The Reserve

6

A DENSE, LAYERED, ROSE-TINTED MIST HOVERED ABOVE THE lake as Jordan Groves came over the Great Range and began his descent. From above, the mist obscured the pilot’s view of the black surface of the water. There was no wind. He cut his speed as close to a stall as he dared and brought the biplane in gently, like laying a newborn baby into its downy crib. He felt the lake before he saw it, and when he knew the pontoons had settled squarely into the glass-smooth water he brought the engine speed back up a notch and headed for the hidden cove south of Rangeview, where he had anchored the day before. From a distance of a hundred yards he could make out the shoreline easily enough, but little else, nothing higher up on the shore, not the clear blue sky above the mist or the towering pines and not the Coles’s camp buildings. Just the mossy rocks and the low pucker bushes at the edge of the lake and the graveled spills where the brooks and streams tumbled from the heights into the lake.

He pulled into the cove and quickly anchored the airplane and strode ashore. It was not yet six in the morning. He had slept barely two hours the night before, half of it on the leather sofa in his office, the other half in his easy chair. His mouth was sour and dry from whiskey and tobacco. All night long he had struggled to make up his mind about something, anything, but had been unable to do it. His entire life felt like a swirl of irresolution, until just before dawn when he made up his mind to fly out to the Second Lake and speak with Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. He had no idea what he would ask or tell her. But she had been a witness to his betrayal, perhaps the only witness — other than Hubert St. Germain, of course, and Alicia herself, and there was no way he could expect to be comforted or enlightened by talking with either of them. Not now. They could only bring him more pain, more irresolution. Vanessa, however, might somehow help him capture the calm objectivity that he needed in order to regain his sense of himself as a man, a man of action. He could not bear thinking of himself in any other way.

Rather than sneak furtively through the brush and forest the way he’d done the day before, Jordan approached the camp forth-rightly, from the shore. He had no fear today of being seen, no shame at being here, no guilty fantasies to hide from himself or anyone else. All he wanted was to tell Vanessa what his wife had confessed to him and ask her what she had seen at Hubert St. Germain’s cabin. From those two points of contact, plus his remembered long history of his marriage and his own crimes against it, he could begin to triangulate and locate his exact position in the shifting present. And once he knew that much, he would know how to navigate the future. Until then, he would thrash about like a child lost in the woods, abandoned and alone, with no idea of how to get home.

He stepped onto the deck and pushed open the screened door to the porch, and there on the wicker couch lay Hubert St. Germain, startled awake by the sound of the door closing and astonished by the sight of Alicia’s husband standing before him. Hubert may well have been dreaming about the artist, he couldn’t remember, but for a few seconds he thought he was still dreaming about him, and somehow in the dream the artist had found out that his wife had been sleeping with Hubert and that she and he were in love with each other, and now the artist had come to kill him.

The man did not seem angry, though. He stood over Hubert as large and sad as a bear. Slowly, Hubert sat up and pushed the blanket away. Fully clothed, he put his stockinged feet into his boots, and leaned forward and carefully tied the laces. Then he sat back and looked up at Jordan Groves and waited for something bad to happen.

For several moments neither man spoke. The artist reached behind him and drew up a large wicker chair and sat down heavily in it, facing the guide. Neither man had taken his eyes off the other’s face. “All right, then. So tell me, Hubert,” Jordan finally said. “Tell me why you did it.”

The guide held his breath and then slowly exhaled, as if in relief. So it was over. Over and done with. “I guess she must’ve told you…about us.”

“If I understood you, if I knew why you were willing to take my wife away from me, I’d probably want to be you. Her I understand. Me I understand. But not you. She has all kinds of reasons for falling in love with someone other than me. I can accept that. But you, Hubert, you I do not get.”

“I don’t know what you mean, if you understood me you’d want to be me.”

“Because then I’d be a real romantic. Like you. But I’m not. Y’know, Hubert, I’ve fucked other men’s wives. It’s true. Just like you. But I never wanted to take them away from their husbands. I only wanted to fuck them. Was it like that for you, Hubert? You just wanted to fuck Alicia? Maybe you’re like me after all.”

“I never meant that,” he said. “She’s not like that. And neither am I.”

Jordan nodded. He agreed, Alicia was not like that, and neither was Hubert. “That’s the thing I don’t understand, why you’d want to steal another man’s wife,” he said. “I don’t get it. It’s outside my mentality.” He looked around him as if registering for the first time where he was located: the Tamarack Mountain Reserve; the Second Lake; Rangeview. “What are you doing out here, anyhow? Fucking Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, too? Maybe I’m wrong about you. Maybe you’re not a romantic. Have you been servicing both of them all along? You’re quite a stud, Hubert. I’d never have figured you for that.”

Hubert said no, there was nothing between him and Miss Cole, and said nothing more. What could he say to Jordan Groves? The guide was not a man of many words. He tried to be truthful and accurate about everything, but too many things, especially when it came to human beings, and even more especially when it came to men and women, were too complicated to speak about honestly or accurately. He had never spoken of the puzzling, conflicted mix of elation and apprehension he had felt when he married his high school sweetheart, Sally Lawrence. Not even to Alicia. And he’d never even tried to speak of the shameful mix of sorrow and relief he had felt when she died. He had told no one of the beatings he had endured at his father’s hands when he was a boy and his mother’s inability — or was it her unwillingness? — to protect him and his three brothers from the drunken man they called, with a sneer, the Old Man. Hubert, the youngest, had been abandoned by his brothers one by one as soon as each was able to leave home, the first for Alaska, the next for Colorado, the third for Montana — loners all, guides, hunters, trappers, woodsmen, each safely protected by his own personal wilderness, except for Hubert, the youngest, who, after the Old Man died drunk in a snowbank when Hubert was seventeen, had stayed on in the Reserve, the Old Man’s wilderness, doing the job his father had done before him.

He never spoke of any of this, not even in painless, smooth generalities. There were no words to describe the feelings that since childhood had warred in his large, wounded heart, and he had almost given up on ever finding them, until he met Alicia, whom he came quickly to believe was willing and able to give him those words and listen to his use of them with sympathy and understanding. That was why he had begun to steal her from her husband. It hadn’t been his intention or desire. It surely was not merely to make love to her, although their lovemaking, tender and trusting and passionate, had brought him closer to speaking of these things and revealing his secret self than he had ever been before.

There was no way he could tell this to the sad, angry, bewildered man before him. So he simply shook his head and said no. No to the man’s accusation that he was fucking Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. No to his charge that he had wanted to steal the man’s wife. Hubert had wanted only to be wholly known and understood by another human being, and because she was a woman, a beautiful, loving woman, he knew of no means of obtaining that understanding other than by making love to her, and afterward, talking in the dark of what’s right and what’s wrong, sorting out the conflicted welter of feelings that each had endured in the past and were fast creating anew, and later, walking in the high meadows, naming the flowers blooming there and naming the birds in the trees from their songs. Until the moment yesterday when Vanessa Von Heidenstamm knocked on his cabin door, it was their lovemaking and its accompaniments that had brought him to the point where he could at last begin to speak directly from his divided heart. And now he saw that he had no choice but once again to silence his heart, to return to being the man of few words, the simple, solitary man of the lakes and woods and mountains, the much admired and sometimes envied Adirondack guide.

“So what the hell are you doing out here this early in the morning, sleeping on the porch, instead of out back in the cookshack or the lean-to?” Jordan asked him, thinking that the guide had a better right and reason to ask him what he was doing out here this early in the morning. He had no idea of what he would give him for an answer. How do you tell a man like Hubert St. Germain that you don’t know why you are where you are? That you’re looking for some solid ground to stand on, and you think this strangely incandescent woman can somehow give it to you? How can you tell the man who has been sleeping with your wife that, because of him, you no longer know who your wife is and therefore no longer know who you are, either?

Hubert said, “I’m helping Miss Cole out with her mother.”

“Her mother, eh? Why? Is she ill or something?”

“No.” Hubert sucked thoughtfully on his lips for a few seconds, then said, “It’s not something I can talk about.”

“What the Christ does that mean?”

“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 reasons 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 thought.

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.

Vanessa said, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Hubert knelt down beside the woman and touched her throat. “Yes.”

“You’re sure?” Jordan said. “She’s really dead?”

“Yes,” Hubert said. “She took both barrels.” He stood up and looked off at the mountains on the far side of the lake.

Vanessa turned and started walking toward the house.

“Where are you going?” Jordan called.

“To get a shovel!”

“What the hell for?”

She stopped and looked back at him, her fists on her hips, and studied him for a second. “To bury her, Jordan,” she said and hurried on.

“To bury her! My Christ! Will you tell me what on earth has been going on here?” Jordan said to the guide.

Hubert stood and looked at his hands. His guilty hands. This was an accident that shouldn’t have happened. If he hadn’t tried to take the shotgun away from her, the woman would have had to put it down of her own accord. Or she would have handed it over to the artist. Maybe the artist would have flown her out of here then. And maybe Vanessa Cole would have agreed to do what her mother originally wanted, ship her off to that hospital in Europe. Only first they’d make the mother promise no brain surgery, no lobotomy that can turn you into a vegetable, that would be the deal, and maybe in a few months or a year Vanessa would come out cured of whatever mental sickness she had, and she would return to America, and her mother would have forgiven her by then for all this. For being kidnapped and imprisoned here at the camp by her own daughter. And someday Vanessa Cole would get her inheritance and enjoy the kind of life she was supposed to have.

“Hubert, for Christ’s sake, answer me! The woman has just been killed! This is goddamned serious. And Vanessa just wants to bury her and forget it? Are you two both crazy, like the old woman said?”

“No. What she told me made sense. Sort of. Oh, hell, at least yesterday it did.”

“Who? Who made sense?”

“Miss Cole. Vanessa. She told me that her mother signed her into a mental hospital in Europe and took away all her inheritance money from her father and her grandparents. It was extreme, maybe, what the mother did, and Vanessa was really scared of going into the hospital. What she did was maybe more extreme than what the mother did, but it was understandable, I guess. Because she was scared of having brain surgery. You know, a lobotomy. I was trying to get them to find some kind of agreement is all. It was wrong, what Vanessa did, tying up her mother and keeping her here against her will. It was wrong what the mother was doing, too. But it was an accident, Jordan, the gun going off.”

“Yeah, it was an accident. I know that. You know that. But it won’t look like an accident if we let Vanessa bury her out here,” Jordan said. He tossed his jacket on the ground, turned the guide boat over and slid it on its keel toward the water and in. “You’ve got to take the body out and report what happened. I’m not supposed to be here, especially with the airplane, so it’s up to you, Hubert. If we load the woman’s body into the boat now,” he said, “before Vanessa comes back with the damned shovel, you can row it across the lake to the Carry.” From there the guide could get the body of the woman over to the First Lake on the cart the guides used for hauling supplies between the two lakes, row across to the boathouse, leave the woman’s body, and walk in and report what had happened. “And by the way, Hubert, nobody needs to know I was out here this morning. It’ll only complicate things. So c’mon,” he said, “give me a hand with her before Vanessa tries to stop us.”

The guide didn’t move, except to pick up the fallen shotgun. He broke it open, removed and automatically pocketed the empty shells, and looked down the barrels. “This’s going to hurt me, you know,” he said. “Accident or not. People talk.” He snapped the shotgun shut and hefted it in his hands, noting its balance. It was a custom-made Belgian.28 gauge. Worth at least a thousand dollars, Hubert thought. He said to Jordan, “Word’ll get out. People will know that the wife of one of my best clients got herself killed by her own gun in my presence. In my care. Guides are supposed to make sure things like this don’t happen.”

“We don’t have a choice. Anyhow, it’ll blow over eventually. People talk, but they forget, too.”

“I’m a guide, Jordan. Word’ll get out. Someone in my care got herself shot, and it might even look like I shot her myself. Wouldn’t matter that it was an accident. Look, this is a serious problem for me. You don’t understand, Jordan, it’s the only living I got,” he said, then added, almost as an afterthought, “Vanessa says nobody knows her mother is even up here. Except me. And now you. And you, you’re setting up to say you weren’t even here this morning.”

“What about Kendall? He must know.”

“Yes, but he thinks it was of her own free will that she came in to the camp. He wouldn’t check on whether she’s still here or left already for New York City. Vanessa could drive off and say she took her mother with her, and nobody’d be the wiser.”

Jordan held the boat by the gunnel and looked back at the man. Was he serious? Was he really going along with her? Had that been their plan all along? It slowly dawned on Jordan that Vanessa and Hubert might have been working together from the beginning, and not only had they been sleeping together, they had also been trying to scare Mrs. Cole into releasing Vanessa’s inheritance — and when she agreed to that, they would murder the woman. Maybe they planned to make it look as if she’d died of natural causes, smother her with a pillow or something, or drown her in the lake and just say she went swimming and never came back. Vanessa probably promised Hubert more money than he’d ever imagined making in a lifetime. The artist’s unexpected arrival this morning had stymied their plan, or at least complicated it. And then Mrs. Cole found her husband’s shotgun. And now she was dead, but not of natural causes. Explainable, though. An accidental shooting.

Jordan looked up the slope toward the house and saw Vanessa coming from the toolshed carrying a long-handled spade and a pickax. “C’mon, Hubert,” the artist said, “help me put the body in the boat and shove off. For Christ’s sake, hurry!”

“No. We can’t do that. Not without Vanessa’s permission. It’s her mother.”

“I don’t know what kind of spell she’s put on you, man, but I’m not waiting for her permission.” Jordan let the boat float a few feet from shore. Moving fast, he got his arms under the woman’s body and lifted it and carried it to the boat and gently laid it in the bow. He put the oars into the boat and looked down and saw blood smeared across the front of his shirt. “Damn!” he said.

He grabbed the guide by the shoulder and shoved him in the direction of the boat. The man didn’t move. “Hubert, get in the goddamned boat, and start rowing!” Again Jordan shoved him, but Hubert stood rooted to the ground, still holding the shotgun loosely in one hand.

From fifty yards off, Vanessa saw the boat bobbing in the water and her mother’s body in the boat, saw the bloodstains on Jordan’s white shirt and Hubert with the gun, and started to run toward them. “Stop! You can’t take her, Jordan! You can’t!” she cried. Dropping the tools at the shore, she ran knee deep into the water. She pushed Jordan aside, grabbed the boat, and drew it halfway back onto dry land.

Jordan said, “Let Hubert take her in and report it. It was an accident, Vanessa. That’s all. You’ve got to report it, Vanessa.”

“No! No one will believe me! Don’t you understand? People will think I did it! The police, everyone, they’ll all blame me. Because of…because of what she was doing to me. And what I’ve done to her.” Vanessa was panting, her eyes darting from one man to the other. “She was sending me away, back to that mental hospital, Jordan. And my grandparents’ trust and my inheritance from Daddy, she took them, Jordan. So not only am I certified crazy, I’ve got a motive. Motive, opportunity, and means, Jordan. Plus crazy.”

“No one has to know about that,” he said.

“It’s all documented, Jordan. They made me sign the papers, my mother and her lawyer.”

“I meant, what you were doing to her. Out here. No one has to know that. It takes away motive, at least. And craziness.”

“We can swear it was an accident,” Hubert said. “Because it’s the truth. We’ll swear we were here and we saw it.”

Jordan turned to him in surprise. “You can say you were here and you saw it. Not me. As soon as I can, I’m flying out of here. You and Vanessa can claim it happened any damned way you want.”

Vanessa looked at the two men as if they were boys and simply did not understand the ways of adults. “If they don’t believe me, and they won’t, what makes you think they’ll believe you, Hubert? Or you, Jordan? If I have to, to protect myself, I’ll say you both were witnesses. But it won’t matter, no one will believe you, either. They’ll just think you’re both covering for me. The famously philandering artist and the lonely widower of the woods, they’ll think you’re both in love with me. Or at least were sleeping with me. They’ll say I worked my wiles on you. Oh, and will you tell the sheriff why Mother had the gun in the first place, Hubert? Will you say she got the drop on you when you went to make sure she was still safely locked away in the bedroom? You could go to jail for that alone, you know. Aiding and abetting a kidnapper. Or maybe I’ll just claim you did it, Hubert. All on your own. You shot her because you’re so in love with me, you big hunk of a man, and in your own love-struck way were only trying to free me from my mother’s nefarious intention of tossing me in the loony bin and spending all my money. Which would be better spent on you, right? I mean, look, your fingerprints are all over Daddy’s gun! And poor little me, I don’t even know how to shoot a gun. Or maybe I’ll say you two were out here early in the morning, fighting, because Hubert’s been sleeping with your sweet wife, Jordan, and Mother tried to stop you—”

“Jesus, Vanessa,” Jordan said. “Stop.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I wouldn’t do it.” She smiled wanly at Hubert, then at Jordan. “But seriously, whatever you say or I say happened, no one’s going to believe us. Unless I confess that, yes, I shot my mother, and you’re only covering up for me. People will believe that story easily enough. But no matter what story they believe, someone’s going to jail for this mess. Me, for sure. But maybe you, too, Hubert St. Germain. Possibly even you, Jordan Groves. Because no one’s going to believe it was an accident. And in a way, it wasn’t, was it?” She looked down at her mother’s body in the boat. “Oh, God, she’s really dead, isn’t she? This isn’t a dream, is it?”

“No,” Jordan said. “It’s real, Vanessa. That’s why we can’t lie about it. Regardless of the consequences.”

Vanessa said, “You don’t mind lying about your being out here, though. Do you?”

“That’s…that’s different.”

“The main difference being you can get away with it.”

“I’m thinking maybe we should take the body in and report it,” Hubert said. “I’m thinking maybe Jordan’s right.”

“You’re not listening to me,” Vanessa said. “Either of you. If you take my mother’s body in and report her death, no matter how you tell it, I am definitely going to jail for a long, long time. Or I’ll spend the rest of my life in a mental hospital. There’s no way around it. Please, you two, help me with this. I need you both. Please help me. We can bury her in the woods, and then you both can leave, and tonight after it gets dark I’ll take the guide boat and go back to the Club and drive away. No one will see me leave. That’ll be the end of it. Nothing will happen to either of you. Nothing will happen to me.”

“How will you explain her disappearance?” Jordan asked.

“I won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll just say she was fine when I dropped her off in Tuxedo Park after our trip to the Adirondacks with Daddy’s ashes.”

“There’ll be a search. Up here, especially. Where she was last seen alive.”

“The only people who’ll know where to look will be you two. And me. And I’ll never tell anyone. If you never tell anyone, Mother’s disappearance will remain a mystery, pure and simple. Of course, I’ll stay under suspicion for years, maybe forever. But I can live with that. I’ve lived with worse.”

Hubert said, “No one would think to ask Jordan about it, probably. Nobody knows he’s been here. Me, though, they would ask. Since it’s known I brought supplies in yesterday.”

“You’d have to lie, then. You’d have to say she was fine when you last saw her,” Vanessa said.

“I don’t like lying. I’m not much good at it.”

Jordan gave a short, hard laugh. “I’d say you’re damned good at it.”

The three stood with their backs to the lake and the boat and Vanessa’s mother, and were silent for a long moment. Jordan put his jacket on, took his tobacco and papers from the pocket and rolled a cigarette and lighted it and smoked.

Finally, Hubert sighed and said, “She wouldn’t be the first person who’s buried in these woods and nobody knows it.”

“I expect not,” Jordan said.

“There’s always been stories about hunters going into the Reserve alone and not coming out and no body ever found.”

“That right?”

“Yes. Some of it might’ve been funny business, some of it not. When it’s local people, of course, everybody pretty much knows what’s what.”

“But you wouldn’t call Mrs. Cole local people.”

“No. Not really.”

“She’d have to be buried deep, with rocks on her,” Jordan said. “To keep the animals from digging her up. You understand I’m just speculating here.”

Vanessa looked at the ground and was silent.

Hubert said, “You’d need someplace high, where there’s no brook or stream. Snowmelt moves the banks around a lot in spring and washes out any low places.”

Jordan said, “You’d have to replace the sod, make it look natural again. No tracks.”

“Yes,” Hubert said. “You would.”

For a long moment neither man said anything.

“You know the land hereabouts,” Jordan said to Hubert. “Any good ground high up that’s not covered with trees, where there’s rocks close by?”

Again, neither man spoke. Then, as if he’d had the spot in mind for a long time, Hubert said, “There’s a bluff about a quarter mile east of the house.”

The three of them looked from one to the other, each to each. Jordan picked up the shovel and pickax and passed the shovel to Hubert. With the shotgun in one hand, the shovel in the other, Hubert led Jordan and Vanessa up the slope toward the tall pines and into the woods beyond. Behind them, the guide boat, half in the water, half out, rocked gently on its keel, and Evelyn Cole’s cold dry eyes stared at the morning sun.

The American woman sat alone in the dining saloon on Level A of the airship. She was dressed in the same brown tweed jacket and skirt as when she’d first boarded, except that the wide-brimmed hat and veil had been replaced by a green chenille head scarf knotted in back and worn low on the forehead, like a flapper of a decade ago. Not having eaten dinner the night before, she was evidently hungry and ordered a full breakfast off the menu. She looked with mild interest at the silk-covered wall opposite her. Twenty-one panels were painted with scenes illustrating last year’s flights of the Graf Zeppelin, the Hindenburg’s sister ship, to South America. She looked at the pictures in sequence from left to right, one at a time, as if they were sections of a mural, instead of a collection of individual pictures. During the night the Hindenburg had passed over England, and at a nearby table three middle-aged men in business suits and an elderly, silver-haired lady, Americans, were discussing the coronation next week of George VI. One of the men had gotten the news of the day early this morning from the airship’s radio operator. They agreed that the abdicated king’s forthcoming marriage to Mrs. Simpson, whose divorce from her previous husband had been granted a day ago, was scandalous. Imagine an American president behaving like that, said the lady with the silver hair. She spoke with a crisp Connecticut accent. Seated at a banquette in the corner of the dining room, a German woman with two small blond boys waited to be served. The younger boy got down on the carpeted floor to play with his windup toy, a tin car driven by Mickey Mouse. He wound the key and set the car on the floor. It ran under the table and came out the other side, making a whirring noise and giving off metallic sparks. Quickly, the steward crossed the room, grabbed the toy, and stopped the wheels from spinning. In German he said to the mother, I’m sorry, Frau Imhoff, but I must confiscate this. We take no chances with sparks. The Americans, meanwhile, continued to discuss the news of the day. Franco’s advance against the republic is going swimmingly, said the man who had visited the ship’s radio operator. His air force destroyed a Basque town called Guernica, near Bilbao. The man next to him said, That’s only thanks to the Germans, of course. Who the heck do you think was flying those airplanes? Certainly not Spaniards or Italians. The third man said, In the future the main use of airplanes will be in war. As airborne artillery. And all the casualties of war will be civilians. Mark my words, it won’t be like the last one. The lady from Connecticut said, Oh, dear, I do hope you’re wrong. This is so depressing a subject. Can’t we talk about something else? She turned then and smiled at the young woman seated alone by the window. Would you like to join us? she asked. Do you speak English? I’m afraid none of us speaks German. Before the woman could answer, the waiter arrived with her breakfast. He set the plate before her, and she began to eat at once. For a few seconds the silver-haired lady and her three companions watched her, waiting for a response. Finally, they turned away. The lady raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. No speaka da English, one of the men said, and the others smiled uneasily and quickly resumed their discussion of the news of the day.