Flat Lake in Winter

by Joseph T. Klempner

  It would all go to Troy.

  And, therefore, to Jennifer.

  Was that what had consumed her all these years? Was that what had fueled her plan, day in and day out, as she scraped her pennies together on her fold-down aluminum table top, in her miserable, godforsaken trailer park? Struggling to make her car payments the first of every month, while knowing that back at Flat Lake, the vast Hamilton wealth was being wasted on her senile grandparents and her retarded brother? Had Cavanaugh stumbled upon the truth in spite of himself? Was he right about it having been a “murder for money,” even as he was wrong about who’d committed it?

  It was enough to drive a person totally crazy, Fielder decided. What on earth had he been doing for the past hour? Concocting a truly preposterous scenario, based on a series of absurdly tenuous assumptions, for which he had absolutely no evidence whatsoever. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that none of it made sense. Here he’d indicted, tried, and convicted Jennifer without so much as confronting her with his suspicions. And what were those suspicions based on, when you came right down to it? That she’d remembered a place as a Dunkin’ Donuts, when it was actually some other kind of donut shop? What kind of a slip was that? Would he ever argue such a trivial inconsistency to a jury? Surely they’d laugh him out of the courtroom if he did. Besides, if given half a chance, no doubt Jennifer would be able to come up with a perfectly logical explanation for her mistake, as well as all the rest of the stuff he was imagining.

  A numbness spread through Fielder’s body. He suddenly felt totally drained, exhausted beyond the point of being able to think anymore. It was time for bed, time for sleep.

  Time for escape.

  He reached back behind him to push himself up into a standing position. As he did so, his hand slipped an inch or two under the sofa he’d been leaning against, and he felt something. He reached underneath the springs and groped for whatever it was, until he found it and retrieved it. In the firelight, he could make out its shape, but not its color. It was a brush, a woman’s hairbrush. No doubt it was Jennifer’s, since it had been she who’d slept on his sofa for two nights. He wondered vaguely if she was even aware she’d lost it. Probably not, he decided. Didn’t all women have dozens of extra brushes?

  Before heading for the bedroom, he placed it on top of the bookcase in the corner.

  FIELDER AWOKE TO the ringing of his telephone. The numbers on his clock were too fuzzy to read, but he could see that it was light outside. In early February, that meant in had to be seven, seven-thirty, at least. He never slept that late.

  He found the receiver, picked it up, and managed to say something approximating “Hello” into it.

  “Hey, Matt, Gil Cavanaugh here. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Not a chance,” Fielder said. “What time is it?”

  “Ten of nine.”

  “Jesus! What’s up?”

  “Judge Summerhouse is back,” Cavanaugh said. “I’m going over to see him later this morning. Wanted to know if you’d like to go with me.”

  Where, Fielder wondered, had this sudden burst of ethics come from? He considered the offer briefly before saying, “No, I think you may have a better chance without me.” Which was true: Fielder’s presence would only serve to add a confrontational aspect to the meeting, and make it less likely that the judge would go along with the disposition Fielder had proposed. Better for the two cronies to put their heads together and see if there was some way they could live with it without losing face.

  “You sure?” Cavanaugh asked.

  “I’m sure,” Fielder told him. “Tell him I’ve given you permission to do it on an ex parte basis.” A bit of lawyerspeak never hurt. Why say something in English, after all, when plain everyday Latin would suffice?

  “Okay, Matt. I’ll call you later, let you know how it went. Unless you’re able to hear the judge’s reaction from there, that is.”

  A touch of humor from the home team. Then again, Cavanaugh had the advantage of being awake.

  Fielder set down the phone and looked at his watch. It really was almost nine o’clock. He tried to remember what time it had been when he’d finally gone to bed last night. Three? Four? What was it that had kept him up so late?

  The answer came to him, and with it, the absurdity of it all. He’d stayed up concocting fantastic scenarios pointing to Jonathan’s innocence. And of all the people in the world he might have picked to pin the crime on, he’d managed to come up with Jennifer - surely the unlikeliest candidate of all, the very individual who’d been trying her hardest to help Jonathan, and who’d already been largely responsible for saving him from the death penalty. And what was it that had set Fielder’s fantasy in motion? A mistake about how long a stupid donut place had been in operation! That’s what.

  He wondered what Freud might have had to say about such fanciful thinking. Was Fielder so threatened over the prospect of getting involved in a lasting relationship that he had to turn the object of his desire into an ogre, a quadruple murderer, at that? Wasn’t that a wee bit drastic, perhaps, even for someone whose idea of paradise was to live like a hermit in the woods?

  He spent the better part of an hour puttering around in his cabin, accomplishing nothing. He tried to read, but found he couldn’t concentrate. Every few minutes he’d catch himself stealing a glance at his watch, wondering why the phone hadn’t rung yet. When was it Cavanaugh had said he was meeting with the judge? Later this morning? That could mean anytime before one, Fielder knew. Hell, to a lawyer, that could be four o’clock in the afternoon.

  Fielder put on a jacket and walked outside. It was still on the warm side, probably right around freezing. He knew he should take advantage of the midwinter thaw and split some wood, burn off a little of his nervous energy. But for some reason, he felt the need to get away from home, to put a little distance between himself and his cabin. He walked over to his Suzuki. It was salt-streaked and splattered with mud, and the windshield was an opaque gray, except where the wipers had cleared twin semicircles of transparency. Say what you might, the little car had gotten him through winter so far. He stepped closer and gave it an affectionate pat on the fender. He couldn’t see through the driver’s-side window, but he knew the keys would be in the ignition, where they belonged.

  It had taken him a full six months to learn to leave them there. When he’d first moved up to the Adirondacks, not only would he remove them, he’d also lock the doors each time he left the car, a New York City habit that - though he knew it was ridiculous - he seemed powerless to break. Over time, he’d forced himself to lock it up only at the end of the day, before going to bed. Then, one night, he left it unlocked, though entirely by mistake. In the morning, miraculously, the car was still there. Gradually, Fielder had managed to become bolder, leaving the keys first under the floor-mat, next in the ashtray, and finally right in the ignition itself. Eventually, he got to the point where he was able to do so overnight - but not without worrying if he wasn’t being overly reckless. Surely he’d wake up one morning to discover he’d been victimized by some kid who’d wandered up from the South Bronx in search of a set of wheels to take for a joyride! It was only much later - when it had become truly second nature to go to bed with his keys purposefully left in the ignition, with his cabin door unlocked by choice and not inadvertence, and his mind nevertheless free of fears - that Fielder could say he’d finally shaken the city mentality and arrived in the woods for good.

  The engine started on the first try.

  Coming out of the driveway, he turned right and headed toward Big Moose Lake. He picked up Route 28 at Eagle Bay and took it as far as Blue Mountain Lake, where he headed north on Route 30. He had no particular destination in mind, he told himself. It just felt good being out on the road. He made believe he was simply a passenger along for the ride, that it was the Sidekick that was in charge of deciding where they were headed, much the way a trusty dowsing rod might lead a well-digger in search of water.

  But h
e knew better. As each mile passed, and as each turn came up, he knew where they were going.

  AS BEFORE, EVERYTHING was still, just as he’d known it would be. There was no sound of man in the air, and no evidence of him in sight. He was the only one there. There were tracks on the path leading downhill, but they were the tracks of deer, of rabbit, and of wild turkey. In the shelter of the trees, the snow was white and untouched.

  And all around him, silence.

  As he neared the water’s edge, he wondered if he’d be rewarded, as he had been last time, by the sight of the lake in its smooth, unbroken flatness. He found himself hoping that it might be so. He desperately needed to see it again that way, and no different. For some reason, it took on an importance he couldn’t quite understand, and certainly couldn’t have begun to explain, had he been called upon to do so. He just needed to see it again as it had been before.

  But as he reached the spot where the trees ended and the bank dropped off, he realized that he was to be disappointed. Things had changed. Covering the ice was a layer of snow - beautiful enough in its whiteness, but broken here and there by the crisscross of track lines laid down by earlier visitors, four-legged and two-legged alike.

  The breathtaking, perfect flatness had been reduced to a thing of the past.

  Gone.

  CAVANAUGH’S CALL CAME at one-thirty. Fielder picked up on the third ring, his heart pounding as though he was awaiting the return of a jury filing back into the courtroom to announce its verdict.

  “It’s a go,” the DA said. “I gotta tell you, Matt, it took some doing. But Summerhouse’ll go along with us, as long as we do it quickly, before public sentiment shifts again. Like, tomorrow. You there, Matt?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You should be thrilled.”

  And so he should have been.

  FIELDER SAT ACROSS from Jonathan Hamilton once again. Once again, they were separated by the Plexiglas partition. Once again they spoke through telephones. This time, they were alone. Jennifer was nowhere in sight. She was back in New Hampshire with Jonathan’s son. Or nephew. Or brother.

  Fielder began the conversation by asking Jonathan for the umpteenth time if he knew whether or not he’d caused the deaths of his grandparents. For the umpteenth time, Jonathan answered him by saying he didn’t know. Fielder had expected as much; at the same time, he had to ask the question.

  He told Jonathan that the time had come for them to make their decision. “We’ve worked it out so you can leave here and go to a hospital,” he said. “They’ll want to keep you two years, maybe a little more. After that, they’ll let you go home.”

  Wherever “home” might be, by that time.

  “If you don’t want to do that, then we have to take a chance. If we’re real lucky, you could go home much sooner. If we’re unlucky, you could end up staying in a place like this forever.”

  Jonathan held the phone pressed to his ear for a long time, as though waiting for more words, more help, more clues. When finally he spoke, it was into the mouthpiece. But even as his lips moved, his eyes remained riveted on Fielder’s.

  “I don’t w-want to stay here forever,” is what he said.

  THAT NIGHT, FIELDER took up his familiar spot on the floor in front of the wood-burning stove. He leaned back against the front of his sofa, watched the flames dance against the darkness, and wondered what on earth it was he was supposed to do.

  One thing he knew for sure. They didn’t teach you stuff like this in law school.

  Not even in Death School.

  The thing was, when it came right down to it, he really knew no more than his client did. He couldn’t say for sure if Jonathan was guilty of murdering his grandparents in cold blood, wasn’t responsible because he’d been asleep when he killed them, or was totally innocent of everything.

  Not that there wasn’t a way to find out, he knew.

  All it would take would be a blood sample from Jennifer, to submit for testing. If her DNA wasn’t the same as that of the seventh hair - the one that didn’t quite match Jonathan’s - then Fielder would know that all of the previous night’s ravings were nothing but the product of his overworked imagination.

  On the other hand, if it was the same, that was a different story altogether. Then he’d have to confront her about everything.

  Confront her, and accuse her.

  Of course, there was the little matter of obtaining a blood sample. Just how was he supposed to go about doing that? Perhaps when they were lying in bed one night, in the midst of making passionate love, he could turn to her and say, “Oh, by the way, I think you just might be a quadruple murderer. Might I trouble you for a blood sample?”

  But then again, could he not do it?

  Didn’t he owe his client that much?

  Could he go ahead and plead someone guilty to a crime he might not have committed?

  One way of answering that question was to say, Of course he could - lawyers did it all the time, and rightly so. Some clients lied to you so much that you reached the point where you couldn’t tell if they were guilty or not. That didn’t mean you forbade them from accepting a good plea bargain when one came along. Other clients turned out to have been so drunk or stoned at the time, that they often didn’t know what they’d done. There were even rare instances where defendants’ memories had become impaired by injury or illness, resulting in cases of amnesia. In such situations, the law permitted guilty pleas, even where defendants were unable to honestly acknowledge their guilt in open court.

  But those were only the legal rules. There had to be more to it than that.

  Suppose Fielder could truly establish that it was Jennifer, and not Jonathan, who’d committed the crimes? Fielder himself would emerge as a hero. Jonathan would be released, free to go home. Cleared of any wrongdoing, he’d also be permitted to inherit the Hamilton fortune.

  But what was left for Jonathan back at Flat Lake? His parents were dead, and now his grandparents, too. Would he live with the Armbrusts? They were old, and hardly the sort of nurturing company Jonathan needed. And what would he do with millions of dollars? All he ever asked for was to be fed and sheltered and kept warm. Money was something he didn’t even understand, let alone need.

  And Jennifer? She’d be arrested and prosecuted, not only for the stabbing deaths of her grandparents, but possibly for the arson deaths of her parents as well. There was enough there to send her away for life four times over. Maybe worse. Juries tend to take a dim view of those who try to pin their crimes on others.

  As for Troy, he’d become - what was the expression they used? - a “ward of the state,” that was it.

  So whereas Jonathan’s guilty plea might bring some closure to the long line of tragedies that had plagued the Hamilton family, his exoneration would trigger a whole new chapter, more bizarre and more sensational by far than any before it. With Jennifer as the target.

  Was that what Jonathan wanted?

  But even if he didn’t owe it to Jonathan to turn the tables on Jennifer, didn’t he perhaps owe it to the public? The answer was an unqualified yes, he decided quickly - if he believed that not only had she killed, but was likely to do it once again. But he didn’t believe that. How could he believe that? He loved Jennifer. Two days ago, he’d been ready to spend the rest of his life with her.

  And, if he was satisfied that she wasn’t going to do anything like it again, was he nonetheless duty-bound to try to uncover what had really happened? Wasn’t that what the process was supposed to be, after all, a search for the truth?

  But surely that was the job of others. Wasn’t Fielder, who still loved her even as he suspected her, the very last person on the face of the earth who should now have to turn on her and accuse her?

  Life was often a matter of conflicts, he knew, of choices between unpleasant alternatives. You were expected to step up, pay your money, and take your chances; that was all there was to it. You were never supposed to look back. Regrets were for suckers.

 
But this was different. This wasn’t just your ordinary, everyday, garden-variety conflict. This was a choice that comes along maybe once in a lifetime.

  And the phrase that came back to Matt Fielder wasn’t one out of the fine print of Black’s Law Dictionary. It wasn’t some wise Latin maxim borrowed from Caesar’s time, or some bit of lawyer-speak designed to confuse and impress the common folk. It wasn’t something solemnly intoned by the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes or Learned Hand or Benjamin Cardozo.

  None of that.

  Instead, it came drifting across the years from a Saturday afternoon in summer, long, long ago. It came from the memory of a makeshift ballfield, adjacent to a dirt parking lot. It came damp with sweat, streaked with grass stains, and coated with infield dust. It came in a nasal Lower East Side voice, from a kid named Whitey Ryan. And it came in two words.

  Fielder’s choice.

  What was the lesson he was supposed to have taken away with him that day? With the game safely in hand, and the ball bouncing your way, what was it you were supposed to do?

  EVEN AS THE ball comes your way, out of the corner of your eye, you can see the runner breaking from second and beginning to dig for third - something he’s got no business doing. You’ve got a play on him, you know. You can wheel around and fire to third, try and cut him down before he can slide in under the tag. A good throw nails him by two steps. Or you can play it safe, go for the sure out at first, just thirty feet away.

  This time it’s not Goober Wilson’s glove the ball’s in; it’s yours. The runner heading to third presents a tempting target. He never should have gone for it. He doesn’t deserve to make it.