Flat Lake in Winter

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Whatever you say, Gil,” he said instead. “You come up with the right numbers, we can call it anything you like.”

  Long after he’d hung up the phone, the words “murder for money” continued to ring in Fielder’s ears. Weren’t they almost the same words Bass McClure had used that very morning?

  THE FOLLOWING DAY Fielder devoted almost exclusively to two of his least favorite things, shopping and cleaning, and one of his most favorite, cooking. He took an inventory of his food cabinets and discovered that they were just about empty. He’d consumed nearly everything edible in the cabin by the time the snowstorm had ended, and probably would’ve started in on his shoes pretty soon if it hadn’t.

  Shopping consisted of taking a drive to Blue Mountain Lake, where there was what passed for a supermarket, but in reality was a midsized deli that sold items at campground-store prices. There Fielder restocked on staples, picked out ingredients for a few days’ worth of meals, and tried to imagine what kind of snacks a nine-year-old boy might be into. He settled on pretzels, peanut butter, bags of crackers shaped like little fish, a gallon of chocolate ice cream, and marshmallows to toast over the fire.

  Back at the cabin, he put the groceries away, made up the couch as a guest bed, put clean towels in the bathroom, and began straightening things up. “Straightening up” is about as far as Fielder’s version of cleaning goes. Vacuuming floors, dusting furniture, and washing windows are all high on the list of reasons why he left the city. In the country, there is little in the way of dust to speak of. You sweep the ashes out from under the woodburning stove from time to time, and you pick up any leaves and twigs that have wandered inside, but that’s pretty much it. Other than that, you adopt what environmentalists like to call “natural solutions” to problems. Bothered by flies? Leave the spiderwebs alone for a week, and you’ll be surprised how well the spiders take care of your fly problem. Crumbs get under the couch, or in some other hard-to-reach place? Relax, the mice will find them. The mice start getting out of hand? No problem; you borrow a neighbor’s cat for a few days.

  By early afternoon, Fielder was peeling and chopping vegetables, cooking chicken, and shaping meatballs out of ground turkey. He’d decided on pasta for dinner that night, since he wasn’t sure what time Jennifer and Troy would be getting there, and chicken pot pie for the next day. He’d toyed with the idea of fish, but imagined a nine-year-old boy might turn up his nose at the thought, or pinch it shut from the odor. Then again, Fielder knew the aroma could produce a bonus of its own. One time he’d been simmering a seafood stew, complete with shrimp, scallops, and two or three kinds of fish, when a mother bear, with two cubs in tow, had ambled up to his front door. Fielder had obligingly divided the stew into four portions, but the bears had apparently been hoping for dessert, as well. He’d ended up having to shoo them away with a broom. When he’d told the story later to some local people, they’d taken him to task for feeding the bears, explaining that he wasn’t doing them any favors. The lesson would only serve to embolden the animals, they pointed out, and cause trouble for everyone down the line. Still, sharing dinner with bears had been quite an experience for a city kid, and the memory of it had prompted Fielder to pick up some frozen shrimp at the supermarket that morning, just in case Troy was game.

  As the afternoon wore on, Fielder realized that his anticipation went far beyond what Hillary Munson would have called his horniness for Jennifer. Certainly he wanted to go to bed with her again; he wasn’t going to deny that. But a good part of the excitement was the thought of being in his bed with her, in his cabin. He realized, of course, that with Troy along, none of that would be possible. But the interesting thing was that it didn’t seem to bother him too much. His preparations seemed to be extending well beyond his sexual desire for Jennifer; they included planning outings for the three of them, coming up with little touches around the cabin to please Jennifer, and taking pains to make Troy feel at home.

  Home?

  Was that what he was doing here? Playing family with Jennifer and her son? Setting up some sort of a trial run for a new life he was envisioning? Nesting? The realization was one that normally would have sent Matt Fielder into a total panic.

  What was really scary was that it didn’t.

  JENNIFER AND TROY arrived around nine o’clock. There were hugs and kisses all around; apparently Troy hadn’t yet reached the stage where such things were to be avoided like the plague. They seemed to love the cabin, and particularly the setting, though it was hard to see much outside in the darkness. The pasta and meatballs were a big hit, and Troy showed no sign of suspecting that it was really ground turkey he was eating.

  When the subject of sleeping arrangements came up, it was Troy who asked if he could camp out on the floor, in front of the wood-burning stove. He’d brought his sleeping bag along, hoping to spend a night in the woods, but the amount of snow on the ground convinced him not to. He was promptly awarded the floor.

  That left the bedroom and the couch.

  “You take the bed,” Fielder told Jennifer. “I sleep on the couch half the time, as it is.”

  “No way,” she said. “It’s your bed.”

  “C’mon,” he said. “I even changed the sheets. I do that every couple of months, whether they need it or not. Well, maybe not that often.” He shut up at that point, suddenly aware that he’d been doing a standup comic routine for Jennifer’s benefit.

  She lay down on the couch and curled up, as if trying it out for size. “I’m fine right here,” she announced.

  Looking down at her, he had to admit that it looked like a pretty good fit. So it was decided, without another word. Or, put slightly differently, Fielder had lost their first argument, and it felt just fine.

  “How does the fire stay hot all night?” Troy asked.

  “Good question,” said Fielder. “Grab a couple of those biggest logs over there. We’ll stoke her up real good, and shut the doors tight. Then you’ll see what happens.”

  Troy watched as Fielder placed the logs just so, leaving a small amount of space between them for sufficient draft. “That should do it,” he said, closing the doors and stepping back. Almost immediately, there was an audible clanking from the cast iron, as it began expanding from the sudden increase in heat.

  “Good stoking,” Troy said, pleased at the addition of a new, outdoorsy word to his vocabulary.

  IN HIS DREAM, Fielder found himself locked in a fierce struggle to the death between the armies of good and evil. He was Saint Matthew, the defender of the hearth, the protector of the holy family unit. Pitted against him were the dark forces of lust, temptation, and sensuality. He alone could withstand their onslaughts. Vastly outnumbered by their legions, he continued to fight on valiantly until the hordes drove him back and pinned him against the castle gates. On and on he battled, but to no avail. At last he was knocked from his feet and toppled backward. He lay helplessly on his back, awaiting the moment of his death. As the first of them set upon his defenseless body, he was able to make out a face. It was the beautiful female face of a Nordic vixen Fury, her blonde hair framing her perfect features, her red mouth opened wide, her white teeth gleaming in the moonlight. At first she seemed intent on going for his jugular, or clamping her jaws around the entire width of his throat. But even as she fell upon him, she dropped her head and aimed it toward his chest. Was it, then, his heart she intended to rip from his breast? Lower still her head sank. Did she mean instead to wrench out his stomach, his liver, to devour his very entrails? And would he be forced to watch, a modern-day Prometheus, doomed to eternal torture for the unpardonable sin of bringing fire into his cabin?

  But no! Even lower her mouth sank, until at last he could feel it clamp onto its final target, and begin to gorge itself upon the naked flesh of his groin! He readied himself to cry out in agony from the unbearable pain of her bite - only to feel instead the soft, wet warmth of her mouth, as it rose and fell rhythmically.

  Reflexively his upper body jerked up into
a sitting position. In the darkness, he felt a hand cup itself over his mouth to quiet him, and another press itself gently but firmly against his chest, gradually pushing him back down on the bed.

  When at last his body convulsed, and the insides of his eyelids lit up in flashes of red and white and purple, he bit into his lower lip hard enough to taste blood, in order to keep from crying out. But he felt no pain.

  It took him a long time before he could finally utter “my God” between gasps for air. Jennifer’s muffled giggle from beside him told him she’d settle for even such an inarticulate expression of appreciation. And Fielder’s very last thought, before he drifted back off to sleep, was that poor, long-suffering Prometheus simply might have misunderstood his orders; had he listened just a bit more carefully, he might be remembered to this day as the one who stoked fire.

  “ARE YOU SURE you’re okay with this, Jennifer?”

  “Yes, I’m okay. Just a little nervous, is all.”

  They were sitting in the visiting room of the jail, sharing a booth on one side of the plastic partition, waiting for Jonathan to be led into the other side. They’d dropped Troy off at the courthouse, in the capable hands of Dot Whipple, who’d promised to take him on a tour of the building. There were phone sets for both of them, an arrangement that had taken a bit of doing on Fielder’s part. He’d asked the guard what they would have done if he’d brought along an interpreter, to help him converse, say, with a Spanish-speaking inmate. The guard had looked at him as though he were crazy. Apparently there were no Spanish-speaking inmates in Ottawa County. But he’d agreed to hook up another phone for them, anyway.

  A door on the other side of the partition swung open, and Jonathan was led in. Fielder knew that his only warning of the visit would have been a piece of paper he’d been shown five minutes earlier, containing the names of the two people who’d come to visit him. He watched now as Jonathan, wrapped in his familiar blanket, sat down and smiled shyly at the sister he hadn’t seen in almost ten years.

  “Hello, Jonathan,” said Jennifer into her phone.

  Fielder had to point to Jonathan’s phone, to remind him to pick it up.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Do you remember me?” she asked him.

  “J-Jennifer,” he said, by way of answer.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Warm.” He smiled, touching his blanket.

  “I’ve missed you.”

  “M-miss you, too,” he said. Then a look of concern crossed his face, a knitting of his brow and a narrowing of eyes, as though he’d suddenly remembered something from long ago. And though he’d let the phone slip down against his chest, the word he now formed silently with his mouth was easy to read.

  “Baby.”

  It was the same word he’d spoken to Fielder, back in October, when the subject of Jennifer had come up for the first time. The same word, in all likelihood, that Jonathan had uttered to Hillary Munson as early as September, when he’d been asked about surviving members of his family other than his brother. It struck Fielder as a classic example of association: You mentioned Jennifer - or even vaguely referred to her - and Jonathan immediately was reminded of his baby.

  “He’s not a baby anymore,” Jennifer said. “He’s a big boy now.”

  A look of confusion spread over Jonathan’s face, replacing the expression of concern that had been there only a moment earlier. In Jonathan’s mind, it was as if his child had been forever frozen in time, and to him would always be a baby.

  Fielder asked Jennifer if she had a photo. She nodded, set down her phone, and rummaged through her handbag. After a moment she found a wallet and extracted from it a photo of Troy, blond-haired, smiling, and nine years old. She passed it through the opening in the partition to Jonathan. He stared at it for a long moment, as though totally unable to make the connection.

  “Troy,” she said. “His name is Troy. He’s your son.”

  “Troy,” Jonathan repeated, continuing to stare at the photo. For an instant his eyes narrowed just a bit, as though he appeared to see something in it for the first time; Fielder dared to believe that it was true recognition they were witnessing. But then Jonathan took a corner of his blanket, and began rubbing it against the glossy surface of the photo, where some smudge or fingermark had evidently caught his attention. Watching the act sent a tiny shiver through Fielder’s body, and took him back across the months to one of their earliest meetings together, when Jonathan had done the very same thing with a business card Fielder had handed him. For all of his failings and shortcomings, for all of his inabilities, Jonathan had a streak of compulsive cleanliness in him, a streak that compelled him to rub things clean. A streak, no doubt, that went a long way toward explaining the mystery of why no fingerprints had been found on his hunting knife. Even in his sleep, even in his unconscious, murderous rage, the strange compulsion to wipe things clean had manifested itself.

  Jonathan went to pass the photo back to his sister, but she motioned that it was for him to keep. He pressed it against his chest, or where the blanket covered his chest. But to Fielder, it seemed that he still had absolutely no clue who the boy in the picture was.

  “Jennifer’s here to help us decide what we should do,” Fielder explained. “Whether we want to have a trial and fight the case, or see if they’ll let you plead guilty and come out in a few years.”

  Jonathan stared at Jennifer, as though waiting for her to announce what it was he was supposed to do. The two of them looked so much alike to Fielder that they could have been twins, this pair of stunningly beautiful, blond people, both of whom had now become so much a part of his life, in such very different ways.

  “Can you stay here a while longer?” Jennifer asked her brother through the phone.

  “It wouldn’t be here,” Fielder corrected her. “It might be somewhere not as nice.” But as soon as he’d said it, he realized he was only complicating matters, making them harder for Jonathan to comprehend.

  “Can you wait?” Jennifer asked her brother. She, at least, understood he needed things simplified, stripped to the basics.

  He nodded. “I’m okay,” he said. “They f-feed me, and Mr. Matt brings me b-blankets, k-keep me warm.”

  “I’ll come visit you,” she said. “And Troy, too.”

  “Troy,” Jonathan repeated, as though trying out the sound of the name.

  “I will, too,” Fielder added.

  But Jonathan was off somewhere in the distance, unreachable. Perhaps he was trying to make some sort of sense of things. Perhaps he was still trying to figure out, in his poor, damaged, child’s mind, just what the connection might be between two people he knew only from their photographs - one of whom was named Baby, the other Troy.

  It was hard to know.

  THAT AFTERNOON, while Jennifer, Troy, and Dot Whipple went up the block to the diner to get some lunch, Fielder dropped in on Gil Cavanaugh.

  “Well, well, Matt. What brings you here?” The district attorney extended a hand, and this time Fielder took it. It had been four months since he’d caught Cavanaugh referring to him as a “Jew lawyer,” and though he’d never forget the incident, he figured it was about time to forgive. Besides, he wanted something, and he knew he couldn’t afford to let personal battles get in his client’s way.

  “I’m here to see if we can work out a disposition,” he said.

  Cavanaugh motioned to a chair, and Fielder took it. “What do you have in mind?” he asked.

  “What I have in mind,” Fielder said slowly, “is Man One, two-to-six, to be served in a hospital.”

  Cavanaugh smiled his politician’s smile. “Even if I thought that was an appropriate disposition,” he said, “the judge would never go for it.”

  Fielder looked him in the eye. “The judge will go for it,” he said, “if you tell him to.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “I’m new around these parts,” said Fielder, trying his best to sound like Bass McClure, “but unle
ss I miss my bet, you’re the one in charge here. I may be wrong about that, of course, but I don’t think so.” With that he stood up, thanked Cavanaugh for the meeting, and walked out the door.

  The idea, of course, was to play directly to the man’s ego. If Cavanaugh really was in charge, he’d want to talk the judge into accepting the plea, just to prove how much clout he had. And on top of that, hadn’t Cavanaugh said only a couple of days ago that he wanted the case to go away, and go away quickly? Well, now Fielder was giving him a chance, a guilty plea in a case the district attorney could lose at trial, if enough people bought that sleepwalking stuff the media kept talking about. Come election time, he could run as a softer, gentler Gil Cavanaugh, who knew when to go easy on a poor, unfortunate soul. Who knows? It might even get him 90 percent of the vote, next time around.

  Fielder found Jennifer, Troy, and Dot Whipple at the diner, just in time to pick up the check. He shot Jennifer a wink, trying to tell her that things had gone as well as he’d hoped at his meeting with the DA. But it was difficult to read her return wink, which might have signaled that she understood, or might have related to the night before, for all he knew.

  Whichever was the case, for Matt Fielder it had been a pretty good twelve hours, all things considered.

  DRIVING BACK TO his cabin that day, Fielder had every reason to feel on top of the world. Sitting in the car alongside him was the woman he was in love with. In the backseat was a boy who, in Fielder’s mind, had already begun to look up to him as the father he’d never known. An hour ago, Fielder had taken a bold first step toward successfully resolving the most serious case he’d ever handled, involving a truly deserving client he cared very much about. The early indications were that he might actually be able to pull off a result that would have seemed nothing short of miraculous, only two weeks ago.

  In a word, he had momentum on his side.

  But students of momentum know what a fickle creature she can be, how she can shift her affections as quickly and as unpredictably as an April breeze. And in this particular case, the amount of time Fielder would have to savor his good fortune would be measured not in days or weeks, but in mere minutes.