She put a hand on her left hip, kept her right on Louis’s waist, stretched her right leg out as though she expected us to admire it. Then she glanced at Clair’s chest, the lump under the jacket.
“Vietnam, right? I saw it on TV. Ken Burns.”
Clair nodded. “A long time ago.”
“Louis says you’re—what do they call it? The real deal?” she said. Turned to me. “And you’re a reporter.”
Wariness in her tone.
“Somebody has to take notes,” I said.
“Oh, Jack pulls his weight,” Louis said. He went to the refrigerator and took out another brown jug, opened it, and topped off our jars.
“We should sit,” Marta said, back in control.
We had the couch. Louis had his big chair. Marta sat on the arm of the chair, her arm still around his shoulders. He looked content, sated. Conjugal bliss, well-armed.
“Marta was here way back when. When it was just the little cabin down by the stream in all these woods,” Louis said.
“Eleven years ago,” I said. “A long time.”
We smiled and sipped. She leaned closer to Louis and took his hand in hers.
“All that time deployed,” Louis said. “I kinda lost my way, I guess.”
“Me, too,” Marta said. “The bright lights blinded me. But when we were together we were in love, or at least as in love as you can be at seventeen. But you know, I think that can be a lot.”
She squeezed his hand.
“Marta and I were at Pelfrey at the same time.”
“It’s a boarding school in Pennsylvania,” she said. “I was the new foreign student. My uncle in New York sent me there after my parents died.”
“Died where?” I said.
“Kiev,” she said. “Ukraine. Their car hit a bus.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She shrugged.
“I met Louis the first day at the school. He was the one who stuck up for me, everyone looking at me like I was nothing and nobody, some foreign freak. The only one had my back was Louis.”
Louis the Good Samaritan. That I could picture. Never met a rescue mission he didn’t like.
“To the girls there I was a target. They were awful. Made fun of my clothes, my shoes, my hair.”
“Didn’t like you because you were prettier than them,” Louis said.
“The guys were different,” she said. “I was their prey.”
I’m sure you were, I thought. Waited as Marta drank, lowered the jar.
“At my first party, I’d been there, like, three weeks. Everyone drinking, somebody’s parents’ house, the mom and dad away. All these Americans with their big smiles and shiny white teeth. What do I know? They decide they get me drunk and have some fun with me. I went to use the bathroom upstairs and I can still remember the feeling, being swept along, you know? Out of control, not knowing what was happening, two of them pushing me down the hall and through a door, and the rest were waiting.”
She glanced at Louis.
“But Louis was watching, had followed them upstairs. He bangs the door open as they’re pushing me onto the bed. He pulls them off, throws them across the room. It was so great.”
She grinned at the memory.
“One boy tries to punch him and Louis smashes his nose. Another one attacks him and Louis just hits him. Kapow.”
“Poochie Halloway,” Louis said. “Always hated that guy.”
All of this I could picture.
“There’s blood all over the place and they’re all yelling, but none of them dares to come close to us. After that they stayed away from me. Far away. They were all afraid of Louis.”
She looked at him.
“Weren’t they, babe.”
We looked at him and back at her.
“So you started dating,” Clair said.
“That whole year,” Marta said. “Together all the time. Then the year ended and this counselor at the school got me into Bryn Mawr. The poor orphan girl. We decided we’d break it off for a bit, not do the long-distance thing. We thought we were being very mature. Louis was supposed to do a gap year. But he just disappears, like off the earth.”
“Not totally off. Just Fallujah and Ramadi,” Louis said.
“His mom and dad, they practically had heart attacks. They had no idea he was going to join up.”
She looked to Louis.
“Remember your mother? Oh my God.”
He nodded.
“I was so worried, but I always supposed he was still alive,” Marta said. “I mean, I would have heard if he’d been killed or something, right? But still, maybe not. Maybe he’s missing in battle, whatever they call it. Then, after how many years?”
“Eleven,” Louis said.
“Where does Louis pop up?” she said.
She looked at us. We didn’t answer.
“Facebook.”
We looked at him. Louis? Facebook?
He shrugged. “Buddy wrote me a postcard. General Delivery, Sanctuary, Maine. Said the Three-Five had a Facebook page. Pictures of everybody back in Iraq.”
“Good to reconnect,” Clair said. “Those guys know you like nobody knows you. Or maybe ever will.”
He looked at Marta.
“Somebody from school shared his picture,” she said. “It was like, ‘Louis Longfellow is back from the dead!’ I cannot believe it. I message him, say, ‘WTF, Louis? Where are you?’ He said he was living in a cabin on the family land in Maine. I said, ‘Are you with somebody?’ I mean, I didn’t want to visit him and his wife and kids, right? He said, ‘Me and the dog.’ I was on my way. Didn’t even tell him.”
Make sure he’d still be there, I thought.
“Surprised you found it,” I said.
“Oh, I remembered. One school break we drove up and stayed in the little cabin and—”
She looked over at him and smiled, eyebrows twitching almost imperceptibly.
“Hung out,” Louis said. I felt like I should blush.
“And that’s what we’ve been doing,” Marta said, looking at me, then Clair, making sure we knew what she meant. “Hanging out.”
Clair looked at her and smiled, said, “I’m sure there’s a lot to talk about.”
There was a pause in the conversation while we all drank. The dog watched from the floor, his eyes flicking from person to person, coming to rest on Marta. When was she leaving?
“Sorry I didn’t show on Thursday,” Louis said. “Marta rolled in middle of the night. Then I couldn’t find my phone. When I did, it was dead. Didn’t see your texts until this morning.”
“No problem,” I said. “Good to get out of the house, go for a ride in the country.”
“What else is there around here?” Marta said. “There’s woods, and then there’s more woods.”
“After you’ve been here a while, it’s more complicated,” Clair said. “There’s woods—and then there’s different woods.”
Marta looked at him, smiled. “Right. Maple trees, pine trees, some other kind of trees?”
Clair let it roll off.
“So where have you been, Marta?” I said.
“Oh, you can Google me. Marta Kovac. New York, Florida, London. Last stop, the Caribbean. My partner, Nigel, he had a place on Virgin Gorda.”
I gave her a blank look. Nobody talks to reporters like somebody who feels the need to educate them.
“BVI?” Marta said. “It’s the third-largest island.”
Clair watched her, listened the way he does, taking it all in, not showing anything. The dog got up and circled the room, his claws clicking. Louis got up from his chair and went to the woodstove, put in two sticks. The dog followed him. Louis stood in front of the stove with his back to us and scratched Friend behind the ear.
“What happened? I said.
“If you don’t mind . . .”
Louis came back and sat. Marta looked at him, as if for encouragement. He nodded and she started in.
“Four men. An inflatable off a bigger boat offshore. Three of them came up from the path from the beach. Fourth one was a lookout. Somehow they disabled the alarms and surprised us in bed.”
We waited.
“Nigel fought with them, of course. He was very tough.”
“SAS,” Louis put in. “But three on one . . .”
“Tough odds,” Clair said. “But only if they’re professionals.”
For someone like Clair or Louis, amateurs weren’t a problem.
“What did they want?” I said.
“Passwords. Account information. They were Russians.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Nigel didn’t give up anything. He was trained for that sort of thing, they tell me.”
“Yes,” Clair said. “We all were.”
“So, what . . . ?” I said.
“When Nigel was fighting them, I ran. There’s a place in the wine cellar, a wall board that lifts off, with a space behind. It was a hiding place for jewelry, cash. I stayed in there.”
She swallowed, took a long breath.
“To try to get the numbers, they tortured him,” Louis said.
“Yes, left him tied to a chair in the bedroom. For hours.”
“He bled out,” Louis said.
“A couple of the accounts, they were emptied that night, like whoosh,” Marta said. “Later the police told me the money went to a bank in the Philippines and then just disappeared.”
“And they weren’t caught?”
“No.”
“How long ago?” I said.
“Three months and four days.”
A pause, out of respect. I could see why Louis would want to be hospitable.
“I’m very sorry,” I said.
Marta clasped her knees to her chest. We all watched the flames, Friend crouching close to Louis. Marta looked over at them and smiled like it was sweet, a man and his dog. Louis pulled on leather slippers that had been in front of the fire, picked up a canvas wood carrier, crossed the room, and went out through the side door to the woodshed. The dog followed.
Marta looked back at us.
“You’re probably wondering what we have in common, Louis and I, after all these years.”
A country song shot into my head. Willie Nelson. If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time.
“That year in school, we were both outsiders,” she said. “Louis, by choice. He was the quiet rebel type; his parents had, like, all this money, but he didn’t care. He thought it was all bullshit—Pelfrey, the social stuff. Me, I was always on the fringe. From a different place. No parents. My uncle having nothing to do with me except to pay the bills.”
“What did he do in the US?” I said.
“Parking lots,” she said. “Those ones with the person in the little building, takes your money. He had, like, forty of them. New York. DC. Philly. He had girlfriends, fancy cars. When I finished at Pelfrey, he was in some sort of trouble. I was on my own.”
“So, Bryn Mawr. What did you study?” Clair said.
“Art history.”
“You like art?” I said.
“It’s fine, but it was an investment. Art history majors come from money, generally. My girlfriends—and I made sure I had some—had brothers. I ran up a bunch of credit cards going to weddings.”
“And weddings led to—?”
“I met Nigel at this fancy wedding in London. The bride’s charming uncle. He was forty-one, I was twenty-three. Handsome in a British sort of way. I mean, think Daniel Craig, but better-looking.”
“With money,” I said.
“Some from his grandparents. His grandfather was Baron Toddington. An ancestor supposedly was at the signing of the Magna Carta. That gave them time to save up a pile of cash, I guess. Nigel added a bunch of his own.”
“No Mrs. Nigel?” I said.
“He was separated. The divorce was like negotiating a nuclear arms treaty.”
“But you weren’t married?”
“We were going to do it as soon as the divorce went through, and then he wasn’t sure. ‘Why do we need government to make our relationship real?’ and all that. Eight years in, still no ring. And then he goes and gets himself killed.”
I hesitated, then said, “And the estate?”
“Ah, the reporter,” Marta said. “No, a good question. The short answer is, his kids got everything. I guess he never changed the will. But hey, that’s okay. Because I can say it now. For Nigel I was just another possession. The plane, the boats, the houses, the cars, the much-younger girlfriend.”
In that order?
“And there were other things,” Marta said.
She paused, like she was deciding whether to confide in two guys she’s just held at gunpoint.
“Nigel was a domineering, abusive man. Psychologically, mostly, except for the hard squeezes. He’d get your upper arm and just crush it. At first it was okay, even if it was sort of paternal, him being older, it being his money, his world. So I thought it would get better, me being more equal. But more and more, I had no say over anything. If I didn’t have everything the way he liked, told the cook to make his shepherd’s pie, he shouted and pounded his fist. And then he left. Leaving me alone, that was his punishment for me. I was alone a lot. It was like they do with little kids who misbehave.”
“Timeout,” I said.
“Yes,” Marta said.
She drank, a quick nervous gulp, then took a breath like she was readying herself for something.
“I’m sorry about what happened to him, but in a way, I’m glad to be rid of him,” Marta said. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m saying this. Isn’t that awful?”
“No,” Clair said. “It’s not awful at all.”
There was a rattle at the side door, Louis coming back with a load of firewood. She got herself together in an instant, looked at him adoringly. He knelt to stack the wood, and she said, “Babe, I’ll get the door.”
Marta put her jar down, padded over in her socks, glancing back at us to make sure we got it, this new world order and her place in it.
Not the help. Not alone anymore.
3
k
We rattled out of the drive, tracing our tire tracks in the snow. After we swung onto the road and I got the truck up to speed, Clair let out a long sigh.
“I know,” I said.
“Pretty girl.”
“His first real romance. Maybe his only.”
“That sort of thing can stick,” Clair said. He and Mary had been together since they were high school sweethearts.
“She drove all the way to Maine to see him,” I said. “She’s been through all of this traumatic stuff with this robbery, this abusive guy. Kind of like Louis and the wars.”
“And she needs him,” Clair said. “Don’t underestimate that—not with Louis.”
We looked out the windshield, the pickup slicing through the billowing snow like a plane through clouds.
“Isn’t grieving much for old Nigel,” Clair said.
“If he was abusive, I can see why.”
“Sure. First rule for survivors like her: You move on, don’t look back.”
I nodded, and then we drove in silence all the way up to Route 105, took the left, and headed northwest, headlights flailing at the darkness. It was snowing harder, the flakes streaking in front of the truck like shooting stars. The snow was picking up and I slowed, then turned the dial to put the truck in four-wheel.
“How much money do you think Louis has?” I said.
Clair shrugged.
“Few months back, he told me he gave a couple of hundred thousand to the hospit
al in San Antonio for wounded vets,” Clair said. “The one he was in.”
“Not small change,” I said.
“Last week, he sent twenty thousand to a buddy from his unit. Saw on the Facebook there that the guy’s baby was sick, they had expenses. I get the feeling he does that kind of thing fairly regularly.”
“Generous.”
“I said that. He said, ‘Whatever. Just spending the interest.’ ”
“And the grandfather made wire?” I said.
“A lot of wire in the world.”
“Means a lot of money.”
“She didn’t come all the way up here to commune with nature.”
We pondered that as the truck plunged through the snow squalls, leaving a swirling white cloud in its wake. We were at the crossroads at Liberty when I said, “Home invasions—most of the time the victims are known to the crooks in some way. Drug dealers have a falling-out. Somebody hears there’s a stash of cash.”
“Russian gangsters,” Clair said.
“He’s been in London,” I said. “Swarming with them there, from what I understand.”
“And she’s Eastern European. Maybe she’s got connections. Wonder who this Ukrainian uncle was.”
We drove. The snow was sticking, the roadway turning into a white blanket.
“The longtime girlfriend gets wind she’s left out of the will,” I said.
“Probably knows vaguely where the money is parked, and how much,” Clair said.
“Maybe she tips off somebody connected with criminal elements, as they say. Maybe the uncle.”
“Have to be somebody tough, if he was SAS. Unless they were just gonna shoot him. But that doesn’t get them anywhere.”
“Had to move fast from the second they got in the door.”
“Which maybe was left unlocked.”
“The alarm system turned off.”
We watched as dim taillights appeared in the swirling whiteness ahead of us, then the vague shape of a semi. I backed off.
“Listen to us,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Much,” Clair said.
4
k
I dropped Clair in his dooryard and drove on to my house, past the next stretch of woods. The lights were on in Sophie’s bedroom, my girl waiting up.
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