Yes, Father, all of that I knew even before I opened the envelope, knew so completely that opening the envelope seemed the merest formality. And in fact I was not surprised, not really, to see that the envelope contained the poem, the very poem, that Jessica Burke (I once believed) had sent me three years before. The same blocked-out, handwritten capitals, regular as architect’s script, marched through the same four nearly equal stanzas, each concluding in the familiar refrain:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Yes, I know it, I had said to Jessica Burke. I know it well.
It was the same poem, unaltered, as though nothing had changed at all, and yet at the same time the poem now was wholly different: the place names not just foreign but strange—Sleuth Wood, Rosses, Glen-Car—the antiquation of the phrasing not just fastidious but alien. What made it so? The strangely familiar paper of the envelope, its slick finish something I remembered from Paris, yet had never thought of again. I realized I was hearing the poem now not in Jessica Burke’s voice as she might have read it to me, but in another voice entirely, a voice struggling with the poem’s oddities of diction, the syllables so difficult to pronounce for someone whose first language was not English but French: heron, drowsy, furthest, faery. I heard the poem, its refractory words—eron, droassy, furdest, feery—in that other, beloved voice. What filled me then, for the briefest instant, was an inexplicable sweetness. It was as though someone had found in a closet or attic a piece of my own memory and had sent it to me, thinking I should like to have it.
Even as this tenderness flowed through me, I perceived that the sheet on which the poem was written was not, as I had thought, some unfamiliar variety of European paper, heavier and smoother, like Bristol stock, but photographic paper, thick and curled at the edges, stiffened from the fixing bath. I turned it over, and it was there, she was there, her face facing me: the image of Jessica Burke dead in her bathtub.
The image was horrid and familiar at once. In every detail the scene in the photograph was just as the officer had described it three years earlier, just as Jessica Burke had been when the building superintendent had found her. There it was: the spent needle. There were the spoon, the lighter, the pool of wax where a candle had burned down, all just as the officer had said. Her works were right by the tub, he’d said. No sign of foul play. Pretty cut-and-dried. Just due diligence. Just dotting the i’s. He had said that the girl’s mother, unable to reach her daughter, had called the super. The super had called the police.
I say the scene was in every detail just the same as I had imagined it, just as the officer had described it, and it was the same, that is, in every detail except one—the plastic sack over Jessica Burke’s head. I have read the statements, all of them, the responding patrolmen’s, the super’s, the medical examiner’s, the young investigator’s; none mentions a plastic sack over her head. But there it was in the photograph, bag drawn down over her face and gathered under her chin, where a collar of what looked like masking tape secured it against her throat. Beneath the collar, the edges of the bag formed a kind of ruffle. The sack’s clear plastic did little to veil her face, her expression one of absorbed preoccupation, as though sleep had surprised her. Her head had lolled to the side, and her arm rested on the edge of the tub, hand expectantly open. A patch of sunlight had draped itself over her breasts and shoulder as though trying to cover her nakedness.
What must be obvious to you now, Father, came to me only slowly, slowly and terribly: someone besides Jessica Burke had been there. The bag meant that Jessica had died of suffocation, but there was no bag present when her body was found. Someone had to have removed it. Someone else had been there, standing a little to the side so that the sun would not lay his shadow across her body. That is what the photograph itself meant: someone had been there, someone who had taken the photograph, someone careful to hide his shadow, someone who had removed the plastic sack and vanished.
At first I could not accept this. After all, could not Jessica have put the bag on her head before injecting the drug? Would not that have made sense, for someone whose intent was not to get high but to kill herself? I had been certain, ever since I received the first letter, that she had taken her own life. I must admit that for a moment I even assumed idiotically that she’d taken the bag off between overdosing and being discovered. It took minutes for the obvious fact to become for me even a possibility. Someone had to have been there. Someone had stood in the bathroom and taken the photo, not the night before when it was thought she had died, but in the morning, after the candle had burned down, after the light of the risen sun had reached in through the window to spread its patch of light on her nakedness. Someone had broken the tape seal around her
