She stopped snipping and looked over at me.
“You mean Abigail Vaneer?”
“Vaneer?”
“She doesn’t like you to call her Abby. That’s what her husband told me in no uncertain terms. Rather grand of her.”
She stood next to the bush with one hand on her hip and the other firmly gripping the sharp little tool.
“And I’m talking to?” she asked.
“Friend of Abigail’s.”
“They’re not here. Went to ski in Italy. As if the winter here’s not enough for them. After that they’ll be at their other unit, I imagine. Not staying here. I’m on for the next two months.”
“I don’t know the other place. What if I want to leave a note?”
“Nothing to stop you. It’s just around the corner. 15A. Right off the common area. Original units. Not as well made, but the trees are bigger. All I’ve got are these disreputable
I thanked her and went to look for 15A. It was a little hard to drive through the misty, burning haze in front of my eyes. Surprise is always such an affront to the intellectually arrogant.
I tried to picture Abby with Tony Vaneer. I’d met him at a neighborhood party, maybe at our house, maybe someone else’s. I rarely cared one way or the other. Abby relished any form of social engagement with the Fairfield County social set, if only to have a go at the other women’s fashion sense or interior decor. These events took place on Saturday nights, so I was normally wrung out from an afternoon at the boxing gym and too weak to mount an effective defense. At least there was always plenty of booze and tasty finger food and occasionally a conversation that wouldn’t immediately trigger an attack of narcolepsy. Tony was always one of the guys there, with his wife, a washed-out, nervous woman with thin tufts of orangey brown hair who held her cigarette between her fingers like Audrey Hepburn. I remember her calling me a fellow ski orphan. That, like me, she hated the snow.
I don’t remember asking her where Tony went to ski, so little did I care. I think her name was Judith. When she talked to you it felt like she was really talking to herself. Distant, absorbed by her inner dialogue. Her husband, on the other hand, was verbose, and had dyed black hair combed straight back and a penchant for white turtlenecks, two things that set me on edge even though I didn’t know he was sleeping with my wife.
Number 15A was on a corner lot, with the front of the house perpendicular to the common area. I got out of the car and walked around the house, looking through slits in the drawn blinds. I didn’t really need to go inside. I got the gist of the place by the arrangement of the windows and the external dimensions. At least well enough to form a concept.
I got back in my car and drove all the way down to Brattleboro, where I was reasonably sure I’d find the necessary provisions. I spent the next two days securing what I needed, which took me to early Sunday morning, which was part of the plan.
I left the company car in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn and drove a pickup truck I’d stolen from the Brattleboro train station back to Warren. Along the way I stopped to grab a set of license plates off a pickup raised on blocks behind a roadside repair shop. I pulled into a picnic area next to a trout stream to have a late breakfast of bagel and sliced ham, after which I switched the plates. It was approaching midday when I got to Fox Run Borders.
At that time of year few of the units were occupied, the old lady in 35G notwithstanding. It was dead quiet when I pulled in with the pickup and went over to where they were building the gazebo. Through some sort of perverse providence they’d left a big Caterpillar front-end loader on the site, apparently brought in to sculpt the surrounding landscape.
The sunporch off the back of Tony’s house had been left open, providing excellent cover for breaking in through the rear door. Tony had equipped the place with an alarm, but hadn’t turned it on, another pleasant bit of good luck. I saw a photo of Tony and Abby on the mantelpiece. I resisted the temptation to search the rest of the living area and went down into the basement.
The support structure of the house was what I figured—a pair of central girders supported by a row of lally columns running the length of the building, interrupted in the middle by the basement stairs. Two-by-ten floor joists ran perpendicular from the sill to the tops of the girders.
I went back outside to the pickup and dug an eighteen-inch Stihl chain saw out of the back. I brought along a box of spare chains in case I hit a nail, which would instantly render the chain saw almost useless.
Back in the basement I pulled the start cord, then immediately regretted the lack of ear protection. No matter how hard you try to plan for a weekend project you always forget something. The best I could do was stuff my ears with pieces of paper towel from Tony’s washer/dryer area and give myself a reminder about using angry little two- cycle engines in confined, concrete-walled spaces.
I stood on a step stool and quickly cut a pair of holes in the box above the sill plate, about eight feet apart, four feet to either side of the centerline of the house. I shut off the saw and ran upstairs. I looked around the neighborhood and it still looked abandoned. No curtains moving in the windows, no gardeners leaning on rakes looking my way.
I backed the pickup truck across Tony’s side yard so I could feed a heavy yellow polypropylene rope coiled in the bed down through the right hole in the sill. I ran back down into the basement and pulled the rope across the length of the basement, around the furthest lally column, then back across and up through the other hole, thus creating a continuous loop circumnavigating the whole row of lally columns holding up the house. I tied the end of the rope to the trailer hitch off the back of the pickup and drove slowly across the lawn, across the street and into the common area, watching in the rearview mirror as the yellow line payed out behind me, subsequently dragging along a lifting-grade industrial chain to which it was attached. In a few minutes I saw the end of the chain emerge from the second hole. I gave it fifteen feet of clearance, then drove back to the street where I parked the truck and retrieved the pull rope.
Back down in the basement, I put on a fresh chain and fired up the saw, which cut through the ends of the joists where they were loaded on the central girders like the proverbial knife through butter. I only bit about eight inches into the nominal ten-inch-wide lumber to avoid nails shot down from the subfloor above me. I still hit a couple, but had the replacement chains to keep production running along smoothly.
I checked my watch when I ran upstairs for the last time and was encouraged to see I’d only been on the job for about forty minutes. This took some pressure off the timetable for the next phase of the process, which was the most difficult to plan for.
I walked over to where the big Cat was parked next to the gazebo project. I assumed it would be tricky to get it started without a key. My father was a mechanic, and I’d literally grown up working on all kinds of cars and trucks, but only gasoline driven, with spark plugs and carburetors. I didn’t know much about diesels, except what I learned optimizing a refinery making diesel fuel.
The Cat was a lot bigger up close than it looked from a distance. The engine compartment turned out to be easily accessible and the engine child’s play to hot-wire, if your child understood the basic principles of twelve-volt electrical current and internal combustion. The most startling aspect was the noise—even with my chain saw- damaged eardrums the engine was disturbingly loud.
My fears then shifted from whether I could start the freaking thing to whether I could actually drive it.
I found the lever that lifted the bucket off the ground and the one that engaged the transmission. At first the sensation of steering from the articulated rear wheels was a little peculiar, though all I needed to do was drive in a straight line over to Tony Vaneer’s colonial ski chalet. I asked forgiveness from the ornamental shrubbery that fell on the way, but otherwise got there in good form. Once in Tony’s side yard, I swung the Cat around 180 degrees and gently backed it up until I was about ten feet from the house.
The heavy-grade chain was probably a lot more than I needed for the job, but I thought better safe than sorry. After a few minutes I had it hooked up to the thick pin seated within the massive structure bolted to the Cat’s rear end.
The subterranean rumble of the diesel engine finally rousted one of the neighbors, a short, balding guy with an accent that might have been Lebanese, or maybe Palestinian, like a lot of the engineers I worked with in the Saudi Arabian petrochemical plants. He took a friendly interest in what I was doing.
“I didn’t know Mr. Vaneer was planning on remodeling. I assume the association’s architectural committee approved,” he said to me while I was wiping the chain grease off my hands.
