The Last True Sentence

Chapter Six: The Alder Tree

Iris sat on the rocky shore, with the last true sentence slipping away from her fingers as it was whistled away by a gust of wind until the rising tide made its way up to her so she could also go back to the sea. The sky had turned from bruised to black and the stars of the San Juan Islands had come out cold, almost like they were looking at me. She could still hear the echo that Eamon Roy had given, heard the sentence that broke the boundaries between art and atrocity. The sister of the first life that I took. He intended Ellie, but from the journal, it was obvious that Ellie wasn't the first. She was just the one that had broken the dam; she was the one that got the man in the monster to want to be caught. The confession did not provide any catharsis. It was dull and reverberating, as if someone broke a bone and it was still aching.

Before Leo's voice, his flashlight pierced the darkness. “Oh Iris, they did discover something,” he said. He was gasping for breath on reaching the end of the bluff. It was a couple of hours in from the site in the journal, the alder tree and the rock formation. “The FBI wants you there.”

Standing up, her legs shaking from cold and fatigue. “Did they locate her?“Were they able to find her?”

“Not now, but they've got an exciting result with the ground-penetrating radar – they're getting the diggers on the site! I told you you would want to be here.”

Iris nodded, but couldn't say a word. She'd been waiting 23 years. There were a couple of hours more that she could wait.

It was a rush going over the ferry and east through Columbia River Gorge. Leo drove in silence, allowing her to lie awake and in a half, with glimpses of the Syntax's journal entries playing in her mind. Her mind played the flat voice in a loop; she struggled. I let her know what the circumstances are. She's deaf. This method must be adjusted as I have to. It was the banality of the language itself that was the horror; a grammar devoid of humanity. When the truck exited the woods and onto a rutted logging road, the blue lights of law enforcement began to flash through the trees, waking her from her sleep.

The staging area was like a bunch of white beetles in the FBI Evidence Response Team's cars. The composed woman who had originally interviewed Iris at the cabin, Agent Park, approached with a grim and sympathetic expression and coffee. Yes, mate, we have marked the spot twenty metres east of the alder tree. The radar signature is consistent: a shallow grave. We will begin excavation as soon as it is first light. You can see on the edges, but I can't let you in the tape.

Iris took the cup of coffee, but her tummy didn't agree with the food. She went to the yellow tape and waited for the teams of technicians to set up their equipment. It was obvious from the trees that grew along the road that this was an alder tree: a gnarled, silver-barked sentinel with a forked trunk, just as the syntax had said. All the time, the female narrator's voice is correcting him about the tree. The alder. Not the oak. How is it you always have the trees wrong? This moment had been called into being by the voice of Celia Munro, who was heard in the margins, but whose voice had stretched across decades to make this moment. Iris silently thanked a never-to-be-met dead poet.

It was a slow morning as the sun slowly rose and the sky turned grey with a milky haze. Work on the excavation began in a ceremonial mode of working. Iris tracked each and every scoop of dirt, each and every moment for photos, each and every moment of quiet consultation between the forensic anthropologist and the lead investigator. Time dilated. She heard herself breathing, the taste of old coffee, and the way the alder leaves were coated in river mist. In the middle of the morning, the team's dynamics shifted; there was a slight change in energy and a crowding of individuals. Agent Park came back once again without expression.

“Remnants, we have found,” she replied in a hushed voice. “There’s a red scarf; it's knotted in the… It has the initials E.V. embroidered on the tag; I think it was your sister.”

Both verdict and unlocking were the words. Iris couldn't stand up, and Leo's arm was there, and it was hard and strong. She did not cry. This pool of tears had been emptied by all the ones she had cried in the cabin. But a deep silence seemed to envelop her, a silence that was not emptiness but completeness. Ellie was discovered. The waiting was over, and she knew no more fear of the unknown that had taken over every cell of her life. It was now time to start the grieving process.

In a hot FBI tent later, Iris recounted a detailed statement of what she'd learned in her linguistic analysis that brought her there. She explained to the agents the patterns of tense change, the oddities of the pronouns, the two voices that were engaged in chat, and the third, hers, who had straightened out the record from the sidelines. Agent Park scribbled notes like a student, sometimes asking questions to jog others' memories. Iris completed her work, and Park replied, “I thought I had been working for the Bureau for fifteen years and I have never seen such a case which is cracked open by punctuation.” It wasn't flattery; it was the respect with a bewildered tinge of the culture of law enforcement facing a new sort of evidence. Iris was requested to do a formal report to the task force, and she agreed. The document would become a "key witness" in the prosecution's case, and a much-cited document in the field of forensic linguistics.

The news vans had located them by 12:00 pm. Helicopters thumped overhead. The news was breaking as it happened: “Literary Legend Linked to Cold Case Murders” and “Hidden Manuscript Unravels Decades of Mystery”. Iris was oblivious of the cameras, and took Leo to a nearby motel that was forty miles away, where the Bureau had set up a protective detail. It was not only the crimes that were the subject of media frenzy; it was the myth of Eamon Roy, the reclusive genius whose novels are taught in universities. High culture and low violence could not have been combined without a collision. That's because the disgraced linguist Iris, who had cracked the code, had suddenly become the main character in a story she had no control over.

She watched the television in the motel room as a cable news reporter recounted her career, “Vance was once a rising star with the FBI until she made a horrendous mistake in the Mallory case and had to leave.” When she heard the words, catastrophic error: she ignored them, hearing a blade instead. That's a mistake she made. She was intoxicated, conceited, and one woman's life had ended as a result of her mistake. It was a scar that never would go away. Or maybe the scar was a map, though. If she had not had the case of Mallory—or the fall—then she would never have been in the position to be named in Roy's will: desperate and unnoticed. Same wound that destroyed her, prepared her.

She left a voicemail for her AA sponsor, Miriam, saying she's still sober, she found Ellie, and she didn't drink. The three sentences were like a small miracle in the midst of chaos. She hung up and noticed that Leo was standing in the doorway.

Mentor, you did well,” he said to Iris.

“It's just a reading as it was written.

“You didn't just do that - you heard the voice in the footnotes; most people wouldn't have heard it.”

Celia Munro’s voice. Iris recalled the woman who had written over a monster's manuscript, adding her own corrections to his trees, challenging his details, adding a margin of truth. That bravery had come at a price for Celia, and her words had lived. It had been a lesson there was, and Iris was just beginning to understand it.

This DNA confirmation could not be issued until three days later. The remains were officially determined to be those of Ellie Vance. The family was informed – Iris' elderly parents, who had long been living separate lives, now faced the harsh reality of a daughter's bones. Iris went to visit her mother in Florida, and in face-to-face encounters, years of estrangement were broken. Both of them embraced and cried, and in their crying, a single thing began to melt, and it was something frozen that was important.

Funerals took place at this place in Portland, under a grey sky, which threatened rain. Iris had made sure an alder sapling was planted close to Ellie's grave. Some of Ellie's childhood friends who are now in their middle years were in attendance, along with the FBI agents involved in the recovery. Iris read aloud Celia Munro's poem “Marginalia,” which ends with the line: I write in the margin, therefore I am. She has laid a copy of The Syntax of Silence on the coffin, the novel through which she learned the power of language, and which she had annotated with her own. The first drops of rain fell, and she said, "I found you in the sentences; now rest.