'What?'
'You told them about Orson.'
'No, Andy.'
'But you’re going to.'
He shook his head.
'Why not?' I asked.
'Come here, Jenna!' Walter hollered. His children turned around and ran back to us, their umbrella so low, I couldn’t see them. Walter took his umbrella from Jenna and lifted it up.
'Jenna, show Uncle Andy the tattoo you got at school.'
'Oh yeah!' she said, remembering. 'Look, Andy, isn’t it cool?'
Jenna raised the sleeve of her robe and held up the delicate underside of her right forearm. My knees weakened. In pink Magic Marker, scribbled from her elbow to her tiny wrist:
I looked up at Walter. His eyes flooded.
'All right, kids.' He smiled through it. 'Here. Go on ahead now. Let us talk.' Jenna took the umbrella and she and John David ran ahead as we continued on, the mailbox not far ahead.
'She had it when she came home from school,' Walter said. 'Beth noticed it when they were putting on her costume. Fuckin’ teacher didn’t know anything about it. Jenna said a nice man was drawing tattoos on all the kids at their Halloween carnival. She hadn’t seen him before.'
'Jesus, Walter. I am —'
'I don’t want your apologies or your pity,' he whispered. 'I’m going with you. That’s what I came to tell you. We’re gonna bury Orson together.'
The kids had reached the white Cadillac. We stopped ten feet from the end of the driveway and Walter turned to me. 'So when are you leaving?' he asked.
'A day or two. I’ve gotta go before my mother’s discovered.'
His eyes softened. 'Andy, I want you to know that I am s —'
'And I don’t need your pity,' I said. 'It won’t help either of us do what we have to do.'
He nodded and looked over his shoulder at Jenna and John David. The umbrella cast aside, they were throwing gravel from the driveway at my mailbox, and coming nowhere close to hitting it.
21
THE eve of my departure for Vermont was our thirty-fifth birthday, and Orson mailed me a handmade card. On the front, he’d designed a collage out of photographs, all taken in the sickly orange light of his shed. There was a head shot of Shirley Tanner’s boot-bruised face; a full body shot of Jeff in a hole in the desert; Wilbur on red plastic from the waist up — inside out.
Below the colorful collage, scrawled in Orson’s unmistakable hand:
Woodside is a foothill community in midwestern Vermont, isolated from the major cities of the North by the Green Mountains in the east and New York’s Adirondacks in the west. On an autumn day, it’s quintessential American countryside, breathtaking in its open vistas of rolling hills, endless mountain chains, and a quaint college town tucked into a vale.
According to the gas station attendant, we were three weeks late. Then the forests had been burning with the brightest color in thirty years. Now, the leaves brown and dead, few remained on the trees, and the blue sky gleamed awkwardly against the winter bleakness of the countryside. Vermont in November smacked of the same stiff beauty as dolling up a corpse for its wake.
Beyond the outskirts of Woodside, on the fringe of the Green Mountains, Walter and I approached the inn. Heading up a long, curving driveway, I saw a large white house perched halfway up the mountain. There was movement on its wraparound porch — empty rocking chairs swaying in a raw breeze.
Walter pulled his Cadillac into the gravel parking lot adjacent to the sallow lawn behind the house. There were only seven other cars, and I felt relieved to be outside of Orson’s town. We’d almost stayed at a motel in downtown Woodside because of its proximity to the college campus, but the risk of running into Orson was too great.
Hauling our suitcases up the front porch steps, we collapsed into a pair of rockers. The mountainside fell away from where we sat for a thousand feet, and the late-afternoon sun shone on the forest of bare trees in the valley below. Naked branches moved with the breeze, and I imagined that three weeks ago the sound of chattering leaves had filled the air. Across the valley, which extended twenty miles west, I could see into New York State, and the grander mountains of the Adirondacks that stood there.
Wood smoke scented the forest, and sitting in the cold, listening and watching, I sensed Walter’s restiveness.
After a moment, he said, 'It’s too cold to sit out here. I’ll check us in.' He stood up and lifted his suitcase off the porch. 'You just gonna sit there?' he asked, walking toward the door.
'Yep.'
Our room was at the end of a creaky hallway on the second floor. There were two double beds, placed on opposite sides of the room, a dormer window between them, from which you could view the mountains. The ceiling slanted up on both sides and met in a straight line, which bisected the room. Two paisley love seats faced each other in the center of the hardwood floor, a squat square coffee table between them. For seventy-five dollars a night, it was a lovely room. There were even fresh irises in glass vases on each bedside table. They made the room smell like an arbor.
Walter sat on his bed, unpacking his clothes, and I lay on mine, my suitcase still unopened on the floor. Voices moved through the walls, and I heard the hollow clack of footsteps ascending the staircase. Someone knocked.
Crossing the room, I stopped at the door. There was no peephole, so I asked, 'Who is it?'
'Melody Terrence.' I opened the door to a striking longhaired brunette, far too young and pretty to be an innkeeper.
'Hi there,' I said.
'You guys settling in all right?' she asked.
'We sure are.'
'Well, I just came to let you know that we’re serving dinner in thirty minutes, if you’re interested. Danny forgot to put the sign up again.'
'Thanks for the invitation.'
'Will you be joining us? There’s a cozy dining room downstairs, and Danny’s been smoking a bird all day. We’ll have fresh vegetables, homemade biscuits —'
'It sounds wonderful,' I said. 'We’ll see you there.'
'Excellent.' She smiled and walked down the hall to the next room. I closed the door.
Walter had placed a stack of shirts into a drawer, and, slamming it, he looked up at me, smoldering. 'You call yourself a crime writer? Think we should go down and meet all the guests? What if someone recognizes you, Andy? If it ever got out that Orson, the Heart Surgeon' — he whispered the infamous title — 'was your brother, and lived in Woodside, someone could put two and two together. They might remember that you were here in Vermont around the same time David Parker disappeared. And, you know, that’s all it’d take to put the FBI on our ass.'
