by Paul Monette
He turned off at the one-lane track that led to his peak-roofed cabin. He parked on a bed of wet brown needles. A sign on a stake beside his porch read: Old Mill Stream. It took its name from the swollen water that coursed through the black-grass meadow behind the house. The mill was nowhere in evidence.
He kicked the car door shut behind him, registering a blow that seemed to go straight to the Dodge’s heart. He got a lot of satisfaction out of the fact that the car was coming apart before it had gone two hundred miles. He had worked at banging the newness out, whenever he had the chance. Besides, he hated to drive at the best of times. He only got in a car when he’d exhausted every public means of transport. Thus, it usually required both Sid and Edna riding shotgun—one with a map, the other calling out landmarks—to get him from A to B.
He let himself in and drew the drapes against the desolate woodland view. He had nothing at all to look forward to. Dinner was served in the lodge from seven to nine, but he couldn’t get too excited over that, since the dozen other guests had all become fast friends before he came. They traded snapshots and recipes with a vengeance, till he felt like David Niven in Separate Tables. Even now, they were crossing back and forth along the ridge, having drinks in one another’s cutely nicknamed cabins.
All Greg had was a bottle of rye and his tooth glass. He’d forgotten to stop for ice. His head still swirled with jet lag, four days after he left L.A. His two-suiter had disappeared between Bermuda and New York, so he only had what little was packed in his carry-on bag. Luckily, he’d been able to buy some farmer clothes at the general store in Hamilton Falls—stiff new overalls, red-checked shirt. He supposed he looked like the worst sort of weekend hayseed.
He poured his Four Roses neat, two fingers’ worth, and sat on the end of the bed. At least he’d got this far without an attack of the horrors. Considering that he teetered close to blackout standing in line for a movie, he was some kind of study in courage. It happened the trip just fell in his lap, the very day he decided the answer lay at Carbon Mountain. Normally, that would not have been enough to get him to fly five thousand miles, but he’d had a sort of breakthrough. He wasn’t sent into a panic to think he wouldn’t make it back to the Cherokee Nile before dark.
He crouched to the fireplace. Every day the inn supplied him with packaged sawdust logs. He struck a match against the brick and lit the balled-up paper down among the ashes. He had a modest pile of real wood stacked on his porch, which he’d foraged himself on the banks of the stream. It was too wet to burn, but he figured to bring in a couple of logs and prop them on the hearth to dry. Later on, when he lay in bed reading, he’d be able to hear a truer crackle and smell the musk of a deeper smoke.
What a lot of trouble it was to be rural and safe from rain.
Still, once he was safe inside, he was fine. He liked the up-country rough of the dark pine paneling. The old New England furniture sat by the fire like a clutch of crones. The spring wind whistled beneath the eaves, as if it would freeze the very blood of a man out walking. As long as he had a room to himself, he was high and dry and cut off from all the threats of wildness. He’d discovered it didn’t have to be the specific room he’d retreated to, when he gave up the hustle two years ago. The southwest quarter of the eleventh floor at Cherokee and Franklin wasn’t magic after all. Any old room would do in a pinch.
His grasp of the whole psychology was very rudimentary. It was as if, in turning thirty, he’d gotten-too old to work the street, and opted instead for a desk job. Like a hooker, perhaps, or a Bible salesman. He wasn’t afraid of open spaces. The true agoraphobe, as he understood it, was always strangling for a breath of air, no matter how sweet the scenery. In his case, the realization had come on him gradually that he simply felt like staying home. It got so he had to work up the courage just to go to the market.
So he dealt wherever possible with stores that delivered, preferably round the clock. He cajoled Sid and Edna to buy him things he was running out of—razor blades and dental floss, dreck like that. His main foray into the world outside came down to Friday morning, when he wheeled the grocery cart to the post office over on Highland.
And now, without any warning, he was suddenly transcontinental again. He had an international layover to his credit, as well as a day and a half on a coral-island shelf. Pretty posh, considering where he’d come from. He wondered now if he hadn’t snapped out of it altruistically, for the sake of Harry Dawes. He’d heard of amnesiacs doing that—coming out of it just in time to save their dearest friend, when a speeding car required diverting. He felt as if he’d emerged from a fog, and the sky above was blinding clear. Was it possible? Could craziness break like a fever?
Maybe so, as Edna would say, twice in a row for good measure, maybe so.
The heat from the fire had flushed his face and made him drowsy. He stretched on his side along the hearth and pillowed his head in the crook of his arm. If he was cured, he thought, then he had the last laugh on a string of shrinks. Those winterized, rational types he’d gone to when he was young and scared, in college and just after. Three or four sessions apiece, and he’d had enough.
More than once in the last two years, he thought he’d have to go back. He didn’t see how he’d ever come out the other end alone. But he put it off and put it off, in the hope that the thing would pass.
And now it had. What’s more, he knew deep down it was gone for good. It didn’t make him cocky, though. He had the good sense to take none of the credit. It was one of those things that just happened.
As he hovered at the edge of a twilight sleep, he thought of the yellow diamond, buried in a jar of Vaseline in the drawer of his bedside table. Probably worth a hundred times what Vivien told him. The moment he found it hanging off the jut of rock above the sound, right at the point where the map said X, he saw the screw was turning ever tighter. After all, he couldn’t simply plop it in among his cufflinks. For all he knew, it would crack if he dropped it. This was the sort of rock they frisked the miners for. The sort that left a trail of bodies stewn up the coast of Africa.
He had knelt at the edge of Vivien’s cliff for two hours Wednesday morning. The water, radiant blue, stretched away in a measureless calm. The catch was in his hand. He realized, now that he’d crossed the border out of madness, just how little time he had. There was no more room for detour. He had to get to Vermont and get it settled which one did it. He probably wouldn’t recognize the clue until he saw it. It wouldn’t hold up in a court of law. But he wasn’t out for something hard as a diamond. What he hoped to find was a kind of lens, to bring it all into his field of vision. Like a sight on a high-powered rifle.
So he stood and slipped the diamond in the pocket of his jeans, patting it like a charm as he turned away up the cedar path. She was right, of course. It was just like Walden Pond. A man could go barefoot for weeks on end, subsisting on berries and clams. For him, it could have turned into the first vacation he’d ever had. The lilies breezed in the air like music. The old stone sill at the cottage door was hollowed with three hundred years of going in and out. But for once he preferred to be on the move. He felt no particular need to protest the cant and pageant of civilized life by making a stand in the boonies. Thank God there were more immediate matters.
His fireside sleep was a jigsaw of mismatched pieces. He made out a body of water as deep as a grown man’s mind, with a house beside it built from scratch. Walden, he thought at first. But he changed his mind when he saw the bougain-villea flaming all around it. It was Vivien’s house above the sound. Yet the water was too far off, and he seemed to look down from an eagle’s perch on a mountain. Of course, he thought—it was Steepside. Even then, before he could be absolutely sure, the mountain beneath him went dead and wet. He was wandering out in a driving storm, trying to get back to Old Mill Stream. Remaining calm at all costs, of course. He’d just sniffed the faintest trace of wood smoke. He knew he was on the right track, when he woke with a start.
I’m not going out, he
thought quite calmly.
He wasn’t hungry anyway. He’d make do with his cache of salted nuts and Oreos. He got up from the hearth, and the heat held on like a sunburn on one side. He felt a little woozy, mixing drinks and sleep. So he opened the drawer beside his bed to grab for the Anacin Plus.
He effected a kind of miracle cure in the process. His head went naked and clear, as he quivered with sudden adrenaline. He crouched like a wrestler, out for a fight. For though the Anacin tin was there—loyal as ever, between the Turns and the Ocusol—somebody’d pinched the Vaseline. It’s not your fault, he thought, putting first things first. So maybe a jar of salve was an old cliché—the first thing a crook checked out, like the safe behind the painting. Well, Vivien should have thought of that beforehand. There were couriers out for hire who’d handcuff a thing to their wrist and swallow the key. She shouldn’t have tried to get out of it cheap.
He didn’t for a moment think he was being followed. His paranoia wasn’t tuned in that direction. To him, it was a very abstract thief who’d broken in and ripped him off. He didn’t connect it up with anything else. He hardly saw the book at the back of the drawer. He noticed it seemed a little fancy to be a Gideon Bible. But after all, at a country inn in mid-Vermont, they probably did the phone books up in antique cowhide. What drew him to it, perhaps, was a sense of déjà vu. He’d begun it all a long time ago with a book about this size.
He lifted it out. The robbery slipped his mind as he weighed it now in the palm of one hand. It might have been the log of the journey he’d taken from there to here. He opened the scarred and spill-stained cover, his mind on Harry Dawes. The inscription in the old book’s flyleaf didn’t register at first. He must have stared at the water-marked page with the one-word title for five or six seconds before he read the handwritten script. In sherry-colored ink, it said:
RWE from HDT, on this tenth of May in 1885. This one particular sunny day, with the lilacs out. Some things a man can’t put in a book.
On the facing page, a washed-out bookplate. Very spare: a chestnut tree and a pinch of Latin. Ex libris above, and then the name: Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Greg took it in, if a little numbly. A first edition of Walden, from one Concord thinker to another. He was sure it was all a coincidence. Somehow, it didn’t seem unreasonable that the inn should supply each guest with a period volume of contemplations. The way things happened lately, it was only to be expected that the book that set him up went with the territory.
He thumbed his way into the middle, to page 160, but the numbers didn’t match with the paperback. The print was bigger here, the margins much more leisurely. He flipped ahead another quarter inch. Page after page was marked to the edges with notes and arrows. He tried to remember the last thing he’d been reading. How to build a chimney, maybe. Though he’d put the book down for good, on account of its vast irrelevance, he wanted to find the place where he’d left off, just to see what Emerson scrawled in the near vicinity.
A square of paper fell out like an autumn leaf and lilted to the floor. Not old like the book, so he nearly let it lie, supposing it to be a former tenant’s bookmark. Then he saw there was writing on it. He bent down and grabbed it and read it through. Right off, he understood why she wrote on a separate sheet. She didn’t like to jockey for space on the flyleaf, Thoreau having beaten her to it. More than that, she didn’t want to upstage Harry Dawes. She made it sound as little like an inscription as she could.
Since you won’t take money, I had to find you something you wouldn’t dare give back. Come to my cabin for drinks? Say at six? I’m in number 4—the one they call “Riverbend.”
Greg looked down at his wrist: 5:38 exactly. He wasn’t a bit surprised that she was here, but how could she be so sure he’d find the note by six? He didn’t like to be quite such an open book, to anyone. He scanned the map of the inn and grounds that was tacked to the closet door—plotting out the shortest walk through the woods to number 4. It was farthest off from the lodge, and it looked to be the biggest too. Leave it to her, he thought, to book the royal suite. As with the old mill, there didn’t appear to be a river for it to be at the bend of. It was simply off in the woods, like everything else.
He could always sit tight and wait, he thought, and by and by she’d have to come to him. But what was the use? The diamond was Vivien’s caper. Let her play out the final scene at “Riverbend,” if she liked. Finish it off with a shot of cognac. In point of fact, he was lucky to have the diamond safely out of his hands. With this loose end tied up, perhaps she’d hear him out about the killer.
He set off at a trot through the meadow and up the hill, not stopping to change his clothes or comb his hair. It was next to amazing, how willing he was to go with the turn of events. But he’d come to see that the momentum of the investigation depended on what he could hold in his head at any given moment. The truth was no one final thing. The bits that sprang up in the way were more and more the key to it all. You couldn’t seek them, or even deduce them. All you could do was keep up your speed and cover ground, going over and over the paths you made.
The trees at the top of the rise were evergreen. The pad of needles beneath his feet soaked up the wet of the mud, so he lost the dread of sinking. The ruthless view of blasted hills—fungus gray as far as the eye could see—gave way in the heart of the woods to a season of mists. He looked up as he jogged along. The pines were blue and motionless above him, as if listening still for the coming on of rain, even now after two days’ false alarm. The moss was full. The ferns were finger-high. So far did the whole thing take him in, he forgot for a moment where he was headed. To reach her clearing, he had to pass two forks, a left and right. He wasn’t aware of either.
But he must have got it right by a sort of natural radar—because there it was, across a field of waist-high grass. Its shingles had bleached to white, so it glowed in the mountain dusk. A curl of smoke floated out of a fieldstone chimney, powder-gray on the lead of the sky. As he entered the meadow along the winding path, the feather ends of the grass rushed against him. How long, he wondered, since he’d been entirely in the open, without so much as a surfaced road or a visible neighbor? Perhaps never. He knew it was just this kind of place that Harry would have led him to, if they’d only had the time.
He could tell the dark would fall as he reached her door. Already the night poured over the woods. There was no going back without a light. He broke through the last of the grass and leapt up the steps to her porch. He realized even the dark was safe enough, so long as he wasn’t lost. The night had a thousand reasons all its own. It wasn’t out for him.
She opened the door before he could lift a hand to knock, and the firelight glowed behind her so that he craned his neck to see.
“You were running so fast,” said Vivien lightly, taking his arm, “I thought there was somebody chasing you.”
She guided him forward toward the hearth, as if she sensed he needed warming up. He fixed his eyes on the crackling fire till he stood so close he could feel the heat on his overalls. Then he looked all around—at the high barn ceiling, the cushy chairs, the cocktail table decked with canapés. Then he looked at her. Hair tied back, in a putty silk dress to the floor, she might have spent the day on skis in St. Moritz. No detail here to connect this place to a public inn. It was more like somebody’s private chalet. Even a good hotel seemed slightly vulgar by comparison.
“Nice layout,” Greg remarked. He still hadn’t said hello. “But if I had money, I’d never put it down for a thing like this. It’s like restaurants—the prices are way out of line. When it’s over, you don’t have shit to show for it.”
“A good hotel is always worth it,” Vivien answered evenly, as she busied herself with drinks. Greg sat down on the hearth stool. “It takes people out of themselves for a while.”
“That’s the worst reason I ever heard.”
“Is it?” she said, passing over a vodka gimlet. “Sounds like you’re all caught up in your reading. How do you
like the book?”
She meant the rare one. He held it tight in his hand, like something saved from a fire.
“I’d just as soon read it in paperback, frankly. Then I don’t have to be so careful.”
“Who says you have to be careful?”
The diamond hung around her neck, paler against the gray of the dress than it had seemed in the bright Bermuda sun. He wouldn’t give her an inch—wouldn’t ask how she tracked him down or found his cache. As for the leather-bound Thoreau, if she really meant it as payment for services, he shouldn’t have to be grateful.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “If you didn’t mind coming this far, why not go all the way.” He loved the rapid-fire investigative mode, where you asked a slew of questions all at once. “Come to think of it,” he went on, “aren’t you supposed to be stuck on a yacht? Bored out of your mind?”
“I canceled,” she said, though of course she hadn’t. “It’s just—I know who did it.”
He stared back at her politely, without any change of expression. She didn’t know what she’d expected—“I told you so,” perhaps—but she wondered now if he didn’t resent the intrusion. She probably should have waited.
“Who?” he said at last.
“Uh—Carl.”
“Wrong,” he retorted, shaking his head.
“Well, who?”
“Artie.”
“Bullshit.”
They took a little break and sipped their gimlets. Greg stared into the fire, and Vivien fiddled at the antipasto. They probably both should have waited. After all, it had less to do with who than how they ought to proceed.
