The Last True Sentence

Chapter Five: The Last True Sentence

The Syntax' journal, which lasted for more than two hundred pages, was a thorough account of terror. These entries all referred to a victim—her name, her physical appearance, her normal day-to-day activities, the time of a*******n, the whereabouts of her body. The language had no feeling, a manual for killing, but it was precise; it was an obscenity. The sister in her screams as Iris read it in detached shock, a forensic linguist cataloging the patterns.

Ellie Vance was the entry for #17.

She tried to read it, but Iris pushed herself to do it. I would tell three days after Ellie about the Syntax, what she does during the day, her coffee order, what she walks home from the library. The a*******n is described in the present tense, like the others, with a deadpan style: “She struggles, I explain the situation, she does not listen, I have to look into the strategy.” It concluded with a set of coordinates and a description of the site, a forested location near the Columbia River Gorge, with a distinctive rock formation and an alder tree. The alder tree. The woman who was about to read a footnote was correcting him regarding the alder tree. That was it, and that one little thing on the edge of defying it opened Iris up. She cried silently, shaking with the loss, as Leo stood watch at the window, and looked out at the dark road.

When she cried, her tears were gone, and a straightener came over her as the coldness of night. Coming all the way down here, she didn't want to come undone now! She took a picture of every page in the Syntax's logbook, every Polaroid, every piece of information. Leo called a contact, someone that he trusted, at the FBI's Seattle field office on his phone, and he started the delicate process of alerting the authorities without really getting the authorities involved in the estate's interference. As they were busy working, however, Iris was aware that there was one final puzzle piece missing the female footnote-voice. Who was she? Why did she know the details which the Syntax got wrong?

The woman went back to the manuscript: the annotations and areas where information had been erased. She performed a linguistic analysis of the female voice, and noted that the stylistic techniques she found in it were different from the two others. This person's voice was educated with good knowledge of grammar, but his usage was marked by self-correction and hedging that indicated someone under duress; someone who feared being caught. It also had regional (Pacific Northwest) affectations not found in Roy's own East Coast ones. It was not a Roy invention! This was not fiction; it used to be a true human being, a collaborator who had witnessed this horror and created a trail.

She looked around the cabin for any more clues. There was a pile of letters in one of the drawers, through the twine of which she could see an envelope whose address was to a woman named Celia Munro. Eamon Roy's return address was New York's apartment. The dates were from 1990 to 1993, when the disappearances took place. Iris began to understand them an increasing amount. Roy's lover, a poet whom he had met at a writers' conference, was Celia Munro. His letters were lyrical and repentant, out of guilt confessing his fear that a “darkness” in him was gaining in strength. The voice for footnote was used in Celia's answers, which have been carbon copied. She knew his early drafts; she knew how his version differed from the version the news had come out with, and she knew it without him talking to her. She had stuck to him in the margins, out of the knowing that anyone would ever read her words. In one of her letters, which were written weeks after Ellie's disappearance, she wrote:

I know you said that you left her by the oak, but I hear they are looking in the alder field. What's going on here? Which is the story? I don't know what to tell you anymore, and I'm terrified of what you're turning into, but if I ever go I'm sure you'll show these letters to someone who'll STOP you.”

Celia Munro was missing since 1994. She was never found dead. She was the last person of the Syntax, the know-it-all, the one who had attempted to enlighten others with the monster's words.

It wasn't for lack of heat inside the cabin that Iris got chilly. Not only was it a confession, but a memorial. The female voice in the footnotes was Celia, who, like a ghost in the machine, was still making an appearance in efforts to put the record straight.

Just before dawn on the water, the FBI also came in stream; agents' contact had called in the local cops. They took the cabin, gathered up the evidence, and listened to Iris's initial briefing in a state of disbelief and fear. His tale was too much of a literary and too bizarre to be readily accepted. But persuasive artifacts were the Polaroids and the Syntax' journal. In a few hours they found their first burial site using the information from Entry 17. Ellie Vance's search for her remains had started.

That same morning, elegant offices in New York were raided, and two detainees, Gideon Thorne and Margot Lyle, were interrogated. They said that they were unaware of the kind of manuscript it was and its content except for its literary worth, but their involvement would be found out through investigation. Iris did not think they were actively conspiring; she just felt they were being unscrupulous and showed a reckless blindness, but that was something that the law would address. Her role was not to give indictments; it was to provide a witness.

Sitting on the rocky shore of Orcas Island, gazing out at the Pacific and watching the sun go down, Iris read the last page of the manuscript, Chapter 40, the final chapter that she had yet to read. Deliberately, she saved it, knowing it was the ending sentence of the novel, the “last true sentence.” Her hands were still; she opened it now.

Chapter 40 couldn't be a conclusion because it wasn't a narrative. It was a letter which was addressed directly to her and spoken in the voice of Eamon Prime, the man who had constructed the cage. It read: Iris, it is my story that has come to an end, and that of yours has just started. You shouldn't have given me your sister. I was not worthy of Celia. I only deserve silence, which I await. But first, before I depart, I will give you the one thing that I have left to give: The truth in the shortest form. There is the sentence and the sentence is the truth. Here is the key.”

Then, there's this last real sentence. The line was just one, unadorned with fancy lettering, embellishment, or anything else:

I, Eamon Roy, who still have this and my other pieces of myself, admit I'm the one who committed these crimes, and the one who made this one possible, and I leave it up to the sister of the first life I took Ellie, was not my first, but she was the one that made me want to be caught.

"Iris let the page drop down into the sand. It wasn't an admission of innocence; it was an admission of responsibility. Not in his last breath did Roy blame The Syntax as a whole. It was his lot to have claimed all this. The lyricist was the monster, and there was one sole means of redemption, that truth.

She pondered on the years of work on linguistic ghosts, the career she had lost, the sister she had lost without a body. Narrated from the margins, Celia was a footnote that she thought about. And she thought about the sentence itself: carefully ordered, a series of words could hold the darkest of human darkness, yet sometimes, in some way, it was release.

The story was over. The real ones, the sentences, however, would endure forever.