About the Author (29 page)

I also know I must destroy it, and at once; I know that as incontrovertibly as I knew, so long ago, that I had to burn Stewart’s version of
Almost Like Suicide
. It will be no easy thing to destroy the single act of literary creation I have waited my whole life to perform. But such is the complex history of this manuscript’s birthing that its very existence predetermines that it must immediately be made
not
to exist. This batch of pages must die so that I may continue to live on with Janet—Janet, who will walk through the door of this house just a little more than forty-eight hours from now. So I have finished ahead of my deadline. For what else is there to tell? I have brought these reflections up to the present moment. I have emptied myself of the past. I see, through the small window above my writing desk, that the sun has risen; I have worked all night. It is morning. It is time. It is time for me to commit these pages to their final resting place. Time for me to wipe the slate clean. In consigning these pages to the void, I command Stewart’s shade—and now Les’s as well—to trouble me no more. May they forever rest in peace.

Or not so fast. In the hour since I set down the above sentences, there has been a—what word should I use?—an
interesting
development. Exactly what might be going on, I cannot be sure. That something
is
going on, I have no doubt.

In preparation for torching these pages, I decided to drive down to Ernie’s to pick up a bottle of lighter fluid. Strictly speaking, an inflammatory agent is not
necessary
to ensure that paper will burn swiftly and completely. So I suppose I must admit to a slight impulse toward procrastination. If only for another half hour, I wanted to savor the sense of fullness and completion that has come with filling these pages with my
own
words; I wanted to go out into the world, just once, aware that a manuscript wholly of my own creation was sitting, snugly hidden, in the locked bottom drawer of my desk.

And so I got up and drove down to Ernie’s. After so many days spent in the universe of writing, it felt strange to be in the world of the living, the actual. For over a week, the reality of these paragraphs has superseded all other realities, so that when I walked out to my car, the present-tense world hit me with the force and vividness of a hallucination: each blade of grass on the front lawn looked as bright and shiny as a sliver of green plastic; the cumulonimbus clouds banked in the blue sky seemed laughably substantial and close by, as if I might be able to reach up and hug one of them to me like a pillow; my tired Toyota seemed a miracle of human ingenuity and engineering, all arabesques of lovingly bent metal and tilted planes of glass. The very air struck me as a medium of thitherto unnoticed mobility and texture, after I had breathed, for so long, the still, aromaless atmosphere of reminiscence. It was as if the act of conjuring up remembered sensory perceptions had stripped away a layer of dullness that had caked my senses, so that the world leapt up to my ears, eyes, nose, and skin.

It is to this heightened perceptual acuity that I attribute what happened next. Having driven down to the village, I parked outside Ernie’s General Store. Before getting out of the car, I paused for a moment, turned, and absorbed the vista of lake and surrounding hills.

And that was when I saw him.

A pale, heavyset man standing on the edge of the sidewalk directly across the street. His flat, untanned meat slab of a face, unpleasantly lipless, was partially obscured behind a pair of wire-rimmed aviator sunglasses. On any other day, I might not have noticed him; on this very special day, when my radar was working at fullest capacity, I could not have missed him. Partly it was that he was the only entity standing stock-still on the sidewalk, where bikinied teens, poloed yuppies, and grunged twenty-somethings filed in both directions past him. Partly it was that he was the only person standing with his back to the gasp-provokingly beautiful view of the lake and hills. Mostly it was the way he twitched his head, almost imperceptibly, to scan the people who passed by. There was, or seemed to be, something unnatural, something stagy and forced, about the interest he was pretending
not
to direct toward the unfolding street scene. Like a novice stage actor who doesn’t quite know how to hold the angle of his head, or where to put his hands, he tried, in vain, to blend in with the flow of rainbow-colored life swirling all around him, and the more he tried, the more he called attention to himself as someone who was in town for reasons other than enjoying the long last weekend of summer. For it happened to be the Friday before Labor Day—the anniversary of my
own
first glimpse of New Halcyon, when I rolled into town anonymously to search out the mysterious Janet Greene. Was I sensing some echo between my former self and this stiff, edgy stranger?

I had been observing him for less than a minute when suddenly he stepped forward off the sidewalk and trudged, with a forward-leaning, heavy-footed gait, straight in my direction. My heart jumped violently as he drew up to my car. I snatched up from the passenger seat a section of the newspaper and held it up over my face. He stumped by and disappeared into Ernie’s.

I lowered the paper and watched, through the store window, as the man sauntered up to the counter. I saw Ernie’s narrow, cigarette-ravaged head, with its oiled pompadour of jet-black hair, tilt with curiosity at the man’s approach. He, too, had sniffed something unusual about the stranger.

The man reached into a back pocket, withdrew a walletlike object, and flipped it open. Ernie nodded. They exchanged some words, and then the man conjured another object—possibly a photograph—from the breast pocket of his coat. Ernie began to nod vigorously. He pointed up the lake. The cop turned to look in the direction of Ernie’s pointing finger. Then he turned back and gave a short, curt nod, repocketed the object, and turned and walked out of the store. Again I shielded my face as he passed my side window. He walked across the street, got into a nondescript four-door sedan, and drove off.

When the car had disappeared from view, I got out and hurried into the store. Ernie smiled at me as I approached the counter with a small tin of lighter fluid. “And let me have a pack of Camel Lights,” I said.

Ernie pulled the cigarettes from the display rack and slapped them on the counter. He smiled at me the smile of a man who has some juicy gossip to impart. “Got a feelin’ there won’t be too much more trouble up at the Yellow House,” he said.

“Why’s that, Ernie?” I asked as I thumbed through my billfold for a ten.

“Just had a cop in here come looking for Les. Showed me a picture of her and everything. He come all the way up from New York City. So they must want her pretty bad.”

“Did he say what they want her for?” I asked as casually as I could. I placed the bill in Ernie’s callused palm.

“Oh, hell no,” Ernie said. “He was one of them cops don’t tell you nothin’.” He punched the cash-register buttons. “But I pointed him up the Yellow House way. I told him that I ain’t seen the girl in a week or so. He looked surprised.” Ernie fingered my change from the drawer and handed it over. There was a guilty look on his face now. “I mean, I had to tell him where she
lives
,” he said. “You play dumb, they haul you right in on an obstruction-of-justice charge.”

I assured him that he’d done the right thing. Then I quit the store and drove back to the house.

Judging from what Ernie reported of the cop’s inquiries, and judging also from the way the cop was tensely scanning the sidewalk crowds, he clearly has no inkling that Les is dead. The cop expects to
find
her here. Which in turn suggests that he must be following up on some lawlessness that Les committed back in New York. I figure it must be in connection with that beating she received, more than two months ago, at the hands of “New York’s finest”—that pummeling that left both her eyes blackened and prompted her flight from New York to “lie low” here, in New Halcyon. Les said then, “They’ll never think to look for me up here.” Famous last words. The NYPD must have stumbled on some clue in her belongings in New York—a Vermont bus schedule? an old Greyhound receipt?—that put this cop on her trail. Could he be the one who beat her so badly? He certainly looks big and brutal enough.

So now what? Nothing, I guess. I wait. I wait until the dragnet widens out, as it will inevitably do, when they find that she is missing. I suppose that sooner or later, the cops will start making inquiries about Les in the underworld of local drug dealers, one of whom might pass along a tip about her quixotic drug-smuggling mission. Which will, it seems reasonable to surmise, lead to a search along the smuggling route: the Ghost River. Which, in turn, will (or may) lead to the detective’s catching a sudden telltale whiff, as of rotting seafood, amid the trees.

Frankly, I’m looking forward to their finding the body. It has greatly contributed to my anxiety over the past week that she has not yet been discovered. It’s not that I fear they’ll find some evidence linking me to the crime (we’ve been through all that); it’s a question of
closure
. Mind you, now that the authorities are on the case, I do find myself wondering if Les left any living informants who could connect me to her adventure in the woods. Did she tell Alain of my role as courier? I sincerely doubt it. She was too crafty, too cunning, to offer up any information to Alain that he did not strictly need to know.

But just for argument’s sake, suppose she
did
tell Alain about my part in the smuggling scheme. And suppose that the police investigation does wend its way to Alain’s doorstep—as it’s sure to do eventually. He would be a fool not to rat me out to the police in exchange for leniency toward himself. Such deals are the very foundation upon which the American justice system is built! And after Alain spills the beans, it will be only a matter of time before the police arrive at this house to speak with me, and to request that I come with them to the police station in order to supply them with a set of my fingerprints!

Is this mere paranoia? The product of an overactive imagination? I do not know. But one thing is certain. The burning of this manuscript is, for the time being, postponed. At least until I find out a little more about what the fuck is going on.

Just got back from another trip into town. Don’t know what I hoped to achieve. I just couldn’t sit up here, on this isolated hillside, while I knew he was down there snooping around.

In my car, I made several slow passes through the holiday throngs. No sign of the cop. Then I drove over to Les’s place. Naturally, I did not venture down her driveway, but I did pause at its entrance to see if I could spot the cop’s car. I could not. I drove up the road a hundred yards and began to turn around in the Halcyon Inn’s parking lot. It was there, in the lot, in a space between two other vehicles, that I saw the dark sedan. Parked there plain as day. There was no sign of the cop himself. After a moment’s swift debate, I parked in a far corner of the lot, then got out and ambled over to the sedan. I saw what I had not noticed earlier: the license plate carried a car-rental sticker from an agency in Manhattan. Why, I asked myself, would a cop be driving a rental car? I would have expected the department to have an entire fleet of unmarked cruisers for jobs such as this.

That wasn’t the only mystery about the car. When I glanced inside, I was amazed by what I saw. It was a sty. Crushed pizza boxes, coffee cups, cigarette packs, scattered highway maps, newspapers, bundles of what appeared to be soiled clothing—it looked like a car in which someone had been
living
for the past week. In no way did this squalor accord with what I imagined would be a lawman’s militaristic fastidiousness. Furthermore, there was no police radio, no walkie-talkie, none of the accouterments of the cop’s trade. Nothing, that is, except for a pair of steel handcuffs peeking out from beneath the edge of a ketchup-smeared Styrofoam burger container. Well, that certainly seemed to clinch matters.

I turned and began to head back, quite quickly, to my car. That was when a voice hailed me.

“Cal!”

I slowly turned.

Coming down the path from the inn was red-faced Bantam O’Hanlon, general manager of the Halcyon Inn—a friendly, ineffectual, hard-drinking prepster who had cornered me at a cocktail party six months before and praised my novel with the observation that a certain scene describing an act of oral sex had sent him scurrying to the lavatory to service himself. “Now that’s what I call descriptive prose!” he had said, beaming. He was smiling now, too, as he strode toward me, his hand extended.

“What brings the local literary celebrity to our humble establishment?” he asked, clasping my hand.

I said something vague about having considered popping in for lunch but having forgotten about the holiday crowds and all, so . . .

Bantam said that he would move heaven and earth to fit me in. But I demurred, freeing my hand and mumbling about how it looked a little crowded.

“Suit yourself. Oh, say, Cal,” he whispered, sidling up so close to me that I could smell not only the liquor on his breath but even a whiff of the mixer he’d been using (cranberry juice). “We may have the makings of your first mystery novel on our hands.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“Had to free up a room, pronto, for a gentleman with the New York City Police Department.” He nudged my ribs with his elbow and executed a stagy wink. His eyes, I noticed, were bloodshot. They also contained, in their weary depths, a certain unsavory look of wounded secrecy, the origins of which were anyone’s guess—even, I daresay, Bantam’s.

“Really?” I said, affecting only minimal interest.

“Detective Thomas Cantucci, NYPD,” Bantam said in a mock Brooklyn brogue. “I tried to get him to tell me what he was here for, official business or a vacation. All he’d say was that he was ‘on duty.’ I’m telling you, Cal, I bet there’s a murderer hiding out in our burgh. I just know it. You can write about it in your next book.”