Maya Alexander was not charged in her husband’s death. We all testified that it was self-defense and that she had indeed saved us all. She is back in New York, Maya Hausman now, having gone back to her maiden name, something I’d have done in a flash, too, if I had found myself in her situation. She’s looking for a job, given her late husband’s assets are all frozen. It was not my powers of persuasion that convinced her to believe me and not her husband that fateful day. It was not even Willow lying in the mud unconscious. Instead, it was one of those moments when everything one has been trying to pretend doesn’t exist just cannot be ignored any longer. In Maya’s mind, her friend Bev and Robert were the perfect couple, and it is possible that Maya was always secretly in love with her best friend’s husband. Bev tried to confide in her, but Maya either could not, or would not, hear what Bev had to say. On that fateful day in the rain, suddenly everything Maya feared was exposed, the message was crystal clear. And, as Robert put it, she knew what she had to do. It was perhaps not what he had in mind. She says one of her real regrets, other than not realizing what was happening to her friend, and what kind of poor excuse for a human being Robert was, is that she will never feel able to go back to Orkney. The place, she says, has gotten under her skin.
I can understand that. Despite all that had happened in Orkney, I kept thinking of its rolling countryside, the soft touch of the air, the clouds coming down to kiss the green slopes, the shining water of St. Margaret’s Hope, where children play, and even the wild fury of the wind and the sea. Most of all I think of the kindness of strangers. Percy said he was looking for salvation there. I doubt salvation was his. He said I went to Orkney to seek vindication, and I think I can say with some justification that I found it. But more than that, I gained a profound sense of history as a continuous stream, as a living presence in our lives. I’m happy to have breathed the same air, felt the same rain, and watched the same sunsets as Percy, Sigurd, Thor, and yes, Bjarni the Wanderer. If there is treasure to be found in Orkney, I believe that is where it lies.