Jenkins ponders this for a moment and then says, “Speaking of your dog, I don’t think Taft is lying about that.”
“Oh?”
“Taft claims to loves dogs. I believe him.”
Sam now admits, “That door has always been a problem. I’ve come home a few times to find it flung open.” Then again, it’s a lot easier for him to believe that no malice had ever been directed toward his dog.
They are all situated in the living room, Sam sitting stiffly upright on a distressed leather loveseat, Jenkins occupying a wingback chair. Kennedy, who has taken a wooden ice cream parlor chair away from the kitchen table, is sitting right next to Jenkins, so that Sam can speak to both of them simultaneously without having to look from one to the other.
“So Taft believes he saw you leaving the pond,” Jenkins announces quietly.
The real reason why they’ve driven down there, Sam concludes miserably. He stares at the blue fiberglass encasement of his broken leg, feeling imprisoned by it, wishing he could release himself from it and pace the room in a frenzy. “Then why did he wait until now to say something?”
“Because we already suspected you,” Kennedy says. “That it was only a matter of time before we’d find proof. And that if he’d admitted to going back to the pond, he’d end up being a suspect himself. And that would only take the pressure off you.”
“And you don’t think that sounds suspicious?” Sam says with disgust.
“Of course it does,” Kennedy says. “But sometimes people who are innocent have more trouble trying to explain—or even extricate—themselves than people who are guilty and know they have to concoct lies.”
Sam takes this in for a moment and then says, “Then I guess you have a choice. To believe him or to believe me.”
At this, they hear a car pull into the driveway.
“That must be Mike,” Sam says, catching a look of annoyance on Jenkins’s face. “He called me right after you did—he calls me every day to check in—and I told him you were coming and he said he wanted to talk to you. He has a light day at work,” he explains just as Mike bursts into the room.
“I need to say. . .,” he announces to them all as he shrugs off his leather bomber jacket and throws it on a spindled wooden bench chair next to the door. “And I probably should’ve said it way earlier.”
With a severe look on his face, Jenkins turns both his hands over. “You need to say?”
“I was at the pond on the night Luc Flanders disappeared. I didn’t do anything to him. But I was there.”
He didn’t do anything to him. Sam’s vision narrows with a rush of blood while the light in the room begins pulsing in strobe-like syncopation. He’s suddenly dizzy, even a bit nauseous, and can’t quite believe what has just been said. The confession, meanwhile, has caused a general commotion.
“Sit down,” Jenkins orders Mike.
“How could you have been there?” Sam demands.
“Just wait a second.” Pointing to an empty club chair that is some distance away from the gathering of other chairs, Kennedy says, “Bring that one over here.”
Mike complies.
“Okay,” Jenkins says. “So let’s have it.”
Mike begins, “It was literally a five-minute conversation between Luc and me.”
“A conversation,” Kennedy repeats.
“About someone we both really cared about.” He glances worriedly at Sam.
“What do you mean by ‘cared about’?” Kennedy asks.
“I mean like . . . best-friend-cared-about, at least from my end. I guess from Luc’s perspective, romantic-love-cared-about.”
“So wait, you drove up to Carleton from Boston and back to Boston in time to meet me at the airport?” Sam says.
“Yes.”
“Three hours both ways just to have a five-minute conversation with Luc?”
“Sam,” Jenkins warns. “You need to stop talking. This is not your investigation.”
Sam ignores him. “Why didn’t you say anything about this before, Mike?” He slams his fist down on the arm of his chair. “You know what’s been going on!”
Mike glances at Jenkins and then at Kennedy, who says, “Go ahead and answer him.”
“Wait,” Jenkins says.
“Nick.” Kennedy surprises Sam with a tone of pleading in her voice. “Just let him talk.”
“Fine,” Jenkins agrees at last.
Mike resumes, “I didn’t say anything because I truly believed that what happened to Luc had nothing to do with my talking to him. And I also thought that if I said something, it would’ve made things worse for you,” he tells Sam.
“Worse for me? How? That’s ludicrous!” Looking at Jenkins, Sam says, “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
Jenkins says to Mike, “Tell us why you think it would have made things worse.”
Tears are flooding Mike’s different-colored eyes. “Okay.”
On February eleventh, he had impulsively driven up to Carleton from Boston. “I just felt that I had to talk to Luc, to try and get through to him. When I was able to find his address from the campus directory, I left Boston convinced that I’d find him. I drove right to his apartment. And bingo, he was leaving just as I got there.” He recognized Luc—from the photographs Sam had shown him—in his funky military overcoat and his hat with its two Slavic-looking earflaps. Luc was headed toward the pack of Carleton college students who were trekking up and down the lanes of the institution in the early darkness.
Mike quickly parked and followed. The moon paved the way on the path to Skylight Pond, and both men were able to walk in concert with each other, Mike significantly behind. As he followed Luc, Mike rehearsed what he would say. He would tell Luc how much Sam was suffering, that it was more than just depression over the breakup. That it was a crisis of faith in love itself. He believed that Sam, hitting fifty, felt doomed to be alone for the rest of his life and just might be tempted to do something reckless.
When they reached the pond, Mike saw Luc beaming his flashlight against the snow and the ice that had been sheared for the miniature, makeshift hockey rink. Luc was beginning to cross the frozen plane when Mike called out, “Hey, Luc,” and watched him stiffen and hunch over, giving the impression of being caught in the act of doing something covert.
Luc whirled around, shining his flashlight in Mike’s eyes. “Who are you?”
“I’m Mike, Sam’s friend from Boston. You’ve probably seen photos of me. I’ve seen photos of you.”
Luc collected himself and slowly walked toward Mike until they were a foot away from each other, their nervous breath accumulating in frosty pillows around them, the cold air burning their lungs. Holding the illuminated flashlight in one hand like some Norse deity, six-foot-two Luc was towering over him, a sad, pained, quizzical look on his face. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”
“I saw you walking away from your apartment. I came up here because I need to talk to you.”
Luc crossed his free arm over his chest. “Talk to me about what?”
“About Sam.”
Luc’s voice softened. “About Sam? Is he okay?”
“No, he’s not okay. He’s not sick or anything . . . but then again, he’s really gutted over this breakup.”
“He’s not the only one,” Luc said. “Gutted over the breakup. I don’t know how I can help him if I can’t even help myself. And it’s pretty douchy of you to drive up here and expect to just talk to me like this. I don’t suppose he knows you’re here.”
“He doesn’t.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“Probably.”
“Well, he’s not going to be happy.”
“He’ll probably be angry.”
“Knowing Sam, he’ll be fucking furious!” Luc said. “So what do you want from me?”
>
Struck by Luc’s palpable distress, Mike said, “Just communicate with him. Don’t let him twist in the wind. He’s about to go out to Utah with me. I know he’d love to hear from you before he leaves tonight. Just pick up your phone and call him tonight is all I ask.”
“I’ve already reached out to him,” Luc flared with hostility. “He never responds to my emails. Except for a few stupid text messages.”
“But then why haven’t you replied . . . to the texts?”
“Did you hear me? He hasn’t even answered my emails!”
“Your emails?” Mike repeated. “Sam never said anything about getting your emails.”
“Maybe he’s done with me and just doesn’t want to talk to you about it, his straight buddy from Boston who drove all the way up here to creep after his ex,” Luc said with noticeable irony. “You’re probably about as straight as I am.”
“Well, everybody thinks you are—straight—don’t they?”
“That’s my problem, thank you. I’ve been lying to nearly everybody. And I’m sick of lying, to be honest.” It got windy suddenly, and granules of snow stung their eyes. Luc wiped his and looked down at Mike. “So maybe I can detect lies from other people.”
“Look, I love Sam like a brother,” Mike told him, “like family. But I am not in love with him. You don’t have to be into guys to love another guy—a dear friend—to love him enough to want to do anything you can to help him.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Hang on one second,” Jenkins interrupts, and then to Kennedy, “Luc had a flashlight.”
Kennedy says, “McKinnon says he never came by to get it.”
“So then where did he get a flashlight?”
Kennedy says, “I’ll verify this once again with McKinnon.” Turning to Mike, “Do you recall what kind of flashlight it was?”
“It was a small one. I think it was an LED.”
“Go on with your story,” Kennedy says.
“I thought Luc was bold-faced lying about the emails and was just doing it to shut down the conversation, to get rid of me,” Mike says. Then to Sam, “Do you remember when we were flying out to Utah, when I asked if you’d heard from him?”
Sam nods.
“I felt there was something weird and evasive about the way you said you hadn’t heard.” Now facing Jenkins and Kennedy, Mike says, “After everything happened in Utah, after Sam’s accident, I started to wonder if Luc was actually telling the truth and”—he turns to Sam again—“that maybe you had read the emails and just didn’t want me to know you’d read them. And then later on when the emails were discovered to have been read and deleted, you claimed not to have been the one who read and deleted them. Because at the pond Luc told me–he insisted—that in those emails he’d begged you for a meeting. And ever since then I’ve kept wondering how three emails could possibly have failed to reach you. Or perhaps I should say somebody read them but you never did.”
“I don’t know how!” Sam cries.
Mike hesitates, his two-colored eyes darting like a cornered animal. “So I eventually decided that the emails did get to you. That you had read them. And I didn’t want to bring that up against you.”
Sam says, “I swear on everything that is sacred to me. I swear on the life of Luc Flanders, I did not get them!” He stops, realizing that swearing on the life of Luc Flanders is probably the worst thing he can possibly say.
Looking even more distressed, Mike shakes his head and mutters something unintelligible. “Just need to finish.” He glances at Kennedy and Jenkins. “So I started to believe that Sam denied receiving those emails because he didn’t want anyone to think he actually had a pressing reason, an agreement to meet up with Luc in Carleton the night we left for Utah.” Now he can’t even look at Sam.
It’s supremely difficult but Sam knows he has to remain embedded reasonably in the conversation. “But, Mike, don’t you think that would be a desperate denial if I were lying, if I actually had read the emails? How could I have faked something like that? How could I have hidden that from you, my best friend in the world?”
Mike shrugs and says, “I thought the same thing. But then I thought maybe you had to lie.”
Sam happens to notice Kennedy throwing Jenkins a quizzical look. Jenkins shakes his head slowly and then says to Mike, “Okay, so let’s move on. What happened next between you and Luc?”
Luc took a menacing step toward Mike and said, “Get the hell out of here! Leave me alone! Tell Sam ‘have a great time—’” This said with heavy sarcasm. Mike remembers seeing a vague expression on the younger man’s face, a look that oddly was not in keeping with his angry outburst. “So I walked away. I was off the pond and heading along the path when I heard some commotion and turned around. It was dark obviously, but from where I was, it looked like he’d slipped and fallen on the ice again and was lying on his stomach. I started back toward him, but then I stopped because I saw him getting up. He looked shaky. And then he noticed that I hadn’t left. ‘I told you to leave me alone,’ he yelled at me. And then I walked back to the campus. I walked back to my car.”
Everything is crashing down: the terrible demise of Panda; the endless two-week vigil for news of Luc; and now this confirmation of the suspicion harbored by his best friend, who at last is staring at him unrelentingly, his mismatched eyes flickering nervously. Sam says, “So all this time you were covering for me. All this time you believed that I went up to Carleton, that I saw Luc on February eleventh, and that I’ve been lying about it.”
Pondering this for a moment, Mike says, “All I can say is when I left Carleton to drive back to Boston, there was still time for you to have driven up there yourself.”
Nobody speaks for several moments. At last, Jenkins says, “Mike, about those emails.” Glancing meaningfully at Sam, he says, “Sam never got them. We now know somebody else intercepted those emails and read them. So Sam is not lying about this.”
“Why the hell didn’t you say this earlier?” Sam cries out.
“Because once again, you need to let me handle this,” Jenkins tells him quietly but forcefully.
Kennedy asks Mike, “So when Sam told you we were on the way, you just dropped everything to drive up here?”
“I figured you’d finally found evidence against him and maybe were going to arrest him. I wanted . . . to be here. I wanted to make sure all the facts were in.”
Jenkins says, “Well, the facts are in. But we could also construe that you hid your trip up to Carleton because you were afraid of being suspected.”
Mike shrugs. “You’re certainly welcome to suspect me.”
“I need to ask Mike something,” Sam says.
“Go on,” Jenkins says, lackadaisically waving a hand.
“Why drive all the way up to Carleton the very night we’re supposed to go out west? Why not another time? Why in such a tight time frame?”
Shaking his head, Mike says, “Like I told you, Sam, it was because of Black Diamond Fall. It came to me that Luc would have been constantly on your mind before we skied it, while we skied it. That thinking about him could have been a distraction. I was hoping that if I could get him to contact you the same night we were leaving, you’d feel better. That you’d be able to focus on hiking up onto the ridge and making the descent. That you’d be able to ski free. Ski free of him. But then, just like I feared, you pushed it too hard. You fell and you almost died. And like I’ve told you before, I began to wonder if your fall was deliberate, like it was some kind of death wish. Maybe because he was already dead? Maybe because . . . well, because maybe you’d done something to him yourself?”
There is a long, wretched silence following this. At last Mike says, “But there is another thing. When Sam called and told me you were on your way, I remember . . . a flash of something that I, for some reason . . . hadn’t considered. Or maybe, maybe I just didn’t want to think about it or remem
ber it, or remembering going up, I don’t know, I . . . don’t blank me, Sam, please!” Mike cries. “Look at me!” And Sam does. “When I was leaving the pond, when I was walking along the path, I think I saw somebody else walking away.”
“Who was that?” Jenkins demands.
February 25; Carleton, Vermont; 40 degrees, unseasonably warm
In the campus police conference room sits a young lawyer with fashionable scruff, dressed in a slim-fitting tailored suit. The guy has long hair pulled back and twined into a bun, and he wears expensive-looking tortoiseshell glasses.
“Did you see that hipster with the hair bun who arrived from Jersey?” Kennedy remarks to Jenkins out in the hall.
“That’s what all upwardly mobile youth look like in the metro areas,” Jenkins comments.
As they file into the cramped, book-lined room, Jenkins looks up at the small crosshatched windows viewing the monotonous gray afternoon. Remembering the last time he was there with Elizabeth and Portia Dominic, he feels a bit of transitory claustrophobia. Introductions are made, necessary pleasantries exchanged, and once everyone is seated around the large cherry wood conference table, the young lawyer presents Kennedy and Jenkins with a sheaf of interrogatory guidelines. Perusing them, Jenkins has difficulty hiding his skepticism. “We’ve never spoken before, have we?”
“We have not,” the guy says with ridiculous-sounding formality.
“How come Thompson didn’t come up?”
“He was called away to California.”
“You’re an associate?”
“Correct.”
Jenkins looks hard at him, refraining from saying “junior associate.” “Okay, well, some of this is just plain wrong. The restrictions. They can’t be met. Because we have proof that . . .” He glances at Elizabeth. “Let’s just say that we demand leeway if someone we’ve questioned hasn’t been forthcoming.” He regards Elizabeth, who looks surprisingly calm. “Besides, we only want to question Ms. Squires about a few things that she neglected to mention to us. Shouldn’t take very long. Let’s see how far we can get without you trying to shut this whole thing down.”
Black Diamond Fall Page 21