Long Shot (25 page)

Looking down, he saw he was square in the path again, though he'd stumbled on it aimlessly enough. The sight of it trailing away through the trees reminded him of the fire he planned to lay. The rain grew lighter and lighter. He had to get back to his place, he thought, before it let up and made the night too gentle. He couldn't wait to get into bed.

“We'll have breakfast up at the inn,” he said. “I'll meet you there at eight.”

“Say seven,” she countered. “Morning's the nicest time of all. You want to come get your book?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I'm reading something else right now. Good night.”

“Good night.”

And they tipped their hats like kinsmen met on a forest trail. It was the ideal way to see your friends, Greg thought as he headed down the path. For backdrop, you had the crackling air and the various face of the woodland slope. When you took up your journey again, you went with the memory of one irreducible face, which quickened your heart like a thumbnail sketch in a locket. All the while, you were drinking in the enormous world of the perfectly real.

Last year's leaves in silken piles. The blue-black gleam of rain on rocks. Nothing got saved and nothing spent. People could meet in the middle of things without treading on anyone's property. He walked downhill through the overarching trees, and he thought how the breeze that followed a storm was light as the breathing that came with sleep. The longer he stayed outside, in fact, the plainer did all things seem. Was it only two or three hours ago that he cursed this raw and sunless country? Well, so what. He admitted the inconsistency quite gladly. Took a certain pride in it, almost.

He came out of the woods and saw his cabin at the foot of the hill, a single lamp at a single window. Another time, he might have asked what good it was all going to do him in
real
life—that is, the far-off corner of Cherokee and Franklin. For once in his life, he didn't care. The first star clicked in the clearing sky like a flashbulb. The crickets skirled in the hillside grass. All across the mountains, there was no straight line discernible between any one thing and any other. The world was nothing but arcs and whorls and random clusters.

She's right
, he thought as he trotted zigzag down the slope. She was just like him.

chapter 6

“‘
THE
C
ARBON
M
OUNTAIN
P
LAYERS
present
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, a play by William Shakespeare.' In case you're not up on your authors,” said Greg. He tossed the flyer to Vivien. “With Artie Balducci as Puck, you'll notice. That's the fall of their freshman year. In the winter, he did
The Country Wife
. In the spring, a very racy
Glass Menagerie
. I have the reviews, if you'd like to see them,” he said, holding up a sheaf of documents.

They sat on the marble steps in the sun, the mountains spread before them like a postcard. Dotting the distance here and there, they could see the red of a barn or the skyward thrust of a village steeple. Mostly, they noticed the first faint green like a mist in the wintry trees. The April sun had drawn the sap, till the buds glowed greenish-gold. The morning was warm as California, though the buds did not yet dare to break and send out leaves. There was still a month of drift and savage changes coming—still a blizzard waiting in the wings, and a couple of killing frosts. Today was just an article of faith.

“So what?” she threw back with a shrug. “So Artie used to be an actor too.”

“Not
too
,” corrected Greg, as he stood up and put his arm around a fluted white stone column. He swung on it like a lamppost. “Jasper never acted once,” he said, and waited a beat before he went on with the résumé. “
Sophomore
year,” he announced. “Artie Balducci in
West Side Story
—very big hit up here. Then a one-man cabaret, the whole of it written by him, with original music. Right after that, a season of summer stock in the Adirondacks. Junior year: They let him drop all his courses, so he could stage the
Oedipus
cycle.”

Vivien had to give him credit. If all of this was news to her, it was probable nobody knew. The thing itself was not as startling as the fact that no reporter ever turned it up. She could hardly see why Artie's past should have to be kept a secret. But then, this whole approach was the last thing she expected. Having hiked for an hour straight up these untracked hills, she supposed the signs would be a bit more mystical.

“He was some kind of regional theater, all to himself,” concluded Greg. “Twenty-four hours a day—except for the time he spent up here.”

“Here,” as far as Greg had been able to ascertain, was a kind of honor society. In the midst of the Great Depression, a beer-baron alumnus had funded the carting of eighteen tons of yellow-veined marble halfway up the mountainside. The membership convened every Thursday and Sunday evening, where it underwent a form of group interaction somewhere between a cocktail hour and a seance. Though the story of Jasper Cokes had always had the three of them back-slapping pals from the day they arrived on campus, in fact they never even met till they got elected into this, in the fall of their junior year. Only then, maybe six months later, did they further decide to share a room.

“How do you figure it?”

“Well,” she said, as she hefted the documentation, “it looks from this like Artie ought to have been the star. By
rights
, that is. By rights, it seems like Jasper should have been parking Artie's car. But Jesus, Greg. What is it with you? You still think cream's the thing that rises? No wonder you can't sell a script.”

It irritated her mightily, if only because he made her feel like such a cynic next to him. And she wasn't that way at all. She was only fifty pages shy of finishing
Walden
, damn it—thus refused to come across as anything less than pure of heart. But she couldn't sit by and let him go off on a tangent as to how it might have been. What was the point? There wasn't enough for murder in any of
this
.

“Mm,” said Greg, with a sudden squint in his eye. He might have been reading the wind on a weather vane, far in the valley below. He went on, half to himself. “But that's the way it must have been. It was
Artie
they planned to make a star.”

“Listen,” she pleaded, slapping down on the step beside her all his stack of evidence, “this is all
my
fault. I should have told you. There's proof. Carl flew all the way back to L.A., the Monday Jasper died. Fictitious name and everything.” Then, by way of apology, she tacked on a bit of a motive. She said: “See, Jasper was just about to fire him.”

“I thought we'd agreed to hear
my
side first.”

“But it's more than that,” she protested. The sharpness had fled from her voice, as if she longed to apologize for knowing more than her share. She spoke it gently, like somebody breaking terrible news. “Artie wasn't there that night. Not till he came in later and found them dead. He's got fifty different witnesses could tell you where he was from five to seven. Honest.”

“Are you done?”

“Now don't get mad.”

“What you don't seem to understand,” he said, pointing a finger at her like the barrel of a gun, “is that we have reached an impasse.” He cocked his thumb as if to click the hammer. “This part's over, Viv. We got no choice. You have it out with
your
killer. I'll have it out with
mine
. I heard you, all right? Now you listen.”

He went to the wooden box he'd hauled to the porch from deep within the airless marble room. He'd planned on bringing her in, so they could sit in the faded wing chairs, hard by the dusty fireplace. The only light would be what fell through the open door. She would see what it was to be surrounded by the aimless memorabilia of men who assumed the future cared.

But Vivien, once she'd seen it, wouldn't cross the threshold. It was more of a tomb than she bargained for. She'd had her fill of death, not two weeks since. She saw now how it got them off on the wrong foot. How could he ever begin to sustain his atmosphere, working against the morning sun and the reach of the mountain vista? She'd fucked around with his staging.

“All right,” he said, pulling out Exhibit A.

She knew it from Steepside: Jasper's yearbook. He thumbed to the place he'd marked and passed it over. She looked at a gray group photograph she was sure she'd looked at time and again.

“There are sixteen men in the club at any given time,” he said. “Eight from the graduating class. Eight from the class below.”

She nodded and stared along the line, automatically picking out
her
three. Carl was third from the left, the only one in a tie. Jasper, last on the right, grinned as he held two fingers up like rabbit ears behind Artie's head. She felt the raw edge of grief well up, at so much innocence all in a row. Eight men stood on this very porch where she now sat in silence. They looked out over the photographer's shoulder and saw the world was at their feet. Nothing could touch them.

“This one,” Greg said, crouched at her ear. He reached around with a felt-tip pen and drew a circle round the face of the man on the left of Artie. He lowered the pen to the string of names that made up the caption. “Gary Barlow,” he said, laying a line of ink beneath the words.

“Never heard of him,” she said.

“Right,” he nodded—not a bit surprised. He flipped to the back impatiently. “See, here's the graduation. Here—you've got all your societies marching, every one with a banner. Notice the letters.”

He touched the tip of the pen to what looked like a square of satin, held aloft on a pole. Under it bobbed a wave of caps and gowns. Three Greek letters she couldn't begin to decipher were blazoned on the banner. Greg might have read them out like a line of Homer, except his Greek was as bad as hers. Instead, he tapped her shoulder and pointed up, at the pediment over the door. The letters cut in the stone were a perfect match.

“Now,” he said, as if the trick were all in place at last, “I want you to count. How many men in the group?”

Seven.

“All right,” she said. “What happened to Gary Barlow?”

She hoped she didn't sound bored, but somebody had to pick up the pace. Having gathered speed so recently herself, she began to think that fast was the safest way. If he'd only state his evidence succinctly. Why did they have to have separate suspects? Couldn't they narrow it down right here? Either he had the goods or he didn't.

“Died,” said Greg. “Five weeks before commencement. The third of April, to be precise.”

“How?” she demanded sharply, like she wanted it over and done with.

“Exposure, I think they call it,” he said. He sounded uncertain. He reached in his conjurer's box again and brought up a yellow clipping. “It's very hard to say without an autopsy. But they wanted the matter buried quick, so they couldn't be bothered with all the fine points. There isn't a paper in twenty miles of here. We've only got the campus rag to go on. From what I can gather, it started out as a Boy Scout trip.”

She read the brittle account in snatches, while Greg spun the story out in more detail. They had eight men in four canoes. They paddled down the Connecticut River, from close to the source high up in the mountains, as far as the Massachusetts border. Very uneventful. The country wasn't especially wild, the water hardly ever white. When they came ashore at night, they always managed to reconnoiter a liquor store at a close remove. After six days in the bush, they were met at a prearranged spot, where Vermont Route 2 crossed the water. A couple of pledges drove down in vans. They lashed the canoes to the roof and stowed the gear. They piled in, five in a van, and—

“That's when they had the idea,” said Greg, as he paced the columned porch. “I don't know who it was, but somebody says ‘Hey, I'm gonna
walk
home. Anyone want to join me?'” Pause. “You have to be twenty-two to understand the moment. There's a ripple of laughter. Then one steps out—then two and three. You got four altogether.” He ticked them off on his fingertips. “Jasper, Artie, Barlow, and another guy. They get out their packs and sleeping bags. The only map they can find is a Texaco road map. Doesn't matter. Once you start a thing like this, you don't turn back—for anything.”

She could see the kind of day it must have been. Late afternoon, with a pale, banana-yellow April sun. Chilly as hell. A day not so different from what today would soon turn into, once the sun was past its peak. The four men set out overland. She could see them, whistling “The Colonel Bogie March”—as if the rolling hills of Vermont led all the way to Katmandu.

“Every now and then, they'd cross a country road,” said Greg. “They'd take a break in a small-town bar. The mud was up to their ears, of course, but say it was warm for the end of winter. They probably froze their ass at night, but the tougher it got, the better they liked it. There was really no danger. They could always follow a valley and find a road. They were only six miles south of Carbon Mountain when it hit.”

She had no idea what a blizzard was like. It had never so much as crossed her mind.

“If they'd only kept going north,” he said, “they would have made it easy.”

He was standing between two pillars, holding on and leaning out as if to get a bird's eye view. Vivien sat on the step below and narrowed her eyes to picture it. Knowing half the people made it twice as hard. If they'd never seen fit to mention it, what made it any business of hers? She tried to see it at one remove, shooting it like a movie, with anyone else in the lead but Jasper. She looked along the placid range, where the near edge of spring had taken hold, and measured six miles as the crow flew.

Greg now built to the climax. Snow was driving down. The four men staggered forward, blind before the first inch fell. The wind or the hill's steep slope threw them off course in a flash. Still Greg seemed to hold out hope. For a moment more, he appeared to cling to the notion of change implicit in all things not complete. Somebody might yet pull out a compass. Somebody might see flares.