Ida’s Mark

For a long second nobody in that clearing moved.

The three lamps held us in their white cross. A moth, a late one, blundered through the beam and burned out in it. I could hear my own blood. I could hear, somewhere up the hill, the heavy tramp of boots, and Dunleavy's voice bawling for someone to get a light on his hands, I want to see his hands, and over it all, soft and level, the dry small sound of Voss refolding a piece of paper.

He did it with great care. He creased it along the old worn line. He slid it into the breast of his coat, behind the lapel, where he had put the telephone, and patted it flat. When he looked up his face had closed again, as a door closes, and the eyes above the mask were once more calm.

But I had seen.

"Well," he said, in a conversational tone. "Ida."

Then he reached into his coat for something that was not a telephone.

…

I don't remember the can leaving his hand.

I remember only that he said, "Close your eyes, Ms. Ostrander," in a voice of such mild courtesy that I did it before I could stop to think, and that a moment later the world went black. It wasn't darkness. It was a roaring, rolling, solid thing, a wall of oily smoke that burst from the grass at his feet and mushroomed up in a single heaving gout, swallowing the iron bowl, the stone, the trees, the three white beams of light. They went out one by one like candles in a sack. The smoke was black and ropy and smelled of burnt rubber. It poured into my mouth.

I fell to my knees, coughing.

Something struck the ground beside my hand with a small flat clack.

I groped for it. My fingers closed on warm plastic, a cracked screen, a strip of tape. The phone. It must have jerked out of his coat as he drew the can. I held it against my chest like a drowning woman holding a plank. I could not see my own hand. Somewhere in the blackness a man was shouting, and a woman was screaming a name that was not mine, and a lamp went spinning past me on the grass, throwing a mad white wheel of light.

And in the phone, against my ribs, something said, small and urgent and quite calm:

"Mom? Mom, can you hear me?"

…

"June—"

"Don't talk. Walk. Do you still have your hands?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Get up. Don't run, run's loud. Crawl if you have to. Keep the stone behind you." A breath. "Which way is the stone?"

"I can't see anything."

"Feel the wind. It's from the lake. It's on your left cheek?"

I turned my face. A cold fingertip of air touched my skin. "Yes."

"Then you're facing south. The old section is south and a little east. Mom, go left. Hard left, away from the lamps. Two pines are leaning in a V. Grandma always went that way. Always. She said it was the shortest path to the next section. She never said what was in it." Her voice shook and steadied. "She'd step off the main path and go in sideways, between them, like a person slipping through a gate. I used to wait with the thermos."

I got to my feet.

I do not know how. My legs were water. I went forward with my hand stretched out in front of me and the phone held tight to my chest, through the choking murk, my eyes streaming, and I heard a branch crack behind me and a heavy tread coming across the leaves, patient and unhurried and getting nearer, and I thought of nothing. I became an animal. I ran.

…

The pines were where she'd said.

I came on them out of the smoke like a swimmer coming up from deep water, two black trunks leaning together at the top as if conferring, so close that their lowest boughs interlaced. Between them was a gap. It was hardly a gap at all. It was a darker place in the dark, a slit no wider than my shoulders, choked with dead branches and brambles and the grey ghosts of old spiderwebs.

I put my arm over my face and went in.

The boughs tore at me. They raked my cheeks, my forehead, my hands. A thorn drove into my scalp and ripped out a strand of hair. I felt the blood come, warm, and not hurt. Behind me I heard the pines close with a rustle, like a curtain, and the roar of the smoke fell away, and the world became very quiet.

I was in a tunnel of green. I could smell resin. I went on bent double, on my hands and knees, down a narrow trampled lane that I knew, and did not know. I had never been here. And yet my palms found the ground as if they remembered. They found the hard-packed earth and the small stones set in a line along the edge, the border of a path, laid by a patient hand and long since overgrown.

Grandma's feet, I thought. Her feet were here.

The branches thinned. The air changed. There was a smell like a cellar, stone and moss and cold earth, and the ground, which had been sloping gently down, dropped away under me, and I fell.

…

I fell perhaps four feet. I landed on my side in a bed of dead leaves, and something struck my wrist with a crack. The phone flew out of my hand.

I heard it hit a rock and skitter, and then silence.

I lay there. My lungs were full of hot knives. My cheek was in the leaves and I could taste dirt. I listened to the sound of my breathing, and to the other sound beneath it, very small and very far, of a girl's voice saying Mom, Mom, Mom from somewhere in the grass. Then even that faded as the battery or the signal or the lid of the little plastic case, I'll never know, gave out.

I pushed myself up on my elbows.

I was in another cemetery.

That was the only way I could think of it. The old section I had known from childhood, with its mossy slabs and its angels, had been behind me, a pleasant garden. This was something else. It lay in a bowl of the hillside, hidden from the paths, a hollow the size of a tennis court, ringed by cedars so old that their trunks had split and rejoined. The ground was a tangle of ivy. Out of it, tilted and sunken and heaved up by the roots, stood hundreds of stones.

They were small. They were gray. They were worn so smooth that they looked like loaves left to rise. Some were no more than rough slabs the length of a forearm. Some leaned together in heaps. And not one of them had a name.

I got to my knees.

I saw, now, that the lack was not accident. The faces had been scoured. Each was blank, each rubbed smooth with a chisel and a rasp, as the stone behind the incense burner had been, so that nothing could be read: not a name, not a date, not a line of verse. They stood in the dark like a congregation of the dead who had been told to hold their tongues.

The first nameless headstone, I thought.

And the second. And the third.

How many?

…

I counted forty before I gave up.

I crawled between them with my hands in the ivy, my knees sinking in wet leaf-mold, and I thought of the note. Don't trust the first nameless headstone. The one by the iron bowl, with its fresh spade-cut and its bundle of clay. The one that Voss had gone to like a dog to a bone. It had been a lie, planted, a lure for the man who had been told, for twenty years, by a loving old woman, that the answer was a grave.

So where is the real one?

I did not know. I knew only that my mother had walked this way. She had come, year after year, in her black dress and her sensible shoes, with a thermos and a child waiting at the gate, to a stone in the front of the old section. She had stood before it. She had put her hand on the iron. And then, when she thought no one was looking, she had stepped off the path and come here, into the quiet hollow where nothing was written, and walked among these small blank faces for a time with her head bowed, and gone away again.

She wasn't visiting a grave, I thought.

She was checking on something.

I put my hand on a stone.

It was colder than the others. It was a squat broken thing, half buried, its top sheared off at a slant, as if by lightning, and its back was turned to me. I leaned around it, and my fingers, groping in the ivy, touched an edge. Not the natural edge of a stone. A cut one. A groove, deliberate and shallow, running down the rear face of the slab from top to bottom.

I stopped breathing.

I knew that scratch.

I had seen it on a map. I had felt it with my fingertip on the back of a photograph. I had felt it, God help me, on the spine of a four-year-old, in the dark, at bedtime, drawn with the tip of a finger by a woman who smelled of lavender. Rub rub rub. Rub. It was a line of small chisel strokes in a row, three short, and then, widely spaced, one long.

I put my forehead against the cold stone and began to cry.

…

I cried for perhaps ten seconds.

It's a wonder I was allowed that many. It came up from somewhere that had been shut since a Tuesday in October, a hard dry heave with no tears in it, and when it was over I felt scoured and light. I wiped my face on my sleeve. I looked at the scratch again.

This is a pointer, I thought. Not the original.

It was the thing June had worked out beneath the bridge, her face white and fierce in the glow of the lamp. Three short and one long. It's a sign that says "this is a way, not the place." It's the opposite of an X.

So where does it point?

I ran my hand down the groove. At the bottom, where the slab met the earth, there was a crack. It was a narrow one, an inch wide, running along the base where the stone had split from its footing. And wedged into the crack, so tightly that it had rusted fast, was a thin flat blade of iron, no longer than my hand.

I worked it loose with my nails.

It came out with a screech of corrosion. It was a strip of black iron, hand-cut, hand-punched, pitted all over with rust, like a very old key. One end was filed to a point. And along its face, in a row of tiny crude letters struck with a nail and a hammer, was cut a single word.

RIVERVIEW.

I turned it in my palm. In the dim blue glow that was all the moon gave, the letters were barely legible. But I read them. I read them twice, and a kind of cold slow understanding began to spread out from under my heart.

There are three places in this city with that name. We had counted them, a few hours ago, on a map in the annex. A street, a park, a bridge. And on the edge of the map, where I had not looked, there had been a smaller print. Riverview Photo, in a back lane. A shop where nobody ever went.

Pointer, I thought. She's pointing at one.

"That," said a voice behind me, "is very clever."

…

I turned.

He stood at the mouth of the pines, where the black smoke was still seeping through the boughs like water through a dam. His coat was torn. The cap was gone. His mask hung down around his throat, and for the first time I saw the whole of his face, clearly, in the faint moon: a big soft pale face, a gray crew cut, rimless glasses crooked on his nose. There was a long raw scratch across his cheek, leaking blood. A twig was caught in his collar. He had run through the thorn gap as I had, and the thorns had had their way with him.

But the eyes were the same. They were pale and flat and entirely calm.

"Ida's mark," said Voss.

He stepped out of the pines. He moved with a kind of slow, ponderous ease, as if he had all night. I tried to stand. I got a foot under me, and he came on, and I saw that his right hand held something small and flat, no bigger than a playing card, a dull gray square of metal with two short prongs.

"Don't," I said.

"It doesn't hurt," said Voss. "I give you my word."

He was on me. I never saw him move. There was a hand on my shoulder, big and warm and heavy, and then the metal square against the muscle above my collarbone, cold as a coin, and a crack like a snapped twig. My whole right side went numb. My arm fell. The sky tilted, and slid, and I went down on my knees among the faceless stones with my cheek in the ivy and the iron strip clutched in my dead fingers.

I heard him bend. I felt him take the strip from my dead fingers, gently, one finger at a time, and I heard him turn it over and read it, and breathe out through his nose.

"I know where it points," he said. "I have known for twenty years. What I don't know is how to read it." He laid it down in the ivy beside my cheek, as one sets a toy beside a sleeping child. "The child does. Thank you for finding her homework."

He straightened. He stooped again, a little stiffly, and picked something out of the leaves a yard from my face: a small gray telephone with a cracked screen and a strip of tape on its back. It had landed face up, still faintly lit. He thumbed it open. Then he touched a key, and I heard, tiny and far away, the beginning of a ring.

"Good evening," he said, pleasantly, into the mouthpiece, holding the phone out over my head like an offering. "Miss Ostrander? I think you can hear me. I'm afraid your mother is indisposed, but she's asked me to pass on her love."

A pause.

"Half past nine," said Voss. "Riverview Alley. You come alone."