Chapter 39: Ultimate Reason

I was awakened by the sound of someone knocking on the door.

“Breakfast for any of you sleepyheads?” asked Melissa, poking her head into our makeshift camp in Lara’s room.

“Already?” Cottonmouth prevented a clean utterance.

Melissa laughed. “You really have no idea what time it is?”

“Feels like seven,” I croaked.

“Nope, but it rhymes with seven!” she quipped.

“Whoa, are you serious?” Lara asked.

“Of course I am.”

“We’ll be out in a bit. Save us some bacon.”

“Oh, better than that,” Melissa teased. “Louisa shot a late season deer with her bow a couple of weeks ago and brought us a nice pack of goodies this morning. I’m making the venison up with her homemade wine and those dried porcinis we got from her in the fall. But you might want to hurry, because it’s going to go fast!”

“Mmm!” Lara and I both sat up, much more lively at the sound of this breakfast treat. Well, maybe not breakfast anymore. Lunch treat...

Heather didn’t move, though. In fact, she was not in her cot, I realized.

“How long has Heather been up?”

“Hours!” Melissa chirped as she slipped away.

When the door closed, Lara looked at me, her hair crazy, her eyes sleepy but smiling. “Was last night real?” she asked.

“As far as I can tell, yes.”

She shook her head. “Are you mad at me?”

“Mad at you? Why would you say that?”

“I kissed Heather.”

I swallowed. “You did. And I watched. It was beautiful.”

Lara breathed deeply. “Wow. This just feels so surreal. And what happens now?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. Everything.”

“Sounds like you don’t have a clue,” Lara said sympathetically.

I laughed richly. “Nope! And sometimes that’s a good thing. But hell, we better start finding these damn rocks, because at this rate it’s going to be dark soon. I want to find our present before Heather leaves tomorrow morning. Who knows how long this crazy hunt is going to take.”

The search took up our entire afternoon and more. Heather often tagged along with us, amused at our confusion, never offering a single hint to help us along. She did celebrate our victories, though.

“What happens if we can’t figure it out?” Lara asked her.

Heather shrugged, remaining mute.

I knew the answer. “If we can’t figure it out, we don’t get our present, Lara,” I said, looking evenly at Heather. She just returned my look, stoking the mischief therein with the embers of desire. I shivered, despite the warmth of the fireplace.

God damn, her eyes are amazing.

“Really?” Lara asked.

I nodded. Of this I was pretty sure.

The rocks proved challenging to find with all the snow. Amusingly, one of them ended up being the flat rock that Heather had used to weigh down the paper bag that held the heels, when I had unknowingly brought them with me after Thanksgiving. At each location we discovered a hundred-piece puzzle. They were identical puzzles, depicting a couple dancing the tango on the street, their bodies also shown in the reflection of a café window.

After examining the pieces, it became clear that Heather had written something on the back. Unfortunately, it also became clear that she couldn’t be bothered to replace the right pieces in their original boxes, so the triplicate pieces were all mixed together. We had a rougher time of assembling it than we thought! Initially we were flipping the puzzles like flimsy pancakes to check each side, but when I dropped one and it crumpled into a mess, Lara had the brilliant idea of using a piece of glass. Melissa wasn’t super pleased when she saw the entire top pane of our screen door missing, but she’d survive.

For a time, the scene looked out of a mental institution. I had the large pane held up on each corner by four chairs. Lara worked the puzzles from the top. Me ... well I was lying on the floor, looking up at the underside of the puzzles, directing Lara if the backs matched the fronts that she was putting together.

At last, Lara put the last piece into place and I had her slide the puzzles to line them up so that the message on the backs was readable. She joined me on the floor, and as we lay there side by side we read the six-line poem.

The splendor of solstice reflects sparks
Where the nymph is sister to the drake
Between them a playful boundary marks
The canvas where he uncoils a design
Siren eyes linger wide awake
Where the circle marries the line

We stared.

“Any ideas where this riddle points to?” Lara asked me, after a long period of silence.

“Not at all. Am I a drake?”

“I don’t know. That would make me a nymph. You copy this down while I go change out of my pajamas in case we need to walk around outside.”

I was no closer to deciphering the riddle when Lara came into my room, wearing jeans and a sweater. We pored over the words for a while, brainstorming all possible interpretations. We tried a few spots, coming up empty, until we finally guessed the correct location. Our victory had been mostly luck, but in hindsight, the riddle made complete sense.

Lara and I grinned at each other as we were rewarded with a third set of clue pictures at the location. The mat again contained three photos, a single eye in each. Attached to the back was a second negative strip with a Chinese character drawn on it.

“This one’s just as clear as the other one,” I sighed, as I looked through it. “Probably just some more chicken scratch.”

“Let’s work on the eyes, then. Whose are they?”

“This one is definitely Heather,” I said, pointing to the first picture.

Something felt odd about the trio, though. The eyes were all out of focus, a technical mistake I didn’t remember seeing in any other of Heather’s precise Trilogy shots. Maybe the blurriness is from enlarging a wider shot.

“What about the other eyes?” Lara asked.

“Not sure.”

“Doesn’t look like a guy’s eye, so it must be Mairead or our parents,” Lara suggested. “Come on. Let’s find Heather first and see if she has a clue for us, since it’s her eye.”

Heather was out for a walk with Aongus and Frej. We soon found them hanging out by the stream. When we confronted her told her it was her eye, she cheerfully produced a slip of paper from her pocket without resistance. Lara eagerly unfolded it. A series of capital letters was present in six lines:

“Roman numerals,” Lara observed.

“Yeah ... But not really. What’s IVX?”

“Maybe it’s a mistake. The others are thirty, nine, ten ... Hmm. Or not. Wait, is that a backward E or a three?”

Heather’s smile didn’t flinch when we both looked at her.

“Let’s find these other eyes,” Lara suggested.

A quick look at Frej and Aongus ruled them out. These were all decidedly feminine eyes. Back inside, Sarah and Mairead didn’t match either set, but Melissa appeared to be the owner of the third blurry eye.

“So what’s our clue?” Lara asked her.

“Clue?” she replied innocently.

“Come on, cough it up,” I pressed.

“That’s not my eye,” Melissa said.

“Yes it is.”

“No, it’s not.”

We checked again. It was very similar, but not an exact match. I even checked her other eye in case Heather had tried the negative reflection trick again, but no dice.

“Are you sure?” Lara asked.

“Absolutely,” Melissa said with a grin.

Lara and I retreated to my room to think.

If it isn’t Melissa, who’s left?

“Wait, is it my eye?” Lara suddenly asked.

“Come on, Lara. That’s dumb.”

Lara raised a brow at me. “No, it’s not. I do have Mom’s eyes, after all. And Heather did take some close ups of my face at the shoot. Check!”

I grabbed the photo and put it beside her face, almost rolling my eyes at the absurdity. “Even if it—”

A chill suddenly ran through me.

“Holy shit ... It is your eye! But ... what the hell? That makes no sense! How would you have a clue to the puzzle you’re trying to solve?”

On that point, Lara was as stumped as I was.

“Is it in your clothes?” I asked.

“Doubt it. I just changed. She had no way of guessing what I was going to wear today.”

“Unless she reverse pickpocketed you outside.”

Lara checked her pockets for any pieces of paper, but the search turned up empty.

I let out a breath as I thought. “Anything that Heather said to you during the shoot? Think!”

“Nothing rings a bell, Matt.”

We grasped at straws. Was it something she’d said the previous night? It was all hazy now.

“What about the middle eye?” Lara asked, switching gears.

“I have no idea. Definitely no one in this house.”

“Then who? Someone in Montauk?”

“Has to be. Julie? Or Aunt Beth!”

“Let’s call them.”

We dialed Julie’s number, but there was no answer. Aunt Beth’s line went to the answering machine. We hung up when we remembered that they were still on their trip.

“We’re just going to have to wait for Julie to get home,” I said glumly.

“This is hard.”

I looked at the middle eye for some time, trying to zoom out on a face. It looked familiar, possessing a slight feline quality to it. Still, I couldn’t be sure of anything.

Reflections...

I looked closely at Lara’s eye again. Her corneal surface reflected an image of our guest cabin window. The snowy light made the reflection quite bright and clear. Although distorted by the curvature of Lara’s eye, I realized with mounting excitement that the window was in perfect focus. Oddly, there were some dark lines visible on two of the panes.

“Hey, when you did the shoot with Heather, did she tape something to the windows?”

“Huh?”

“Of the cabin. Some strips of tape or something?”

“Tape?” Lara pondered. “Oh, yeah, she put some negatives up so we could look at them. ‘Nature’s light box,’ I think she said. How did you know?”

I showed Lara the reflection. After a moment, she took in a sharp breath.

“Oh my god, Matt.”

“What?”

“Those are my initials!”

“What?” I exclaimed, flabbergasted.

But Lara was undeniably right. The strips formed a blocky ‘L J’

“Damn ... Just like my first photo project,” I murmured, utterly astounded at the discovery.

The immediately obvious thing to do was to examine the other eyes. Lara soon pointed out the ‘H M’ in Heather’s set. It only took us a few seconds more to figure out who the third eye belonged to.

“But that’s impossible!” Lara protested. “She’s hardly been around Shannon! We were together the whole time last night, and they were never alone.”

That was true, but Heather was nothing if not extremely tricky.

“I know. Still, this has to be her. Who else is ‘S F’?”

Lara shrugged. “Okay, but Shannon’s out for the day with her family, remember?” she reminded me.

“Maybe they’re back,” I said, trying to sound hopeful. I picked up the phone and dialed, sitting back in my chair. “Fuck. It’s the answering machine,” I soon muttered.

“ ... reached the Fitzpatrick home,” came Shannon’s voice. “Please press star to leave a message and we’ll return your...”

“Now what?” I groaned, throwing my head back. “It has to be her!”

“We probably were supposed to have gotten this far by last night and asked her at the shoot. Damn. We’ll have to wait until tonight, I guess,” Lara said sadly. “At least leave a message so she can tell us when she’s home.”

“Nah. We’ll try again later.”

I was about to hang up when I heard an odd thing on the other end of the line. A pulsing sound was building up. It sounded like a muted version of the off-hook tone the phone company sent down the line if you left the receiver off the cradle for too long.

But it wasn’t quite that. This was much smoother, vibrant, like ... music. A chill ran along my spine. It was Shannon’s dance piece, Electric Counterpoint!

Shannon started talking again. “If you’re calling for Arthur Henry Hallam, then he can be reached at the following: Line one: One-point-two-point-three. Six-point-two-point-eight. Seven—”

I slammed the receiver onto the cradle, startling Lara.

“We were right!” I blurted out. Then I laughed. “Ah, of course! Jonah’s house!”

“What are you talking about?”

“They said they went for some night photography! Give me that pen. The clue is on the answering machine message.”

I redialed and listened as Shannon eventually spoke the numbers again. Lara waited expectantly as I carefully wrote down the name and then the six lines of digits, all in grouped into – of course – threes:

When the sequence was over, the machine beeped. I left a brief message so that the Fitzpatrick family could reclaim their answering machine from Heather’s far-reaching grip. “Thanks for Arthur, Shannon! See you later!”

After I hung up, I sat back in my chair, looking at the numbers and feeling a bit overwhelmed.

“Six lines. Just like the Roman numerals,” Lara noted.

“And like the other two poems,” I added. “Who’s Arthur Henry Hallen?”

“No idea,” Lara said.

We put the two sets of numbers side by side and pored over them. Attempts to spell out the Roman numerals – the ones that made sense, at least – revealed nothing. It was obviously some kind of code, but the rubric was thoroughly elusive. We were stumped.

My gaze drifted up to the photo of Heather that hung on my wall, the one where she was fly-fishing on the Esopus. Her fly line was curved into a sinuous question mark, with her enigmatic face at the point. The riffles of the river rapids around her appeared suddenly animated, snickering as if the absurd secret should be simple to answer. Even though I’d been at some distance when taking the shot, Heather’s impish smile and sparkling sidelong glance seemed to reach right through the lens and tease me about our present puzzle.

She knew. She knew, even back in October, that I’d be sitting at my desk at the year’s crepuscule, sending a desperate murmur to her halide doppelgänger.

“What’s hidden in here, Heather?”

She only smiled back. Even suspended on the wall behind a plate of glass, she was ever a step ahead of me, despite being forever delimited by that thousandth of a second that my camera had allowed for her to grace the film with her larger-than-life attitude.

“This could be anything. We need that third clue,” Lara muttered.

“Take off your clothes,” I demanded abruptly, sitting up from my thoughtful slouch.

“What are you talking about?”

“Take off your clothes! You obviously have the clue and we’re not going to find it unless we start looking.”

A small smile crossed her face. “Ooh, are you suggesting a full body search?”

I sighed patiently. “If it comes to that, then yes.”

“There’s places on my body I can’t really see, though. I might need help.”

“Then I’ll examine every inch of you if I have to.”

Lara’s eye narrowed as she giggled. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Come on, start stripping already,” I pressed. “Make it good.”

“If you say so! One strip show, coming up!” she teased.

“Get on with it.”

She peeled off her sweater and tossed it to me so I could search it. Nothing. Meanwhile she checked her long-sleeved shirt. The t-shirt also came off and proved empty as well. Lara reached behind her back to remove her bra.

I looked at Lara. “Turn around, will you?”

Lara smirked. “Come on, Matt, you’ve seen me nude a thousand times.”

“Just turn around,” I repeated urgently. “I want to look at something.”

“Oh, you want to check out my ass?” she goaded lewdly.

“I do, actually.”

I’ll admit that it was true. Lara turned with a dramatic wink as she reached back to unhook her bra. A shiver of pleasure went through me as my gaze drifted along her shapely body and got caught around the narrowest part, not unlike a grain of sand might as it traveled within an hourglass.

Damn, she’s completely unreal!

I was vaguely aware of Lara looking over her shoulder at me, teasing me with a puckish pout. She twirled her bra in the air and then let it fly. It might have landed draped over my shoulder, but I was too entranced with her waist to notice. She was taking off her jeans now. I stared at Lara’s wiggling hips, deeply transfixed as the denim sank down to her knees.

Reflections ... Everything is a reflection. A mirror image of reality, but just as real. Water molecules, useless beauty, the circle marries the line ... Three is just a reflection of two across one...

For just an instant, the entire world seemed visible to me, and it ... it all made sense.

Of course!

I suddenly jumped up and grabbed Lara by the arms as the dizzying vision faded. I spun her around, pushing her backward toward the wall. Her eyes widened in surprise, a grin blossoming on her face. She almost tripped since her legs couldn’t keep up with my excitement, restricted as they were by her half-lowered jeans.

“Matt! What are you doing?” she shrieked. “I was just mess—”

“Shh!”

I knelt beside her and looked at her body again. In very tiny letters, penned almost tattoo-like with a thin marker, two lines of text were delicately written on Lara’s lower back. I hadn’t been able to read them during her little burlesque show, because it seemed like Russian or something.

loved and lost

But I knew the method of translation. Now that Lara was standing with her back toward the mirror that hung behind my door, I crouched down and looked at the reflection of the inscription.

‘tis better to have loved and lost
than never to have loved at all

And below that was written:

3.4 IIVXX

“Take a look at your lower back,” I whispered.

Lara finally shook out of her surprised state and looked over her shoulder.

“What the hell is that?” she blurted out after she spotted the lines.

I read the words to Lara, finding that a slight tightness in my throat made me crack several of the syllables. A most eerie feeling shivered through me.

Unreal...

“How did that get there?” Lara asked quietly.

“Fuck if I know. She must have written it on you this morning, while you were sleeping.”

“Jeez. I must have been out like a log.”

“Same here, obviously.”

We were both too overwhelmed for a moment to even move.

“Maybe she drugged us,” Lara said, only half-joking.

I sniffed. “Or she just kept us up really late with the kiss and all, so we’d be out all morning ... Anyway, what’s it all mean?”

“Is it a message about Pete?” she asked, seemingly transported somewhere else.

“I don’t know.”

“Or about her? And us?” Lara murmured, suddenly moved by the words she’d unknowingly been carrying around all morning. She swallowed hard.

I waited until Lara came back to the present.

“But there’s more, obviously,” she breathed, as she started pulling up her jeans. “The Roman numerals and the numbers again.”

“There’s only two digits on your back,” I said, handing her the bra that was still hanging over my shoulder.

“Oh, thanks. Hmm. Those lines are famous,” Lara pondered. “The dude who wrote it, what’s his name?”

I shrugged. I’d heard the phrase before, but had no idea of the source. Lara started to get excited again as I watched the wheels turning. She gestured impatiently at me, her forgotten bra still dangling around her arms.

“That English guy. Charge of the Light Brigade, you know? Shit, I should so know this! It’s on the tip of my tongue. We read some of his poems in English class last year! I’m pretty sure that Ms. Rhyan even put this quote on the board. Yeah, she did! I remember, because it kind of...”

Lara looked at me wistfully as she trailed off.

“What?” I asked.

“It made me think of you and Julie.”

Faint recognition started to seep into my brain. “Oh, yeah. Lord something?” I suggested.

That was enough to trigger Lara. “Yes, that’s it! Lord Tennyson! Come on!”

She hurriedly finished putting on her bra and t-shirt as she rushed to her room. I followed, watching as she flung open her closet doors. Despite the comprehensive mess therein, amazingly she found her student encyclopedia within seconds. There was a sense of anticipation as she flipped to the back part of the tome and found the entry.

“Anything?” I asked, after Lara didn’t speak for some time.

She held up a hand as she read on.

“What was the name Shannon said?” she finally asked.

The message was back in my room. “Um, Arthur Henry ... something. Let me get the paper.”

“Don’t bother. In Memoriam, A.H.H., That’s one of Tennyson’s poems. Has to be it!”

“Sweet! We’re on the right track for sure. Do you think we have a copy somewhere, or do we have to hit the library?”

“It’s probably closed today. We can look through our English textbook,” Lara suggested.

“Knowing Heather there has to be a copy around here somewhere. You check the textbook, I’ll look around.”

I returned to my room, looking on shelves and in drawers for any sign of a foreign text. My room was a bust, though. When I went out into the hallway, Lara fell in beside me and steered me toward the living room.

“Anything?” I asked.

“No. Nothing in the index about Tennyson, so definitely no poem.”

We went straight to the bookshelf in the living room, almost at a run. There was the familiar mix of cookbooks, old novels, and magazines. We scanned the shelf, pulling out anything that wasn’t obvious. A fat book with an old, unlabeled binding eventually yielded the prize: The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, stated the title page.

“I have a funny feeling this book wasn’t here a week ago,” I mused.

Lara and I looked at each other, eyes afire. We could sense we were getting close. I flipped through the pages to find the index and then the poem in question. I skimmed the first stanza, flipped a few pages, and then a few pages more.

“Holy shit! This is some crazy long-ass poem ... Damn, look, it keeps going!”

Lara interrupted my flipping, grinning as she pointed at one of the pages.

Canto LVII.

“There’s our Roman numerals,” she breathed, unable to control the note of unbridled excitement in her voice. Then her face fell. “Except, ours aren’t Roman numerals, exactly.”

I just smiled as I reminded her of the obvious. “Reflections?”

“Reflections?” She frowned at the numerals and then grinned. “Oh, duh. Of course! Okay, quick, look this one up,” she urged, turning around and pulling up the hem of her shirt to display the writing on her lower back.

It took a moment for me to realize that the Roman numeral on Lara’s back was actually in regular order when I looked at it directly, due to the double reflection from both the code and the reversed writing. I hurriedly flipped to the indicated canto and skimmed through the four stanzas, my heart beating rapidly.

There... At the very end of the fourth stanza were the same words as were written on Lara’s back. I shivered as I passed the book to Lara.

“Damn, we got it, Lara! Look!”

Lara read the two lines silently, letting out a long breath.

“What were the other numbers on my back again?”

“Three-point-four.”

“Three-point-four ... Or four-point-three. Fourth stanza? Third line?”

“And the extra numbers from Shannon’s code?” I asked. “There’s three in each group.”

There was a moment of silence.

“It can only be the whatever-th word in the line,” Lara said with finality.

“Hmm. Let’s try it and see if it makes any sense,” I murmured. “What’s the first set from the papers?”

Lara translated from the number sequence clues. I flipped through the poem until I homed in and found the target word. We repeated this for the next three words. Lara wrote down the first line of Heather’s short verse as Tennyson’s epic poem revealed it to us.

Then she read the line. It was coherent. There was a deep feeling of certainty as we smiled at each other in amazement, somewhat awed at the sequence of events that led to the production of this first phrase.

“What a trip,” Lara said reverently. “This is crazy. She’s obviously been planning this for months, laying everything out so carefully. I can’t even guess how she did it. But ... But everything also has this whole other layer of meaning, it seems. Like some random puzzle that then ends up being connected to real life in the end. Who would ever do that?”

“Only Heather,” I said, grinning. “Remember that giant fishing net that she weaves, that I told you about once? Well, you’re caught in it too, now. And it’s bigger than I even thought. Come on, we’ve got some more work to do.”

Lara and I finished deciphering the verse. We were at the spot we thought that the riddle-poem pointed us to. Another clue, or would this be it? Everything had been in threes, it seemed, and this was the third clue chain. It felt like the end. But it also felt like it wasn’t the end, because Heather was strangely absent to witness the victory.

We found the large Ziploc bag just where we thought it would be. It contained only a film strip.

“Just a negative this time.”

“That’s it?” Lara asked.

I pulled the prize out of the bag and held it up to the sky. “Looks the same as the others, just a character and probably the scratches too.”

“All right, time to print them, I think,” Lara said.

Soon we found ourselves once again staring at the strange markings produced by the strips. Each one had a little cloud of them of roughly the same size. I made a print of each one, but things were no clearer when looking at them on photo paper. The white doodles on the black background of the prints were still indecipherable. We turned them, squinted at them, curled them, angled them ... Lara even looked at them in the mirror. It was no use. This new trilogy of pictures was profoundly impossible to make sense of. I fell back on the bed and sighed. Lara plopped down right beside me.

“Have we missed something?” I asked.

“Obviously.”

We spent fifteen minutes retracing everything we’d discovered along the way during these last three days. The possibilities were endless, it seemed. Discouragingly so. And yet the answer had always been, somehow, obvious in the end.

Heather wandered into the darkroom during a period of grim silence. She glanced at the three chicken-scratch prints that sat on the table, by the enlarger.

“Ooh, nice photos,” she chirped. “So do you like your present?”

“No, we haven’t figured it out yet. We’re totally stumped,” I admitted.

“Stumped?” she asked with a frown. She looked disappointed. “Those pictures are the present!”

I looked at her in the faint light. No way.

“Pfft. Whatever,” I grumbled.

Heather looked sad. “You mean you don’t like them? It’s the last set of Trilogy photographs! See, I think I’m entering my modern phase. Personally, I would’ve gone with eight-by-tens, but it’s your present, so you—”

“Whatever!” I repeated. “We have no idea what to do with them. We’ve tried everything.”

“You can frame them,” Heather said simply.

“A hint?” I pleaded, ignoring her feigned ignorance. “Please?”

Heather looked offended at my request. “Of course not ... Look out, coming through!” she suddenly called. She pushed onto the bed, splitting Lara and me as she slid between us and turned around to lie on her back. “Mm. Comfy!” she purred happily. She grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. “It’s like a Heather sandwich!”

Lara and I laughed at her bubbly demeanor, despite our frustrated state with the hunt.

“So no hints. Then we’re stuck,” Lara said with finality.