Abyss

The stone went up in April.

It was a small one, as he had asked: a plain gray slab, eighteen inches by twelve, set flush to the grass in the old section of Cedar Hill, by the wall, in a row of nameless numbered markers that the city had been laying down for a hundred years. I paid for it myself. It took some arranging. Cemeteries, like hospitals, are fond of forms, and a form had to be found for the substitution of a name for a number, and a second form for the signature of a next of kin, who did not exist. In the end it was Mrs. Penhallow who signed, in a wavering hand, with a cat on her lap and a magnifying glass.

The stonecutter asked what I wished to have carved.

I said, "Her name."

"Just the name?"

"And her age."

He had looked at me over his glasses. He was a stout man with sawdust in his eyebrows, and he had cut a great many words for a great many people. "No verse? No 'beloved'? There's a line on the form for it."

"No," I said. "She would have said it was showing off."

STELLA MARSH

Aged nine

That was all. I have stood before it many times since. It looks very small, in the grass, with the spring light on it. It looks like the stone of a person who made no noise.

…

I was not alone that morning.

I had not expected company. I had come early, at seven, before the groundsmen, with a paper bag of daffodils from a stall by the gate, and I had meant to say whatever I had come to say to the grass. But when I turned the corner by the wall, there was a man already there. He was kneeling. He was a big, square, slow-moving man in a gray overcoat, with a shaved head and a scar across the back of his left hand, and he had set a single sprig of rosemary on the stone and was smoothing the earth beside it with his palm.

"Mr. Kane," I said.

"Max." He did not look up. "Please. I've had enough of mister."

I stood a little behind him, with my bag of daffodils.

He had been released in March. The court had been kind; there had been some argument about the time he had served already, and a good deal of weeping from a woman who ran a halfway house in Fishtown, and in the end a judge with a face like a closed door had signed a paper and looked at the ceiling. He was fifty-six now, and looked it. He had put on a little weight, and a good deal of color, and he moved with the careful deliberation of a man learning to walk through a house in which he had once been a ghost.

"I come every week," he said. "Since I got out. I don't know why. I never met her."

"Nor did I."

"No." He sat back on his heels. "But you've got to put it somewhere, haven't you? All of it. You've got to put it down."

I knelt beside him and laid the daffodils on the stone. The bag crackled. A blackbird was singing in the yew behind the wall, loudly, like a small creature with something to prove.

"I read the report," said Max.

"Which?"

"The inquest. Both of them." He rubbed his thumb along the scar. "It's a thing to read, you know. When you've known the man. My brother's name is in it eleven times. Always in a footnote. 'The late Dr. Kane, who prepared the original findings.'" His voice was dry. "Never in the text."

"He wrote a good report."

"He wrote a very good report." Max looked at the stone. "And then somebody leaned on him. And he stopped."

I said nothing. I had my own notebook, and in it the line from the red ink that I had read, for the last time, in the dark of a hospital car park. They did not die of natural causes. I had never learned who he had been writing to. I knew only that he had written it too late, and in the wrong color, and that no one had been left to read it.

…

The letter had come in March.

It was an email, in fact, though I think of it as a letter, since it was written like one: carefully, in complete sentences, with a considered signature. It was from Dr. Hannah Frost. I had not heard from her in four months. She had left the Medical Examiner's office in December, and gone to a post at a university in Edinburgh, and I had thought, when I thought of her at all, that I should not hear her name again.

Dear Atticus, it began.

I have been wanting to write to you for some time, and have not known how. I hope you will forgive me if I do it plainly.

The compound has finally been identified. The Federal lab held it for sixteen days, and when they reported I was asked to review the findings, as an external consultant. I read them on a Friday. I read them again on the Saturday. I am afraid I must tell you what they say.

It was a hepatotoxin of a kind we have known for some time, though not in this preparation. It is slow, and it is quite specific in its action. And it is treatable. This is the thing I have not been able to put down. There is a standard intervention, which is neither exotic nor expensive, and which is highly effective if given within a certain window after ingestion. That window is thirty-six hours. After it, the damage is progressive and not reversible. Before it, the prognosis is, in the great majority of cases, good.

He took it at four in the morning. He was brought to hospital at a quarter past. He died at nineteen minutes to one on the Tuesday.

I have gone over the times a great many times. I want you to know that I have. The vial was in evidence before noon on the Sunday. I should like you to think of that, and not to think of it too much.

I do not know what I wished to say. I think only that it seemed wrong for you to be the last to know.

With affection, and with apology, as ever,

Hannah.

I had read it at the kitchen table in my flat on Pine Street, with the harp playing very softly in the room below. I read it three times. I put the screen face down.

And then I got up, and went to the window, and stood there until it was dark.

…

"Do you ever think about it?" said Max.

"The vial."

"Yes."

"Constantly."

"I thought you might." He was silent for some time. "I think about the camera. Did I tell you? On the morning of the stream, the day it began. I was in the jail on Passyunk. I had the radio. And they were saying on it, 'police are in touch with a man who claims responsibility.' And I knew." He looked at his hands. "I knew who it was. I'd had a feeling for months. A boy in a library, at the back of the stacks, with a notebook. A boy who followed my brother's pen. I thought, if only I'd said."

"You couldn't have known."

"No more could you."

"I could have said wait." I said it quietly. "In the cellar. When they picked up the tube. It took four seconds. I had it in my mouth."

Max said nothing. The blackbird had stopped. In the stillness I could hear, a long way off, the muffled drone of the road beyond the cemetery wall, and the faint rattle of a trowel somewhere among the graves.

"I'll tell you what I think," he said at last. "I think it's a terrible thing, to be right."

I turned to look at him.

"My brother used to say it. He said, 'The worst thing in the world is to be right too late.' It was a joke. He was always making that joke. 'I was right, you know, Max. About the weather. About the stocks. About her.'" His mouth twisted. "And then there was this. And he was right about that too. And it did no good."

"No."

"And you were right about the door."

I did not answer.

"You knew about the door. You'd worked it out. And you said it, on the stream, in front of all of them. I watched the tape." He looked at me, directly, with the clear steady eyes of a man who has done a great deal of thinking in small rooms. "Did it work?"

"It worked."

"Then why do you look like that?"

…

I have been asked it since.

I have been asked it by a journalist, by a board of inquiry, by a student in Cambridge at the end of a lecture, and once, in a dream, by a small girl in a gray coat who stood at the foot of my bed. I have never found a good answer. The nearest I can come is this.

It worked. It worked like a blade. I put it through the one place in him that was soft, and the armor opened, and everything poured out. He told me everything. He wept; he laid down his weapon; he confessed to all that he had done and a good deal that he had not. Four rooms and five guilty and a city on its knees, and at the end of it a thin pale boy in a hospital bed with a clip in his hand. We had Hollis within the week. We had Holt within the night. The Aldridge name came off the Academy gates in June. By any measure that a court or a newspaper would apply, it was a victory.

And I had known, in the instant that I chose, what the other card was.

I had known that it was an old woman's story about a pipe. I had known it was a gesture and not a fact. I had known it might be refused. And I had thought: a gesture is not a weapon.

I had been right. That was the thing. It was not a weapon.

It had never needed to be.

There is a sentence in Nietzsche that I had by heart at twenty. I had it from my tutor, who had it from his, and I used to repeat it to myself as a kind of charm against the dark. He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. I had thought it a warning about other men. I had thought it was about the things one watched.

I had not understood that it was also about the things one did. That the abyss does not wait for you to look into it. That it can be reached by a very reasonable, very well-argued, very skilled hand, in a very good cause, at an hour when the clock has stopped.

…

We left together.

It was a quarter to nine. The gates were open, and the groundsmen had come out in their green jackets and begun to roll their carts along the paths. A mist hung over the lower field, thin and silver, with the sun just starting to burn through. Max walked beside me with his hands in his coat pockets, saying nothing, and at the gate he stopped and held out his hand.

I took it. It was dry and warm and hard as a plank.

"Go and sleep," he said. "You look like you need it."

"I haven't slept well since October."

"I know." He gave a slow nod. "There's a trick, you know. My brother taught it to me. When you can't sleep, you count. You count something real. The tiles. The steps. The knocks on a pipe." He gave a small wry smile. "It's not much. But it works for a little."

He turned and walked off up the road with his rolling gait. I watched him until he reached the corner.

Then I stood, for a moment, at the gate of the cemetery, in the thin April sun. The daffodils were bright against the gray slab, and the mist was lifting off the grass. I put my hand in my breast pocket, and took out the pen, and held it in my fingers.

Two fast.

One slow.

I clicked it three times, as I had done ten thousand times. And I tried, for the first time in a very long while, to remember what I had been counting, and found that I could not. There was only a fine pale morning, and a blackbird, and a small gray stone in the grass, with a name on it.

I put the pen away. I went home.

…

THE END — Ending 6 of 8: Hollow Dawn

The sharpest truth can open a man completely, and still be the wrong tool.

You broke the killer with a blade, and it worked. He confessed, the men behind the cover-up fell, and a nameless grave finally has a name. But the boy at the center of it all died of a poison that was curable, and you chose cruelty over kindness at the one moment kindness was all he needed. The case closed. Something in you did not.

There are seven other endings. Go back to Chapter 43 to choose differently.