by Susan Conant
“Axelrod was a jackass,” my father said. “Did anything to feel important. Built himself up. He probably told Fairley you were from the New York Times. Axelrod sucked up to celebrities, not that he knew any, but according to him, he did. He’d drive by Stephen King’s house in Bangor, and the next thing you knew, he’d tell you they were best friends. Easier than admitting he didn’t have any, best or otherwise. Axelrod, of course, not Stephen King.”
“So, you knew Norman Axelrod?”
“Christ, everyone in the state of Maine knew him, or knew who he was. And bolted at the sight of him.”
“Except Gabrielle.”
Buck flushed. “Gabrielle is an exceptional person,” he said glowingly. Then the flush turned from warmth to anger. “What else do you know about Fairley?” he demanded.
“Everyone sings his praises. Everyone. Gabrielle. Quint and Effie. And they’re real purists. Last night, Effie didn’t like it one bit that people were breaking the rules of the Beamon Reservation. And for all that Quint has this job as caretaker because he’s Gabrielle’s nephew, he still knows a lot about environmental issues, nature, all that kind of thing. Effie thinks that Malcolm shouldn’t have anything to do with Opal and Wally, because they’re developers, but Quint obviously admires Malcolm. And the guests at the clambake were grateful that they’d made so much money from the Pine Tree Foundation. No one said it quite like that, but if you want to be blunt about it, the clambake was really a thank-you party for Malcolm Fairley for making everyone lots of money.”
“Nothing else fishy about him?”
“About Malcolm Fairley? No. Except what I overheard on Dorr. But I was barely conscious. And this business about knowing him. But that was me. Because of Ann’s letter. I might have missed something about him, though. I wasn’t myself. I’m still not.”
Buck caught my eye.
“Yet,” I said dutifully. “And besides doing all this financial wizardry, he does hands-on work. He’s organized a volunteer crew to restore the Homans Path, which is this old, abandoned—”
“I know what the Homans Path is.”
“Well, Malcolm Fairley has Wally and Opal, and, today, his daughter, Anita, and Steve Delaney working on the trail. Some other people, too, I think. When Malcolm Fairley talks about preserving Acadia, M.D.I., you can tell from his voice that he’s absolutely genuine. About the rain forests, too. He has some involvement with Guatemala. Anita Fairley is a whole other story. She’s the Pine Tree Foundation’s attorney, but she doesn’t necessarily do the work pro bono. Or maybe she does. For all I know, she does it out of dedication or maybe loyalty to her father. And she must be an investor, and in that case, she’s making plenty. So her motives could be strictly economic. If she has some commitment to conservation, it’s strictly to conservation at a distance. Her father apparently put the pressure on her to spend a day working on the trail, and she was anything but happy about it. She isn’t the outdoor type. But you can tell to look at Malcolm Fairley that he’s in great shape, and he spends a lot of time in the park.”
With no warning, Buck gave an abrupt, military-style salute and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
His smile was sly. “Off to keep Maine green.”
Chapter Twenty-three
“YOUR FATHER,” Gabrielle began, “is really extremely angry.”
Despite the peculiarity of my mental circumstances, I was already starting to get sick of hearing about my father. Did people imagine that Buck’s behavior was under my control? I was happy to notice, however, that the sensation of being tackled about Buck was vividly familiar.
“He came charging in,” she continued, “asking all sorts of questions about Malcolm.” An essential component of Gabrielle’s beauty, I decided, was her obliviousness to it. Objectively speaking, she was too plump to wear jeans, and the plaid flannel lining visible where she’d turned up the cuffs added to her natural bulk. Although the day was still dry and sunny, she had on ugly, muddy rubber duck boots and a frayed yellow oilskin jacket that had probably cost a fortune forty years ago. If she wore makeup, it didn’t show. The flaws in her skin did. Her silver-blond hair was wild. She must have noticed that I was staring at her. “I’ve been digging clams,” she explained.
My father, I somehow knew, would admire a woman who digs her own clams. Molly the bichon had evidently not gone clamming. Her curly white coat was unmuddied. As usual, she was fastened almost umbilically to Gabrielle’s middle. With what I immediately recognized as a flash of memory, I felt surprised that Buck hadn’t yet severed the cord that kept Molly off the ground. Distant memories came to me of his lectures about small dogs as real dogs, creatures who should damned well stand on their own four paws.
“What did he want to know about Malcolm Fairley?” I shooed Rowdy and Kimi away from Molly. They’d moved from sniffing her paws to rising up in what might become obnoxiously rough efforts to dislodge her from Gabrielle’s arms.
“Where the quote s.o.b. Unquote lives, where he is right now, and how quote he got his clutches into me unquote.” Speaking more to Molly than to me, Gabrielle added, “Clutches! Not that I haven’t noticed a gleam in Malcolm’s eye, but there’s none in mine. There’s something too nice about him. I can’t imagine where your father got the idea that the attraction was reciprocated. And I told Buck that. You didn’t say anything to him to suggest…?”
I shook my head. “Not a word. Not that I can remember. We mentioned the Pine Tree Foundation. I talked about the clambake. I did say it was in honor of Malcolm, but…”
“Well, it was, of course,” Gabrielle said, “but it isn’t as though I’d given a party for Malcolm. The investors did. I do have reason to be especially grateful, because thanks to Malcolm, I was one of the original investors, and I’ve taken advantage of the opportunity to reinvest.”
“Does Buck know that?” I asked. Whoops! “Not that he cares…” What’s a gracious way to tell your father’s inamorata that he would never marry for money?
Gabrielle spotted my dilemma. “Of course not,” she assured me. “Buck isn’t the gigolo type.”
I smiled in relief. “Anything but.”
“Yes. He does have a competitive streak, though. Maybe there’s a little rivalry going on there because of what Malcolm and the foundation have been able to do for me. For many others, too, of course. That’s why we wanted to celebrate. It isn’t as if I, personally, had given a party for Malcolm,” she said again. “Still, the fact is”—Gabrielle’s husky voice dropped—“that the celebration was for Malcolm and not for him. Men get their feelings hurt about things like that, you know. Well, enough! What’s happened now is that Buck has gone charging off like a…” Gabrielle left a sort of fill-in-the-blank gap.
“Moose,” I supplied.
“In mating season,” she finished, flushing a little at the indelicacy. A second later, however, she burst into beautiful laughter.
I didn’t join in. The idea of an enraged bull moose in rut struck me as very dangerous and not in the least bit funny. “Gabrielle, does Buck know where Malcolm Fairley is? I told Buck about the work on the Homans Path, but I’ m… I think I told Buck that I’d seen Malcolm there today. But I just can’t remember.”
“Of course he knows,” Gabrielle said blithely.
“How?”
“He asked me. I told him. This is the crew’s regular day on the Homans Path. Where else would Malcolm be?”
“You told Buck that? When he looked like a bull moose in mating season?”
“That was just a figure of speech,” Gabrielle replied. “And a coarse one at that. Forget I said it. But after I told Buck, when I realized how angry he was, I had second thoughts. So I thought I’d better stop in here and pick you up instead of just going there myself. Buck needs to be mollified a little, that’s all, Holly. He’s misunderstood something, and once we find out what he’s misunderstood, we’ll get it straightened out. With both of us there to talk to him, I’m sure he’ll l
isten to reason.”
If I’d been in my right mind, I’d probably have mouthed a cliché: There’s always a first time for everything, isn’t there? What frightened me, however, was not a conviction about what my father would or wouldn’t do; on the contrary, it was a deep, sure sense of Buck’s utter unpredictability. My most powerful feeling astonished me: I felt frantically compelled to protect my father from himself.
“Let’s go,” I told Gabrielle. Then I told Rowdy and Kimi the same thing in the same tone of voice. Gabrielle didn’t seem to mind. Maybe she and my father really did have a future together.
The five of us—two people, three dogs—piled into Gabrielle’s white Volvo. Molly, as usual, was glued to Gabrielle’s tummy. Rowdy and Kimi were loose in the back. Twisting around to remind them to stay there, I missed seeing the approach of another vehicle until Gabrielle had pulled to the side of the dirt road and yoo-hooed through the open window to Quint and Effie, who’d been heading toward her house. Effie was at the wheel of an adorable green pickup so small and so cute that it looked like a magnified toy truck.
“Were you coming to see me?” Gabrielle asked. Without waiting for a reply, she went on to report excitedly that her hero was off to fight a misguided duel in her honor and that she and I were rushing off to intercept him. “We can’t talk now!”
Her eyes gleaming, Effie said, “There! I told you so, Quint! We saw Buck Winter tearing out of here, and I told Quint, but he didn’t want to believe me. Someone”—Effie glared at me—“must have told him about how Wally and Opal are trying to get their hands on that land of Norman Axelrod’s that abuts the reservation! Is he really going to shoot a developer?” Her face and voice exuded horrified delight.
“Effie, don’t be foolish!” Gabrielle replied. “We’ll discuss it later.” With a little wave of her hand, she drove off.
“Shoot a developer!” I exclaimed. “Honestly!”
“Well,” remarked Gabrielle, without taking her eyes off the narrow road, “he does have a gun. But Effie couldn’t possibly know that, could she? She’s just worked herself into a fit of excitement about that bumper sticker. Effie takes everything to heart, you know.”
“He has a rifle in his van.”
“Oh, not that one,” Gabrielle said brightly. “It’s some kind of little gun.”
“A handgun?”
“It’s in a holster.” Gabrielle said it reassuringly, as if the holster somehow rendered the sidearm inoperable.
“What for?”
“Buck always carries a gun in the woods. The first time we went for a walk together, I asked him about it, and he said you never know what you’re going to run into. I assumed he was thinking of snakes.”
“There are no poisonous snakes in Maine,” I pointed out. “Certainly not this far north, anyway. And in Acadia? What is there to shoot in Acadia National Park?”
“Tourists!” Gabrielle joked.
Her lightheartedness was grating on my nerves. I wished I could think of some way to impress the seriousness of the situation on her. “Carrying a handgun in a national park? I’m sure it’s illegal. I hope he doesn’t get arrested.”
“Anita will get him out if he does. Besides, his jacket covers it. At worst, he’ll just pull it out and show it to Malcolm,” Gabrielle insisted. “But I don’t think he’ll even do that. What I’m afraid of is that they’ll end up in a fistfight and that one of them will get hurt. Your father is really very angry, you know.”
“I believe you,” I said, still with no precise idea of what Buck was so angry about. By now, we were speeding along Route 3 past The Tarn, almost at the turn for the Sieur de Monts Spring area. Glancing back to check on Rowdy and Kimi, I caught sight of the cute little pickup, which was no distance behind us. “Oh, damn it!”
Gabrielle flicked her eyes to the rearview mirror. “You didn’t know?”
“No, I didn’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. I suppose Effie just couldn’t stand to miss seeing Buck take potshots at a developer.”
As Gabrielle cruised around looking for an empty space in the big parking lot by the spring, the Nature Center, and the Wild Gardens of Acadia, I noticed Buck’s van, bumper sticker and all. Steve Delaney’s van, its window lowered to provide air for his dogs, was still parked where I’d seen it earlier.
“Oh,” Gabrielle said cheerfully, “Opal and Wally are here! That’s their Land Rover!”
You’d have thought we were arriving at a cocktail party. With no hint of frivolousness, however, Gabrielle hopped out of the Volvo and set off toward the abandoned Homans Path. Even on the flat terrain, I had a hard time keeping up. My injuries were beginning to reassert themselves; my shoulder hurt, and my head was swimming. At the ends of their leashes, Rowdy and Kimi trotted behind Gabrielle on the sidewalk by the Wild Gardens and then along a broad dirt road. I let the dogs drag me.
“We turn left somewhere around here,” Gabrielle said. “There it is! And now we have to keep our eyes open. To your right, up there on the hill, you’ll see where the Park Service cut down a lot of trees. That’s what they do when they officially abandon a trail. You should hear Malcolm on that subject! And it really is outrageous. They just chop down tons of trees at the top and bottom, and that’s that. No more trail. You have to look carefully for a little track leading to it. The trail phantoms keep it open. Unauthorized people, you know, who sneak around keeping abandoned trails open. I’ve wondered whether Zeke might be one of them.”
“Who?”
“This nice young man who suddenly turned up here and volunteered for Malcolm’s trail crew. There’s some-thing…I don’t know how to put it. Something unsaid about him, if you know what I mean. Malcolm doesn’t think so, but he—Zeke, not Malcolm—was fishing for an invitation to the clambake, and it made me wonder. Here’s the trail!”
For once, Molly belonged in Gabrielle’s arms. The narrow track soon gave way to an area of felled trees that we had to scramble over. The logs were the remains of tall trees. Dozens and dozens had been cut and left to rot. It seemed almost impossible that the Park Service had been guilty of such savagery against the natural resources it was supposed to protect. When I said as much to Gabrielle, she made the obvious reply: Malcolm Fairley felt the same way. That was the whole idea of the reclamation project.
“Wait till you see the actual path!” She scrambled over a big log with surprising agility. “The excuse for abandoning it was there was no money for maintenance, but it’s held up remarkably well with almost no upkeep.”
From behind us, Effie’s voice sounded. “Gabbi! Gabbi! Wait up!”
“Oh, no! I thought we’d lost them,” Gabrielle grumbled. “We do not need Effie complicating this situation. I suppose we’d better wait. They’ll catch up with us in no time, anyway.”
Quint and Effie reached us in less than a minute. They glowed with pink-cheeked youth. Neither was out of breath. I expected Gabrielle to greet them with a request that they turn around and go away. It was, however, as contrary to Gabrielle’s nature to make anyone ever feel unwelcome as it was to Rowdy’s or Kimi’s. Both dogs issued their usual woo-woo-woos, and Gabrielle hailed her nephew and his wife with an ordinary “Hi there, you two!” and then informed them that they were to let her go first. “And Effie, it would probably be best if you were to leave the talking to me. And to Holly. We just need to straighten out a little misunderstanding. A certain bumper sticker would be outside the scope of the discussion.”
It took us what seemed to me like forever to navigate the big logs and reach the beginning of the Homans Path itself, another stepped trail similar to Kurt Diederich’s Climb and in almost equally good condition. By now, I was feeling too sore and weak to take in the clever beauty of the steeply rising stone stairs. Quint and Effie charged ahead of me, thus inspiring Rowdy and Kimi to forge up the damned steps far too fast for me. I hung on to their leashes and concentrated on keeping my footing. Last in line, I was also the last to hear the shouting that bounced downward over the rocky sta
irs.
My father’s unmistakable bellow reached me. Delighted to hear his voice, the dogs put on speed. I scrambled and gasped until the dogs came to such an abrupt halt that I crashed into them. No one noticed. At a wide, flat landing where the stepped trail paused before resuming its upward course, Buck and Malcolm Fairley faced each other. They stood about a yard apart. In back of them, near a pile of newly cut brush and small tree limbs, Wally and Opal, Steve Delaney, and a cranky-looking Anita Fairley silently observed the confrontation. Amazingly, Buck didn’t even seem to see Rowdy and Kimi, never mind Gabrielle or me. He and Malcolm Fairley stared at each other with locked eyes. In dogs, that’s the signal of an imminent fight.
My father had stopped roaring. Now, his voice was frigidly calm. “If something sounds too good to be true,” he said to my amazement, “then it probably is.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
As if he’d read my thought, he broke eye contact with Malcolm Fairley and turned to me. “You never could draw,” he reminded me. “That picture you showed me? That’s not a kite. It’s a pyramid. That’s what you meant it to be.”
I was still lost.
“A pyramid!” he suddenly roared. “A pyramid scheme!”
Chapter Twenty-four
AS WAS HER HABIT, Effie spoke up. “I had a friend who got caught in one of those. It had to do with food supplements. There was some disgusting yellow powder you were supposed to mix with water and drink for breakfast, and cookies that tasted like gravel. Anyway, somebody recruited her to be a distributor for all this stuff, and supposedly, her main job was to recruit other distributors. That was how she was supposed to make money, getting commissions from the people she recruited. Only, to get started, she had to buy this humongous inventory, which she was stupid enough to do, and then she couldn’t talk anybody into distributing it for her, and she was stuck with the whole mess.”
“Effie,” Gabrielle said, “does this have anything to do with anything?”