by Chris Orcutt
“I appreciate your faith in me, Svetlana. Especially considering, like you said, that we’ve only known each other for a few days. And while I appreciate your point about ‘no risk, no reward,’ and your accomplishments in chess, there’s a big difference between what you do and what I do. Chess is a game that takes place on a board, in a controlled environment. But my work takes place in the real world—a harsh, unforgiving and often violent world. If you take a risk in chess, what’s the worst that can happen? You lose the game. But if I take a risk, I can lose my livelihood and people can die. I’m sorry, but I’m letting the Bureau handle the Malone case from now on. Besides, I’m not ready for a case involving an international conspiracy yet.”
“I have learned that we do not get to decide when we are ready,” Svetlana said. “Fate or Destiny decides.” She laid a hand on my forearm. “Dakota, I think it is your destiny to solve this case. You must do it.”
“I’m not pursuing the case, Svetlana, and that’s final.”
She gazed at the tabletop for a few seconds. When she looked up at me again, her eyes were steely and her jaw was clenched.
“I wish you well with your firm,” she said, “but do not bother to contact me when you return to New York. I have decided not to rent out the first floor of my building. Perhaps I turn it into exercise room and practice studio for my chess. I will decide when I go home tomorrow night.”
“That’s fine.” I shook her hand. “Nice meeting you. Thanks for your help.”
She stood and shouldered her purse. Turning to leave, she stopped in her tracks and glared at me.
“There is one other detail you might find interesting,” she said. “That nonprofit, the International Psychology—”
“Yeah, the one backed by the Saudi prince?” I said. “What about it?”
“The Saudi prince in question is a hemophiliac,” she said. “Blood type A-B negative.”
“That is interesting,” I said. “Hopefully the Bureau will take note of it.”
“Goodbye then,” she said.
“Bye.”
She walked out. The woman had a lovely walk. I’d miss it.
On the TV, Jim, the girl, and her dead husband’s partner were in a barn, digging holes to find the stolen loot. It was the end of the episode. Damn it. I’d missed the entire second half while being lectured at by Svetlana.
When the bartender came over with my beer, I chugged half of it and asked him to bring me another one right away. Then, beer in hand, I went out to the phone booth in the lobby, closed the door and called Special Agent Suzuki.
“Hey, Jen,” I said when she answered, “I was thinking. How about you pack a swimsuit and a change of clothes and come over here and join me for dinner? The Bureau’s treat. What do you say?”
“Dakota,” she said, “I think it’d be best if we…said goodbye.”
“Why? We had a good time the other night, didn’t we?”
“Yes, but your case is over. The Director called me personally this morning and was very firm—I am not to provide you with any more assistance. Oh, which reminds me…my partner will drop by first thing in the morning to pick up the gun we lent you.”
“Fine, but this isn’t about the case or assistance,” I said. “It’s about you. I like you, Jen. I need you tonight.”
“But that’s tonight. You go home tomorrow.”
“So?”
“So…I’m not some woman you can just hook up with because you’re lonely and we happen to be in the same city. I’m not a damn flight attendant, Dakota.”
“I never said you were. And I don’t think I’ve treated you like one.”
She groaned. “Look, I have to go. We had fun. Let’s not spoil the memory of it, okay?”
“Yeah, I understand,” I said. “Take care of yourself, Jen.”
“You too, Dakota. Bye.”
27
When I Came to Die
The next morning, I checked the girls and myself out of the Charles Hotel and drove us out to Concord. It was rush hour on a weekday, but since most of the traffic was on its way in to Boston, we made good time. Fittingly for the first day of October, a dusting of snow had fallen overnight, making for a pretty ride.
I took the girls to the historic Concord Inn for a late breakfast. The three of them gossiped in rapid girl-speak and joked and laughed the entire time. I was glad to see that Sally and Megan were getting along again, and Jade and Megan both seemed much less uptight together than when I’d dealt with them individually. A few times during breakfast, however, I poignantly felt my age. Like when Megan took a cranberry scone out of the bread basket, declared herself “The Scone-y Monster,” and crumbled it against her mouth while making comical munching sounds. Sally and Jade, apoplectic with laughter, thrashed in their chairs.
The girls’ hijinks drew unwanted attention from other diners, including a long table of twenty women—from yoga-fit young moms to pearl-adorned elderly matrons—who turned in unison and stared at me, as if to say, “Why aren’t you with one woman your own age?”
I was relieved when we finally left. Sadly, by now the temperature was up, and the snow dusting was gone. From the car back seat, Megan gave me directions to her house and continued to joke around with Jade. Once we were outside the village, Megan directed me down a road that passed the entrance for Walden Pond. When Sally saw the sign, she grabbed my arm.
“Dakota, can we stop?” she said. “I’ve never seen Thoreau’s cabin. I’ve always wanted to see it.”
“Well, it’s not his original cabin,” I said. “It’s just a replica they built for tourists.”
“You’ve been here before?” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “When I was in college, I used to come out here to clear my head. It’s very peaceful.”
“Well, I want to see it,” she said. “Who knows when I’ll be over here again.”
“We can go if you want.” I glanced in the rear-view mirror. “Megan, Jade—how about it? Want to see Thoreau’s place?”
Megan shoved her head between the front seats and rested her chin on my shoulder
“Lame!” she said. “My house borders the south side of the park, Dakota. My family’s hiked in there so many times, we made our own path. That’s a hard pass.”
“Me, too,” Jade said, looking at Megan. “Sounds super-lame.”
“Hard pass?” I said. “What, Megan? Speak English, Miss ‘Perfect SAT Verbal.’ ”
Sally giggled. “ ‘Hard pass’ means she’ll pass on it. But will you still take me? On the way back? Please?”
“Sure,” I said.
Past Walden Pond, there was a lot of road construction. Several times we were stopped by a flagger and forced to wait while the traffic crept one-way through a construction site. When we finally turned in to Megan’s driveway, she groaned.
“Oh…my…God do I hate the construction around here,” she said. “That took like, what—half an hour? That should be like a five-minute drive. Ugh!”
Her house was at the end of a long driveway. Typical for Concord, it was a big and boring white Colonial with black shutters and a red door. Nearby were a detached garage and a shed. There were no cars in the driveway.
“Are either of your parents home, Megan?” I asked.
“No, my dad works in Boston, and my mom does volunteer stuff. Why?”
“I wanted to talk to them about this situation with Malone.”
“Chill, Dakota,” Megan said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll tell them all about it tonight, I swear.”
“All right.” I gave her and Jade each a business card. “The number on there is for my beeper. Tell your parents they can call—”
“Your beeper?” Megan and Jade looked at each other and sniggered.
“Seriously?” Jade said
“I know, right?” Sally said.
“I’ll tell them, Dakota,” Megan said. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“Yeah,” Jade said, “thanks, Dakota.”
“You’re welcome, girls. Goodbye.”
They each grabbed a suitcase and a knapsack of books and got out of the car. Outside, Megan rapped on Sally’s window.
“Bye, bitch,” she said.
“Bye, bitch,” Sally said.
Waving goodbye to Megan and Jade, I waited until they entered the house, then pulled away. It took us another twenty minutes to get back to Walden Pond, but when we turned in to the parking lot, there was only one other car. There were no buses either, which I was grateful for because that meant no school kids. Outside, I took my survival pack out of the trunk and slipped it on.
“What’s that for?” Sally asked.
“It’s a survival pack.” I closed the trunk.
“Like we’re really going to need it out here,” she said, waving a hand. “This isn’t exactly the wilderness, Dakota.”
“No, but we’re going into the woods,” I said, “and anytime you go into the woods, the rule is…Never underestimate Nature.”
She covered her mouth to muffle a yawn. “Whatever.”
“Hey, don’t make fun,” I said. “You’re with a former Eagle Scout, my dear.”
“Oooh, I feel so honored.” She rolled her eyes.
“Do you know what the Scout motto is, Sally?” I led us down the gravel path toward Thoreau’s cabin. “ ‘Be Prepared.’ Anytime you go into the woods, you need to have a few basic items on you.”
“All right, I’ll play along,” she said. “Basic items…like…?”
“A compass. Fire-starter and dry tinder. First-aid kit. Bottled water. Emergency food. A knife. Cordage. A tin cup for drinking and cooking. Emergency blankets and—”
“Oh, like those aluminum thingies?” She put her arm around my waist and rested her head against me.
“Actually, they’re Mylar, but they’re shiny so they look like aluminum.” I stopped, took my pack off one shoulder, unzipped a pouch and pulled out an orienteering compass. “Do you know how to use one of these?”
“What’s that—a compass?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t.” She stared up at me with her hands clasped behind her back.
“Would you like to learn?” I asked.
With her lips pursing in amusement, she slowly shook her head.
“You little city wench.” I put the compass away. “I ought to lose you out here. Then we’d see how smart you are.”
“Yeah,” she said, “it’d probably take me a whole hour to find Megan’s house and have a pizza delivered.”
I chuckled and pulled her against me. I walked with my arm over her shoulders telling her about Thoreau. When we got to the replica cabin, the door was open, revealing the contents inside: a table, a writing desk and three chairs, a fireplace with a woodstove, a firewood box, and a bed.
“That’s it?” Sally said. “That’s all he had? Seriously, how did the guy not die from boredom?”
“Well, the village is only a couple miles from here,” I said. “As I understand it, he would go into town a lot and eat dinner with the Emersons.”
After a look at the outside of the cabin, we started down the path toward the pond. Sally gesticulated over her shoulder.
“I thought it would be…you know…bigger,” Sally said. “He lived in that thing for two years?”
“Well, again, I don’t think he was out here the entire time,” I said. “Do you know how much the cabin cost him to build?”
“No.” She punched me gently in the arm. “But I bet you do.”
“Twenty-eight dollars, twelve and a half cents.”
“They had half-cents back then?”
“Yup.”
“Crazy,” she said.
Ahead, a wooden sign stood at the trailhead. It was a quote from Walden. We stopped, and Sally read it aloud:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. —Thoreau
“So”—Sally poked me in the ribs—“what’s it mean?”
I led us down the trail. “Didn’t you read Walden in high school?”
“Yeah, sure, but…that was like three years ago. Besides, what’s with all of the not’s in there? It’s confusing.”
“It means,” I said, pulling her close to me, “that he built a cabin in the woods and lived there for two years because he wanted to live elementally, without technology and modern conveniences. He wanted to see if he could live in Nature, on Nature’s terms, and he was curious what he’d learn from the experience. The book Walden is his report on what happened and what he learned.”
“Damn you’re smart!” She grinned up at me. “How many times have you read it?”
I shrugged. “Ten or twelve.”
“Twelve times! What?”
“Sure. It’s a great book. Hold on a second.”
Fifty feet or so down the trail, directly next to a conspicuous “No Bicycles” sign, was a man in his mid 20s on a mountain bike. He was snapping on his helmet.
“Excuse me,” I said. “You can’t ride that in here.”
He threw his shoulders back and jutted his chin at me. “You work here or something?”
“No, but there’s a sign.” I pointed at it.
“Screw you,” he said and pushed off.
“What a jerk,” Sally said to me.
“Yeah, but the world is full of them, my dear.” I breathed deeply of the fresh air. “You know…I’ve always wanted to live in a cabin like Thoreau. Or at least I like the idea of doing it.”
Sally looked up at me, biting her lip. Her eyes flashed.
“If you do it, I’ll do it, too! We could do it together!”
“That would kind of defeat the purpose,” I said. “Thoreau’s experiment was about a person living alone in the woods, having to face himself and Nature. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a twenty-year-old minx shacking up with him.”
Sally laughed.
“If he had,” I continued, “he wouldn’t have written his book. And if somehow he had managed to write it, that quote back at the trailhead would have gone, ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…well, that is until Little Sally Sexpot came knocking on my door, after which the two of us spent all our time holed up in the cabin copulating furiously, like rabbits.’ ”
“ ‘Sally Sexpot!’ ” She slapped me in the stomach and laughed harder.
As I walked with my arm around her, a gentle autumn breeze came up, fluttering her hair against my fingers. For a blissful moment I forgot all about the thirteen-year chasm between our ages. I felt like I was back in college and the two of us were dating. A week ago, when Director Reeves had forced me to take this case, a case whose sole mandate was to entice a privileged college girl away from an unsavory professor, I never would have imagined I’d actually come to care for the girl in question. But I liked Sally. Not only did she make me feel ten years younger, she also made me more optimistic about my future; I wasn’t a guy in his early thirties at a dead-end in his career and his relationships; I was a still-young man embarking on a new adventure.
Gnawing at the back of my mind, however, was the awareness that these past few days with Sally had been a pipe dream. When I got her home to Connecticut, I would be rudely reawakened into reality. Right now, though, it was just the two of us in the colorful woods around Walden Pond, strolling the foliage-flanked and acorn-strewn paths. I resolved to enjoy the remaining few hours we had together. We strolled in silence for a while, following the trail up a gradual rise until we were on the far side of the pond. At a bend in the tra
il, we stopped and stared down at the placid water. Stepping in front of me and draping her arms around my neck, Sally stood on tiptoe, craned her head up, and kissed me. We kissed for a couple minutes. In the distance, a woodpecker drummed on a tree, and I thought I heard the crunch of acorns underfoot somewhere down the trail. When we opened our eyes, Sally was beaming at me. She hugged me tightly, resting her head against my heart.
“I don’t want to go home, Dakota.” Biting her lower lip, she looked up at me with a rebellious flash in her eyes. “Let’s do it—let’s pull a Thoreau! Just leave everything and move to Alaska together! Let’s do it!”
I chuckled. “What about Harvard?”
“I’ll…take a leave of absence. They let students do it all the time.”
When I chuckled again, she frowned and jabbed me in the ribs. “Oh, I forgot. I’m too young for you.”
About ten feet behind Sally’s shoulder, where the trail cornered and descended the other side of the ridge, was a sugar maple with long branches that jutted into the trail. The flame-orange leaves rustled, and then I noticed another flame-orange object coming up and around the corner of the trail. It was a head of red hair.
It was Big Red from the ferry.
28
The Race of Your Life
I yanked Sally behind me and reached into my jacket for my gun. My stomach sank when I realized I no longer had a gun; Jen’s partner had collected it from me this morning. What could I use for a weapon? I had a Swiss Army Knife in the survival pack. No…my ASP baton. When Big Red started toward me, I pulled the baton out of my pocket, flicked my wrist, and telescoped it. He stopped.
“Dakota,” Sally said behind me, “what’s going on?”
“Sally,” I said, “I need you to run.”
“Run? Where?”
“Back to the car and get help. Don’t argue with me. Go! Run!”
Sally turned and took off, her footfalls fading into the woods behind me. Feeling the adrenaline start to course through my body, I slowed my breathing and deliberately focused on curbing the onset of tunnel vision. By staying calm, I was able to slow everything down, so that the events of the next minute felt like five.
