ACCORDING TO LATER REPORTS, PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED, but generally conceded to be accurate by those who were present, by the time the firefighters arrived at the site, the main building of the camp called Rangeview had burned nearly to the ground, with only the large brook-stone fireplace chimney left standing. The nationally known artist James Heldon managed to retrieve from the wreckage of the house one of what he claimed were twelve high-priced paintings that he had placed on loan to the late Dr. Cole. The artist was confident that the appraised value of the eleven destroyed paintings would be covered by the late doctor’s fire insurance. However, most of the rest of the furniture, household goods, and personal possessions were destroyed or so badly damaged by smoke and by water tossed onto the dying fire by the bucket brigade as to be unsalvageable. The firefighters with great effort managed to confine the fire to the nearby grounds and, with the exception of several large pine trees located next to the main building, saved the surrounding trees and outbuildings and kept the fire from spreading to the adjacent forest. They were aided in this by the heavy rain that began to fall within minutes of their arrival at the site.
On the basis of pale green pieces of shattered glass found in the fireplace and certain other evidence, Essex County sheriff Dan Peters stated that the fire appeared to have been started by a kerosene lantern either thrown or, much less likely, accidentally dropped into an already lit fire in the fireplace. It was assumed by all that the person who threw—or dropped—the lamp was Vanessa Cole. Vanessa’s mother, Evelyn Cole, was at first thought to have been in residence at Rangeview at the time of the fire. But the region’s other well-known artist, Jordan Groves, said that he had flown Mrs. Cole from the Second Lake over to Westport on Lake Champlain the previous evening. Presumably, she had made her way to the Westport rail station and later returned by train to her home in Tuxedo Park, New York. It therefore appeared that at the time of the fire Vanessa Cole was alone at Rangeview. Russell Kendall, the manager at the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve Club, and the guide Hubert St. Germain confirmed this.
When the firefighters first arrived at the camp, Vanessa Cole was nowhere to be found, and it was feared that she had perished in the fire. The firefighters, once they had succeeded in keeping the fire from spreading to nearby trees and the outbuildings, searched in vain through the still smouldering rubble for the remains of the woman. Meanwhile, the artist Jordan Groves, guided by intuition and a more thorough and intimate knowledge of Vanessa Cole’s mind than that available to the others present, left the group and bushwhacked his way uphill through the dense woods behind the camp and discovered the poor woman in a clearing about a quarter mile away. As he did not bring Vanessa in until sometime later, many of those present did not learn firsthand what had happened to her or even that she had been found by Jordan Groves. It was raining very heavily by then, and many of the firefighters and most of the volunteers from the clubhouse had started making their way back, either along the shoreline trail or across the lake by guide boat to the Carry and from there on to the First Tamarack Lake, where a second flotilla of guide boats awaited the brave, exhausted men and boys of the Adirondacks and the loyal members and guests of the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve.
JORDAN GROVES STRODE QUICKLY UPHILL FROM THE CHARRED remains of the house and after a few moments of climbing through the stand of red pines saw Vanessa Cole in the clearing a short ways beyond. She was seated on the ground at the grave of her mother. She was still wrapped in the sheet, sopping wet from the rain, and was visibly trembling from the cold, and as he entered the clearing and drew near her, he saw that beside her on the ground lay a shovel—the same shovel that he and Hubert had used to bury Vanessa’s mother. Next to the shovel was a thick, brown, cardboard file folder tied with a black ribbon.
Vanessa was speaking, at least her lips were moving, but all Jordan heard was a low murmur cut with static and broken hisses, the same sound she had breathed into his ear that morning at Rangeview, the day they’d dropped Dr. Cole’s ashes into the lake. It had seemed intimate and erotic then, a teasing invitation. But it sounded like madness now. She stared straight at the grave of her mother and seemed to be addressing her—addressing the woman’s ghost, perhaps, or Vanessa’s memory of her mother from long ago, because there was a childlike tone to her voice, making sentences that ended with an upturn, a question mark. For a moment Jordan thought that she was mocking her mother in a little girl’s voice—he heard her say a great fall, or perhaps it was grateful, and together again, or maybe it was never again, and on a wall—words that emerged from a running stream of words in a grammar other than English. Or maybe it was a childhood nonsense song he was hearing, or a nursery rhyme.
He knelt beside her and realized that she was still naked under the cold wet sheet. He shucked his heavy waxed fireman’s coat and draped it over her shoulders. She stopped speaking then—it was more a noise that had stopped than speech, but a noise filled with feelings he’d never before heard articulated by her, nor by anyone else he’d known. Feelings he had no name for.
“Can you stand?” He held her by the elbows, ready to lift her to her feet.
“Yes, of course,” she said, and without his help moved gracefully to a standing position.
He backed away, surprised, once again unable to distinguish between authenticity and performance, unable to know for certain if she was mad in actual fact or was acting mad, was lost to herself in pain or merely imitating it—and if imitating pain, then what was she really feeling? For she had to be feeling something, didn’t she? No one could be alive and conscious and not feel something.
“Did you set the fire, Vanessa?”
“Yes.”
“Was it an accident?”
“Not really.”
“‘Not really.’ Why did you come up here, Vanessa?”
She pointed at the file folder. “To bury that. I could have let it burn in the fire. Maybe I should have let it burn. Turn it into ashes, like Daddy. I was going to. But then I wanted to bury it with my mother. Put it in the ground with her,” she said. “But I couldn’t.”
“Why? What is it? What’s inside the folder?”
“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let them burn up in the fire, and I couldn’t bury them, either. Isn’t that ridiculous, Jordan? Can’t live with ’em, and can’t live without ’em,” she said and abruptly smiled, then was serious again. “Will you do it for me?”
“What’s inside the folder, Vanessa?” he demanded. He reached for the folder, but she shoved his hand away.
“Something that should never have existed! Something that, once it did exist, should have been burned or buried long ago.” Vanessa spoke rapidly now, with more anger than agony. “Something that, if it wasn’t burned long ago, should be buried with my mother. I can’t bury them with him, it’s too late for that now. Besides, she’s the one who allowed them to come into existence in the first place.”
Vanessa was smiling, and Jordan took a step back and tried to see her more clearly, more objectively, as he thought of it, so that he could somehow gain purchase on what she was feeling. He couldn’t know what she was talking about, what she was referring to, unless he had some idea of what she was feeling. Otherwise, she was simply raving. Otherwise, her words had no connection to reality, not even a tangled, mad connection. Unless, of course, she was acting. And if indeed she was only acting, then it was something other than madness, something maybe worse than madness.
“Daddy kept them up here at the Reserve,” she went on. “Hidden in the library, of all places. Can you imagine? Hidden right there in plain sight in the old Beinecke, in the one place he knew she would never look. And neither would I. Until yesterday, when I took you into the library, which had been the nursery when I was little, and I thought, of course, ‘Everything is in the library.’ That’s what Daddy used to say whenever I asked a question he didn’t have the answer for. ‘Everything is in the library.’”
“What the hell are you talking about? Am I supposed to t
hink you’re crazy, Vanessa?”
“I’m not crazy.”
“What’s in the folder, then.”
“What’s in the folder? Why, photographs.”
“Photographs. Of what? Of whom?”
“Photographs of me, Jordan! Me with no clothes on, me when I was a teeny-weeny girl, taken by my daddy, with my mommy acting as his studio assistant. Drunk or doped at the time, no doubt, but my daddy’s faithful assistant all the same. Then and now. Even dead. Do you want to see them?” she said and picked up the folder.
“Yes.”
“Well, you can’t.” She hugged the folder to her chest. “They’re mine. They’re me.”
“Okay, fine. You want me to bury them?”
“Yes. I…I can’t do it myself. I don’t know why. I want to, but I don’t want to let them go. It’s too…hard, somehow. I feel like it’s destroying evidence.”
“I’ll do it,” Jordan said.
“But don’t look at them!”
“I won’t.” He picked up the shovel and proceeded to dig a hole in the soft wet ground that was the width and length of the folder. “Okay, let me have it.”
She handed him the folder very carefully, as if it contained sacred scripture, a gnostic revelation. “You can’t look.”
“I won’t,” he said, and he didn’t. He was absolutely sure that there were no photographs inside the folder. Papers—he could tell that much from the weight and shape of it—but probably nothing more than receipts for materials and work done at the camp, or letters, newspaper clippings, possibly a half-dozen old magazines or a pack of Dr. Cole’s personal Rangeview letterhead stationery. But photographs? No. Jordan lay the folder flat in the hole and filled it in and tamped down the dirt and kicked a layer of pine needles over it. “There, it’s done. Do you want me to place a rock on top, some kind of ceremonial marker?”
“Don’t condescend to me.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “In case you ever change your mind and want to come back and dig them up.”
“‘Them.’ The photographs.”
“Yes. The photographs.”
“No. No need to mark it.” She stood with shoulders slumped, hands lost in the sleeves of the heavy fireman’s coat, strands of soaked hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks—a bedraggled, lost child, Jordan thought.
“Come on, Vanessa. I’ll take you over to my place, get you some dry clothes, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”
“You can do that? Fly me away from here?”
He was silent for a few seconds, then exhaled slowly, as if a quandary had at last been resolved. “Yes. I can do pretty much whatever I want now.”
“What’s going to happen to me, Jordan?”
“Nothing,” he said. Then added, “But only if you agree to do what your mother originally wanted you to do.”
“Oh! Go into that hospital? That’s what she originally wanted. So they could perform the operation on my brain. The operation they learned from Daddy. The operation that will make me nice.”
Jordan put his arm around her shoulders and gently moved her away from the grave and toward the woods below. “Vanessa, no one’s going to operate on you. Trust me. There’ll be no brain surgery. All that business about your father and lobotomies, it’s not true, Vanessa. You know that. No more than your belief that he took obscene pictures of you when you were a child. You’ll be fine, I promise. If you go into the hospital, nothing bad will happen to you.”
“You don’t know as much as you think you do.”
“I do know that if you don’t go into the hospital, there’s going to be a thorough investigation into the fire, and you’ll likely go to jail for setting it. They already know you set it. That you set it ‘not really’ by accident. And who knows what else will come out in an investigation and trial? Your mother’s death, for example. Which might also be seen as ‘not really’ an accident. And that you kidnapped her. And buried her body here on the Reserve. You’ve still got plenty to hide, you know.”
“Is it like I’m pleading insanity?”
“Yes.”
“Am I insane, Jordan?”
“I don’t know.” Then added, “No, not to me.”
They walked a few more feet, and she stopped and stuck out her lower lip and pouted. “I don’t want to go.”
“You’ll be fine,” he said again. “Trust me.”
“What if they find out about what happened to Mother?”
“They won’t. Not if you go quietly into the hospital. I told the sheriff and Russell Kendall that I flew her out last night and she went back to New York by train from Westport. Your original plan. They believed me. Or at least the sheriff did. Kendall went along for his own reasons, I guess. And Hubert will, too. No one will ever know what happened here. It will be just as you planned. Your mother will have simply disappeared. But now, because of the fire, you have to disappear, too. Only for a while, though. A hospital in Europe is perfect. A nervous breakdown is perfect. In a year, you’ll be able to come back to New York and start your life over again.”
“Start my life over. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? What about you, Jordan?”
“Yeah, well, like I said, I can do pretty much whatever I want to now.”
“So you’re free?”
“Yes. I’m free. In a sense, you are, too. We’re both free as birds.”
AT THE TAMARACK CLUBHOUSE, THE OVERHEATED KITCHEN WAS crowded with local women and girls cleaning the pots and dishes and utensils. The firefighters and the Reservists who had gone out to the Second Lake with them had been rewarded with a large dinner prepared by the staff of the Club and the wives and daughters of the volunteers from the surrounding villages. Local women and girls had cooked the meal, and the wives and female guests of members had served it and cleared the dining room tables afterward. Then, a little before nine o’clock, Alicia Groves left the kitchen and walked slowly, wearily from the building, past the tennis courts and toward the staff parking lot where she had parked her car. Her mind was on her sons, Bear and Wolf, whom she had left at the house in the care of the girl Frances. Alicia needed to get back to them. They were trying not to show it, but she knew they were frightened and confused and did not believe her steady assurances that everything was going to be fine, Papa will come home soon, but then he might have to go away on a long trip to Spain.
The rain had stopped falling. As she neared the car she glanced up at the rising meadow beyond and saw flickering chartreuse lights dotting the darkness—fireflies. She stopped for a moment to watch. They were beautiful, the first thing of beauty that she had noticed in days, it seemed. The first thing that had given her pause and taken her thoughts away from the sudden dismemberment of her life. Fireflies. Their tiny lights flared against the darkness, then went out, like sparks from an invisible fire.
For a long time Alicia stood beside the car watching the fireflies dance through the darkness, until it came to her that she would survive this day and the next and the next, for in the midst of a life of loneliness and unacknowledged abandonment she had finally come to know true love, and because she had known love she had for the first time been able to see the darkness that for so many years had surrounded her. She had deceived her husband, yes, but in the end she had not lied to him about her love for Hubert, and now she was glad that she had not lied to him, glad that she had not told her husband what he wanted to hear, which would have partially healed the breach in their marriage and allowed it to continue more or less as before, in darkness, with no brilliant lights illuminating for a few brief seconds the wildflowers strewn across the alpine meadow before her. She did not realize it, so caught up was she in the glow of her thoughts, but as she got into the car and drove it from the parking lot down the road toward her home and her children and her unknown future, Alicia Groves was smiling.
But then she stopped smiling. No, she thought, nothing good or useful could come of what she had done. The undeniable truth was that her husband, her marriage, had used her
badly, and she had rebelled against that abuse by convincing herself that she had fallen in love with Hubert St. Germain so that she could commit adultery with him. She had used Hubert as badly as her husband had used her. But that was not the problem she faced now. That was merely the truth. The problem she faced now was that except for her children she was alone in the world. Her marriage was ruined, and the man for whom she had ruined it was not a man she could love and live with. Hubert St. Germain, the guide, the man of the woods, a taciturn, stoical, mildly sensual man, a man who had let her be his envelope, his perfect companion and lover: Hubert St. Germain was dull and unimaginative and provincial. She saw clearly for the first time that he was not capable of knowing who she was. And he was not ignorant enough to pass for innocent. She might have learned to love him if he had been innocent. She had brought down on herself an unexpected darkness, and she could not blame him, and she could not blame her husband. She could only blame herself, and that did not matter, because it did not change anything.
What will she do now with the rest of her days? She knows the answer. She will raise her sons, and when they become men she will cling to them and want to ask constantly of them if they love her, but she will hold her tongue. Instead, over and over she will ask herself, and now and again will dare to ask her sons, if she did badly by them, and they will sigh and reassure her one more time that she did not do badly by them and they are grateful. She will not ask them if she had been wrong to betray their father after he had so many times betrayed her, because they will never know of that. Their father will have died in Spain in April 1937. Shot down by the Fascists. In their eyes and in the eyes of most of the western world who cared about that war or cared about art or both, he will have died a hero. Only Alicia, his widow, will know what took him to Spain in the first place, and even she won’t know the whole story.
The Reserve Page 26