Nelson Demille

by Spencerville(Lit)

  She looked around at the room that she'd decorated with country antiques and family heirlooms. Cliff had been both proud and sarcastic regarding her taste. She came from a far better family than he did, and at first she'd tried to minimize the dissimilarities in their backgrounds. But he never let her forget their social differences, pointing out that her family was all brains and good manners and no money, and his family had money even if they were a little rough around the edges. And brainless, Annie thought.

  Cliff liked to show off the furnishings, show off his stuffed and mounted animals in the basement, his shooting trophies, his press clippings, his guns, his trophy house, and his trophy wife. Look but don't touch. Admire me and my trophies. Cliff Baxter was the classic collector, Annie thought, an anal compulsive personality who couldn't differentiate between a wife and a mounted deer head.

  Annie recalled with amazement how proud she'd once been of her husband and her house, and how much hope and optimism she'd had as a young bride, building a life and a marriage. Cliff Baxter had been an attentive and courtly fiancé, especially in the months preceding their marriage. If Annie had any second thoughts about the engagement— which, in fact, she had—Cliff had given her no reason to break it off. But early in her marriage, she'd noticed that her husband was just going through the motions of marriage, keying off her in what he did and said. One day she realized with a sinking feeling that Cliff Baxter was not a charming rogue who was eager to be domesticated by a good woman, but was in fact a borderline sociopath. Soon, however, he lost interest in his halfhearted attempt to become normal. The only thing that kept him in line, kept him from going completely over the edge, she knew, was his official capacity as guardian of law and order. Spencerville had made the bad boy the hall monitor, and it worked for Spencerville and for the bad boy, but Annie lived in fear of what might happen if Cliff became a private citizen, without the prestige and accountability of office. She swore that the day he retired or was asked to step down, she'd run.

  She thought of his gun collection: rifles, shotguns, pistols. Each and every weapon was locked in a rack the way a good cop would do. Most cops, however^ probably all cops, gave their wife a key just in case there was an intruder. Cliff Baxter, though, did not give his wife a key. She knew how he thought: Cliff feared his wife would shoot him at four A.M. one morning and claim she mistook him for an intruder. There were nights when she stared at the locked weapons and wondered if she would actually put a pistol to her head or his head and pull the trigger. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the answer was no; but there had been moments . . .

  She tilted her head back in the chair and felt the tears roll down her eyes. The phone rang, but she didn't answer it.

  She gathered the dinner scraps in a piece of newspaper and took them out to the kennel. She opened the wire gate and threw the scraps inside. Three of the four dogs—the German shepherd, the golden retriever, and the Labrador—attacked the food. The fourth dog, a small gray mongrel, ran to Annie. She let the dog run out of the kennel and closed the gate.

  Annie walked back to the house, the gray mongrel following her.

  In the kitchen, she fed the dog raw hamburger, then poured herself a glass of lemonade, then went out to the big wraparound porch and sat in the swing seat, her legs tucked under her, the gray mongrel beside her. It was cooling off, and a soft breeze stirred the old trees on the street. The air smelled like rain. She felt better in the fresh air.

  Surely, she thought, there was a way out, a way that didn't pass through the town cemetery. Now that her daughter was about to start college, Annie realized that she couldn't put off making a decision any longer. If she ran, she thought, he'd probably grab her before she got out of town, and if she did manage to slip away, he'd follow. If she went to a lawyer in Spencer County, he'd know about it before she even got home. Cliff Baxter wasn't particularly liked or respected, but he was feared, and she could relate to that.

  The patrol car passed again and Kevin Ward waved to her. She ignored him, and the dog barked at the police car.

  Still, she thought, this was America, it was the twentieth century, and there were laws and protection. But instinctively, she knew that was irrelevant in her situation. She had to run, to leave her home, her community, and her family, and that made her angry. She would have preferred a solution more in keeping with her own standards of behavior, not his. She would like to tell him she wanted a divorce, and that she was moving in with her sister, and that they should contact lawyers. But Police Chief Baxter wasn't about to give up one of his trophies, wasn't about to be made a fool of in his town. He knew, without a word being said, that she wanted out, but he also knew, or thought he knew, that he had her safely under lock and key. He put her in a pumpkin shell. It was best to let him keep thinking that.

  This summer night, sitting on the porch swing made her think of summer nights long ago when she was very happy and deeply in love with another man. There was a letter in her pocket and she pulled it out. By the light from the window behind her, she read the envelope again. She had addressed it to Keith Landry at his home address in Washington, and it had apparently been forwarded to someplace else where someone had put it in another envelope and mailed it back to her with a slip of paper that read: Unable to forward.

  Keith had once written to tier saying that if she ever received such a message, she should not try to write to him again. She would be contacted by someone in his office with a new address.

  Annie Baxter was a simple country girl, but not that simple. She knew what he was telling her: If a letter was ever returned to her, he was dead, and someone in Washington would call or write to her regarding the circumstances.

  It had been two days since the letter had been returned to her sister's address in the next county, where Keith sent all his letters to Annie.

  Since then, Annie Baxter had feared answering her phone and feared seeing her sister's car pull up again with another letter, an official letter from Washington with a line or two beginning with, We regret to inform you . . .

  But on second thought, why would they even bother with that? What was she to Keith Landry? A long-ago girlfriend, a sometimes pen pal. She hadn't seen him in over twenty years and had no expectation that she'd ever see him again.

  But perhaps he'd instructed his people, whoever they were, to tell her if he died. Probably he wanted to be buried here with the generations of his family. He might, at this moment, she suddenly realized, be lying in Gibbs Funeral Home. She tried to convince herself it didn't matter that much; she was sad, but really how did it affect her? An old lover died, you heard the news, you became nostalgic and dwelled on your own mortality, you thought of younger days, you said a prayer, and you went on with your life. Maybe you went to the funeral service if it was convenient. It struck her then that if Keith Landry was dead, and if he was going to be buried in Spencerville, she could not possibly go to the service, nor, she thought, could she expect to sneak off to his grave someday without being seen by her constant police chaperons.

  She petted the dog beside her. This was her dog—the other three were Cliff's. The dog jumped on her lap and snuggled against her as Annie scratched behind its ears. She said, He's not dead, Denise. I know he's not dead.

  Annie Baxter put her head down on the arm of the swing seat and rocked gently. Heat lightning flashed in the western sky and thunder rolled across the open cornfields, into the town, just ahead of the hard rain. She found herself crying again and kept thinking, We promised to meet again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Keith Landry walked through the quiet farmhouse. Distant relatives had looked after the place, and it wasn't in bad shape considering it had been empty for five years.

  Keith had called ahead to announce his arrival and had spoken to a woman on a nearby farm that he called Aunt Betty, though she wasn't actually his aunt, but was his mother's second cousin, or something like that. He'd just wanted her to know in case she saw a light in the house, or a strange car, and so fort
h. Keith had insisted that neither she nor any other ladies go through any bother, but of course that had been like a call to arms—or brooms and mops—and the place was spotless and smelled of pine disinfectant.

  Bachelors, Keith reflected, got a lot of breaks from the local womenfolk, who took inordinate pity on men without wives. The goal of these good women in caring for bachelors, Keith suspected, was to demonstrate the advantage of having a wife and helpmate. Unfortunately, the free cleaning, cooking, apple pies, and jams often perpetuated what they sought to cure.

  Keith went from room to room, finding everything pretty much as he remembered when he'd seen it last about six years before. He had a sense of the familiar, but, at the same time, the objects seemed surreal, as if he were having a dream about his childhood.

  His parents had left behind most of their possessions, perhaps in anticipation of not liking Florida, or perhaps because the furniture, rugs, lamps, wall decorations, and such were as much a part of the house as the oak beams.

  Some of the things in the house were nearly two centuries old, Keith knew, having been brought to America from England and Germany, where both sides of his family originated. Aside from a few legitimate antiques and some heirlooms, a good deal of the stuff was just old, and Keith reflected on the frugality, the hardscrabble existence, of a farm family over the centuries. He contrasted this with his friends and colleagues in Washington who contributed heavily to the gross national product. Their salaries, like his, were paid from the public coffers, and Keith, who had never successfully accepted the fact that you don't have to produce anything tangible to get paid, often wondered if too many people in Washington were eating too much of the farmers' corn. But he had dwelled on that many times, and if any of his colleagues thought about it at all, they'd kept it to themselves.

  Keith Landry had felt good when he was a soldier, an understandable and honorable profession in Spencer County, but later, when he'd become involved in intelligence work, he began to question his occupation. He often disagreed with national policy, and recently, when he'd been elevated to a position of helping to formulate that policy, he realized that the government worked for itself and perpetuated itself. But he'd known that secret long before he was invited into the inner sanctum of the White House as a staff member of the National Security Council.

  Keith stood at the window in the second-floor master bedroom and looked out into the night. A wind had come up and clouds were sailing quickly across the starlit sky. A nearly full moon had risen, casting a blue light on the ripening cornfields. Keith remembered these fields long ago when a drought had been followed by constant rain, and the wheat—they had planted mostly wheat in those days— wasn't ready for harvesting until late July. A bright summer moon had coincided with a dry spell, with a forecast for more rain, and the farmers and their families had harvested until the moon set, about three A.M. The following day was a Sunday, and half the kids were absent from Sunday school, and the ones who showed up slept at their desks. Keith still recalled this shared experience, this communal effort to pull sustenance out of the land, and he felt sorry for urban and suburban kids growing up without a clue as to the relationship between wheatfields and hamburger buns, between corn and cornflakes.

  In fact, Keith thought, the further the nation traveled from its agrarian and small-town roots, the less it understood the cycles of nature, the relationships between the land and the people, the law of cause and effect, and ultimately, he reflected, the less we understood our essential selves.

  Keith Landry realized the inconsistencies and incongruities of his thinking arid his life. He had rejected the idea of becoming a farmer but had not rejected the ideal of farm life; he thrived on the excitement of Washington and foreign cities but was nostalgic for this rural county that had always bored him; he had become disenchanted with his job but was angry about being let go.

  He thought he had better resolve these discrepancies, these big gaps between his thoughts and deeds, or he'd become emblematic of the lunatic place he'd just left.

  The clouds obscured the moon and stars now, and he was struck by how totally dark and still the countryside was. He could barely see the old ghost of the kitchen garden twenty feet from the house, and beyond that the landscape was black except for the lights of the Muller farmhouse half a mile away.

  He turned from the window, went downstairs, and carried his bags up to the second floor. He entered the room he had shared with his brother and threw his luggage on the bed.

  The room had oak furniture, pine floors, and white plaster walls. A hooked rug, older than he was, lay on the floorboards. It was any farm boy's room from the last century until recent years when local people had started buying discount store junk.

  Before he had left Washington, Keith had filled the Saab with the things he needed and wanted, which turned out to be not so many things after all. There were a few more boxes of odds and ends, mostly sporting gear, coming by UPS. He had given his furniture in his Georgetown apartment to a local church. He felt basically unencumbered by possessions.

  The house had been built before closets were common, and in the room were two wardrobe cabinets, one his, one his brother's. He opened the one that had been Paul's and unpacked first his military gear, his uniforms, boots, a box of medals and citations, and finally his officer's sword. Then he unpacked some of the tools of his more recent trade: a bulletproof vest, an M-16 rifle, an attaché case with all sorts of nutty spy craft gizmos built in, and finally his Glock 9mm pistol and holster.

  It felt good, he thought, putting this stuff away for the last time, a literal laying down of arms and armor.

  He looked into the wardrobe cabinet and contemplated what, if any, significance there was in this moment.

  In college, he'd been taken with the story of Cincinnatus, the Roman soldier, statesman, and farmer in the days before Rome became an Imperial power. This man, having saved the fledgling city from a hostile Army, accepted power only long enough to restore order, then returned to his farm. In Washington, Keith had often passed a building on Massachusetts Avenue, the stately Anderson Mansion, which housed the Society of the Cincinnati, and he imagined that its members had the same sort of experience as its Roman namesake, Cincinnatus. This, he thought, was the ideal, Roman or American, this was the essence of an agrarian republic: The call to arms came, the citizen militia were formed, the enemy was met and defeated, and everyone went home.

  But that was not what happened in America after 1945, and for the last half century, war had become a way of life. This was the Washington he'd recently left: a city trying to cope with, and minimize, the effects of victory.

  Keith closed the door of the cabinet and said, It's finished. He opened the other wardrobe and unpacked the two handmade Italian suits he'd decided to hold on to. He hung up his tuxedo and smiled at the incongruity of the thing in this setting, then hung a few items of casual clothing, making a mental note to stop at Kmart for jeans and plaid shirts.

  To continue the Roman theme, he reflected, like Caesar, he'd burned his bridges behind him, but he wasn't certain that the future included this farm. It depended on who Keith Landry had become.

  In his mind, he still thought of himself as a farm boy, despite college, travel, custom-made suits, proficiency in foreign languages, and proficiency with exotic weapons and exotic women. Whether he was in Paris, London, Moscow, or Baghdad, he still imagined there was a residue of hayseed in his hair. Probably, however, this was not true; perhaps what he had become was who he was. And if that was true, he was in the wrong place. But he'd give Spencerville some time, and if he started enjoying trout fishing and church socials, the VFW Hall and small talk at the hardware store, then he'd stick around. If not . . . well, he could never go back to Washington. He'd spent over half his professional life on the road, and maybe that's where he belonged: everywhere and nowhere.

  Keith noticed that the bed was made with fresh linen and a quilt blanket, compliments of Aunt Betty, and he realized that she
remembered this was his room, and she hadn't upgraded him to the master bedroom. This had been his father's room as a boy, and his father's before him, so Aunt Betty probably figured he should sleep there until he grew up. He smiled.

  Keith walked downstairs into the big country kitchen. The round table could seat ten: family, farmhands, and any kid who stopped by for a meal. Keith opened the refrigerator and saw it had been stocked with basic necessities, except beer. Many of the rural people around here were teetotalers, and the county, while not dry, wasn't awash in alcohol either. Keith, on his rare visits, had found this quaint, but as a resident, it might be a problem. Then again, this might be the least of his problems.

  He went into the living room, removed a bottle of Scotch from one of his boxes, returned to the kitchen, and made himself a Scotch and water in a blue plastic glass that made the drink look green.

  He sat at the big round table, in his chair, and looked around at the empty places. Aside from his mother and father and Paul and Barbara, there had been Uncle Ned, his father's younger brother, who used to sit opposite Keith, and Keith could still see his uncle at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, eating quietly, tired after a long day of farm work. Ned was a farmer through and through, a serious but not humorless man, a son of the soil who wanted only to marry, raise children, raise crops, fix broken things, and do a little fishing on Sunday, usually with his nephews, and someday with his yet-to-be-born sons.

  Keith was about ten when Uncle Ned was drafted into the Army, and he remembered his uncle coming home one day in his uniform. A few weeks later, Ned left for the Korean War and never returned. They'd sent his things home, and they were stored in the attic. Keith had gone through the trunk when he was a boy and had even put on the green dress uniform once.