Because Kennedy knows more about steroids and steroid use, Jenkins had originally suggested that she be in on the questioning. But Kennedy demurred. “I would get nowhere with these guys. They hate women like me. They’re guys’ guys and woman they respect are bodybuilders with small waists and big fake tits.” She’d jammed her hands on her hips and said, “That’s hardly me, is it?”
Jenkins says, “I need you to cooperate. The more you cooperate with me, the less jail time you’re going to do.”
“Jail time?” Mark Newcombe asks.
“Yes, jail time. Your DNA is linked to a crime scene where a historical monument was trashed. So I don’t imagine either of you will deny being at the Frost farm on the night of February tenth.”
Both men stare at him, indignant.
Jenkins says, “Where does your father live?”
“He’s dead,” both say in unison.
“Did he work for Robert Frost?”
The twins glance at each other quickly. “Yes,” Mark Newcombe says.
“For how long?”
“Two years.”
“And when was this?” Jenkins asks.
“Around 1962,” says Howard.
“And they had a dispute?” Jenkins asks.
The twins are silent for a moment. “Seven-hundred-dollar dispute,” Mark says.
“That Frost owed?”
“A tidy sum way back when,” Kennedy remarks to Jenkins.
“Was your father ever able to collect it?”
Howard says, “He tried. Twice. But Frost refused. After that, Dad was too offended to ask again.”
“Frost was a shit,” says Mark Newcombe.
“Nobody ever said he was a model citizen,” Jenkins comments. “Just a great poet. And speaking of poetry, what did you think you’d gain by taking those three books we found in your bag?”
“Because they weren’t his?”
“His?”
“Frost’s?”
“How do you know?”
“Dad lent them to Frost. Dad complained to us that he never got them back.”
“So your father lent books of poetry to the Poet Laureate of the United States.”
“That’s right.”
“Where did they ever meet?”
“At Carleton. Where else?” says Mark.
“Your Dad went to Carleton?”
“Yes.”
“Seeming to pause for a moment in order to collect his thoughts, Jenkins resumes, “So you leased an apartment in Portsmouth. On February thirteenth. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think we wouldn’t find you there? A hundred and fifty miles away?”
“We weren’t thinking about that. We like Portsmouth,” Howard says. “We’re thinking about moving there permanently. We like the water.”
“If you like the water,” Jenkins says, “you can always go shopping up at Lake Champlain.”
“We like ocean.”
“You like ocean,” Jenkins repeats. “So when was the last time you actually were at Carleton College?”
“Been a while,” says Mark.
“Were you in the area of Carleton College on the night of February 1o?”
“No.”
“The night of February eleventh?”
“No.”
“February twelfth?”
Then Mark blurts out, “Look, we don’t know anything about that missing kid.”
“Missing kid?” Jenkins asks. “Who suggested you did?”
Kennedy is carefully watching Howard Newcombe, who is glowering at his brother. “Look at that face,” she remarks.
“Have you ever met this ‘missing kid’?” Jenkins asks.
“We read about him,” Howard says finally. “It was on the news. That he disappeared on February eleventh. From Carleton.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Have you ever actually met ‘this missing kid’?”
“No,” the twins say simultaneously.
“Will you take a polygraph?”
“Not without a lawyer,” Howard says.
“You’ll get your lawyer, no worries about that,” Jenkins tells them.
February 21; Donner’s Field, Weybridge, Vermont; 20 degrees, cloudless night
Luc has sculpted a little cave for himself inside the giant hay bale and he can hear the winds. The wind of sleep. He can no longer feel anything: the temperature, his hunger, his extremities. He has no idea how long he has been here in this hovel, tasting snow, melting it in his mouth to slake his thirst. Just beyond him lie the snowfields, splendid in the shadows of the sun, which slips behind the ragged peak of Snake Mountain. He knows he’s approximately seven miles from campus, and yet feels worlds away from the broken terrain of his own life, of his own heart.
One thing constant is Sam, always Sam circling slowly around him. They’re making love, and while people like Taft and McKinnon joke harshly about men with men and make it sound like depravity, he knows that there is a naturalness to it, a rightness, and that his wiring, his craving again, is almost spiritual in nature. That’s what he could never convey to anyone: that between the right people, irrespective of gender, sex can be a journey, a transcendent journey.
That he was born to receive and not give, although he can give and has given to many women and made them happy. In so doing, he has made himself only partially happy because he knows it’s what a man is biologically supposed to do; celebrated among his friends, bantered about in the locker rooms, and ironically any guy who can resist falling into the trap of a relationship is always worshipped as a hero. Because down the line is marriage with all its constraints and commitments. Until then you were supposed to have a grand old time.
When Luc would come back from those weekends in South Woodstock and McKinnon and Taft greeted him, they always imagined he’d been with an older lady somewhere, a neglected, married woman housebound with a husband who traveled. Sadly he’d never try and contradict them. And yet whenever either of his roommates described a romp with a woman, the adventure, recounted with delight, sounded less significant somehow than his lovemaking with Sam. Luc wondered why this was. Shouldn’t the act of love between two men have less meaning, less power, because it has no real biological imperative? Because it’s not powered by the instinct and compulsion that might, for example, induce penguins to travel hundreds of miles over hostile wintry terrain to mate and have children, or drive soldiers through the perils of war so that they can return home to their brides?
Taft and McKinnon know Luc has disappointed some of the women in his life. They know that he hasn’t cared enough and actually think he’s cool because of it. They think he’s just another guy who likes to keep his distance, a guy who likes to get as much as he can from a woman without promising anything. From his perspective, though, even if women like Janine have taken some of their power back, in general, young men like him still get away with being callow and cavalier. If he were only able to love women the way he should, or the way he loves Sam, he certainly would never have jumped from one woman to the other. Certainly someone like Elizabeth deserved better than what she got from him.
And Sam, of course, deserved better, too. He’d failed Sam. Luc has been asking himself what was it that made him cut loose finally? Could it be that Sam reminded him how fragile the balance is between living and death, between health and illness? And that due to Luc’s accident, due to the strange electric, epileptic spells that plague him, as unforeseen as the spells of atrial flutter that affect Sam, could it be that Luc always felt the possibility of ill-health looming over both of them? Or maybe because Sam, the rugged outdoorsy guy, was about to turn fifty, and that distant decade seemed a lot closer to death than birth. Having been seriously injured once, Luc finds himself preoccupied with how something in the body can suddenly go wrong,
can leave you defenseless, can leave you sometimes without hope.
* * *
During one of Sam’s arrhythmic episodes, to stem his own worry, Luc managed to overcome his fear that doing line drawings would bring on some kind of unwanted aura of his misfiring synapses. While Sam lay on his bed, eyes closed, doing yogic breathing to slow down his fitful heart rate, to bring his cardiac rhythms into a sinus pattern, Luc took out an unlined notepad that he’d found in Sam’s office and began to sketch. It was late fall and Sam, who felt chilled due to his erratic heart, was wearing a fleece jacket and corduroys. But after sketching Sam’s supine form, instead of copying the drapes and folds of his lover’s clothes, Luc drew the naked body he knew so intimately, the body that brought him every pleasure he could possibly want. And after such a long time away from drawing, once Luc began to sketch Sam, the technique and perspective all came back. It was like wheeling a bicycle out of a dark hallway after years of neglect, listening to the tires click, click, click as they venture forward, spewing dust that has collected during months or years of disuse. The ability to balance on two wheels is still there, the knack of steering second nature.
And somehow this one time, Sam’s state of alarm over his heart in revolt subsided enough so that he fell asleep and he gratefully woke up with a slow, regular heartbeat. Sam claimed that whenever the fit of arrhythmia ends and his heart is finally beating as it should, the feeling is euphoric, like finding religion after some sort of revelation.
Luc left the finished drawing on the coffee table downstairs, and later on that evening, when Sam first saw it, he didn’t even make the connection. “Where did you get this?” Sam held up the drawing.
“What do you mean, where did I get it? I did it.”
“Really? This?” Sam’s eyes hungrily reverted back to the drawing, studying it carefully, microscopically, as he would one of his own architectural renderings. “This is really well done.” Then he regarded Luc skeptically. “I thought you didn’t draw anymore.”
Luc shrugged. “I don’t.”
Sam gently waved the drawing at him. “Obviously you do.”
“Special occasion,” Luc said. “I wanted to make sure I drew you in case . . .” He paused, realizing what he was about to say might be misconstrued.
“What, in case I croaked?” Sam asked with a hearty laugh.
Luc looked down at his hands. “Don’t say that.”
“Only thing is this doesn’t really look like me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, yes, I recognize myself, but you’ve . . . made me look a lot better than I do.”
Luc got defensive. “What are you talking about, that’s exactly how you look.”
“You airbrushed your perspective, let’s put it that way.”
“Bullshit I did!”
“You know what I’m saying.” Sam sat down opposite him and reaching over to touch Luc’s arm but gaining nothing because Luc instinctively wrenched away.
“No I don’t,” Luc said at last. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I’m sorry, maybe I should have said the drawing is flattering.”
Luc remained resolute. “No, the drawing is you, Sam. And the problem here is that this world that you’ve lived in, this competitive world of guys rejecting each other because of some—or one—ridiculous physical imperfection, has dented your self-image.”
Now Sam got angry. “Okay, whoa, that’s a lot to insinuate.”
“What do you mean? You’ve already said it yourself. And what bugs me, Sam, is that is the world that’s waiting for me.”
“Well, you have nothing to worry about because you’re lovely and young,” Sam said, sounding flippant.
“What a dumb-ass thing to say,” Luc told Sam with hurt incredulity, and Sam, who at first stiffened angrily in his chair, suddenly went slack, realizing his mistake. “You’re right,” he capitulated, “you’re right. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Luc said. “And you wonder why I still think about being with a woman.”
“Well . . .”
“Women aren’t as critical as men. At least about the physical body. They’re much more forgiving. They don’t sit around and take men apart because their ass is just a little too big or because they walk funny. Other more important qualities matter more.”
“I’d agree with that,” Sam said. “However, if you don’t have the gut desire for the person you’re with, man or woman, you won’t have the patience to put up with them for the long term, for the rest of your life.”
“Sex isn’t the be all and end all,” Luc said.
“I don’t believe you really think that,” Sam told him.
And of course, Sam was right.
February 21; Carleton, Vermont; 15 degrees, high winds
Elizabeth Squires and her roommate, Portia Dominic, meet Jenkins at the campus police office. As far as twenty-two-year-old Carleton coeds go, Elizabeth seems rather typical: flaxen-haired, slight of build and yet with muscular legs that strain against her corporate-looking navy blue pantsuit. Portia, however, is a lovely, exotic woman of mixed race with long limbs and a natural grace of movement.
The two women have arrived punctually, whereas traffic on Route 7 from Burlington delays Jenkins’s entrance by ten minutes. Greta Thornhill, the blowsy Scandinavian woman who was the last person to see Luc Flanders before he disappeared, meets him.
“Ms. Squires and Ms. Dominic are here already. And you are late,” Thornhill tells him with a tone of admonishment that seems to come easily to her. She leads the way into a small whitewashed, book-lined room where Elizabeth and Portia are already seated at an oblong, highly polished cherry wood table. In between them is a yellow legal pad with handwritten notes. Both rise slightly to cordially shake his hand and sit down again. They are trying to maintain an officious, businesslike air, but he can detect nervousness and discomfort radiating like waves of heat in this chilly room that is, like many of the old campus clapboard buildings, draughty and poorly insulated—particularly on such a blustery day. He hesitates a moment before beginning, feeling a bit sorry for Elizabeth as well as for all the people in Luc Flanders’s life, the people who love him.
He begins, “Elizabeth, Will McKinnon mentioned that you took a break for a few days and went home.”
“Yeah, I did.” She looks down at her nail-bitten hands. “It was all getting to me.”
Portia is meeting his gaze with a confident glint in her eyes. “It gets a bit much, you know, people coming at her all the time. Telling her how bad they feel. Parking their sympathy on her.”
Elizabeth shrugs and, sticking out her lower lip, blows some stray tendrils of hair out of her eyes.
“A few things have come up since we last spoke,” Jenkins tells them. “First I want to talk about Luc’s email being accessed the evening of his disappearance.”
“I wouldn’t know what to say about that,” Elizabeth says.
“Understood. But have you any idea of who might have gotten into it?”
Elizabeth states the obvious: that most people would keep this kind of information on either their smart phone or their computer.
“But Luc didn’t really—consistently I should say—carry around a phone like other friends of his, did he?”
Elizabeth replies, “I would have to say more often than not, Luc didn’t use his phone much. If he did have it on him, whenever I spent the night with him, whenever he took off his pants, he left it in there.”
“Do you think he might have been hiding . . .” Jenkins hesitates. “Messages?”
“I do.”
“Did you ever see any messages flash?”
She blushes deeply. “You mean, like from Sam?’”
“Right.”
“Once or twice I saw, ‘Sam.’ I even asked Luc about them, but he lied and said they we
re from a school friend. School friend, Sam,” she says bitterly.
“I mean, you’ve got to know,” Portia breaks in. “That Luc Flanders is quite a liar. He lied about the ring. He lied about who gave him the ring. And until Liz browbeat him into it, he completely lied and covered up his relationship with . . . Sam.” She pronounces the name with almost musical emphasis. “And Luc should’ve told her. He had at the very least a responsibility to inform her that he was having sex with a man right before he and Liz got together.”
Jenkins can’t help agreeing with this, although he does nothing except glance questioningly at Elizabeth. “Your friends call you Liz?”
“No,” she replies. “Portia’s the only one. So please don’t get in the habit,” she instructs Jenkins. “Anyway, Luc told me eventually about Sam.”
“Eventually,” Portia repeats with sarcasm.
He’s proven right. “Okay, enough, Portia!” Elizabeth retorts. “You might be easy on somebody, too, if you fell in love with them.”
“As if I haven’t?” Portia replies.
At this, Jenkins hears a phone vibrating. “It’s mine,” Portia says, grabbing a blue canvas book bag. With a look of annoyance, she says, “Can we hang on just a second?”
“Of course. Take your time.”
Portia reaches into her bag, at first looking inside and then glancing up at the ceiling and feeling for the phone, which continues to vibrate. At last it’s in her hands, and she shrugs and says, “Hi,” and then to Jenkins, “It’s my dad.”
“Go ahead and speak to him,” Jenkins tells her. “I’ll take a little break. I have to speak to the lady in the office anyway.”
Portia nods and says to her father, “Hang on, the detective is just going outside.”
Greta Thornhill looks startled when Jenkins arrives at the chest-high counter. “That was very quick,” she says.
“She had to take a phone call.”
“Ah, okay.”
“But I also wanted to speak to you.”
Her face darkens for just an instant before she turns to him with a calculating look. “How can I help?”
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