“You were the last person to see Luc Flanders before he went to the pond.”
“Okay.”
“Was there anything about him that day that struck you as odd or off?”
“Well, I hardly meet him before this.” Thornhill clings to using present tense. Strange, because up until this moment her English seemed perfectly correct.
“I thought you told Randy James you’d met him before.” Jenkins refers to a personal friend of his who until recently had worked for Carleton Campus Security.
“Oh, so you know Randy?” She’s clearly jostled. “I didn’t realize.” She takes a deep breath. “Anyway, hardly a meeting, but I spoke to him briefly when the girl who . . . lost some of her intimate garments.”
“You’re talking about Portia Dominic?” Jenkins asks, tilting his head toward the conference room.
Momentarily ruffled, Thornhill says, “Yes . . . I didn’t know if you knew who it was. We have campus policies here to discuss these things with outsiders as little as possible.”
“Oh really? Even if it’s with a local detective investigating a possible crime?” Jenkins asks, incredulous. Thornhill stares at him until he continues, “So back to Luc Flanders. On the night of February eleventh, when Luc Flanders came to you, what was the gist of your conversation with him?”
“About the break-in at the farm. That’s what he comes to know. I don’t give him much information, again because of policy.”
“Was he . . . bothered?”
“Not after I tell him the provost calls his mother about it.” She pauses. Jenkins is finding her mixing of past and present tense truly curious. “And then he checks his phone to see if there is a message. He said he would wait to hear from his mother. And that’s it. He left. And I know nothing more than that.”
The problem with questioning foreign speakers of English, particularly those who’d pretty much mastered the language, was that you couldn’t really analyze syntax or word choice in any sort of forensic way. While still with the FBI, Jenkins had spearheaded a course in analyzing the diction as well as the writing style and substance of anybody the bureau questioned. It was a particular interest of his; he’d been keen to hire more linguistics experts such as the one now studying Luc’s diary and his emails to Sam Solomon. A subset of linguistics geared at forensics is now taught at a minute number of universities and criminal justice colleges. One thing he’s learned: a word that might set off alarms with a native speaker of English could very well be insignificant when uttered by a foreigner such as this woman, who clearly came to the language much later in life. Around fiftyish, she probably emigrated to the U.S. in her twenties. And while (ironically) her English has more dimension than the vast majority of native speakers, the text of what she says will, because of the natural influence of her mother tongue, be more difficult to break down.
As he walks back toward the conference room, Jenkins takes out his phone and sends Kennedy a text. Ask Randy James about Greta Thornhill at campus security. I think she is sitting on something.
A text comes back almost immediately. Do you want me to try her myself?
Yeah, why not?
Portia is done speaking to her father by the time Jenkins returns to the conference room. There is a fury of wind belting the side of the building and the clapboards are crackling in submission to its force. Jenkins looks out the window at the frenzied weather. “Crappy out there,” he says. “And warm and . . . pretty cramped in here, isn’t it?”
She looks around, her face wrinkling. “Kind of.”
“Everything okay with your dad?” Jenkins says.
“Everything is fine,” Portia replies curtly.
“So before we go back to Elizabeth, I need to speak to you about something else,” Jenkins tells her.
“Me?” Portia says a bit haughtily.
“Yes,” Jenkins says. “Having to do with the incident back in October when . . .” He pauses, wanting to frame his question with some delicacy. “When your garments were stolen,” Jenkins clarifies. “Greta Thornhill from Campus Security spoke briefly to Luc Flanders.” Out of his peripheral vision he can spy Elizabeth Squires shifting uncomfortably in her chair. “Was he actually in your dorm room?”
“Yeah, he was there. But he dropped in to see . . . Li . . . Elizabeth, not me.”
Pivoting quickly toward Elizabeth, Jenkins says, “So you were good friends with Luc back before you got involved with him?”
“I’ve known him since freshman year.”
“She’s always had a thing for him,” Portia says confidently. Elizabeth clucks her tongue as though in protest and Portia insists, “Well, you told me you did.”
Jenkins says, “So Elizabeth, when did you start to suspect that Luc might be gay?”
“I think any woman these days wonders . . . if a guy isn’t really into it.”
“And Luc wasn’t into it?”
Elizabeth ponders this for a moment. “While we were dating, he was always preoccupied with something, not quite completely with me in the moment. That’s what I mean.”
He turns to Portia. “What about you?”
“Oh, I thought he was gay, gay, gay, from the moment I saw him. Or pretty close to it.”
“And why is that?”
“Because when he looked at me, he didn’t really look at me the same way most guys look at me.”
“What way is that?”
“He looked . . . let’s put it this way: I never saw his eyes anywhere but on my face. He never checked me out, let’s say.”
“Did you share this opinion of him with Elizabeth?” Jenkins asks.
“From the very beginning.” She looks over at Elizabeth. “But you didn’t believe me.”
“No I didn’t,” Elizabeth says with baleful exasperation. She now seems—oddly—more tolerant of her overbearing roommate.
“I don’t think Luc is even into women,” Portia continues. “I think any interest he has is all show. I think he just went through the motions of being with a woman. You know, he wanted to save face among all the jocks.”
“That’s so wrong!” Elizabeth disagrees. “He’s not like that. He wasn’t your boyfriend, so you don’t know!”
Portia looks warily at Jenkins. “Okay, so I don’t know. Don’t listen to me.” Then she says to Elizabeth, “Why am I here anyway?”
“Ask him!” Elizabeth snaps.” But Jenkins wouldn’t dream of interrupting the exchange. Tears are glossing her eyes, and she bows her head for a moment. “Portia,” she says at last, “can you lighten up on me a little? Don’t forget you’re on the outside of this.”
“Well, not really if I’m here with you being questioned. But all right. I’m sorry, Elizabeth.” Portia now sounds sincere, notably using the name her roommate prefers. And then to Jenkins, “Cosmo recently did a survey of women and seventy percent of them said they would never date a man who even one time slept with another man.”
Jenkins takes the opportunity to take two business cards out of his billfold and gives one to each woman. “That’s my contact info if you happen to think of anything else, or just to be in touch for any reason.”
His card threaded between her fingers, Elizabeth is looking up at him. “Do you think Luc might be hurt, or maybe even . . . dead?”
“I’m not at liberty to speculate,” Jenkins says, watching her carefully.
“But if he didn’t take his car, how far could he have gone?”
“Could somebody have given him a ride somewhere?” Jenkins asks her.
Elizabeth frowns at this.
“Somebody could’ve helped him and, then, maybe not helped him.”
“So what are you saying?” Portia asks. “That he could have been, like, kidnapped and taken somewhere?”
Jenkins doesn’t answer for a moment. At last he comments, “Hard to say.”
Elizabeth says, “Or like the last time: living someplace where he doesn’t even remember who he is?”
“Possibly.”
Then her voice goes high-pitched. “Or that somebody . . .” She convulses into tears. Portia moves to comfort her with an arm loosely placed around her neck.
Waiting for Elizabeth to collect herself, Jenkins vaguely wonders what kind of father he would’ve been. Probably because he has seen so much, too many families devastated by gratuitous violence and death, he would be neurotically overprotective. Then Jenkins wonders: Would it be easier for this young woman if she knew Luc were dead? He’d already ended the relationship; she’d become his inadvertent casualty and by now she knew things would never resume. So if he were to die or be killed, then she could assume his barely articulated troubles somehow led him to someplace where he otherwise shouldn’t have been. Perhaps from Elizabeth’s point of view, if she couldn’t have Luc Flanders, neither should anybody else.
Kennedy is waiting for him outside, maintaining a discreet distance from campus security. She nods at the two women as they walk away, watching their backs until she’s sure they are out of earshot.
“You talk to Thornhill?” Jenkins asks.
“Yup.”
“And?”
Kennedy glances at the building. “She’s Charlie Taft’s aunt.”
“Oh really? And I specifically asked her how she knew Luc Flanders,” Jenkins carps.
“But you didn’t ask her how she knew Charlie Taft,” Kennedy points out.
“True,” Jenkins admits.
“When I asked her how she knew Luc and his roommates, she presented her connection to Taft like it was no big revelation.”
“Of course. She’s not going to lie if she knows we’re zeroing in on her.” Jenkins reflects for a moment. “And you didn’t find her a little strange?”
“Maybe a little.”
“My gut is there is something she doesn’t want us to know.”
“Like what?”
“McKinnon does too much of the talking. We have to get Taft alone and see what we come up with. Maybe one of us should take a trip up to his hometown. Poke around.”
“I actually don’t mind going up to Newport,” Kennedy offers. “I need to discover the Northeast Kingdom anyway.”
“I’d do that in the summer, if I were you.”
“But I like bleak. I like bleak winter landscapes.”
“You really do sound like you’re from New Jersey.”
She glances at him sharply. “Hey, I’m proud of my humble beginnings.”
“I know you are. But it’s different up there . . . in the Kingdom,” Jenkins remarks. “It’s insular and folks aren’t so forthcoming.”
“I have my ways of getting people to talk,” Kennedy assures him.
February 21; South Woodstock, Vermont; 10 degrees, snow squalls
Sam dreams he has driven up to a car service station attached to a junk store that he recognizes from an earlier time in his life. Somehow he knows he’s traveled back in time and sees the confirmation of this when he catches a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror: A much brighter, younger, contented, cleanly shaven man is staring back at him. Overjoyed, he jumps out of the car and runs inside the building to find out what year he’s gone back to. But the people manning the counter are Hasidic Jews with top hats and peyot, and when Sam asks them, they tell him in severely broken English that they go by Jewish years, 5770, which he cannot translate. Frantic to find out in which Western year he has ended up, Sam thinks to look at an expiration date on some food item, and opens a freezer to find a pound of frozen hamburger meat stamped with the date “June 17 1999.” Fourteen years in the past. He’s only thirty-four years old, and immediately he thinks: Now only eleven years older than Luc makes me more age appropriate. Until he realizes: Wherever he is, Luc Flanders is only ten.
He awakens to a familiar, desperate desire to be a decade younger, to the quixotic belief that a smaller age gap (say, between men of twenty-three and thirty-nine) would make the relationship more attainable, that if he were thirty-nine, the idea of his getting older, transiting middle age, would be still comfortably in the distance. Winter light is glinting off a foot of new snow, which normally would have him in “powder panic,” up at dawn and packing his car with gear and heading to Killington to get “freshies” as he and all his ski buddies call them. Soft skeins of it fathom the rolling land in drifts and swales. But waking is also remembering that Luc is missing. Gone. Disappeared. He sees the monolithic obstruction of his severely broken leg, the mound of fiberglass pushing up belligerently through the bed sheets. Sam glances out his bedroom window at the new quilting of snow. He is hit with an intense flash of misery. He can’t quite bring himself to believe that Luc might be dead and yet recognizes there is a part of him that is beginning to wrap itself around the staggering idea of it.
He hears a thump and then clicking of toenails against the soft pine floors downstairs. He listens to Panda ascending the stairs with a bit of hesitation. Sam grimaces. “She’s getting old. Soon I’ll have to put a runner on those stairs to make it easier for her to get up and down.” Don’t leave me yet, dog of mine, he thinks. One departure at a time.
Stocky, longish-haired Panda trots into the room, looks hard and penetratingly at him. “There she is,” he coaxes his dog and suddenly feels guilty about a certain lack of affection that he showed Panda after he dropped into a chasm of depression over Luc pulling away. Panda is presently gazing out a large low window at the dark shape of an animal that looks like a porcupine moving steadily along the perimeter of the land where the white blanket ends at a mass of snow-laden trees. She whimpers and barks wildly for ten seconds and then goes quiet and still.
Sometimes after Luc would leave to go back to Carleton, Sam would say to her, “Where’s Luc, Panda? Where is he?” And she’d start to whine. Didn’t go and look for him because she knew he was gone, but just cried. He could say, “Where’s Mom, Panda, where’s Mike, where’s anybody else,” and she wouldn’t peep. But Luc’s name? She’d weep.
* * *
It was a late November afternoon, cold and gray and the wind whistling through the barren trees. Luc was glancing over Sam’s shoulder at the markups on the paper he wrote for his Greek and Roman history course. “Wow, you’re all over it.”
“I taught expository writing,” Sam reminded him and then looked at Luc askance. “Did you get any help writing your essays when you applied to Carleton?”
Luc’s face crimsoned. “No! Why?”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said and returned to his markings on the paper. “You just make some . . . mistakes here.”
“You mean elementary mistakes?”
Sam stroked Luc’s arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”
“I’m not a natural writer. I’m more of a visual person.”
Sam could tell that Luc was still simmering over his question about getting help writing his college essays. “What’s wrong?” he asked gently. Luc didn’t respond at first. “Did I hit a sensitive nerve?”
“Kind of,” Luc said and avoided meeting Sam’s gaze.
“Do you want me to give you some basic pointers about style?”
“Sure.”
“Keep it simple. If possible, try not to use words like ‘currently,’ ‘additionally’ or phrases like ‘very unique.’ The word ‘unique’ doesn’t need a modifier.”
Luc brightened a little. “That makes sense.”
“And then there’s the ‘gerund.’ The gerund can be used in a powerful way. You don’t always use it . . . effectively. ”
Luc studied the sentence. “Okay, I see what you’re saying.”
Sam waited a few moments and then asked, “Didn’t your parents give you any help at all?”
Luc looks up at him, disconcerted. “The few times my father helped me wit
h my papers, he was kind of dismissive of my writing ability.”
“Really?”
“Really! And honestly because he’s an academic, it bugged me.”
“But he teaches fine art,” Sam clarified. “Not writing.”
“He’s still very well educated. And much as I hate to say it, he writes beautifully.”
“That’s the first complimentary thing you’ve said about him. Whenever you talk about your father, you tend to dismiss him.”
“That’s because he always has been too critical of all of us. He’s also having a shit time getting older.”
“So am I, for that matter, having a shit time getting older,” Sam said with a sad smile.
“But I think he envies the fact that I’m young.” Luc looked at Sam quizzically. “You don’t, do you? Envy me my youth?”
Sam shook his head. “Not last time I checked with myself.” And they both laughed. “Although naturally I’ve just wished we were closer in age.”
Luc now pointed to the marked-up essay that lay between them on the desk. “My father had the ability to help me but never bothered. My father discouraged me from pursuing the things I was good at like painting and drawing. My entire life he has said how hard it is to make it as an artist and how he’s afraid of what failure would do to me. Because of what failure did to him.”
“I mean, you can understand that, his fear of you failing? Then again, if you really wanted to be an artist, your father would be unable to discourage you.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“You told me your parents never held a gun to your head when you were choosing your college courses.”
“Obviously your parents never discouraged you,” Luc muttered.
“That’s probably because being an architect is . . . respectable, not to mention quantifiable.”
“Exactly!”
“Hey, it’s not too late. You could go to college for another year and study art and other electives if you wanted.”
“You always go back to that. And it’s just not going to happen,” Luc said gently but emphatically.
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