Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  February 16; Salt Lake City, Utah; 35 degrees, steady rain

  Jenkins manages to find a sparsely populated lounge down the hallway from the hospital room and sits for a moment collecting his thoughts before calling his partner, Helen Kennedy, in Carleton, Vermont. Some sort of hospital orderly in mint green garb appears, pushing a metal cart of what looks like wound dressings—gauze pads, cotton balls, rolls of flesh-toned tape—to a window that views the spokes of streets in the flat city surrounded by a white panorama of mountains. Jenkins can spy a package of Marlboros sticking out of the man’s pocket. With a curious glance at him, the fellow extracts a single cigarette and heads toward a bank of elevators.

  Watching idly until the man disappears, Jenkins turns his attention once more toward the window and looks out toward the Wasatch Mountains. There’s a certain feeling the West gives him (he went to college in California), expansive, magisterial yet starkly prehistoric. The mountains of the West, jagged, monolithic, look as though they recently erupted into existence. Whereas the mountains of the East, softer, rounder more beaten down, perhaps give a more accurate account of thousands of centuries having passed since the world was formed. Glancing idly down toward the hospital parking lot, Jenkins spies what looks like a sculpture of an American Indian head painted terracotta red and sporting a feather crown. He can’t imagine finding something similar in the parking lot of an East Coast hospital.

  Jenkins is struck by the fact that Sam Solomon is more or less his own age and, somewhat similarly, still pushing himself to physical extremes. Part of pushing himself was Solomon’s risking an involvement with a much younger man who, according to his parents, was conflicted about his sexuality. Like Sam, Jenkins is skier, although he does more Nordic skiing than downhill, and bicycles in the summer—often with a crowd of younger guys. It occurs to him that they just might be two men trying to hold on to their power, two men afraid of aging. And then his years of investigative experience kick in and he hears the warning voice of some mentor or other in his head saying, If the suspect happens to be your brother, cut him even less slack.

  “Got there safe and sound?” Kennedy asks when he calls her.

  “Yup. Easy flight. No delays. Some bumps on the way in.”

  “So what’s the update?”

  “Well, I’m at the hospital.”

  “And how does he seem to you?”

  “Genuinely surprised and upset.”

  “You believe him?”

  “He sounds it.”

  There is a speculative lull and then Kennedy asks, “So what’s his alibi?”

  “He claims that, except for that phone call, he and Luc Flanders haven’t communicated since December twenty-eighth.”

  “But that’s not true. They did. Texts. Emails.”

  “Yup.”

  “So what do you think?”

  Jenkins wrestles with the thought. At last he says, “I think they possibly could have seen each other right before Sam left town. But I’ll reframe the question.”

  “Alibi probably isn’t going to change.”

  Thoughtful for a moment, at last Jenkins says, “I kind of wish it was you out here questioning this man instead of me.”

  Kennedy asks, “Why?”

  “I just think you’d be better at it.”

  “Better at questioning him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t buy it. There is another reason why you’re saying this. Are you going easy on him?”

  “Not really. Well, maybe a little.”

  “Then get over yourself, Nick,” Kennedy says.

  Jenkins glances at his watch. “All right. I will. Get over myself.”

  “So when are you going back in to see him?”

  “He’s doped up right now. I’m going to wait until just before he gets his next painkiller injection. I tried to ask the nurse when it would be.”

  “And she didn’t tell you.”

  “Of course not. So maybe I’ll go and do some sightseeing. Check out the Tabernacle.”

  “The Tabernacle? You can’t get into The Tabernacle unless you’re Mormon.”

  “Then maybe I’ll sit outside the Tabernacle and watch the multiple wedding parties.”

  February 11, 5:15 p.m.; Carleton, Vermont; 8 degrees, clear skies

  Skating at night. Flying across the ice under the blaze of a full moon. Wearing baggy snow pants and sweatshirts, Luc Flanders and his roommates, Will McKinnon and Charlie Taft, are playing pond hockey. There’s no checking in pond hockey, no fouling, just a makeshift rink carved out of a column of thigh-high snow and goals made out of muck boots spaced four feet apart. Part of the challenge: not to drive the puck deep into the drifts that rise off the pond like frozen waves. They each have come with three pucks, and by the end of the game these pucks will have vanished into sparkling powder.

  Luc might have continued playing hockey as a kid if it hadn’t been for the head injury that he suffered at the age of fourteen. A point of departure in his young life, when he broke away from solid ground and entered a world of uncertainty, of light breaking into blinding points, of headaches and nausea. Upsurges of intense, almost unbearable emotions unanchored to any event and then numbness to everyone and everything. The doctors surmised that when his head slammed against the ice, his temporal lobes got rattled and that’s why he had a seizure in the ambulance. The scar tissue that grew in his brain brought on the plague of vivid, feverish daydreams, and Luc soon began to understand that his body and brain were now tuned to new frequencies. After the accident, whenever he looked at colored plates of paintings in art books, he’d come away with strong after-images of brushwork and mood. He could hear music on his parents’ classical music station and then days, even months later, have an exact recall of long melodic passages. Religious chorales in particular unspooled in his head, music in full orchestral flower, ripe with devotion, with light and celestial harmonies. The doctors conferred about these symptoms and then pronounced him mildly epileptic and put him on a daily dose of Lamotrigine.

  At first he couldn’t bear to think of himself as even slightly brain-scarred and sometimes wondered if he’d ever fully woken up after his knockout on the ice. Too often he felt dissociated from people, from friends, from family.

  And of course the weird daydreams, the euphony of music that sometimes increases to unbearable volumes in his head. He commits desperate acts to try and wrench himself out of them. He takes freezing showers; he runs wind sprints until exhaustion. When he was younger, he’d do things like joyriding beside a friend driving without a license, underage binge drinking. He once inadvertently set a hayfield on fire.

  “Earth to Flanders . . . are you passing?” Taft calls out.

  Luc takes a swing and shoots foolishly. The puck goes way wide of the goal. And vanishes into the snow. “Who, bro, you out of it again, or what?” chortles McKinnon.

  “Yup, I’m out to lunch.” Luc glances up at the sky, ottoman blue and just beginning to flicker with stars. Even with the moon, it’s almost too dark to play and they need to wrap it up.

  When the game finally ends, they continue skating for the joy of it, circling one another and racing toward either end of the pond and then digging their skates into the ice and stopping before turning sharply with abandon. At some point Luc hears something tinkling, a sound of skittering. He stops and listens to a faint groan, the perilous cracking sound of ice bridging a dark current fed by the nearby Millstone Creek. Even though people blithely drive their cars and snowmobiles across winter ponds that could in places be twelve feet thick, there will always be those patches of thin ice where even a hundred pounds of weight will cause a dangerous spiderweb fracture.

  Luc skates a few feet farther and hears another sound, more brittle now, like a pebble or a loose shard, and flees toward the shore. There he notices Elizabeth, standing in a quilted light blue coat,
her head tilted to the side, her long, straight, fair hair feathering back in the cold wind. Taft glides by close to him, and Luc can see the thick eyebrows raised.

  Luc and Elizabeth broke off their relationship two weeks ago and have seen very little of each other on campus. They have gone to great lengths to avoid being in the same place at the same time. He glides over to her and stops with a fine spray of ice. “What’s going on?” he says, a bit undone.

  “Hi . . . don’t meant to intrude,” she says in a voice of uncertainty, “but I want you to know before you hear it from someone else. Your mom would . . .” she begins and then momentarily breaks off. What about his mother? His mother is actually quite cut up that they are no longer together; could some news about his mother have reached Elizabeth first? He believes his parents have Elizabeth’s cell number, but his phone is on him and there is signal, so he resents whatever mysterious bond she might have with his mother—now placing him at some momentary disadvantage.

  “Did something happen . . . to her?” he asks and she adamantly shakes her head. “Oh, God, nothing like that, Luc, no, no!” And then the ridiculous thought: Could Elizabeth be pregnant? She’d been taking birth control, or so she claimed. Scanning her face again, he somehow can tell it’s some other news that has nothing to do with his mother or Elizabeth. She exudes almost righteous patience. She used to show up outside his off-campus apartment in acute distress and text him to say she needed to speak to him.

  “I meant to say your mom probably already knows. There’s a rumor is going around the campus,” she says at last. “About the Robert Frost farm. Have you heard it?”

  “No. What about it?”

  She pauses and takes a deep breath. “It’s been vandalized.”

  “How bad?”

  “I don’t know. I was told furniture got broken and there’s shattered glass everywhere.” She hesitates and then continues, “Like a bunch of kids apparently went there to drink or something and then got out of control.”

  “Really?” Luc croaks.

  “A fire was even started, but then I guess it got put out.”

  Luc slowly kneels on the ice and drops his stick. “That’s crazy,” he says at last, nervously rubbing his hands through his long wavy hair, the other three staring at him. Luc’s maternal grandmother, now deceased, had been a Carleton college librarian whom Robert Frost befriended. They’d maintained a lively correspondence; she’d been given several signed editions of the author’s poetry, all of which his mother proudly displays on the bookshelf in the family room. Both his grandmother and his mother were experts on Frost’s life, on his work, and up until recently his mother had been a docent at the Frost farm. Time after time Luc had been ordered to bring the author’s books and correspondence and photographs to show-and-tell at elementary school. It had always been a burden to stand up in front of his classmates and recite all the Frost facts.

  Now he thinks that his mother, a Carleton alum, will lose it when she hears, if she hasn’t heard already. Luc says to Elizabeth. “Did you call her?”

  A pained look crosses her face. “Of course not. I would never call her.”

  “Get the facts first, Cool Hand, before you upset the apple cart,” McKinnon warns, employing the nickname he gave Luc—McKinnon the only one of them to have seen the film. McKinnon has taken off his skullcap, his military-cut bright red hair slick to his skull. The nerdiest of the three and a polymath, McKinnon was accepted to Harvard but decided—because he is such a rabid skier—to attend this venerable college in the sticks. They all look up to McKinnon.

  The path back to campus winds through dense evergreen woods. Taft, with thick hair and the dark features of a Spaniard, the quietest, most introverted—and perhaps most troubled—of the three, and McKinnon stroll ahead, assuming that Luc and Elizabeth might want to talk. It’s the courteous thing for them to do, but nothing more to say about the doomed relationship other than the obvious platitudes: that they want different things, and she understandably demands emotional fidelity. This was after she figured out he was suffering over Sam.

  As they reach the first exterior lights of the campus, Luc is feeling overheated and unzips his jacket. Elizabeth remarks a bit snidely, “Don’t you wear his ring anymore?”

  He clutches his throat, feels the nakedness at his neck, then a piece of the filigree chain dangling precariously on his shirt collar like a fine, broken bone. He panics. And remembers the pinging sound, and it occurs to him that the ring must have broken free of the chain, fallen on the frozen surface of the pond and bounced somewhere. Now he has to go back to find it; leaving it there might bring him—well, bad luck, not to mention misery.

  “Hey, McKinn,” he calls ahead.

  His roommate dances a few steps and then whirls around with a grin. “Yo.”

  When you get home, can you get that big flashlight? Leave it on my desk.”

  “Sure, bud, what do you need it for?”

  “Lost something—so just do it, okay?” His voice is obviously wound tight, and McKinnon knows him well enough not to press.

  When they arrive at the entrance of Elizabeth’s dorm, she turns to him. “I actually have a flashlight in my room. I’ll lend it to you.”

  Flustered, he glances up at the sky. “Nah, it’s okay.”

  “It’s small and really powerful,” she insists almost angrily. “Wait here just a second. Be right back.” He knows she must be glad he lost the ring, so why is she offering to help him find it?

  As she rushes into the boxy, gray brick building, eyeing her slim athletic body he thinks: Shame that she doesn’t move on to any number of the kids who were always so envious when we were together. But then thinks that one of the illogical conceits of love was detecting ambivalence and feeling compelled to stay with a person in order to disprove it. Elizabeth returns with one of those LEDs the size of a small pastille box, hands it to him. “I’ll bring it back,” he promises.

  “No rush, ” she says flatly. Leaning forward, Luc hugs her quickly, awkwardly, and hurries off toward the Campus Security Office on South Main Street.

  Walking along the cold empty lanes of the college, he remembers the last time he made love to Elizabeth, the incorporeal sensation of looking down on his own body, on his ass pumping mechanically and joylessly. He went soft inside her, the first time he’d ever gone soft inside a woman, and they’d had to stop and he’d made excuses for it, said he wasn’t feeling well.

  And afterward they were just lying there in the gloom of his bedroom. A late afternoon at the tail end of January, and trying to transit the awkwardness of their failed coupling, they began talking about how, even though the winter was young, the light was fracturing differently on the snow, wasn’t quite as harsh, and days already seemed to be getting longer, or were they both imagining it, even hoping for it? They were talking about taking the shuttle bus up Route 125 and going skiing together at the Snow Bowl the next day and Luc wanting to try a pair of skis one of his buddies who wrote for a skiing website had lent him. But he was so incredibly sad as he lay there, his whole body pulsing in distress. And that’s when she turned to him in the midst of their idle chatter.

  “Something’s obviously wrong. What is it, Luc?”

  He frowned and said unconvincingly, “Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.”

  “That’s what you always say, and every time you say it, I know it’s not true. I know there is something.” She sat up in bed and then gently turned his head, focused out the window, toward her. And the rueful look in her eyes. “There is someone. You’re thinking about somebody else. You love somebody else,” she accused at last, the first and only time she’d ever say it.

  The confirmation came in the simple fact that he kept his eyes averted when he replied, “No. That’s wrong.” And yet he knew how transparent his denial probably appeared to her.

  And then she reached over to the dresser and grab
bed the college ring with the date “1990,” which was carefully folded up in the chain from which he wore it and which she’d insisted he take off. “I’m not stupid,” she said, banging the ring and the chain against his naked shoulder. “I mean, you’re wearing a man’s ring around your neck. Why aren’t you wearing it on your finger?”

  After Luc broke it off with Sam, he couldn’t bear to put the ring in a dark drawer. So he’d kept it tight against his body like a hair shirt, a constant reminder that he’d killed something rare and beautiful. “I just don’t,” was all he said in response.

  “That ring is from 1990. Means he’s old. Way old. Old enough to be your father!” And then her fury finally unleashed. “Why are you even with me if you can’t be honest?” she hissed. “About him.”

  He was gazing at her now. “I don’t want to be with anybody else, Elizabeth. And once you get tired of this, of me—”

  “No! You’re the one who’s tired of it.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not. And I won’t be.”

  “Luc,” she said, “you need to tell me if you want to be with somebody else.”

  He shook his head and said, “No. . . I don’t know.”

  She pressed, “That’s clearly a yes. Which means you’ve been with him already. And you don’t know where he’s been when he’s not with you.”

  “He hasn’t been with anybody.”

  “You can’t be sure—”

  “I am sure.” Which, he has to admit, was not completely true.