had reconsidered this assumption. James Boyd had no interest in me or them, I realized. Even if he had, there was no way he would put himself to the trouble of traveling all the way to Covey Island to make his cryptic point, whatever that point could possibly mean after so much time. If not him, though, who?

I peered along the curved rocky shorelines in both directions, looking back from the far end of the dock, and saw no one. Without pausing to think twice, I sprinted up the hill along a narrow path that led directly over the island to the houses on the far side. This trail, since it offered no lovely views—and because we never visited those on the other end, nor they us—was rarely, indeed almost never, used. Nor did it show any signs of having been taken by anyone recently. When I emerged from the green thicket to make my way down through a glass-slick slope of talus, I saw no smoke coming from Mrs. Milgate's coal-stove chimney, and the adjacent house looked dormant as well. A postcard picture of tranquil island life.

It had been a couple of seasons since I last encountered Angela Milgate. Small though the island was, she really did keep her own counsel. Because of this, I felt every bit the intruder myself here as I sheepishly climbed her wooden steps and quietly knocked on her door. She didn't answer, though I could swear I smelled baked beans, or burned syrup maybe, wafting from the open windows. Her pair of duck boots were neatly placed side by side next to the doormat, and their leather uppers, I saw, were still wet from a recent walk down to the water.

"Mrs. Milgate?" I called out as loudly as I dared. "You home? It's Cassandra Brooks here."

Either she wasn't in the mood or else was napping, and so I decided to try my luck at the other house. Since the tide was out, I walked a beeline across the kelp-strewn muddy flats past where a cormorant perched like some elegant angel of death atop a beached skiff whose hull was the worse for wear. Not a boat one would want to take to sea. When I knocked on the front door, it swung open slightly. Sensing the place was long abandoned, I stuck my head inside and shouted, "Anybody home?"

Uninhabited houses, derelict houses, always have some kind of unwritten symphony going on in them, and this one was no different. Tiny crumbs of sound, dim little cracks and creaks made by nothing other than the walls talking to one another. I once heard a recording of what was purported to be the sound of solar winds and was reminded of it then as I took a few steps inside. The furniture was old, springs corkscrewed up through the upholstery. The musty air itself seemed tired. Whoever owned the place showed as much indifference toward it as James Boyd did toward his poor father's farmhouse. Careful where I stepped, I toured a few of the downstairs rooms. It was when I discovered more fresh cigarette butts in the kitchen sink that I realized I had no business trespassing here. And besides, I had begun to worry about leaving the boys alone for so long.

Stepping out of the woods once more onto the ramparts above our dock, I cast my eye across the open waters and saw an unfamiliar outboard boat with its white crest of wake water receding into the horizon line where the ocean met the mainland. Small as a sesame seed shrinking into a poppy seed. There was no guarantee that the man who had spoken to Morgan and Jonah was aboard—I realized I hadn't even asked them for a description of him—but I hoped he was. Still, I made a cursory search along the coast to both the east and west of the landing, my thoughts racing in useless circles, and came up with nothing.

As I climbed the hillside back to the cottage, I had to admit that while the noises at the cemetery probably were either those of an animal or my imagination, the man who spoke with my sons needed to be treated with a different order of respect and wariness. My parents' arrival was still a couple of days off, and that evening I decided to raise the flag that let the mailboat captain, Mr. McEachern, know I wanted him to stop at Covey while making his island rounds. I needed to get to a telephone.

We ate a quiet dinner and went to bed as rain started falling, having secured the downstairs windows and doors—a rare measure. The next day low clouds moved hastily between the ocean and overcast sky like random thoughts under a proven theory. Jonah, Morgan, and I stood on the dock after lunch, waiting for the mailboat to arrive. Choppy seas used to unnerve me a little but island people, as I'd become in my way, don't take the waves as much more than, well, waves. Hurricane waves, tropical storm waves—those mattered. You didn't have to be a hydromancer to know today was only a nice chop. Our clothes were snapping in the brisk breeze. The air and water shared the yellowish-green hue of a healing bruise.