The Last True Sentence

Chapter Seven: The Author’s Shadow

Returning to work, Iris Vance had the blessing of a few weeks to think about her husband and son, to remember them, as a diver who has surfaced too quickly, her ears popping from the pressure, her ears and mind. Her employment had been restored with a probationary period by the FBI, and her first post was to deliver the Roy methodology to a group of senior FBI agents and forensic experts at Quantico. The conference room was windowless and cold, and had one long table, which was shiny with the fluorescent lights. That table was an expression of puzzlement and doubt. They were aware of the news; they had heard about the Mallory case. Iris was able to sense the silent question in the air. Do we have faith in her this time?

She led them through the analysis and plotted linguistic characteristics of the manuscript. She illustrated the curves of the distribution of pronouns for Eamon Prime's lyrical voice, compared to the clinical, contractionless voice of The Syntax. She demonstrated the code in the punctuation, the lack of randomness of the pattern of the tense shifts, and the triangulation of the voice of Celia Munro's footnotes and her archived letters. She finished, and a man with a gray head sat back, said, “It's good, but it's a piece of writing.” How to sell this to a jury that desires DNA and fingerprints?

Language is like a fingerprint, Iris said. '’There is a footprint from each sentence. The key is knowing how to get it up.” She changed their attention to the syntax and took them on a tour of the journal entries, showing them the passages in the manuscript, and then explained that the distribution of function-words was exactly the same in each, with a statistical significance level of 99.7 percent, if not more, of a guarantee. The numbers were more at ease in the room than the poets. At the end of the session, she was invited to create a training package for the Behavioural Analysis Unit! A little step towards redemption, a door opened a c***k, which had been closed for years.

Outside, however, was a different story. The narrative was changing in the news. The S. writer Barrett Cole, who specializes in contrarian outrage, wrote a long-form piece titled “The Sentence Is a Prison: How a Flawed Linguist Manufactured a Monster.” The play portrayed Iris as a woman despairing over the loss of her sister, and the grief she was feeling as a fictionalization of the real loss of an author. It cited "sources close to the president" (probably former colleagues) saying she was "not mentally stable" and "was drinking again. The article was picked up by others and became a topic of public discussion – with Iris being praised by true-crime consumers as a hero, while literary purists branded her a "murderer of genius. She was invited to speak at her university, but was later rejected. All sorts of hate mail and letters from families of other missing persons who had come to count on her as their final chance came her way.

One day he came across her in his kitchen as she was observing a bottle of whisky that he had left untouched. He didn't say a word, and he poured it into the washbasin. “So I don’t need that,” said HE with a smile. It's important to keep in mind your motivations for doing this.

“Remember I said that I remember,” Iris said. I am always mindful of each day. But the world appears that I invented it all.

“This world didn't read the fine print; you did.

She held onto that. The footnotes, the corrections on the alder tree, the little acts of defiance that were in the margins. This was her lifeline. She retrieved Celia's letters, now scanned and archived, and her former reading of them. The more she read, the more she saw a familiar face, a woman who fought and fought and fought, and when she fought, she fought deadly. Celia had not been able to stop the Syntax, but she had left the map. It was just that Iris did it.

It was hot on the legal front, though. Gideon Thorne was lawyered up with a white-shoe firm, and the executor of the estate had an even more specialised firm that specialised in reputation management. Their approach would be that Iris was talking fictional letters, the double voice was a standard literary device, and that Iris's view was from a traumatised mind. They recruited Dr. Harold Fenwick, who was one of the foremost linguists. The ‘so-called Syntax voice' was nothing but Roy trying to sound hard-boiled, and any link with any crime was a coincidence, Fenwick's initial report claimed. The battle would be fought in the court of public opinion, which would eventually be a federal grand jury.

To prepare Iris to testify, she was flown to Washington by Aisha Coleman, the federal prosecutor in the case. Coleman was a small woman, in her fifties, who had never been known to cry, and who had a voice that could slice through glass. She proceeded to tear into Iris over many days in a conference room in the Department of Justice. “They're going to be talking about the Mallory case.” They'll ask whether or not you were drinking when you viewed the Roy manuscript. They will enquire about your psychiatric history. You've got to get the jury "warmed up. “Can you do that?

Iris gazed into his eyes. “For years I've struggled with it…I'm an open book, good or bad.”

Coleman nodded, I suppose because he was pleased. Let's hear you read it right, then, Juries.

The grand jury convened in closed session at the end of October. For two days Iris had testified, methodically laying out the linguistic evidence. She demonstrated the difference between the two voices with big display boards, one with the coded acrostic, the other with Celia's footnotes. She read from the Syntax's journal reading loud and clear even as she reached Ellie's last moments. Nationals were chosen to serve as jurors, and were heard with horror and fascination. The charges against Thorne for tampering with evidence and obstruction were added to the indictment, and that against the executor for conspiracy, and a muffled storm of whispers broke forth in the courtroom. The truth had been accepted by the legal system: in fact, Eamon Roy was a serial killer, and his final manuscript was a confession. A dead man couldn't be prosecuted.

Iris stood in front of a wall of cameras on the courthouse steps. Coleman had told her to keep quiet, but she couldn't help but feel the words building in her throat. With a quiver in her voice that she refused to control, she moved to the microphones. Thirty years ago, my sister Ellie was abducted. In a book, I discovered her voice. In addition to being weapons, words may also be keys. We turned a key today. I'm grateful. Then she left the flashbulbs and frenzy behind her, walking away with Leo at her side. The weight of shame began to lessen for the first time since the Mallory tragedy, creating space for what seemed to be the start of grace.