“You better get Miss Cole to explain. It’s complicated.”
“I guess to hell it must be,” Jordan said and stood up. “You and I, Hubert, we have more to discuss. A lot more.”
“I expect so.”
“Where is she, Vanessa? Is she up yet?”
“Can’t say.”
Damn the man, Jordan thought. What the hell did he and Alicia ever talk about? It must have been completely sexual between them, he thought, at least on her part, and he felt himself shudder with anxious jealousy, something he could not remember ever feeling before, not with Alicia, certainly, and not with Anne, his first wife, whom he had met and married right after returning from the war. He’d come home an American innocent made cynical by what he’d seen and done in the skies over France and had been brought briefly back to his innocence by marrying a slim, sweetly smiling, blond girl from his Ohio hometown. But her own innocence and naiveté, cut with his new cynicism, had left him exhausted and empty of affection for Anne within a year, so that when he left Canton for Greenwich Village in 1920 to study with Charles Henri, he refused to take her with him. Anne Zayre, his war bride, as he referred to her, had been incapable of making him jealous or sexually insecure, although before his departure for New York she had tried to hold him by deliberately conducting several flagrant love affairs, which had not upset him in the slightest. They had merely eased his guilt for abandoning her and her world and his familial past for a life in art.
Alicia, a much greater sexual threat, due to her physical beauty and Viennese charm and smooth intelligence, had up to now so flattered him by word and deed for his sexual prowess that it simply had never occurred to Jordan that another man could satisfy his wife as completely as he—until this man, Hubert St. Germain, came along, this melancholy widower of the woods, this man of a few well-chosen words who had never been farther from his traplines and hunting grounds than Albany and Schenectady, if he’d even been that far. It made no sense, Jordan thought. None.
Except for the old perennial sexual attraction of the bourgeois woman for the proletarian male. That must be it. It was an attractiveness that Jordan Groves, no matter how radical his politics, was unable to generate for himself, except among aristocratic women. Aristocratic women, he believed, had the same weakness for men like him as Alicia had for men like Hubert. That’s the explanation, he thought, it’s all about class, and felt a little better, his jealousy no longer quite so tainted by sexual insecurity. He was merely angry and confused again.
He was about to knock on the door to the living room and go inside, when the door opened as if of its own accord, and there was Vanessa, in tan slacks and one of her father’s flannel shirts untucked and open at the throat, her hair pulled back and tied with a black ribbon. She was barefoot and carried a small round tray with two mugs of steaming coffee.
Startled to see Jordan Groves, but evidently pleased, she gave him an open smile and leaned forward and kissed him on his unshaven cheek as if greeting a family friend. “Why, Jordan, I didn’t expect to see you out here this morning. And so early!” She brushed past him and set the tray on a table by the couch where Hubert sat and quickly disappeared inside again, returning with a third mug of coffee. “Isn’t this a beautiful morning?” she said and raised her cup to the lake and the pinking mist and, on the far side of the lake, the mountaintops floating above the mist.
Jordan picked up one of the mugs and sipped at the strong black coffee, closing his eyes for a moment as if to gather his thoughts. Vanessa took the seat he had vacated earlier and looked first at Hubert, then at Jordan standing beside her. Both Hubert and Vanessa seemed to be waiting for Jordan to speak.
“It’s all very strange,” Jordan finally said.
“What is?” she asked.
“The three of us out here together, politely drinking coffee by the lake, as if nothing’s happened.”
“But nothing has happened, Jordan,” Vanessa said, and she meant it, because in her mind nothing had happened that could not be explained away. At least nothing between her and her mother that Jordan could possibly know of, and nothing between her and Hubert, and so far nothing between her and Jordan. And since she had said not a word to anyone other than Hubert about seeing Alicia at Hubert’s cabin yesterday and drawing the obvious conclusion, she thought nothing had happened between the two men, either. Everything, for the moment, was neatly separated into discrete compartments that did not communicate with one another. Vanessa was still able to track all the lies and keep the contradictions and inconsistencies between them from revealing the larger, comprehensive truth. She believed that she alone knew that truth, of which Hubert knew a small part, and Jordan a lesser part, and his wife, Alicia, an even lesser part. Vanessa’s mother, Evelyn, knew her part of the truth—that her daughter had kidnapped and imprisoned her here in the middle of the vast wilderness of the Reserve and had somehow convinced the family’s longtime guide and caretaker to assist her in carrying out this crime. Thanks to Hubert St. Germain, Evelyn Cole was free now to move about the camp and was no longer tied to a chair and gagged, as long as she stayed inside the main building and out of sight. If she did not try to escape, Hubert had said, he wouldn’t tie her up, while behind him Vanessa had nodded threateningly over his shoulder. Hubert had tried to explain to Evelyn Cole, as if it were a perfectly reasonable thing, why her daughter was doing this to her.
Evelyn Cole was no longer afraid that Vanessa was going to kill her. Not as long as Hubert was present. But the man was inarticulate and not very bright and was obviously smitten with Vanessa and in her thrall. He didn’t know the half of it, anyhow, Evelyn believed—that Vanessa’s rage and insane need to punish her mother had little to do with her fear of being sent to a mental hospital in Zurich or of being cut out of her inheritance from her grandparents and father. No, it was rooted somehow in the distant past, in the darkness of her early childhood and the sordid things she imagined had occurred there. Most of Evelyn Cole’s own memories of those years were cloudy and indistinct, blighted by a pervasive, unaccountable, nameless shame. But, really, she was sure that nothing terrible had happened in Vanessa’s childhood. Certainly nothing at the hands of her father. There were no naked photographs of Vanessa that she knew of, although she had not gone through her late husband’s files, as Vanessa thought, or his albums. Somehow she had been afraid to examine them.
The guide had made several halfhearted attempts to explain to Evelyn Cole why Vanessa was doing this to her and had asked her to reconsider her decision to send Vanessa to Zurich and agree to turn her daughter’s inheritance over to her and, as he put it, “let bygones be bygones.” And if Evelyn agreed, the man said, he would take her back to the Tamarack Club tomorrow and would even be willing to drive her home to Tuxedo Park in her car. “Miss Cole can stay here at the lake, if she wants, and I’ll come back up on the train,” he said, adding that he’d need a few dollars’ advance for the fare.
Evelyn had agreed at once, but Vanessa read her mind and told the guide that her mother was lying, that as soon as she got back to the city she would take out a fresh set of commitment papers and would send the sheriff here to carry her out of the Reserve in a straitjacket, tossing her in a paddy wagon and driving her to some upstate insane asylum, where she’d be confined with the lunatics for the rest of her life. It would be worse than sending her to the hospital in Zurich, she had said to Hubert. And the man had believed her, and when the three of them had finished eating supper, he had locked Evelyn in the bedroom again. “I’m sorry to have to do this, Mrs. Cole,” he had said to her. “Maybe in the morning you two will see more eye to eye.” Then he had gone outside and closed and hooked the winter shutters over the bedroom and bathroom windows, plunging both rooms into darkness.
Out on the porch, Jordan Groves said to Vanessa, “Look, I came out here this morning to talk to you. I don’t need ol’ Hubert here to hang around while I’m doing it. I don’t know what you two have going on between you, but I’ve got enough reas
ons of my own to want to drive the man into the ground with a hammer. So if you value his physical well-bring, you’ll tell him to disappear for a while, until I’m gone from here. Then you can resume whatever it is you two were doing before I interrupted. All right?”
“All right,” she said. “But, believe me, there’s nothing going on between us. Hubert, do you mind?”
He said no, he didn’t mind and got up and left the porch for the deck outside, disappearing in the direction of the outbuildings among the trees in back—the guesthouse, the toolshed, cookshack and woodshed, the outhouse, and the open lean-to where the help slept.
Afraid that her mother, still locked inside the bedroom, might hear the artist’s voice and cry out for help, Vanessa needed to get Jordan Groves away from the main building. “Let’s walk down by the lake,” she suggested, and the two left the porch and made their way across the sloping, rust-colored blanket of pine needles down to the rocky shore. She needed to keep the two men apart, too. Hubert, his resolve somewhat softened by her mother’s pleas last night, was not an altogether reliable ally in this and might take it into his mind to confide in Jordan or ask for his help, and she had no idea whose side Jordan would take in this, once he knew the truth.
He pulled his leather jacket off and spread it across the hull of Hubert’s overturned guide boat, against the dew. They leaned back on the boat and held the mugs of coffee close to their mouths, warming their faces and hands, and gazed at the rising mist and the smooth, black surface of the lake. A pair of loons cruised low over the lake from north to south and dropped into the water with a quiet splash. Every few seconds the water was puckered by feeding trout and then was still again.
“I keep looking along the shore for Daddy’s ashes,” she said. “Or do you think when they hit the water they just sank?”
“The ash dissolved right away, probably. He’s part of the lake now. It’s what he wanted, right?”
“What about the bigger bits and pieces? There were some. I looked.”
“On the bottom, I expect. Or in the belly of a lake trout. Watch what you catch and eat,” he said.
“Jordan, really!” she said and smiled. “Where’s your airplane? How’d you get out here?” she asked.
“Anchored in a cove up a ways. No sense in advertising its presence.”
“I didn’t hear it come in,” she said and wondered if her mother had.
“I cut the engine back pretty far. Practically glided it in.” He turned to Vanessa then and said, “I know you saw my wife over at Hubert’s place yesterday.”
“Yes. I did.”
“And what did you make of it?”
“Make of it? Why, nothing. I went there to hire Hubert to bring in supplies to Rangeview. I had business with him. I assume she did, too. That’s all. Why, was there more to it than that?”
“A lot more. What’s he doing here now?”
“You’re changing the subject, Jordan. And it’s not really any of your business anyhow,” she said. “But if you must know, he rowed out with the second load of supplies after dark, so I suggested he sleep on the porch and go back in daylight.”
“Well, that’s not what he told me. Anyhow, what he’s doing out here is my business. The man’s been sleeping with my wife. She’s in love with him, she says. So if he’s sleeping with you, too, I’d like to know it. It’s got nothing to do with you. You’re free to sleep with anyone you damn well please.”
“Thank you very much.” She laughed lightly and lay the palm of her hand against his cheek. “No, Jordan dear, I’m not sleeping with Hubert. He’s very pretty, and sexy in a stolid sort of way. But there’s nothing between us. I’m curious, though. What did Hubert tell you?”
“About why he’s out here? He said he was helping you with your mother. Didn’t make sense, so I didn’t believe him. I don’t believe you, either. The fact is, I’m reasonably sure my wife’s in love with a man who’s screwing at least one other woman. You. And probably a couple more for good measure. I’m going to see that she knows it, and I’m going to take the bastard down for it.”
“For what?”
“For deceiving her. And me. And deceiving you. Though I don’t expect you’re in love with him, too. Are you?”
Vanessa laughed again. “Oh, if I’m in love with anyone, Jordan Groves, it’s probably you,” she said. Smiling, she put her mug down on the boat and kissed him, sweetly, sincerely, not quite passionately, but capable of becoming passionate in a matter of seconds, he could tell. Reluctantly, he removed her hands from his face and pushed her away, and her expression suddenly darkened, and she said, “Oh, dear.”
He followed her gaze and saw what she saw—Hubert St. Germain trudging slowly toward them, head down, hands at his sides, and a few feet behind him, Evelyn Cole. She walked woodenly, but with calm determination, her face cold and tightly knotted. And she held a double-barreled shotgun aimed at his back.
“What the hell is this?” Jordan said.
“Oh, Christ, she’s got one of Daddy’s guns,” Vanessa whispered.
They drew near, and in a trembling voice Evelyn Cole told Hubert to stop right there. “Mr. Groves, I need you to take me out of here in your airplane,” she said.
Hubert said, “I went to check on her, and she was waiting with the gun. It was in the closet. We forgot.” He looked glum, as required by his lines, but also oddly relieved, and Jordan wondered if this were an event somehow rehearsed and staged for his benefit, some kind of weird, amateurish piece of theater.
“He doesn’t have his airplane, Mother! Please, put the gun down. You don’t need the gun!”
“No, I do have it. I have my airplane,” Jordan said. “But somebody tell me what the hell this is all about.”
“They’ve gone crazy, Mr. Groves! Crazy! Both of them. They won’t let me leave. You have to take me out in your airplane! Where is it?”
“He doesn’t have it here, Mother. He came by boat. Hubert brought him in, didn’t you, Hubert?” Vanessa looked at the guide and then at Jordan Groves with pleading eyes, Lie for me, please. Both of you, goddamnit, lie for me! Neither man’s eyes answered one way or the other.
Jordan took several steps to his right, separating himself from Vanessa and the others. Evelyn Cole watched him warily, but kept the shotgun trained on Hubert’s back. The end of the barrel wobbled a little, Jordan noticed, as if it had grown heavy to her. He said, “I don’t know what’s going on, but it can’t be worth someone’s getting shot. Whyn’t you let me have that gun, Mrs. Cole? I’ll fly you out, if you’ll give me the gun.” He extended his hands, palms up.
“No, you can’t!” Vanessa cried. “You don’t have your airplane! Don’t believe him, Mother. He’s lying. He came over in Hubert’s boat. See? It’s right here,” Vanessa said and patted the hull of the guide boat.
“Put the gun down, Mrs. Cole. We don’t need anybody getting hurt. We can all discuss whatever’s going on. Whyn’t you give the gun to me?” Jordan said and with both hands extended took a step closer to her.
“I heard the airplane,” Evelyn Cole said. “I was awake, and I heard the airplane. They’ve kept me prisoner, Mr. Groves. My daughter’s lost her mind, and this one, he’s helping her.”
Hubert slowly turned around, saw the over and under barrels of the shotgun a few inches from his chest, and inhaled sharply at the sight. He wasn’t sure the woman had ever fired a gun. Dr. Cole was the hunter. A good shot, too. But he’d never seen the wife with a gun in her hand. He looked along the length of the under barrel and saw that the safety was off and knew that the shotgun was hair triggered and remembered the box of shells stored in the drawer of the gun rack in the doctor’s clothes closet. He concluded that both barrels of the shotgun were loaded. The woman was having trouble holding the gun, he could tell. The barrel was ninety centimeters long and in her weakened condition was too heavy for her. If she doesn’t fire it first, Hubert decided, she will have to lower it. The moment for her to fire the gun has almost passed, he thou
ght.
Mrs. Cole took her eyes off the guide to glance at Jordan Groves’s large open hands, then his eyes. She saw that he was a kind man, a worried man, and that, unlike the guide, he was not caught up in Vanessa’s insanity. “Please, Mr. Groves,” she said to him. “Please help me.”
“Vanessa,” he said. “For God’s sake, let me take her out of here, before something really bad happens.”
“It already has,” she said. Suddenly Hubert grabbed the barrels of the gun and wrenched the weapon to his left, with both hands pushing it away from Jordan and Vanessa so that if it went off it would fire harmlessly into the air. Evelyn Cole tugged fiercely back, surprising Hubert with her strength, causing him to yank hard on the barrels. The woman pulled back, but then lost her grip on the stock, and suddenly the barrels of the gun in Hubert’s hands felt like twinned snakes. He let go of the barrels and the shotgun flipped 180 degrees in the air, end over end. In precise, unforgettable detail Hubert and Jordan and Vanessa saw it happen. They watched in horror as the hair-triggered shotgun fell through the air between them and Vanessa’s mother, and the stock hit the ground first, and the gun fired. Both barrels emptied almost simultaneously into the woman’s chest. The force of it blew her backward the length of her small body and tossed her onto the ground in a crumpled heap, arms and legs akimbo. Her head flopped once, twice, then was still. Blood bubbled from her open mouth onto the hard ground. The dark, fist-size hole in her chest instantly turned scarlet and filled and overflowed. Her blue eyes stayed open, as if in permanent surprise.
No one uttered a word. The morning mist had risen above the warming lake and had dissipated. The sky was cloudless and azure colored, and on the far side of the lake the mountains of the Great Range glowed in bright sunlight. Jordan looked across the glassy water, and each individual tree—one and one and one—leaped from the bright greenery, sharp to the eye, even from this distance. A perfect Adirondack day. The sound of the shotgun blast echoed back once from the high gray cliffs. The two black loons broke free of the water and flew low to the northern end of the lake and disappeared above the trees.