by Susan Conant
“Most common accident in the park,” Fairley said. “Falling on rocks. There’s a sign at the Nature Center that says so. Thank God, most of the time the worst that happens is a skinned knee. What happened to Norman was a freak accident.” He paused. “Tragic,” he murmured. “A tragic accident.”
Chapter Nine
THE ODDITIES OF MEMORY and its loss being what they are, I retained solid expectations about the spending habits of New England white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Consequently, I wasn’t surprised to find that the toast to Malcolm Fairley was to be drunk with cheap champagne. What amazed me was that there was champagne at all. And lo and behold, more than a single bottle for the whole crowd! Two bottles, to be precise. But by Yankee WASP standards, especially rich Yankee WASP standards, the supply was generous. I’d have bet on ginger ale, and little of that.
In response to the mosquitoes and the darkness, Wally Swan had erected a half dozen bug-repellent torches in a circle around the fire. The flames efficiently illuminated the stinky black plumes of smoke that emerged from the wicks. Effie O’Brian limited her protest to loud coughs and a stagy display of fanning away the fumes with her hands.
“They do smell rather awful,” Gabrielle remarked, “but they look festive, don’t they!”
Effie grumbled something.
“What’s that? Well, you know, I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Gabrielle said. “It’s only citronella, isn’t it? And, really, in no time, it vanishes into the air. That’s one of the nice things about being next to the ocean. It washes everything clean.”
It was unnecessary to see Quint and Effie to perceive their reaction to this bit of environmental wisdom. I could practically feel a wave of rage emanate from them and churn through the air. Kimi, who’d been peacefully lazing at Tiffany’s feet, suddenly got up, moved purposefully to Effie, and planted herself there, as if expecting to be told what the problem was and what she could do about it. Effie reached out and stroked Kimi’s dark head. “What an intuitive dog you are. Good boy.”
“GM,” I said reflexively.
Meanwhile, Wally Swan, who served almost as Gabrielle’s butler, had opened the champagne and was pouring it into small plastic cups that his wife, Opal, distributed to everyone.
“I was hoping Anita would be here by now,” Gabrielle said.
“Steve, too,” Malcolm Fairley added.
“Yes, of course, and Steve, too. We are all dying to meet him. But what I meant was that all of us who support and, uh, benefit from the foundation owe our thanks equally to Malcolm and Anita.”
“Anita’s the foundation’s attorney,” Tiffany muttered to me. “Malcolm’s daughter.”
Lifting her small plastic glass, Gabrielle intoned in that extraordinary voice of hers, “To Malcolm Fairley! And the Pine Tree Foundation!”
Voices rose. “Hear, hear!”
Malcolm Fairley benignly accepted the tribute. He had the good manners not to drink in his own honor. I didn’t exactly drink to him, either, not out of disrespect, but out of the conviction that champagne in my bloodstream would end up as bubbles in my brain, which felt quite foamy enough already, thank you. I settled for bringing the plastic cup to my lips and miming a sip.
“And to Anita!” Gabrielle added.
After drinking to his daughter, Malcolm Fairley cleared his throat and proposed a new toast. “To the absent friends who make our work possible!” Norman Axelrod’s name flew across my mind. I brushed it away. For one thing, Axelrod wasn’t just absent; he was dead. For another, he didn’t seem to have been anyone’s friend except Gabrielle’s and possibly mine; from what I’d heard, he’d been more enemy than friend to the Pine Tree Foundation. Also, there’d been only one of him, of course, and Fairley has clearly said friends. Plural. Fairley elaborated. “To the generous benefactors of the Pine Tree Foundation for Conservation Philanthropy! Our deepest gratitude!”
“They make matching contributions,” explained Tiffany, my self-appointed interpreter. “That’s why the rate of return can be so high, because of their contributions.”
In innocence, I asked aloud, “Who are they?”
Lowering her voice, Tiffany said reverently, “Philanthropists, really. Very wealthy people who are totally committed to the environment. And to M.D.I.” She translated. “Mount Desert Island.”
In case you’ve never smashed your head on rocks while visiting Acadia National Park, let me assure you that you can do so without forgetting the name of the park’s principal benefactor, mainly, I guess, because it’s a household word: Rockefeller. Well, not household, exactly. Mansion-hold? Anyway, I’ve subsequently had the occasion to look up a few statistics on John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Mount Desert Island, and Acadia National Park. So, here goes. It won’t hurt; it’ll only sting a little. M.D.I. consists of about 74,000 acres, of which 34,000 acres belong to Acadia National Park. The park owns another 6,000 acres on nearby Isle au Haut, Schoodic Point, and other gorgeous spots. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., gave more than 10,000 acres to Acadia, which also received gifts of land from the Morgans, Astors, Fords, Vanderbilts, and Pulitzers.
What’s famous about Rockefeller’s gift isn’t just its size or its value. It’s what John D., Jr., did with large portions of the land before signing it over to the park. He built carriage roads. Why? Because the principal heir to the Standard Oil fortune hated, and I mean detested, automobiles. He saw motor vehicles as the potential ruin of M.D.I. and, in fact, battled to ban cars from the island. What he liked were horses. Consequently, just as you or I might have done in his position, he spent twenty-seven years building fifty-one miles of no-cars-allowed broken-stone roads designed for horse-drawn carriages. Well, maybe just as you might have done. I, of course, would’ve spent the twenty-seven years constructing fifty-one miles of groomed paths open only to hikers accompanied by dogs, or a fifty-one mile sled-dog trail, or fifty-one miles of dog-recreational something else. But I’m not John D., Jr. Among others things, having funded and supervised the construction of fifty-one miles of anything whatever, I’d keep it for myself and my dogs, whereas John D., Jr., donated most of his carriage road system to Acadia National Park. Most. Not quite all. Here and there on the carriage roads near the town of Seal Harbor, you come to a sign announcing you’re about to leave the park and cross onto what is discreetly called “private land.” It doesn’t take half a brain—about what I had left—to know whose heirs’ private land it is.
So when Tiffany mentioned philanthropist benefactors deeply committed to M.D.I., I took the obvious baby-step mental leap and was just opening my mouth to utter the mansionhold word when Tiffany raised a finger to her lips. “The benefactors prefer to remain anonymous,” said Tiffany, obviously quoting the official policy of the Pine Tree Foundation.
I can take a hint. Instead of loudly sputtering, “Wow! The Rockefellers!” I just said, “Wow!”
“Everyone knows, really,” Tiffany said. “It’s just like, uh, some game they like to play, you know, pretending they’re normal. Well, not normal exactly. You know, low profile. A couple of times a year, they meet with Malcolm at his house for formal stuff, votes, that kind of thing. They don’t want to be seen at the foundation. But I do the agendas for the meetings, so I have to know, really.” Her voice glowed. “And in between, they’ll call Malcolm, not that they give their names, not outright, not to me, or Malcolm will have to consult them about something, and then he’ll go see them at their, uh, house, or sometimes in the park. I always know who’s involved, really. I do the agendas for those meetings, too.”
Malcolm Fairley startled me by swooping out of the darkness beyond the fire and the torches. The dread that had plagued me since I’d awakened on the mountain had been in partial abeyance. The sound of small waves, the unromantic reek of the ocean floor at low tide, the comforting presence of uninjured people and of my big, strong dogs, all of it had beaten back the terror. My grip on comfort was pitifully fragile. What set my heart racing now was, in part, a healthy startle reflex, a p
rimitive what-the-hell-is-that? response. A figure unexpectedly swooped out of darkness. What seriously scared me, though, was my reaction to Malcolm Fairley’s voice. His words and tone were benign. In fact, all he did was tell Tiffany in a light, jocular fashion that he hoped she wasn’t giving any secrets away. “Anonymity is anonymity! It’s a solemn promise.” I had, of course, heard him speak of anonymity before. Addressing me, he added pleasantly, “Names are not for publication.”
“No names have been named,” I said flatly, battling the temptation to ask where he expected me to publish any names that might have been mentioned. I enjoyed a fleeting and somewhat frightening moment in which I saw myself as a roving correspondent for some highbrow newspaper or toney magazine. Loose pages of the Times and The New Yorker drifted through empty brain space. Each page prominently displayed my byline. Recovering from this little fit of journalistic grandiosity, I realized that Fairley might not have been speaking literally. For all I knew, my publications, like the late Norman Axelrod’s, consisted of crank letters printed on the editorial pages of local weeklies.
Fairley went on to suggest otherwise. Playfully wagging a finger at me, he said, “I hope that Tiffany hasn’t been giving any secrets away.” To Tiffany, he added, “Holly’s here because Norman promised her a story. A scoop? Is that still the term, Holly? So we need to watch what we say to her, or it’ll all end up in print!” Fairley sounded pleased at the prospect: You’re not going to write about ME, are you? Are you?
Another bit of knowledge. I was evidently a writer, a Rachel Carson type, perhaps, whose subject was the environment, pollution, conservation, ozone, global warming, and all that sort of thing. Ah-hah! The mysterious message on the answering machine about the arsenic front! Norman Axelrod’s promise of a story! The pieces interlocked. I, Holly Winter, famed chronicler of environmental issues, had been summoned by Norman Axelrod to prepare a special report on arsenic contamination at Acadia National Park. Scandal! Millions of innocent park visitors each year exposed to the notorious toxin! Thousands of M.D.I residents! Not to mention everyone who ate a Maine lobster! Well, no wonder I suffered from this dreadful sense of mission! And Norman Axelrod? Although I remembered nothing about him, what I’d heard this evening suggested a man who’d never have voluntarily started down a ladder trail on his own, especially not on a wet, foggy, slippery day. Rather, he’d been a man on the verge of exposing mass arsenic pollution at one of the nation’s most cherished national parks. But before we’d gone public with our revelation, poor Norman Axelrod had fallen to his death.
Chapter Ten
PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN about something the cat or dog dragged home have obviously never met human children. All of a sudden, a pigtailed girl of seven or eight dashed into the light of the campfire. Dangling a stinky, repulsive length of what appeared to be bubble wrap encrusted with the rotting corpses of sea creatures, she ran up to Quint and demanded, “What’s this?”
Far from being put off, Quint showed the eagerness appropriate to the caretaker of a nature preserve. “This is a curious find, isn’t it?” he told the child. He pulled out a flashlight and shone the beam on the loathsome thing.
“Is it an animal?” the child asked.
“How about we take it up to the house,” Quint suggested, “where we can look at it in good light?”
Skipping after Quint, the child babbled happily. “Roberta said it was just an old piece of junk,” she gloated. “But Roberta was wrong!”
“Sisters often are,” Quint said sympathetically. “But they usually outgrow it. Roberta probably just didn’t get a good look at this specimen. It’s pretty dark here. Once we…” His voice trailed off.
Was the repulsive thing an animal? I had no idea. Worse, I had no desire to find out. As a conservation biologist or a famous science writer, I seemed to be on a par with the scorned Roberta. Scratch that hypothesis. So, why had the late Norman Axelrod summoned me here? I could hardly beg Quint and the little girl to play scientific detective by deducing my vocation in the fashion of Sherlock Holmes. Malcolm Fairley apparently knew the answer to my question. Still, I could hardly catch his eye and remark, even in an offhand way, Say there, Malcolm! You’ve piqued my curiosity about how I earn my living. Do you suppose you could fill me in?
Trying to dream up a subtle probe, I idly ran my fingertips down Rowdy’s throat, as if a bright idea wedged in his vocal cords might transmit itself to my nervous system and eventually excite my enfeebled cerebrum. I studied him. In daylight, Kimi’s dark facial markings had made her the more wolflike of the pair. Now, by the light of the fire and the torch flames, each was as primeval as the other. Huddled around the remains of the clambake, glutted with the flesh of oversize undersea insects, we human beings looked none too civilized ourselves. With their dark, heavy coats, blocky muzzles, neat little ears, and intelligent eyes, my dogs had the advantage of startling beauty. By comparison, mine was a species of mutant ape ravaged by a skin disease.
Watching me, although not quite reading my thoughts, Malcolm Fairley spoke up with his usual joviality. “It’s in the genes! I’m not joking!” Lowering his voice only a hint, he added, “They’re the same way, of course. Dog nuts all.”
In perfect seriousness, I asked, “Would you consider me a dog nut?” Not only Malcolm Fairley, but Effie, Gabrielle, and a couple of other nearby people laughed.
“Very good!” Malcolm complimented me. “Wonderfully dry sense of humor.”
“It is genetic,” said Gabrielle, who looked, I might add, far less apelike than anyone else there. Like my dogs, she had an appealing rightness. Whereas others appeared to suffer the hideously revealing effects of a skin and coat disorder, Gabrielle’s perfect bone structure was obviously designed to be seen and admired. Her muslin ruffles were utterly correct for her breed. I realize now that the great gift she shared with my dogs was the invisible, elusive ability to make everyone feel special. “The love of dogs, I mean,” she continued, eyeing me. “It’s genetic. In this case, like father, like daughter.”
“Daughter?” Fairley asked. “In general, the foundation deals with—”
“We’re at cross-purposes here.” Gabrielle slapped a mosquito. “I was talking about Buck and Holly. Her father and I met at a show. A dog show,” she explained, presumably for the benefit of the genetically challenged. “Buck rescued me.”
“I think that’s very romantic,” said Tiffany, who had persuaded Kimi to stretch out at the base of a boulder and was now using the big dog as a hairy headrest. “How did he rescue you?”
“Oh, everyone’s heard this already,” Gabrielle replied. “Malcolm knows the story, and poor Holly has suffered through it I don’t know how many times.”
“Don’t mind me,” I said, suppressing any hint of eagerness. The notion of this heroic father of mine was inexpressibly comforting. I was ravenous for details.
For once, Malcolm Fairley looked less than jovial. Still, he made a grunt of agreement. I felt sorry for him. Every time he looked at Gabrielle, he went all Bambi.
“Well,” Gabrielle said happily, “I was supposed to meet Horace Livermore at the show, but Horace hadn’t been too clear about exactly where. Horace has a tendency to assume everyone knows him and he’ll be easy to find. But it isn’t necessarily true. Shows are all spread out.”
“Horace is…?” Tiffany asked. “Maybe you said before.”
“Molly’s handler. But she does not travel with him the way poor Isaac did. I always thought that was very wrong of Norman. In theory, I have Molly all groomed, although I’m not very good at it yet, and then Horace takes her into the ring. Or one of his assistants does, or he finds me another professional handler. Sometimes he has a conflict, when he’s supposed to be in two rings at once. Molly and I are not his most important clients.”
Teasing Gabrielle, Tiffany said, “This is not very romantic so far!”
Gabrielle patted her arm. “Well, no, Tiffany, it isn’t! Horace is a wonderful handler. Even Norman Axelrod admitted tha
t. Norman’s gripes about Horace had nothing to do with how Horace presented Isaac. But Horace is not the romantic type. What I’m leading up to is that I drove through this simply terrible rain to get to the show, which was in Portland, at some enormous convention center. Shows are so chaotic! I got up at four o’clock in the morning, and then I drove all the way there. Then I did have the sense to carry Molly. To keep her clean, of course. But she’d been in the car all that time, and she really had to go. And once I got indoors, there were these rows of pens with cedar shavings and so forth, and I thought, well, here are the potties! So I let Molly in one, only it turned out that they were private. And some dragon of a woman came charging at me. And poor Molly still hadn’t had a chance to relieve herself. So what could I do? I picked her up and took her outdoors again, and I put her on the ground. She ended up dripping wet, with her feet all muddy.”
“You have a great future with Harlequin,” Tiffany said. “This is getting more romantic by the second.”
“Isn’t it!” Gabrielle went on. “Well, it does now. You’ll see! So there I was, carrying Molly back inside, and she really was a mess. Meanwhile, I still hadn’t seen a sign of Horace Livermore. I asked four or five people, and they were about as helpful as that dragon woman with the private dog potties. So I thought, What am I doing here? This is not fun! And I turned around and tried to leave. Only it turned out that when I’d taken Molly out the first time, I’d lost the little piece of paper saying she belonged there.”
“The entry,” I supplied.
“Yes, the entry. You have to have it when you take a dog out of the building. To prove you’re not stealing the dog, you see, Tiffany. And I’d had it the first time, so I must’ve dropped it when I put Molly on the ground. The people at the exit were perfectly nice. They’re just ordinary people, volunteers. They weren’t going to have me arrested. But they were not going to let me take Molly home, either. They kept explaining some dreadful, complicated procedure. I was perfectly miserable.” Gabrielle paused. “And along came Buck Winter.” Her voice lingered on the name as if it were astoundingly famous and satisfyingly distinguished. And along came Winston Churchill. “Buck,” she continued, with a verbal caress, “knows everyone. He just swept us up—he’s a big man—and in no time, he had Molly on his grooming table—he has the most beautiful golden retriever—and he found Horace, and he made Horace handle Molly himself. And Molly went Winners Bitch and Best of Opposite.”
