She said, “I’m sorry for coming unannounced. But I need to ask a very special favor of you, and it can’t wait. May I come in?” Placing her hand flat against the door, she pushed lightly, intending to speak with Hubert St. Germain, but only in the immediate presence of Jordan Groves.
Hubert pushed back from the other side. “Is something wrong up at the lake, Miss Cole?” he asked, his face nearly expressionless — unreadable to Vanessa, but not mysterious. For her, there was no mystery to the man. He was compact and muscular, like most of the guides, and of average height, his hands and neck darkly tanned. Vanessa had never really thought of him as someone with a life of his own and therefore had never thought of him as someone who was unknowable. For years he had merely been the coolly detached, competent, always available guide, efficient and attractively designed, like one of those fine Adirondack guide boats he built and handled more expertly than any but the old legendary guides from her grandfather’s day.
In the near darkness behind him she saw a silhouette of a person slip out of her line of sight into a bank of shadows deeper in the room. Hubert moved to come out onto the porch and close the door behind him.
“May I come inside?” Vanessa asked. The dog had followed her onto the porch and now stood beside her as if ready to escort her into the cabin. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I do need to speak personally with you.” She wanted Jordan Groves to hear her plea and volunteer to help her in Hubert’s place, and she resented to a small degree the artist’s obvious avoidance of her. She intended to press herself on him, to make it impossible for him to ignore her specific need and rising desire. Confident since yesterday’s encounter at the camp that his need and desire matched hers, she felt entitled, even invited, to risk being rejected by him. He was trying to run from that fact, and she had no intention of letting him.
Hubert said, “It’s all a mess inside. We can talk out here on the porch. I…I’ve got a…,” he stammered uncomfortably.
Then a woman spoke from the darkness behind him. “I’m just leaving, if you want to have a private conversation,” she said, and suddenly, standing in the doorway beside the guide, was Alicia Groves. “Hello, Miss Von Heidenstamm,” the artist’s wife said and pushed past them onto the porch. The dog backed out of her way, but otherwise made no fuss over her presence. Clearly, the animal was used to her.
Vanessa stepped out of her way, too, and watched in silence as Alicia Groves crossed the porch, hurried down the stairs, and walked from the yard to the pine grove where the Ford sedan was parked. Alicia’s bright blond hair, Vanessa noticed, had been freshly brushed. Without looking back, Alicia got into the car and drove quickly down the hill and away.
Vanessa said to Hubert, “Well, I believe that now we can talk out here on the porch, if you like.”
The guide gazed down the slope to the bend in the rough lane where the car had disappeared behind a stand of spruce trees, almost as if he expected Alicia Groves to return. “What is it you want me to do for you, Miss Cole?” he said without looking at her.
JORDAN BROUGHT HIS AIRPLANE INTO THE RESERVE FROM THE west this time, cutting a wide arc to avoid the clubhouse and the First Lake altogether, flying instead above the forested spine of the Great Range and coming in low over the swampy headwaters of the Tamarack River, where, except for a few solitary mountain climbers, he was least likely to be seen. A mile north of Dr. Cole’s camp, he cut his speed as much as he dared and put the airplane into the water gently and taxied slowly along the shore. He anchored it in a shallow, protected inlet a mile or so above the beach where he had first seen Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. He came ashore there and went into the woods, making his way through low scrub alongside a small, rock-filled brook.
Soon the trees and brush thinned out, and he saw the roofs of the camp woodshed and the caretaker’s shack. Avoiding the open ground in front of the camp, he walked through tall pines toward the guest quarters and approached the main building from the side. He passed the big stone fireplace chimney and was a few feet from the steps leading up to the deck when he stopped suddenly and stood stock-still, as if to hear the breeze stroking the high branches of the pine trees.
This is crazy, he thought. I’m a goddamn lunatic doing this, coming out here in the middle of the afternoon. I’m like a hound chasing a bitch in heat. It was his first conscious thought since he’d put Frances Jacques in charge of the boys. Alicia was in town, he knew, doing her thrice-weekly volunteer work at the little medical center there and picking up groceries afterward and would be home by three or so. He’d told Frances to inventory all his tools and brushes and to let the boys help her. That way she would learn where everything was located in the studio and what it was called. Just as his own father had done when he was a small boy, Jordan had taught his sons the names of the tools of his trade. It was the first step toward teaching them the trade itself. He gave the girl a pad and pencil and said that if she found a tool or a piece of equipment that neither she nor the boys could name, she was to make a drawing of it, and he would tell her later what it was called. He wanted her to memorize the location and name of every tool he owned, so that he could be like a surgeon and she his nurse, and all he’d have to do was ask for a particular brush or chisel, and she’d place it in his hand. He instructed her to go through all the drawers and look on every shelf and into the cabinets. He had nothing to hide. No secrets, he told her. He wanted her as familiar with every square inch of the studio as he was. Today was tool day, he said. Tomorrow they would inventory materials. Then he had left the studio for the hangar and his airplane, and until this moment, when he found himself in the Reserve at the Second Lake and about to step up onto the deck of the late Dr. Cole’s camp, Rangeview, and quietly knock on the front door, he had no thoughts about what he was doing or why. He simply did it.
He realized that his silly sexual fantasy, not the woman herself, had gotten the best of him. Vanessa Von Heidenstamm was beautiful and provocative and intriguingly unpredictable, but she was flawed, terribly flawed, as if something inside her, a crucial, defining part of her mind, were permanently broken and made her dangerous to anyone foolish enough to get close to her. It wasn’t a matter of liking or disliking Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. You were magnetically attracted to her or you were repelled, and in his case it was both. He glanced down the slope in front of the camp to the glittering water and noticed that the guide boat was not there. So she was gone, then.
He searched the lake for a moment and saw only a deer with her fawn stepping cautiously from the woods on the far side to drink. A pair of loons floated offshore a ways, bobbing in the low waves, disappearing abruptly underwater, reappearing a minute later fifty yards farther on, and Jordan wondered if, like swans, loons mated for life. Then suddenly the artist felt very foolish. He felt foolish and exposed, like a lovesick adolescent boy caught standing below the window of an inaccessible woman, a nobleman’s young wife or daughter, and he merely the carpenter’s son. Turning, he walked back along the side of the main building of the camp and into the woods and made his way downstream along the brook to the inlet where he had anchored his airplane.
The new American flyers flew formation drills at Los Alcázares twice a day for a week. The rest of the time they amused themselves pitching coins with their Spanish mechanics, tossing five peseta pieces the size of silver dollars. The tall American, the one they called Rembrandt, mostly kept himself apart from the others and made drawings of the blond hills. Finally one morning in early February, after they had been checked out and approved by their Spanish commander and a Russian colonel, they were sent to Valencia aboard an old Fokker trimotor transport. The Fokker landed at a half-constructed airfield in Manises, just outside the city, shortly after noon, and the Americans took a taxi to the Hotel Ingles, where they dropped their luggage and strolled to the nearby Vodka Café. They went there to meet the other foreign pilots based in Valencia, men who had been in Spain most of the fall of ’36 and now the winter of ’37. They were Allison and Koch and Brenner from the United States, and the Englishmen, Fairhead, Papps, and Loverseed. The three new arrivals were known to each other by their nicknames, taken earlier when they’d first arrived in Los Alcázares — Whitey, because of his pale hair, Chang, because of his round face and flat features, and Rembrandt, because back in the States he was a well-known artist — but they introduced themselves to the veteran pilots by their last names instead, Richardson, Collins, and Groves, as if somehow here in Valencia where there was a war on, nicknames seemed frivolous. Groves, the artist, asked, What’ve they got us flying out of here? All we had in Los Alcázares were a couple of old Polish Cojo-Jovens. Real clunkers, barely held together with tape and baling wire. Fairhead, who was the squadron commander, smiled and said they’d be flying even older 1925 Breguet 19s. Groves scowled. Christ, that crate was obsolete the day it came out of the factory, he said. The Englishman laughed. Oh, you’ll get so you can squeeze enough out of it. It’ll always get you home. Or nearly always. Every airplane has its virtues, Groves. Like women. You just have to learn how to locate them. Their virtues, I mean. And then how to get the bloody most out of them. Do you read me, Groves? he asked. Do you read me? The Englishman seemed drunk, and the American didn’t answer. He moved away from the group and after a while left the café and went back to the hotel. The rest of the flyers kept drinking, and as the afternoon wore on they grew very loud and raucous, the veterans because they felt lucky to be still alive, the newcomers, Whitey and Chang, because they were afraid.