The Gargoyle

and told the police that she had no doubt of the love between Marianne Engel and me. While she did confirm that I didn’t know about the changes to the will, she also added, “I thought I would have plenty of time to talk Marianne out of it later. I didn’t expect her de-th to come so soon.”

Jack Meredith can speak words that I cannot write. Words like de-th. Words like suic-de. These words make a coward of me. Writing them would bring them that much closer to being real.

The legal proceedings accounted for most of my time during the summer, but in truth I barely paid attention. I didn’t care what the police decided about my responsibility in the disappearance and I didn’t care what the lawyers said about the will. In the end, Jack had to retain an independent lawyer on my behalf, because, without counsel, I would have signed any document put in front of me, just as I had in the hospital when my production company was put into bankruptcy.

Marianne Engel had bequeathed almost everything to me, including the house and all its contents. Even Bougatsa. Jack, despite the years of service she had given in managing Marianne Engel’s business affairs, received only the statues that were already in her gallery.

In a collection of shoeboxes at the back of a closet, I found bankbooks from a dozen accounts holding hundreds of thousands of dollars, now mine. Marianne Engel had been entirely debt-free, perhaps because no financial institution considered her an acceptable credit risk. I also discovered a series of receipts that revealed the truth of my private hospital room. It was not, as Nan had said at the time, a “happy accident” that the room was available so she could research recovery rates for patients in private, versus shared, rooms. Nor, as I guessed at the time, had I been put in a private room primarily so Nan could keep Marianne Engel away from the other patients. The truth was that Marianne Engel had paid for the private room so she could tell me her stories without being disturbed. She just had never told me.

Nothing that I inherited will become mine for a number of years yet, because there was no body. Only after sufficient time has passed will a “presumptive de-th certificate” be issued for Marianne Engel, and until then her assets will remain in escrow. Luckily, the courts determined that I could continue living in the fortress as it was already my primary residence when she went missing.

The local newspapers, and even a few international ones, carried short articles about the disappearance of a mentally ill but highly talented sculptress. “Presumed de-d,” they all said. Because nothing improves an artist’s reputation more than a tragic end, Jack was able to sell the gallery’s remaining statues in record time. Although I had to violate the terms of the will to do so, I gave Jack most of those that still remained at the fortress. (I kept only the statue of myself, and a few other favorite grotesques.) My lawyer advised against this, but it wasn’t as if the police were monitoring my actions. It was common for trucks to come and go, so no one in the neighborhood paid any attention when a few more statues were hauled away. When Jack brought over a check for their sale, less her commissions, I pressed the payment back into her hand.

She deserved it more than I did. And even though the bank accounts were frozen, I had ample money on which to live.

Marianne Engel, despite her generally scattered thinking, had foreseen the possibility that she might not always be around to pay my bills. After her disappearance, I found an envelope addressed to me, containing a key to the safety deposit box that she’d arranged would be accessible to me. When I opened the box, I discovered that it contained more than enough cash to provide for all my needs until the will came into force.

There were two other things in the box, as well.

· · ·

Ultimately the police determined that I was without culpability in the disappearance of Marianne Engel. But they were wrong.

I killed Marianne Engel. I killed her as surely as if I had lifted a gun or tilted a bottle of poison.

As she walked towards the ocean, I knew that she was not going swimming. I knew that she would not return, and I will not pretend otherwise. And yet, I did nothing.

I did nothing, just as she had once requested that I do, as a way of proving my love.

I could have saved her with nothing more than a few words. If I had told her not to enter the water, she wouldn’t have carried out her plan. I know this. She would have returned to me, because her Three Masters had told her that I needed to accept her final heart but then release it, to release her. Any effort that I made to stop her would have constituted a refusal to release her, so all I had to say was “Marianne, come back.”

I didn’t, and now I’m doomed to live with the knowledge that I didn’t say three simple words that would have saved her life. I’m doomed to know that I didn’t take her to court in an attempt to have her committed, that I didn’t try hard enough to sneak medicine into her food, that I didn’t handcuff her to the bed whenever her carving got out of control. There are literally dozens of actions that could have prevented her from dy-ng, all things that I did not do.

Marianne Engel believed that she had killed me seven hundred years ago, in an act of kindness, but that story was fiction. The reality is that I killed her in this lifetime: not with kindness, but through inaction. While she believed that she was freeing herself from the shackles of her penitent hearts, I knew better. I am not schizophrenic. And still, I remained quiet. Ineffective. Murderous.

I face this fact for a few moments each day, but that’s all I can stand. Sometimes I even try to write it down before it slips away, but usually my hand begins to shake before I can get the words out. It never takes me long to start lying again, trying to convince myself that Marianne Engel’s imaginary past was legitimate simply because she believed it so deeply. Everyone’s past, I try to rationalize, is nothing more than the collection of memories they choose to remember. But in my heart, I know this is just a defense mechanism that I manufacture simply so I can go on living with myself.

All I had to say was “Marianne, come back.”

· · ·

The word paleography comes from the Greek palais (old) and graphia (script), so it is not surprising that paleographers study ancient writings. They classify manuscripts by examining the lettering (size, slant, pen movement) as well as the writing materials (papyrus or parchment, scroll or codex, type of ink). Good paleographers can determine the number of writers who worked on a manuscript, can assess their skill, and often can even assign the manuscript to a specific region. With religious writings, they can sometimes identify not only a specific scriptorium but even a particular scribe.

Not long ago I engaged the services of two of the world’s foremost paleographers: one an expert in medieval German documents and the other an expert in medieval Italian documents. I hired them to look at the items that I had found, in addition to the cash, in the safety deposit box.

Two copies of Inferno, both handwritten but by different hands: the first in Italian and the other in German. Both appeared, to my untrained eye, to be hundreds of years old.

Before I would tell either paleographer what I wanted examined, I made them sign strict nondisclosure agreements. Both men found my request unusual, almost humorous, but consented. Professional curiosity, one supposes. But when I presented the manuscripts, both men realized in an instant that they’d been handed something exceptional. The Italian blurted an excited profanity, while the German’s mouth twitched at the corners. I assumed a pose of complete ignorance regarding the origins of the books, saying nothing about where I’d acquired them.

Because Inferno was immediately popular with readers, it is one of the most common works to survive in copies from the fourteenth century. The Italian paleographer had little doubt that my copy was among the very earliest, perhaps made within a decade of the first publication. He begged that I allow him to confirm his findings with other experts, but I declined his request.

The German was not as quick to assign an age to the translation, partially because his initial examinations provided some bewildering contradictions. First, he wondered how a manuscript so remarkably well-preserved had