mind’s ear, of metaphor and simile. She could list dozens of sources for narrative texture. Ryan couldn’t remember them all.
In the texture, you began to see patterns. Some were patterns of plot, which you could think of as like the center lines on a highway and the guardrails at its extremes, there to be sure that you got to your destination without getting lost in byways of meaningless event. Others were patterns of the obvious theme, to give the story purpose that made it meaningful, in part just as the rules of construction for a sonnet gave it meaning, in part just as the truth of human suffering in a blues song made it worth singing.
The most difficult patterns of all to understand, the most intriguing, and usually the most ominous were those that arose from subtext, not from the surface theme but from the implicit meaning of the tale. The less you thought about those patterns, the more you understood them, for they were the patterns of primal truths, some of which the modern mind rejected on a conscious level.
Studying the photos of the three dead women, brooding about their living sisters, Ryan suspected that this pattern of twins, though seemingly the key to the plot, rose more from subtext and that the more intently he focused on it, the farther he traveled from the revelation he sought.
The yellow wind made pendulums of the traffic lights suspended over intersections, tore dead fronds off tall palm trees, harried tumbleweed out of vacant lots and along busy streets, buffeted the car, hissed at the windows, and in general made such an exhibition of its power that a pagan might have cast basketfuls of flower petals into it as an offering, to solicit exemption from the miseries of the coming storm.
Returning the photographs to the envelope, he said, “George, Cathy, I’m flying out to Denver from here. I don’t know that I’ll really need anyone with me, but there’s a longshot that I may have a security issue. I’d feel a lot more comfortable with someone who had a license to carry.”
“We’re both cool to carry in Colorado,” Zane said, “and Cathy has all the gun training that I have. Fact is, she may be the better shot.”
“I’ll lay twenty to one on that,” she said.
Ryan asked, “Are you up for Colorado, Cathy?”
“I only brought one change of clothes in my overnight bag.”
“That’s all you’ll need. We’ll be going back to California tomorrow.”
In truth, it didn’t seem likely that Ismena Moon, a fifty-eight-year-old woman described as a sweetheart, would prove to be a threat to Ryan’s physical safety.
He wanted someone with him more for company than protection. He had been something of a loner the past year, and solitude had taken its toll.
Denver in particular seemed to be a dangerous place for him to be alone. On his previous visit, he had arrived confused, as he would be arriving this time, and he had departed confounded, in a condition close to despair.
Besides, since he had first seen Cathy this afternoon in Spencer Barghest’s garage, Ryan had felt there was a question he wanted to ask her. Needed to ask her. A question of considerable importance. He just didn’t know what it might be. He sensed the question half-formed in the back of his mind. Perhaps it would fully coalesce in Denver.
Forty minutes out of Las Vegas, high over Utah, above the weather and bound for Colorado, Ryan excused himself and went to the lavatory.
He dropped to his knees and threw up in the toilet. He had developed a nervous stomach awaiting takeoff, and it had grown worse in flight.
At the sink, he rinsed out his mouth twice and washed his hands. He was struck by the paleness of his fingers, as white as bone.
When he looked at his face in the mirror, he found that it was paler than his hands, his lips without color.
Reluctantly he met his eyes and for some reason thought of Alvin Clemm and the convenient stepladder, the convenient concrete, the silk scarf and the convenient heart attack.
His legs grew weak, and he sat on the toilet. His hands were shaking. He clasped them, hoping one would steady the other.
He didn’t know when he had gotten up to wash his hands again. He found himself at the sink, scrubbing.
He was sitting on the toilet again when he heard a rapping, which quickened his heart until he realized this really was a hand upon a door.
“Are you all right?” asked Cathy Sienna.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“You’re okay?”
“A little airsickness,” he explained.
“Do you need anything?”
“Just a minute. Give me a minute.”
She went away.
Airsickness wasn’t the correct diagnosis. He was sick with fear about what he would find on the ground, in Denver, in the house of Ismena Moon, which had once been the house of Ismay.
FORTY-SEVEN
Leaving stars behind, and moon, they descended through deep clouds, a white boil at the portholes, and then Denver appeared below, sparkling in the clear night air.
In flight, Ryan had phoned Ismena, telling her only that her late sister had done a kindness for him that he’d never forgotten and, as he was in Denver, he would like to stop by and find out more about Ismay. After Ismena welcomed their visit, Ryan had arranged for a Cadillac Escalade, which awaited them at the airport.
The January night was so bleak that his cold hands felt warm by comparison. His breath plumed from him, curls of vapor lingering for brief moments before deliquescing into the still air.
His stomach was settled, but not his nerves, and after they put their two small pieces of luggage in the back of the Escalade, he asked Cathy Sienna to drive. In the passenger seat, he read Ismena’s address from a notepad on which he had written it, and Cathy keyed it into the navigator.
She drove well, handling the big SUV as if she had put fifty thousand miles on it before this. Ryan suspected that she was good not merely with a gun and a car but also with just about any machine or tool, good with things because she preferred them to people.
The very act of driving brought a slight unconscious smile to her. Although she usually guarded her expressions closely, her face was not a mask at this moment, but relaxed as Ryan had not before seen it.
“Do I need to know who this woman is, why we’re here?” she asked.
He told her only about Ismay Clemm’s kindness to him during the myocardial biopsy—and then that he had this day learned the nurse had died twenty-one months before he met her.
Of the reactions he expected from Cathy, she exhibited none. The faint smile remained, and she kept her eyes on the road, as if he had said nothing more surprising than that, judging by the lowering sky, snow would soon fall.
“Twenty-one months. What do you make of that?” she asked.
“Ismena and Ismay are identical twins.”
“So you—what?—think it was Ismena at the biopsy?”
“Maybe. Probably.”
“But she was using Ismay’s name? Why would she?”
“That’s one thing I want to find out.”
“I guess you would.”
He waited for her to say something more. She drove in silence, and only spoke to say “Yes, ma’am,” each time the computerized voice of the navigation system gave her an instruction.
For her line of work, Cathy had been trained to listen carefully to what a client needed to tell her about his problems and to have no curiosity about any portion of his story that he failed to disclose. But her ability to feign disinterest in this case seemed almost superhuman.
As the navigator announced a final turn to the left coming in three hundred yards, Ryan recognized the park with the aspen trees and the church beside it.
“Pull over,” he said. “I know this place. If her house is just around the corner, we can walk from here.”
Their jackets were not heavy enough for the weather, but the air remained still, with no wind-chill factor. Hands in their pockets, they walked first into the park.
The aspens had shed their leaves for winter. The
smooth bare limbs described pale geometries against the night sky.
A recent snow, not yet despoiled by children’s boots, mantled the grass, and the brick walkways wound like channels of dark water through the whiteness.
“I was here once,” he told Cathy, “sixteen months ago.”
She walked with him and waited.
“That time, I had the most powerful experience of deja vu. The air was as still then as now, but the aspens were whispering, as they always do when they’re leafed out. And I thought how much I’d always loved that sound—and then realized I’d never heard it before.”
A lamppost spilled light upon an iron bench. Icicles depended from the front skirt of the bench, and ice glazed the bricks directly under them.
“Sitting on this bench, I became convinced I’d sat here many times in the past, in all seasons and kinds of weather. And I felt the most powerful nostalgic sense of…of love for this place. Strange, don’t you think?”
Again surprising him, she said, “Not really.”
Ryan looked at her. Aware of his stare, she did not return it.
“Are you experiencing any of that now?” she asked, gazing up into the aspen architecture.
Shivering, Ryan surveyed the park. “No. It’s just a place this time.”
They walked to the front steps of St. Gemma’s Church, where a bronze lamp in the shape of a bell brightened the oak doors.
“I knew what the church would look like before I went inside. And when I went in…I felt I’d returned to a much-loved place.”
“Should we pay a visit?”
Although he knew he could not have been located and followed to Colorado so quickly, Ryan imagined that if he went into the church, he would find waiting for him the woman with the lilies and the knife, this time without the lilies.
“No,” he said. “It won’t feel special now. It’ll be like the park—just a place.”
His ear lobes began to sting with cold, his eyes watered, and the icy air had a faint ammonia scent that burned in his nostrils.
On the opposite side of the church from the aspen grove lay an expansive cemetery. No fence encircled it, and lampposts flanked a central walk.
“I didn’t see this before,” he said. “I didn’t come this far. When I left the church, I was so…spooked, I guess, I just wanted to get back to the hotel. I thought I’d been poisoned.”
This statement seemed to strike Cathy Sienna as more peculiar than anything else that he had revealed. As they walked past the cemetery toward the corner, she was first silent, but then said, “Poisoned?”
“Poisoned or drugged with hallucinogenics. It’s a long story.”
“No matter how long it is, seems to me poisoned-and-drugged is a bigger leap than some other explanation.”
“What other explanation?”
She shrugged. “Whatever other explanation you didn’t want to consider.”
Her answer disturbed Ryan, and suddenly so did the graveyard.
“I’ll bet she’s buried here,” he said.
“You mean Ismay Clemm?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to look for her?”
Grimacing at the gravestones in the snow, Ryan said, “No. Not in the dark.”
On the first block of the next cross street, houses stood on only one side, facing the cemetery.
The sixth house, a Victorian place with elaborate cornices and window-surround moldings, belonged to Ismena Moon. The porch light welcomed them.
Lace curtains on the mullioned windows and a brass door knocker in the form of a wreathed cherub holding a diadem in both hands suggested the interior style.
A slim handsome woman in her mid-sixties answered the door. She had white hair, a light café-au-lait complexion, and large clear brown eyes. Her sensible black dress shoes with block heels, blue rayon dress with high round neckline and narrow white collar, white cuffs, and gathered sleeves suggested she had recently returned from vespers or another service.
“Good evening, ma’am. I’m Ryan Perry, and this is my associate, Cathy Sienna. We have an appointment to see Ismena Moon.”
“That would be me,” the woman said. “So pleased to meet you. Come in, come in, you’re dressed to catch pneumonia in this weather.”
Ismena and Ismay were not identical twins, or twins of any kind.
FORTY-EIGHT
The parlor was high Victorian: floral wallpaper; deep maroon velvet drapes, trimmed and tasseled; lace curtains serving as sheers between the velvet panels; a cast-iron fireplace complete with kettle stand, with a black-and-gold marble surround and mantel; an étagère filled with collectible glass, two Chesterfield sofas, plant stands with ferns, sculpture on pedestals; a side table draped with a maroon cloth covered by a crocheted overlay; and everywhere a fabulous and precisely arranged clutter of porcelain busts, porcelain birds, groupings of ornately framed photographs, and knickknacks of all kinds.
Ismena Moon prepared coffee, which she poured from a Victorian-silver pot, and with which she served a generous selection of exotic cookies that she called biscuits.
While Ryan had been expecting a fifteen-minute meeting in which he might get to the truth of events on the day Dr. Gupta performed a myocardial biopsy, Ismena imagined their visit to be an occasion for socializing, with one of her favorite subjects—her sister, Ismay—as the inspiration for the get-together. She was such a charming woman, and so gracious, that Ryan could not disappoint her.
Besides, his identical-twin theory had deflated as completely as a hot-air balloon lanced by a church steeple. He needed a rational explanation for how a woman dead twenty-one months could have spoken with him on that day. For a moment, when he discovered there was a third sister, Ismana, his hope revived that she was Ismay’s twin, but she was the oldest of the three, and had died before Ismay.
“I can see how the similarity of the names would lead you to think twins,” Ismena said. “But they’re all just forms of Amy, you see, which was quite a popular name in the Victorian era, with many derivatives. Amia, Amice, Esmee, on and on.”
Victoriana, Ismena explained, had fascinated the Moon family going back to their grandfather, Dr. Willard Moon, who had been one of the first black dentists west of the Mississippi, with a patient list of mostly white folks. Ismay had been somewhat less infatuated with all things Victorian than was Ismena, but like everyone in the Moon family, she had been a great reader, and her favorite books and writers were mostly from the nineteenth century, primarily from the Victorian part of it.
Ismena indicated a book-lined alcove off the parlor, which featured two leather armchairs and reading lamps. “She was never happier than when she was in one of those chairs with a book.”
As Ismena had been talking, Ryan had stepped to the alcove to look over the titles on the bookshelves, which included complete collections of Dickens and Wilkie Collins.
Moving along the shelves, he stepped around a white marble bust displayed on a pedestal.
Ismena said, “That was a favorite thing of hers. Of course, she had to have it fixed above the parlor door, exactly as in the poem, but I am definitely not comfortable with a thing that heavy hanging over my head.”
“Like in what poem?” Cathy asked.
“‘The Raven,’” Ismena said. “Poe was her very favorite, though the poetry more than the stories.”
While she spoke, Ryan came to the Poe collection.
Ismena recited the verse from memory: “‘And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.’”
The meter of the verse, the compelling repetitions, the rhymes, the alliteration conspired to catch Ryan’s breath for a moment, not because the poem was new to him—it wasn’t—and not only because it was lyrical and brilliant, but also because the unmistakable style of Poe, his essential voice, seemed of a piece with the strange events of the past sixteen months.
As he withdrew a volume of Poe’s collected poetry from a sh
elf, a yet more powerful sense of the uncanny overtook Ryan when he heard Cathy, in the spirit of the moment, recite: “‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—’”
“‘—While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,’” Ismena continued with delight, “‘As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.’”
“Not sure I remember,” Cathy said, “but maybe…‘ “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—/ Only this and nothing more.”’”
“But it wouldn’t be only a visitor, would it?” Ismena asked. “Not in one of Mr. Poe’s creations.”
The rapping.
Ismay had known about the rapping.
After the biopsy, as he dozed in the prep room, she had said to Ryan, You hear him, don’t you, child? Yes, you hear him.
He didn’t understand how she could have known about the rapping, but of course that was not as much of a stumper as how she could have been there almost two years after dying.
You must not listen, child.
Now he opened the volume of verse to a random page—and saw a poem titled “The City in the Sea.”
“Ismay knew all of Mr. Poe’s verses by heart—except for ‘Al Aaraaf.’ She just couldn’t make herself like that one.”
Ryan scanned the early lines of “The City in the Sea,” and found something that he felt compelled to read aloud: “‘But light from out the lurid sea / Streams up the turrets silently / Gleams up the pinnacles far and free / Up domes, up spires, up kingly halls / Up fanes, up Babylon-like walls…’”
His voice must have trembled or otherwise betrayed his fear, for Ismena Moon said, “Are you all right, Mr. Perry?”
“I had a dream like this,” he said. “More than once.”
After scanning more lines, he looked up, realizing that the two women were waiting for him to explain himself.
Rather than elucidate, he said, “Ms. Moon, I see that you have half a dozen copies of Poe’s collected poetry.”
“Ismay bought it over and over again every time she found a new edition with different illustrations.”
“May I pay you for one of them? I’d like it as a…as a memento of Ismay.”
“I wouldn’t think of accepting a dime,” she said. “You take whichever one you like. But you still haven’t told me what kindness she did for you that impressed you so much.”
Carrying the book, he returned to the Chesterfield on which Cathy sat, and settled there to spin a story peppered with a little of the truth. He set the date of this tale before Ismay’s death, did not mention a heart transplant, but instead gave himself a multiple bypass. He told of how afraid he’d been that he was going to die, of how Ismay counseled him so wisely for an hour in the hospital one night, two hours the next night, and how she stayed in touch with him after his release, keeping his spirits up at a time when he would otherwise have fallen into depression.
He must have told the story well, because Ismena was moved to tears. “That’s her, all right, that’s how Ismay was, always giving.”
Cathy Sienna watched him dry-eyed.
Ismena pulled on calf-high boots and a coat, and walked with Ryan and Cathy across the street to the cemetery. She led them to Ismay’s grave and focused her flashlight on the headstone.
Ryan thought about how things would have been different from the way they were now if he had found this cemetery and this grave on his previous visit to Denver, before his transplant.