by E H Davis
“Not in the market, thanks.”
“Well, you seem pretty interested, if you don’t mind my saying. Why don’t you c’mon in and make a deal?”
“Just doing research,” Jens mumbled, turning on his heel, and walking away.
“Suit yourself,” delivered the clerk as a final salvo.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
It took a few days of phone calls and red tape to get Teddy situated in his new school, Kennett High, in North Conway. That morning, Teddy’s first day at school, Jens drove him down Black Mountain to Route 16, branching off the highway at Eastman Rd, to find a new building surrounded by thickets of hemlock and birch.
As Jens pulled up in front to park, they joked about how the school looked like a railroad station, with its central edifice an elongated tower, flanked by the administration offices, classrooms, and gym. Teddy wondered if it was supposed to “allude” to the antique railroad station in North Conway. Jens observed that he had a point, and complimented his use of the literary term. They lapsed into silence, neither apparently wanting to be the first to say goodbye.
“Good luck, son,” said Jens at last.
“I know you’re worried ... that I might do something stupid, like beat the shit out of the first wanker that looks at me funny ... I promise, I won’t.”
“Naw, I know you’ll wait for the second wanker who steps out of line and clobber him.”
Teddy turned to him with a smile. “See, I knew you’d understand.”
“Get out, already,” said Jens, laughing.
“Thanks for the ride, Daddio.” He pushed open the door and took his backpack from the rear seat.
“You know what bus to take home, right?”
Teddy waved him off and started toward the school. Jens watched him enter the administration building before pulling away from the curb and driving back onto Eastman Rd. He sent up a prayer for all to go well on Teddy’s first day ... and every day thereafter.
________
At the cabin on Black Mountain, Jens sat on the back porch, staring out at the sun-dazzled field behind his cabin, watching the evaporating morning dew tease fledgling ferns open, each one recapitulating, as it unfurled, the miracle of the Fibonacci golden spiral.
He inhaled deeply, relishing the scent of pine mixed with the tang of November. Like the survivor of a shipwreck carried to safety on the waves of chance, he viewed his recent trials and tribulations like a penitent forced to acknowledge the hand of Grace.
Taking stock of himself and his situation, he counted not the shadows but the light. He was still in one piece, albeit slightly worse for the wear, with his arm in a sling. He’d lost a wife but gained a muse. He’d been betrayed, not by his own gullibility, but by his trust in a woman, his wife, an old hand at deceit, apparently. He’d gambled everything on a story that titillated and teased like a Naiad, luring him on, taunting him with the promise of salvation or literary suicide.
He turned his thoughts to his story, of Cassie, the young predator slayer, the savior of the damned, damned herself by guilt for not protecting her own child.
Now, he felt nothing but cold indifference and gray shadows in the absence of his familiar cone of light, his inspiration. They had been back at the cabin a week, and he was still blocked.
________
He spent a good part of the day exploring the speech recognition system on his computer, trying to master it sufficiently so that he could avoid having to type with one hand. But no matter how many times he resorted to the “set-up wizard,” he could not get it to respond to his command to “start listening,” let alone “correct that.”
In the end, he decided to give up on it, instead reviewing his rough notes in his journal and re-reading his earlier chapters, seeking to reconnect with his story and its characters.
When last he’d written of Cassie, she’d surrendered herself to her lover Tommy, afraid that her feelings for him would compromise her discipline and betray her daughter’s memory. Having run for years on adrenalin fueled by guilt, she feared her romantic surrender would make her vulnerable. Meanwhile, young Emma, Orozco’s victim, a captive on his yacht and a pawn in his dangerous fantasy, was fighting for her life.
Will Cassie find her in time? Will her feelings for Tommy distract her at the critical moment? Jens didn’t know. Worse yet, he really didn’t know where to begin. The power of his imagination — which had always summoned the heart of each scene and revealed its connecting threads as though by chance — refused to conjure.
Discouraged but not defeated, he decided to call it a day. The years had taught him the wisdom of going “off-line” and letting his unconscious take over. He poured himself a glass of Valpolicella and began planning the tasty dinner he would serve when Teddy came home and Nola joined them.
________
While Teddy cleared the table and Jens and Nola rinsed dishes and put them in the dishwasher, Jens found Nola looking at him pointedly. He waited for Teddy to excuse himself and go downstairs to watch TV.
“Okay, madam, what’s on your mind?” he asked, spinning her around with a hand on her backside.
“Mmmm. Some of what could develop if you let your hand move in a slow circular motion.”
“Oh, you mean like this?” He dropped his hand lower, feeling beneath the fabric of her skirt, doing as she commanded.
“Mmmmm, precisely,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
They kissed. He pulled away and drew her toward the bedroom. As they approached the bed, she let out a shriek and toppled onto him.
“Hey! Watch the arm, please. And shhhh ...” he cautioned. “Teddy ...”
“Shhhh, yourself,” she answered, mounting and pinning him. Her long red tresses hung over her face like a veil. It made him think of the Naiads of his earlier metaphor, tantalizing him onto the rocks of literary suicide. The image of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus popped into his mind once more, with its nubile subject’s ropes of hair framing rather than hiding her nudity, accentuating her frank sexuality. He thought of the ever-present proximity of death, and though a cliché, the true subject of all art.
“Shhhh,” he repeated, though this time it was more of a challenge than a plea.
“Shhhh?” she asked, smothering him with a kiss. She tossed her head back and laughed archly.
________
Afterward she lay in his arms while she caught her breath. He was in one of those lucid suspended states — detached from his body, aglow, his mind a laser illuminating all the parts of his life.
“Daniel,” she whispered.
“What about Daniel?” he asked, emerging from his reverie.
“Do you ever think about him?”
“So this is what’s been on your mind all night. What made you think about him?”
She sat up.
“You — your pig-headed refusal to acknowledge the danger that surrounds us.”
“Ferdie is convinced that both villains have flown the coop, maybe together. She’s on top of this. Why are you so worried?”
“We’re unprotected up here. It would take Ferdie and her troopers a half hour to get here —”
“I need to be here for my book and for Teddy.”
“Meaning what — I don’t have to be?”
“I didn’t say that.”
He put an arm around her to reassure her, but she shrugged him off.
Their second fight, noted Jens.
“How’s the writing going?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Great!” he lied.
“Are you able to type with one hand?”
“Not a problem,” he said without conviction.
“Tell you what — you dictate, I’ll type.”
“I don’t know ... writing’s so personal, so ... intuitive.”
“Aren’t I your muse?”
He nodded, unconvinced.
“Then it’s settled.”
She rolled over to her side of the bed. Soon she was snoring contentedly, while he lay awake
long after, turning over in his mind the scenes he hoped to write tomorrow.
Jens slept fitfully, hovering on the edge of consciousness, sensing but not quite grasping the shadowy contours of images flitting by. He was hurtling through a universe of tonal darkness, surrounded by fathomless space. Curiously, he was not frightened.
They were safe, weren’t they?
________
The familiar ringing of the land phone forced him rapidly up through the layers of sleep. He reached groggily for the extension, fumbling it to his ear.
“Hello ... hello?” he said.
There was silence on the other end of the line: baited, pulsing. Someone was there, listening intently, breathing, focused like a pinpoint of light in the darkness.
He knew who it was.
“Laurent,” he spat. “My phone is tapped. The cops are here. You come anywhere near us, you’re screwed, asshole.”
The breathing continued, ragged, erratic. Jens tried to imagine it coming from a brute like Laurent but couldn’t.
“Vivian, is this you?” he asked softly. Silence. “I know it’s you. Where are you?”
He felt Nola’s reassuring hand on his shoulder. He spoke again, even more gently, as though to a child.
“Are you injured? I’ll send someone to get you or come for you myself.” Pause. “Vivian?”
The ragged breathing built to a crescendo, then burst into muffled cries.
“Vivian,” he said soothingly. “Let us help you, please ... Where are you?”
When she didn’t answer he lay the phone down on the night table and listened to her crying, bearing witness. After a while, the line went dead.
He hung up and turned to Nola, reading in her eyes the same concern about Vivian — Teddy said he hadn’t heard from her in days.
“Do you think she’s low enough to hurt herself?” asked Nola.
Jens shook his head. “I don’t know. I hope not.”
Nola turned away to hide the fear in her eyes.
“What if it’s not her? What if it’s Laurent?”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
In the morning, Jens phoned Ferdie and asked her to check on Vivian. Again. He described her phone call, and their suspicion, his and Nola’s, that she might harm herself.
Ferdie said she would send a sheriff by the house in Lee, as she was up north near the Canadian border, tracking down a lead on Laurent, where some summer cottages had been broken into and pillaged for food.
Meanwhile, Flynn’s Ford pickup had been found abandoned on Peirce Island in Portsmouth, at Cliff Overlook, one of the last bits of land before the Piscataqua poured into the Atlantic. She promised to let him know if anything helpful came back from forensics. Its location at the end of Shoreline Trail suggested an escape by sea.
“Could it really be Laurent that far north?” asked Jens, back on the break-ins. He stirred his bowl of hot oatmeal, watching the butter melt in swirls.
“Worth checking out, though it’s probably just kids.”
“Should I be worried?”
“It’s at least a hundred miles from you — way on the other side of the White Mountains.”
“Think he might seek refuge in the Berlin area? Ground zero, given his history. Maybe he still has some friends there.”
“He’d be a damn fool to try it. There’s a new prison there; it’s crawling with law enforcement. Anyway, stay sharp.”
“Thanks. I will.”
“How’s Teddy doing?”
“Good, I think. He’s pretty excited about an accelerated program at Kennett that would permit him to graduate a year early.”
“You approve?”
“We’ll see.”
________
The cabin was empty with Teddy at school and Nola at work. Jens decided to try word-processing one-handed. If it worked, he wouldn’t need Nola, who was certain to distract him, despite her good intentions.
He sat before his computer waiting for it to boot up, conjuring his proverbial cone of light and considering what he wanted to accomplish in the chapter where he’d left off. It seemed like ages ago but in reality no more than a month. He summoned up an image of tall, lithe Cassie, fresh from bedding Tommy, feeling determined to get her game back.
Resting his sling arm on the edge of his writing desk, Jens found that he could type haltingly using his right hand for composing words, and the left only for caps, tabbing and shifting. It was painstakingly slow and frustrating, with his mind racing ahead, his fingers groping the keys unfamiliarly. He assembled the words one by one to form phrases, sentences, and finally paragraphs. It made him think of the typesetters of the 19th century and their frustration of setting a wordy novel by Balzac or Dumas to print. An interminable task, doubtless. But unlike the typesetters, he did not know the text until he saw it processed onto the screen. The story sputtered forth.
The longer Emma was in the monster’s clutches, the less likely she would survive. In point of fact, she’d lived a lot longer than predators like Orozco normally allowed, once their victims begin to lose their pubescent allure. Cassie decided the place to begin her rescue was with Cervantes, the PI who had betrayed her to Orozco. He had not counted on her escaping, but he would be ready if she came at him. She knew where his office was, but first she would need to change her identity if she was going to dupe him into setting a trap for Orozco.
Jens paused to review what he had written, finding it devoid of his usual crisp imagery and rhythms, but decided it could be revised later. The important thing was that he was getting it out, however slowly!
As she gave herself a final look-over in the mirror, she asked herself why? Why was she was leaving Tommy out? He would be frantic looking for her. If he knew what she planned, he would stop her. She knew the answer, tried to push it away, but finally had to admit that she cared about him and didn’t want him in jeopardy. The admission was an awakening. She would have to do something about her feelings, if she survived the night.
Jens felt the cone of light receding. He had brought Cassie back to life — however blurry the image — and it was a good place to stop, knowing she would be waiting for his vivifying attention.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
As Thanksgiving approached, life at the cabin on Black Mountain settled into a comfortable routine. Jens worked on his book mornings, after seeing Teddy off to school and Nola to work.
The coming holiday provided a goal as well as a welcome respite, with Teddy looking forward to a five-day break from classes, Jens expecting to submit his first draft of Forsake Me Not to Jean Fillmore-Smart and his publisher, and Nola planning a gourmet feast for Thanksgiving.
Meantime, Ferdie reported that Vivian was not to be found at the house in Lee, which displayed a for sale sign in the front yard. She’d phoned the realtor with the listing, only to discover that she was desperate to get in touch with Vivian, as she had a motivated client with an attractive offer. But Vivian had not returned her calls. Ferdie checked on her cell phone, too, only to find that it was no longer in service.
Keeping the anxiety out of her voice, Ferdie said she’d called around to the hospitals in and around Portsmouth looking for her, as well as the morgues, asking for a “Jane Doe” answering her description. As a last resort, she contacted the New Hampshire State Hospital Psychiatric Facility, also with no luck.
She had disappeared.
Jens hadn’t received any more mysterious phone calls from her.
Ferdie promised to set up a trace on Jens’ line in case she did. As for Vivian, hopefully she’d gone off the grid to get herself together. Soon she’d call Teddy and everyone would breathe a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, Ferdie had filed a missing person report on her and was following up on the leads.
Jens thanked her for all that she was doing, and then went on to fill her in on Teddy, honoring her as part of the family.
Teddy seemed to be doing well in the AFEX program, the alternative learning program that Jens had allowed him to enroll in, relieved as he
was of the pressure of homework, also a relief to his dad. Happily, his grades had gone up, and he was working out practically every day, bulking up steadily.
Ferdie agreed that Teddy seemed to be on course, finally, and was to be congratulated on his self-discipline. As was his dad, for seeing him through.
“Who knows,” joked Ferdie. “Maybe he’ll consider a career in law enforcement when he finishes with school.”
“Before or after he wins the Mr. Universe title?”
“He could do worse.”
Before hanging up, Jens got Ferdie to commit to joining them for Thanksgiving.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” added Ferdie. “If that was Laurent up at the northern lakes, he’s long gone over the border.”
“So, I’ve nothing to worry about it?”
“Didn’t say that — but chances are he’s hiding out in Canada and won’t be back for a long time, if he knows what’s good for him.
________
One evening, while Jens and Nola were relaxing after dinner, playing backgammon and listening to Chopin on his Kindle, the phone rang. Jens was expecting Jean, checking on his progress, and was reluctant to answer. But it was “the breather” again, back after a hiatus. Jens put the caller on speaker phone so that Nola could hear.
“Vivian, I know it’s you, I know you’re there.”
Now he was not sure; maybe it was Laurent calling to threaten him again; maybe it had been him the first time, too.
The breathing rose and fell, intimating a well of sadness. Finally, a voice broke through, reedy and arrhythmic, as though from beyond.
“Please, I just want to talk to Teddy,” Vivian croaked.
Jens signaled Nola to get Teddy, who was in the basement working out.
“Vivian, where are you? Are you alright? Ferdie’s been looking for you everywhere. You’re not in danger, are you?”
“Can I please talk to Teddy?” she sobbed. “Please, Jens, don’t make me beg. I’m not well.”
