“He’s still in college, Elle. It’s not too late.”
“Still in college,” Eleanor muttered. “His last year of college. And he hasn’t taken a single class in art or art history. All econ and poly sci. No wonder his grades aren’t good. He probably hates what he’s studying.”
At last, under a stack of crude India ink drawings that dated back to when Luc was ten, they found a cloth-bound diary filled with his barely legible scrawl. With a quick glance, Eleanor determined that the dates of the entries were recent. “Wonder why he didn’t take this with him back to school.”
“Just look for Sam.”
She flipped through the pages quickly, both afraid to read and horrified of what she might find: not about his romantic life so much as harsh and unforgiving words about herself. When she saw the name, she closed the book and held it against her chest, her heart clattering. “Okay. Sam is in here,” she whispered. “Sam Solomon.” And then words flipped by: “Beautiful man. I’ve woken up, finally.” They’d located a Sam Solomon, Architect, on Giles’s computer. Noah Wood Road, South Woodstock, Vermont.
Giles looked up the telephone number, called and left a message that it was an emergency. “Probably a landline he doesn’t answer on weekends. Probably where Luc is right now. He’ll probably drive back up to Carleton later on tonight in time for school tomorrow.”
“He doesn’t have his car.”
“Well, then maybe Sam will drive him back.”
Cleaving to this new hope, Eleanor wiped her tears. “You think so?”
“You always assume the worst is going to happen to him,” Giles reminded her. “You were never that way with Janine, even during her rebellious period when she stayed out all night and we didn’t even know where she was.”
“But Janine never had a head injury. She never just took off like Luc did.”
They’re now entering the town of Carleton, a town Eleanor has known for forty years. It seems almost a travesty that Luc has disappeared in the place she grew up but left many years ago. As Route 7 doglegs and runs through the middle of the town, Eleanor notices the blazing white spire of the Congregationalist Church; next to the entrance is a sign painted in rainbow LGBT colors with the phrase “God is still listening.” She parses the words over and over, trying to understand what they mean. Could it be that the church is reminding its parishioners (and the general public) that God speaks to anyone of any sexual persuasion, and that these souls deserve to listen as well as be heard? And yet she can’t be sure that the words “God is still listening” actually mean what she thinks they do, and Eleanor’s anxiety ratchets up to an even higher level.
They come to a red light, and after the car comes to a brief halt, Giles says, “I’ll be honest. I’ve been wondering if maybe he just decided to blow off college once and for all and just took off somewhere.”
This annoys Eleanor. “Well, if he ‘took off,’ he was bored. Because he wasn’t studying what he really loved.”
Giles looks over at her. “Sounds like you’re blaming me for this misbehavior.”
“Well, you’ve made him feel bad about himself.”
Glancing over at her, Giles said, “Like how? How did I make him feel bad about himself?” The light goes green and he begins driving again.
“All those jokes you used to make about him going out and blundering his way through girls to get experience.”
“But fathers joke around like that with their sons.”
“Yeah, but I remember you when started talking about it . . . and he wasn’t even fifteen. Can you imagine how that must’ve felt . . . if he was struggling with his sexuality?”
“No, but he already had that girlfriend.”
“Oh God, Giles! He’s always had girlfriends. Clearly that doesn’t mean very much.” And then a thought comes to her. “Now I’m thinking that maybe his running off that first time had something to do with the fact that there was something he felt he couldn’t discuss with us.”
“Yes, I suppose that could be possible.”
As they pass the old train depot on Seymour Street, make a left turn under a railroad trestle and then another left to get to the police station, Eleanor, for the first time, sees one of the flyers with Luc’s face on it affixed to the side of a beverage and liquor market. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? At first she feels an almost electric jolt. But then retreats from the impact, and the image she sees becomes a refraction, a backlighted scrim that both clarifies the image of her son and obscures it so that he’s staring back at her like a stranger, like somebody she’s never known or perhaps vaguely recognizes from a different life. It takes another moment for the acute recognition and then nausea, and then bewilderment and then fear. “Have you seen this man,” she actually whispers to herself. “Have you seen my son?”
February 18; Carleton, Vermont; 18 degrees, snow
Jenkins enters a quiet waiting area with a potted bottle palm tree, where the Mr. and Mrs. Flanders have been shepherded, deliberately removed from the melee going on in the dispatch center. After shaking Eleanor’s hand, he says to Giles, “Good to meet you finally,” and Giles, staring down on the detective from his six-foot-three height, shakes his hand reluctantly. He may be the problem, Jenkins surmises to himself. “If you’ll follow me, I have a nice quiet place that we can talk.” He leads them back to a small conference room with an oblong table, where Kennedy has been waiting. She jumps out of her chair and comes forward to introduce herself.
Once everyone is seated, Jenkins says, “The trip okay? No pockets of bad weather?”
“A little bit of snow around Sharon,” says Giles.
“Well, last I looked, there is nothing predicted, so it should be smooth sailing getting back to Norwich,” Jenkins says. Both parents are staring at him like frightened children. He can tell they want to dispense with small talk. “Anyway, as I was saying to you on the phone, the difficulty for us is that your son took off once before. So after we completed our search around the pond and took his exiting footprints into account, our only option was to put the word out everywhere. Now we have to wait and see if anybody spots him or comes forward with something. ”
Mrs. Flanders pulls a sketchpad out of a canvas book bag she has brought with her. “We found this in his room.” She shows Jenkins and Kennedy the dates written on the inside cover. “We’re thinking these might correspond to a bunch of drawings he did recently. But obviously the drawings were ripped out of here.”
“Which is . . . unusual because he supposedly stopped doing drawings,” Mr. Flanders explains. “He claims drawing makes him feel weird—after his accident playing hockey.”
“Well, there were no drawings or personal art of any kind in his room down in Carleton,” Kennedy tells them.
“So do you have any leads at all?” Mr. Flanders asks. “Heard anything from anyone?”
“Nothing credible,” Kennedy says.
“But wouldn’t it be worthwhile to search the entire area around Carleton?” Mrs. Flanders asks. “Rather than just the area around Skylight Pond?”
Kennedy answers, “We searched a thirty-mile radius. We announced the search on the local radio and in the local paper. We have posters up everywhere with his picture and a hotline telephone number.”
“I know,” Eleanor says despairingly. “I just saw one.”
“So if by chance he is holed up somewhere, somebody should recognize him when he decides to go out in public,” Jenkins says.
“But like the last time, he might have gone farther away,” Mr. Flanders points out.
Mrs. Flanders says, “The people he was staying with that first time he went missing didn’t even ask him any questions for over a week.”
“Could also be the case here,” Jenkins says. “His picture has been sent to a national register.”
“What about foul play?” Mr. Flanders asks. “When I saw you at the sear
ch, you told me it looked like there could have been a struggle.”
Jenkins says, “Yeah. Maybe two people wrangling. Snow all churned up with footprints. But then a single trail that matched his shoes left the pond and went to the road. Nobody else’s footprints there but his.”
Jenkins notices that Mrs. Flanders has suddenly gone extremely pale. “Do you want to stop for a bit?”
She shakes her head and seems to be fighting back tears. “No,” she replies at last. “I’m sorry . . .”
“Don’t be sorry,” Kennedy says. “You’re his mother.”
Mr. Flanders turns to Jenkins. “But why would Luc go back to the pond from a different direction than he went the first time . . . with his friends?”
Kennedy replies, “Because when he went back the second time, he went specifically to look for Sam Solomon’s ring. That’s where and when—we surmise—a struggle occurred.”
“How do you know the struggle wasn’t with Solomon?” Mrs. Flanders asks sharply.
“We don’t know for sure,” Kennedy answers.
Jenkins goes on to say that Sam Solomon conceivably could have driven from South Woodstock to Carleton, had a half hour encounter with Luc and then continued to Logan Airport. Therefore, Solomon would be the likeliest instrument of harm. “We’re keeping an eye on him. We’ve asked him not to leave the state.”
“What was your impression of him?” asks Mr. Flanders.
Jenkins replies, “He and his story seem credible. He is liked and admired down in Woodstock, vouched for as being a model citizen as well as a gentle, honest man who treats everyone with kindness.”
“You hear that about a lot of people,” Mrs. Flanders says, “who then change stripes when it comes to love.”
“Absolutely true,” Jenkins agrees.
Kennedy says, “We also spoke to Sam’s Canadian ex-partner of five years. An established Toronto lawyer for a multinational with a twenty-four-year-old daughter. Apparently Sam confided in him about the relationship with your son, and this man consistently warned Sam that the affair could not possibly last. This Canadian man insists that Sam wholeheartedly agreed with his assessment. He says that Sam knew that Luc had a lot of conflict about the relationship as well as the age difference, and Sam figured/assumed the affair would come to an end.” She glances down at her notepad.
Jenkins says, “Sam claims he didn’t fight it when Luc broke things off.”
“Well, I don’t haspicion about Sam Solomon,” Mr. Flanders says.
Surprised, his wife turns to him. “I didn’t know you felt this way.”
The man stares at Jenkins. “Maybe it’s that I just don’t want to consider the idea that somebody who supposedly really loved my son could’ve . . .” The possibilities hang in the air.
“That’s why it would be good to rule Sam Solomon out entirely,” Jenkins says.
“So you haven’t yet?”
“It’s hard to because, like I said, logistically Sam could’ve gotten himself up to Carleton.”
“I can’t take this anymore!” Mrs. Flanders cries.
“We’re almost done,” Jenkins says. “But—”
“Just go on!”
He continues quietly, “What I am about to discuss cannot go outside this room. I need your assurance.”
“You have it,” Mr. Flanders says.
“And mine, too,” says Mrs. Flanders.
“Your son is of age, so we had to ask a judge to grant us access to his email accounts. One of them was an America Online account. In that account there were three emails that your son sent to Sam Solomon right after they spoke on January sixth. One was sent on January seventh. Then one on January eighth. And the last one was sent on January ninth. American Online customers are able to see if the mail they send to another American Online customer has been read by the recipient. The three emails I refer to—that were sent to Sam Solomon—were all marked as read; however, Solomon claims he never got them, never read them.”
“And you believe him?” Mrs. Flanders asks with understandable skepticism.
Jenkins says, “When he found out about them, Sam seemed genuinely distraught.”
“But what do the emails say?” Mrs. Flanders asks.
“All very passionate. Describing Luc’s love for Sam. Luc asks for a meeting.” Jenkins pauses, and then adds, “Wanting to reconcile.”
There is considerable silence following Jenkins’s pronouncement.
At last, Mrs. Flanders says, “So maybe they had their meeting and Sam is just not confessing to it.”
“No, Elle, I disagree. If they’d had the meeting, they’d probably be back together right now.” Mr. Flanders turns to Jenkins. “You did say the breakup was one-sided, correct?”
“According to Sam,” Jenkins says.
“And so what about these emails, if Sam claims he knows nothing about them, then who read and deleted them?” Mrs. Flanders asks.
“Somebody could have hacked into Sam’s email,” Kennedy says. One theory we have is if somebody else did read the emails and deleted them, this person wanted Luc to think that Sam had read them and just hadn’t bothered to respond.” Looking from one parent to the other, she asks, “Is there anyone you can think of. A close friend or former friend who could have done something like this?”
Mr. and Mrs. Flanders glance at one another. He shrugs and she shakes her head. “No. Not really,” they both say.
“Can we at least read them, these emails?” Mrs. Flanders finally asks Jenkins.
“Do you really want to read your son’s love letters, Elle?” Mr. Flanders asks his wife.
Mrs. Flanders peers at Jenkins fixedly as though he might be able to answer the question. “I don’t know,” she says finally.
After a short silence, Kennedy says to her, “I wanted to ask about something else, something having to do with the Frost farm.”
“Oh?”
Kennedy grabs her laptop and pulls up the photograph she showed Jenkins. “We have a lead on these guys. They’re a pair of twins around forty-one years old. Their names are Howard and Mark Newcombe. They live in Bethel. They were once competitive bodybuilders. Do those names or descriptions ring a bell?”
“Are you suggesting they have a personal connection to Robert Frost?” Mr. Flanders asks.
“Perhaps, but not necessarily,” Jenkins says.
Mrs. Flanders stares at the photo, blinking rapidly. “Well, I don’t recognize them,” she says, “however, as I think back, I believe there was a guy, a gardener who worked for Frost back in the very early sixties, maybe a year or two before Frost died. I think I heard from somebody in Carleton that this guy had twin sons late in the sixties, maybe 1970.”
“They were born in ’71,” Kennedy says.
Mrs. Flanders politely nudges the laptop away. “I remember my mother saying that Frost had a major altercation with this . . . gardener, who I guess would have been their father.”
Jenkins interjects, “Do a lot of people know about your family’s¬¬—and Luc’s—connection to the poet?”
“People in Carleton do.”
Mr. Flanders says, “So let’s just say these guys are the ones involved in the break-in. Are you now suggesting they also might be the ones who could have . . . waylaid Luc?”
“That’s something we obviously need to look into,” Jenkins says. “When we locate them.”
February 14; Donner’s Field, Weybridge, Vermont; 22 degrees, high clouds and windy
It’s probably been at least two days, maybe more than two days. Everything has slowed, something is not right. Luc has been able to slake his thirst by sucking on the snowy halo all around him, so he has plenty of water if nothing to eat. But he’s not hungry and feels the way he feels in the morning when he wakes up and his stomach is dead, before intense hunger sets in. Or when he’s waiting to hear fr
om Sam, the phone call that is supposed to come in at 10 p.m. but is, for some reason, delayed for an interminable fifteen minutes. He retreats into his room to wait—often to the dismay of Tate and McKinnon. Anxiety builds brick by brick until its weight is unbearable and smothering. Sometimes he’ll even call Sam instead just to short-circuit his worry that something has happened, something gone irrevocably wrong, like Sam hooking up with somebody else, and sometimes Sam doesn’t answer and the dread grows even worse, truly frightening, so all-consuming in the real estate of Luc’s brain, that he begins to desperately think of ways of breaking things off with Sam—which, of course will be painful and self-destructive and yet will prove to him that he can at last take control of his passion. Sometimes he’ll look at Taft and McKinnon, whose dalliances with women seem so enviably blithe and carefree. They never pine over anyone.
Here he is, huddled in this cavern of frozen straw, doing nothing but daydreaming. Although he feels no chill or shiver, he wonders if he might be febrile, like Ivan Karamazov. He feels the all-too-familiar ringing in his head, the relentless sonority of an injury that never seems to completely heal, as if too many complicated parts have been deranged and scattered like shrapnel. The day seems to go on endlessly.
He remembers the day back in early September, right before he returned to school, when he was studying Middle Eastern politics in Sam’s office, after having made love to him upstairs. Sam was somewhere outside, chainsawing a fallen tree, the sounds of metal chewing into green wood ferocious and guttural. And episodic. And in the crashing silence between cuts, Luc ventured out into the hallway and peered around the downstairs, the old pine floors, the dusty bookcases with ceramic vases on top of them, the paintings of North Sea landscapes that were made by Sam’s best friend who lives just outside of Newcastle, just south of the border of Scotland. The house and its furnishings struck Luc that Sam had a whole life from the past that he, Luc, was not part of, that there was still a great swath of Sam’s life, still separate, and it made him sad. Scared. Once again he glanced out the window at the long late-afternoon light in the pasture behind the house, and the light lacerating his eyes and making him feel once again strange, as though one of his fits might come on.
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