Cantrell glanced at his wife, who nodded. “Okay, we vote. I vote inside.”
“Me, too,” said Nelson.
“Make that three,” Earl added.
Lenore looked at him with utter disgust. “So predictable.”
“I’m not looking to die, sweet thing,” Earl snapped. “We got business at home, remember?”
“What’s her name, this business?” Lenore taunted. “Does she tell you you’re a big, brave hombre? Or does she know how little you are?”
The Texan’s fingers dug into the leather chair. “At least everything I got works, Lenore. For all that talk that body of yours does, I’m the one who knows you’re all bait and switch.”
Lenore’s expression did not change, but her fingernails trembled. “How dare you! In public like this!”
“What’s the matter, sweet thing?” Earl grinned. “Am I getting too close to the enchilada?”
She threw her drink in his face and snarled at him: “I’m sorry God screwed up my plumbing and I can’t give the little man a little man to leave his computer company to. But I’m still the best thing that ever walked into your sorryass life. Don’t you forget it.”
Lenore laughed at Earl’s expression as the Bloody Mary ran down Earl’s face. She threaded her fingers through that thick mane of exquisitely dyed hair. Then she took us all in at a glance, and pointed at Phil. “Anyone wants to take my scalp for a trophy will have to fight for it. I’m with you, Muscles.”
“You bitch,” Earl said as he walked toward the bathroom.
No one said anything for the longest time after he left. Lenore fluffed her hair again and looked at us. “Don’t worry about it. Earl and I… every now and then… we need to tell each other how much we… love each other. Finish the vote.”
“Butch?” Phil said.
“Outside,” he replied without hesitation, but he did not look happy.
Arnie struggled to control his voice. “I don’t want to go out there again. Not after today. But I’m not waiting in here to die on my knees like that guy Pawlett. I’ll hunt.”
“Arnie, my man,” Phil said. “All right.”
Griff pursed his lips and gestured to the outfitter. “I hate to say it, Mike, but I think they’re right. We have a better chance if we go after them.”
Cantrell was stone-faced. “Sheila?”
“I’ll stay inside.”
“Guess I got to be a team player sometime,” Theresa said, rolling her eyes. “Inside.”
“Five for, five against,” Phil said, looking at me and Kurant.
“I’m going to abstain,” Kurant said. “I’m a journalist. I’m supposed to be covering this.”
“Up to you, Diana.”
I felt a sour giddiness low in my chest. This is what women must have suffered thousands of years ago when they gathered their children to break camp and head after their mates into unexplored terrain. Men had their hunting cults to prepare them for such upheaval. Women had no such institutions. We have always been relied upon to negotiate the vagaries of life with an instinctive optimism. A return to security in such instances often seems impossible. As it did at that moment for me.
I realized I had spent the previous fifteen years telling myself I could remain encamped in the Back Bay of Boston, sheltered from the savage issues of a life. The thinness of my philosophy now struck me as ludicrous. The hearth would have to be abandoned. “I’m going out.”
“I knew she would!” Phil cried.
“But on two conditions,” I added. “We try to capture, not kill, them. And neither you nor Cantrell is in charge once we begin.”
“What? Who the fuck, then?” Phil demanded. “You?”
“No,” I said. I pointed at the guide. “Nelson.”
There was a lot of grumbling on the outfitter’s part over putting Nelson in charge. But Cantrell came to see my position. The guide had worked on the estate for three years. He knew the land better than anyone. If we were to have a chance at capturing the killers, we needed a strategist who could adapt instantly as the hunt evolved.
When it was agreed upon, there appeared among us a new strength. We were taking action. We were asserting control, acting less like potential victims.
While Sheila finished up with dinner, we pored over the map. We put red pins where we’d found the intruders’ footprints. White pins where we’d discovered secondary evidence, such as the felled trees. Green pins for the bodies. A blue pin for Phil’s encounter.
A fragmented pattern emerged. They had killed Pawlett, then moved south toward the estate sometime in early November, felling the trees to trap us. The freshest sign was located east and north of the lodge, this side of the Dream and south of the Sticks. We would focus our efforts in that nine-by-nine-mile quadrant.
“Hundred and ten square miles is a lot to cover,” Nelson was saying at dinner.
“We don’t try to cover it,” countered Griff. “We try to predict their movements based on the travel corridors they’re using. People are creatures of habit, just like animals.”
“Yeah, but don’t we need to know where their camp is, where they sleep, where they eat?” Lenore asked.
“Sure would help,” Cantrell agreed. “But we got no idea where that is.”
“Not exactly, maybe,” I said. “But if the tracks we found leading to and from Patterson are an indication, it’s somewhere north of the Sticks.”
“And within a few hours’ hike,” Butch said.
“They’ll come south tomorrow,” Nelson said, nodding. “If we can get them moving on our terms, we should be able to backtrack them to their camp.”
“Let’s not forget we know a lot about them already,” Griff said.
“Like what?” Theresa asked.
“Like those cedar arrows. It means he, or they, shoot traditional recurves or longbows.”
Kurant’s face screwed up. “Sort of bow-hunting fundamentalists, then?”
“I think we’re talking fanatics, not fundamentalists,” Arnie said. “But so what?”
Griff waved his fork in the air. “The method they’re using is as important to them as the end result. If they just wanted to kill us, they’d use a gun.
A longbow has an effective range of maybe twenty-five yards. It forces them to be more methodical, restricts them to thick cover, says that they’ve hunted for a long, long time.”
“You all think I’m so friggin’ stupid, don’t you?” Earl interjected.
No one replied. He’d been drinking hard since his verbal brawl with Lenore. She smiled grimly at us and then at her husband. “I think it’s someone’s bedtime.”
Earl laughed and slapped the edge of the table. “You think because I let her get on me like she does that I’m a stupid shit, don’t you? I see it. The way you look at me.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. “But, folks, I’m no stupid shit. I’ve made forty million bucks in my life. Earl Addison. He’s a little eccentric, sure. But stupid, no, no, no.”
“Little man… “
“Shaddup, will you for just once?!” he roared, rolling his bloodshot eyes. He waved both hands at us like a preacher. “You’re the ones who’re stupid. Stupid and blind.”
“You got a theory about what’s happening here?” Griff asked.
“You betcha, bub,” Earl slurred. “You think about it.
They drag Grover into the lodge yard and hang him. Why?
To scare us? Sure, I believe that.”
“Tell us something we don’t know, little man,” Lenore said.
“Ah, sweet thing… that’s what I love about you — you never change. They ain’t coming in here with Grover just to scare us; they’re doing it, or rather he’s doing it — the one with the air-bob soles — because he feels at home doing it.”
“You’re drunk,” Lenore said, dismissing him with a flick of her long fingernails.
“That so?” Earl said, gesturing up at the longbow and the quiver of cedar arrows hanging below the big nontypical buck a
bove the fireplace. “Now, who’s drunk, or stupid, or crazy? Not me, sweet thing. Not old Earl Addison.”
“But Metcalfe’s — ” Kurant began.
“Who says so?” Earl interrupted. “I heard they never found the body.”
My head began to thrum. And the semblance of control our decision to hunt had instilled in us now threatened to unravel.
NOVEMBER TWENTIETH
That thought almost destroyed our little community. If James Metcalfe was alive, why was he hunting us? Could his purpose be so twisted that he’d kill his beloved illegitimate son, Grover? And who was hunting with him? I jerked in and out of sleep under these burdens and the conflicting emotions Kurant had provoked in me.
Cantrell had ordered us not to travel anywhere alone. At least one person in each group had to be armed. He gave guns to Sheila and Theresa, to Butch and to Kurant. The writer had blanched when accepting the .12-gauge shotgun.
“Carrying this goes against everything I believe in,” he said as we trudged through the snow back toward our cabins. Griff had remained behind with Nelson to plot our tactics for the morning.
“The gun’s just for self-defense,” I said. “Anyway, we’re trying to capture them.”
“C’mon — it’s self-defense if we stay here in the compound. Otherwise it’s murder. And you know as well as I do that the way this is going, we’re not capturing anybody.”
I said softly, “I can’t think like that.”
“I’m paid to think like that.”
“So you’re not going in the morning?”
“I have to go,” Kurant said. “It’s my job. But I never saw it coming to this. I guess I have a vision of man as more sophisticated and civilized than the tribesman or…”
“Or the hunter?”
He stuck his chin out. “Yes.”
“Well, what are you going to do out there tomorrow if you come face-to-face with Metcalfe or whoever it is? Say, ‘I think the human being is above this sort of thing, so don’t kill me’?”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were,” he insisted.
I took in his dim form in the darkness. I wanted things, for once, to be cut-and-dried. “I didn’t mean to be.”
We reached my cabin. He stood on the porch while I got the door open and one of the lamps lit. I could tell he wanted to come in. Despite my exhaustion, I wanted him to come in. In the soft, flickering glow, he reminded me of Kevin, or at least what Kevin used to be. I was frightened of everything that had happened. And I needed to retreat into something that was familiar. I needed to hang onto a warm body in the night, to take hope. That’s what making love is, isn’t it — primal hope?
Finally I said, “Come in.”
“I’d like that,” he said.
He took off his coat and hung it on a peg over the woodstove. He rested the shotgun in the corner. He took a seat in the chair underneath the buck. “You surprise me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a woman. And still you don’t reject all this.”
“Reject what?”
“This way of life. The killings just go hand in hand with it.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “this is the work of two people who are mentally ill.”
“Is it? Or is it just the natural progression of the throwback, barbaric culture in which they were raised?”
“Already developing the themes of your article, I see.”
“I have to think ahead.”
“So do I,” I said, cooling quickly to the idea of him spending the rest of the night in my cabin, then describing it in his chronicle of our nightmare. “I’m tired now. I think you’d better go.”
“Something I said?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t hold it against me,” he said gently.
I nodded. “Whatever. You’d better go.”
I shut the door behind him and sighed. I might have found a few moments of physical refuge with him, but spiritually I was in this alone.
I locked the door, then braced it with the chair. I turned down the lights and brought the loaded rifle into the bedroom and stood it against the wall where I could reach it.
I got into bed and tried to sleep. I kept asking myself, was he right? Was my childhood a barbaric throwback? Was my soul damned by my supplications within a pagan religion?
In fits and starts I drowsed into a troubled sleep. I cried in my dreams. Katherine appeared as she was when I was fifteen. She laid my head in her lap and stroked my hair. I understood that this was the day that I’d lost my first boyfriend, a soccer player named Stan with remarkable green eyes and powerful legs who’d also taken my virginity on a dusty bearskin rug at his father’s fishing cabin. In the addled reason of the hormonal teen, I was certain I’d been cheated out of my one chance at a soul mate. I snuffled a more base description of my convictions to Katherine, who, incredibly, responded with giggles.
I’d stormed to my bedroom, not believing that she could be so callous.
“Now calm down,” she soothed, coming after me. “I was laughing because I had the same breakdown after losing my first boyfriend. You’ll learn that life rarely hands out soul mates on the first go-round. For the most part, we get boys posing as wise men who appear to see the whole world, but who are really fumblers who can’t see past the ends of their penises.”
She said this with such charity that I couldn’t help but laugh.
She reached out to stroke my face. “The rough edge of each fumbler rubs you toward who you will be. When life thinks you’ve been disappointed enough, your soul mate will appear and you’ll know immediately.”
“Did you know when you met Dad?’:
“Even before I met him,” she replied. “I was running for a second term, giving a speech at a garden party thrown by one of my father’s cronies. Your father wandered among the delphiniums at the rear of the crowd. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. But it was the way that he stared off into space that got to me. For some reason it was important to me that he listen to what I had to say. I gave the speech directly to him, but he never looked at me. I went up to him later and asked him why he didn’t listen to my speech. He said he did. I said he didn’t, that he was looking off into the sky. He assured me he’d been watching hummingbirds feed in the tulip trees, but had used my voice as music to narrate their flight.”
It was a story I’d heard countless times, but I asked as I had countless times: “You fell in love with him right then?”
“Wouldn’t you?” She laughed as she always did.
I stirred in my dreams and came awake for a moment. I grimaced at the knowledge that I might have spent years with a man who would never have thought to tell me my voice was the melodic counterpoint to nature’s drama. It was then that I realized that perhaps we are granted several kinds of soul mates in life; Katherine was the one I can point to with certainty.
Which is what made the winter of my fifteenth year so difficult. It was swearing-in day at the statehouse in Augusta. My father and I always went to watch her take the oath. I loved seeing her on the floor of the Senate, among all those men, standing tall.
Afterward she hosted a get-together in her office. Katherine got up on her desk. She talked about the legislation she hoped to push in the coming session.
“Maine’s rivers, as much as her forests, are her spirit, she began. “For too long we have ignored the fact that the spirit is being slowly squeezed out of our waters by papermill chemicals and efforts to develop the banks of our wildest rivers.
“The legislation we’ll push for will ensure that…” She stopped. A puzzled expression spread across her face. She looked around for my father, found him and smiled. “The legislation we’ll push for will ensure that Maine and Mainers will…”
She tried a third time. And when that failed, she brushed back a lock of hair that had fallen across her eye. “Excuse me, won’t you, everyone? I’m not feeling very well…
the excitement… I’m fatigued.”
Fatigued was a word one did not associate with my mother; she was one of those people who never needed more than four hours of sleep a night. My father eased his way through the crowd and helped her down. The two of us and her chief of staff got her into her office, where she could lie down on the couch. My father asked her questions, all of which she answered coherently. Fifteen minutes later she was back on her feet, ignoring my father’s orders that we go to the hospital for some tests, attending to the business of legislating. But in my eyes much had changed; until that day, I’d always regarded my mother as a still water incapable of being riffled by unseen currents.
The second episode took place three months later. I came home from school on a Thursday afternoon. The legislature was on its Easter break. Katherine was at the flytying table my father had built for her for Christmas.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi there,” she said, distracted. That same puzzled expression on her face. She held up the incomplete fly. “For the life of me, I can’t remember what hackle to use.”
My mother had been tying the Catskill version of the Elk Hair Caddis for as long as I could remember. “You all right?” I asked.
Katherine set the fly down on the table and stared through the magnifying glass at it. “I’ve been forgetting things,” she said simply. My mother was forty-seven. She was renowned for her ability to cite the details of a dozen pieces of pending legislation off the top of her head. She should not have been forgetting things.
After several inconclusive tests in Bangor, we trooped south to Portland and finally to the Leahy Clinic in Boston. Three days later, they returned a verdict: Katherine exhibited all the signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s. My mother was losing her mind on a daily basis.
I came awake in the cabin at 4 A.M. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I remembered how stoically she’d taken the news. She’d even managed to make a joke about how the newspaper columnists could now rightly describe activity at the statehouse as “immemorable.” A month later, though, I found Katherine in her bedroom gazing at the rain-splattered window as if from a great distance.
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