by Marti Green
“Right. You’ll walk away from her money. You’ve made it clear that’s not in the cards.”
Ben pulled her into his arms. “Six months after Rick dies. I promise. That’s all I’m asking you to wait.”
Ben arrived home a little after 9:00 p.m. He knew Charly wouldn’t return until 10:00 p.m., but he didn’t like to cut it close. With his plan already in motion, it was vitally important that nothing disrupt it. He couldn’t have Charly getting suspicious by his absence. At moments like this, he thought he should step back from Lisa for the next few months, really play it safe, but that was just his nerves talking. He had everything under control, so why deprive himself of some pleasure?
At 10:05 p.m., Charly walked in. Her eyes were puffy, and she walked as though she were carrying a heavy backpack. As soon as she saw Ben, she stepped into his arms and began sobbing. He stroked her hair and let her cry herself out. When the sobs subsided, he asked, “Is there something new?”
She nodded. “He was turned down for the experimental treatment.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“I wouldn’t cry in front of him. I needed to show him I’m strong. But as soon as I left, I broke down.”
As Ben held his wife tight in his arms, his only thought was, I wonder if Mallory can lose enough weight in time.
Graham was already warming up when Ben arrived the next morning for their weekly racquetball game, and they dove into the competition right away. This time, Graham swept all three games, although Ben only lost the last by one point. After they’d showered and changed, they stopped by the café for a quick lunch.
“Weren’t you close with Jeff Mullin in high school?” Ben asked when they were seated.
“Yeah. We grew up on the same block. Our sisters are still friends. Sad case.”
“That’s what I heard. Came back from Afghanistan all messed up, right?”
Graham nodded. “Hooked on heroin. He was arrested a few times—petty stuff, mostly, then robbed a few homes, you know, to support his habit. When he got out of jail, his folks finally forced him into a rehab center. He got out six months ago and is working at a warehouse. His parents wanted him to move home, but he took a room in some flophouse in Brooklyn. Supposedly, he’s still into drugs and still looking for easy money to get them. He’ll end up back in jail before long.”
Ben held back a smile. He was pretty sure he’d found the guy he needed.
CHAPTER 15
At Ben’s suggestion, I went to the local gym, a small building with treadmills and bikes and elliptical machines, along with several weight machines and free weights. I signed up for personal training sessions twice a week and was assigned to Jackie. I wasn’t a gym rat. I never had the money to belong to one, or the inclination. Neither was I athletic. My life had been filled with school and work, with no time for anything else.
That done, I found my way to the Mohonk Preserve visitor center, off Route 55, where I filled out a hiker’s membership form and received an ID card, then purchased trail maps. I’d never hiked before and was a bit leery of it. I spoke to the helpful volunteer at the visitor center, and she suggested I start with a walk on the Duck Pond trail. “It’s mostly level, and pretty short,” she’d said, before showing me directions to get there on the map.
I drove to the trailhead, where there was a small parking area, and went through the gate opposite. The dirt path was easy to follow. After about twenty minutes, it veered off to the right and went steeply uphill. I struggled upward for just a short distance before it leveled out again. I enjoyed being alone in the woods. As I walked, I felt the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot. Before long, I reached Duck Pond. I walked to the edge and spotted a large tortoise swimming near the surface. I wished I’d brought my sketch pad with me—the clear pond, surrounded by hills, autumn-colored leaves on the trees painting a stark picture against the deep-blue sky, would have been lovely to draw. I resolved to come back another day.
I found a rock to sit on and slipped off my backpack, then pulled out a thermos with hot chocolate and a bag of trail mix—assorted nuts, chocolates, and dried cranberries. I supposed I should have brought something more conducive to losing weight—maybe coffee and baby carrots—but I hadn’t, and I hungrily tore into what I had.
Except for the two hours a week I would train with Jackie, I was alone day and night for the first time in my life. No mother to take care of, no customers to wait on, no classmates to shoot the breeze with. I was completely isolated, charged with one task only—become Charlotte Jensen Gordon. I didn’t think it would be difficult. I was used to playing the part people expected of me.
I had watched a few of the videos Ben had left me. He was right—Charly’s accent was different from mine. Not by a lot, but enough so that someone who knew her well would wonder about it. I had purchased a recorder and planned to practice speaking into it until our voices were indistinguishable. I didn’t think I’d have trouble with that. I was more concerned about losing enough weight. I’d always weighed the same, and I didn’t eat that much to begin with. One of the perks of growing up poor. But I supposed I could eat better—fewer carbs and more vegetables. And definitely cut out the sweets. Maybe the wine, also, although only if I absolutely had to.
Being alone left me a lot of time to think about what I was doing. I had given it considerable thought before I’d told Ben I was in. In my reasoning, Charly was a monster who didn’t deserve what she had. If Mom had kept Charly instead of me, then I could have been adopted by the Jensens. I could have gone to private schools and an Ivy League college. I could be the one inheriting their wealth.
Watching Charly on the videos, though, changed her from a concept to a real person. She was flesh and blood. She was my sister.
When I wasn’t thinking about Charly, I thought about the money. What I would do with it. I knew I would need to get away from New York, away from the possibility of running into anyone who might know either one of us. I loved the idea of living overseas, maybe France, studying art in Paris. Or Italy. Or Spain. With the kind of money I would have, the world would be open to me. I’d never let myself dream, growing up. Now I could dream big.
My phone rang just as I walked into the Gordons’ house—my house for now. It was Ben.
“It might happen faster than we thought,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Rick was turned down for the experimental drug treatment. His doctor said it could take anywhere from two to four months. Can you be ready in two months?”
I thought about it. I’d never tried losing weight before. I didn’t know how easy or hard I’d find it. Still, much as I loved this house, loved being in the country, I could see how living in isolation from other people more than two months could drive me batty. “I’ll be ready.”
“Good. I’m just about finished with a list of everybody Charly knows, all her friends going back to elementary school. And her relatives, of course. With a description of each, and how she feels about them. Little anecdotes about them. Pictures, too. I’ll e-mail that to you tomorrow.”
“I think it would be useful if I had her passwords on social media. I could learn a lot from seeing what she posts.”
“I don’t know her passwords. But mine is GypsyMax29, and you can access what she posts from my accounts, since we’re Facebook friends. Twitter and Instagram, too. Password’s the same.”
When I hung up, I immediately headed to the pantry closet, removed the box of chocolate chip cookies and a bag of potato chips, then dumped them in the garbage. I opened the freezer and did the same with the half gallon of black raspberry ice cream I’d bought. When I finished, I hopped in the car and headed back to the supermarket. I needed to pick up veggies and sugar-free Jell-O. It was time to get serious about losing weight.
Two days later, I was startled by the ringing of the front doorbell. I opened it to find a bearded man dressed in a fleece jacket and Timberland boots. He was at least six feet tall, with wavy brown hair that f
ell midway down his neck.
“Hi, uh, is Judith home? Or Sidney?”
It took me a moment to remember that those were the names of Ben’s parents. “No. They’re in Florida for the winter. I’m a friend of their son, Ben Gordon. He’s letting me stay here for a few months.”
“I thought that’s where they were. I passed by a few times and saw the lights on in the house. I wondered if they’d come back.”
More likely, he wondered if there was an intruder in the house. “Well, thanks for checking in.” I hoped my voice gave him the message that I wasn’t interested in chitchat, but he didn’t move from his spot.
“Is there something else I can help you with?”
“I plow the driveway for Judith and Sidney when it snows. And, well, if you’re going to be here over the winter, I provide fireplace logs for my customers. I’d be glad to add you to my list.”
I looked over at the stone fireplace in the living room and thought how nice it would be to curl up with a book in front of a roaring flame. “That would be great, but you’d have to show me how to start it up.”
“No problem.” He flashed a wide smile, and for the first time, I realized how handsome he was. Stop it, Mallory, the voice in my head warned. Even before I’d embarked on this charade, I’d sworn off romantic entanglements. This certainly wasn’t the time to start.
“So, uh, I’ll drop off a half a cord for you tomorrow, say, around eleven? That should hold you for a couple of months. If you’re home then, I’ll show you how to get it started.”
“Thanks. I’ll be here. How much will that be?” For the first time in my life, it didn’t matter how much something would cost. Ben had given me a credit card and deposited $5,000 into my bank account. If I ran out, he’d assured me he would replenish it. But I doubted this man took plastic. I wasn’t even sure he took checks. I had to make sure I had enough cash on hand for him.
“I’ll just bill the Gordons.”
“No,” I said, a little too quickly. “I’m paying my own way.”
“Then, a hundred bucks should do it. So, eleven tomorrow. See you then.”
He turned away from the door, took a step, then turned back. “By the way, I’m Jake. What’s your name?”
“Mallory.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mallory.” He waved his hand, then left, leaving me wondering if I’d made a mistake using my real name.
CHAPTER 16
At precisely 11:00 a.m. the next morning, I heard a truck rumble up my driveway. I looked out the living room window, saw it was Jake, and opened the front door.
“Are you always this punctual?” I called out to him as he exited his Chevy Tahoe.
“I try to be,” he shouted back. He headed to the back of his truck, then loaded firewood into a caddy and wheeled it to the side of the house. Five minutes later, he came to the front door, holding a number of logs in his arms.
I opened the door, and he stepped inside. “The Gordons have a rack for the wood on the side of the house,” he said. “I stacked the rest there. It’s covered with a tarp.” He walked over to the fireplace and placed the logs inside. “Ready for your lesson?”
“Sure.”
From his back pocket, he pulled out a box of extralong matches. “Got any old newspapers?”
I shook my head. Did anyone read a newspaper anymore? I got my news from the Internet, just as I suspected most of my contemporaries did nowadays.
“Old magazines?”
Again, I shook my head.
He sighed. “I’ll be right back.” He ran out to his truck, then came back in with a stack of newspapers in his hands. “Okay, the first and most important thing is to make sure the flue is open.”
“The what?”
He waved for me to get closer, then leaned his head inside the fireplace. “See this lever here? Push it back, and it opens a vent for the smoke to go up the chimney. Pull it toward you, and the vent closes. When a fire is going, the vent needs to be open. When the embers are out, close the vent.” He tore the newspaper into strips, laid them over the wood logs, then lit the paper with one of the long matches. When the flame caught one of the logs, he stood up. “There. Simple as that. Think you can do it?”
I said I could, then went to get my wallet. I withdrew five twenties to hand to him.
“How about instead of paying me for the firewood, you let me take you to lunch?” he said.
“That doesn’t seem like a fair bargain for you.”
He smiled his killer smile. “Actually, I think I make out pretty good with that deal.”
Ben had warned me to keep to myself as much as possible. But after five days of being mostly by myself, the thought of spending an hour with another human being was too tempting to turn down. “Sure. It’s a deal.”
Before we left, he showed me how to put out the fire, for those nights I was ready to turn in before the fire had died down. Once it was out, we got into his truck and drove into town, then pulled into the parking lot of the Eggs Nest. It was brightly decorated with funky pictures of people and buildings in Pop Art style. The waitress led us to our table and handed us our menus.
“What’s good?” I asked as I looked over the offerings.
“Everything. This place has been an institution for decades.”
We gave the waitress our orders, then sat back in our chairs. I studied the man sitting opposite me. With so much hair covering his face, it was hard to tell just how handsome he was, although his eyes were almost as blue as mine, and his straight nose fit perfectly on his face—not too long or wide. His lips were full, and when he smiled, his whole face lit up. “What do you do when there’s no snow to clear or firewood to chop?” I asked him.
“This stuff is just filler for the winter months. I’m a landscape architect. I studied it at Cornell.”
I’d never gone to college myself, but I knew Cornell was one of the Ivy League schools.
“And you came here to work? I’d think there’d be more of a call for your services in Westchester County. From what I’ve seen, the landscaping on homes around here seems more natural, less planned.”
“Don’t be fooled. It takes a lot of work to make a garden look natural. Besides, my territory extends down to Rockland and across the river to Northern Westchester and Putnam County. But my base of operations is here in High Falls, because this is where I grew up. And it’s too beautiful to leave.”
I nodded in agreement. It was too beautiful to leave, surrounded by mountains, dotted by farmland and cozy hamlets that seemed to be a mecca for artists.
“So, what brings you here?” Jake asked.
It was a question I’d expected, and one I’d prepared for. “I’m writing the next great American novel, or, hopefully, at least a readable one. Back in Queens, I shared an apartment with three other women. It was hard to concentrate with all their noise. So, Ben suggested I stay here for a few months.”
He seemed to buy the line, and why not? As I said before, I’m a good actress. The rest of the lunch was comfortable, and when Jake dropped me back off at the house, he asked if we could do it again next week. I figured once a week wasn’t going to be a problem. “Yes.”
The next day, I had my first training session with Jackie. I told her I’d never worked out before, so she started me off with light weights. Even so, I struggled through the bicep curls and tricep lifts, the leg presses and squats. The hour seemed to go on forever. When it was almost over, she had me hop up on a table and lie down, and she then put me through various contortions stretching my muscles. I thought that was almost as painful as the weights.
By the time I walked into the house, I was limping. I was about to jump in the shower when Ben called. “How’s it going?”
“I ache all over.”
“That’s good.”
“Maybe for you. Not for me.”
“No, it means you’re getting a good workout. You need that. Charly goes to the gym three times a week.”
“You’re telling me my s
ister is a masochist?”
Ben laughed. “No, just a rich Manhattan girl, where there’s no such thing as too thin. She runs four times a week, also.” He paused for a moment. “I just realized . . . you need to start jogging. It’s important not to change Charly’s routine, at least at first.”
I inwardly groaned. Becoming Charly was going to be harder than I’d anticipated.
After a few days of my muscles torturing me following my first personal training session, I’d actually come to look forward to working out with Jackie. I’d successfully started a fire in the fireplace twice and had gone back to Duck Pond with my sketchbook and spent an hour drawing. I was starting to feel like this town really was my home.
As we’d agreed, Jake showed up a week later to take me to lunch. “I have something special in mind for today,” he said when I got in his truck. We drove past the restaurants in the village, past some homes, onto a road that was flanked by woods. After fifteen minutes, we pulled into a circular parking area and got out of the truck. Jake grabbed a basket from the back, and we walked over to a paved path. “This is the Ashokan Reservoir,” Jake told me. “It provides the water for New York City.”
It was breathtaking. The large expanse of water was surrounded by mountains, the peaks dotted with snow.
“It’s my favorite spot in the area,” Jake said.
We walked a few minutes, then stepped off the path onto the grass. Jake opened the basket and pulled out a blanket, which he spread on the ground. “I thought we’d have a picnic today.”
I couldn’t have been more pleased. He brought out a bottle of wine, then laid out sandwiches, cut-up fruit, cheese, and a bag of potato chips. As we ate, he pointed out the names of each of the mountains. “That’s Indian Head, which sort of looks like the profile of an Indian, don’t you think?”
He was right. It did.
“Next is Twin, because of its two peaks, then Plateau and Sugarloaf. They’re part of the Devil’s Path.”
