Flat Lake in Winter (28 page)

And, if he was satisfied that she
wasn't
going to do anything like it again, was he nonetheless duty-bound to try to uncover what had really happened? Wasn't that what the process was supposed to be, after all, a search for the truth?

But surely that was the job of others. Wasn't Fielder, who still loved her even as he suspected her, the very last person on the face of the earth who should now have to turn on her and accuse her?

Life was often a matter of conflicts, he knew, of choices between unpleasant alternatives. You were expected to step up, pay your money, and take your chances; that was all there was to it. You were never supposed to look back. Regrets were for suckers.

But this was different. This wasn't just your ordinary, everyday, garden-variety conflict. This was a choice that comes along maybe once in a lifetime.

And the phrase that came back to Matt Fielder wasn't one out of the fine print of
Black's Law Dictionary.
It wasn't some wise Latin maxim borrowed from Caesar's time, or some bit of lawyer-speak designed to confuse and impress the common folk. It wasn't something solemnly intoned by the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes or Learned Hand or Benjamin Cardozo.

None of that.

Instead, it came drifting across the years from a Saturday afternoon in summer, long, long ago. It came from the memory of a makeshift ballfield, adjacent to a dirt parking lot. It came damp with sweat, streaked with grass stains, and coated with infield dust. It came in a nasal Lower East Side voice, from a kid named Whitey Ryan. And it came in two words.

Fielder's choice.

What was the lesson he was supposed to have taken away with him that day? With the game safely in hand, and the ball bouncing your way, what was it you were supposed to do?

EVEN AS THE ball comes your way, out of the corner of your eye, you can see the runner breaking from second and beginning to dig for third - something he's got no business doing. You've got a play on him, you know. You can wheel around and fire to third, try and cut him down before he can slide in under the tag. A good throw nails him by two steps. Or you can play it safe, go for the sure out at first, just thirty feet away.

This time it's not Goober Wilson's glove the ball's in; it's yours. The runner heading to third presents a tempting target. He never should have gone for it. He doesn't deserve to make it.

But when it comes right down to it, he doesn't matter. What you need to do right now is to fight the impulse to grandstand, to avoid going for too much. It isn't about whether or not the runner deserves to make it to third safely. And it surely isn't your job to punish him.

You're supposed to take care of business. You're supposed to respect
momentum.
You're supposed to remember that if you don't, it can shift once again, in a heartbeat. And you can end up blowing the whole ball game.

He knew he ought to forget about this crazy business of Jennifer and Dunkin' Donuts, of the two photographs and the seventh hair.
Leave well enough alone,
he told himself.
Get Jonathan his two-year deal, and be done with it.
Because that's what it had all come down to, this
Fielder's choice
of his: being smart enough to go for the safe play, the sure thing.

But even as he knew all that, Matt Fielder also knew that there was no way on earth he was going to be able to do it. Not any more than Goober Wilson had been able to do it some thirty years earlier. The thing was, try as you might, there's just no way on earth you can play it safe, not with that runner streaking for third, daring you to go for him.

You scoop the ball up. You pivot. You cock your arm. And you put every last ounce of whatever you've got into that throw to third. And you hope for the best.

There's simply no other way to play the game.

HE LIFTED HIMSELF up from the floor. He placed a half log of oak on the fire before shutting the doors of the stove for the night and plunging the cabin into darkness. Needing some light so he could straighten up the room, he walked over to a bookcase in the corner, where he flicked on the switch of an old table lamp. An unfamiliar object next to it caught his eye: a pink, plastic object. For a second, its presence there confused him; he couldn't think of anything pink he owned. Not him, a macho child of the fifties.

But then he remembered. It was Jennifer's hairbrush. The one he'd found under his sofa, just the night before.

He picked it up. White clumps of bristles were set into the pink plastic in neat rows. Idly, he counted them off. There were four rows across, and eleven clumps of bristles to each row. Forty-four clumps in all. His own age, forty-four. Was there, he wondered, some sort of special significance in that?

Then something else caught his eye, something between the rows. He squinted to try to make it out. It was a hair, a single hair. Gently, he unsnaked it from the bristles. It came away easily enough. Holding it up to the light, he could see it was long, blonde, and straight. One end came to a point. The other end seemed to have something attached - a root it was.

A follicle.

He looked about the room, and spotted a small glass bottle on the windowsill, one of the ones he'd picked up for collecting samples of his well-water for potability testing. Each bottle was sterile inside and sealed around the top with plastic.

He twisted the top until the plastic seal broke, and the cap came off. Carefully, he dropped the hair into the bottle and replaced the cap.

Back in college, Fielder and some buddies had gone down to the Village one night to check out a standup comedian who was said to be headed places. He was a thin, balding, nerd of a man, with glasses that kept slipping down his long nose, and a kind of whiny, apologetic way of speaking. He told this story about how he'd been walking along in the city one day, when he'd noticed something small lying on the sidewalk. He'd bent down and had realized it was a bullet, a single live round of ammunition. Afraid of leaving it there, he'd picked it up and dropped it into his shirt pocket, and promptly forgot about it. Months later, he was out walking again, when his attention was caught by one of the city's certified crazies, a religious fanatic of a woman who was shouting at other pedestrians at the top of her lungs. She took one look at him and, gathering all her strength, hurled her Bible directly at him. Her aim was good, and the Bible would have struck him right over the heart, and no doubt killed him on the spot, had not the bullet saved his life.

The man's name was Woody Allen.

Fielder thought of that story now, a story that prompted him to take the bottle and drop it into the pocket of his old flannel shirt. The next-to-last thing he did that night, before going to bed, was toss the shirt into the bottom of his closet. The last thing he did was to pray that he was wrong. That the time would never come when he'd have to reach inside that pocket again.

HE CALLED HER first thing in the morning. He'd spent half the night trying to figure out a way to ask her the things he needed to know, without coming right out and accusing her. He spent the other half knowing there
was
no other way.

“Matthew!” She sounded glad to hear his voice.

He had no idea where to begin.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“What's the matter,” he repeated. “What's the matter is, I don't think Jonathan killed your grandparents.”

“That's
good,
isn't it?”

“No,” he said. “That's not good.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think maybe
you
killed them.”

There was the briefest pause before she said, “Me?”

“Yes,” he said. “You.”

Then - nothing but silence on the other end of the line.
Tell me I'm crazy,
Fielder pleaded silently.
Tell me I'm on drugs. Tell me I'm out of my fucking mind. Tell me something, anything.

But there was only silence. And then a click.

THE DRIVE TO Nashua took him four and a half hours. He thought not having slept might be a problem, but it turned out not to be. He felt as though he was back in college, having pulled an all-nighter before a final exam, downing No-Doz with black coffee, operating on adrenaline, running on fumes. His hands cramped from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. His eyes ached from watching mile after mile of white line slide underneath him. He knew he must have stopped for gas along the way, but afterward he couldn't recall when or where that might have been.

It was a little after one by the time he pulled into Nightingale Court. The police were already there; a sheriff's department car was parked directly in front of number 14. They had a woman with them, a nervous gray-haired woman who described herself as a social worker trained in crisis intervention. They were waiting for the boy, they explained. Waiting for him to come home from school, so they could tell him there'd been a terrible car accident, and that his mother wouldn't be coming home.

“You his next of kin?” asked one of the deputies. He had a round face and couldn't have been much more than twenty, Fielder figured.

“Yes.” Fielder nodded. “I guess I am.”

THE LETTER WOULDN'T arrive for three full days. Mail travels slowly between places like Nashua, New Hampshire, and Big Moose, New York. But even before he opened it, Matt Fielder knew what it would say. It would say how much she loved him, and how sorry she was. It would tell him it had been no accident. It would ask him to look after Troy.

And it would set Jonathan free.

IN THE HEART of the Adirondacks, winter eventually gave way to spring once again, and spring to summer. The snows melted at last, the trees grew heavy with leaves, and the air was filled each afternoon with the rich scent of dry pine needles baking in the sun.

Troy Walker finally found the father he’d never had, and Matt Fielder the son he hadn’t quite expected. And as things turned out, the cabin was plenty big for two. It didn’t take Troy long to become handy splitting wood, caulking logs, and working on the new barn.

Jonathan Hamilton was taken in by Bass McClure and Bass’s wife, Betsy. When asked about the arrangement, all Bass will say is, “I always did like that boy.” Early most mornings, Bass and Jonathan can be spotted fishing in one of Ottawa County’s many lakes or streams.

Gil Cavanaugh was reelected for yet another term as Ottawa County District Attorney, receiving 72 percent of the vote.

Arthur Summerhouse retired from the bench.

Kevin Doyle, Mitch Dinnerstein, Laura Held, and the rest of their team at the Capital Defender’s Office continue to fight the good fight, and have so far kept the wolf at the door.

Flat Lake is as beautiful as ever.

* * *

THERE WOULD COME a day when Matt Fielder would have occasion to pull an old flannel shirt out of the bottom of his closet and put it back on, unwashed. Men who live in cabins without women tend to do things like that. No crazy religious fanatic would suddenly appear and hurl a Bible toward his heart. Instead, at some point, Fielder would idly touch his hand to his chest, or reach into his pocket, or simply become aware of something in there. Then would he rediscover the bottle that he’d placed there months ago. He’d step outside with it, out into the sunlight. There he’d open it up and invert it, tapping it ever so gently, until a single blonde hair would tumble out and land on the open palm of his hand. He’d stare at it for a long moment, taking in its length, its blonde color, and its perfect, undamaged follicle.

Then a warm breeze, gusting out of the south, would lift it up, carry it off, and drop it soundlessly among the pine needles.

My heartfelt thanks, as always, to my wife, Sandy; my children, Wendy, Ron, and Tracy; my editor, Ruth Cavin, and her assistant, Marika Rohn; my literary agent, Bob Diforio; and my circle of loyal manuscript readers.

My appreciation to my sister, Tillie Young, for medical assistance, and to Dina Vanides, for legal research.

Beyond that, I am forever in debt to my parents,
Fran
and Mac, who (though gone nearly twenty-five years now) continue to shape so much of who I am and what I do.