Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold! (7 page)

Ben shook his head slowly. “No, I’m not. I’m talking about saving myself, Miles. I’m talking about something that doesn’t have a price tag.”

“But this is … crazy!” Miles’ hands gripped the edge of the desk top until the knuckles were white. “This is irresponsible! It’s just plain stupid, damn it!”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“You don’t? Shucking off your professional responsibilities, your life’s work? Going off to live in a castle and fight dragons—assuming there are any and you’re not simply getting fleeced? No TV, no Bears games, no Wrigley Field, no cold beer, no goddamn electricity or showers with hot water or indoor toilets or anything? Leaving behind your home and your friends and … Jesus Christ, Doc!”

“Just think of it as an extended camping trip—the kind where you get away from it all.”

“Great! A million-dollar camping trip!”

“My mind is made up on this, Miles.”

“Off to some godforsaken …”

“My mind is made up!”

The hard edge to his voice left them both shaken. They stared at each other in silence for a moment, feeling the distance between them widening as if a chasm had opened. Then Ben rose and came quickly around the desk. Miles rose as well. Ben put a hand on his shoulder and gripped it.

“If I don’t do something, Miles, I’m going to lose myself,” he whispered. “It may take a few months or even a year, but in the end I’m going to slip into the cracks and be gone. I can’t let that happen.”

His friend looked at him wordlessly, sighed and nodded. “It’s your life, Doc. I can’t tell you how to live it. I never could.” He squared himself. “Will you at least take a few days to think about this some more? That’s not asking too much, is it?”

Ben smiled wearily. “I’ve already thought it through a hundred different ways. That’s enough. I’m all done thinking.”

Miles shook his head. “Guess a blind man could tell that, couldn’t he?”

“I’m going to tell the others now. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep what you know to yourself.”

“Sure. Why not? Why let anybody else know that the leading light of the firm is deranged?” He gave Ben a final glance, shrugged and turned toward the office door. “You’re nuts, Doc.”

Ben followed him out. “Yeah, I’ll miss you, too, Miles.”

He called the staff together then and told them of his plans for a leave of absence from the firm. He told them of his need to get away from his present life, the city, the practice, everything familiar; he told them that he would be leaving in the next few weeks and that he might be gone for better than a year. There was stunned silence and then a flurry of questions. He answered them all patiently. Then he left and went home.

He never mentioned Landover to any of them. Neither did Miles.

It took him the better part of three weeks to put his affairs in order. Most of that time was spent in tying up the loose ends of his law practice—communicating with clients, clearing his court calendar, and reassigning his case load. The transition was difficult. The staff had accepted his decision with stoic resolve, but there was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in their looks and conversation that he could not mistake. They felt that he was deserting them, bailing out. And truth be told, he was feeling a bit ambivalent about that
possibility himself. On the one hand, the loosening of ties with the firm and his profession gave him a newfound sense of freedom and relief. He felt as if he were escaping a trap— as if he were beginning his life all over again with a chance to discover things he had missed the first time around. On the other hand, there were undeniable twinges of uncertainty and regret at letting go of what he had spent the better part of his adult life building for himself. There was that sense of abandoning the familiar for the unknown that characterizes all journeys made for the first time.

Still, he could come back whenever he chose, he reminded himself. There was really nothing permanent in any of this— at least, not yet.

So he went about the business at hand and tried not to think about the ambivalent feelings, but the more he tried not to think about them, the more he did, and in the end he gave up on it altogether and accepted that it was inevitable. He let the feelings buffet and rage within him, let the doubts and the uncertainties gnaw, and found that he gained a certain measure of strength by being able to withstand them. He had made his decision; he found now that he could live with it.

The three weeks came to an end and he had completed the transition at the firm. He was free of his professional obligations, free to pursue whatever other paths he might choose to follow. In this instance, the path he had chosen led to a mythical kingdom called Landover. Only Miles knew the truth, and Miles wasn’t talking. Not to him, not to anyone. Miles was in a determined funk. Miles was convinced he was crazy.

“There will come a time, Doc—a time in the not-too-distant future, unless I miss my guess—when a lightbulb will click on inside your muddled head and you will realize in a flash of belated wisdom that you made a huge mistake. When that happens, you’ll come slinking back to the firm, feeling a bit sheepish and a lot poorer, and I will take enormous pleasure in saying ‘I told you so’ at least half a dozen times.
But that hasn’t anything to do with anyone but you and me. So we’ll just keep this bit of middle-aged foolishness between ourselves. No point in embarrassing the entire firm.”

That was the last comment Miles had made with regard to his decision to purchase Landover. He had made it the day after Ben had announced his decision to take a leave of absence to the partners and staff. Since then, he had kept his conversations with Ben confined strictly to business matters. Three weeks later, he had not said another word to his friend about Landover. He had contented himself instead with meaningful glances and a condescending manner suggestive of a shrink trying to glean some insight into the mind of his prize lunatic.

Ben tried to ignore this behavior, but his patience wore thin. The days dragged past, and he grew anxious to end the waiting. Ed Samuelson called to announce that the stocks and bonds had been liquidated and the money was available for the investment—if Ben was still certain that this was something that he wanted to do without further consultation. It was, Ben assured him as if missing the pointed suggestion, and wired the purchase price of Landover to Rosen’s in New York, attention Meeks. He made arrangements with Samuelson to manage his financial affairs for an indefinite period of time, preparing suitable powers-of-attorney and supplemental authorizations. The accountant accepted them with a look that was suspiciously similar to the one recently adopted by Miles. Ben’s patience ebbed some more. He paid his rent at the Towers for twelve months in advance and arranged for cleaning and security checks. He told George to keep an eye on things, and George seemed genuinely anxious that he have a good trip and a pleasant stay at wherever it was that he was going. George was probably the only one who felt that way, he decided. He prepared an update of his last will and testament, cancelled magazine and newspaper subscriptions, called the health club to advise them he would not be coming in for a time, but to keep the boxing facilities intact, put a hold on his mail at the post office effective the
first of next month and deposited the key to his bank lockbox with Ed Samuelson.

Then he sat back to wait some more.

The waiting ended in the fourth week, three days before the end of the month. Snow flurries spit and swirled in the graying afternoon, the post-Thanksgiving pre-Christmas holiday weekend flooding the city with eager shoppers dying to celebrate Christ’s birth with an exchange of cash for goods. His discontent with the waiting was breeding a rather nasty cynicism. He was watching the madness from the confines of his ivory tower when George called up to announce that a special delivery envelope had arrived from New York.

It was from Meeks. There was a letter, airline tickets, a roadmap of the state of Virginia and an odd-looking receipt. The letter read as follows:

He read the letter through several times, glanced at the airline tickets and the receipt, then examined the roadmap. A red pen line traced a passage on the roadways leading west of the city of Charlottesville to a small “x” in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains just south of Waynesboro. There were cursory instructions printed in the margins of the map, numbered in consecutive paragraphs. He read them through, read the letter once more, then folded the entire packet up again and slipped it back into the envelope.

He sat there for a time on the sofa, staring out at the gray day with its flurry of white snowflakes and the distant sounds of the holiday rush. Then he walked into the bedroom, packed a small overnight bag and called down to George for a taxi.

He was at O’Hare by five o’clock.

It was beginning to snow harder.

It was not snowing in Virginia. It was cool and clear, the sky filled with sunlight that streaked a backdrop of forested mountains glimmering crystalline with morning dew. Ben eased the steel-blue New Yorker into the right lane of Interstate 64 traveling west out of Charlottesville toward Waynesboro.

It was midmorning of the following day. He had flown to Washington National, stayed overnight at the Marriott across from the airport, then caught Allegheny’s 7:00
A.M
. flight to Charlottesville. Once there, he had presented the odd-looking receipt at the terminal courtesy desk and received in exchange the keys to the New Yorker and a small box wrapped in plain brown paper addressed to him. In the
box was a brief letter from Meeks and a medallion. The letter read:

The medallion was an aged, tarnished piece of metal, its face engraved with a mounted knight in battle harness advancing out of a morning sun that rose over a castle encircled by a lake. A double-link chain was fastened at its apex. It was an exquisite piece of workmanship, but badly worn. The tarnish would not come clean, even with rubbing. He had slipped it around his neck, picked up the car reserved in his name and turned south out of Charlottesville onto Interstate 64.

So far, so good, he thought to himself as he drove west toward the Blue Ridge. Everything had gone according to script.

The map supplied by Meeks lay open on the seat beside him. He had memorized the instructions written on it. He was to follow 64 west almost to Waynesboro and exit the Skyline Drive on the road south toward Lynchburg. Twenty miles in, he would come upon a wayside turn-around on a promontory overlooking a stretch of mountains and valleys within the George Washington National Forest. It would be marked with a small green sign with the number 13 in black. There would be a courtesy phone and a weather shelter. He was to pull over, park, and lock the car with the keys inside, and cross the roadway to the nature path on the opposite side. He was to follow the path into the mountains for approximately two miles. At that point, he would be met.

The map didn’t say by whom. Neither did the letter.

The map did say that someone would come later to pick up the car. The phone could be used to arrange for transportation back again, should he decide later to return. A telephone number was provided.

A twinge of doubt tugged suddenly at him. He was a long way out in the middle of nowhere, and no one but Meeks knew exactly where he was. If he were simply to drop from sight, Meeks might suddenly be a million dollars richer— supposing for the sake of argument that this was all an elaborate hoax. Stranger things had happened and for much less.

He thought about it for a moment and then shook his head. It didn’t make sense. Meeks was an agent for Rosen’s, and a man in his position would have been thoroughly checked. Besides, there were too many ways that Meeks could be caught in such a thing. Miles knew of Ben’s contact with the store and the reason for that contact. The funds he had cabled could be traced. Copies of the confirmation letter from Meeks were with his safe papers. And the ad for Landover’s sale was public knowledge.

He forced the doubts from his mind and concentrated on the drive ahead. His anticipation of what lay ahead had been working on him for weeks. He was so keyed up that he could barely contain himself. He had slept poorly last night. He had been awake before sunrise. He was susceptible to all sorts of half-baked ideas.

He reached the entrance to Skyline Drive in a little more than thirty minutes and turned south onto it. The two lane highway wound steadily upward into the Blue Ridge, weaving through the tangle of forest and mountain rock, rising into the late November sunlight. Panoramic views spread away to either side, the sweep of the national forestlands and parkways slipping past in breathtaking still life. Traffic was light. He encountered three cars traveling in the opposite direction, families with camping gear and luggage, one pulling a fold-up trailer. He came across no one driving south.