Velocity

obstinacy. If one could not read the future in the unique conditions of each dead thing, it might also be true that the dead have nothing to tell us and that a child waiting to hear the voice of a lost mother might never hear it no matter how well she listened or how silent and attentive she remained.
    And so she studied photos of possums broken along roadsides, of dead mantises, of birds fallen from the sky.
    She silently walked her house, noiselessly shelled pistachios, softly spoke to the raven or did not speak at all, and at times the quiet became a perfect hush.
    Such a hush had fallen over them now, but Billy broke it.
    Interested less in Ivy’s analysis than in her reaction, watching her more intently than ever the bird had done, Billy said, “Sometimes psychopathic killers keep souvenirs to remind them of their victims.”
    As though Billy’s comment had been no stranger than a reference to the heat, Ivy paused for a sip of tea, then returned to shelling.
    He suspected that nothing anyone said to Ivy ever elicited a reaction of surprise, as if she always knew what the words would be before they were spoken.
    “I heard about this case,” he continued, “where a serial killer cut off the face of a victim and kept it in a jar of formaldehyde.”
    Ivy scooped nut shells from the table and put them in the waste can beside her chair. She didn’t drop them, but placed them in the can in such a way that they did not rattle.
    By watching Ivy, Billy could not tell if she had previously heard of the face thief or if instead this was news to her.
    “If you came upon that faceless body, what would you read from it? Not about the future, but about him, the killer.”
    “Theater,” she said without hesitation.
    “I’m not sure what you mean.”
    “He likes theater.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “The drama of cutting off a face,” she said.
    “I don’t make that connection.”
    From the shallow dish she took a cherry.
    “The theater is deception,” she said. “No actor plays himself.”
    Billy could only say, “All right,” and wait.
    She said, “In every role, an actor wears a false identity.”
    She put the cherry in her mouth. A moment later, she spit the pit into the palm of her hand, and swallowed the fruit.
    Whether she meant to imply that the pit was the ultimate reality of the cherry, that was what he inferred.
    Again, Ivy met his eyes. “He didn’t want the face because it was a face. He wanted it because it was a mask.”
    Her eyes were more beautiful than readable, but he did not think that her insight chilled her as it did him. Maybe when you spent your life listening for the voices of the dead, you didn’t chill easily.
    He said, “Do you mean sometimes, when he’s alone and in the mood, he takes it out of the jar and wears it?”
    “Maybe he does. Or maybe he just wanted it because it reminded him of an important drama in his life, a favorite performance.” Performance.
    That word had been impressed upon him by Ralph Cottle. Ivy might have repeated it knowingly, or in all innocence. He could not tell.
    She continued to meet his eyes. “Do you think every face is a mask, Billy?”
    “Do you?”
    “My deaf grandmother, as gentle and kind as any saint, still had her secrets. They were innocent, even charming secrets. Her mask was almost as transparent as glass—but she still wore one.”
    He didn’t know what she was telling him, what she meant for him to infer from what she had said. He did not believe that asking her directly would result in a more straightforward answer.
    Not that she necessarily meant to deceive. Her conversation was frequently more allusive than straightforward, not by intention but because of her nature. Everything she said sounded as limpid as a bell note to the ear—yet was sometimes Semi opaque to interpretation.
    Often her silences seemed to say more than the words she spoke, as might make sense for a girl raised by the loving deaf.
    If he read her half well, Ivy was not deceiving him in any way. But then why had she just suggested that every face, her own included, was a mask?
    If Ivy visited Barbara only because Barbara had once been kind to her, and if she took photographs of dead things to Whispering Pines only because she took them everywhere, the photo of the mantis had no relationship to the trap in which Billy found himself, and she had no knowledge of the freak.
    In which case, he could get up, go, and do what urgently needed to be done.