Black Diamond Fall

  Kennedy says, “Don’t worry—we’ll be in touch very soon.”

  After they watch the two men file out of the gymnasium, Kennedy turns to Jenkins, “That was brilliant about seeing the Jeep near Skylight Pond.”

  “You think it worked?”

  “Perfectly,” Kennedy says.

  February 22; Norwich, Vermont; Hanover, New Hampshire; 21 degrees, some sun

  Eleanor is reading about white snowy orchards and early blossoms felled and scattered by a freak spring freeze; birch trees as objects of ornamental beauty; black alders dying out at the edge of a forest from lack of light. It seems that Frost believes in God, but Eleanor has never been sure. “For this is love and nothing else is love, That which it is reserved for God above.” The poet’s mother was a devout Christian, but it’s hard to tell that beyond the physical spirituality of his intimacy with the outside word, if Frost was actually a believer.

  She marks the volume with a dried sprig of calendula, stands up, walks over to the stove and turns the flame down on a boiling pot of sycamore bark, the water now stained a deep vermillion. She will use the solution for itchy rashes: for eczema, for poison ivy. In the sink there is a crystal highball glass, the sign that Giles has slipped back into steady drinking. These days he rarely emerges from his side of the house, except to fulfill his teaching obligations at Dartmouth. Leaving his study, he will make an effort to walk upright and correctly, and Eleanor figures he has the presence of mind to at least remain sober while tending to his art classes. Then again, in view of what has happened to them, the dean’s warning about the attrition of enrollment is probably all but forgotten.

  I dwell in a lonely house I know

  That vanished many a summer ago

  And left no trace but the cellar walls

  And a cellar in which the daylight falls.

  This, her state of being—her life a vanishing point beyond the day-to-day grinding movements of survival. She has dropped ten pounds from barely eating. She can no longer look at herself in the mirror; her face sags, drawn from lack of sleep, from acute uncertainty. Friends have told her about salutary books written by brave mothers whose children vanished or died, but she can’t bring herself to read them. Her life feels as desolate as a wartime city bombed from the height of its grandeur into a crater of specters and ashes. All alone in the house where her inebriate husbands sleeps narcotically in another wing, she wonders how she’ll get through yet another day. Luckily today will be different. Eleanor glances at her watch. Janine will be disembarking from a bus in Hanover in just under an hour, her arrival only a faint promise of some sort of mainstay.

  Her daughter has insisted upon taking a two-week emergency leave from her job, and her arrival from New York City coincides with today’s article in the Valley News—SOLOMON PROVES WHEREABOUTS IN CARLETON STUDENT’S DISAPPEARANCE—with a photograph of Sam in his study looking bewildered, his faithful black-and-white dog at his feet. Sam is a handsome, rugged-looking man, more or less the same age as Giles but far fitter and younger-looking. At least the newspaper has been sensitive enough not to publish any more pictures of her son. Eleanor had known the article was coming; they’d received a phone call from a fact-checker.

  The interview, reiterating everything Jenkins already has told them, is filler around a spanking new fact: that on February eleventh, Sam Solomon received a phone call from his dog-sitter at 6:28 p.m. This left him without enough time to drive northward to Carleton from his home in South Woodstock and then head down to the Boston airport, where he arrived at ten o’clock that evening. Eleanor still can’t quite believe that Sam played absolutely no crucial part in her son’s disappearance.

  The bus stop is next to the Hanover Inn, and Eleanor and Giles meet Janine at the drop-off point. Their daughter descends the steps of the Dartmouth Coach with a bit of a head-tossing feminine swagger, totting a small rollaway suitcase and wearing a sleek urban-looking backpack. Eleanor, with a shock, can see her own drawn features re-etched in the taut lineless face of her tall, rangy, athletic-looking child, who approaches them with tears freezing on her reddened cheeks as she wipes them away with the back of her mittened hand. They all embrace for a moment, and out of the corner of her eye, Eleanor can spy bystanders looking on.

  The fifteen-minute drive home along the Connecticut River is ruminatively quiet. Each of them is reflecting that the space in the backseat next to Janine is where Luc should be—as he was for all the road trips they took up to Prince Edward Island and out to Jasper National Park. Their family, reduced to three, has been crippled into a lopsided formation. Most of the river is snowed in, encrypted in a grayish craze, but there are welters of dark wet spots where the currents prevent ice crystals from forming—a reminder of the unstable state of the ice on Skylight Pond before the unexplained events that pulled Luc away from everyone. At one point Eleanor turns around to find Janine staring out the window, perhaps making similar connections.

  “I have the Valley News article for you,” Eleanor says.

  “I saw it.” Janine is still gazing out the window. “I was sent a link to it and read it on the bus.” She hesitates. “Didn’t mention this, but Pete Skalski called me in New York to ask me for some clarifications.”

  “Why didn’t you mention it?” Giles asks sharply.

  “I made the decision not to, Dad, okay? And I think I was right. It was difficult enough to know that the piece was appearing. And I have to say I’m actually glad it was by him.”

  Eleanor turns around in her seat to meet her daughter’s calculating gaze. “So you don’t think a college friend of Sam’s would be biased?”

  “Sympathetic, yes. Biased, no. I mean, Sam is going through a lot, too. I think he needs a bit of a break.”

  Eleanor turns back around and looks ahead into the monochromatic winter landscape. “I wanted to write to him. But I didn’t.”

  “Mom,” Janine says, “you know I believe Sam is innocent. That if Luc has come to any harm, Sam has nothing to do with it. It’s got to be somebody else and that’s the hardest part, because nobody has any idea of who it might be.”

  Eleanor can see Giles nodding. Their elder child always seems to have the final word on things. And she concedes—momentarily—that usually when Janine is certain, Janine is rarely wrong.

  February 23; Burlington, Vermont; 9 degrees, sleet

  A somewhat assiduous chef, Jenkins has concocted a Cassoulet confection of white beans, Vermont pork sausage and duck confit and has left it smoldering in a ceramic Crock-Pot. “Would never peg a cop for a gourmet cook,” Connie had ribbed him when they first met. But soon discovered (by her own admission) that he was generally more cultured than she was. Knew two other languages, for example.

  They sit silently at the dining table, a bottle of Chianti in its festive straw basket marking the distance between them.

  At last she says, “It’s been a while since I’ve seen a case preoccupy you to such a degree.”

  Somewhat surprised at her observation, Jenkins sits there considering all the disparate pieces that don’t make sense, not just Luc Flanders’s disappearance, but the bizarre car theft that seemed orchestrated to frame Sam Solomon, the Carleton College security guard concealing her connection to one of Luc’s roommates, the possible involvement of the bodybuilder twins in Luc’s disappearance as well as in the vandalism. “I feel like I’m falling down on this one,” he says at last

  Rolling her nearly empty wineglass between her fingers, Connie says with a frown, “You’ve said that before. You don’t seem to realize that being in a state of . . .well, near despair is the way you work, the way you grope toward a solution. But you don’t usually let work creep this far into your life.” Wondering if he welcomes the distraction of work now more than ever, Jenkins grabs the wine bottle and pours the rest of it into her glass. “No, have some of it,” she says, stubbornly pouring back half into his glass. “I w
on’t sleep well if I have more.”

  “Okay.” He takes a sip.

  “So what is it about this one in particular?”

  “I don’t know precisely. Kennedy and I for once don’t quite agree. She thinks that the two lovers met up the night Flanders disappeared. And that Solomon might be lying.”

  “But you believe him?”

  “I do.”

  “Because?”

  “My gut. Kennedy thinks I’ve been easy on him because . . .maybe I see myself in him.”

  “Do you?”

  Jenkins hesitates. He doesn’t say what troubles him most of all is that Sam, a reasonable middle-aged man who loves the outdoors, a man (despite his sexual preference) not altogether different from himself, is mourning the loss of his great love, while he, Jenkins, is married to this woman who sits across from him, looking at him with polite interest and whose love for him, he believes, has changed into something like fond tolerance.

  “I could be. But I’ve been in this game long enough to know my own prejudice.” He pauses. “The one I really want to talk to is Luc Flanders. But the only way I could do that is if he weren’t missing. And if he weren’t missing, then Je n’existe pas.”

  “Ah, a Pascalian concept,” Connie says with a dry, appreciative smile. She reflects for a moment. “So what would you ask this kid if you could talk to him? What would you say?”

  “I’d mentioned the letters he wrote to Sam Solomon. Tell him how beautiful they are. I’d encourage him to be honest with the people close to him. And then I would ask how he lost his way.” What he doesn’t say is that the letters Luc wrote to Sam could be letters that Jenkins once might have written to Connie if he’d had more guts.

  Connie taps her fingers against her wineglass. “And you’re absolutely sure Sam never got those emails?”

  “He claims not to have, even though it says they’d been read and deleted. I just don’t believe if he’d seen them, if he’d read them, that he’d be able to deny knowledge of them.”

  “Which means you don’t think he did something in a fit of passionate rage and then regretted it later.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So can you at least give him—Sam—the letters?” she asks.

  “I will soon. They’re still with our linguist.”

  “Because?”

  “There have been some discrepancies in the speech patterns. We’re trying to be certain Luc wrote them.”

  “Maybe somebody got into them and deleted words?”

  “More difficult, but not impossible to trace.”

  “Maybe one of the cookie-cutter macho roommates?”

  “Possibly. Kennedy is up in the Northeast Kingdom doing some digging on one of them.”

  At this, they hear the ring tone of a text message that could be from either of their cell phones, both of which are in the kitchen.

  “That could be her.”

  “Mine’s in there, too. It could be for me,” Connie says in an abrupt manner that Jenkins finds a bit odd.

  Both get up and head into the kitchen. Jenkins grabs his phone and sees the text message is from Kennedy. Just back from the Kingdom. Give a call when you can.

  Jenkins can’t help noticing that, as if aware she’s going to get a message, Connie grabs her phone, lying on the kitchen counter next to some cucumber parings, and as she’s walking back into the dining room, Jenkins hears the ring tone of her text messaging. He reenters to find Connie staring at her phone. When she looks at him, he holds his up. “It’s Kennedy.”

  Connie, however, doesn’t identify the person who has texted her.

  Jenkins tries to put this out of his mind as he walks into the front parlor. A streetlamp beams through the stained glass once fitted in a high transom by some distant hippie relative of Connie’s who occupied the house in the late sixties before heading off to live in a commune in Oregon. One of the panels is the color of blood.

  “Well, I know why Greta Thornhill was so guarded about her connection to Taft,” Kennedy tells him when she answers his call. “Up in Newport, Taft wasted somebody. The guy can only see out of one eye. She probably knows all about it.”

  “Why didn’t this come up when we did the check on him?”

  “Because nobody was charged. Because the locals like keeping some things hushed. You’ll be pleased to know that I didn’t have to dig too hard to find this out. I went to the local garage. Hung out a little bit, showed the guys I know how to take apart and put together engines. Got some respect and then started asking questions. It was a fight that apparently was mutual. The guy called Taft a fag. Taft apparently just kept going, wailing on him. ”

  “Can we find this other guy?”

  “Lives in Michigan. But I got his name.”

  “Good.”

  “Worth noting is the slur that started it.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Jenkins says.

  “And I haven’t even gotten to the best part.”

  “Oh?”

  “I asked the guys at the garage why all the rage and they told me, point blank. ’Roid rage.”

  Jenkins is stunned.

  “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “I’m thinking about the way the twins reacted when you mentioned Skylight Pond.” Each falls silent. At last Kennedy says, “It’s after nine. How long will it take you to get down here?”

  “I can be there probably by ten fifteen. ”

  “I’ll be waiting for you outside the apartment,” she tells him.

  February 23; South Woodstock, Vermont; 10 degrees, late afternoon snow expected

  Sam, on his crutches, is maneuvering out his front door en route to his pickup truck, when he notices, parked across the road from his house, a fresh-faced news reporter from WCAX television in Burlington. The kid vaults out of his car clutching a microphone.

  “Mr. Solomon, I would love to talk to you,” the man says tentatively.

  “I have nothing to say. Please just leave me alone.”

  The guy stubbornly remains on the street, staring at him with a furtive hope as if he might change his mind. And in the momentary standoff, Sam realizes he’s forgotten a collection of renderings, turns around and hobbles back inside. As he begins combing through his desk drawer, he hears the reporter’s car start and the sound of it driving away. He takes a deep breath just as he sees something, a manila folder, and opens it.

  He recognizes the drawing Luc did of him while he was suffering his episode of A-fib, but then several other drawings of him as well. Sam is stunned to see himself in various unconscious attitudes: his arms wrapped around Panda; leaning against the brick chimney that occupies the center of his old farmhouse; outside on a pair of cross-country skies. The drawings are executed with confident precision. And Luc has been able to capture the deep setting of Sam’s eyes. Except for the one during his atrial fibrillation episode, remarkably, Sam never sat for any of these drawings; clearly Luc had done them from memory. But why had he left them in Sam’s drawer? In the top-right-hand corner of each sketch, there’s a date: 10/19/13; 11/3/13; 12/5/13; 12/21/13. The last date was on the drawing of Sam on cross-country skis when he and Luc had gone for a quick tour. It’s as if Luc somehow knew that one day Sam would stumble upon them. The thought is oppressive.

  Today, for the first time since his injury, Sam is headed out to a client meeting; having the cast on his left leg luckily doesn’t impinge on his driving. On the way to the interstate, en route to a late afternoon appointment in Concord, New Hampshire, he realizes he’s thirsty and decides to stop at a country store on Route 4 that has easy access for somebody on crutches. It’s a store he rarely visits, and as Sam propels himself in the door, he recognizes a few of the locals sitting around a wood stove, drinking coffee and eating homemade muffins and sugary donuts. Their murmuring conversation di
es to a hush, and the door shutting firmly behind him sounds as loud as a firecracker. A forbidding silence follows, and pairs of eyes lock on him as he swings his way toward a row of glassed-in refrigerators holding all kinds of craft iced teas and beer and exotically flavored waters. He’s grown used to these quizzical silences when he makes a public appearance, his romantic connection to Luc Flanders a broad topic of discussion in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont.

  At the glass gates of the coolers stands a young, strapping guy in a denim coat and painters jeans who can’t be more than thirty-five years old. He has a neatly trimmed black beard and, in Sam’s opinion, a rough-hewn, rural beauty. The man has just chosen his alcohol for the evening, perhaps soon to head home and polish off every single can in the twelve-pack of Budweiser. Recognizing Sam’s incapacitation, he opens the glass door so that Sam can grab a bottle of spring water. “Thanks, man,” he says and pivots toward the cashier’s counter. As he stops in one of the aisles to grab a few cans of tuna fish, the guy breezes past him swinging his twelve-pack. Looking after him, Sam remarks to himself on the habit of nightly beer drinking to excess. He sees tradespeople just like this guy throughout New England and Upstate New York buying large quantities of beer that they’ll consume at home quietly embedded with family, polishing off one can after another until they reach a state of nocturnal numbness that leaves many of them a bit bleary in the daytime. Sam joins the cashier line right behind the fellow when he hears the snap of the words “Faggot murderer!”

  Sam knows that sometimes the word “faggot” is trotted out for stupid, belligerent mudslinging, not necessarily slurring sexual preference, just an ill-chosen jibe of ignorance. But “murderer” is something altogether different. Sam assumes the person has read the article in the Valley News and is refusing to believe he is innocent of wrongdoing.

  Meanwhile, the guy standing in front of him has turned around with a questioning, almost hurt expression. Even he assumes they are talking about Sam.

  Knuckling the bottle of water, Sam pivots and deftly hobbles his way over to the group of men, a collection of mostly grizzled fellows in their forties and older—and maybe one in his thirties. “Who said that?” he demands aggressively.