Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  Eleanor is stunned into silence, her head muddled with clashing reactions to this news. “So you think Luc is involved with a man?”

  “I think he was involved with a man before we got together, and I think he’s still involved with that man now.”

  The girl can no longer hide it; her face is flickering with anger and Eleanor knows that even though alternative sexuality is more widely accepted these days, Luc rejecting Elizabeth for another man is probably still an assault to her self esteem. Eleanor explains that she and Giles have wondered about Luc, bewildered why he never would have said anything. “It’s not like we’re these . . . I don’t know, rednecks who’d disown him.”

  “A deep flush has suffused Elizabeth’s face. “Do you remember when Luc brought me to visit that one weekend, when I asked you where his friend Sam went to school?”

  Eleanor nods. “I do. And I think I said I didn’t know any friend named Sam.”

  “Well, I asked you that because I once saw a yellow Post-it Note on his desk . . . he didn’t realize I saw, and it said . . .” She recites from what has clearly been committed to memory. “‘Sam, why do I think you can see into me? Why do I hate that? But why do I love it, too?’”

  The words are a jolt. And Eleanor’s first flash is: Can they even be Luc’s words? Is he this passionate a man? He often strikes her as so buttoned up. But then, it occurs to her that sometimes the most passionate people are—buttoned up.

  With reluctance, Elizabeth informs her, “I happen to know there isn’t a single student at Carleton named Samantha. I checked. There are plenty of male Sams, obviously.”

  Wow, and just a little obsessive, Eleanor concludes with some concern.

  “Did you know that the ring is dated 1990?”

  Eleanor stares back at her and now begins to realize. “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, that’s the probably the year his guy graduated from Carleton.”

  Even though she finished Carleton College in 1985, Eleanor finds herself momentarily unable to even calculate the age of somebody who’d graduated in 1990. But then she does with a shiver: fifty years old, more or less. Thrown off kilter by this revelation, she finds herself saying, “Last summer I had this feeling that Luc was having a relationship. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all. I sensed he wasn’t at a friend’s house. And he was always vague. Lying doesn’t come easy to him.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong, Mrs. Flanders!” Elizabeth says a bit too forcefully for Eleanor’s liking. “Luc is a liar. For example, he lied to me about that ring. He told me he bought it from his friend who transferred to Tufts.”

  Eleanor feels obliged to admit, “He told me the same story.”

  In fuming silence, Elizabeth nervously runs her finger along the edge of her white paper cup. Then, with an abrupt gesture, she swills the last dregs of her coffee and sets the cup to one side. “If you saw how Luc was last night when he realized he lost the ring, if you watched his face as I did . . . you’d know exactly how he was feeling. And that’s why I couldn’t sleep last night. Because I saw this . . . devotion in him, devotion toward someone else that he’s never shown to me, and it makes me feel so awful.” Tears glaze her eyes. “And I just want to get over it. I just want to get over him.”

  February 12; Route 23, Donner’s Field, Weybridge, Vermont; 20 degrees, light snow

  Daylight is gathering at edge of the sky. For so many hours he’s been caught in a crippled vagueness, walking slowly along Lemon Fair Road in the early morning, every foot of snow and ice crossed a sort of triumph. The four-mile journey to warmth and safety seems longer than the longest White Mountain hikes he’s made up Jefferson and North Kinsman, Moosilauke and Madison, all distant summer memories now. The chill at these mountain summits was tropical in comparison to the agony of this penetrating and punishing cold that seeps into bone ache, making him want to sleep off the pain even though he knows that sleeping will probably kill him.

  Trying to remember how he came to this place, Luc stops and looks across the wind-blown, snow-bound meadow that unfolds for thousands of acres in flat white patchwork toward Snake Mountain, which stands between him and the shores of Lake Champlain. He faintly recalls falling and struggling and waking up and feeling compelled to walk through curtains of snow and sleet and the brutish gales rising up around him. He remembers the tamarack trees bent over with their mighty plumes of white. Miraculously, the night is almost over and he is now looking at the cobbled split rail fence of a farm’s perimeter.

  He’s woozy from his fall on the ice, flooded with misimpressions. Has it been a long march, or did he actually get a ride here? He just can’t recall precisely but knows somebody has been in his company. Was it more than one person? He’s just not remembering. But he wants to believe that Sam somehow came to him, even made love to him, when he lay on the ice back at Skylight Pond. Why couldn’t he have told Sam that he now craves the warmth of what he rejected, the warmth that made him feel the peril of his own neediness? Sam’s body heat would keep him alive if only he could find him again in the midst of this endless wilderness of wax.

  And then he spies the enormous pinwheel hay bale left out in a field, a bale that should have been gathered in months ago. It looks broken apart, and he can see fresh yellow tendrils of straw and then a curious gaping hole inside it. Had an animal dug it out, a bear perhaps? Dig in, climb in, curl up and try to stay warm—this is what the survival guides would suggest for these extreme circumstances.

  As Luc musters all his strength to climb over the plowed wing of snow and hobbles toward refuge, he hears the muted music of the Millstone Creek, which runs just beyond him. Closer he sees that the hole in the bale is fairly large, maybe even hospitable enough to shelter him without his hollowing it out much more. But then he wonders: could this be a place where he might wither and die? Could this be a trap?

  * * *

  The thought of a trap recalls a movie Sam insisted they see called In the Bedroom, the title referring to the rear of a lobster trap in which a pair of caught lobsters, after a time, turn fierce and try to slaughter each other. While they were watching it, Luc was shocked to hear the Eastern Orthodox choral music that he’d been hallucinating intermittently since the hockey accident, actually playing in the movie. He grabbed the remote and stopped the film and confessed to Sam about hearing religious melodies when they’re together, that he’d begun hearing them after his helmet came off during the hockey game, after his head hit the goal post. He described his blackout, the strange syncopated lighting and rising up above his own body in a kind of euphoria, looking down on the officials and the medics crowded around him, watching himself being carried to the bench, and then the delicious daydream ending with a slam, and falling back into the uncertain world of concussions and CT scans, scrambled thoughts, the daydream lock. How the doctors diagnosed mild epilepsy brought on by the shock of the injury. How they said there was nothing he could do but wait it out, how they said perhaps his body would slough off the disturbances like an unwanted electrical skin.

  “How come you’ve never really told me about this?” Sam asked, looking perplexed.

  “I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t want anyone to think I’m not normal.”

  “But it sounds more like a gift, being able to hear that music.”

  “It’s not a gift. Not when it comes on involuntarily.”

  Sam considered this for a moment and then said, “You might have gone to an Orthodox church when you were small, heard that swell of music and just don’t remember.”

  Luc disagreed. “If music made that kind of impression on me, I think I would definitely remember it.”

  Sam actually went out and bought the choral music, thinking that if Luc actually listened to it, his auditory hallucinations somehow would become easier to bear. Luc felt nervous the first time they heard the recording and worried that the melodic passages might bring on
one of his dissociative states. But the music sounded no different than when he hallucinated it. And it didn’t make him hallucinate.

  But then, shortly after they begin listening, Sam began suffering from his own fit, of atrial fibrillation, his heart fluttering as the real music swelled through the house. Luc lay next to him and stroked his chest with calm resolution, knowing this affection would help the episode to pass. This strong, vital man momentarily incapacitated, and Luc wanting so much to take care of him, thinking this is what it must be like when carnal love ripens into devotion. And Sam accepted him, and unlike Luc’s father, Sam didn’t try to change or criticize him. But then, as Luc laid his head on Sam’s chest, as he listened to the discordant rhythms of his lover’s erratically beating heart, he grew petrified of losing him, afraid that their powerful love possibly might be compromised by the unforeseen.

  Now, nestling into his makeshift straw shelter, Luc removes a glove and tamps some of the snow down into an icy curd and with a finger scrawls his lover’s three-letter name. And then he notices a deep purple and yellow bruise blooming where his palm ends and blotching its way over his wrist. He pushes back the sleeve of his jacket to see the dark lesion’s territory continuing up his arm. It frightens him enough to take his phone out of his pocket, to call someone—his mother, or maybe even Sam—but the battery appears to have died.

  February 18; Police Headquarters, Carlton, Vermont; 17 degrees, windy

  Helen Kennedy is a small-framed woman with deep blue eyes and brush-cut silver hair. She arrives at Jenkins’s office with two cups of coffee and sets them down on the corner of his desk. With an index finger, she wipes a black-and-white framed photograph of Mount Mansfield that is hanging on his wall. “You need to spruce up this place,” she says, glancing around the small, windowless room. Jenkins grunts an unintelligible reply. “That light enough for you?” she asks about his coffee, grabbing and taking a sip of hers, which she drinks black.

  Glancing at his steaming cup, Jenkins says, “Um. Caffeine.”

  “Well, don’t expect miracle brew. The coffee machine is still on the fritz.”

  “What about the new one that’s incoming?”

  “Incoming probably means two years from now.” Sitting down in the chair next to his desk, Kennedy says, “Got some good news. An ID on the DNA we found at the Frost farm. Something was in the database.” Jenkins now faces her and he can see the trace of a grin that is trying to cross her freckled Celtic face but that she suppresses. “It points to a pair of twins, two forty-one-year-old guys living down in Bethel. Howard and Mark Newcombe. Who once got booked on a drug bust.”

  “Bethel, the meth hub of Vermont?”

  “But they didn’t get busted for meth. It was steroids.”

  Jenkins is surprised. “Steroids, huh?”

  “Never told you this, but my brother used to do and deal them. And he eventually got slammed for it.”

  “I assume all this is from Barb Kessler?”

  “We just got off the phone. Apparently, these guys had/have a very small, select clientele. Some hard-core cyclists. Some gym rats. By the way, they work out at V-tech in Randolph. Gimme your keyboard.” With a few strokes, Kennedy brings up a picture of a pair of tanned, bodybuilder-jacked twins dressed in identical flannel shirts cut off at the shoulder. They have huge biceps and wear their hair in long, blond dreadlocks.

  “They hardly look Vermonty,” Jenkins says. “With those fake tans, they look like they walked off Venice Beach. Blond Rastafarians.”

  “You’re close,” Kennedy says. “They’re actually Trustafarians.”

  “Come again?”

  “They live on an inheritance. And not a family one either. Some rich geezer whose farm they lived on left them a shitload of money.”

  “So if they have money, why do they sell steroids?”

  “Barb says they do it for sport. I guess they like seeing other guys get big.”

  “Wait, are they gay?”

  “No. Not according to Barbara. She knows one of their ex-girlfriends.”

  “So what the bleep were they doing breaking into Frost’s house?”

  “Well, Frost was a rock star poet with lots of followers. And probably also lots of detractors.”

  “They broke in because they hated his poetry?”

  “I don’t know! Maybe the poet was secretly bonking their mother. I guess we’ll find out when we find them. One of the neighbors saw them a week ago throwing duffel bags in the back of their camouflage Jeep Wrangler and presumably heading out of town.”

  “Camouflage Jeep, huh?”

  “I fed them to the DMV and they gave me the plate number. I just put out an APB.”

  “So I guess we sit tight.”

  Pausing a moment, Kennedy says, “I was actually thinking that maybe Mrs. Flanders, knowing chapter and verse about Robert Frost, might have something on these jacked-up twins.”

  “Let’s ask her.”

  February 18; Route 89 North, Vermont; 13 degrees, light winds, snow

  I-89 north of White River Junction has always been desolately majestic: long stretches of uninhabited conservation land, gentle rising cerulean mountains softly contoured with snow. Giles is driving and Eleanor looks out onto the mantle of snow, imagining what lies beneath it: frozen fields flayed down from late summer haying, the remains of small animals that have perished trying to cross a desert of ice. On the side of the highway she sees the yellow cautionary signs for moose crossing. Medical care may have evolved since her childhood, but if your car strikes a moose at more than 50 miles an hour, your life will be forever altered. If you live, paraplegia, and if you die . . . ?

  Once afraid of colliding with such brutally dense animals, she cares little now. For in death there would at least be a disconnection from this inverted daytime nightmare that is only alleviated when she drugs herself to sleep.

  She is now one of those mothers waiting for news about a missing child. That Luc had gone missing once before does little to dull the persistent worry that he may never return. The last time was in summer only a year and a half after his injury when he was still suffering frequent headaches, spells of feeling withdrawn and alienated.

  Since his first disappearance, Luc has consistently promised to be in frequent touch. Aware of the potential risks of driving with anybody who is drinking, he reassures them that he would never put himself in this sort of situation. He always promises that if he ever gets stuck in a place where nobody is sober, he’ll call—no matter what time of night—for a ride home. Which is why this disappearance seems so out of the blue, and why she can only conclude that something or someone lured him away from Skylight Pond. Most likely Sam Solomon.

  Back on Sunday, when he’d been missing for only forty-eight hours, Giles had said to her, “I mean, think about it. If, like Elizabeth suggests, he’s been having a secret affair with an older guy, he probably would be off the grid whenever they were together. So maybe they just recently got back together. And . . . I don’t know right now are celebrating their reunion. So before we report him missing, why don’t we try and figure out who and where this . . . Sam guy is?”

  With great reluctance, but knowing they had little choice, they invaded Luc’s bedroom. Luc had never been the sort who liked putting up posters, and his only wall adornment was a series of drawings he’d done as a high school senior of the Calvin Coolidge birthplace over in Plymouth, various photorealistic studies of vintage stone-and-wood buildings and rambling, magisterial barns. Approaching his son’s mounted and framed creations, Giles studied them. “These are really pretty good, you know.”

  Luc’s desk was decoupaged with a brightly colored map of the world. Cautiously they began to open its drawers, surprisingly neat inside, with stacks of sports gear catalogs, several antique rulers, tiny hubcaps from his miniature car collection, a stack of Flash Gordon comic books, golf balls and tees,
old schedules for high school soccer seasons, all the talismans of a young man, certainly nothing to give any hint of sexual preference—no porn magazines or DVDs. But then beneath a driver’s education manual, they found a sketchpad with all the pages torn out.

  “Must be one of his old ones,” Giles said.

  “No, look.” Eleanor pointed to the flip side of the cover, and a series of recent dates: 10/3/13; 10/19/13; 11/3/13; 11/27/13; 12/5/13; 12/12/13; 12/21/13. “I thought he’d stopped drawing,” she said sadly.

  “I guess he hasn’t.”

  Below the sketchpad lay a book of colored plates by Caravaggio. Eleanor glanced meaningfully at Giles, who nodded his approval, and they acknowledged a certain irony in finding this, the great painter able to invest religious images with a kind of male eroticism unequaled in any other artist, including Michelangelo. She flipped through it and found a small, penciled scrawl of notes under several paintings: “Crazy light, wow. If only I could do something like this. He’s rogue. Loves men but a real man.” And then a whole entry under the painting of The Death of Saint Lucy in the duomo of Siracusa. “My favorite. Got to get to Sicily. Naked men digging a grave, never saw that before. Got to be the best painting about death I’ve ever seen.”

  Reading the short description, Giles nodded and agreed, “He’s probably right. Probably is the best painting about death.”

  “Did you ever discuss it with him?”

  Giles shakes his head. “No. We never did.”

  “Maybe you should have!”

  Giles turned to her, his features pinched and his silvery dark hair cascading into his eyes. “Trying to be an artist. Spending four years at art school and then having to make it in a world that’s a lot more competitive now than it was when I graduated. Is that what we want for him?”

  “Perhaps he could use the training to do something practical but more meaningful. Like graphic design. I would hate to see him do what his friends are doing: going to work for some money organization or some consulting firm. You’ve always been so . . . black and white about education.” Black and white about where their children went to school.