by Tim Green
Suddenly, right in front of Jill, swam two enormous dark shapes. She jumped back with a gasp. Jeremiah sprang to her side and broke out in his easy laughter.
“Scared you?” he said. “They’re just water dogs.”
Jill looked from his mirthful face back to the two dark, ponderous shapes moving eerily away. “What?” she asked.
“Just carp,” he told her.
“Carp!” she exclaimed. “In this lake? I thought this was one of the cleanest lakes in the world!”
“It is,” he said. “Carp don’t mean a lake is dirty. They’re just bottom feeders. The dirtier a lake is, the better it is for them, but they can live in almost any lake. There aren’t many here, but the ones we do have are so damn big we call ’em water dogs.”
“They’re about as big as a dog,” she said.
“See?” he said. “Come on, don’t worry about them. They’re long gone and they wouldn’t hurt you anyway. Look at this rope.”
Shedding his shoes, socks, and finally his T-shirt, Jeremiah began to climb the rocky bank wearing only his red mesh shorts until he reached a ledge about ten feet above the water’s surface. His prodigious torso was shockingly white next to the deep farmer’s tan that colored his face, neck, and arms. From a twisted branch, he unwound a thick old rope that shed its furry fibers like an aging dog. Without warning, he grabbed hold and launched his enormous frame from the ledge, swinging well out over the lake before letting go and plunging into the green water in a boil of pure white bubbles. He came up with a loud whoop.
“Come on!” he yelled. “Grab the rope and climb up.”
The knotted rope was swaying from its limb just within reach of the break wall’s edge. Jill took off her shoes and socks, got hold of it, and began her ascent. From up on the ledge, the whole thing looked a lot scarier.
“It’s okay!” Jeremiah hollered, his massive limbs pumping like a steady machine to keep him afloat out in the deep water. “Come on! Just swing out and let go just before you start to swing back.”
Jill grasped the rope tightly and musical laughter bubbled up out of her throat. She let herself fall from the ledge and swung down toward the break wall, then past it and up into the air like a swallow. At the peak, her eyes grew wide looking down at what seemed to be the tiny shape of Jeremiah grinning up at her from the pure green water. She let go and her laughter became a scream. She dropped through the air and plunged deep into the water, cooled instantly by its brisk temperature. With several strong kicks, she thrust herself upward, shrieking with delight as she burst through the surface.
The two of them laughed together, all the way to the break wall and down its length to the open end on the north where the gravel beach spilled out into some shallower water and they could easily climb back out.
Together they walked back toward the rope. While Jill excitedly told him the story of how she and her brother used to swim in a cloudy pond in the Catskills, Jeremiah stared into her eyes. Their color had somehow changed in the unusual reflection of the green water. They were striking. Jeremiah never looked down from those eyes, though. It was as if he were afraid to let his vision wander down the front of her athletic frame for even a brief glance at the places where her dark T-shirt now clung tight to her shapely torso.
“Want to do it again?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said with a laugh, and they swung and jumped over and over until they were cool and breathless, lying on their backs in a lush patch of grass that grew beneath the willow’s shade.
“This is so beautiful,” Jill whispered after a while, looking up through the softly rattling leaves of the tree at the wispy sky.
“You’re beautiful,” Jeremiah blurted out.
“Jeremiah!” Jill said, turning her head toward him with a tolerant frown. “Why did you say that?”
“I’m sorry,” he said bashfully. His cheeks were burning cherry red and he kept his eyes focused straight up in the air. “It just came out.”
After a pause, Jill smiled and said quietly, “You’re a sweet person, Jeremiah. You’re a friend.”
He sighed heavily.
Jill took comfort that she had been very clear about Kurt. It was on the very first day they rode around the lake together that she told Jeremiah she was very much in love and engaged to be married. She didn’t want to confuse him.
“I’m glad I’m your friend,” he said. “And I know that’s all it is, but I’m glad anyway. Your fiancé, he’s the luckiest person on earth, you know. I don’t think there are many women who are as beautiful on the outside and still that beautiful on the inside. I’m just saying it. I don’t mean anything by it . . .”
“Thank you, Jeremiah,” Jill said softly. “I appreciate it.”
They lay there quietly for a time, each of them thinking about the other. Jill’s Spandex pants began to dry and grow uncomfortable. She sighed, sat up, and began to put on her socks and shoes. Jeremiah continued to lie there covertly watching her with his hands under his head, his broad pale chest rising and falling peacefully.
“Don’t be mad,” he said to her.
She looked at him fondly and replied, “I’m not, but I have to go.”
“I know,” he said. “Will I see you tomorrow?”
“It’s supposed to rain,” she said, “finally.”
“Rain doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I’m a farmer.”
“All right,” she said with a smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
As she pedaled leisurely home, her mind was preoccupied with her new friend. She was devoted to Kurt, but there was a small voice inside her that cried out in admiration for Jeremiah. Their conversations over the past two weeks hadn’t been limited to their bike rides. It wasn’t uncommon for them to stop in town at the Skaneateles Bakery, where he would eat half a dozen egg sandwiches and they would both have coffee. Jill knew most of his story by now, about how he had attended the state university in Albany, become a state trooper, and lived in a small house on the edge of their farm.
“My parents moved to Florida and my older brother got the farm,” he had told her frankly. “Then my parents died and my brother became a Jehovah’s Witness.”
The brother, ten years Jeremiah’s senior, sounded to Jill like he had been a bit of a slacker to begin with. When the parents went south he abandoned the family farm and moved with his lawyer wife and kids into a two-family home in Auburn to be closer to their church. When that happened, Jeremiah moved back into the main house and took over the farm. He refused to give up his job with the state police and instead switched to working mostly nights. “They might want to come back,” he had simply explained.
So he had fixed up the property to the way it had been when his father was young and strong, and he worked diligently at both jobs, long hard night shifts with the troopers, then as a steward to the family farm during the day until his brother decided to come back.
“What if he never comes back?” Jill had asked.
Jeremiah had simply tossed down the rest of his egg sandwich, shrugged, and said, “Then he never comes back. I don’t know. I don’t think about it. It doesn’t matter if he comes back. The farm belongs to him. The house on Mead Hill is still mine and I’ve got a good job. If he came back, it’d be good. I’d get to see my niece more and I wouldn’t have to work the farm.”
After that comment, Jill had shaken her head and suggested mildly that Jeremiah might want to wrest control of the property from his brother.
“That’s city thinking,” Jeremiah had said benevolently, leaving her to feel slightly ashamed.
But that was part of why she couldn’t get him out of her mind. He was so foreign to her. He was like a friendly giant from a children’s storybook, kind and passive and affectionate. But she knew he was more than that too. Occasionally she had seen glimpses of his sterner side, and she imagined that he cut an intimidating figure in his trooper’s uniform. Jill wished she had a sister or a close friend that she could fix him up with. She thought Talia
was probably the only woman she knew open-minded enough to appreciate someone like Jeremiah, but of course Talia was already married. Jill racked her brain for someone.
In truth, Talia aside, Jill didn’t have many real friends. Acquaintances from her first marriage were mostly limited to the wives of her husband’s friends, almost all of whom had faded into oblivion after their break. There were a handful of women at Safe Tech whom she considered to be nominal friends, but not even the best of them would consider the notion of marrying a farmer from New Hope, New York.
Well, who could find fault with that? She certainly couldn’t imagine leading that kind of life. At least she couldn’t bring the image quickly to mind in a favorable light. He had cows, for God’s sake. She supposed, though, if she took some time to think about it there were some good things . . .
Her ruminations were so intense that she passed her own driveway. When she realized it, she backtracked and coasted down through the trees, parking her bike in the garage. Kurt was awake and sitting on the flagstone veranda in back of the kitchen. He was having his breakfast and reading the newspaper. By now her clothes and her hair were dry so she sat right down, hopeful and somehow optimistic that this would be the moment when she broke through to the Kurt she knew before that fateful phone call three weeks ago.
“Hi,” he said, looking up only briefly before dipping his head back down into the paper.
Jill poured herself a glass of juice. Clara, the local woman who cooked and cleaned the house for them, appeared in the doorway and silently mouthed the question as to whether she wanted anything to eat. Jill shook her head no and waited to see if Kurt would come up from his paper for air. She tapped her foot impatiently. Here they sat under the shade of the massive trees hissing in the breeze, with a spectacular view, financially free from the cares of the rest of the world, recently engaged, and about to start a whole new life together. But none of it was as sweet as Jill had dreamed it would be. Over the last few weeks, Kurt had subtly and gradually grown distant. Something was happening, something that made her question whether the two of them would ever be the same again.
After a time she gathered her emotions and softly said, “Kurt, could I talk to you?”
She got no response. He only continued to read.
“Kurt?” she said patiently.
“What, Jill, what?” he said somewhat peevishly, snapping the paper shut as if she were some kind of pestering teenager.
Part of her burned with anger. She felt the urge to toss her juice in his face, but she won the struggle to remain calm by remembering the state he had a right to be in. She had read Talia’s book on grief and she knew better now the multiplicity of effects that it had on those who had lost an important loved one. Oftentimes, she had read, grief hid behind the mask of anger. Maybe she contained herself because of the irrational pang of guilt for secretly enjoying her friendship with Jeremiah.
“I just . . . wanted to talk,” she said.
Kurt looked confused, as if she were speaking Chinese. “What do you want to talk about?”
Jill nodded, biting down on her lip to keep from becoming emotional. “I’m having a hard time,” she said in a whisper, “with everything . . .”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked irritably.
The dark circles under his eyes accentuated the red in them. Jill knew he wasn’t sleeping much, and when he did, it wasn’t uncommon for him to rise up out of bed in the middle of the night shrieking in horror. While at first she had been able to soothe him to sleep by stroking his hair, it seemed now the only way he could sleep was when he collapsed from sheer exhaustion. She wondered to herself now if she’d woken him when she left the house for her ride.
“It’s just . . .” Jill’s hands were trembling slightly now. The complaints that had seemed so cogent were now stuck in her throat. During her ride home, they seemed justified, but somehow saying them out loud to a man who was suffering from the grief of a lost child suddenly seemed selfish. What concerned her most was that Kurt’s moods didn’t seem to be getting any better. On the contrary, he seemed to be growing worse, drifting farther and farther away from her. It all seemed so unfair, as if she were cursed never to find happiness in a relationship.
“I know how much you loved him,” she said abruptly, breaking through the barrier of shame. She was bolstered by the words she had read; there was truth in them. To begin to heal, the book said, an aggrieved parent had to confront the reality of their child’s death. “But he’s gone, Kurt.”
“I know he’s gone.” Kurt glared, his voice turning instantly bitter. “I don’t need to be told that he’s gone. I feel it every second of every day. I’m afraid to sleep, you know. I see him in my dreams and he’s real! Then I wake up and I have to feel the sting of his death all over again from the beginning. I have no peace! I can’t stop feeling it.
“Do you know what it’s like?” he exclaimed in a voice pitched with pain.
Then his words faded almost to a whisper, and as he spoke, Jill thought that for the first time the tears of despair were pooling in the rims of his eyes. “Do you know what I can’t stop thinking about?”
He looked at her now with his face contorted in agony. “When Collin was in high school, they played in the county lacrosse championship game. I knew it was important to him, and I planned to be there. But I was also in the midst of closing the financing on the Edison Lab that was going to get Safe Tech the navy contract. Well, we almost lost the deal at the last minute because the credit manager at Bank of New York felt the deal was undersecured, so I had to stay in the city. I convinced him to let the deal go through—but I missed the game.
“They won,” he continued quietly, his eyes drifting down to the backs of his hands, “and Collin scored the last three goals to win it. It was probably the highlight of his life, and I wasn’t there . . .
“But what happens with someone you love is that you just assume that they’re always going to be there. It’s like your health. You don’t really realize how good you had it until it’s gone. And I just can’t stop thinking about that game and all the other moments in my life that I wasn’t with him when I could have been, when it was important to be with him. But I wasn’t there because I never imagined that I couldn’t just make it up to him the next day . . .
“Now . . .” Kurt’s brow wrinkled, and Jill was certain he was about to cry, but she could see the immense struggle going on inside him. His body twisted and he held his head in the awkward position of a lifeless puppet.
Jill reached across the table and grasped his hand. “It’s all right to cry, Kurt,” she said desperately.
“No it’s not!” Kurt was standing now and he slapped the paper down on the table to emphasize his words. Anger seemed to burn inside him like a live ember. His glare was filled with hatred, and Jill looked away from him, tears running down her face.
“I know what I’ve become!” he howled at her as he burst into tears. “Do you think I like it? Do you think I like brooding and tearing myself apart from the inside out? Someone killed my boy!
“I asked you,” he said. He was panting, fighting back the flow of tears. “I asked you for help. I asked you to be patient with me. Is this being patient? Is it?”
“No,” she sobbed, shaking her head.
“I will get through this!” he said intently, wiping his eyes clean and hiding his face in his hands. In a muffled voice he continued: “I told you I would. Now please, give me time. This will all work out, but you’ve got to give me time!”
CHAPTER 21
The moon rose over the ridge on the east side of the lake like an enormous luminescent melon. Oblong and orange, its glow cast a parade of sparkling light across the rippling water. With weary, bloodshot eyes Kurt set off in his skiff and eased his way across the lake to the judge’s property. He wasn’t able to sleep anyway and he felt that if the solution were going to come to him, it would come to him there. In recent days, he had found that the more he thought about
it, the more impossible it all seemed.
Part of his mind seemed to be carried away by insanity. He caught himself wistfully considering other options—taking the president out on the street with a high-powered rifle, or wild things like obtaining a missile on the black market and launching it from his boat, blowing up the president’s bedroom in the middle of the night. There were even moments of despair when he found himself pondering a simple suicidal rush. These, he knew, were the most effective means of assassination. They were the darkest fears of the Secret Service.
But besides his own will to live, there were two reasons why Kurt continued to strive for a solution to his puzzle. First, he wanted to be certain of success. He wanted to personally put the bullet into the president’s brain at close range. Second, he wanted Calvin Parkes to know why he was going to die. He wanted to see the anguish on his face when he realized the mistake he’d made when he ordered Collin’s death. He wanted the president to know that he was going to die at the hands of a vengeful father. He wanted him to think about it, to see the terrible black hole in the end of a gun barrel and know that death was imminent. He wanted the president to experience the same horror that his own son obviously had. Somehow that was as important to Kurt as the act itself.
If anyone could kill the president and then escape, Kurt believed it had to be him. He had spent the first part of his professional life focusing on protecting the president. He knew the weaknesses in the system, the things agents most feared and why. He had then spent the second part of his adult life building a company part of whose mission was to provide sophisticated technological security. That business operated in a perpetual cycle. Every time one group conceived a new protection, another group would work to engineer their way around it. And the people most suited for that circumvention were always the ones who knew most about the construction of the impediment. Kurt knew the obstacles the Secret Service raised to prevent people from getting to the president, and because of his experiences over the years with his team of Safe Tech scientists, his mind was uniquely attuned to getting past them.