The Last True Sentence

Chapter Three: The Grammar of Violence

As was the morning of our salvation, a gray morning that would hardly fall on its face. Iris had not slept. All night she had been breaking apart, sentence by sentence, charting the language's geography from the case file which resided in her mind, the case file of Ellie Vance, her sister. She didn't have paperwork or police reports – and never had the FBI handed those over to her. However, she didn't need them. She had memorized every minute detail the family was told, every bit of information she had gathered herself in a very peculiar investigative process; she knew details of the timeline, how it happened, the witness who had seen a man with “strange, deliberate speech” loitering near Ellie's apartment on the day she disappeared, the description of the parked car, and the description of the vehicle itself. Strange, deliberate speech. A linguistic tic. It was the ‘word’ the detective used and the one that had stuck in Iris's youthful mind and never left.

Then she read Roy's manuscript, and she discovered this sentence in it. The character ‘Ellie' wasn't only a victim, but was described with such intimacy that it upset Iris. The knack of freckles that were on the back of her shoulders, the habit of humming as she locked the door, and the book she kept on her night table, one of which had belonged to Ellie Vance and which had never been published—a pattern the narrator knew. These were all full sentences spoken by the predator in the story, and he had no contractions, using a sort of formal, precise language, like that of a detective in a report. I'm going to take you now. If you do what I say, you're not going to get hurt. Would you know what the conditions are?” No contractions. Deliberate syntax. Reading voice of a man who used to wield grammar.

Iris compared with the comparison materials. It occurred to her in his letters to his editor that when he was talking about everyday details of his business, he employed contractions. However, when he was writing in his personal writings in the late 1980s, especially about his journeys in the Pacific Northwest, the contractions disappeared. The prose turned stilted and formal, even ritualistic. The dates on the journal entries matched and were roughly in line with the happenings of the disappearances. Iris started to draw a chart, plotting linguistic elements to a sequence of unsolved cases. The correlation was close – it wasn't a coincidence.

At midday, she had found five places in the manuscript that matched actual unsolved crimes from around Washington and Oregon from 1987 to 1993. The signatures in hadroforensic terms were unmistakable, both hidden inside the novel's more epically crafted storyline, with various character names and settings. The author's idiolect, his individual language signature, seeped through the fiction and was uncontrollable. Language in the violent episodes indicated a disproportionate use of "self-referential" language, which is different from the language the writer would typically construct to imagine a scenario of violence. When she asked the linguistic analysis computer what it thought these were, it confirmed her suspicions: "These are not inventions. They were accounts.

She was at this very moment startled by a knock at the door of her cottage, at about 2 p.m. Iris jumped, and a pile of papers fell to the ground. The place was empty, and there wasn't anyone there who meant to be. She was on her way to the door carefully and hoping that she would have something to kill with. As she opened it, she found a woman in her sixties, dressed immaculately in a tweed blazer and scarf of silk—her silver hair was cut in a hard bob. She was carrying a leather briefcase and had a neutral, albeit polite and professional, expression.

The woman, who reached out a gloved hand, introduced herself as Margot Lyle, the estate's attorney. I was sent to you by ‘Gideon Thorne' to see how you are getting on. May I come in?”

Iris stepped back, her mind in frenzy. She didn't expect anyone for another two days. Suddenly appearing felt like pressure like-being brought into the agenda to make her work quickly. Margot Lyle rushed through the door, her eyes scanning through the manuscript bits, the desktop with the laptop, and the broken mug in pieces all over the floor.

“Yes, I have taken my time, Margot,” I replied, “I see you have.” Longevity is the quality that is appreciated in the estate.” Have you had any preliminary conclusions?”

Iris pondered her possible choices. If she did reveal what she had found, it would be a risk; she had no idea who it was that Margot Lyle was, nor what their motives were in covering up the truth. But to lie would be something she couldn't do. So she adopted what was known to her as the middle ground—the truth she could bear to take.

She kept the rhythmic pitch and vocal inflections flat: "the linguistic markers are consistent with Roy's known corpus. The deep structure is syntactic complexity, vocabulary richness, punctuation patterns, etc.—all align, but with anomalies: some places display a stylistic shift of which I am still in the process of analyzing what it might be; whether it is a natural development of his later style or some other factor, is a question that I need to give more time to before I can determine that.

Margot's smile was set even though her eyes were widened. “Something else? Such as?”

Iris said that she doesn’t want to “speculate” until she finishes the complete analysis. “It's scientific, you know,” he said.

“Of course.” Margot pulled her briefcase open and took out a thin folder. Here are some excerpts from Roy's psychiatric evaluations, over the course of a year before his death, which I think might help provide some context for his mind during the composition of the manuscript.

Iris took the folder with a whoosh of excitement and apprehension. Why wasn't this included in the first place? She opened it up. The psychiatric documentation read: a man with acute dissociative states, memory loss, and a psychiatrist's term coined by the evaluator: “narrative dysphoria” – a dissociation between reality and imagination. One thing lodged in my mind:

The patient tells me he did some things in his life that he doesn't remember, but that a different consciousness, the “dark twin,” wrote his story with his hands. I can't tell who it is or whether he's being delusional or whether there is a story that really did happen.

A dark twin. A separate consciousness. The manuscript seemed to have two linguistic signatures, two minds in dialogue, which coincided, and was a major discovery, as was Iris's. One was the lyrical & philosophical voice of Eamon Roy the literary genius. The other one was the cold, unyielding predator's voice. They were on the same page, often in the same paragraph, but in two colours of ink woven together in a single thread.

“This is… helpful,” Iris said, as she closed the folder. “Thank you.”

Margot rose to her feet, smoothing her skirt. “Well, I'll leave you to it,” she said, "the estate is looking forward to your conclusion; please remember time is of the essence. Her hand rested on the doorknob; she stopped. “One other thing,” said Mr. Thorne, “Mr. Alford stated that he would tell you that the contract of confidentiality also states that no content of the manuscript can be divulged to anyone, not even law enforcement. If it is, you will face dire legal penalties.”

It came in a threatening manner with a smirk on its face. Iris said, "Yes," but she made no movement of her jaw. Margot left, and once again that was the stillness of a nighttime.

Over the next few hours, Iris spent researching the psychiatric history and made correlations with the dual-voiced manuscript. She found a grammatical device she termed “tense-break,” in which the author of the passages would tense the verbs to show violence (as if present tense) when using the past tense. By contrast, in the lyrical passages the tense was always past, an indication of "reflective distance. The two modes were so different that Iris started separating each of the passages in the manuscript that contained the present tense, like beads on a string. These were read sequentially, building a clear statement, or step-by-step account of the actual k********g, captivity, and killing, delivered to a sense of “you” that evolved.

But that you”, Iris knew, as she drew a sharp breath of realization—was her. The speaker was talking to a Forensic Linguist. The last passage in present tense not likely to be noticed was in chapter 39:

There's a sentence that's like a prison. I've left the key for you alone.

The key. The grammatical key. Iris read the previous chapters of the book and looked for the mechanism of encoding. She was able to do so in the punctuation, a series of em-dashes, semicolons, and parentheses when plotted by letter frequency, which formed coordinates. Not geographical coordinates, linguistic coordinates! A reference is made to Roy's own published works, and the page numbers and line counts of The Syntax of Silence. She searched her bookshelf for her dog-eared copy that she had brought from home, and read the marked-up parts. This time, in a novel she had read a dozen times, she discovered a hidden acrostic, which was only revealed when the reader knew what to look for: a name, an address, and a single word.

Sanctuary.

The location of the last truth's grave.

Iris got up on her feet, shaking. The manuscript was not only a confession; it was also a puzzle-box, a trail of breadcrumbs that a man, in his fifty-ninth year of life, had laid on the ground for thirty years, hidden among the trees, among the birds. At the end of that trail was the answer to the question that had tainted her life: What became of Ellie Vance?

She had to go. There she had to discover this Sanctuary. However, the cottage didn't come with a car, a telephone, and the forest out was so dense it wouldn't even swallow a scream. The words that Margot Lyle had cautioned her to help herself with came back to her: somebody did not want her to complete this analysis. There had been someone who had been following her. It couldn't have lasted any longer, and it was the visit, the creak of the floorboard, the psychiatric history that put her on the right track; the whole thing was just too scripted. She was within someone else's story now, and the writer continued to write.

The pages of the manuscript, the psychiatric records, and her copy of The Syntax of Silence, in which Iris had made her own notes on the work, were all picked up by Iris. She put them in her bag. She didn't have any idea, just the demanding, uncalculating power of a woman who has been pursuing illusions for years and now has a form of it. She would read the story patiently to the end; if it was meant to kill her, she would read the story patiently to the end.