The Dogs of Babel

Back Bay Books

Chapter One

I was in the university library when it happened, doing research fora paper I was working on for an upcoming symposium. I had an eveningseminar to teach that night, and if I hadn't called home to tellLexy something interesting I'd read about a movie she'd been wantingto see, then I might have taught my class, gone out for my weeklybeer with my graduate students, and spent a few last hours ofnormalcy, happily unaware that my yard was full of policemenkneeling in the dirt.

As it was, though, I dialed my home number and a man answered thephone. "Ransome residence," he said.

I paused for a moment, confused. I scanned my mental catalog of malevoices, friends and relatives who might possibly be at the house forone reason or another, but I couldn't match any of them to the voiceon the other end of the line. I was a bit thrown by the phrase"Ransome residence," as well; my last name is Iverson, and to hear astrange man refer to my house as if only Lexy lived there gave methe strange feeling that I'd somehow, in the course of a day, beenwritten out of my own life's script.

"May I speak to Lexy?" I said finally.

"May I ask who's calling?" the man said.

"This is her husband, Paul. Iverson."

"Mr. Iverson, this is Detective Anthony Stack. I'm going to need youto come home now. There's been an accident."

Apparently Lorelei was the one responsible for summoning the police.As our neighbors returned home from work, one by one, they heard herendless, keening howl coming from our yard. They knew Lorelei, mostof them, and were used to hearing her bark, barrel-chested and deep,when she chased birds and squirrels around the yard. But they'dnever heard her make a sound like this. Our neighbor to the left,Jim Perasso, was the first to peer over the top of our fence andmake the discovery. It was already dark out - the days were gettingshorter, and dusk was coming earlier and earlier each day - but asLorelei ran frantically between the apple tree and the back door ofthe house, her movements activated our backyard motion-sensorlights. With every circle Lorelei made, she'd pause to nudge Lexy'sbody with her nose, stopping long enough to allow the lights to goout; then, as she resumed her wild race to each corner of the yard,the lights would go on again. It was through this surreal,strobelike flickering that Jim saw Lexy lying beneath the tree andcalled 911.

When I arrived, there was police tape marking off the backyard gate,and the man I had spoken to on the phone met me as I walked acrossthe lawn. He introduced himself again and took me to sit in theliving room. I followed him dumbly, all my half-questions stalled bythe dread that seemed to have stopped the passage of air through mylungs. I guess I knew what was coming. Already, the house felt stilland bare, as if it had been emptied of all the living complexitythat had been there when I left. Even Lorelei was gone, having beensedated and taken away by animal control for the night.

Detective Stack told me what had happened as I sat there, numb.

"Do you have any idea what your wife might have been doing in thetree?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. She had never, in the time I had known her,shown any interest in climbing trees, and this one couldn't havebeen an easy one to start with. The apple tree in our yard isunusually tall, a monster compared to the dwarf varieties you see inorchards and autumn pick-your-own farms. We had neglected it, notpruning it even once in the time we'd lived there, and it had grownto an unruly height of twenty-five or thirty feet. I couldn't beginto guess what she might have been doing up there. Detective Stackwas watching me closely. "Maybe she wanted to pick some apples," Isaid weakly.

"Well, that seems to be the logical answer." He looked at me and atthe floor. "It seems pretty clear to us that your wife's death wasan accident, but in cases like this when there are no witnesses, weneed to do a brief investigation to rule out suicide. I have to ask- did your wife seem at all depressed lately? Did she ever mentionsuicide, even in a casual way?"

I shook my head.

"I didn't think so," he said. "I just had to ask."

When the men in the yard finished taking their pictures andcollecting their evidence, Detective Stack talked to them andreported back to me that everyone was satisfied. It had been anaccident, no question. Apparently there are two ways of falling, andeach one tells a story. A person who jumps from a great height, evenas high as seven or eight floors up, can control the way she falls;if she lands on her feet, she may sustain great injuries to her legsand spine, but she may survive. And if she does not survive, thenthe particular way her bones break, the way her ankles and kneeshatter from the stress of the impact, lets us know that her jumpwas intentional. But a person who reaches the top branches of anapple tree, twenty-five feet off the ground, and simply loses herfooting has no control over how she falls. She may tumble in the airand land on her stomach or her back or her head. She may land withher skin intact and still break every bone and crush every organinside her. This is how we decide what is an accident and what isnot. When they found Lexy, she was lying faceup, and her neck wasbroken. This is how we know that Lexy didn't jump.

Later, after the police had left and Lexy's body had been takenaway, I went out into the yard. Underneath the tree, there was ascattering of apples that had fallen to the ground. Had Lexy climbedthe tree to pick the last of the apples before they grew rotten onthe branches? Perhaps she was going to bake something; perhaps shewas going to put them in a pretty bowl and set them someplace sunnyfor us to snack on. I gathered them up carefully and brought theminside. I kept them on the kitchen table until the smell of theirsweet rot began to draw flies.

It wasn't until a few days after the funeral that I began to findcertain clues - well, I hesitate to use the word "clues," whichexcludes the possibility of sheer coincidence or overanalyzing on mypart. To say I found clues would suggest that someone had laid out acareful trail of bits of information with the aim of leading me to aconclusion so well hidden and yet so obvious that its accuracy couldnot be disputed. I don't expect I'll be that lucky. I'll say insteadthat I began to discover certain anomalies, certain incongruities,that suggested that the day of Lexy's death had not been a usualday.

The first of these anomalies had to do with our bookshelves. Lexyand I were both big readers, and our bookshelves, like anyone's, Iimagine, were halfheartedly organized according to a number ofdifferent systems. On some shelves, books were grouped by size, bigcoffee-table books all together on the bottommost shelf, andmass-market paperbacks crammed in where nothing else would fit.There were enclaves of books grouped by subject - our cookbooks wereall on the same shelf, for example - but this type of classificationwas too painstaking to carry very far. Finally, there were her booksand my books - books whose subject matter reflected our ownindividual interests, and books each of us had owned before we weremarried that just ended up in their own sections. Beyond that, itwas a hodge-podge. Even so, I came to have a sense of which booksbelonged where. A mental impression that I had seen the novel I hadloved when I was twenty sitting snugly between a book of poems we'dreceived as a wedding gift and a sci-fi thriller I had read on thebeach one summer. If you asked me where you might find a particulartextbook I coauthored, I could point you right to its place betweena Beatles biography and a book about how to brew your own beer. Thisis how I know that Lexy rearranged the books before she died.

The second anomaly has to do with Lorelei. As far as I can piecetogether, it seems that Lexy took a steak from the refrigerator, onewe'd been planning to barbecue that night on the grill, cooked it,and gave it to the dog. At first I thought she must have eaten itherself and merely given Lorelei the bone to chew on - I found thebone several days later, hidden in a corner of the bedroom - but thething is, there were no dirty plates or cutlery, only the frying pansitting on the stove where she left it. The dishwasher was locked,having been run that morning after breakfast, and when I opened itup, I could still recognize my own handiwork in the way the disheshad been negotiated into place. The dishwasher hadn't been touched,the dish rack next to the sink was empty, and the dish towelsweren't even moist. I have to conclude that one of two thingshappened: either Lexy surprised Lorelei with an unprecedented wealthof meat or she stood in our kitchen on the last day of her life andate an entire twenty-ounce steak with her fingers. As I think aboutit now, it occurs to me that there might be a third scenario, and itmight be the best one of all: perhaps the two of them shared it.

Maybe these events mean nothing. After all, I am a grieving man, andI am trying very hard to find some sense in my wife's death. But theevidence I have discovered is sufficiently strange to make me wonderwhat really happened that day, whether it was really a desire forapples that led my sweet wife to climb to the top of that tree.Lorelei is my witness, not just to Lexy's death itself but to allthe events leading up to it. She watched Lexy move through her daysand her nights. She was there for the unfolding of our marriage fromits first day to its last. Simply put, she knows things I don't. Ifeel I must do whatever I can to unlock that knowledge.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Dogs of Babelby Carolyn Parkhurst Copyright © 2003 by Carolyn Parkhurst. Excerpted by permission.
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