The Last True Sentence

Chapter Two: The House of Sentences

The driver didn't speak, and the car was black with tinted windows and a non-English-speaking driver. Iris drove through the Virginia suburbs and saw what had become a pastoral Maryland countryside, and then some woods of Pennsylvania, and thought of the few facts that she had regarding Eamon Roy's disappearance. In 1996, having published The Syntax of Silence, Roy read once at the 92nd Street Y, sat for questions from the audience, and then strolled out into the New York night, in answer to the crowd's questions giving out aphorisms. Since then he had not been seen anywhere. It had been rumored that he was living under another name in Paris, that he joined a secret monastic order, that he was not really mentally well and was institutionalized, that he was never a real person but was really a pen name of a group of literary linguists until now; it was all confirmed. As he had left, there had grown around him the mystique, a black hole which the galaxy of American letters circled.

Now he was dead. And somehow he knew her.

Iris attempted to make a timeline. In 1996, as an undergraduate at Penn, she had a fledgling fascination with linguistics, graduated with a novel in a book on her shelf, and Roy's novels too. That year, she had sent him a letter, an overwrought and awkward fan letter asking him about the narrative use of tense-shifting in his writing. No one had ever responded to her. Had that letter somehow imprinted itself on her? Had he kept it? If he had followed her career from his secret refuge, seeing her soar up the ranks of the FBI before a fall into disgrace, would he have bought a ticket to do just that? It was flattering and unsettling to think of him cataloging my dreams.

The Lincoln veered off Highway onto some gravel and then dirt road. Trees were overgrown, close in, apathetic. After a rutted two hours, they stepped out of the ruts into a clearing, and there stood a stone cottage, as if conjured from the pages of any Brontë novel, with ivy draping the house, an old slate roof and windows black with jaundice and staring from the trees. This was no corporate get-together or publishing think tank. This was an outpost for monks.

The driver pulled her open door and gave Iris a brass key on a wooden fob. This was his first and last word, “Everything's inside.” Then he jumped back into the Lincoln and resumed his journey, leaving her in the clearing with her one suitcase, with the feeling of being plunged out of the world.

Inside the cottage, there were a lot of discrepancies. The ground floor consisted of one huge room, with a modern fitted kitchen in one half, and a study with a giant oak desk, leather chair and wall of bookshelves in the other. It seemed a fire crackled in a stone hearth, but Iris didn't see anyone else arrive. A laptop and a printer were laid out on the desk, with one cardboard box, tightly taped with red tape, on it. A manila envelope, also with her name in elegant script, was on top of the box.

Iris took the envelope. Iris was the one who opened the envelope. Inside was a letter from the estate's lawyers stating the terms of her engagement and a confidentiality agreement that made a CIA agent break out in a sweat and a thick cream stationery note from the estate's personal note. The note read:

Dr. Vance—

In the box you will find the entirety of the text of “The Last True Sentence” (not only printed but also printed-out and stored as a digital file). The accompanying binder contains selected letters and journal entries from Eamon Roy, for comparison purposes. It is recommended that you start your analysis in Chapter 12. A representative of the estate will call you in three days to give you a preliminary report.

—G.T.

Gideon Thorne’s initials. So, he was the go-between, the manager. Iris observed the specificity that there is in chapter 12. Why that chapter? Let's begin at the beginning! It was a directive that could either be the harmless suggestion of a publishing professional (the best poll of the best sample) or one entirely to the contrary: a lure.

Using the food in the refrigerator, she made a cup of tea and sat down in a leather chair and opened the cardboard box. The book was as big as they said: six hundred pages, single-sided and in a black three-ring binder. The words, The Last True Sentence, were on the title page, as was an odd epigraph:

This sentence is a prison, The truth is the prisoner.”

Iris took a leap to Chapter 12. The story was her straightaway; that all-important syntactically complex, rhythmic, and dense style of writing that was definitely Roy's. Long sentences, of course, looping like rivers revisiting their origins; abrupt and brutal short sentences like glass shards; a slang and an archaic vocabulary blended together. It was like a fingerprint: each ridge line had a resemblance to one of Roy's published writings.

However, there lurked a slight wrongness in her, as she read. It wasn't in the style; it was in the substance. Chapter 12 recounted a story in which a man, the novel's leading male character who's been disgraced as a professor, follows a female through the streets of a fog-filled coastal town. The woman is young and dressed in a red scarf; she appears to be wearing it for warmth. Her prose was rich and even quasi-luxurious, but the descriptions were disturbingly literal: how the fog coated her scarf, how close the streetlights were to one another, what turns she took, where she felt her eyes drawn, how her shoulders stiffened, an unnoticed way. It was a predator's log; a poet's meticulous rendering of it.

Iris' hands got chilly. This sounded pretty close to what she'd read somewhere before, but not in a novel; rather, an FBI case file. In 1988, Lena Holt had disappeared from the University of Washington campus as a 23-year-old graduate student. Three weeks later, her body was discovered in a shallow grave on the Olympic Peninsula. The prime suspect was never even charged, as there was too much circumstantial evidence. The case was cold, but Iris had done some research on it in her training. She recalled witness accounts, the timeline, and she recalled one thing: The night of her disappearance, Lena Holt wore a red scarf. This particular detail was never revealed.

Her heart beat quickly as Iris shut the binder. Coincidence. It couldn't be a coincidence, though. It wasn't unusual for people to wear red scarves. The foggy towns were a cliché that abounded in thrillers. However, the order of the turns? The amount of street lights apart? That sounded like a story more like a true account of events.

She started to do the cross-reference, opening the comparison binder, Roy's letter, and journals. In the letters, primarily to his editor during the early ‘90s, is a mind that dwells upon the limits not only of reality but of narrative. Her stop was in one passage, which was written in 1992:

I have started work on a project that is going to prove this theory true or false, perhaps even false – the stories we make up are the confessions we cannot confess. I have begun a project that will show the world what I am.

What I am. Not who. It was deliberate and a categorisation and not the identification of the pronoun. It was a man's language, one who thought he was a phenomenon, not a person.

The next six hours Iris spent reading the manuscript, jumping ahead, highlighting, running stylistic analysis on the PC. Those linguistic patterns she had installed into the forensic software included use of pronouns, frequency of function words, type token ratios. All of these were fitting for Roy's known corpus – but one. In some instances, the number of first-person singular pronouns jumped suddenly, and at the same time the tense of the verbs changed from past to present. The violence and the surveillance described in these passages are so detailed and often more like a confession than fiction.

At 3 a.m. Iris discovered Chapter 27. It was a story of a woman named “Ellie,” a bartender in a small Oregon town, who was abducted – taken from her apartment, driven for hours in the dark, and left in a cellar with a single light bulb and a notebook. It was so focused and systematic, Iris could feel her stomach form a fist. This case she knew well. Ellie Vance. Her sister.

Her sister.

Iris stood back from her desk as she knocked over the cold tea. The shattering of the mug was too loud for the silent cottage. Ellie Vance had been a fugitive for a few years in Portland in 1993. Iris had just turned 17 years old. Never had the case been cracked, and never had their body been discovered. The wound that had seized her to study linguistics, the FBI, and even to hope that by studying language in enough depth, she could uncover the truth that had engulfed her sister whole.

But now the truth was here and in this manuscript, written by a man who was dead, who had left her in his will.

I thought about the pages; my eyes were hazy. It was more of a novel than a novel. A map of crimes, a serial killer's memoir in the guise of literature. Here was the ghost who had summoned her—a demon named Eamon Roy who either killed her, or was the one who could have known who her killer was. She was not one of the authenticators. Thirty years old was the expected age of a woman for whom she had written a confession.

A rat-tickled floorboard could be heard somewhere in the cottage. Iris turned, but couldn't see anything. The fire died down to a smolder. The forest smuggled itself against the windows as if it, too, was holding its breath. From a clarity that was like a blade, she knew she truly was on her own with the handwritten pages of a killer in a house picked out by strangers, no car and no telephone signal. The ideal spot to engage in reading. Where you can go to get lost.

She returned to the desk, retrieved her pen, and started to mark up Chapter 27, her deceptively precise and dispassionate way of writing.