by Susan Conant
“Oh, yes.” Gabrielle nodded. “Naturally, all the investors wanted to share the opportunity with their friends and relatives, too.”
“Norman Axelrod must’ve just eaten this up,” Buck commented.
“On the contrary,” Effie said. “He couldn’t have been more hostile. We’ve already said that.”
With an evil grin on his face, my father clarified his meaning. “Axelrod must’ve eaten up the prospect of blowing the whistle on this whole scheme. Profit motive masquerading as charity? Keep Maine green! The color of money. And the Rockefellers. Let’s not forget them. And Fairley, don’t give me this anonymity crap. Axelrod must’ve been drooling over that one, especially if Wally here is right. Axelrod would’ve loved blowing the whistle on a con that took in the Rockefellers.” Buck paused. “So, why didn’t he? What stopped him? Why didn’t he go ahead and blow the whistle?”
“He died,” I said.
“Good girl!”
Kimi wagged her tail.
“Axelrod hates trees,” Buck resumed. “He’s in lousy shape. He goes for a hike. On a slippery day, he hikes with the head of a foundation he’s going to expose as a Ponzi scheme. Why? And Fairley, no one’s asking you.”
“To discuss things,” Quint suggested. “Take a walk together and talk things out.”
“Oh, Quint!” Effie said. “That’s what you’d’ve done. You know perfectly well that it’s not what Norm would’ve done. And even if Norm had wanted to ask Malcolm some questions, or go ahead and confront him, he could’ve done it over the phone. Or at the foundation. Or anywhere else.”
I said, “Norman Axelrod expected to meet one of the Rockefellers.”
No one asked whether I was hypothesizing or reporting.
“He’d’ve climbed Everest for that,” Effie said. “Never mind Dorr.”
“Norman did have a weakness for celebrities,” Gabrielle agreed. “But maybe what happened was that Norm expressed his, uh, doubts about the Pine Tree Foundation to Malcolm.”
“Threatened to expose the whole scheme!” Wally amended.
“So,” Gabrielle continued, “Malcolm must have arranged a secret meeting to assuage Norm’s suspicions.”
Everyone, of course, turned to Malcolm Fairley, who promptly said that he was not at liberty to reply. “I’m a man of my word,” he said.
I again tried to report on the fragments of conversation I’d overheard, but Gabrielle was determined to confront Fairley. His smugness probably annoyed her as much as it did me. “Malcolm, really!” she exclaimed. “Being a man of your word doesn’t mean refusing to answer straightforward questions about what’s obvious anyway. We have taken your word for a great deal, you know, including the finances of the foundation and the support of the benefactors and your hike with Norm. Now, stop being mysterious!”
Buck beamed at her. “Cut to the chase,” he said. “Fairley sets up this Ponzi scheme. Axelrod gets suspicious. Fairley lures him up here by promising him he’s going to meet a Rockefeller. Hah! Poor sucker! Axelrod dies.”
“I was not there!” Fairley protested. “For some reason, Norman wandered off, and I was, in fact, hunting for him in the wrong place when he fell. I was near the top of Dorr and nowhere near the Ladder Trail. The person who was, in fact, nearby when poor Norman died was your daughter!” He glared at Buck.
“If we’re going to start trading accusations about daughters,” Opal said, “let’s not neglect yours, Malcolm. If the foundation is, God forbid, a Ponzi scheme, then Anita is in on it, too. For all we know, she murdered Norm to save her own skin. And yours, too!”
“Anita’s a proven sneak,” Effie pointed out. “She snuck around behind Malcolm’s back to do Opal and Wally’s legal work. Maybe she snuck up behind Norm’s back and—”
“Anita was with me,” Steve interrupted.
“Sir Galahad,” Buck commented.
“He’d say anything for her,” Effie agreed. “Lawyers and developers! The scum of the earth!”
I was about to remind her that Steve was a veterinarian, not a lawyer or a developer, but before I had the chance, Opal spat out, “Effie O’Brian, I’d like to give you a good swift kick and send you tumbling down this mountain! Your holier-than-thou attitude makes me want to puke! In case you wondered, everyone knows that before you married Quint, you didn’t have a plug nickel, and if you had to work for a living like the rest of us instead of living off the Beamon money—”
“If there’s any left,” Gabrielle said glumly.
“Maybe your hero stepped in to make sure there was,” Opal said nastily. “He certainly seems to believe his own conspiracy theory. He probably killed Norman Axelrod to give you time to get your money out before Axelrod was supposedly going to blow the whistle.”
“Wish he’d warned us,” Wally said.
“You seem to have missed the grand finale that Steve outlined for you,” Anita said. “He showed you how a Ponzi scheme begins, and he showed you how it ends. You have overlooked the last act. When the house of cards begins to collapse, the organizer absconds with the goods, whereas my father is right here and has shown no indication whatever of going anywhere. I, however, have had enough of this performance. I cannot imagine why we allowed ourselves to be dragged up here in the first place by some paranoid buffoon!”
“We’re jogging,” my father responded.
“Jogging?” Anita demanded. “Oh, please! Gabbi, if you want my advice—”
“I’ve taken too much of your advice already,” Gabrielle snapped.
“What we’re doing here,” said Buck, as if no one else had spoken, “is jogging Holly’s memory.”
I looked blankly at him and shrugged my shoulders.
“I am leaving!” Anita announced.
“Head toward the Ladder Trail,” Buck ordered her, “because that’s where the rest of us are going. We’re going to set the scene, and—”
Anita radiated scorn. “This is the corniest thing I’ve ever heard of, and I’m having no part of it. I was nowhere near here yesterday, and I can prove it. I’m leaving. Steve, let’s go!”
“Jogging,” Steve said quietly, “strikes me as not a bad idea.” Our eyes met. He looked heartbreakingly sad.
Imitating my father, Anita said, “Sir Galahad! Well, Holly Winter, there’s a little something Sir Galahad hasn’t told you yet.”
“What would that be?” I almost whispered.
“Aren’t you curious about how I can prove where I was yesterday?”
“Not very,” I said.
“You should be,” Anita said vindictively. “Because as Steve told all of you, he and I were together yesterday morning. What he didn’t tell you is that we have the marriage certificate to prove it.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
FAINTING IS A PHYSICAL PHENOMENON that results from a lack of blood supply to the brain. One minute, you’re in full possession of consciousness. The next, you’re out cold. Why? Because, as Science in Her Wisdom used to tell us a few hundred years ago, a hard whack to the head disrupts the flow of vital fluids to the Seat of Reason. So far as I know, explanations have not improved greatly since then, probably because there’s been no public demand. For zillions of years, people have had a perfectly satisfactory understanding of what happens when you discover that your true love loves someone else. Thus was born, of course, the partnership between Homo sapiens and the genus Canis: the unspoken Till death us do part, unspoken because it goes without saying. Who exchanges rings with a dog? If love is absolutely permanent, who needs a gold band? Who needs a symbol? Dog love is never token love. It’s always the real thing.
I have digressed. My father has a good excuse for transporting me from the scene of my swoon to a clearing near the top of the Ladder Trail. According to Buck, his original aim in dragging everyone up the little mountain toward the scene of Axelrod’s death was to reawaken my memory of the events preceding Axelrod’s fatal plunge. When I passed out for the second time, he decided that I should regain my senses in more or le
ss the same place I’d been when I first lost them. For all I know, he thought they’d been hanging around waiting for a brain to reinhabit. I see no excuse, however, for the method he used to revive me, which consisted of upending a water bottle on my head. I had, admittedly, awakened yesterday with my face in a puddle, but Buck didn’t even know about the water and the blood. Furthermore, our companions had used their jackets, sweatshirts, and sweaters to make a soft pallet for me on the rock slab, and in applying his primitive first aid, Buck had dampened other people’s clothing. I don’t buy his crummy excuse, which is, “What did you expect? Smelling salts?”
I shouldn’t complain, though. And it’s hard to argue with someone who turns out to have been right.
This time, Rowdy and Kimi were there to nurse me back to sentience, which is to say that when I awoke, I was coughing up water and dog hair. As I work it out, Kimi stood above me on all fours scouring my eyelids with her maternal tongue, and Rowdy was sprawled on the ground at my head with his forelegs wrapped protectively around my skull. When Kimi finally let me see anything, I stared up into Rowdy’s toothy jaws. Not everyone would have found the sight as cozy as I did.
Before I had the chance to orient myself, Buck started asking questions. “Is this where it happened? You left the dogs near here? Why’d you do that?”
Gabrielle had to force him to give me a minute to recover. I’ll never forget how sweet she was. No wonder I’d been confused about Ann’s letter. This Gabbi, too, was sweet and bossy. “Leave her alone!” she ordered Buck. “Dogs, out of the way! Let me in here!” As I struggled to sit up, she helped me, and then she produced a welcome wad of clean tissues, dried my face, and commanded me to blow my nose. I did. Unlike my father, she had the courtesy to ask whether I was all right. I was. I should have lied.
“So, is this where it happened?” Buck repeated.
I was slow to reply. The old hymn was running through my head again: I love to tell the story of unseen things above. This time, however, I knew what that line meant to me. I had the sense not to blurt out my knowledge. “Are we near the top of the Ladder Trail?” I asked.
Buck said that we were. Hauling me to my feet, he told me to show him where I’d left the dogs. I glanced around to take stock of our exact location. The faces distracted me. Steve Delaney’s eyes sometimes turn from blue to green. Now it was his face that bore a chartreuse tinge. Anita Fairley—Delaney? Fairley-Delaney?—was as beautiful as ever: thin, blond, soignée. Her father, Malcolm, looked distant and embarrassed, as if he were witnessing some tasteless public display that had nothing to do with him. He busied himself by retrieving his damp canvas jacket from the head of my makeshift pallet, brushing dirt off its sleeves, and draping it on a large rock to dry. The couples, Opal and Wally, Quint and Effie, stood in twosomes a few yards from the rest of the group. I wondered whether anyone had congratulated Steve and offered felicitations to Anita. Molly the bichon was, for once, scurrying around on the ground. Noticing that Anita had her right hand casually tucked into the pocket of her pants, Molly pranced up to her and yipped. Anita rolled her eyes, removed her hand from her pocket, and absentmindedly brushed imaginary contaminants off her thighs. Gabrielle called to Molly, who zipped to her. As Gabrielle was about to hoist the little white dog, Anita muttered, “Christ! Here we go again. Kanga and Baby Roo.” No one replied, but instead of picking up the dog, Gabrielle settled for retrieving the end of Molly’s leash.
“Over there,” I said, pointing to the torn saplings I’d identified that morning. “I hitched the dogs to those trees.” “So she’d have her hands free for Norman Axelrod,” Anita said.
Again, no one responded to her. During my blackout, the group had evidently decided to ignore Anita’s existence. The agreement must have been tacit; Steve Delaney would never have concurred aloud with the policy of pretending that any wife of his, even Anita, wasn’t there. Doglike loyalty befits a veterinarian. My violent and unwelcome physical passion, I might mention, had vanished. All that hullabaloo about the intimate connection between love and death? Sex and death? My knowledge of mortality is limited, but I swear that there’s a deep tie between lust and the death of memory.
“You ever see those movies where they reenact the crime?” I am tempted to say that Buck asked the question rhetorically, but I can’t get the adverb to jibe with my father’s attitude, probably because Buck is more dictatorial than oratorical. Also, Q.E.D., as people actually say viva voce in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Buck can be hopelessly corny. Cambridge? Where, as I now remembered with startling clarity, the dogs and I lived. In case you wondered, my Latin is on a par with Rowdy’s and Kimi’s. In communicating with some of our vernacularly challenged Ph.D. neighbors, we point and gesture. I have picked up a few phrases of academic pidgin. Q.E.D. Viva voce. The dogs wag their tails.
Speaking of that eternal subject, perfect dogs, Buck led Rowdy and Kimi to the saplings they’d damaged in breaking free. I followed. “Do what you did yesterday,” he instructed. In typical Buck fashion, he said nothing about the injuries I’d suffered, but allayed my fears by promising that the dogs wouldn’t get loose this time. “They won’t have any reason to worry about you,” he added encouragingly.
Considering what Cambridge would call my “family of origin,” it’s a miracle that I ever progressed from barking to speech. To give my parents the credit they earned, however, they did continue to obedience train me even after they made the horrid discovery that I was not a golden retriever. My parents’ child, I compliantly hitched Rowdy to one tree, Kimi to the other. “That’s it,” I told Buck. “Except that they had on their packs.”
Under Buck’s direction, I made my way past the silent people and took a few steps beyond the trail, onto the ledge. There I paused.
“And then she pulls out her camera and takes ghastly tourist snapshots of the vista,” Anita narrated.
My camera had, of course, remained in my day pack, where I’d later found it, completely smashed. There’d been fog; it had been a bad day for photography. As to tourist shots of vistas, the most prominent feature in the otherwise spectacular view was the hideous sprawl of the Jackson Lab. Now I remembered exactly what those ugly buildings were. I’m not an animal-rights lunatic, but I am an animal lover. Research facilities that experiment on animals are not my prime choice of subject for vacation photos.
“Move away,” Buck ordered me. “Head down the ridge, closer to where you fell from. You remember where that was? Because I don’t know.”
I nodded and took a few steps. My heart pounded. I looked uphill to my tethered dogs. Both stood alert, their eyes on me. I’d glanced back at them yesterday, too. They wore the same expressions of watchful curiosity.
“The parade of suspects,” Buck bellowed. “Isn’t that what they call it in the movies?”
Anita groaned. Still, when Buck herded everyone a few yards down the path toward the Ladder Trail, she stayed near Steve.
“Me first,” Buck volunteered.
“Big of you,” Anita said.
Ignoring her, Buck made a foolish show of striding up the path. Where the trail passed between the ridge where I stood and the trees where the dogs were hitched, he made a needless display of marching as if he were leading a parade. Kimi whined for his attention. Rowdy woo-wooed. Gabrielle came next, with Molly bouncing merrily on lead at her side. Wally went by. Then Opal. Then Steve. My heart pounded. Anita. Effie took her turn. Quint took his. As I waited for Malcolm Fairley, I felt suddenly giddy.
“Just walk on by?” Malcolm asked unnecessarily.
“Like the song says.” Buck assumes that everyone is a country-and-western fan.
Fairley looked puzzled. As he approached, I said, “You offered Norman Axelrod a lure. That’s what you told us last night. At the clambake. People wanted to know how you’d persuaded Axelrod to hike up Dorr. And you told them you’d offered Axelrod a lure. You did.”
Fairley halted, blocking my view of Rowdy and Kimi. Rowdy has possibly the most beautiful ma
lamute head in the world: correct shape, ideal ear set, lovely small ears, blocky muzzle, dark pigment, gorgeous bittersweet-chocolate-brown almond-shaped eyes with the sweet, soft expression that’s perfection in his breed. Kimi looks tougher than Rowdy does, mainly because her black mask hints at her willingness to obey no one’s laws except her own. At the moment, I didn’t want or expect either dog to do anything but serve as an emboldening sight for my frightened eyes. Regardless of how sweet or tough the appearance, an Alaskan malamute doesn’t back down. Ever. In contrast to my dogs, I am only an honorary malamute. Fortified by the sight of them, I could be tough. With their gaze on me, I’d be ashamed to back down.
But I couldn’t see them. Without their strength, I felt paralyzed. As I’ve said, however, dog love is the real thing. Both dogs shifted, and catching their eyes, I did, too, until our views were unobstructed.
“You offered a positive lure,” I told Fairley. “Axelrod confronted you with his suspicions about the Pine Tree Foundation. You offered the ultimate reassurance. At the same time, you offered him a lure he couldn’t resist: the chance to meet a celebrity. Bigger than Stephen King. Legendary! A household word! The magic name you keep warning everyone not to say aloud.”
“Rockefeller,” my father boomed.
“Anonymity!” Fairley pleaded with unmistakably genuine distress.
“Tiffany,” I said, “your secretary, told me that she prepared agendas for your meetings with the benefactors, meetings at your house. Not at the foundation. She said that sometimes you went to see them, or sometimes you met them in the park.”
Fairley nodded silently.
“So, no one but you had seen them before.”
Fairley’s nod was almost imperceptible. With sad eyes, he said, “I beg you to leave them out of this.”
“I will, more or less,” I promised, “except for a little something you said to me at the clambake. We were talking about dogs. About loving dogs. You said that it’s in the genes. And that they were the same way. ‘Dog nuts all.’ That’s exactly what you said.”