Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  She is home when he arrives, lackadaisically stirring a pot of black bean soup with chicken sausage that Jenkins made two days before and that they’ve been dining off of the entire week, neither being a big meal planner. Knowing he’d gone to question Luc Flanders’s roommates, she asks, “How did it go?”

  Before he responds, Jenkins grabs a decanter full of Bourbon and, in a gleaming crystal tumbler, pours himself a finger full. “Both seem disgruntled.”

  By contrast to bright-haired McKinnon, Connie is one of those lovely auburn-haired types whose skin freckles (to him appealingly, although she claims to hate it) whenever she spends any time in the sun. She laughs flatly and says, “Welcome to my world. Medical students: frazzled, drama-ridden and always pissed off. With what they put themselves through, it amazes me that they can even focus.”

  “So what do you think it is . . . with all of them?”

  “Well, many of them are on Adderall, thinking that will give them an advantage. Allow them to work with less sleep, to focus better. But the drug makes them really irritable.”

  Connie starts ladling the thick, steaming soup into two deep white bowls. She has set the table in the dining room: two round rattan place mats, pale blue plates and mustard-colored cloth napkins. She sets the bowls down carefully and hands Jenkins a soup spoon. They both sit.

  As they begin the meal, Connie says, “I told you I’m going to Athens next week.”

  “Athens?”

  “Ohio Athens. For a conference.”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess you did tell me a while ago,” he says just as he notices a delicate gold chain on her neck that he’s never seen before. He is fairly certain he never gave it to her.

  She takes a spoonful of the thick soup and nods to say that it’s good. Eyes on her bowl, she says, “I would say ‘come with me’ but you sound pretty tied up right now.”

  “I am, pretty much,” he says, sensing that her invitation is halfhearted. “How long will you be gone?”

  “Three days,” she says breezily.

  No, she definitely doesn’t want my company, he perceives.

  Connie stops eating her soup and looks at him squarely. “So this kid who’s missing? You said he took off once before?”

  “Yeah, when he was fifteen.”

  “How long has he been gone this time?”

  “Eight days.”

  He can sense Connie is pondering something and he waits. At last she says, “There is something interesting that came up at the lab today. Related to a report on a science website. I watched it on my laptop. I’d like you to see it.”

  “Would it help this investigation?”

  “It very well might. I’ll let you determine that.”

  She gets up from the table, disappears for a moment and returns with her silver laptop, which she opens and brings over to Jenkins. She awakens the screen and he is staring at a red play arrow on a YouTube video. Connie clicks on the arrow.

  The story that unfolds is about a Swedish man who’d entered a mysterious state of human hibernation after driving off the road and down into a ravine in the dead of winter. “Most people would have frozen to death overnight,” the commentator points out. “However, this man was kept alive by two lucky factors: When his car plunged off the road, the impact of the collision knocked him unconscious. His breathing slowed and so did his heart, and he entered what scientists at the University of Stockholm describe as a twilight state requiring very small amounts of oxygen. And very little water. The man survived for an entire month like this until he was found. He completely recovered. He had no bodily damage. No frostbite. He wasn’t even dehydrated.”

  Bewildered, Jenkins turns to Connie. “Is this really legit?”

  “The YouTube video reported other cases as well. An Austrian woman who was skiing off-piste crashed into a frozen pond and went under the ice for well over a half-hour and survived without any brain damage. Then there was a Japanese guy who went hiking in December and slid down a steep slope. He went into the same state of hibernation and lived for six weeks in a snowbound welter and wasn’t found until January.”

  “And your colleagues. What do they say?”

  “We’re looking into it. It may be relevant to something we’re doing. But I thought it might be relevant to you.”

  February 19; Norwich, Vermont; 25 degrees, snow squalls

  Eleanor Flanders is back to reading the poems of Frost, the poems of her childhood; they seem to settle her, to soothe her more than Walcott. Perched by the bay window in her kitchen with the first edition Collected Poems she inherited from her mother, she looks out at their red, dilapidated barn that long ago began to look sculptural, in the beauty of its decay. A frozen spume of snow clings lightly to the wooden flanks.

  Essence of winter sleep is on the night.

  The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

  I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight.

  And then later in the poem, the lines of course, strike her

  One can see what will trouble

  This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

  Because, of course, with Luc missing, she is sleeping fitfully, waking up to the knotted nightmare of where he might be, whether he’s alive or dead and, wanting to stay in bed, feeling forced to begin another endless day that needs to be gotten through. Jeanine keeps calling, wanting to take off from work and just come up and devote herself to helping her mother get through it all. But Eleanor keeps refusing, dreading the disruption of her daughter’s life—for her daughter’s sake.

  Eleanor is on autopilot. She now spreads chamomile buds on the fine mesh of one of her herb-drying racks and sets the rack out in the thermally warm greenhouse. Back in the kitchen, she begins a preparation of hawthorn, a dark watery extrusion with which she will make an alcohol tincture to help regulate erratic heartbeats. She adds freeze-dried calendula to a glycerin gel for burns and rashes. And then begins her most popular item: arnica salve for tired and aching muscles, something that she had always pressed on Luc, who used it reluctantly. If she has time later, she’ll begin another batch of atropine for her own asthma, which has been acting up under the stress of waiting for word.

  On one hand, she yearns for this terrible period to end with some definitive news of him; and on the other, she is afraid to hear the worst and is tempted to prolong her ignorance, to cling to the shred of hope that somehow he will just walk in the door, as if returning from some nonsensical adventure, his pale eyes full of mirth and affection. She has imagined this sudden euphoric appearance again and again, prayed for it in her own Unitarian way. She was recently encouraged by the story of a mother in Alaska who was mistakenly told her son had died in a car accident, only to have him show up at her door six weeks later. But Eleanor’s hope has always shrunk to a small aperture of light that only for a moment plumbs the dreaded darkness of his being found, his death confirmed, and the wretched hopelessness with which it will surround her. She feels the chimerical desire to switch with him, to bring death upon her as long as her death will sustain his life. And then the guilt over unwittingly discouraging him from avowing his lifestyle, for somehow giving the impression that she’d have difficulty accepting a man as her son’s lover. It occurs to her that any sexual or identity struggle would have been a lot less of a conflict had he gone to a different school, maybe an “art college” like Rhode Island School of Design, where a substantial percentage of the student population identifies as bisexual or gay. But instead, Luc got caught up in the patriarchy of Carleton athletics; nearly all of his close friends are nerdy jocks like McKinnon and Taft. So had Luc needlessly imprisoned himself with his secrecy? Had he felt shame? Eleanor has done her own digging, contacting the head of a New England chapter for sexual equality on college campuses and was told that Luc’s making a secret of his sexuality was still quite common.

  Jenkins told Eleanor that when he que
stioned the roommates, he could see how uncomfortable they were when the subject of Luc’s affair came up, that they hardly acknowledged it, much less were willing to talk about it. She could well imagine Luc hiding his comings and goings from them, so that his not showing up on any given night (such as the one on which he disappeared) was not in any way unusual and certainly not questioned. She has the feeling that early last autumn he was away many evenings, trekking back and forth between the college and South Woodstock, maybe driving over the Carleton Gap in one of those freak October snowstorms.

  Eleanor wonders if Luc even mentioned his head injury to Sam. She wonders what Sam thinks might have happened to Luc. And then she realizes what she really desires is to know that Sam is genuinely tormented at Luc’s vanishing, to get her own piece of mind that Sam Solomon has had nothing to do with her son’s disappearance

  Imagining the start of any conversation with Sam Solomon, her heart pounds and she can feel the pulse in her neck. Abstractedly, she looks over the kitchen, over the vessels and crocks of her naturopathic and homeopathic preparations, jars full of herbs and oils with neat labels—now throbbing before her eyes like foreign bodies, and the appliances she’s operated for years glinting strangely, looking as alien as moon rock. Eleanor wonders if there is anything she could tell Sam about Luc that he doesn’t yet know—like how Luc had wound his way to Connecticut the last time he took off. And maybe if she told Sam how it all happened, he might remember something Luc had said that could indicate where he’d gone this time. But then she seesaws back into: Luc didn’t go anywhere. Sam is hiding something. Whenever this thought crosses her mind, she grows frantic.

  Then again, if Luc ended that eight-month relationship around Christmas, if Luc withdrew to the point that Sam was barred from his day-to-day, that must’ve been pretty unbearable. And all this business of emails sent and retrieved and (supposedly) deleted, she tends to distrust it. Then again, if as Jenkins says, they are unalloyed love letters, maybe she doesn’t want to see them, just like she wouldn’t want to know the intimate details of her children’s sex life. Luc not responding to Sam’s messages but for that one phone call is certainly plausible. After all, he rarely ever answers her messages.

  She now realizes that Luc failed this man, and what her son ultimately withheld from him is similar to what he has withheld from her. And she certainly doesn’t want to hear confirmation of this. It strikes her that when children Luc’s age fall in love, as much as they might seem caught up in the object of their desire, in the end when things settle down, they probably don’t behave much differently toward their lovers than they do toward their parents.

  February 19; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Carleton, Vermont; freezing rain, 10–20 degrees

  A New Hampshire state policeman spots two men matching the description of the bodybuilder twins entering a residential warehouse building on the wharf in Portsmouth. They have bleach-blond dreadlocks flimsily concealed by loosely knit Rastafarian caps. They dress like lumbersexuals and they walk like apes. Jenkins contacts the building landlord, who verifies that Mark and Howard Newcombe leased the building on February 13, three days after the vandalism occurred. He asks the Statie to find their apartment, ID them and detain the brothers until he arrives.

  Halfway along the 207 miles between Carleton, Vermont, and the coastal New Hampshire city, Jenkins hears from the Statie who showed up at the loft with backup. He is now calling from the street and tells Jenkins they’ve just finished searching the apartment. “No hostages,” the officer says. “And also no furniture. Just two sleeping bags, two inflatable mattresses and a black nylon duffle with clothes, a few books and a zip-lock full of large hypodermic needles.”

  “Large hypos, you say?” Jenkins says.

  “Definitely large,” the Statie says.

  “Any vials of anything?”

  “Nope, just the needles.”

  “What are the books?”

  “Three books of poetry.”

  Jenkins is startled. “Come again?”

  “Three books of poetry,” the Statie repeats.

  “You get the names of the poets by any chance?” Jenkins asks.

  “I wrote them down. Let me find them.” Jenkins hears some rustling. “We have books by Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell.”

  “Well, blow me down,” Jenkins mutters.

  Inside the posh, upscale warehouse apartment building, the detective finds the twins sitting on the floor on opposite sides of an empty open plan great room whose old wooden floors look newly bleached and pickled. They look at him inquisitively, their eyes a pale, cruel blue framed by voluminous, medusa-like blond dreadlocks. Deeply bronzed by what looks like uneven spray tans, they are dressed identically in military pants and thick, fitted flannel shirts. Two tightly rolled sleeping bags are lined up next to the black nylon overnight bag.

  Scrutinizing them, Jenkins says, “You guys are traveling light for having just rented an apartment.”

  “That’s what we do,” says one.

  The Statie who made the arrest now enters the room. He’s young and pasty and has a sizable gut. “Inflatable mattresses in the closet,” he informs Jenkins.

  “So I guess you guys were planning on staying for a spell,” Jenkins says.

  “We like Portsmouth,” says one of the twins, who looks a bit wall-eyed.

  “Really?” Jenkins says. “You think Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a step up from Bethel, Vermont?”

  “You ever been to Bethel?” the twin asks.

  “I have, indeed. I helped shut down a meth lab there. You got some real sketch hanging out in your town there. Never saw so many missing teeth in my life. Smile for me,” Jenkins says and both of them show perfect rows of white teeth. “Well, I can see meth is not your drug of choice. So what’s with the hypodermics?”

  “No crime to carry them around,” blurts out the other twin, whose gaze is steady and sharp.

  “You’re Howard, right?” Jenkins asks.

  “Yeah,” the man says.

  “And you’re Mark,” Jenkins says to his slightly wall-eyed twin brother.

  “That’s right.”

  Jenkins turns to the Statie. “Books still in the bag?”

  “No.” He lumbers over to a cardboard box turned upside down to make a wobbly surface upon which the three slim paperback volumes are resting. When the Statie hands them to Jenkins, he glances at them and then says, “Marianne Moore, Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound. You guys certainly have highbrow taste in poetry.” Silence follows his remark. “Where did these come from?”

  Howard says, “We don’t have to explain anything to you.”

  “One way or another you’ll have to,” Jenkins tells them. “We have a DNA sample from a crime scene that matches both of you.”

  “Well then, I think we’re going to have to call our lawyer.”

  “You can certainly call your lawyer. Do you want to use my phone?” Jenkins offers his with a gesture of sincerity.

  The twins don’t respond to this but rather stare at him vapidly.

  Turning to the New Hampshire Statie, Jenkins says, “I’d rather not leave these guys together on the ride back. We’ll also need to get forensics to go over their car. Ever been to Carleton, Vermont, before?”

  The Statie shakes his head.

  “Quaint town. I think you might like it. Can I get you or another officer to drive one of these guys back?”

  “You’ll have to talk to my lieutenant about that.”

  February 20; Carleton, Vermont; 20 degrees, black ice

  Sitting in an observation suite with a two-way mirror, Kennedy looks at the bodybuilder twins seated at an examining table. They are facing Jenkins, who is questioning them with an unnerving calm. “So you have a website,” he is saying to the twins, his voice piping into Kennedy’s headset. “When was the last time you updated it?”


  The brothers look at each other. And then the one on the right, the wall-eyed one, says in a slower cadence of speech, “Maybe a year ago.” Through a microphone Kennedy says, “Just want to make sure: This one is Mark?” Jenkins nods slightly and then asks the twins, “And what was the occasion for the update?”

  “A new workout program,” they both say in unison. And then Howard says, “One of the kids at V-tech saw us doing it at the gym and asked about it.”

  “So we decided to post it,” Mark says.

  Kennedy says to Jenkins, “Notice how big their heads look? Especially their foreheads? That’s human growth hormone. That’s what happens when you take too much of it.”

  “Are you guys still working out regularly?” Jenkins asks.

  Both brothers simultaneously flex through their loose flannel shirts. By the way the fabric drapes on them, Kennedy can see the peaks of their biceps and a hint of cleanly defined pectorals. “Still pretty buff,” she murmurs. “Nicky, I’d just cut right to the cheddar and ask if they’re still ‘on the juice.’” Jenkins blinks in auditory pain and adjusts his earpiece as though lowering the volume, and then rolls his eyes as if to say, You don’t think I’m going to ask this? Ignoring him, Kennedy says, “And then tell them we know how loaded they are. Why do they need . . . to illegally supplement their income.”

  They hear Jenkins say, “Regarding the paraphernalia you guys had in your bags. Are you on the juice?”

  Both men stiffen simultaneously and Mark Newcombe says, “No.”

  Kennedy says to Jenkins, “Press them.”

  And Jenkins, poker-faced, says, “Just tell me what you’re on, all right, and save me the time of having your blood drawn.”

  “Okay, we’re on test,” Howard says.

  Jenkins looks confuses and Helen clarifies, “Testosterone. Ask them if they’re on a stack.”

  “Anything else. On a stack?” Jenkins adds.

  Both twins look startled. “D-ball,” Mark says.

  Kennedy says, “D-ball is injectable, usually smuggled in from Mexico. D-ball and testosterone are often taken together. A combination of these drugs is known to increase aggressive behavior dramatically.”