On the table, in the photo, the mantis said nothing to Billy.
“Where did you get this idea to read dead things?” he asked. “From your grandmother?”
“No. She disapproved. She was an old-fashioned devout Catholic. To her, believing in the occult is a sin. It puts the immortal soul in jeopardy.”
“But you disagree.”
“I do and I don’t,” Ivy said more softly than usual.
After the raven finished the third cherry, the naked pits were left side by side on the window sill, as if in acknowledgment of the household rules of neatness and order.
“I never heard my mother’s voice,” Ivy said.
Billy did not know what to make of that statement, and then he remembered that her mother had died in childbirth.
Ivy said, “Since I was very little, I’ve known my mother has something terribly important to say to me.”
For the first time he noticed a wall clock. It had no second, minute, or hour hands.
“This house has always been so quiet,” Ivy said. “So quiet. You learn to listen here.”
180
Billy listened.
“The dead have things to tell us,” Ivy said.
With polished-anthracite eyes, the raven regarded its mistress.
“The wall is thinner here,” she said. “The wall between the worlds. A spirit might speak through if it wanted to badly enough.”
Pushing the empty shells aside, dropping the nut meats in the bowl, she made the softest symphony of sounds, quieter even than the melting ice shifting in the tea glasses.
Ivy said, “Sometimes in the night or in a particularly still moment of an afternoon, or at twilight when the horizon swallows the sun and fully silences it, I know she’s calling me. I can almost hear the quality of her voice… but not the words. Not yet.”
Billy thought of Barbara speaking from the abyss of unnatural sleep, her words meaningless to everyone else, yet fraught with enigmatic meaning to him.
He found Ivy Elgin as troubling as she was alluring. If her innocence sometimes seemed to approach the immaculate, Billy warned himself that in her heart, as in the heart of every man and woman, must be a chamber where light didn’t reach, where a calming silence could not be achieved. Nevertheless, regardless of whatever he himself might believe about life and death, and in spite of whatever impure motives Ivy entertained, if indeed she entertained any, Billy felt that she was sincere in her belief that her mother was trying to reach her, would continue trying, and would eventually succeed. More important, she so impressed him, not by reason but by the judgment of his adaptive unconscious, that he was unable to write her off as a mere eccentric. In this house, the wall between worlds might well have been washed thin, rinsed by so many years of silence.
Her predictions based on haruspicy were seldom correct in any detail. She blamed this on her incompetence in reading signs, and would not abide suggestions that haruspicy itself was useless.
Billy now understood her obstinacy. If one could not read the future in the unique conditions of each dead thing, it might also be true that the dead have nothing to tell us and that a child waiting to hear the voice of a lost mother might never hear it no matter how well she listened or how silent and attentive she remained.
181
And so she studied photos of possums broken along roadsides, of dead mantises, of birds fallen from the sky.
She silently walked her house, noiselessly shelled pistachios, softly spoke to the raven or did not speak at all, and at times the quiet became a perfect hush.
Such a hush had fallen over them now, but Billy broke it.
Interested less in Ivy’s analysis than in her reaction, watching her more intently than ever the bird had done, Billy said, “Sometimes psychopathic killers keep souvenirs to remind them of their victims.”
As though Billy’s comment had been no stranger than a reference to the heat, Ivy paused for a sip of tea, then returned to shelling. He suspected that nothing anyone said to Ivy ever elicited a reaction of surprise, as if she always knew what the words would be before they were spoken.
“I heard about this case,” he continued, “where a serial killer cut off the face of a victim and kept it in a jar of formaldehyde.”
Ivy scooped nut shells from the table and put them in the waste can beside her chair. She didn’t drop them, but placed them in the can in such a way that they did not rattle.
By watching Ivy, Billy could not tell if she had previously heard of the face thief or if instead this was news to her.
“If you came upon that faceless body, what would you read from it? Not about the future, but about him, the killer.”
“Theater,” she said without hesitation.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“He likes theater.”
“Why do you say that?”
