The Fifth Angel

by Tim Green

  “I knew you’d love it,” he said. “I used to come up here . . . a while ago.”

  Beth nodded. She said nothing, but reached over and scratched the back of his neck, then kneaded the muscles there.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said.

  He slowed down a little so they could talk better.

  “I thought after that night in the library that my art-house movie days were over,” he said. It had been nearly a month ago, and although he’d come up with a brilliant explanation for acting like an ass, they had never really gotten into it.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said.

  “You’re sorry? I’m the one who’s sorry.”

  “Jack,” she said. “I thought you were . . . e-mailing your ex-wife or some other woman or something. The first night we’re together and you’re off to the races . . . But after you told me what you were really doing . . . well, I wasn’t going to bring it up again, but I’m glad we’re talking about it, Jack. I want us to talk.”

  “I know,” he said. It wasn’t a complete lie that he’d told her, and that was some comfort. It was a cathartic process he was going through. And even though he wasn’t really writing a private memoir about his broken life like he said he was, his work on the computer did help him. It helped him survive. He couldn’t have told her the truth. He had done what was best for them both.

  “I haven’t had a day away since . . . I can’t even remember,” he said. “God, look at the way the wind has made the top of that pine tree grow.”

  Beth gave him a pained expression. He knew she wanted to talk more, but he couldn’t help the way he felt. He slowly sped up.

  “When can you visit Janet again?” Beth asked.

  Jack glanced at her, startled, as if she’d slapped him. Her fingers continued to work without pause. He tried to focus on that, tried to let his neck relax.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Dr. Steinberg said she needs more therapy—and more time.

  “I just want to see her,” he said after a pause. “Sometimes I think I’d rather see her, even if she . . . hates me, than not see her at all . . . but that’s stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid,” she said. “You love her.”

  Jack squinted into the sun despite his sunglasses. From the car floor beneath his seat, he fished around for his bottle of Maalox and took a swig.

  Beth watched him but said nothing.

  She gripped his leg above the knee and held it. He could feel the warmth of her hand and her strength.

  He began to concentrate on the road. A sign told him to turn off the main highway. The town of Racquet Lake was just a mile away. They rambled through a grassy fen and over an old wooden bridge that clacked noisily as if to warn them away. The town consisted of an abandoned mill, a hotel, a bar, a gas station, and a general store. Except for the mill, each of the other establishments was part of a large green three-story building built in the early 1900s at the southern edge of the lake. It had once been the last train stop for the millionaires as they made their seasonal trek from the sweltering heat and filth of New York City to the cool beauty of the Adirondack Mountains.

  Now the only people in sight were a family of four with a black Lab puppy. They were unloading a bright yellow canoe and an equally colorful cluster of camping gear off the top of their dusty minivan. A towering spruce filtered the sun’s rays, allowing only patches of light to reach the ground where pavement and gravel and smooth oily sand somehow coexisted in harmony beneath a single gas pump. Jack got out and stretched his legs as he ambled toward the store. Beth twined her fingers with his and walked along beside him, deeply inhaling the fresh air. They stopped momentarily to look north, across the lake, over the treetops at Blue Mountain, dominant among the other peaks.

  The grocery store seemed almost empty. Several feet of mint-green wooden shelf space separated one group of items from the next. On Long Island goods were stacked to the ceiling. One whole portion of this store, about a third of its total space, was completely empty. In the back corner was a scant butcher’s case, but no one stood behind the stainless-steel and glass counter. The only person in the store was an older woman with long kinky hair dyed so black it was nearly blue. She was smoking a cigarette and staring at them with a disinterested sneer.

  “We’re looking for a cabin to spend the night,” Jack said to her. “Do you know of any places that are still open?”

  “People don’t usually come this far this late in the season. ’Course, you wouldn’t know the season was over by the looks of the sun,” she said, turning her attention outside to the sparkling surface of the dark lake.

  Jack waited for a moment before asking again. “Is there anyplace you know of that’s still open? We’re looking for a cabin . . . on the water. Someplace quiet.”

  “Ha,” she said. “Everyplace around here is quiet.

  “Hotel’s open,” she said, indicating with her sagging chin the rooms that apparently waited for them just above. “It’s dirty, but it’s open.”

  Jack decided to try again. If this crone with her grimy nails and ketchup-stained blouse was calling it dirty, he didn’t want to even look.

  “No,” he said, “I think a cabin is what we want to try to find. I guess I’ll try up at Blue Mountain.”

  “You might want to try Steffenhausers,” she said. “You go north on twenty-eight for about four miles and you’ll see a sign. It’s got a big purple teddy bear on it. You can’t miss it. I guess that’s why they do it.”

  Jack thanked the woman, then bought a six-pack of Bud Light and a damp box of pretzels as a recompense for the information.

  They soon came to the purple bear, and Jack turned off the highway once again. Halfway down the long arcing drive, which led to a cluster of cabins on the lakeshore, they came upon the owner of the place busy in the midst of several great woodpiles. Steffenhauser was a large burly man with a big gray beard, thick black plastic glasses, and a faded green fisherman’s hat. He was splitting wood. He noticed them and stopped to wipe his eyes and clean his glasses with a red bandanna that he’d removed from his back pocket.

  Jack got out and walked over, asking if he had a place for them to stay.

  “Give you my best cabin on the point for a hundred dollars,” he said, speaking so fast his words were hard to digest. “I got twice that two weeks ago.”

  “Before the season ended,” Jack said.

  “Wouldn’t know the season was over by the looks of the day,” he said. “Nice car. Almost got me a convertible once, a Mustang. Wife wouldn’t allow it though. Would simply not allow it. How’d you hear about us anyway?”

  “The woman at the general store told us,” Jack said.

  “She did?” he said, his round face falling. “Well, she’ll be here for her ten percent I imagine and it’ll be in the bartender’s drawer at the Dirty Spoon by sundown. Not that I blame the old girl. Tough life that one, Claire Conner. Got a son, Tom. Tom Conner. Went to jail.

  “You watch yourself, miss”—he directed his rapid flow of words at Beth—“you don’t ever want to stay down on Seventh Lake. Some people think it’s me trying to hurt the competition, but it’s not.”

  He dropped his voice and spoke to just Jack.

  “I just think people like knowin’,” he said. “I’d want to know if I wasn’t from around here. He lives by himself right there, on the hill overlooking the inn. He killed a bunch of girls a while back. Raped ’em and killed ’em and now he’s out and livin’ right there.”

  CHAPTER 30

  I just think people ought to know,” Steffenhauser said. “People with young ladies in their party ought to, but you folks are wanting to get into that cabin. Birch Bow, we call it. There is a birch tree right there, you’ll see it, planted by my granddad. Squatter, he was. No land deeds back then, but well—”

  “If you just give me the key,” Jack said, “I’ll find it.”

  “The key. Oh, yes, the key,” he said, considering the problem with a knitted br
ow. “Well, you best talk to my wife about the key, she’s in the office and if you don’t mind, don’t tell her about the ten percent coming to Claire. I’ll just handle that on the back side.

  “If she knew that, she’d sure as hellfire charge you a hundred and ten, just to pay Claire,” he said. “But I’ll take care of that on the back side.” He winked broadly. “Well, back to work!”

  With that, Steffenhauser went after a massive chunk of wood with surprising intensity. Jack looked at Beth, who smiled from the front seat of the car.

  “I couldn’t hear what he was saying,” Beth said with a laugh as they continued up the drive, “but he sure was saying it fast.”

  Inside the office Jack rang the shiny little dome-shaped bell on the counter. Moments later he was confronted with the sour visage of a tiny white-haired woman with piercing brown eyes.

  “That old fool,” she said in a mutter after listening to Jack. “I just cleaned Birch Bow for the winter yesterday. He knows that. No, maybe he doesn’t. If the old fool would ever stop talking and listen,” she said under her breath. Then to Jack she said, “You can have Red Squirrel. It’s next door to Birch Bow and it’s got a phone. Only cabin that does. Phone and a fridge. I’ll let you have it for one fifty. I got one seventy-five two weeks ago, but it’s out of season now. Not that you’d know.”

  Jack paid in cash and took the key without a word.

  They spent the afternoon simply lounging in a comfortable hammock slung between two cedars at the water’s edge. At one point a broad beam of the afternoon sun fell directly onto them from between the trees and Jack stripped down to his shorts. After a time, he took a swim. They were in the lee of the small south breeze, and it was almost as if the summer had truly returned for an encore. Bright green ferns waved gently in the golden light that found its way to the forest floor. Nestled together, the two of them read their books, swinging gently and breathing in the rich warm scent of balsam.

  Jack was absorbed in Shogun, a novel he’d read before, and one he remembered as powerful enough to distract his active mind. But instead the book and its revealing perspective on the Asian psyche—where death was no more significant than the petal of a blossom falling to the earth—brought him inexorably back to Tom Conner. And as engaging as Jack found the book, he hadn’t read through very many pages before his mind came to rest again on the old man’s words about the ex-con who lived only one lake to the south. The ominous warning about young women haunted him.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked, forcing himself to break the train of thought.

  “If you are,” Beth said.

  “I am,” he said. “Let’s go back to that place we saw back in Inlet. It looked halfway decent.”

  “I’m getting cold anyway,” she said, shivering slightly and burying her icy nose into his neck.

  “You are cold,” he said drawing her lips toward his own.

  “And you’re warm,” she said, breaking away just long enough to add in a husky voice, “you’re always warm. Hey, how about sharing some of that heat?”

  “I could do that,” he said. He stroked a long strand of hair away from her face.

  When they emerged from the cabin forty-five minutes later, both were freshly showered and in clean clothes. As they drove toward Inlet—a town of two gas stations, a hardware store, and a small movie theater along with a handful of restaurants—the sun set and the air began to cool fast. The top of the Saab was already up, but now Jack closed up the crack in his window and Beth did the same.

  When they passed by the Seventh Lake Inn, Jack couldn’t keep his eyes off the peeling blue Victorian on the hilltop across the street. A single light shone from a corner window. Something vicious stirred in his veins.

  He’d had his afternoon in the sun. Too much time had gone by since he’d done something to pay for his past sins. He didn’t deserve to leisurely lounge around in a hammock when his daughter was inside a mental hospital.

  At dinner, Beth said, “You’re quiet.”

  “I’m always quiet, remember?” he said. He looked at the bubbles rising up one by one in his beer glass against the backdrop of the red linen tablecloth. The place was half empty, and the smell of stale beer along with someone’s cigarette smoke drifted into the dining room from the bar.

  “Look at me, Jack,” she said. “Look at me. I thought we were making a breakthrough here today . . .”

  “I like that space between your front teeth,” he said.

  She nodded. “Now we’re getting somewhere. What about my eyes?”

  “They’re like . . . they’re so blue, and every guy in the place almost fell off his seat when we walked through the bar.”

  “That’s it? You’re supposed to be a wordsmith?”

  “I’m a lawyer,” Jack said. He was beginning to smile.

  “What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?” she asked.

  “A start.”

  “You heard.”

  “I like your nose, too,” he said. He took a drink of beer. “The way it kind of turns up at the end, just a little. And your hair.”

  “I like your eyes, too,” she said. “They’re blue like the intense color in Renoir’s flowers.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know,” she said. “I have it all.”

  He stared.

  “You know I love you,” he said. He reached across the table and grabbed her hand. Beth gazed back at him. It was the first time he’d ever said that. He had thought it before now, but something kept him from saying it. Her eyes were moist.

  “And I love you, Jack Ruskin,” she said. “I love you so very much . . .”

  “Sometimes I worry that a lot of this is you just feeling sorry for me.”

  “You need to get past that,” she said. “The first time I really talked to you it was because I felt bad, but that has nothing to do with anything now.

  “When I’m not with you, I’m thinking about the next time I will be. When it’s cold and you offer me your jacket or hold my hand across the table and sit there looking at me the way you do listening to every word I say, I’m like . . . I feel special.

  “I never had that before. I had guys who looked around the room when I was talking. I never met a man as handsome as you who wasn’t totally self-absorbed. You’re special. That’s why I love you.”

  For quite a while the two of them simply stared at one another, their hands intertwined atop the table. Their waitress brought them coffee.

  When she was gone, Beth said, “I’m not a counselor or a psychologist or anything like that, but I have to say that I know something is bothering you, something more than normal. I know it hurts you for me to even say that, or for me to even mention things like Janet’s name, but you brought it up. I mean . . .

  “I guess I kind of feel like I did when I was a little girl and my family went camping on Sandy Pond up on Lake Ontario. I had this new kite and I was trying to get it to fly. The wind was blowing good, but it just kept dragging along in the sand no matter how hard I ran.

  “I needed help, Jack,” she said. “I just needed someone to help me the littlest bit. My brother Caleb finally came along and he gave it just the slightest lift, just to get it started, and it took off and I let all the string out and it kept going . . .

  “And then I let the string go and I imagined that it just went forever. That’s what I asked my mom, if it would go forever, and she told me that yes, as far as she knew, it would. And when I went to sleep every night for about a week, I’d think of that kite just going on and on. But at the beginning, I needed help to get it started. And now . . . I feel like I need you to help here and it could be really good. I guess that’s a silly story . . .”

  “Well,” Jack said, clearing his throat after a moment of silence between them. “I think that’s something that I can do and I want to do . . . And it’s something I will do. There are some things that . . . I just need you to be patient with me. I’ll get there. I just don’t know when.”
r />   Beth pressed her lips together and nodded slowly, signaling that she had pushed as far as she was going to.

  Jack paid the check and led her out into the night. The cold air slapped his face. The stars burned across the darkness above them like a million diamonds. Beth clasped his hand as they crossed the gravel parking lot to his car. They rode in silence back up the winding road toward Racquet Lake with the radio playing softly.

  As they passed the Seventh Lake Inn, Jack tried not to slow down. He tried not to look at the old house on the hill. He failed. The nightmare flickered vaguely, unwanted, in the back of his mind.

  In the murky shadows of the starlit night, the peak of Tom Conner’s roof seemed sharper and the sockets of the windows deeper and darker. The window that glowed on their way to dinner was now a black void and Jack wondered if the monster named Tom Conner was sleeping or out, stalking someone in the inky night.

  “What are you looking at?” Beth asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. He calmly redirected his attention to the road, but his heart was racing. In his mind’s eye he could see himself mounting the steps to the porch and knocking on the front door. Jack felt suddenly constricted, almost short of breath. His mind was flooded with a thought that was as wildly dangerous as it was exhilarating. He felt drawn to it in the way a person might feel the urge to jump from a staggering height.

  He hadn’t done the proper setup, but he hadn’t done it with Brice either. That was dicey for a while, after the plumber in the van had seen him. But that was over now. This was different. The setting was so isolated and the target so certain that he couldn’t go wrong. He had no right to be holding hands and carrying on like a teenager. He had to think about others.

  Thinking about himself was what had gotten him here in the first place. He should have been thinking about Janet. He should have been there. And now he should be thinking about Tom Conner. He should be thinking about wiping that human excrement from the face of the earth. He didn’t need much, just his nerve and his Glock, and that was nestled in its metallic case . . . in the safest place a person could hide something—in the trunk of one’s car.