The Last True Sentence

Chapter Ten: The Reader in the Text

Six months after the trial, Iris had the bound galley of her memoir, The Last True Sentence: A Memoir in Language and Loss. It was a June morning, and the light that passed through her window into her apartment was golden. The book was dedicated to Ellie and Celia, and the epigraph, from Roy's The Syntax of Silence, was a benediction in the wake of all this: Stories are the only prisons that can also set you free. The memoir was not just about the investigation; it was the archaeology of her own life, the stories she had lived through her childhood in the shadow of Ellie, the rise and fall of her FBI days, the long, lost journey to the shadow of sobriety, the extraordinary events and chance occurrences that had put a manuscript in her hands like a lit fuse. Advance reviews were good, as were the reviews of the literary world, which had recoiled at the scandal and now had to deal with the disconcerting fact that genius and monstrosity could be joined in the same sentence.

The publication was released at the Library of Congress, which was selected because of its symbolic significance. The grand domed reading room was packed with an unusual and emotional group of FBI members, linguists, victims' families, students, journalists, and an army of Celia's extended family that had come from Mexico and the Pacific Northwest. The front row was occupied by Elena Munro in a wheelchair, and her face glistened with pride and sorrow.

Iris was chosen as the speaker. She was speaking extemporaneously, her voice reaching out to the farthest corners. She quoted from the first lines of Celia's poem “Marginalia,” and spoke about the power of words to hurt, the power of words to heal; the invisible work of the annotators, the people who write between the lines. She explained that the first time she read the footnote which mentioned the alder tree, she knew that she wasn't the only one in the text. “Celia Munro was the reader that wouldn't let go,” she said. “She went into a story which was attempting to wipe her out and preserved the truth; we all read in one another's lives, the question is: are we courageous enough to write in the margins of each other's lives?

She finished with a reading of the last chapter in her memoirs, where she writes of the planting of the alder sapling at Ellie's grave, the red scarf tied to the sapling and waiting to be read, like a sentence in a book. Afterwards there was a long quiet moment, before the applause started.

Then a young girl walked up to her and her eyes were unwavering. My name is Amelia, and I am a linguistics PhD student at Georgetown, and I chose this field because of your work and because I want to help find missing indigenous women whose cases are ignored, using forensic linguistics.” Can you advise me?” Iris had that sense of a full-circle shiver. She gave Amelia her card and would mentor her. Later, she would help the young woman get a job as an FBI intern, and sow a seed for the next generation of margin-readers.

That same summer, the foundation that Iris had conceived, the Vance-Munro Foundation for Narrative Justice, was founded with the advance from the memoir, and a large number of donations. It provided grants to families looking for missing relatives, provided training in forensic linguistics to police officers, and had an online archive of all of Celia's letters and annotations. The first big project was a cold case effort in the Pacific Northwest that involved the linguistic methods Iris had developed and re-examining old threat letters and anonymous tips. A few new leads arose, but this time none as dramatic as the Roy case. It was a rather quiet, incremental, and satisfying job.

On an individual basis, Iris' life began to flow smoothly. She stayed on at Quantico as a well-respected senior consultant. She participated in meetings of AA as a sponsor; in the fellowship, she encountered a community which spoke a different language: the language of addiction. They made a friend of Leo, and their friendship eventually took on a romantic aspect, but neither was in a hurry. Iris finally indulged herself in dreams of a future other than loss for the first time in years since Ellie disappeared.

On October 1st, the one-year anniversary of Ellie's discovery, Iris went back to Orcas Island. With the consent of the families of the victims, the estate had already paid for a small memorial garden on the bluff above the sound. There was a low stone wall with the names of the women Roy murdered on it, and a second stone on it with Celia's name and the line from her poem: I write in the margin, therefore I am. There was an alder tree in the middle of the garden, taller than Iris, and silver-skinned to catch the afternoon sun.

The red scarf with Ellie's initials embroidered on the tag had been brought by Iris, and cleaned and preserved. She fastened it to the lowest branch, and it waved like a banner in the wind. Then she wrote one sentence - her own addition to the streaming text - the text she had been writing in her heart since the first time she knew that words could be keys. To the empty garden she read it aloud, its sound ebbing to the sound of waves:

The truth is not a prison, it's a door.

She folded and put the paper under a stone at the base of the alder. After that she stood for a long time, watching the ferry ride across the sound, to see their people onto the new land. Eamon Roy and The Syntax's story was done. The real sentences, the ones written in the margins by women such as Celia and Ellie, that Iris herself wrote, would be read, spoken, opened new doors in minds she never encountered.

She turned and ambled back to the road where Leo was waiting with the truck. A scarlet scarf, a shadow long behind her, a grey sky.

The last true sentence had been written. But the reading, Iris understood, was infinite