The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow Read Free Book Online Page B

interrupted to ask about my character. Was I on the up and up? Should he have checked around a little more carefully before sending me, sight unseen, out onto his property? Sheriff Hubert assured him that my integrity wasn't in question. And asked if Henderson happened to have the best number to reach the prior owner, Statlmeyer. That was the same Statlmeyer sold him the four hundred acres, right? Henderson—and this gave Niles a mute laugh, he admitted to me—corrected him. Four hundred and sixteen acres. I mean, at some point, who's counting? Yes, Karl Statlmeyer, Henderson said, after giving Niles the message I needn't bother doing any more work on his behalf and should send him a bill for the hours I had put in. Niles said he would pass the word.
    He reached Statlmeyer long distance from home that night and queried him about ways to access the land on foot other than from the logging road we'd been using. Turned out Statlmeyer wasn't any more helpful than Henderson. The acreage had once been part of his family's enormous landstead. He used to let some distant cousin's kid hunt the land in exchange for throwing poachers off and replacing the No Trespassing signs around its boundaries. But that was years ago and he and the boy had fallen out of touch. When Statlmeyer himself finally walked around the place, he told the sheriff, that was enough. The dirt and trees were worth more money than they should ever have been, out in the middle of nowhere. He had been only too happy to dump it on Henderson. Was there anything more? Niles thanked him and said that would probably do it.
    My phone rang early the next morning. I asked him what if anything he had learned overnight, and he told me about these conversations with Henderson and Statlmeyer.
    "Finally got nowhere," Niles said. "Because there was probably nowhere to go."
    He had stayed up late after that, studying a survey map of the area, and in fact there did turn out to be another possible path down to the spot where I saw what I saw. Much tougher trail, if a trail at all. Maybe another approach would render another result. Or, rather, any result. Would it be asking too much of my mother to take the boys again?
    "If you don't feel overly upset," he continued, "I think it'd be useful if you walked back in with me."
    "You believe me about the girl."
    "I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is you might see something I don't."
    "I'll call Rosalie right now."
    "You'll be waking her?"
    "She was up at five, guaranteed. Always is."
    The boys were sleepyheaded and grumpy until they found out they were going to spend their Saturday morning with Nep. The affection was mutual. He never failed to brighten and revert at least a little to his old self when the twins came around. For kids their age—turned eleven this eleventh of April, a couple of precocious Aries—they were quite sensitive to his disease. It both fascinated them in a boyishly morbid way—Jonah and Morgan could sit cross-legged side by side and watch a spider methodically anesthetize a web-caught moth until it was ready to devour its prey—while, at the same time, they drew from deep reservoirs in their spirits some profound sense of human mortality. They also held their grandmother in high esteem, despite their sense she was a bit too religious for her own good, and willingly embraced doing any little thing that might help her help him.
    "Hurry up," I urged.
    One of my worst mothering—or misguided "fathering"—mistakes was when I had allowed them, far too early on, to try a sip of my morning coffee. Now there was no going back. Like little demonic connoisseurs, they objected to the cups of Sanka I made to move things along.
    "What's the big rush?" Morgan asked, pushing his long brown hair out of his face. His hair, which he grew out the previous year after many evenings of family debate, was one of the few physical traits that differentiated him from his otherwise identical brother. That and