Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  “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 something 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 e
xcept 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.

  I’m sorry for breaking us apart, Sam. I’m sorry about breaking you. I’m sorry I’m not older. I’m sorry I ran away. I realize that you might not be able to forgive this and might go on without me. And of course I will try and understand.

  All my love,

  Luc

  February 25; Donner’s Field, Weybridge, 7 miles from Carleton, Vermont; 17 degrees, sun and clouds, brisk wind

  The bodybuilder twins, Howard and Mark Newcombe, have been told that their cooperation with the search for Luc Flanders will be factored into the length of their sentencing for vandalizing the Frost farm. They have no idea that Elizabeth Squires has been arrested and charged with assault.

  “Right here. We dropped him right here,” says Mark, the wall-eyed twin, just as the patrol car reaches the end of London’s Field, a long pasture in Weybridge, just outside of the boundaries of Carleton. Jenkins brakes and a cloud of salty dust rises off the dry, winter-beaten dirt road.

  Beyond them a long expanse of snowfield that, in bare patches, shows the stubble of straw. A line of carefully planted larch trees limns the far perimeter. It’s a cold, bleak place, like some end-of-the-earth place and yet located in one of the smallest states of America. Vast for Vermont, anyway, it’s a field big enough for a jumbo airplane to land. Out of the contemplative silence that is wrought by such a broad vista, Jenkins asks, “So you saw him walking down the road.”

  “Walking, yes,” says Mark.

  “Walking real slowly,” Howard interjects, and then does the rest of the talking.

  “And you stopped and offered him a ride,” Kennedy says.

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say where he was going?” Jenkins asked.

  “We asked him and he said he was on his way home.”

  “Did you ask him where he lived?” Kennedy asked.

  “He told us he lived near Dartmouth and we told him we could give him a ride part of the way south. To Bethel.”

  “But then he asked to get out of the car?” Jenkins says.

  “Right,” says Mark.

  “He asked to get out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “In the middle of nowhere,” repeats Howard.

  “Why the middle of nowhere?” Kennedy asks.

  There is an odd pause and then from Howard comes the hoarse, accusatory, “He probably would’ve stayed in the car if my brother hadn’t weirded him out with stupid talk.”

  “Stupid talk?” asks Kennedy.

  “Bodybuilder bullshit,” explains Howard.

  “Did you try and sell him steroids?” Kennedy asks.

  There is a brief pause and then Howard says, “Look, we saw him. We offered him a ride and then he wanted to get out.”

  “Doesn’t answer my question,” Kennedy says.

  “Yeah, we did, okay?” Mark says.

  “But he didn’t want them,” Howard says.

  “Anyway, he wasn’t going to stay in the car forever,” Mark says.

  “Oh?” Kennedy asks. “Why wouldn’t he just take the ride and go the distance you offered him?”

  “He got jumpy, what
can we say?” says Mark. “Maybe he had figured out a destination. Maybe he’s somewhere like San Francisco by now.”

  Pointing at the pasture and the distant looming shadow of Snake Mountain, Kennedy says to Howard, “And did you note which way he walked?”

  “No, not really.”

  “You didn’t watch him out of the rearview mirror when you were driving away?” Jenkins asks.

  “No,” Howard says, indicating his brother with his beefy shoulder. “Because he kept opening his big trap!”

  Jenkins waits a few moments and then proceeds. “And once again, how did he seem?”

  “He seemed out of it,” says Mark.

  “Like on drugs out of it?” Kennedy asks.

  “No, more like . . . depressed out of it,” says Howard.

  Kennedy and Jenkins glance at one another. “Okay, let’s head back into town,” Jenkins says.

  May 16; Carleton, Vermont; 65 degrees, sun and high clouds, breezy

  In early May with the last traces of ice still plaguing the slowly awakening land, a hay bale is found by a farmer at a place called Donner’s Field in Weybridge. Inside the bale is an entombment large enough to accommodate a person of six feet two inches who seemed to have dug themselves in with their fingernails. The arrival of spring could have allowed the body to plunge into the swollen river.

  When the DNA samples are extracted from the crusty remnants of straw and matched to the DNA of Luc Flanders, a river search begins. A helicopter team from Maine flies over the Otter Creek, snapping photos with a special camera able to plumb turbulent river depths, scanning for human remains.

  Then, on the sixteenth of May, a young mother with a toddler on her back is walking along the riverbank and sees a raft-like pallet protruding from a crest of the turbulent water. The wood (yellow pine) is soaked dark and gelatinous and crosshatched in a grid and, she imagines, once sustained the weight of some heavy piece of machinery. Maybe last summer the pallet had been appropriated by a wood-worker for pleasure-river-riding with family and friends but then abandoned like a boat to nowhere—perhaps at the end of September when the days cooled off and the temperature was no longer warm enough for swimming.