The sweet golden parachute

CHAPTER 3

They were running through central park together. He was flying a kite. She was holding a great big lollipop. Her long, blond hair was flowing. It was a bright, beautiful summer day. It had never been so beautiful…

A Maisie dream. Mitch was having one of his Maisie dreams. Often, there were montage sequences:

Now it was raining and they were hugging under an awning on lower Fifth Avenue. Then it was sunny and they were strolling through the West Village carrying shopping bags from stores he’d never heard of. Now they were eating ice cream cones in Washington Square. Now Maisie was feeding hers to a puppy…

This montage is way sappy, Mitch couldn’t help observing. Which was something he did. He reviewed his own dreams in his own head as he was dreaming them.

Now they were in their big brass bed together. Maisie was over him, her beautiful hair gently grazing his bare chest.

“You won’t ever leave me, will you, Bear?”

“How could you ever think that?”

“I can feel you slipping away, that’s how.” She kissed his eyes, his cheeks, his chin. “You won’t, will you, Bear?”

“Maisie, I’ll never leave you. I’ll never go.”

“Yes, you will,” she insisted.

Which was not at all in character for Maisie. She was never the jealous type, Mitch noted as he lay there, savoring the taste of her, the smell of her. Although she did seem a lot smaller than he remembered. Hardly weighed a thing. And her nose was cold and wet. And she was:

Purring. Maisie was definitely purring.

And with a startled yelp Mitch awoke to discover his outdoor hunter, Quirt, standing on his chest in the halflight of dawn, licking his face.

“Hey… buddy,” Mitch gasped, his chest heaving as if he’d just run two miles with a fortypound pack on his back.

He had a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth, and he was drenched in sweat. None of which was the fault of Quirt. Or of his docile stayathome muffin, Clemmie, who lay curled at his feet, fast asleep. No, this was one of those awful panic attacks like he’d suffered in the weeks after his beloved Maisie died. Always, they came in the night as dreams. He and Maisie would be happy. Then she’d start begging him not to leave her. And then he’d wake up with his heart galloping, convinced he was having a heart attack. His doctor had explained to him that what he was experiencing was anxiety. That the metallic taste was adrenaline. And that it would pass-which it had. Mitch hadn’t had a Maisie dream since he’d come to Dorset and met Des.

So why had he had one now?

It was a few minutes past six, according to the alarm clock next to the bed in his sleeping loft. Snow was falling on the skylight above his bed. Shuddering, he got up and waddled down the steep, narrow stairs, Quirt dashing nimbly along ahead of him.

Mitch’s place was a twohundredyearold exposed chestnut postandbeam carriage house that once belonged to one of the grander homes out on Big Sister Island. The downstairs was basically one big room where Mitch lived and worked and made beautiful notquite music on his sky blue Fender Stratocaster. He had a big bay window that looked out over Long Island Sound in three different directions. He had a kitchen and bath. He had his sleeping loft. He needed nothing more.

He cranked up the heat and let Quirt out. The snowfall was very light. Some of it was coating the windshield of his truck but it was not sticking to the ground. According to the thermometer outside of his bay window, it was thirtyfour degrees. It was supposed to warm all the way into the upper forties by the afternoon. Mitch had become something of a weather nerd since he’d bought his little house on Big Sister. What the weather was doing really mattered out here. Plus, he was hopelessly addicted to the Weather Channel and the daring exploits of ace storm tracker, Jim Cantore.

He built a fire in his big stone fireplace and put a pot of coffee on in the kitchen. While it was brewing he shaved. Gazing at his reflection in the mirror, he found his mind straying back to that Maisie dream. He didn’t know what to make of it. Because he wasn’t leaving her-it was she who’d left him. He’d lost her to ovarian cancer when she was thirty. Maisie was his first love. She would always occupy a cherished place in his heart. He accepted that-as did Des, the woman who he intended to spend the rest of his life with. So why had this anxiety suddenly reared its ugly head? Was it because St. Patrick’s Day was right around the corner? It did so happen that March seventeenth was Maisie’s birthday.

Sure, that was it. Had to be.

He dressed in a fisherman’s knit sweater, baggy corduroys and his Mephisto hiking shoes. By now the snow had stopped, the clouds were breaking up in the southern sky over Long Island and Quirt was scratching to be let back in. Mitch put some kibble down for him. The sound of that brought Clemmie ambling slowly downstairs to join them, yawning hugely.

Mitch poured himself some coffee and topped it with two fingers of chocolate milk. Then he flicked on the fortyeightinch grow lights in his bay window and spent a few good minutes doting over his tender little charges in their leakproof modular seed trays. Tiny, bright green shoots were sprouting up out of the seed plugs. His early season lettuce, leeks and parsley. Mitch could not believe how devoted he’d grown to his vegetable garden. Not only had he sent away for a gazillion seeds but also enough gear to stock a small nursery, including propagation heating mats and a halfdozen clear plastic protective domes. These he’d taken to calling Clemmie Domes after he’d discovered that sweet, gentle Clemmie loved to dig her paws into the fragrant starter mix, gum his little seedlings and fling them around the room.

For breakfast, he put away a bowl of the Cocoa Puffs that he kept stashed in the cupboard under the kitchen sink behind the Drano. Des had no idea they were there. While he ate, he cranked up his computer and printed out the baseball stats that he’d downloaded yesterday. Mitch was in a fantasy baseball league with a gang of other film critics. Their talent draft was coming up and he was getting ready to stock his team, the Rocky Sullivans, with a roster of prime talent.

When he was done he climbed into his C.C. Filson redandblack checked wool packer coat, grabbed his binoculars and notepad and trudged on out.

A dusting of snow still coated the meadows and trees, but the sun was starting to break out. It would melt very fast. Mitch poked around in his flower gardens and found snowdrops and snow crocus. In the slushy mud beneath some dead leaves there were daffodil shoots. The birds were returning. He could hear the cardinals, and see the robins poking at the limp, pale grass beneath the trees. Chipmunks scampered about.

Mitch filled his bird feeders, then plodded down the sandy path toward the narrow beach, feeling incredibly fortunate to be here. Mitch was the only island resident who wasn’t a Peck by birth or marriage. Most of the Pecks were still down in Hobe Sound for the winter. There were five houses on Big Sister, not counting the stone lighthouse keeper’s house and its decommissioned lighthouse, the second tallest such landmark in New England. There were forty acres of woods, a tennis court, a private beach, a dock where Evan Peck kept his J24 tied up during sailing season. A narrow, quartermilelong wooden causeway connected the island to the mainland. It was Yankee paradise.

Spring didn’t arrive gradually on Connecticut’s Gold Coast-it lurched in. The giant chunks of ice that had floated downriver from the frigid north and washed ashore here still said winter. And yet those slick, shiny harbor seals that were basking out on the rocks in the morning sun positively cried out spring. Mitch watched them for a few minutes before he trained his binoculars on the osprey platforms out in the river on Great Island. He was on lookout duty for The Nature Conservancy. On this particular morning, he happily spotted his first osprey circling slowly around the raised platform. It was a blackish raptor with a white head and a wing span of nearly six feet.

Lowering his glasses, Mitch dutifully marked the date, time and location of the spotting in his notebook, tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth as he wrote. Then he noticed a long black feather stuck in the sand next to him. He reached down and picked it up. It was white on its underside. Not an osprey feather. It was the wing feather of a greater blackbacked gull.

Nevertheless, Mitch tucked it carefully in his pocket for future use.

There was a big wooden bin next to the exit door of the A amp;P where customers could leave donations of canned goods and other nonperishables for Dorset’s Food Pantry. Some guy with a truck would come by every couple of days to pick them up and deliver them to the Fellowship Center of the Congregational church. Lately, that guy with a truck had been Mitch.

He idled in the fire lane while he piled the bags into the back of his kidneycolored Studebaker halfton. Then he headed over to The Works, Dorset’s upscale gourmet food emporium, to pick up the frozen dayold artisan breads that the bakery contributed, along with dozens of those round, doughy things that Dorseteers chose to believe were bagels. From there Mitch rolled his way into the Dorset Street Historic District, with its towering maples and its dignified twohundredandfiftyyearold colonial mansions. Anchoring the south end of the Historic District, set back behind a deep lawn, was Dorset’s stately old Congregational church.

The Congo church-as most everyone called it-was the very embodiment of a smalltown New England meetinghouse. It was white. It was unadorned. There were two full stories of mullioned windows to let in the sunlight. A towering steeple with a working clock and a bell tower topped by a gleaming brass weather vane. It was not, in fact, Dorset’s original Congo church, which burned to the ground in the 1840s. This one had been erected in its place soon thereafter. Supposedly, it was an exact reproduction, inside and out.

The rather sterile Fellowship Center, which had been added on in the 1970s, was connected to the church by an office annex. It had a full kitchen, space for lots of long tables and folding chairs. The center was in constant use by support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, by singles groups and senior citizens groups. The blood bank was held here. The visiting nurse gave flu shots here. And the Food Pantry was here. It was a known fact that Dorset boasted more millionaires per square mile than East Hampton. But to live here year round, as Mitch did, was to discover that there were plenty of havenots, too. A lot of the men were in seasonal trades like roofing and landscaping. Winters were especially tough. To make ends meet, they relied on the Food Pantry. For those who wanted one, there was also a hot meal.

Mitch pulled into the gravel driveway that looped around back and parked by the kitchen entrance beside Eric Vickers’s battered Ford F150, where Eric was unloading huge baskets of his organically grown potatoes and carrots. Poochie Vickers’s buoyant farmer son was in his early forties, gangly, bonynosed and more than a little geeky. His Adam’s apple always seemed too busy, and his pants invariably fell a good three inches short of his mudcaked work shoes. A big Leatherman multipurpose knife hung in a sheath from his belt. The chunky, shapeless brown sweater he wore had been made by his FrenchCanadian wife, Danielle, using wool from their own sheep. Eric kept his blond hair short, his beard neatly trimmed. His ears he left alone, and the man had to have the lushest ear hair Mitch had ever seen. He looked as if he were part faun. And yet Eric’s ears were not his most notable feature. His eyes were. Eric’s blueeyed gaze was so intense, so lit with positive energy that it bordered on religious zeal. This was why many in Dorset fondly referred to him as the Green Market Messiah.

“You’re looking at the last of it, Mitch,” he declared as Mitch climbed out of his own truck. “Our root cellar is now officially, one hundred percent bare. But not to worry, because today’s the day. As soon as I get home, I’m planting my All Blues. The soil is reeally perfect today. And when the soil is perfect you do not argue with it. You get down on your knees and you dig. Ever eat a blue potato?”

“Uh, I’ve had blue tortilla chips. Do those count?”

“Those are made from corn, Mitch.”

“Okay, then I guess not.”

“You’ve got to try one. They’re my fastest sellers at the Union Square green market. The chef from Savoy grabs them up the second he sees them. God, I love this time of year!” Eric exulted, raising his face to the sun.

The two of them started toting their loads inside for Danielle to parcel out. Danielle was heating up a vat of her bean soup for the folks who were starting to trickle in. She’d also baked several loaves of whole wheat bread. Danielle Vickers shared her husband’s tireless devotion to their farm and their community, but she was much more reserved. Even a bit dour. At times, she almost seemed to have wandered in from an allnight Ingmar Bergman glumfest. Mitch had rarely seen her smile, although some of this was selfconsciousness-her teeth were exceptionally crooked. Danielle had grown up poor. Her father, an itinerant Sheetrocker, had worked only sporadically. Danielle had paid her own way through Bates College, up in Lewiston, Maine, by tending bar nights. It was at Bates that she’d met Eric. She was not particularly tall but she was strongly built. Also pretty shapely, though you had to look awfully hard. She dressed in oversized sweaters and baggy overalls that hid her figure. In fact, she almost went out of her way to look frumpy. Her strawberry blond hair was always in ropy braids or pigtails. And her unflattering wireframed glasses looked as if they’d been filled by an optician in Uzbekistan.

“How goes it, Danielle?” asked Mitch, setting his load down on the counter. Hyper Eric had already bounded back outside for another basket of potatoes.

“It goes, Mitch,” she replied, stifling a yawn. She looked beat. There were dark circles under her eyes. “We’re in the middle of lambing. Four of our ewes delivered last night, so I’m a little short on sleep. But, really, it’s fine.”

“Is the coal cellar unlocked?”

“I’ve already emptied out the freezers for you.”

The frozen baked goods that Mitch collected were stowed in two big freezers down in the dimly lit, intensely creepy cellar under the old church. The cellar was accessed from outside by raising a pair of Bilco metal doors. Like most Bilcos, they locked from the inside. Lem, the church custodian, locked and unlocked the doors for Mitch on Food Pantry days. Mitch didn’t know how Lem made it out of the cellar once they were locked, and he didn’t want to know.

Mitch raised the doors and headed down the steep cement stairs, his arms loaded down with bread. It was damp and cold down there, and reeked of mold.

Eric gave him a hand-grabbing two big bags from Mitch’s truck and very nearly beating Mitch down the stairs with them. Eric moved at a faster pace than most people, and possessed phenomenal energy.

“Mitch, can I get your take on something? It’s kind of personal.”

“Sure, what’s up?” Mitch said as he stuffed the “bagels” in the freezer.

Eric squatted there on the steps, swallowing uncomfortably. “Have you noticed Danielle acting strange lately? Preoccupied, maybe?”

“She does seem a bit down.”

“Has she been paying special attention to anyone?”

“I don’t think I’m following you, Eric.” Mitch often didn’t. The trick was not minding.

“The truth is, I think she’s had it with me. But I wanted to make sure before I said anything to her.” Eric gazed at Mitch intently. Very intently. “That’s why I’m asking you.”

Now Mitch got it. Eric wanted to know if he and Danielle were involved. He hadn’t come out and said it, but the impression was quite clear. “Eric, I’d be very surprised if she’s seeing anyone else. She’s devoted to you.”

Eric nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing convulsively. “You think I’m being insanely jealous, don’t you? That shouldn’t come as a surprise, Mitch. Insanity runs in my family.” Eric jumped to his feet and said, “Sorry to bother you. I’m out of here.”

And he was. Jumped into his truck and sped off, leaving Mitch there to wonder what, if anything, was going on between the farmer and his wife.

When he was done down there, Mitch went up the outside stairs and lowered the Bilcos shut. Otherwise, squirrels would take up residence in the cellar. Then he grabbed the computer printouts from the front seat of his truck and went back inside. About two dozen people were gathered around the community tables, chatting as they had their soup. Seated at a table all by himself, hunched over his bowl, was Dorset’s Can Man.

The gaunt old Can Man rattled around town on an old bicycle with two supermarket grocery carts chained to its back end. Spoke to no one. Guzzled rum. Dressed in filthy old clothes. A few days earlier, Mitch had noticed him poring over the NBA box scores in the Hartford Courant while he slurped his soup. Apparently, the guy was a stat freak.

With the fantasy baseball draft fast approaching, Mitch thought he’d try to engage him. So he ambled over, sheaf of printouts in hand, and said, “I’ve got my eye on Mendoza. Let me know what you think of him, okay?”

In response, the old ascetic gazed up at Mitch with a look of sheer, eyepopping terror.

Never had Mitch inspired such fear in another human being. He felt as if he’d just turned into Freddy Krueger. “Or not,” he added hastily. “Entirely your choice.”

But he was too late. The old guy had already jumped to his feet, kicking over his chair, and fled the room, leaving his soup unfinished.

Chastened, Mitch helped Danielle bag up the Food Pantry donations and pass them out to the folks who were lined up waiting. In spite of her lack of sleep, Danielle worked tirelessly, the sleeves of her baggy sweater pushed up to her elbows. When they were done she helped herself to a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the urn and sat at one of the tables with it, chewing distractedly on the inside of her mouth. Danielle did seem preoccupied, Mitch observed. Behind those severe glasses, her eyes were crinkled with concern.

Mitch joined her. He and Danielle weren’t especially close, but they were both outsiders. It didn’t matter how long you lived in Dorset. Unless you were born and reared there, you were always an outsider. And outsiders gravitated toward each other. “Danielle, are you sure you’re okay?”

She made a face, as if she’d just smelled something bad. “It’s a hard time of year for us, Mitch. No cash coming in. We make our money at the green markets during growing season. Eric’s in New York City at Union Square two mornings a week, I do three more out here. Our customers are crazy for our organic produce and eggs. Our grassfed lamb, too. They can taste the difference, and they’re willing to pay for it.” Danielle paused, sighing wearily. “But the winters are hard. Sometimes, it all seems so impossible.”

“What you need is a good night’s sleep.”

“What we need is to get bigger. We need at least sixty more acres, Mitch. Twice as many sheep. We’re planting veggies when we should be investing in cheesemaking equipment. Sheep’s milk cheese is our only hope for the future,” she confessed, sipping her coffee. “Unfortunately, our credit line is maxed out, Poochie is famously tightfisted and Claudia is… well, Claudia. She has forty good acres of meadow out behind her cottage just sitting there. But will she let us use it? No, because that’s hers. Claudia hates everything about our farm. Our hairy, stinky sheep. Our noisy, stinky tractor. She’d like to see us go under. And at this rate we will. I just don’t know hhow much longer we can…” Danielle ducked her head, clutching the coffee cup in her chapped, workroughened hands. “Eric tries to act like everything is okay. Does his yoga every morning to perpetuate his calm. Tends his flock. But I can tell he’s upset about Poochie.”

“I hear she drove into Duck River Pond last night.”

“And didn’t think a thing of it. This morning, she acted like it was a big joke. All of which means more ammunition for Claudia.” Danielle’s eyes met Mitch’s briefly, then looked away. “Claudia has designs on the family purse strings. That greedy woman has driven poor Mark away with all of her scheming. Mark is a sweet and sensitive man. He has the soul of an artist. And now he’s sleeping on his office sofa and drinking too much and…” Danielle broke off, coloring slightly.

Mitch couldn’t help thinking Danielle seemed awfully upset about her brotherinlaw. Was she involved with him? Could Eric actually be on to something? “Has Eric talked to Claudia about Poochie?”

Danielle shook her head. “Eric detests confrontations. And everything with Claudia is a confrontation. If Eric sees her coming, he walks the other way. If she phones him, he won’t take the call. She doesn’t speak to me at all, you know. If I answer the phone she just says, ‘Is Eric there?’ I don’t exist. I never have, as far as she’s concerned. I’m just some trash her weird brother dragged home with him from college. Eric won’t stand up to her. He just says, ‘If it’s about money, then I don’t care.’ Well, I’m sorry, that’s no kind of an attitude. Not when it involves your own mother-and our whole future. Only I can’t say a word to him about it. He won’t listen. It’s very frightening.”

“Why frightening, Danielle?”

“Because Claudia is strong willed but at the same time very weak. She relies on her mother more than she cares to admit. If Claudia gets her way, she will be totally out of control. Very dangerous.”

“And will she get her way?”

“Mitch, I honestly don’t see how anyone can stop her.”