Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  “She probably felt that way because Luc has always been so secretive and shut down,” Giles points out.

  “What you don’t know is he confided in me about her,” Janine points out. “And his impression was Elizabeth defines her life according to the guy she’s with.”

  “Many women do,” says her father.

  “Well, I’d rather be alone than have to mold myself to a guy.”

  And then Giles asks, “Janine, are you trying to tell us something about . . . your relationship to other women?”

  Eleanor and Janine look at one another in surprise and actually burst out laughing. Then Janine says with deliberate gentleness, “Oh, Dad. That question . . . I want to say it’s dumb of you, but . . . shit, we’re all in a bad way here, aren’t we?”

  Giles foolishly tries to defend his remark. “Well, I don’t know any other women who obsess over hockey the way you do. Who when they watch the Bruins, they wear not one, but two jerseys, Bergeron and Marchand.”

  “Yeah? Well, I love those guys. However, if either of them were my boyfriend, I’d whip him into shape.” Then, more philosophical, Janine says, “But no. I’m not gay. However, men are definitely wary of me.”

  It occurs to Eleanor that perhaps a few of Elizabeth’s softer qualities might help her own daughter find men suitable for dating. “Does anybody want more of this?” She points to the glass casserole dish of perfectly baked macaroni and cheese.

  “I’m good,” Janine says, looking down appraisingly at the substantial leftovers clinging to her plate.

  Eleanor doesn’t even wait for Giles’s response; she assumes he is finished eating. She grabs his plate, reaches for the nearby potholder, picks up the casserole and pushes back from the table. She takes out a box of foil wrap and prepares the hardly touched meal for the refrigerator. It occurs to Eleanor that putting the meal away is like preparing a body for burial, and like so many of her activities these days, this one seem final, like last rites. Just the other day, believing that viewing slides of her son might somehow precipitate his return to her, Eleanor scrolled through several carousels of family holidays and summer sojourns, lazy days of balmy weather around their cabin on Lake Fairlee. She’d projected the pictures on the living room wall and kept a cardboard box next to her into which she dropped the slides. Hearing the sound of the slides hitting the bottom of the box reminded her of the sound of dirt being thrown onto a coffin. Yes, her sense of mourning is aching, pervasive. Two days ago she broke down and wept over a little big-eared mouse that had gotten stuck in the children’s bathtub and couldn’t climb out and slowly perished, its body desiccated from starvation and thirst.

  “I mean, maybe it’s the amnesia again,” Janine says once they’ve moved into the family room and are sitting in front of a blazing fire. “Maybe he just hitched a ride, went somewhere else like he did the last time and . . . I don’t know, is flying under the radar now? Maybe flipping burgers someplace?”

  “He didn’t have his wallet with him,” Eleanor says. “No ID.”

  “Exactly! So once again living without a name.”

  “Yes, and maybe he’s become somebody’s slave!” Giles says angrily. Both women stare at him. “Look, I’m sorry, but how can that be: He’s living somewhere without his name?”

  “Because he did it once before,” Janine says.

  Giles refutes, “He was fifteen then and fresh off that injury. He’s responsible now. He’s a man. I think it’s ridiculous to speculate that he’s gone anywhere.” Glancing at Eleanor, Giles says softly, “I just don’t think he’s alive anymore, Elle,” his words like rock salt subsuming the fire roaring up before them. “The snow is deep this time of year. He could be in it anywhere and we won’t know until spring. Until he thaws.”

  As she watches the flames in the fireplace flicker and crackle, a now familiar weariness comes over Eleanor, the fatigue of having to live every waking moment with the tangible possibility of catastrophe. She wants to get up and go straight to her bedroom and take a Xanax; she wants to wait for the gently falling curtain of chemical relief, her nocturnal escort away from the reality of Luc being gone but which, she knows, will once again break upon her as predictably as daylight.

  At last Janine says, “Too long to wait. We can’t live like this.”

  “We have to,” Giles says. “We have no other choice.”

  February 23; Carleton, Vermont; 2 degrees, snow and sleet, heavy winds

  Taft is wearing a heavy sweatshirt emblazoned with “Newport.” Standing a foot away from him wearing a pair of white earmuffs is Elizabeth Squires, her vehement words punching the air in frosted plumes. At last, Taft pulls the hood of his sweatshirt down over his face and, looking druid-like in the bitter darkness, stalks away from the building. Elizabeth stands there watching him leave and then hurries in the opposite direction, arms crossed against the severe, windy cold. She walks right by the unmarked car, and her aqua ski parka looks momentarily iridescent beneath the nearby streetlamp. Jenkins and Kennedy watch this unfold from inside the vehicle.

  “Stalkerish,” Kennedy remarks, “interesting. Let’s try on the fact that something else went down on the night of February eleventh, that they know more than they’re saying.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Any gut reaction?” she asks him.

  “Yeah. Either one or the other or both followed him back to the pond.”

  Kennedy smiles. “I think that’s right on the money. Let’s go on that assumption and see where it gets us.”

  Peering up at the dimly lighted apartment, they figure McKinnon is probably at home. Kennedy gets out of the car, climbs the stairs and knocks on the door. Nobody responds. It’s going on ten thirty. She returns to the car. “Absolutely frigid out there.” They continue waiting. At last, somebody wearing a long dark wool coat crosses the street, approaches the ground-level door, opens it and heads inside. “McKinnon. So that’s one down,” Kennedy remarks. Five minutes later, Taft returns. “I guess it’s now or never.”

  Jenkins says, “So I’ll mosey Taft to Maplefields?”

  The plan: When Kennedy is done questioning McKinnon, she will text Jenkins and then head over to find Elizabeth, who will either be in her dorm or in the library. Whether or not Jenkins is through questioning Taft, he’ll keep him tightly under watch to make sure he doesn’t try and contact either of the other two. The detectives glance at each other and each gives a final nod to say they are in agreement about strategy. They then venture out into the unforgiving, blustering night. “Jesus, it’s deeper than the grave,” Kennedy says with a slight Irish lilt as they head toward the apartment stairs.

  “I’d rather this than roasting in a D.C. summer,” Jenkins says.

  “Right now that roasting sounds pretty fine to me.”

  Jenkins climbs ahead this time and knocks. A moment later, Taft opens and looks miffed, a line of apprehension knitting itself across his dusky features.

  “We need a quick word, can we come in?” Jenkins says.

  “Do we have a choice?” they hear McKinnon say from somewhere in the near background.

  Taft says nothing in reply, shrugs and admits them into the kitchen, which smells of frying and oil. McKinnon, shirtless at the stove, is cooking what appears to be scrambled eggs and generously adding hot sauce from a pencil-thin bottle. His pale freckled body is muscled and pumped up and defined; he looks particularly powerful. There is a rash of acne on his broad shoulders—according to Kennedy, a telltale sign of steroid use.

  “A little late for dinner isn’t it?” Jenkins asks.

  “Dinner number two.” McKinnon greets them with a wave of a spatula. Increased appetite, another sign of steroid use, Jenkins thinks. “Looks like you spice your eggs.”

  McKinnon gulps and nods his head and says, “Yeah, sometimes.”

  “So what’s going on?” Taft asks them.

 
“I thought you were done asking us questions,” McKinnon says.

  “We thought we were but we have some things to clarify and thought you could help us,” Kennedy says.

  “Okay, so what are they?” Taft says nervously.

  “I’d like you to get your coat and come with me,” Jenkins says to him.

  “Can’t we talk here?”

  “We’d prefer to speak to each of you separately,” Helen says.

  Both men stare at them, as though stunned. Then McKinnon says, “Not without a lawyer.”

  “Absolutely within your right,” Kennedy says. “You can each call a lawyer, but we’d like Mr. Taft to come with Detective Jenkins and Mr. McKinnon to stay here with me. If neither of you have a lawyer on tap, we’ll help find you one.”

  Taft grabs his heavy sweatshirt and begins jabbing his arms into the sleeves.

  Jenkins follows him down the stairs. “Make a left,” he orders as Taft opens the outer door and a forbidding blast of sleet hits them, “and keep going until you hit that Ford.”

  “It’s too dark to see the make of these cars,” Taft complains.

  “Then just keep walking until I tell you to stop.”

  The air inside the car is still warm from Kennedy’s and his vigil, and sleet is slamming softly against the windshield. Jenkins sits there, waiting.

  “Are we going to just hang here?” Taft asks.

  Jenkins starts the car and maneuvers out of the parking space.

  “Where we headed?” Taft asks.

  “To the police station. Where you can call a lawyer.”

  “I don’t want to go to the police station.”

  Jenkins explains this is necessary to get the name and contact information for a public defender.

  “I’d rather find one on my phone.”

  “How about a cup of coffee?” Jenkins suggests.

  “How about one,” Taft says.

  Jenkins drives down Weybridge Road, continues onto the Pulp Mill Bridge Road and drives slowly across the covered bridge. By now the sleet has evolved into snow, and he notices what looks like a group of college students staggering out of Flatbread into a vortex of flakes. Eyeing them, Taft grunts with disdain and perhaps, Jenkins wonders, maybe even with a bit of envy.

  When they come to Greg’s Market, which is a minute’s drive from Maplefields, Jenkins decides he needs a few more minutes to strategize and takes a longer route. Glancing at Taft, he makes a left onto Exchange Street and drives them along a curving road with tall, sil0-like structures that almost look as though they might conceal nuclear warheads but are actually state-of-the-art microbreweries of beer and hard cider. Deep in a silence of his own, Taft doesn’t even seem to register the detour. They pass a do-it-yourself carwash and then an Agway parking lot, where two pickup trucks with headlights blazing are facing each other in an automotive showdown, a slanting curtain of snow illuminated between them. Jenkins hangs a right on Route 7, and they proceed a quarter mile to the parking lot of Maplefields.

  “There are a few seats in the back,” he says once they are inside.

  On a winter night full of uncertain precipitation, the gas-and-convenience store is nearly empty of customers. A bored-looking cashier with tattoos and piercings in her eyebrows, nose and mouth watches them with a scowl. Rap music is blaring. Jenkins fishes out his wallet. “Get yourself a coffee,” he tells Taft.

  Taft walks stiffly over to the line of cylinders supplied by Vermont Coffee and pumps himself a tall hot drink but doesn’t put anything in it. He goes and stands at the counter while Jenkins, now filling a small cup and adding half-and-half, calls “Just got snag us a table and sit down.”

  Taft sits in one of the vinyl booths in the back. Jenkins arrives at the table to find him staring worriedly into his coffee and sits down opposite him.

  Taft looks up, dark eyes flashing. “So?”

  “Let’s just talk.”

  “Okay.”

  Leaning toward Taft, Jenkins says, “Why don’t you tell me about the soccer team.”

  Taft looks miffed. “The soccer team?”

  “You’re at Carleton on a soccer scholarship, right?”

  Taft nods.

  “So you must be pretty good to get a scholarship.”

  “I’d like to think so. My family can’t afford this place.” He guardedly looks around the chain convenience store as if it were a proxy of the Carleton campus. “I guess the college wanted me enough to help out.”

  It strikes Jenkins again that Taft, thickly muscled, swarthy and dark-eyed like a Latino, probably stuck out in his small Vermont border town. Pointing to the bold lettering on Taft’s sweatshirt, he says, “Carleton’s a far cry from Newport, isn’t it?”

  Taft looks at him warily. “Oh, for sure.”

  “Anyway, you consider yourself to be pretty good friends with Luc Flanders, right?”

  Taft colors. “Well, he’s my roommate.”

  “Roommates aren’t always good friends, though, are they?”

  “I guess not always.” And then well before Jenkins expects it, the opening comes. “Why do you want to keep questioning me?”

  “Like I said. To make sense out of some unrelated facts we have. And we think talking to you will help us.”

  “But what unrelated facts?”

  “Well, for starters, your aunt, Greta Thornhill, seems to have hidden her connection to you.”

  “But if you’d asked me if I was related to her to begin with, I would have told you, no problem.” Taft was obviously prepared for this.

  “I can appreciate that. By the way, Detective Kennedy, who is back at your apartment taking to your roommate . . .” Jenkins waits a moment. “She went up to Newport.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s call it a fact-finding mission.”

  “Facts about what?”

  Jenkins says, “Facts about you.”

  “Facts about me,” Taft says slowly.

  “Because we found out you wasted somebody up there in Newport and we wanted to learn more about it.” Jenkins inverts the truth.

  Taft, who has been sitting up straight, suddenly deflates in his chair. Then he glares at Jenkins. “I didn’t go around wasting anybody. It was a fight.”

  “What was the fight about?”

  “Why else do guys fight? Somebody rubs somebody else the wrong way.”

  Jenkins pauses for effect. “He must’ve made you really angry. I understand he only has one good eye left.”

  Taft spits out, “Fucking Christ!”

  “I am amazed you weren’t arrested for that.”

  “It started mutually. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. So no arrests, okay?”

  “But usually somebody starts a fight,” Jenkins points out reasonably.

  “Maybe somebody swings first. But the other person says something that makes them swing.”

  “So, in this case, who said something first. And who swung first?”

  “I actually don’t remember. It wasn’t a good thing. I don’t like to think about it.”

  “I don’t blame you.” Jenkins knows it’s time to move on. “So let me ask: How well does your aunt, Greta Thornhill, know Elizabeth Squires?”

  Taft says, “Her roommate got stalked. They met then. Other than that, my aunt doesn’t know her.”

  Jenkins hesitates and then asks, “So what do you think of Elizabeth Squires?”

  Taft shifts uneasily in his chair. “What do I think? She was Luc’s girlfriend. They kept to themselves. She’s seems okay.”

  “Ever run into her on campus?”

  “It’s a small school. You run into everybody you know.”

  “So you don’t hang out?”

  Now Taft realizes where it’s going and stops, pondering his next move. “Sometimes we’ll see each other and talk. M
ainly about Luc.”

  “Have you talked with her about Luc recently?”

  Taft is glaring at him. “She tell you that?” His voice croaks.

  Jenkins lets several moments pass, watching carefully how Taft hunches nervously forward, one of his legs pumping up and down. “She was outside your apartment tonight. You two seemed pretty upset. What were you talking about?”

  Taft manages to say, “I was just giving her a pep talk. She’s been really depressed.”

  “Didn’t look like that to us. Looked like you guys were having an argument.”

  Taft remains silent.

  “When I asked you about her a few minutes ago, why didn’t you tell me you saw her tonight?”

  Taft looks perplexed and stares at Jenkins for a moment. “I think I need to have that lawyer.”

  “Okay, then let’s finish our coffee, head to the police station, and I’ll get you a list of public defenders.”

  “I told you I don’t want to go to the police station. I—”

  There is a sharp clattering and both turn to see that the young woman with the nose piercings has accidentally dropped a glass coffeepot, which has shattered on the floor. A few of the shards bounce up close to where they’re sitting. Lackadaisical, she hunches her shoulders and bends down to start picking up the pieces. Turning back to Taft, Jenkins continues, “I can’t call you a lawyer here. You’ll just have to come with me.”

  “Why can’t you lay off me?” Taft says softly.

  Jenkins ignores him. “But before we go, can you tell me: How long have you been on the juice?” Jenkins is satisfied by Taft’s expression of pained recognition, and then adds, “McKinnon’s on it, too. I saw tonight he’s all broken out in acne on his back.”

  Taft doesn’t respond.

  “Detective Kennedy is pretty good with questioning. I wonder what he’ll say when she asks him about the juice. There won’t be any reason for him to lie. He doesn’t really have anything to worry about. Detective Kennedy will assure him she’s not looking to bust him for steroids and that he’s not a suspect in the disappearance of Luc Flanders.”