by Susan Conant
Buck was running out of patience with me. “Let’s move this.”
“You’re the one who taught me to fish,” I told him. “We’ve hooked a big one. What you do with a big fish is play it.”
Buck sighed mightily.
“It is in the genes,” I told Fairley. “But the Rockefeller family has two branches. John D.’s branch. Benefactors of Acadia National Park. His brother William’s branch. The mistake you made was not knowing which side of the family was the dog side. It’s William’s side, you see. On William’s side, the Rockefeller family tree produces crop after crop of dog nuts.”
“I was mistaken,” Fairley conceded. “If you knew these people the way you said you did, you wouldn’t have made that mistake. You lured Norman Axelrod up here. I followed you. I was suspicious. I wanted to see for myself. And I did.”
“Holly, what did you see?” Gabrielle asked.
“I tied the dogs,” I told her, “so I could creep down this ledge and get a good look. I watched Norman Axelrod follow Malcolm Fairley to the top of the Ladder Trail. Malcolm said that was where the meeting was supposed to be. Only no one else was there. The fog had cleared temporarily. Then Malcolm headed up an abandoned section of the Ladder Trail. You can use it to get to the top of the cliff. Norman climbed up behind him. I saw no one else. I heard no one else. Then Norman’s body fell from the top of the cliff. The sound was nauseating. I started to cut across and down these ledges, but you, Malcolm, came charging at me. You knocked me off the ledge, and I blacked out. I don’t know why you left the job unfinished.”
“This is outrageous!” Malcolm Fairley was furious.
“Norman was about to blow the whistle on your Ponzi scheme,” I continued, “until you lured him up here with the promise of meeting a benefactor. The foundation wasn’t a Ponzi scheme after all! It was backed by the Rockefellers! And poor Norman could get to meet one! Then, since you couldn’t actually produce one, you shoved Norman Axelrod off that cliff. What I saw yesterday were the unseen things. I saw that there are no benefactors. Anonymous is the least of what they are. They are the product of your imagination. Yes, I overheard you talking to one of them, and you obviously believe they’re real. But they aren’t. The foundation’s benefactors don’t exist!”
Chapter Thirty
“I HAD A BAD FALL myself once,” Malcolm Fairley said somberly. “Head injury. The recovery is slow. Truth is, it was years before I was myself again.”
I’d returned from the ledge to the trail, where I stood next to my father, facing Malcolm Fairley. Speaking of the man’s face, let me note that I was struck by its honesty and familiarity. As I now knew, I’d met him only this week, but I had known men like him, or at least men who looked like him and who, in some invisible and intangible way, had the same air or feel about them. As malamutes recognize other malamutes, poodles other poodles, I’d identified Fairley as one of my own breed.
“Give yourself time,” Fairley advised me. “Keep the stress to a minimum.”
“If you actually knew the Rockefellers who’ve been Acadia’s benefactors,” I said slowly, “you’d never have thought they were so-called dog nuts. I’ve been wondering about where you got that idea at all. At a guess, you read a book about the whole family dynasty. As homework, so to speak. Background research. And you read a paragraph or two about Geraldine R. Dodge, and you remembered her because she was memorable. Only, you didn’t get her pedigree straight.”
Malcolm Fairley told Buck, “Bangor’s less than an hour’s drive. There’s a major medical center there.”
“I know where Bangor is!” Buck roared. “So does everyone else here! What these people would like to know is where their money is.”
“The foundation has consistently provided full reports,” Fairley answered in the excessively rational tones that people reserve for lunatics. “Anita prepares the financial statements. She knows the workings of the foundation inside out.” He guffawed. “She knows the details better than I do myself!”
If I’d been Anita, I’d have been unhappy to have the responsibility shifted to me. Steve, who had his arm around her shoulders, may have felt her muscles tighten or heard a change in her breathing. I saw no sign of a response.
“Isn’t nonexistence very hard to prove?” Gabrielle asked the question abruptly, as if it had been lingering on her lips and suddenly spat itself out of its own volition. “I keep thinking about that. Like atheists and God! How would you ever prove that there aren’t benefactors?”
“Gabbi,” Quint said softly, “the point here isn’t theological. And it isn’t whether or not Holly saw anyone. It’s whether or not the foundation has backing.”
“What’s needed,” Wally said, “is an independent audit. Anita, when was the last one?”
“Recently,” she said.
“Recently meaning yesterday?” Opal demanded. “Or recently meaning two years ago?”
“Don’t you just love Gilbert and Sullivan?” Gabrielle exclaimed. “Not that this is the time or place. Why is it that serious worry always brings out the absurd in everyone?”
“It doesn’t bring it out in everyone,” Effie said. “It brings it out in you.”
“Anita,” her father said, “Wally has asked you the date of the last independent audit. That’s a reasonable question from one of the foundation’s investors, and it deserves a prompt, specific answer.”
“I don’t know the date off the top of my head,” Anita said coolly. “The point is that these accusations don’t deserve serious consideration. They’re completely unfounded.”
“What’s unfounded,” Buck charged, “is your foundation. Hah!” He’s at his most obnoxious when he’s pleased with himself. Unfortunately, when it comes to himself, he’s easy to please.
As I’d done on about a million previous occasions, I sought solace in the company of dogs. As I climbed the slight slope to where the dogs were tied, my father was lecturing about Ponzi schemes. According to Buck, every characteristic of the Pine Tree Foundation was cause for suspicion, and taken together, the cluster of characteristics led to the conclusion that its proper name would’ve been the Ponzi Foundation. As I unhitched one dog, then the other, Buck pointed to the incredibly high rate of return, the payment of the initial investors, the old investors’ reinvestment and their recruitment of new investors, and the reliance on the foundation itself as the only source of information about its dealings.
“Ponzi schemes collapse!” Anita Fairley countered. “They are houses of cards! What makes these charges so ludicrous is that the Pine Tree Foundation is thriving. Everyone connected with it is doing very nicely indeed, thank you very much. No one is absconding with anything!”
As I led Rowdy and Kimi back toward the group on the trail, we passed the big rock where Malcolm Fairley had spread his jacket to dry. Rowdy brought me to a sharp halt by stopping suddenly to sniff Fairley’s jacket. The source of Rowdy’s interest, I assumed, was either the scent of a dog that had marked the rock, or my own scent, which must have transferred itself to the jacket when my head had rested on its fabric. To Rowdy, the source wouldn’t matter. In Rowdy’s view, interestingly odiferous outdoor objects have no damned business emitting any scent except his. The nerve! The world is his fire hydrant. For the sake of civility, I speak euphemistically to Rowdy when informing him that people’s belongings are not fire hydrants and are not to be treated as if they were. Instead of shouting, Don’t lift your leg on that! I say sternly, Not there! Kimi sometimes requires the same command. She’s not just a girl. She’s a malamute.
So, as I was starting to say before my train of thought fell off its tracks and crashed in a brain lesion, I found Rowdy’s interest in the jacket unwelcome. As I tell Rowdy and Kimi, if I don’t want dog urine on my possessions, imagine how everyone else feels about it!
“Not there!” I told Rowdy.
To Rowdy’s credit, he quit running his hydrant eye over the jacket. Perfect obedience to human commands is, however, contrary to the Alas
kan Malamute Code. Instead of abandoning all curiosity about the jacket, Rowdy switched to sniffing and nudging it. Unlike my father, Malcolm Fairley wasn’t the sort of person who always carried dog treats, but he might have stashed trail mix, crackers, a sandwich, or some other snack in one of his pockets. Preoccupied with Rowdy, I took my eye off Kimi, who, obedient to the Malamute Code, Opportunism Provision, seized on my inattention to her to snatch the jacket off the rock so swiftly that by the time I saw what she’d done, she had it clamped between her teeth and was alternately shaking her prey to make sure it was dead and raising it proudly upward to give everyone the chance to admire her prize. When Kimi is in this victor-with-her-spoils mode, she shows no aggression; if you try to take her trophy, she won’t growl, snarl, or snap. On the contrary, her attitude is maddeningly impersonal: She acts exactly as if the booty has mysteriously enmeshed itself in the gears of a machine that she has no idea how to operate. In theory, Kimi responds to the command Trade, which is an offer to exchange the filched object for a generous helping of roast beef, liver, cheese, or the equivalent. Indeed, she understands the command so perfectly that she ignores it until you open the refrigerator door. Acadia failed to provide even a rusted refrigerator. Except for worthless bits of fossilized cheddar, my pockets were empty.
While I was busy contemplating and rejecting the image of the cheesy debris as a tasteless symbol of the accusations still being tossed back and forth—valueless, unpersuasive—Rowdy’s allegiance to the aforementioned Code drove him to make the most of my abstraction. Even if I’d been vigilant, he might have struck anyway. Kimi’s braggadocio always provokes him. She really should learn never to lord anything over Rowdy.
Zoom! Rowdy shot forward and locked his jaws on what proved to be one of the capacious pockets of Malcolm Fairley’s jacket. Sturdy though its fabric was, the jacket had been designed as outerwear for human beings, of course, and not, as the prolonged r-r-r-i-i-i-p-p-p of cloth proclaimed, a tug-of-war toy for Alaskan malamutes.
Alerted by the rough play of my big dogs and the sound of the pocket being torn off the jacket, everyone finally quit the bickering. Finding themselves the object of universal attention, the dogs showed off. Kimi, in possession of the ruined jacket, gave it another neck-breaking shake of joy. Looking beautiful and absurd, Rowdy stood absolutely still, the torn-off pocket dangling upside down from his mouth. A large white envelope protruded from the pocket.
Infuriated beyond all reason—I’d have paid for a new jacket, for heaven’s sake—Malcolm Fairley stomped up to Rowdy and, in the incalculably stupid manner of a person who knows nothing about dogs, made a quick, doomed grab for the envelope. In case I haven’t mentioned it lately, I must note that Rowdy is not only gorgeous, but friendly, winsome, and playful. Tactfully disregarding the clumsiness of Fairley’s effort to initiate a game, Rowdy accepted his invitation by executing a charming front-end-down, hind-end-up play bow while simultaneously chomping down even harder than before on the pocket and its contents. What did Fairley expect! If someone tries to snatch something from you, what do you do? Tighten your grip!
Exhibiting a disgraceful lack of the lighthearted high spirits of even the average dog, not to mention Rowdy, Fairley veered toward me. “I want that back,” he demanded childishly, “and I want it back right now! It’s mine! Make him give it to me!”
I’d have complied. Even with no refrigerator in sight, Rowdy will usually trade.
But Fairley panicked. Turning back to Rowdy, he made another grab.
“Stop it!” I told Fairley. “You’re making things worse! Stop it!”
Paying no attention to me, Fairley darted a hand at Rowdy. This time, he got a grip on the ragged remains of the pocket. The fat white envelope dropped to the ground. The upper lefthand corner was embossed with an airliner-and-suitcase logo and, in big letters, Worldmaster Travel.
“Going somewhere, Malcolm?” I asked.
Fairley lunged for the envelope, but Rowdy beat him to it. Instantly discarding the shredded pocket as second best, he went for the first prize and, within seconds, had it in his mouth.
I transferred both leashes to my left hand. With my right, I proudly reached out and said softly, “Rowdy, trade!”
As I may have mentioned in passing, this is one hell of a good dog.
The white envelope was moist and tooth-marked, but the plane ticket, the printout of Fairley’s itinerary, and the colorful travel brochure were undamaged. Of course, I didn’t actually read the ticket, the printout, or the brochure. I didn’t really need to. And I didn’t have time. As the word Guatemala was leaving my lips, Malcolm Fairley, correctly sizing me up as an easier mark than Rowdy, tried to wrest his travel documents from my hand.
Stupid, stupid! Rowdy is a friendly boy, but he does not like people to touch me without my permission. My greater fear, however, centered on Kimi. Rowdy might give a warning: a low growl or a menacing move. But Kimi? I was deathly afraid that she’d go directly for Malcolm Fairley’s throat.
I underestimated Kimi’s intelligence. As I’d feared, she shifted instantaneously from silent, vigilant immobility to snarling, violent action. Shooting upward, propelled by the drive of her sled-dog hindquarters, her muscles rippling, her eyes flashing, her ears flat against her head, a hideous growl roaring from between her exposed teeth, she flew at Malcolm Fairley, who didn’t have time to evade her, but took her full projectile force on his left shoulder. He spun around as if he’d been hit by a bullet instead of a dog. Kimi’s goal, I saw in retrospect, wasn’t to knock Fairley off balance and off his feet. Her aim wasn’t even his throat, his face, or the center of his chest. Rather, she delivered an offcenter blow designed to knock him out of action and slam him away from me. Rowdy, her partner, backed her up with rumbling growls until Fairley lay doubled over on the ground. Then Rowdy moved in to loom over the moaning Fairley, who undoubtedly found the sight of those open jaws less cozy than I had. The entire episode, including the horrendous, terrifying noise of the dogs, lasted less than ten seconds.
At that point, my father startled everyone, especially Rowdy, by bending at the knees, wrapping his powerful arms under the eighty-five-pound dog, lifting him off his feet, and strolling off with him.
“Enough!” I told Kimi. “Leave it! This way!” Having done precisely what she’d intended, Kimi eyed me gently. As I led her from Fairley, I studied him for signs of blood and found none. Only later did I learn the remarkable fact of Fairley’s condition: Far from drawing blood, Kimi hadn’t used her teeth at all; she didn’t leave so much as a mark.
Trembling, I halted, breathed deeply, reached for Kimi’s neck, dug my fingers into her thick, infinitely comforting double coat, and briefly closed my eyes. When I opened them, Malcolm Fairley was seated on the ground. Looming over him in Rowdy’s place was his daughter, Anita, slapping the air in front of her father’s face with the travel itinerary, the plane ticket, and the brochure about Guatemala. I knew at once that I had never before seen a human being so fiercely and purely enraged.
“You son of a bitch!” she screeched. “So this is what you were up to! You sneaky son of a bitch!” Anita was not even slightly beautiful when she was angry. She was as bony as a witch and twice as ugly. “You son of a bitch! You were going to bolt and dump this entire frigging mess of yours on me! And leave me to explain your goddamned imaginary benefactors! You crazy bastard! Guatemala! Goddamn Guatemala!”
“Anita,” Malcolm said, “I am already aware that you don’t share my commitment to saving the rain forests, but—”
“The amazing thing about you—the irony! the damned irony!—is that you do care about the rain forests! You are absolutely sincere about saving the planet! What’s incredible is that everyone believed in your anonymous benefactors because you believed in them yourself! You convinced yourself of their existence. You conned yourself, didn’t you? But you didn’t con me. Rockefellers! Hah! You want to know the difference between you and me, Daddy? You’re sincere. But I’m honest. I’m a shys
ter, and I know I’m a shyster. But you’re the murderer, not me, and you won’t admit even to yourself that you deliberately shoved Axelrod off that cliff. Before you did it, you convinced yourself that it was going to be an accident!”
Anita addressed the group. “I am no one’s fall guy,” she said with dignity. “My father did take your money. He set up a Ponzi scheme. A classic Ponzi scheme with a twist: the anonymous benefactors. You fell for it. Greed disguised as charity? You loved having it both ways. What you don’t know is that my father is the only genuinely charitable person here. You asked where the money was? I’ll tell you, in defense of my father’s sincerity. He took your investments, he opened a brokerage account, he obtained a generous line of credit, and how did he use it? For personal gain? Not at all! He took your money and he drew on that line of credit, and he donated every cent he could get his hands on to every save-the-rain-forest group, every environmental lobby, every conservation organization, and every other bunch of mush-for-brains environmental do-gooders he could find. You want to know where your damn money is? My father gave it away. He donated all of it to charity.”
Chapter Thirty-one
WHEN I MET HORACE LIVERMORE at my father’s wedding, I recognized him immediately from dog shows. Horace is in his late fifties, I guess, a tall, burly, white-haired man who looks nothing whatever like the handsome, dark lone hiker the dogs and I had met at the top of the Ladder Trail. The hiker, Zeke, was a wedding guest, too, mainly because Gabrielle felt that Zeke had at least spotted something off about the Pine Tree Foundation, even if he hadn’t been able to get anyone to listen to him. He worked for the brokerage house that handled Malcolm Fairley’s account. The large amount of money that Fairley drew on his line of credit had aroused Zeke’s suspicions. When his superiors dismissed his concerns, he decided to investigate on his own. In taking time off to go to Mount Desert Island and in volunteering for Fairley’s trail crew, he sought an intimate look at the workings of the Pine Tree Foundation. In presenting himself as the prosperous young man he was and in demonstrating his hands-on determination to save the environment, he hoped to offer himself as a likely investor. After working with Fairley’s trail crew, however, Zeke was impressed by the genuineness of the man’s commitment. Indeed, he began to wonder whether Anita Fairley alone might be responsible for the Ponzi scheme, and Malcolm Fairley merely his daughter’s dupe. The one who’d been almost ready to blow an effective whistle had been Norman Axelrod. Interestingly enough, Zeke had suspected that the anonymous benefactors were a fabrication, but poor Norman Axelrod hiked to his death in the hope of meeting a Rockefeller. If Axelrod had cared enough about his immediate environment to work on the reclamation of the Homans Path, he’d have met Zeke, of course. It’s intriguing to realize that if the two had pooled their information, they’d have put a stop to the Ponzi scheme without giving Malcolm Fairley the chance to abscond. They’d have found another common interest. Zeke isn’t a professional handler, but he does owner-handle his Belgian sheepdog bitch. Axelrod, however, would never have worked on the Homans Path. Once I remembered him, I knew that everyone had told the truth. He really did hate trees.