CHAPTER
22
Desperation in today’s thrillers is often expressed through shopping. It is supposed to be every reader’s fantasy. A threat will force a regular person into frantic extravagance. He or she must spend more and more money until finally delivering a package across the street costs four thousand dollars cash. A character fleeing a bad guy will purchase plane ticket after wig after used car after listening device after digital camera after arctic boots. Your Honor, I did buy an entirely new wardrobe on this credit card I found. But I had to—to save my life.
Pat and Virginia were in the first-class section of an airplane on a runway in Newark. Pat had bought the tickets as soon as they’d returned from BreeZee’s, just like that, online. Whether this was a sign of desperation, Virginia did not know. The impulsive extravagance was similar. Pat was going to turn around this problem with her husband if it killed her. Her smile was as bright as a hubcap.
“What do you think,” she said. “Do we have enough magazines?” She was not asking a question; she was relishing their sheer plenty. She had a thick stack, with as many springtime flowers as celebrities on the covers. (Or at least Virginia assumed they were celebrities; she didn’t recognize any of them.)
“It’s too bad we’re not on an international flight,” Pat continued. “You could have gotten a bottle of Scotch at one of the duty-free shops. You wouldn’t believe the deal Frank got on some twenty-four-year-old Macallan last year.”
“Yeah?”
“It was only two hundred dollars, or maybe it was half off two hundred; I forget exactly.”
The two women were on their way to Oswego County in upstate New York, where they had reservations for a suite in a picturesque old hotel. Tomorrow Johnny Spaulding was going to show them a prospective wind farm site near Lake Ontario. Pat had postponed her search for Phil Hipkins and made the appointment with Spaulding in order to invest some money for LinkAge’s victims. “It’s the ideal solution,” she said.
Virginia had no idea if it would work. Certainly if anyone could pull it off, it was Pat. She thought back to the Marks and idly wondered what Ted had done to distinguish himself among his unhappy lunch crowd. Refuse to leave his bed? Have visions? Drink vodka for breakfast? None of it sounded like much, put so baldly. Yet somehow he had separated himself out. Everyone had suffered, but it was Ted who’d had a “meltdown,” like an ice-cream cone in the heat. Maybe this counted as a “nervous breakdown,” a term that had a quaint appeal. Virginia wondered what she could do to qualify; she seemed to be stuck putting one foot in front of the other forever.
“Look!” cried Pat. “That’s a good sign. Basket of gold.” The curled-up left side of the gardening magazine was trying to unfurl as she excitedly tapped a (very short) fingernail against a photo of a dozen dense yellow floral mounds whose shape echoed the light-colored rocks they were interspersed with.
“Basket of gold,” said Virginia, unexpectedly tickled. “Basket of gold. How about planting it in the Culp garden?”
“I can think of all sorts of plants for that one,” said Pat. “How about Japanese blood grass? Love-lies-bleeding. Bleeding hearts. All sorts of satisfyingly bloody names.”
The engine began its airy roar.
Virginia hadn’t been on a plane in years. The Christmas after her father died, she and her stepmother flew to Costa Rica and stayed in a hut that was part of a resort. Everything about the flight emphasized the suspension of your life. All airports were alike, as were all airplane seats, all airplane hues, all overhead luggage compartments, all seat-back trays, all window glass, all asphalt, all signalers with their futuristic jumpsuits and their arcane hand gestures. She’d been prepared by television for the long, apparently intermingling lines of would-be passengers snaking back from conveyor belts, and for having to take off her shoes while her carry-on was being X-rayed. This simply meant that the process was longer, the interruption of her life more insistent. The tacky uniformity remained.
In one book, a mystery masquerading as science fiction, future humans snatch people from planes about to crash and bring them forward to their own time, leaving behind simulated body parts in their place. Virginia wondered about that moment when you think you’re going to die and instead you’re propelled into the future. It would probably be hard to tell the difference between death and time travel. Your mind would likely disintegrate no matter what strides had been made by then in understanding how the brain worked.
“Thank God for Will,” murmured Pat. “He’s the one who made this trip possible.”
Ruby had been pleased when Pat had announced their departure. “I guess we’ll find something to do,” she’d said in a put-upon voice that wouldn’t have fooled a two-year-old. It fooled Pat, of course, or maybe she was simply used to it. Ruby could have flaunted that secretive smile with impunity for years. Pat might have even got a kick out of it.
Pat did enjoy so very many things. Her taste, in truth, was a bit slack. She was not as discriminating as Virginia and so probably did not appreciate how superior Will was to any other young person who might have happened by. There was great charm in his aloofness, his vulnerability, his slight shiftiness. Although he may already have been cruel—or suffered cruelty—he was still fresh. You had to guess at his past as well as his future.
“I like Will,” said Virginia. “But do you think he’s the right chaperone for a thirteen-year-old girl?”
“Why not?” said Pat, lifting her brows. She extracted some lip balm from her purse, which was silk-screened with the face of a glamorous forties blonde and the words “If I Have One Life to Live, Let Me Live It as a Lie.”
“Do you really have enough money to invest in wind farms?” asked Virginia.
“Sure,” said Pat, offering her the lip balm.
“For a while I thought Ellen might be trying to ruin you.”
“Ellen?” crowed Pat. “Wait till you see her. But I suppose there’s no reason not to tell you.” When Pat had asked her why she hadn’t cashed the check, Ellen had said she didn’t deserve it. Apparently she felt guilty about sending out the memo with the real figures. Pat tried to reassure her. No one blamed her, not even Frank. But finally Ellen confessed that she hadn’t sent out the memo by accident. She’d done it on purpose. “It was just after 9/11, when everyone wanted to go out and save the world. She thought it was the right thing to do. She didn’t know it would destroy everyone’s savings.”
Virginia laughed. “So she set out to destroy the company.”
“I think it would have happened anyway. Eventually.”
“Still…,” said Virginia.
“Yeah,” said Pat.
Virginia leaned back against the headrest, her brain sated.
“It’s not something I would tell Frank, of course,” said Pat.
“How incredible, to think of what one person can do,” said Virginia.
“You’re looking a lot better than you did up in Maine,” said Pat.
Virginia’s thoughts jumped briefly to the man in New Zealand who kept faking his own death. His name was Milton Harris. You could see him in a lot of different ways. The crude view would be that he kept pretending to die so that his insurance would pay off and that the pretense eventually caught up with him and he really did die. But what if his goal was not money. Surely there were less risky ways of making it, even illegally. What if he was getting what he wanted every time he played at death? What if he longed for that middle land, that death-in-life and life-in-death? Maybe there was nothing wrong with reaching out and touching death. Maybe you were supposed to wonder how it tasted.
For the first time, though, Virginia felt that she was on the outside, rather than the inside, of this question. No matter how insistently it demanded an answer, no matter how entangled she might be, no matter how dire her situation, she was distinguishable from the question itself.
“I’m not going to kill myself,” she said.
There was a silence.
“I never
said you would!” cried Pat.
But Virginia peeked and saw that Pat Guiney (or rather Foy) had turned red.
“I probably wouldn’t have even if you hadn’t whisked me away from Maine,” said Virginia.
“Oh,” said Pat. She dropped the magazine, but strapped in side by side as they were, all she could do was grab Virginia’s shoulder. “I knew you were thinking of it!” she said fervently. “And thank God you didn’t go through with it! What would I have done?”
“I don’t know,” said Virginia. “But I liked being whisked.”
Pat became voluble. “Johnny Spaulding is a great-looking guy,” she said. “He was in the Hart Ridge paper when he lost his money in LinkAge. Not that I saw the picture back then, but it’s online now. And there was a more recent picture of him in front of a row of wind machines. They’re so weird, you wouldn’t believe it, not at all like in Foreign Correspondent. They have blades like scissors.”
“Some would call it poetic justice if he swindled you out of all of your money,” said Virginia.
“No, no,” cried Pat, upsetting what was left of her wine in her enthusiasm. “Don’t you see? Johnny Spaulding changed the whole character of what happened. He’s going to do well for himself, for his investors, and for the environment. We have to help him and do right by ourselves as well. Besides, I think you should marry him.”
That was really what she said.
Because the plane was small (and had not been snatched by time travelers), it stopped in the middle of an expanse of asphalt rather than at a gate. They were going to be the first people off the plane. Pat started poking at her cellphone. “Five messages,” she said to Virginia brightly. “I wonder how many that is per minute.”
Overhead compartments sprung open as the passengers twisted underneath them, groping upward. Virginia hoisted her Estée Lauder tote bag to her shoulder.
“What?” Pat’s startled sob was terrible to hear, and everywhere eyes turned toward her with alarm. She fell heavily into her seat and burst into tears. “It’s Ruby,” she said. “She’s in trouble. She’s at the police station.”
“Ruby?” said Virginia, shaking her head in disbelief. “But what happened to Will?”
BY THE RIVER
CHAPTER
23
The house loomed above several cars, including a Touareg, a model Will had never seen before. Even without his Mustang GT convertible (well, his father’s, really), the number of cars meant that they’d have to be arranged and rearranged for access. Inside the house was a lot of the usual crime paraphernalia, only fancy. Even the girl blended in at first—not a campy “girl” spread across an old Lemuel Samuel cover, but a real girl, a little girl, with sleek black hair and bright black eyes. She said, “Are you the babysitter?”
They were in the kitchen. Pat Foy had disappeared in a swirl of words, and he was standing there, looking absently at a glass-fronted cabinet filled with stainless-steel canisters and mounted knives. He said, “Do I look like a babysitter?”
Ruby was her name. She examined him with an air of defiance. She was not tall, yet she appeared to look at him straight on. “No,” she said at last.
“I’m a trapper,” he said.
She nodded. She was wearing skintight jeans and a snug little navy blue T-shirt. She knew he lived near her “country” house; maybe that was why “trapper” had popped into his head. But he didn’t think it was a big lie; he had everything a trapper needed. Really. He was shrewd, intuitive, independent, strong-stomached.
He was supposed to look for work here. That had been the plan concocted in his father’s hospital room a few days after he’d come out of his coma. Lemuel was cranked up in his bed, frowning; Pat was in tandem, rocking from foot to foot, and Will sat in his usual foldout chair, the one the young nurse had found for him to sleep in the first night. He was not enthusiastic—nor was his father—but anything would be better than this three-sided hospital room. Will felt like he’d burst and scatter pieces of himself across the walls. Besides, finding work couldn’t be too hard. Lots of guys his age secured jobs every day, and New Jersey appeared to have plenty of people, plenty of buildings, and plenty of money lying around. Jobs must be everywhere, like rubber gloves, just waiting for him to slip into.
But already the plan seemed less likely, and he’d dropped his father off at Newark Airport only a couple of hours ago, just in time for his flight to Miami, the embarkation point for his mystery cruise. It was hard for Will to conceive of any job he might do here. The airport, for instance, was full of individuals in their official capacities: ticket takers, baggage carriers, security (lots of security), cashiers, flight attendants, pilots, limousine drivers, fast-food workers. Not one of these positions was suitable. Some, like pilot, required unfathomable training; others, like cashier, required unattainable personal qualities, as all cash registers seemed to be run by dark-haired women with accents. He did not see injustice or even inconvenience in this state of affairs, however. He did not expect to be hired for a job he could not picture himself doing.
When Pat bustled back into the kitchen, she said to Ruby, “Isn’t he nice? I told you you’d fall in love with him.”
Will frowned.
But Ruby’s gaze, which had been fixed on him, swung implacably to her mother. “Where’s my peach yogurt?” she said. “You don’t expect me to eat blueberry, do you?”
It was hard to figure out whose statement was weirder, mother’s or daughter’s. Will liked Pat fine, but he’d noticed right off that although she was the sort of woman you’d theoretically want to watch over you—and in fact she’d whipped Lemuel’s hospital into shape—every time she’d talk, she’d leave you as jumpy as a cat. Sometimes her laugh would tickle something at the back of his head, and he’d end up laughing, too, until he realized he was laughing at nothing and he looked like a moron. Or other times she’d set her hand lightly on his arm, and his skin would start to pop. If only he could forget that she was Mallow. Or at least used to be Mallow.
Ruby’s self-involvement was easier to deal with. When her gaze swung back to him, he thought, She expects me to root for her. He was flattered. The seven years separating them made him into a sort of superkid, whose allegiance was worth seeking. What’s more, he admired her dogged hope. She wants me to be on her side so much that I am.
After reading through the want ads the next day, pages and pages of classifieds with not one actual job offering that Will could discern, he began to suspect that here in New Jersey you had to be a person like Pat Foy, who already had money (stolen, apparently), or be her dependent, like Ruby, or her employee, like…Will. When she handed him a wad of bills from the sideboard at the end of the week, he was grateful. “Some trapper,” said Ruby from the doorway, fixing him with her unblinking black eyes.
You’d think that this would drive a wedge between them, but it did not. Will recognized Ruby’s dissatisfaction. The two might not have a lot in common in the obvious sense. When Will saw an ad, he was painfully aware that this little girl had the money to buy whatever was pictured. Ads therefore made him think in a certain way about Ruby and in a certain way about himself, because for him the ads would always remain just ads. It was complicated, and a real live person at the end of all those ads and feelings about ads made it more so. This probably meant that Will ended up thinking more about her than about someone he’d known his whole life. You’d never wonder if a person you’d known your whole life was on your side, because what would it matter? You’d know the sort of things he was going to say to you when you ran into him at the town plaza. Other stuff didn’t come into it.
Will wasn’t sure what he was expected to do at Douglas Point other than hang around and go for the occasional drive. The more specific and tiresome jobs were already filled. A dog walker showed up twice a day. Tuesday and Friday mornings three cleaning ladies arrived in a white van. At various times during the week different men would pick up scattered twigs or old leaves and then disappear. Will’s presence
seemed to be enough, as if he were substituting temporarily for a member of the family. Ruby was in school till four. Then she went on one of the computers to IM her friends. Later she’d ask him what he thought of easy things like TV shows, types of food, or vacation spots he knew only by name.
Will’s problems with her began one evening in February while they watched a program called Heist or Hoax. The TV screen was pretty amazing, high-definition plasma, about forty-two inches—although that’s not as big as it sounds, because it’s measured on the diagonal. Will found himself watching a lot of shows like Heist or Hoax that he wouldn’t have normally because of the quality of the picture. The TV itself might have been as thin as a sandwich, but the world it contained was so three-dimensional he would have liked to walk into it.
The set was mounted high on the wall, probably by an ambitious immigrant, not by a lazy discontent like his new stepfather, who installed cable boxes but who was always going on fruitlessly about leasing an electronics or hardware franchise. “This county is wide open!” he would say, then start naming the various chains that had interested him lately. Will’s mother couldn’t have known that he—Will—would soon become unwelcome in their home, but she should have guessed. Still, she’d struggled for so long it was hard to hold it against her. And Will had fantasized about living with his father for years.
Will and Ruby were alone when they watched Heist or Hoax because Pat had driven off to visit Ruby’s father in prison. Instead of accompanying her, Ruby had made him a card from a digital photo of her dog Winky, which looked professional to Will, since Pat’s color printer made copies with no visible lines.
Heist or Hoax was a reality show in which a dozen contestants were told that one of them was going to try to burglarize the estate they were staying at. In a twist known only to the audience, every guest thought he (or she) was the one playing the criminal.
“Jeez, it’s like really stupid, isn’t it?” said Ruby, with her usual mix of strong opinion and need for reassurance.