I didn’t see her off at Denver International—that was her mother’s job—but she called me when she landed, frothing with a combination of nerves and excitement. Looking forward, not back. I was glad for her. When my phone rang twenty minutes later, I thought it would be her again. It wasn’t. It was her mother. Georgia asked if we could talk. Maybe over lunch.
Uh-oh, I thought.
We ate at McGee’s—a pleasant meal, with pleasant conversation, mostly about the music business. When we had said no to dessert and yes to coffee, Georgia leaned her considerable bosom on the table and got down to business. “So, Jamie. Are you two done with each other?”
“I… um… Georgia…”
“Goodness, don’t mumble and stumble. You know perfectly well what I mean, and I’m not going to bite your head off. If I had a mind to do that, I would have done it last year, when she first hopped in the sack with you.” She saw my expression and smiled. “Nah, she didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. Didn’t need to. I can read her like a book. I bet she even told you I got up to some of the same doins with Hugh, back in the day. True?”
I made a zipping motion across my lips. It turned her smile into a laugh.
“Oh, that’s good. I like that. And I like you, Jamie. I did almost from the first, when you were skinny as a rail and still getting over whatever junk you were putting into your system. You looked like Billy Idol, only dragged through the gutter. I don’t have anything against mixed-race sweeties, either. Or the age thing. Do you know what my father gave me when I got old enough for a driver’s license?”
I shook my head.
“A 1960 Plymouth with half the grille gone, bald tires, rusty rocker panels, and an engine that gobbled recycled oil by the quart. He called it a field-bomber. Said every new driver should have an old wreck to start with, before he or she stepped up to a car that would actually take an inspection sticker. Are you getting my point?”
I absolutely was. Bree wasn’t a nun, she’d had her share of sexual adventures before I came along, but I had been her first long-term relationship. In New York, she would move up—if not to a man of her own race, then certainly to one a little closer to her own age.
“I just wanted that out front before I said what I really came here to say.” She leaned forward even more, the rolling tide of her bosom endangering her coffee cup and water glass. “She wouldn’t tell me much about the research she’s been doing for you, but I know it scared her, and the one time I tried to ask Hugh, he about bit my head off.”
Ants, I thought. To him, the whole congregation looked like ants.
“It’s about that preacherman. I know that much.”
I kept quiet.
“Cat got your tongue?”
“You could say so, I guess.”
She nodded and sat back. “That’s all right. That’s fine. Just from now on, I want you to leave Brianna out of it. Will you do that? If only because I never suggested that you’d have done better to keep your elderly prick away from my daughter’s underpants?”
“She’s out of it. We agreed on that.”
She gave a businesslike nod. Then: “Hugh says you’re taking a vacation.”
“Yes.”
“Going to see the preacherman?”
I kept quiet. Which was the same as saying yes, and she knew it.
“Be careful.” She reached across the table and interlaced her fingers in mine, as her daughter had been wont to do. “Whatever it was you and Bree were looking into, it upset her terribly.”
I flew into Stewart Airport in Newburgh on a day in early October. The trees were turning color, and the ride to the town of Latchmore was beautiful. By the time I got there, the afternoon was waning and I checked into the local Motel 6. There was no dial-up, let alone WiFi, which made my laptop unable to touch the world outside my room, but I didn’t need WiFi to find The Latches; Bree had done that for me. It was four miles east of downtown Latchmore, on Route 27, an estate home once owned by an old-money family named Vander Zanden. Around the turn of the twentieth century the old money had apparently run out, because The Latches had been sold and turned into a high-priced sanitarium for overweight ladies and soused gentlemen. That had lasted almost until the turn of the twenty-first century. Since then it had been for sale or lease.
I thought I would have a hard time sleeping, but I went under almost immediately, in the midst of trying to plan what I’d say to Jacobs when I saw him. If I saw him. When I woke early on another bright fall day, I decided that playing it by ear might be for the best. If I hadn’t laid down tracks to run on, I reasoned (perhaps fallaciously), I couldn’t be derailed.
I got in my rental car at nine, drove the four miles, found nothing. A mile or so farther on I stopped at a farmstand loaded with the season’s last produce. The potatoes looked mighty paltry to my country boy’s eye, but the pumpkins were wowsers. The stand was being presided over by a couple of teenagers. The resemblance said they were brother and sister. Their expressions said they were bored brainless. I asked for directions to The Latches.
“You passed it,” the girl said. She was the older.
“I figured that much. I just don’t know how I managed. I thought I had good directions, and it’s supposed to be pretty big.”
“There used to be a sign,” the boy said, “but the guy who’s renting the place took it down. Pa says he must like to keep himself to himself. Ma says he’s probably stuck up.”
“Shut up, Willy. Mister, you gonna buy anything? Pa says we can’t shut down for the day until we get thirty dollars’ worth of custom.”
“I’ll buy a pumpkin. If you can give me some decent directions.”
She gave a theatrical sigh. “One pumpkin. A buck-fifty. Big whoop.”
“How about one pumpkin for five dollars?”
Willy and his sister exchanged a look, then she smiled. “That’ll work.”
My expensive pumpkin sat in the backseat like an orange moonlet as I drove back the way I had come. The girl had told me to watch for a big slab of rock with METALLICA RULES sprayed on it. I spotted it and slowed to ten miles an hour. Two tenths of a mile after the big rock, I came to the turnoff I’d missed before. It was paved, but the entrance was badly overgrown and heaped with fallen autumn leaves. It looked like camouflage to me. When I’d asked the farmstand kids if they knew what the new occupant did, they had simply shrugged.
“Pa says he probably made his money in the stock market,” the girl said. “He must have a lot of it, to live in a place like that. Ma says it must have fifty rooms.”
“Why you goin to see him?” This was the boy.
His sister threw him an elbow. “That’s rude, Willy.”
I said, “If he’s who I think he is, I knew him a long time ago. And thanks to you guys, I can bring him a present.” I hefted the pumpkin.
“Make a lot of pies with that, f’sure,” the boy said.
Or a jack-o’-lantern, I thought as I turned into the lane leading to The Latches. Branches brushed the sides of my car. One with a bright little electric light inside instead of a candle. Right behind the eyes.
The road—that’s what it was once you got past the intersection with the highway, wide and well-paved—climbed in a series of S-turns. Twice I had to stop while deer lolloped across ahead of me. They looked at my car without concern. I guessed no one had hunted these woods in a long, long time.
Four miles up, I came to a closed wrought-iron gate flanked by signs: PRIVATE PROPERTY on the left and NO TRESPASSING on the right. There was an intercom box on a fieldstone post with a video camera above it, cocked down to look at callers. I pressed the button on the intercom. My heart was beating hard, and I was sweating. “Hello? Is anybody there?”