Here the earth was moist and soft, and when the boy joined her they found the digging easy and soon had carved out a small grave. As Maris gently put the dog’s body into it, the boy kneeled down and quickly plucked out two worms, then tried not to look at the dog as Maris gently covered her with dirt. He thought, Goodbye, Ellie, and started to cry.
Will was harder in every respect. The boy was still upset and Maris didn’t let him help, wrestling Will’s body onto the flatbed herself. He didn’t understand how she found the strength, but wouldn’t look until Will’s corpse lay flat on the wooden slats. They got onto the tractor and drove back around the pond, but this time Maris veered off down the path through the copse. She drove fast now, staring straight ahead of her, and he hung on for dear life until they emerged into afternoon sun with the Valley Orchard before them.
She cut the engine and sighed. She propped her elbows on the steering wheel and stared out at the vista of rows and rows of trees before them. For the first time the boy noticed the dirt streaked on both her arms, and how the back of her head was slick with sweat. She pointed out across the orchard. ‘Your uncle loved this place. It’s what drew him here to begin with. I figure if he wanted to be buried anywhere, it would be here. What do you think, Jacko?’
And he didn’t know how to answer, for all he could think of was how he had been dazzled by his first view from this very position, standing on the tractor behind Uncle Will, relieved to move out of the dark of the small one-acre wood, but stunned by what emerged before his eyes.
‘Jack?’ asked Maris, and he came to.
‘Yes,’ he said simply, like a grown-up.
It seemed they dug for hours, though truth be told Maris did the lion’s share of the work, and the boy mainly helped collect the dirt she emptied out onto the dry packed ground. He was aware that he was talking a lot. In the heat they sweated like pigs. After a while, Maris even took her shirt off and worked in her bra. He found himself looking at her entranced, in an embryonic pre-adolescent way he would not have even six months before, and she caught him at it, saying brusquely, ‘Keep your eyes to yourself.’ He pretended not to have heard her but didn’t glance her way after that.
Until, suddenly, she stopped, and stepping out of the hole she said, ‘It’s a shallow grave, but that’s just the way it’s got to be. I’m too tired to dig any more.’ She looked at the boy. ‘Will would understand.’
‘Sure he would, Maris.’
This time he helped her, holding tight onto the heels of the work boots Will had always worn. He kept his eyes focused on them intently; he hadn’t once looked at Will’s face, not once inspected the carnage of his chest wounds. The grave wasn’t long enough as it turned out, but he let Maris come to his end and bend the legs, and looked away as she began to shovel dirt over the body from the pile of it he had collected.
Finished, Maris smoothed the dirt along the top of the grave then stood and looked at her work. ‘Come here, Jack,’ and he went and stood next to her. ‘Your uncle wasn’t religious – your gram and he never saw eye to eye on that, especially after Vietnam. So I think it would be hypocritical – I mean phoney – if we said a prayer. But I want to say something, okay?’ And as they stood together and looked down at the grave, she started to speak. ‘I loved Will and he loved me. You loved him and he loved you. Goodbye, Will.’ She nudged Jack and he said, ‘Goodbye, Will,’ though by then he would have said anything Maris asked him to say.
They returned the tractor to the barn and went into the house. Inside Maris said, ‘Now you go upstairs and take the big army bag of Will’s from our bedroom. I want you to put some clothes in there. Think about what you need: socks, underwear, pants and shirts, got that? And your favourite books. Don’t forget your toothbrush.’
And when he came downstairs with the bag, he found Maris at the table in the big room, and she motioned him to sit down. She put a blue plate on the table in front of him, and he saw it was a ham sandwich. He looked up at her questioningly, for he definitely wasn’t hungry.
‘You’ve got to eat something,’ she said. ‘Try and get it down. We’ve got ourselves a drive.’
This alarmed him. ‘Where are we going?’
She looked at him calmly. ‘To your grandmother’s of course.’ He must have shown his panic at the idea, for she said, ‘You can’t stay here, Jacko. You can see that, honey.’
And he supposed he could, if Maris said so, though he realised he had taken comfort during the last two hours from the idea that if he had lost Will, somehow he and Maris could stay on the farm. He asked, ‘But what are you going to say?’
‘Say to whom?’ she asked back mildly.
‘About us,’ and then he realised one of ‘us’ was dead. ‘What are you going to tell people happened to me and Will.’
‘Oh that part’s simple. I’m going to say Will got fed up. Everybody thought what he was doing was crazy anyhow, you can’t make money in this part of Sonoma growing apples. I’ll say we split up and he moved north to try his luck somewhere else. This is my cousin’s land – it’s not as though Will owned it; I can sort out the rent he owed. As for you, I’ll tell people the truth. You went back to live with your grandmother.’
And he could not dispute the logic of this.
He felt they drove through the night, though of course they could not have, for the trip could not have been much more than two hours. At first, Maris turned on the radio, but she soon snapped it off. As they drove south along Route 101, Jack turned to look at her from time to time, and saw her in full profile: that long strong nose, and the stub chin, and ever so slightly prominent upper lip, pressed out by her two big front teeth. She had her hands in a severe old-fashioned ten and two o’clock grip on the wheel, and she stared straight ahead through the windscreen, as if to look anywhere else would somehow derail their journey.
Gram was up way past her bedtime waiting for them. She made a great show over Jack, which was unlike her, and showed him into the guest bedroom where again she’d cleared the boxes and made up the bed. At her insistence he had a bath, covering himself with a towel as she came in when he’d finished, then put on clean pyjamas which Maris must have packed, and got into the bed. When Gram came in to say goodnight he asked for Maris, quite insistently.
She came in and kneeled by the edge of the bed. Neither spoke for a long time.
‘We’ve had a long day, you and me,’ she said at last. ‘It’s time you got some sleep.’
‘What about you? Where are you going to sleep?’
‘Oh, I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry about me.’
‘Is Gram going to put you on the sofa?’
‘I imagine so,’ she said, and he thought for a moment she had something caught in her throat. Then she put her hand on his forehead and stroked his hair. He liked this, though it made it hard to keep his eyes closed, and when he opened them he found her staring at him.
‘What’s wrong, Maris?’ he asked, though even at that age he knew it was a stupid question. ‘What’s right?’ would be more like it, after what had happened to them both.
‘Your hair’s wet, Jacko. You can’t go to bed like that.’ She got up, and after a minute she returned with a hand towel which she worked between the back of his head and the pillow. ‘I’ll spare you tonight,’ she said and he smiled, since she usually ignored his howls and rubbed hard until his hair was dry.
‘Listen, Jacko,’ she said, stroking his forehead and hair again. ‘When you wake up in the morning, I won’t be here. There’s a lot to do back at the farm, and I’ve got to go do it.’
‘Let me come with you, Maris.’
‘No, you’ve got to stay here with Gram. Besides, you’ve got to go to school you know. You may be Einstein, but even Einstein finished the fifth grade.’
‘Why do I have to go to school down here? Why can’t I come live with you, Maris?’
She stopped stroking his head and for a moment he worried that he had angered her.
‘D
id you tell Gram, Maris? I mean about Will.’
‘She knows he’s dead.’ She hesitated a second. ‘She knows what happened. And she knows it’s a secret between you and me. Okay, Jacko? Just between you and me.’
‘So I shouldn’t talk to Gram about it?’
‘No. She knows enough, and she told me she doesn’t want to know anything more. Okay?’ She waited until he had nodded. ‘It’s a secret, remember? Between you and me. Everything will be fine if you don’t tell anyone. I promise. No matter what happens – to me or to Gram or to anyone, you will be just fine if you don’t break the secret.’
‘What’s going to happen to you?’ He felt agitated despite his fatigue.
‘Nothing’s going to happen to me.’
‘When will I see you again?’
She was stroking his hair slowly now, long slow strokes. ‘Oh, I don’t know yet. You just be patient. And if things get tricky for a little while, just try and remember what a good time we all had. Promise me you’ll remember that.’
He didn’t hear from Maris again.
At first he told himself she was busy, clearing out the house he guessed, and probably building a bonfire with the contents of the greenhouse’s secret room. Maybe, too, she was selling things off – like the tractor, or Uncle Will’s truck.
But when two weeks passed, this rationalisation failed to contain his concern. He wasn’t worried about Maris – no, now he was worried about himself, about the impact not hearing from her was having on him.
He said nothing to Gram, not sure what Maris would have told her, and Gram in any case did not encourage either questions or confidences. But he waited until Sunday when Gram had gone to church and Miss Lily, who was meant to look after him, was in the bathroom, and he dialled the farm’s number with great care. And to his astonishment it said the number was disconnected. I suppose she’s closed it all down, he told himself, and when Miss Lily turned on the TV to watch the gospel music he called information. And when he tried Maris’s own house in town the phone rang, and rang and rang.
He managed to try four more times in the next ten days, but no one answered. And only by saving quarters and using a pay phone – the one near the principal’s office in his school – was he able to call his old school. He panicked when Mrs McReady answered the phone in the school office, but he put a Kleenex against the speaking part of the instrument and though Mrs McReady sounded suspicious she didn’t say anything and answered his request to speak to Maris by saying that Miss Thompson – funny, he thought, he knew that was her last name but had hardly ever heard it said before – was away on sick leave, indefinitely. And he managed not even a thank you but hung up right away, and now he felt bereft and frightened in a new kind of mix. With his mother it had been bereft or, when she had hit him, fear, but never both at once. And he thought, trying to say it aloud to himself in as grown-up a way as possible, You’re on your own, Jack.
Which was not a disaster but not really a success – he didn’t like the school there, and he didn’t like living with his grandmother. She had rules and routines where his life heretofore had few or none: she limited his television watching, she cooked potatoes with every single meal except breakfast, and she grumbled not so privately that he was there. For she wasn’t really prepared to raise another child, least of all an energetic little boy.
She was strict with Jack and never particularly loving, and as time passed and his hope of going back to Sonoma and Maris became just that – hope rather than an expectation, and then in time a fantasy – he learned to swallow his resentment and just get on with his life. Which meant that despite pretty good grades and a surprisingly high set of Board scores, he was happy to forsake the local college prospects which were all he (well, Gram really) could afford, and instead enlisted in the army when he was only seventeen. Not to flee drugs or the ghetto or the cycle of deprivation half of his fellow recruits seemed to be escaping from, but to strike out on his own for the first time in almost seven years, and – he felt guilty about this but not immensely so – to get away from the trimmed-down version of life he’d had with Gram. To get away from the grim and daily truth that life in the Sunset wasn’t life in Sonoma, that the people he loved best were absent – one taken from him, one inexplicably and heartbreak-ingly gone away.
And did his heart ever heal? Anneal was perhaps the more appropriate word, for by the time Jack Renoir had grown up his heart had hardened over.
*
There had been an old apple tree in the Back Orchard, a Gravenstein which his uncle Will had been determined to save. Apparently, each year more of it had died and each year he had cut off more of the dead wood, until by the time Jack arrived on the scene there wasn’t much tree left – and Maris pointed out that Will was killing the tree in order to keep it alive.
And on each stump where once a bough had been, Uncle Will had painted over the gaping wound, with a black tar concoction that sealed the wound tighter than the tightest applied bandage, and kept out parasites and infection in the air and just about anything else which might hurt it on the inside.
And what Jack Renoir came to resemble was no less than this tree, cut down to size to stay healthy, and sealed off virtually hermetically from the external world. No one got in – not Gram, not his best friends, not all the girls he slept with, not Jenny the antiques dealer, the longest relationship of his adult life. And he was increasingly aware of this as he became first more man than boy, then a mature man, nearing forty.
But of course he had long before made the decision that he could live without emotional engagement if it meant there was no drama in his life – since for twenty-four hours on a mountainside in Sonoma County at the age of ten he had experienced enough drama, in his view at any rate, for an entire lifetime. And he supposed the price he paid was the absence in his life of anyone who mattered to him more than safety did; the absence, not to put too fine a point on it, of love. Because love involved a risk; love was not safe. Love was dangerous.
And though this was not the first time he had had these thoughts, they seemed particularly apt that morning, when, having driven out to the Palo Alto office, which despite the presence of Ticky and Prolog Alley’s inhabitants he didn’t really like, he found himself waiting around, growing increasingly irritated. He had been told by Eckerly, the personnel head, who was away on his golfing holiday, that he had to stand in for him that day with a VIP visitor, and Renoir wondered where in the hell was this person he was supposed to show around, and what was their name? He looked at the printout he had of the email from Peterson’s secretary and saw the name was Palmer. Katherine Palmer. Where is she? he thought, as he looked at his watch, which had stopped the day before but was now moving again.
The Dead Man’s Hat
FIVE DAYS.
At Kate’s end he didn’t know where to look. He had checked out the flat thoroughly, and there was no chance of getting on her machine again. Here at the Gatehouse, they had barely moved in; he couldn’t see what he would find that might suggest how Kate and Benedict were planning to operate. The answer to his questions had to lie with Benedict, and with any luck on Benedict’s PC. For that, Renoir at least knew the help he needed.
‘Tell me again why I can’t mention this to Kate.’ It was Ticky and he had reached her at home, in what was late afternoon California time. ‘I was just about to go out for a run,’ she said. ‘You’re lucky to catch me.’ He pictured her in the kitchen of her little house east and above Berkeley, standing in the kitchen while she spoke, looking out over the deck towards the peak of Tamalpais north of her. If you walked out into the steep street, you could see all of Berkeley and the Bay stretching below you.
‘I told you. She thinks I’m out of the business for good.’
‘So did I.’
There was no point arguing about it. ‘Ticky, you’ve got to trust me on this one. If Kate finds out, I can’t begin to tell you how bad it would be. I’d rather stop digging than take a chance on her finding out.’
>
Ticky ignored this. ‘Unless,’ she said, almost wistfully, ‘this is something Kate herself is involved in.’
He held his breath, unwilling to say anything. ‘Okay,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ve answered my question. Then I’d better keep helping you, don’t you think?’
‘Please,’ he said with relief. He moved into the problem before she could change her mind. ‘I’m not finding what I need.’
‘Maybe that’s because it isn’t there.’
‘I know, but I have to go on the assumption that there’s something on his PC that will help. I’m looking at his home machine after all; where he thinks he’s safe.’
‘All right, but it’s still impossible unless you narrow it down. You’ve got to give me some idea of what you’re looking for.’ She took a deep audible breath. ‘Come on, Renoir, your turn to trust me.’
He hesitated but he knew Ticky was right. ‘It’s a scam,’ he finally declared. ‘To do with shares.’
‘Our old friend Insider Trading?’
‘I’m almost certain.’
‘Do you know the shares he’s dealing in?’
‘Yep.’
‘Well that’s a start. Do you know how he’s doing it?’
‘No, and I need to, because that way I might be able to stop it. He must be doing the trade through somebody else, because he’s got a bit of a record in this field himself, and because it wouldn’t be that hard to trace this guy back to . . . the information he shouldn’t have.’ He groaned slightly. He’d now gone through all the documents and emails mentioning Kate – or sent to her, or received from her – but nothing there helped him figure out just how the dealing was done. He explained this to Ticky. ‘So my only hope is that there’s a name in there somewhere which will lead me to the trader. But I won’t recognise the name. It won’t mean anything to me.’
‘In context it might.’
Keeping Secrets Page 31