The lawyer noticeably stiffens but agrees.
“I am going to turn the questioning over to my colleague, Detective Kennedy. Detective?” Jenkins says.
Seated opposite him, Kennedy is dressed casually in a black untucked shirt and black trousers. “Hello, Elizabeth,” she says, “thanks for coming in again.”
“It’s fine,” Elizabeth replies nervously.
Glancing at her yellow legal notepad, Kennedy cogitates for a moment and then looks up. “So let’s begin with the fact that when we questioned you, you kept to yourself the fact that you walked back toward Skylight Pond the night Luc Flanders went missing.”
Brushing wings of hair out of her eyes, Elizabeth says in a hoarse voice, “Charlie and I decided it was no big deal. Because we never ended up running into Luc.”
They’ve decided that it’s best–at least at first–to soft-pedal the fact that Elizabeth Squires lied. “So you never saw him, Luc, the second time you were there?”
Elizabeth shakes her head. “No, we didn’t.”
Kennedy looks meaningfully at Jenkins, who nods slightly. And then to Elizabeth, “When we asked you what you did that night, you easily could have told us. By not telling us, you were obstructing our investigation.”
“She’s aware of that, Detective,” says the attorney briskly.
Elizabeth speaks up, “Like I said, Charlie described it like going for a walk anywhere else around campus. And not running into a person we expected to see. I went along with that. That’s why we didn’t say anything.”
“So you didn’t have a mind of your own on this?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“And Charlie Taft just happened to arrive at the same place at the same time you did, but coming from a different direction?”
“Correct.”
“And he told you he came to look for Luc?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you why?” Jenkins asks.
“To help Luc find whatever he lost.”
Kennedy says, “How did he know Luc lost something?”
“Because Luc . . . was upset and said he lost something.”
“Did he say what he lost?”
“To me he did.”
“And you told Charlie Taft what Luc said he lost?”
“Yes.”
Slightly raising her eyebrows, Kennedy glances at Jenkins, who nods. “Did Taft ask you why you’d come there?” she continues.
Glancing at her lawyer, Elizabeth sighs and says, “I told him why.”
“Okay, why? Tell us again, why.”
“I just wanted to talk to him, to Luc, again. I thought it would make me feel better.”
“I see. So was it a difficult conversation that you had with him?” Kennedy momentarily looks sad herself. Jenkins is actually stumped by this unforeseen reaction in his tough-minded colleague.
“It wasn’t really. But I still felt bad.”
“Because the breakup was recent?”
Elizabeth nervously exhales. “Yes.”
Despite her words to the contrary, it dawns on Jenkins that Elizabeth Squires has a cooler, more detached demeanor than when he’d previously questioned her several days before. It’s as if she’s already moving beyond Luc Flanders; yes, he’s observed that some people develop an automatic revulsion to the demise of a person who never really loved them. But then, too, kids of twenty-two pick up and go on more quickly than somebody such as himself, mired in love with a woman whose feelings for him, disconcerting as it is, seem to have faded over time.
Jenkins interjects, “Did you ever get a sense from Charlie Taft that he had feelings for Luc?”
“Not at first.”
“Had you figured it out when you two met up the night Luc disappeared?”
“No. Not yet.”
“So when did you figure it out?” Kennedy asks.
“I suspected. But then, two nights ago . . .” she says.
“He admitted it to you,” Jenkins fills in the gap.
“Well, not exactly.”
“Tell us,” says Kennedy.
“He was going on about how Sam got off and how he was sure Sam did it. And then I just said, ‘You’re in love with Luc yourself, aren’t you, Charlie?’ And then he just flipped out.”
“Where did this conversation occur?” Jenkins asks.
“In front of his apartment.”
Kennedy says, “What was your reaction?”
“I was mad, too.”
“Why were you mad?”
“Because he’d made mean comments about Luc being gay. And then he seemed to be in love with Luc himself.”
“Did Taft actually admit to being in love with Luc Flanders?”
“No, I guess not really.”
When Jenkins glances at Kennedy again, she tilts her head to the left, prodding him to ask the follow-up question they both have rehearsed. He shakes his head slightly. He still wants to wait. Squires needs to soften up just a bit more.
“Let’s just keep going,” he tells Kennedy. “So Charlie Taft told you he was going back to the pond to help Luc find what he lost. Did you wonder if he was going back to the pond for another reason?” Jenkins asks.
“No.”
Kennedy continues, “Did you get the sense that Taft was deliberately escorting you away from the pond?”
“Yes, I did.”
“As if he perhaps didn’t want you to see something.”
“Pretty much.”
“And you didn’t wonder what it was that he didn’t want you to see or why he was escorting you away?”
“Not then, no. But I did later on.”
Twirling her pencil with one hand, Kennedy leans back in her chair, her eyes narrowing with inner calculation. “Do you think you’d have gotten an inkling if Charlie and Luc had had some kind of altercation?”
Elizabeth shakes her head with a look of bafflement that makes it seem as though she’s already wrestled with this idea. “Hard to say. I don’t know. Charlie did seem agitated.”
“Charlie said you seemed pretty agitated, ” Kennedy points out.
“I was.”
Jenkins interjects, “When, as you say, Charlie Taft called you a few days after Luc went back to the pond and then disappeared and suggested that you both deny being anywhere near him, didn’t you wonder if maybe Charlie had another reason for suggesting you both keep quiet?”
“No, not then.” Glancing sharply at her attorney, Elizabeth adds, “And I mean, really if I thought something had happened between them, I would’ve spoken up about it.”
“Would you have?” Jenkins says quietly but emphatically.
“Even though you promised Taft you wouldn’t?” Kennedy adds.
Elizabeth falters. “I would have spoken up if I thought he’d done something wrong to Luc.”
Kennedy now looks intently at Jenkins, who picks up.
“Elizabeth, as you know, we’re trying to figure out whom Luc Flanders might have encountered once he left you at your dorm and went back to Skylight Pond. We have one person that you don’t know about, somebody—and not Sam Solomon—that Luc actually did meet up with while he was at the pond.”
Elizabeth looks frightened. “Really?” she says in a hoarse voice. “Was it a woman?”
“Do you think it might have been a woman?” Kennedy asks.
Now observing that Elizabeth seems to be rattled, Jenkins poses the question that he and Kennedy have decided he would ask. “Anyway, we began this . . . discussion by asking why you neglected to tell us you’d decided to go back toward the pond. Is there anything else that you haven’t told us?”
Not even glancing at the attorney, Elizabeth says, “No.”
Jenkins continues, “You indicate that Charlie Taft said ‘he just knew’ Sam did somethi
ng to Luc, but did he actually ever say that he saw Sam walking toward Skylight Pond?”
“He said he thought he saw him.”
“So Charlie didn’t seem sure he saw him?” Kennedy says softly.
“No, he didn’t seem sure.”
“Elizabeth,” Kennedy says and waits until the young woman’s eyes are trained on her. “Like I said before, we know of somebody else who did meet up with Luc. At the pond.”
Jenkins says, “We questioned this man yesterday. However, we don’t have any reason to believe he harmed Luc Flanders. But when this man was leaving, he happened to see someone heading toward the pond, somebody just about to arrive there.” Jenkins looks down on a single page of a lined notepad that contains the words that he reads aloud. “‘It was almost at the lip of the ice. The moon was bright enough for me to see that her parka was light blue.’” He now glances up.
Elizabeth’s face is suffused with a crimson flush; her lawyer is glaring at them.
Kennedy says quietly but sternly, “According to this man, Luc had a flashlight. This flashlight.” She pulls a plastic bag out of her pocket and shoves it across the table toward Elizabeth, who gives the small, square LED a frozen glance. “I spoke to your roommate, Portia Dominic, who told me that on the night of February eleventh, you gave this to Luc Flanders right in front of her. I’m assuming that after you did whatever you did to him, you decided to take the flashlight you lent him back home with you. So now, Elizabeth, you need to tell us the entire truth.” Kennedy throws the lawyer a withering glance and tells him, “Either way we’re taking her into custody.”
February 25; Donner’s Field, the hay bale, Weybridge, Vermont; 17 degrees, snow
Luc’s body is slowly shutting down, his organs slowly giving up. The languor of dreaming stays with him. He vaguely remembers an uncle with kidney disease who’d asked a physician about stopping dialysis and what would happen to his body. And the answer: that he’d slowly fade away, overcome by fatigue, eat and drink less and less, and eventually just slip into sleep. Not so bad, his uncle had said. Not so bad.
Luc has consumed most of the snow around him and now desperately needs water. He’s too weak to leave where he is and take in what will sustain him. And then admits there is part of him that would let go. After all, he believes he has put Sam off forever and what’s left if that possibility has perished?
Hard to believe that Sam received none of his emails. Mike surely was lying. Or maybe Sam was lying to Mike about having received them. All the emails had been sent to the AOL address they always used. Then again, Luc knows that Sam just got tired of the pain. Understandable. Especially since Luc was the one who ended it, and ended it because he was losing control, his fear of rejection getting the better of him. He thinks of his parents, no longer in love but forced to live together. How they’re dead and numb to each other. How it’s safer not to feel anything. And yet he can’t imagine not having any feeling for Sam.
It was humiliating to be cut down by somebody half his size. First feeling the gentle breath grazing the back of his exposed neck. Then the blur of a body coming from behind him. The rage of the rejected. The missile of the small woman tackling him, her small fists beating on his back, shoving him as hard as she could. Falling forward. Her hands on the back of his head slamming his forehead against the ice. “What are you doing?” he managed to cry out. She didn’t answer except with grunts and gasps as she exploded against him. And then one word escaped her breathily. “Fag!” He just let her flail at him because he knew he deserved her anger. But when his forehead smashed against the ice, he was propelled back into disconnection.
She was gone when he woke up to the wind and to the frozen kiss of the ice that seemed as harsh and brittle as a blade. What possessed him to muster the strength to stand up? What compelled him to drag himself over the ice until he regained his sense of balance?
A long, arduous zombie-like march of mile after mile until out of nowhere came those guys in the Jeep, the guys Taft and McKinnon get their drugs from.
Recognizing him, the one with the weird-looking, unfocused eyes rolled down his window and asked where he was going. “To my car, down the road,” he lied to them. Then accepting a ride and climbing in with those whack jobs that rambled on about bodybuilding and teenage girls. And telling him that Taft has to watch his intake, that Taft has ’roid rage. And remembering the day before when Taft had actually complained that he was getting too big and that his balls had shrunk and how he’d laughed about it with McKinnon. “No, I’m not interested,” he told the Newcombe twins when they offered him something they called a “stack.” “I don’t have the money. And why don’t you lay off selling to my roommates! If Taft has ’roid rage, then maybe you’re fucking him up!” And then the twins went quiet and Luc got nervous and asked to be dropped off.
And just walked until light was no longer cloistered and flames began to curl at the edge of the sky, and the smell of wood smoke from the chimney of a farmhouse. Faint frissons of music and the droning tones of public radio personalities. Cars in their early morning cortège beginning to drive by and inquiring faces peering at him. He decided he really wanted to be lying in a place where he couldn’t be found. He had dreams of leaving, of being somewhere with his eyes open and empty of everything except the deepest shadows.
Dry snowflakes falling on the pasture. The undulate furrows filling with snow and glyphs on the surface hewn by the unforgiving wind. His body generating surprising warmth in this makeshift straw cave.
The warmth of Sam’s body, the heat of making love, the difference between the body of a man and a woman. The shock and excitement of a face that needs to be shaved, and no matter how close, the shave will never be as soft as Elizabeth’s face looking up at him with that certain tenderness he sees only in women.
The tenderness he saw even when they were completely consumed in their own pleasure. The softness of their bodies that he was penetrating with the hardness of his own. If only that could have sustained him. But hunger was ignited inside him when he was the one being entered. And he even—foolishly—thought that hunger would make him a better lover to Elizabeth. Knowing what it was like to want that and to get it, wouldn’t that lend him a better understanding of how to give it? But it just didn’t work that way; once he’d gone through the crucible of being passive and wanting passivity, he suddenly no longer felt as complete in being active. And knew that he was lying to himself and to her, but how would he have known this if he hadn’t tried being with a woman again? How could he have been sure about his desire? And that was what he’d told Sam in his first letter, what he’d tried to explain, that the last time they made love, he took that risk because he wanted—at least once in his life—to feel that he couldn’t be closer to another human being than he was the night he begged Sam to keep going and not stop for any reason, to do what would have been the most natural act in the first order of the world. And maybe even then he was in some way already aware there wasn’t much time left for him.
And even though Luc worried, he carefully hid this worry from Sam, who foolishly believed that Luc was unconcerned because he was too young to have context on a fatal illness transmitted by sex; that much younger people never felt the same impulse to be careful. And yet even then, even though Luc knew he wanted to break off the relationship, he felt that if a virus had passed between them, it didn’t and somehow just wouldn’t matter in the end, and lying in Sam’s bed, their legs intertwined, the talk turned to other things, to skiing, to the world cup, to hiking up Moosilauke.
As sleep comes on again, like a heavy elixir, like release, a vision is scrolling before his tired eyes like celluloid: the sharp peaks of a western mountain range, a bluebird day, he and Sam with skis strapped to their back ascending, stopping to collect their breath, which is noticeably shallow at ten thousand feet, crossing a narrow divide between steep slopes that cannot be descended because of sheer cliffs that would
fling someone into oblivion. And then the entrance to the headwall off a five-foot cornice, Sam hesitating but Luc launching himself and a soft landing and then making those first fresh turns on a blanket of snow that nobody has touched, quick turns down a chute that is only slightly wider than the length of his skis, but caught up in the rhythm and sheer delight of mastering a slope whose difficulty is so extreme and remote that you need avalanche gear. But then he sees something, a shadow crossing over the sun, over the steel glint of the ice, and wonders for the first time if Sam made it all the way down Black Diamond Fall.
Dear Sam:
I hope this reaches you before you leave for Utah. I hope you have a great trip. I will think of you out there and will wish it was me skiing Black Diamond Fall with you like we said we might. Didn’t we say we might one day? I know I really let you down. But I got scared, not so much of people knowing or anything like that, but scared that it would only be you, and nobody else but you, for the rest of my life. How could I have known this so soon? And what if something happens to you and I have to live for a long time without you? But now I realize I made a mistake. You are everything to me, and I just have to go with it.
I don’t think I ever really explained it to you, how even though the injury did all kinds of weird shit to me, the fact that I heard music when we made love made me believe that you and I had something. And even when I said goodbye to you that day when I felt I had to, I knew I probably would never hear that music again when I made love to anyone else or have the feeling that making love could be like finding God.
There isn’t a moment when I don’t think about you. There isn’t a moment when I don’t need you. I tried being with Elizabeth, but she quickly figured things out and couldn’t bear me as I was, and I had to let her go. I really can’t blame her for hating me. Now I know it’s better this way because, like I said, the day we were watching U.S. women’s soccer against Japan, I can’t get married with this sort of feeling for another man burning a hole inside of me. It would be unfair. And you agreed. I was resigned to it, but I still was afraid of staying with you. But now I’m no longer afraid. Now I want you.
Black Diamond Fall Page 22