I read the letter.
Feb. 25, 2014
Dear Pastor Jacobs,
You are my last hope.
I feel crazy writing that, but it's true. I'm trying to reach you because my friend Jenny Knowlton urges me to do so. She is an RN and says she never believed in miracle cures (although she does believe in God). Several years ago she went to one of your healing revivals in Providence, RI, and you cured her arthritis, which was so bad she could hardly open and close her hands and she was "hooked" on OxyContin. She said to me, "I told myself I only went to hear Al Stamper sing, because I had all his old records with the Vo-Lites, but down deep I must have known why I was really there, because when he asked if there were any who would be healed, I got in the line." She said not only did the pain in her hands and arms disappear when you touched her temples with your rings, so did the need to take the Oxy. I found that even harder to believe than the arthritis being cured, because where I live a lot of people use that stuff and I know it is very hard to "kick the habit."
Pastor Jacobs, I have lung cancer. I lost my hair during the radiation treatments and the chemo made me throw up all the time (I have lost 60 lbs), but at the end of those hellish treatments, the cancer was still there. Now my doctor wants me to have an operation to take out one of my lungs, but my friend Jenny sat me down and said, "I am going to tell you a hard truth, honey. Mostly when they do that it's already too late, and they know it but do it anyway because it's all they have left."
I turned the paper over, my head thudding. For the first time in years, I wished I were high. Being high would make it possible to look at the signature waiting for me below without wanting to scream.
Jenny says she has looked up your cures online and many more than hers appear to be valid. I know you are no longer touring the country. You may be retired, you may be sick, you may even be dead (although I pray not, for your sake as well as my own). Even if you are alive and well, you may no longer read your mail. So I know this is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it overboard, but something--not just Jenny--urges me to try. After all, sometimes one of those bottles washes up on shore, and someone reads the message inside.
I have refused the operation. You really are my last hope. I know how thin that hope is, and probably foolish, but the Bible says, "With faith, all things are possible." I will wait to hear . . . or not. Either way, may God bless and keep you.
Yours in hope,
Astrid Soderberg
17 Morgan Pitch Road
Mt. Desert Island, Maine 04660
(207) 555-6454
*
Astrid. Dear God.
Astrid again, after all these years. I closed my eyes and saw her standing beneath the fire escape, her face young and beautiful, framed in the hood of her parka.
I opened my eyes and read the note Jacobs had added below her address.
I have seen her charts and latest scans. You may trust me on this; as I said in my covering letter, I have my methods. Radiation and chemotherapy shrank the tumor in her left lung, but did not eradicate it, and more spots have shown up on her right lung. Her condition is grave, but I can save her. You may trust me on this, too, but such cancers are like a fire in dry brush--they move fast. Her time is short, and you must decide at once.
If it's so goddam short, I wondered, why didn't you call, or at least send your devil's bargain by Express Mail?
But I knew. He wanted time to be short, because it wasn't Astrid he cared about. Astrid was a pawn. I, on the other hand, was one of the pieces in the back row. I had no idea why, but I knew it was so.
The letter shook in my hand as I read the last lines.
If you agree to assist me while I finish my work this coming summer, your old friend (and, perhaps, your lover) will be saved, the cancer expelled from her body. If you refuse, I will let her die. Of course this sounds cruel to you, even monstrous, but if you knew the tremendous import of my work, you would feel differently. Yes, even you! My numbers, both landline and cell, are below. Beside me as I write this is Miss Soderberg's number. If you call me--with a favorable answer, of course--I will call her.
The choice is yours, Jamie.
I sat on the stairs for two minutes, taking deep breaths and willing my heart to slow. I kept thinking of her hips tilted against mine, my cock throbbing and as hard as a length of rebar, one of her hands caressing the nape of my neck as she blew cigarette smoke into my mouth.
At last I got up and climbed to my apartment, the two letters dangling from my hand. The stairs weren't long or steep, and I was in good shape from all the bike-riding, but I still had to stop and rest twice to catch my breath before I got to the top, and my hand was shaking so badly I had to steady it with the other before I could get my key into the slot.
The day was dark and my apartment was full of shadows, but I didn't bother to turn on any lights. What I had to do was best done quickly. I took my phone off my belt, dropped onto the couch, and dialed Jacobs's cell. It rang a single time.
"Hello, Jamie," he said.
"You bastard," I said. "You fucking bastard."
"Glad to hear from you, too. What's your decision?"
How much did he know about us? Had I ever told him anything? Had Astrid? If not, how much had he dug up? I didn't know and it didn't matter. I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was only asking for form's sake.
I told him I'd be there ASAP.
"If you want to come, of course. Delighted to have you, although I don't actually need you until July. If you'd rather not see her . . . as she is now, I mean--"
"I'll be on a plane as soon as the weather clears. If you can do your thing before I get there . . . fix her . . . heal her . . . then go ahead. But you will not let her leave wherever you are until I see her. No matter what."
"You don't trust me, do you?" He sounded as if this made him terribly sad, but I didn't put much stock in that. He was a master at projecting emotion.
"Why would I, Charlie? I've seen you in operation."
He sighed. The wind gusted, shaking the building and howling along the eaves.
"Where in Motton are you?" I asked . . . but, like Jacobs, only for form's sake. Life is a wheel, and it always comes back around to where it started.
XI
Goat Mountain. She Waits. Bad News from Missouri.
And so, little more than six months after the brief reincarnation of Chrome Roses, I once more touched down at the Portland Jetport and once more journeyed north to Castle County. Not to Harlow this time, though. Still five miles from the home place, I turned off Route 9 and onto Goat Mountain Road. It was a warm day, but Maine had gotten belted with its own spring blizzard a few days before, and the musical sounds of melting and runoff were everywhere. Pines and spruces still crowded close to the road, their branches sagging under the weight of snow, but the road itself had been plowed and shone wetly in the afternoon sun.
I paused for a couple of minutes at Longmeadow, site of all those childhood MYF picnics, and longer at the spur leading to Skytop. I had no time to revisit the crumbling cabin where Astrid and I had lost our virginity, and couldn't have even if there had been. The gravel was now paved, and this road had also been plowed, but the way was barred by a stout wooden gate with a padlock the size of an orc's fist threaded through the latch. If that didn't make the point, there was a large sign reading ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING and VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW.
A mile further up, I came to the Goat Mountain gatehouse. The way wasn't barred, but there was a security guard wearing a light jacket over his brown uniform. The jacket was unbuttoned, maybe because the day was warm, maybe to give anyone stopping by a good view of the holstered gun on his hip. It looked like a big one.
I powered down my window, but before the guard could ask for my name, the gatehouse door opened and Charlie Jacobs came out. The bulky parka he wore couldn't disguise how little was left of him. The last time we'd met, he had been thin. Now he was
gaunt. My old fifth business was limping more severely than ever, and although he might have thought his smile of greeting warm and welcoming, it barely lifted the left side of his face, resulting in something closer to a sneer. The stroke, I thought.
"Jamie, good to see you!" He held out his hand and I shook it . . . although not without reservations. "I didn't really expect you until tomorrow."
"In Colorado they get the airports open fast after storms."
"I'm sure, I'm sure. May I ride back up with you?" He nodded in the direction of the security guard. "Sam brought me down in a golf cart, and there's a space heater in the guardhouse, but I chill very easily now, even on a day as springlike as this one. Do you remember what we used to call spring snow, Jamie?"
"Poor man's fertilizer," I said. "Come on, get in."
He limped around the front of the car, and when Sam tried to take his arm, Jacobs shook him off briskly. His face didn't work right, and the limp was actually closer to a lurch, but he was pretty spry, just the same. A man on a mission, I thought.
He got in with a grunt of relief, turned up the heater, and rubbed his gnarled hands in front of the passenger-side vent like a man warming himself over an open fire. "Hope you don't mind."
"Knock yourself out."
"Does this remind you of the approach to The Latches?" he asked, still rubbing his hands. They made an unpleasant papery sound. "It does me."
"Well . . . except for that." I pointed to the left, where there had once been an intermediate-level ski run called Smoky Trail. Or maybe it had been Smoky Twist. Now one of the lift cables had come down, and a couple of the chairs lay half-buried in a drift that would probably be there for another five weeks, unless the weather stayed warm.
"Messy," he agreed, "but there's no point fixing it. I'm going to have all the lifts taken out once the snow's gone. I'd say my skiing days are over, wouldn't you? Were you ever here when you were a child, Jamie?"
I had been, on half a dozen occasions, tagging along with Con and Terry and their flatlander friends, but I had no more stomach for small talk. "Is she here?"
"Yes, arrived around noon. Her friend Jenny Knowlton brought her. They had hoped to get here yesterday, but the storm was much worse Downeast. And before you ask your follow-up question, no, I haven't treated her. The poor woman is exhausted. Tomorrow will be time enough for that, and time enough for her to see you. Although you may see her today, if you like, when she eats what little dinner she can manage. The restaurant is equipped with closed-circuit television cameras."
I started to tell him what I thought of that, but he held up a hand.
"Peace, my friend. I didn't put them in; they were here when I bought the place. I believe the management must have used them to make sure the service staff was performing up to expectations." His one-sided smile looked sneerier than ever. Maybe that was just me, but I didn't think so.
"Are you gloating?" I asked. "Is that what you're doing, now that you've got me here?"
"Of course not." He half turned to regard the melting snowbanks rolling past us on either side. Then he turned back to me. "Well. Perhaps. Just a little. You were so high and mighty the last time we met. So haughty."
I didn't feel high and mighty now, and I certainly didn't feel haughty. I felt caught in a trap. I was here, after all, because of a girl I hadn't seen in over forty years. One who had bought her own doom, pack by pack, at the nearest convenience store. Or at the pharmacy in Castle Rock, where you could buy cigarettes at the counter right up front. If you needed actual medicine, you had to walk all the way to the back. One of life's ironies. I imagined dropping Jacobs off at the lodge and just driving away. The idea had a nasty attraction.
"Would you really let her die?"
"Yes." He was still warming his hands in front of the vent. Now what I imagined was grabbing one of them and snapping those gnarled fingers like breadsticks.
"Why? Why am I so goddamned important to you?"
"Because you're my destiny. I think I knew it the first time I saw you, down on your knees in your dooryard and grubbing in the dirt." He spoke with the patience of a true believer. Or a lunatic. Maybe there's really no difference. "I knew for sure when you showed up in Tulsa."
"What are you doing, Charlie? What is it you want me for this summer?" It wasn't the first time I'd asked him, but there were other questions I didn't dare ask. How dangerous is it? Do you know? Do you care?
He seemed to be thinking about whether or not to tell me . . . but I never knew what he was thinking, not really. Then Goat Mountain Resort hove into view--even bigger than The Latches, but ugly and full of modern angles; Frank Lloyd Wright gone bad. Probably it had looked modern, even futuristic, to the wealthy people who had come here to play in the sixties. Now it looked like a cubist dinosaur with glass eyes.
"Ah!" he said. "Here we are. You'll want to freshen up and rest a bit. I know I want to rest a bit. It's very exciting having you here, Jamie, but also tiring. I've put you in the Snowe Suite on the third floor. Rudy will show you the way."
*
Rudy Kelly was a mountain of a man in faded jeans, a loose gray smock top, and white crepe-soled nurse's shoes. He was a nurse, he said, as well as Mr. Jacobs's personal assistant. Judging by his size, I thought he might also be Jacobs's bodyguard. His handshake was certainly no limp-fish musician's howdy.
I had been in the resort's lobby as a kid, had once even eaten lunch here with Con and the family of one of Con's friends (terrified the whole time of using the wrong fork or dribbling down my shirt), but I had never been on any of the upper floors. The elevator was a clanky bucket, the kind of antique conveyance that in scary novels always stalls between floors, and I resolved to take the stairs for however long I had to be here.
The place was well heated (by virtue of Charlie Jacobs's secret electricity, I had no doubt), and I could see some repairs had been made, but they felt haphazard. All the lights worked and the floorboards didn't creak, but the air of desertion was hard to miss. The Snowe Suite was at the end of the corridor, and the view from the spacious living room was almost as good as that from Skytop, but the wallpaper was waterstained in places, and in here a vague aroma of mold had replaced the lobby's smell of floor wax and fresh paint.
"Mr. Jacobs would like you to join him for dinner in his apartment at six," Rudy said. His voice was soft and deferential, but he looked like an inmate in a prison flick--not the guy who plans the breakout, but the death-row enforcer who kills any guards who try to stop the escapees. "Will that work for you?"
"It's fine," I said, and when he left, I locked the door.
*
I took a shower--the hot water was abundant, and came at once--then laid out fresh clothes. With that done and time to kill, I lay down on the coverlet of the queen-size bed. I hadn't slept well the night before, and I can never sleep on planes, so a nap would have been good, but I couldn't drift off. I kept thinking about Astrid--both as she'd been then, and as she must be now. Astrid, who was in this same building with me, three floors down.
When Rudy knocked softly on the door at two minutes to six, I was up and dressed. At my suggestion that we take the stairs, he flashed a smile that said he knew a wimp when he saw one. "The elevator is totally safe, sir. Mr. Jacobs oversaw certain repairs himself, and that old slidebox was high on the list."
I didn't protest. I was thinking about how my old fifth business was no longer a reverend, no longer a rev, no longer a pastor. At this end of his life, he was back to plain old mister, and getting his blood pressure taken by a guy who looked like Vin Diesel after a face-lift gone bad.
Jacobs's apartment was on the first floor in the west wing. He had changed into a dark suit and white shirt open at the collar. He rose to greet me, smiling that one-sided smile. "Thank you, Rudy. Will you tell Norma that we'll be ready to eat in fifteen minutes?"
Rudy nodded and left. Jacobs turned to me, still smiling and once more producing that unpleasant papery sound as he rubbed his hands together. O
utside the window, a ski slope with no lights to illuminate it and no skiers to groove the spring snow descended into darkness, a highway to nowhere. "It will only be soup and salad, I'm afraid. I gave up meat two years ago. It creates fatty deposits in the brain."
"Soup and salad is fine."
"There's also bread, Norma's sourdough. It's excellent."
"Sounds delicious. I'd like to see Astrid, Charlie."
"Norma will serve her and her friend Jenny Knowlton around seven. Once they've eaten, Miss Knowlton will give Astrid her pain medication, and help her make her evening toilet. I told Miss Knowlton that Rudy could assist with these tasks, but she won't hear of it. Alas, Jenny Knowlton no longer seems to trust me."
I thought back to Astrid's letter. "Even though you cured her of her arthritis?"
"Ah, but then I was Pastor Danny. Now that I've eschewed all those religious trappings--I told them so, felt I had to--Miss Knowlton is suspicious. That's what the truth does, Jamie. It makes people suspicious."
"Is Jenny Knowlton suffering aftereffects?"
"Not at all. She's just uncomfortable without all her miracle mumbo-jumbo to fall back on. But since you brought up the subject of aftereffects, step into my study. I want to show you something, and there's just time before our evening repast appears."
The study was an alcove off the suite's parlor. His computer was on, the extra-large screen showing those endlessly galloping horses. He sat down, grimacing with discomfort, and tapped a key. The horses gave way to a plain blue desktop with only two folders on it. They were labeled A and B.
He clicked A, revealing a list of names and addresses in alphabetical order. He pressed a button, and the list began to scroll at medium speed. "Do you know what these are?"
"Cures, I'd assume."
"Verified cures, all affected by administration of electrical current to the brain--although not the sort of current any electrician would recognize. Over thirty-one hundred in all. Take my word for it?"