by James A Ross
Luke took the carved whistle from his pocket and gave it a blast.
“I know! I know!” Tom raised a hand in surrender. “But you had your chance to back me. Now we’re grounded.”
Luke remained silent. Other than the whisper on the boat, he hadn’t said a word since losing the big salmon. Tom was tempted to turn him upside down and shake him until more came out. But his mind was yanked from thoughts of therapeutic child abuse by the appearance of a slim young woman in a form-hugging biker’s outfit peddling past the kitchen window on her way to the front door. “Girl alert!” Tom shouted.
Luke scowled and scooped a spoonful of cereal.
“Did you see her, buddy? Do you know her?”
Luke moved his head from side to side, not bothering to look.
“Come on, she’s a fox. Let’s go see. If we can’t go fishing…”
Luke shook his head again, ignoring the soft knock at the door.
“I’m going.” Tom glanced at the front hall mirror and raked a fist of fingers through a mop of untidy hair. Then he opened the door onto a vision of glossed lips, even white teeth and a cascade of wheat colored tresses falling over slim rounded shoulders. “Hello, Tom.”
His throat spasmed. “Hello, Susan. Plain as ever.”
Luke appeared and tugged Tom’s pant leg, trying to haul him back to the kitchen. “This is Luke,” said Tom. “Grounded fisherman.”
“Hello, Luke.” The woman held out her hand.
“adic-I d-adic-on’t l-adic-ike g-adic-irls.” The boy hauled on Tom’s trousers, digging into the floorboards with his heels.
“Pig Latin?”
“It’s a long story. This is actually a pretty exciting development.”
Luke released his grip on Tom’s pants and slunk back to the kitchen.
“Would you like to come in?”
“I’m not sure that I’m welcome.” She laughed, gesturing at the face scowling from behind a cereal box. “And you don’t look prepared for company. What male mischief have I interrupted?”
Tom rubbed an hand over stubbled chin. “Joe had me out all night playing cops and robbers. If you’re looking for him, you might try his office. But I don’t think he’s there now.”
“Actually, I came to see you.” Some words you hear with your ears, others with your mind. These he felt in his shorts. “Why don’t we walk, if your companion will allow you to go outside with a girl for a few minutes? It’s a beautiful day.”
“Sure. I’ll let mom know that Luke’s in charge until we get back.”
Mindful of Joe’s security gizmos, Tom returned and escorted his long ago love down the center of the gravel drive until they reached the dirt road beyond it. Small birds called from the canopy of green above the lane and insects buzzed among pink spotted knapweed beside it.
“I’m sorry about Billy and your parents. I just found out.”
Susan lowered her eyes and turned her head toward the greenery at the side of the road, content to let the silence gather, although Tom felt overcome by an almost adolescent awkwardness.
“I should apologize for Luke. But I’m also pretty excited. That’s only the second time he’s spoken, that I know of.”
“In Pig Latin?”
Tom explained. “Mom and Bonnie weren’t too keen on the experiment. But I think they’ll come around now.”
Susan laughed. “Don’t count on it. Mamma bears don’t like bachelor bears experimenting with their cubs. You’d make a good dad, though.”
It was an offhand compliment, probably meaningless. But it made him uneasy. “Don’t say that to Mary. It’ll encourage her.”
“She knows. She saw you often enough with Billy.”
That made him even more uneasy. He picked up a stone and threw it into the woods.
“I used to think that you and Billy were variations on the same theme: too much directionless brain power. But you eventually found something to do with yours. Billy didn’t. He became a ‘bad boy,’ hung around people who weren’t half as smart as he was, and got his kicks out of making them feel stupid.”
“The kind of kicks that might have made someone angry enough to kill him?”
Susan shuddered. “I don’t know, Tom. Somewhere along the way Billy developed a talent for pushing people to the edge. I overheard him and Frankie Heller having a knock down drag out argument a few days ago. I told ST about it.”
“Who’s Estie?”
“Oh, dear.” She shook her head, and the flow of tresses made Tom’s heart skip. “S. T. Super Trooper. Your brother.” She grinned. “That’s what people around here call him now. Didn’t you know? I think it kind of fits.” Tom folded his arms across his chest. She tried to console him. “Mother once told me that if Billy had had your looks, some girl would have come along and done a make-over on him, too.”
“I thought your mother didn’t like me. She always acted like I was going to steal the spoons.”
“I don’t think that was what she was afraid of.” In the branches overhead a dove began to coo.
Time to change the subject. “So what have you been doing since you left Coldwater?”
“College, graduate school. Married for a while. Working mostly with a bunch of biotech start-ups. It’s where the interesting science is right now.”
“So how did you end up back in Coldwater?”
“Billy called with the news about our parents. Their lawyer needed to meet with me.”
The birds stopped twittering and a cool breeze blew dust devils across the road. “I’m sorry,’ said Tom. “I heard it was a boating accident.”
Her face tightened and her mouth turned down at the corners. “Dad bought a forty-foot Sea Ray with some of his retirement money. Maybe it was too much boat for him. They found it smashed on the rocks in Wilson Cove.”
“I’m sorry.”
He had said that already. But an invisible censor stopped him from saying more.
“He was so excited when he bought it. He and Mom were going to cruise the Canadian side of the lake during the summer and then go out the St. Lawrence and down to Florida for the winter. It was something they’d been talking about for years.”
“It must have been a shock.”
Can you think of any more clichés?
“It still is. Then coming home for their funeral after being away all those years, and staying in that house I grew up in. I just couldn’t leave it again right away.”
He and Susan had once shared a passion for the hills above town, and the lake that stretched for fifty miles in either direction. It had been hard for him to leave, too. But without more to do than frolic in the woods, it would have been harder to stay. “It was lucky NeuroGene was here,” he said.
She smiled. “I suppose. After the funeral, I spent weeks riding my bike along the shore trails and hiking in the hills. When I was finally ready to leave, I ran into someone at Skippers who I worked with in California. She told me that she’d come here to help a biotech start-up with some grant work, but that they’d found private financing, so she was going back to California. I gave them a call, they gave me a job, and here I am. It’s hard to believe something like NeuroGene exists in Coldwater. But I guess it was meant to be.”
Tom picked up a stick and held it behind his back. “Where did Billy work?”
“He didn’t. He lived off my parents. After they died, he lived off the money they left him.”
“Did he live with them too?”
“Practically. Dad turned the loft above the boathouse into an apartment. Billy did whatever it was he did from there. Sleep mostly. Every once in a while he’d pick up an odd job, like feeding a couple of dogs on Pocket Island for an owner who’s never there. I’ve been staying up at the old house since the funeral. Billy would go out in the evenings, but I have no idea where. By the time he’d crawl back into the boathouse at night, I was in bed. I hardly ever saw him.”
Tom listened for tone as well as substance, taking gentlemanly inventory whenever pace or tu
rn in the road provided the opportunity to do so. Susan had changed little in a decade. Five foot seven in bicycle flats. Her hair hung loose in a ponytail today. But at the funeral, it had been as he remembered: shoulder length, thick and the color of brushed gold. The bicycle outfit took the guesswork out of the rest: slim and curvy still. He remembered the girl on the dance floor laughing, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”
Susan turned to face him. “You have that funny look on your face, Tommy Morgan.”
“Just thinking.”
“I can see that. So what have you been doing that I don’t already know from Googling Thomas J. Morgan about once every six months? You’re not married, either. Is there someone hoping to change that?”
He smiled. “My mother. And you’re toying with me. There are a gazillion Thomas Morgans in the English speaking world. What did you turn up besides pirates and rum makers?”
“Congressional staffer,” she said brightly. “Cornell Law School, Clerk for a New York federal judge, I forget which one. Pictures in ‘The American Lawyer’ on a bunch of corporate mega-deals.”
“Must be one of the other Tom Morgans.”
“Pictures with the eyes my mother warned me about?”
He laughed.
“And that you’re not happy.”
BOOM! It was a statement, not a question. An irritating echo of Joe’s: “Lot more than you get out of yours.”
“Google says I’m not happy?”
“No, some other research I’ve been doing. Your life sounds large. I’m impressed.”
Tom folded his arms, hoping the posture said skeptical rather than defensive. Every emotion except anger seemed to have surfaced in the last ten minutes. He felt as if he were wading through treacherous waters and needed to concentrate to keep his footing.
“It’s not personal,” said Susan. “It’s just science.”
“Which requires explanation, don’t you think?”
“Alright. But it’s that biochemistry stuff that used to put you to sleep.”
Tom smiled. “I could never hit Bobby Cashin’s knuckle ball, until I heard your father’s explanation of chaos theory. You used to have his gift. Tell it to me so I stay awake.”
She shrugged. “I’ll try. But let’s sit. This takes a bit of talking.”
They had arrived at a spot where two shallow streams came together and crossed under a stone bridge. A rough rock wall ran thigh high along either side. Susan sat on the wall and swung her legs over the water.
* * *
“All right. Imagine two cavemen: Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. Barney tries to lead a balanced life. He kills only what he and his family can eat. The rest of the day he spends in quality time with Betty and Pebbles. Fred, on the other hand, is driven. He’s got to have the biggest cave, dried mastodon carcasses piled to the ceiling and curvy cave girls on the side in little animal skin outfits who regularly produce more little Freddies. For Fred Flintstone, enough is never enough.”
Not just for Fred.
“Then comes the flood, famine, epidemic disease… whatever. Who do you think survives? Balanced Barney? Or Insatiable Freddy or one of dozens of little Freddies? Then repeat that process again and again over millions of years. The theory, basically, is that Balanced Barney’s genes never made it out of the Stone Age, and that we’re all the great, great, great grandchildren of Insatiable Freddie.”
Tom hauled his gaze away from distraction. “That may explain my lust for pizza. But what’s it got to do with me being happy as a lawyer?”
“It has everything to do with your inability to be permanently happy with any achievement. As a linear descendant of Insatiable Freddie, your brain is hardwired so that it can’t be permanently satisfied with any accomplishment, no matter how spectacular. You can enjoy them for a while. But you can never be happy resting on your laurels. If you want to get happy again, you have to go out and do something new.”
“So are you happy being a biochemist?”
“Good question. And no, I’m not. Being something or having something can never make one of Insatiable Freddy’s descendants permanently happy. To get that, you have to fool your genes and manipulate your brain chemistry.”
“How?”
“By manipulating your brain into giving you a dopamine or endorphin kick for things that you choose, rather than for things that might have made sense for Insatiable Freddie.”
“Like what?”
“You pick. That’s where intelligence and personal choice come in. You know what’s good for you and what’s not. You know what goals inspire you.”
“So goals are important?”
“Having them. Not accomplishing them. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to eat your way across a dessert table or trying to find a cure for cancer, the Insatiable Freddie gene keeps you on course by doling out dopamine and endorphins in small increments as you go along—not in one big blast at the end.”
“So ‘it’s the journey not the arrival that matters?’”
“Exactly. Though whoever first said that probably thought he’d had some great insight into the human soul. But what he really did was make a forensic discovery about the evolution of human brain chemistry.”
He swung his legs in time with hers, but could not keep them in sync, so he stopped.
“Did you ever talk to Billy about this? It seems like something that might have helped him.”
Her voice faded, as if the bell ending class had just rung. “Once. Down at the boathouse.” She pulled her legs back over the wall and stood.
“What did he say?”
“He laughed, pulled opened a desk drawer, took out a baggie filled with white powder and threw it at my feet. ‘Dope o’Mine,’ he said.”
CHAPTER 9
The troubled look on Tommy’s face confirmed Mary’s fears. But she didn’t get to quiz him about his encounter with the Pearce woman, as his brother chose that moment to wrench Tommy’s mind someplace else.
“I should get paid for this,” he said, putting down the phone. “Joe wants me to find out if Father Gauss has an alibi for Saturday night—as if a priest might have something to do with Billy Pearce ending up in a sleeping bag at the bottom of Coldwater Lake.”
“Not that anyone would blame him,” said Mary.
“What?”
“If you’re going to stay away for years at a time, Tommy, you’re going to miss a few things.”
He folded his arms and waited.
“One of Father Gauss’s pets….”
“His what?”
“All right. One of his protégées. You weren’t the only one. Or the last. The newest was the Frazier’s boy Maurice. He got himself mixed up with that Billy Pearce, and Father Gauss tried to interfere. Pearce’s charms, whatever they were, won out.”
“And that makes Father Gauss a suspect in Billy’s murder?”
“The young man died, Tommy. Drugs or something. But Father Gauss…well, you’d think he lost a child.”
“When did all this happen?”
“Three months ago. Not even.”
“And Joe thinks Father Gauss might have done something to Billy?”
“It’s your brother’s job to look past the collar.”
Footsteps in the hallway signaled the end of Luke’s self-imposed exile. A fishing rod in each hand made it clear what he had in mind. “You might as well go,” said Mary. “He won’t stay with me as long as he’s got you to play with.” The boy nodded and ran out of the house. “But no boats, hear me? And teach your brother that silly language, or you’ll be leaving a mess when you go.”
“Luke will be talking fine before then. One more adventure should do it.”
Mary wrapped her fingers around her son’s arm. “It’s wonderful you’re making connection with the boy, Tommy. But don’t go making the uncle bigger than the father. No good will come of that.”
He nodded.
“And be careful not to insult the other Father, too. I may need him to forgi
ve my sins one of these days.”
A smile spread across her handsome son’s face. “Got any good ones?”
She turned away before the color flooding her cheeks gave an incriminating answer. “Go!”
* * *
Tom left Luke and his fishing poles down at the church dock and walked up the lawn to the rectory. Mrs. Flynn, the housekeeper, answered his knock. Her hair had turned white since his last visit. The shapeless form in the flowered print house dress and blue apron was a size smaller than he remembered, as if she had shrunk as well as aged. She showed no sign of recognizing him.
“Hello, Mrs. Flynn. I’m looking for Father Gauss. Is he here?”
“Out in that rowboat of his, I should think. He should be back for confessions at three.”
“Is it all right if I wait down at the dock?”
“Suit yourself. The geese have made a mess of it though.”
Tom watched his nephew cast a silver Rapala into the clear blue water and retrieve it over the patches of discolored mud and sand where the blue gills and rock bass had fanned their spring nests some months ago. “This is where your dad and I learned to dive. Monsignor De DiMaggio stood in that water with one arm out stretched. Your dad and I would run down the dock and jump over his arm. Then he’d back up and we’d do it again. After a couple of steps back, the only way to get over his arm was head first. Your dad did it before me.”
Luke smiled.
Father Gauss had arrived a half dozen years after that long ago diving lesson. Without a vowel on either end of his surname, he was received with caution by congregation and fellow clergy alike. It didn’t help that he was a thin, chain-smoking, Vatican-trained intellectual with little tolerance for superstition masquerading as theology. Rumor had it that he had been dismissed from his previous post for insubordination.
Like everyone else, Tom had found the new priest a little strange and even somewhat intimidating—especially when he seemed to take a personal interest in Tom’s academic and social development. Tom had been one of those boys who refuse to accept the Darwinian pecking order of the schoolyard, where older boys monopolize the only basket with an unbent rim and bully the younger kids away from the flat, shady spot near the Monsignor’s garage that was the only decent spot for flipping baseball cards. The result was more than the customary number of schoolyard fights. Long stretches of effortless B’s, randomly broken with inexplicable D’s, were equally maddening to the black-robed nuns who ran the school; and Tom’s was a regular presence on the hardwood bench outside the principal’s office. But all that ended with the arrival of Father Gauss. Sister Judith, Principal for Life of Our Lady of The Lake School, simply handed Tom over to a higher power.
