The Digger's Rest (2 page)

He left the table and went into the kitchen,
dialing the servants’ wall phone nervously. When he heard the
answering machine pick up, panic welled up inside him. He went back
to the table mechanically and excused himself politely to those
seated on both sides of him, then headed for the entry hall.

“
My overcoat, Mimi, if you don’t mind,”
he said in Spanish to the small, brown-skinned woman dressed in the
standard black-and-white maid’s uniform.

“
Si, Senor Edgeworth. Aqui,” she
replied, smiling and nodding as she handed him his black winter
overcoat. She always appreciated the fact that he spoke to her
respectfully in her own language, unlike Mrs. Edgeworth, who seemed
to believe that if she spoke louder in English, her
Spanish-speaking maid would understand her better.

“
And please tell Mrs. Edgeworth that
I’ve gone out and will be back as soon as…” Before he could finish
his sentence, he heard Annette’s voice call to him from the other
end of the corridor.

“
Where are you going?” she asked, as
close to rushing as she ever got.

“
I have to go out, Annette,” he said
hurriedly.

“
What could be so important that you
would leave your guests and your family to go out on Christmas
Eve?” she asked, almost shouting then stopped to think for a
second. “You’re going to that boy again aren’t you? You’re leaving
me with a house full of guests to go to that…boy.” The distain in
her voice made him angry, but Annette didn’t give him time to
answer. “I’ve held my tongue until now about him, Jack, but enough
is enough. He’s not your problem and he’s certainly not mine. For
the life of me, I just don’t understand what kind of hold he has
over you.” She paused to think again for a moment, her hands on her
hips then raised her head, her eyes aglow with the dawn of an
original thought. “You’re in love with him, aren’t you? That’s it,
isn’t it?” she hissed at him.

He stopped dead in his tracks, shaken by the
incredible selfishness of her accusation.

“
Why you blistering bitch! The fact
that you would even ask me that after twenty years of marriage
shows how very little you know me,” he said turning to glare at
her, the color of years of restrained fury at allowing himself to
be taken for granted by her for so long coming up in his face,
“…and after all I’ve done for you: loved you, taken care of you,
that’s the best you can come up with? But I guess that’s what it’s
always been about for you, what I could do for you, being Mrs. Jack
Edgeworth of Park Avenue instead of just my wife. Did you ever love
me? I don’t suppose so. Sometimes I wonder if you even have a pulse
anymore.”

He stopped then, his little voice
speaking to him again, shouting,
Something’s terribly wrong. Hurry.
Another bolt
of urgency shot through him. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he
said, pointing his finger at her commandingly, direct, cold,
staring her straight in the eye, “…and we’ll talk about this
then.”

“
Jack,” she said, grabbing his arm. “If
you walk out that door now, I’m taking the girls and I’m leaving.
I’ve had enough.”

“
Well, that goes for the both of us,”
he said, yanking his arm away from her roughly. “And as for the
girls, you took them away from me the day they were born, spoiling
them rotten, teaching them that I was nothing more than a fat
wallet held by…dirty hands,” he sneered and walked out the door,
slamming it behind him, leaving her with her mouth agape and
realizing she’d finally overstepped herself.

Jack Edgeworth was never a man to be
threatened…by anyone.

A yellow cab was cruising by just as
Jack rushed to the curb, his hand out. The snow was coming down so
heavily by then that the driver was going slow enough to pull over
right where Jack stood. He jumped in. “A Hundred and Tenth and
Fifth, and there’s a fifty in it for you if you hurry. Please
hurry. It’s important,” he told the driver, blood coursing wildly
in his veins, his little voice repeating over and over,
Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, SOMETHING’S
VERY TERRIBLY WRONG!

“
Yes, sir,” the driver replied and tore
off, leaving a shower of muddy snow flying in the air.

As soon as the cab pulled up to the corner of
a Hundred and Tenth and Fifth, Jack jumped out, flinging a fifty
dollar bill at the driver and shouting “Thanks” back over his
shoulder as he ran the two houses down the block to the cheap,
five-story, student housing walk-up.

He flew up the front steps three at a time,
jamming the buzzer furiously when he reached the top. A short,
round, balding man in a gray superintendent’s outfit came to the
door, scratching his head sleepily. “What is it?” he groaned as he
opened the door.

“
I’m Dr. Edgeworth, from the college.
Something’s wrong up in 5E. You must know the young man. I may need
you to help me get in,” Jack shouted, his panic growing every
second as he leapt up the stairs, the building super lagging behind
him. “Hurry, man!” Jack yelled back over his shoulder. “It’s an
emergency.”

Jack reached the door of 5E first, banging
wildly with his fist, “Mitchell! Mitchell! It’s Dr. Edgeworth. Are
you in there? Please let me in!” No response. By then the super was
behind him clumsily jangling the ring of keys in his hand. Jack
kept banging. “Please, Mitch. Let me in.” Still no response.

In the brief silence that followed, Jack
heard strains of music coming from underneath the door, recognizing
it immediately, Melanie Woodward’s Christmas song, ‘Poor in New
York at Christmas.’

“
Oh no, no. Please, my boy, no!” he
mumbled to himself, adrenaline shooting though his body like a
raging river, his panic peaking into a flood. “Help me, man. Help
me. Now!” he shouted at the bewildered super. The two men butted
their shoulders against the door and began slamming. The first time
it didn’t budge. The second time, it bowed and shook. The third
time it burst open, splinters flying everywhere. They were
in.

The inside of the tiny college apartment was
almost completely dark except for a small table lamp on a desk in
the far corner by the window, casting a dim, shadowy light on
travel posters of ancient ruins from all over the world. Jack
scanned the room looking for some sign of the boy, focusing on the
only other light in the room, from underneath the closed bathroom
door. “Oh God, no, please, no!” he cried to himself as he threw
himself at the bathroom door.

The lightweight, hollow door flew open.
Jack’s mind scattered at what he saw, dashing itself in every
direction for what to do. Instinctually he leapt to the boy’s body
in the water-filled bathtub, unconscious, blood pumping from a deep
gash in his right wrist, a puddle of it forming on the white tile
floor, an empty pill bottle having rolled a few inches from the
outstretched arm.

Jack’s mind exploded into overdrive as he
pulled the boy’s naked body, not yet twenty-one, from the tub onto
the cold tile floor, his long dark hair covering his face; frail
and thin from what must have been weeks of starving himself.

Jack cradled the boy’s pale body in his arms,
taking only the time to pull the silk tie from around his neck and
tie off the area above the gash in his wrist to stop the bleeding
before covering him with a towel from under the sink. Looking back
to the stunned super standing in the doorway, his eyes crazed with
urgency, he bellowed, “Don’t just fucking stand there! Call
9-11!”

As the super ran to use the phone, Jack held
the boy close to him like a baby, mumbling and crying to himself,
“Oh no, please, my brilliant boy, please no, no,” as if he were
gently rocking him to sleep to the sound of Melanie Woodward’s
‘Poor in New York at Christmas’ playing over and over in the other
room.

Chapter II

MITCHELL

(March 2006)

Well the years start coming and they don't
stop coming. Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running. Didn't
make sense not to live for fun. Your brain gets smart but your head
gets dumb. So much to do, so much to see. So what's wrong with
taking the back streets. You'll never know if you don't go. You'll
never shine if you don't glow. Hey now you're an All Star, get your
game on, go play. Hey now you're a Rock Star, get the show on get
paid. And all that glitters is gold Only shooting stars break the
mold.

All-Star

……
..As performed by
Smashmouth

The knocking got louder on the door of
apartment 7D of the Dakota apartment building on Central Park
West.

“
Dr. Bramson! I know you’re in there.
Please, wake up!”

Silence at first, then a shuffling sound from
the other side of the door followed by the click of a turning lock.
Simon Holly shuffled his feet waiting nervously, the weight of the
metal brace on his right leg telling him that he should have waited
for the elevator instead of deciding on the stairs in haste.

The door opened a crack. A gruff, garbled
voice came from the other side. “Whaddaya want, Simon? Come on,
it’s my day off and I have a screaming hangover. Let me sleep, will
ya?”

“
Dr. Edgeworth wants you to come to the
museum. Now! He’s been trying to call you all morning and when he
couldn’t reach you he sent me over to get you,” Simon said humbly.
He’d rather die than ever offend the man who meant everything to
him.

The chain rattled and the door opened slowly.
Behind it was a man’s figure in an L.L Bean Stewart plaid robe; a
pair of puffy, blood shot eyes squinting from the bright hallway
light as they glared at him through a mass of uncombed
chestnut-colored hair.

“
Okay, come on in,” Mitch grumbled,
putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder and pulling him in. Even a
hangover as gruesome as his couldn’t help but edge itself over into
fond affection when he saw those big, innocent, dark-blue eyes
staring at him through those big floppy black curls, reminding him
how sensitive Simon could be when it came to him. “Okay, what
exactly is it about the tenth century that can’t wait until I come
back to work tomorrow?” he asked jokingly, rubbing his throbbing
head with his hand, his mouth feeling like it was stuffed with
three thousand year old cotton linen with the mummy still intact.
“Don’t answer that. Just do me a favor and go put on a pot of
coffee…and bring me some Advil from the bottle by the microwave,
will ya? I’m gonna jump in the shower and try to scrub off last
night,” and headed toward the bathroom.

“
Yes, sir,” Simon replied nervously,
anxious as always to please him, and went in the opposite direction
toward the kitchen.

A few minutes later, Simon was knocking at
yet another door. “Dr. Bramson, I have your coffee and Advil here,”
he called through the door.

“
Come on in,” the voice called back
out. Simon opened the door and entered the steam-filled
room.

Stunned to see his intellectual and personal
hero standing there naked, carefully drying his shoulder-length
hair with a towel so as not to pull out the thick gold hoop
earrings he had in each ear, Simon’s natural modesty made him turn
his eyes downward immediately. But not before noticing that Dr.
Mitchell Bramson, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s wunderkind of
medieval art history and archaeology, had three-quarter sleeves of
the soldiers and knights, horses and ships of the Bayeux Tapestry,
the almost one thousand year old textile depicting William the
Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066, tattooed on each of his
well-worked arms.

Thoroughly embarrassed, but strangely
fascinated by the spectacle he’d just witnessed, Simon stood there
holding out the coffee cup and waiting for his next instruction.
“Well, give it here, boy. I won’t bite-cha,” Mitch said smiling as
he reached out for the cup with one hand, holding the other hand
out for the Advil. Simon handed them to him, his eyes still
focusing on the floor.

“
Yes, sir,” Simon said shyly, blushing
furiously and turning quickly to leave the room to avoid being seen
that particular shade of red. “Is there anything else I can get
you?”

“
Nah, just go have yourself a cup and
take a load off. I’ll be out in a minute.”

Mitch came out of the bathroom a few minutes
later, a towel wrapped around his waist, and went into his bedroom,
talking as he went. “I’ll be dressed in a few…and don’t be so
nervous,” he said kindly, realizing out of the haze of his hangover
that Simon was not an average kid, and that he’d just embarrassed
the shit out of the young man.

“
B…b…b…but Dr. Edgeworth said it was
important,” Simon stuttered, heading back toward the kitchen, still
not having quite recovered from the unexpected peep show he’d just
witnessed.

“
Well, whatever the old man wants must
have already waited for close to a thousand years by now, so I
don’t think half an hour will kill him,” Mitch called out through
the open door of his bedroom and chuckled, amused by his own
cleverness. Simon laughed too, as he watched the smoke starting to
rise from the toaster, signaling that the bread he’d put in was
just charred enough to satisfy Dr. Bramson’s hangover craving. It
always made him feel connected to do little things like that for
his hero, and to be one of the few people who could appreciate most
of Mitch’s obscure insider jokes.

“
I don’t know about that, Doctor,”
Simon called back. “I know he was on the phone with someone named
Cotswold in London when I got in at seven-thirty this morning and
was acting very…agitated. He’s been ordering me about like a 17th
century pirate ship swabby since then, and when he couldn’t reach
you by phone, I thought he’d pull his hair out…or mine,” Simon
said, clumsily attempting an insider joke of his own as he
slathered a half an inch of butter onto the charred toast, still
not being able to tear his mind away from the visual of the Bayeux
tattoos.