Still Life With Crows

“Think nothing of it.”

Another flash of the dimples, a glance and wink at Miss Cat’s Eyes, and the head of the field office withdrew.

A day or two,Hazen thought as he glanced at his watch. He could hardly wait.

It was now three o’clock. He had a trip to make to Deeper.

Thirty-Six

 

Corrie maneuvered her Gremlin over the dirt track at a crawl, one-handed, balancing the two iced coffees in her lap to keep them from spilling. The ice was mostly melted already, and her thighs were wet and numb. The car jounced over a particularly deep rut, and she winced: her muffler had been dangling rather loosely under the chassis lately, and she didn’t want it torn off by one of these murderous gullies.

Ahead, the low shoulders of the Mounds reared above the surrounding trees, the light of the afternoon sun turning the grass along their crests into halos of gold. She got as close as she dared, then threw the car into park and eased her way gingerly out of the driver’s seat. Coffees in hand, she climbed the grade into the trees. Bronze thunderheads loomed in the north, already covering a third of the sky, great towering air-mountains with dark streaks at their base. The air was dead, totally dead. But that wouldn’t last long.

She entered the sparse scattering of trees and continued along the path toward the Mounds. There was Pendergast, dark and slim, looking around, his back partly to her. “Looking” really wasn’t the word, she realized: more like staring. Intently. Almost as if he was trying to memorize the very landscape around him.

“Coffee delivery!” she called out, a little too cheerfully. Something about Pendergast sometimes gave her the shivers.

He slowly turned, his eyes focusing on her, then he smiled faintly. “Ah, Miss Swanson. How kind of you. Alas, I drink tea only. Never coffee.”

“Oh. Sorry.” For a moment she felt disappointed, somehow, that she hadn’t been able to please him the way she’d hoped. She shook the thought away: now she could drink both coffees herself. As she looked around, she noticed there were topographical maps and diagrams of all kinds spread out on the ground, held down with rocks. Under another rock was an old journal, its weathered pages full of spidery, childlike script.

“You are kind to think of me, Miss Swanson. I’m almost finished here.”

“What are you doing?”

“Reading thegenius loci. And preparing myself.”

“For what?”

“You shall see.”

Corrie sat on a rock and sipped her coffee. It was strong and cold and as sweet as ice cream: just the way she liked it. She watched as Pendergast walked about the area, stopping to stare for minutes at a time in seemingly random directions. Occasionally he would pull out his notebook and jot something down. At other times he would return to one of his maps—some of them looked old, at least nineteenth-century—and make a mark or draw a line. Once Corrie tried to ask a question, but he quietly raised his hand to silence her.

Forty-five minutes passed as the sun began to sink into a swirl of ugly clouds on the western horizon. She watched him, mystified as usual, but with a perverse kind of admiration she didn’t really understand. She was aware of feeling a desire to help him; to impress him with her abilities; to gain his respect and trust. In recent years no teacher, no friend, and certainly not her mother had ever made her feel useful, worthwhile, needed. She felt that way now, with him. She wondered what it was that motivated Pendergast to do this kind of job, to investigate horrible murders, to put himself in danger.

She wondered if perhaps she wasn’t just a little bit in love with him.

But no, that was impossible: not someone with those creepy long fingers and skin as pale as a corpse and strange blond-white hair and cold silver-blue eyes that always seemed to be looking a little too intently at everything, including her. And he was soold, at least forty. Ugh.

Finally Pendergast was finished. He came strolling over, slipping his notebook into his jacket pocket. “I believe I’m ready.”

“I would be, too, if I knew what was up.”

Pendergast knelt on the ground among his maps and documents, gathering them carefully together. “Have you ever heard of a memory palace?”

“No.”

“It is a mental exercise, a kind of memory training, that goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek poet Simonides. It was refined by Matteo Ricci in the late fifteenth century, when he taught the technique to Chinese scholars. I perform a similar form of mental concentration, one of my own devising, which combines the memory palace with elements of Chongg Ran, an ancient Bhutanese form of meditation. I call my technique a memory crossing.”

“You’ve totally lost me.”

“Here’s a simplified explanation: through intense research, followed by intense concentration, I attempt to re- create, in my mind, a particular place at a particular time in the past.”

“In the past? You mean, like time travel?”

“I do not actuallytravel in time, of course. Instead, I attempt to reconstruct a finite location in time and space within mymind; to place myself within that location; and to then proceed to make observations that could not otherwise be made. It gives me a perspective obtainable in no other way. It fills in gaps, missing bits of data, that otherwise would not even beperceived as gaps. And it is frequently in these very gaps that the crucial information lies.” He began removing his suit coat. “It’s especially relevant in this particular case, where I have made absolutely no progress through the usual methods, the offices of the good Mrs. Tealander not excepting.”