Mysterium

The exercise helped to empty her mind. Evelyn hummed to herself from deep in her throat. There was not much traffic on the streets and it was better that way. She decided to go home by way of City Hall, a walk she had always enjoyed in winter when the skating rink was open. She didn’t skate but she used to like seeing the people glide in looping curves, like beings from a better world, light as angels.

Of course the skating rink was closed. The Civic Gardens looked barren, too. City Hall itself was stony gray, and there was something odd about the lampposts lining the avenue.

When she saw the dead children she didn’t understand what she was looking at. The bodies were stiff inside frozen clothing; they moved in the wind, but not like anything human. The ropes had been thrown over the angle brackets of the streetlights and knotted in timeless fashion around the children’s necks. The children’s hands had been tied behind their backs and their faces were hidden under shapeless hemp sacks.

Evelyn came closer without really meaning to, shocked beyond reason. The shock was purely physical, like putting your finger in a wall socket. She felt it in her arms and legs. Somebody went and hung their laundry from the lampposts, she thought, and then the world became suddenly much uglier: No… those are children. Those are dead children.

She stopped and stood for a long time looking at the dead children hanging from the lampposts outside City Hall. A delicate snow began to float down from the sky. The flakes of snow were large and perfect and they landed on the humped, frozen clothing of the dead children until the dead children were clothed all in white, a perfect unsullied purity.

A patrol car passed on the snowy street. Evelyn turned to look at the soldier who was driving, but he was hidden in the shadow of the car and had turned his head away: away from Evelyn, or away from what Evelyn had seen.

∞

She walked without a destination and after a bleak passage found herself peering up through veils of snow to the window of Dex Graham’s apartment. His light was on. The window was a yellow punctuation in the snow-scabbed brick wall. She went inside, walked up the stairs, knocked on his door.

Dex opened the door and looked at her with unconcealed surprise. Maybe he had been expecting someone else. That was natural, after so much time apart. But, seeing him, she was overwhelmed with memories that seemed terribly immediate: of his voice, his touch, his smell. There was that catalog of intimate knowledge still between them. She wasn’t entitled to it but couldn’t put if away.

He said, “Evelyn? Evelyn, what is it—are you all right?”

“I have to tell you a secret,” she said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

We met at a bar,” Ruth Wintermeyer said. “sounds tacky, doesn’t it? But really, we met because he’d read my book.”

She lit a cigarette, drew the smoke into her lungs, and closed her eyes a moment. After the accident at the lab, Ruth said, she had driven to the local grocery and filled a bag with cartons of cigarettes. Lately she had weaned herself to one cigarette a day—“Just a little taste of better times.” She had two packs left.

Howard Poole sat in an easy chair opposite her, too warm in his jacket but cold without it. Like everyone else, Ruth Wintermeyer was cautious about turning up her heat—as if electricity could be hoarded, too.

She said, “I’m a member of the Historical Society. I wrote a book of Peninsula history from colonial times to the Civil War. Strictly amateur scholarship. My degrees are thirty years old and my publisher doesn’t distribute east of the Great Lakes. But I guess in Two Rivers that makes me an intellectual.

“Your uncle called on the phone and we got together. He was interested in the history of the town. In a way, 1 think he was adopting it. He refused to live in government housing—when I met him he was renting a room at the Blue View. Very unorthodox. The government wanted him inside perimeters, but Stern wouldn’t hear of it. He was a kind of scientific celebrity and he could get away with a little prima donna behavior. I think the price of having Stern was indulging Stern.” She paused. “Not that the security people weren’t busy. When he started seeing me, suddenly there were these, you know, little men, these guys in three-piece suits parked outside the house or asking questions at the bank, checking my credit record and so forth. I guess I passed the test. I’m not much of a security risk.”

“You two were dating?”

“Does that surprise you?”

“No. It’s just that I never saw much of his personal life. To be honest, I wasn’t sure he had one.”

“A private life?”

“A romantic life. I guess I imagined he was all intellect.”

“I know what you mean. He didn’t do intimacy very well. Part of him was always detached. Howard, have you always called him Stern?”