loudly. Other than that the town was quiet.
Jacob and I crossed the street toward St. Jude's, stepped up onto the opposite sidewalk, and moved into the parking lot. Our boots crunched in the gravel. Mary Beth jogged on ahead of us toward the cemetery.
'I've been thinking about the money,' Jacob said, 'and I think maybe we were fated to get it.'
'Fated?' I asked.
He nodded. He was eating a hunk of chocolate cake wrapped in a piece of aluminum foil, taking great bites out of it as we walked, and he had to wait, chewing and swallowing, before he could speak.
'There are so many things that might've gone some other way,' he said. 'If it'd just been chance, then it never would've happened. It's like it was meant to, like we were chosen.'
I smiled at him. It seemed like a romantic idea. 'What things?'
'Everything.' He listed them off on his fingers. 'If the plane had flown another mile, it would've crashed out in the open and been discovered right from the start. If the fox hadn't crossed exactly in front of us, and we hadn't crashed, and Mary Beth hadn't been there or hadn't jumped from the truck and chased it, and the fox hadn't run right next to the plane, we never would've found it. If you'd left the bag inside after checking on the pilot, we would've come into town and told the sheriff without even knowing about the money. It just goes on and on.'
We'd reached the cemetery's chain-link gate now, and we stopped there, as if hesitant to go inside. The gate was merely ornamental; it blocked the path but nothing more. There was no fence attached to it. Mary Beth sniffed at it for a moment, lifted his leg briefly against its supporting post, then stepped off the path and entered the cemetery by himself.
'But why is that fate?' I asked Jacob. It seemed more like luck to me, and it was a little frightening to hear him list off all the things that had gone our way. I couldn't escape the thought that everything balances out in the end: if it was luck that was bringing us through our present difficulties, it was bound to turn on us before we were through.
'Don't you see?' he said. 'It's too arbitrary to be just chance. It seems like there has to be something determining it, a plan helping us along.'
'God's?' I asked, smiling. I waved at the church.
He shrugged. 'Why not?'
'And what about Pederson? Was that part of this grand plan?'
He nodded emphatically. 'If he'd come at any other time that day, he would've found the plane. There would've been our tracks. We would've been caught.'
'But why have him come at all? If you were the one making the plan, wouldn't you have just omitted him?'
He thought about that, finishing off his cake. He licked at the aluminum foil a few times, then balled it up and tossed it into the snow. 'Maybe it's important for something which hasn't happened yet,' he said, 'something we don't know about.'
I didn't say anything. I'd never heard him attempt to philosophize before. I wasn't sure what he was getting at.
'It's going on right now, too, I bet,' he said. 'Things are happening in just the right sequence, one after the other, falling into place so that it all works out for us.'
He grinned at me. He seemed to be in an exceptionally good mood, and for some reason this irritated me. It reeked of complacency. He had no concept of the trouble we were in.
'You're happy we found the money, then?' I asked.
He hesitated, as if confused by the question. He seemed to think that there was a trick embedded in it. 'Aren't you?'
'I'm asking you.'
He waited a second, then nodded. 'Definitely,' he said, his voice serious. 'Without a doubt.'
'Why?'
He answered quickly, as if this were something he'd already considered many times. 'I can get back the farm now.'
He looked at me when he said it, to see my response, but I kept silent, my face expressionless. In a few minutes I was going to ask him to betray his only friend: it didn't seem like the right moment to inform him that he couldn't remain in Ashenville.
'And I can have a family,' he went on. 'I wouldn't have before. I need to find someone like Sarah, and--'
'Like Sarah?' I asked, startled.
'Someone aggressive. You needed that, too. You were too shy to find someone on your own; she had to come and get you.'
I was a little bewildered to hear him say this, but at the same time I recognized it as true. I nodded at him, prodding him on.
'Without the money,' he said, 'no one was ever going to come and get me. I'm fat' -- he patted at his stomach--'and poor. I was going to grow old and be alone. But now that I'm rich, all that'll change, someone'll come get me for the money.'
'You want someone to love you just for your money?'
'I've never had anyone, Hank. All my life. If I can get someone now, I'm not going to care why she's with me. I'm not proud.'
I leaned against the cemetery gate, watching him tell me this. His face and voice were very serious. This wasn't modesty or self-deprecatory humor; there was no sense of irony whatsoever. It was the truth, cold and shiny as a bone freshly stripped of its flesh: this was how Jacob saw his life.
I didn't know how to react. I stared down at his massive boots for a moment, embarrassed, then said, 'Whatever happened to Mary Beth?'
He adjusted his glasses on his nose, squinted past me into the cemetery. 'She's in there.'
'She's dead?'
'Dead?' he said. 'What do you mean? She was just here, you saw her.'
'Not the dog. Mary Beth Shackleton, from high school.'
Jacob frowned. 'She's married, I think. Last I heard she'd moved to Indiana.'
'She liked you without the money, didn't she?'
He laughed, shaking his head. 'I never told you the truth about that, Hank. I was always too ashamed.' He didn't look my way while he spoke; he stared off beyond me into the cemetery. 'She dated me as a joke. It was a bet she made with some of her friends. They all chipped in and bet her a hundred dollars that she wouldn't go steady with me for a month. So she did.'
'You knew this?'
'Everybody did.'
'And you went along with it?'
'It wasn't as bad as it seems. It was mean of her to do, but she did it in a nice way. We never kissed or touched or anything like that, but we walked around a lot together, and talked, and when the month was up she still stopped to say hello to me when we passed, which she didn't have to do.'
I was shocked. 'And you named your dog after her?'
He shrugged, smiling strangely. 'I liked the name.'
It was absurd, of course, the whole thing. I felt sorry for him, and ashamed.
A car honked somewhere farther down in town, and we both paused, listening. The night was very quiet. The dog had reappeared out of the cemetery and was sitting now beside the gate.
'I'm thirty-three,' Jacob said, 'and I've never even kissed a woman. That's not right, Hank.'
I shook my head. I couldn't think of anything to say.
'If my being rich'll change that,' he said, 'then fine. I don't care if it's just for the money.'
We fell silent after that. Jacob had spoken too much; we both seemed to sense this. An awkwardness hung about us like a mist, so thick that we could hardly see each other through it.
I unlatched the gate, and we passed into the cemetery. Mary Beth bounded off ahead of us.
'Sort of spooky, isn't it?' Jacob asked, his voice loud, brave, a bulldozer straining to push his embarrassment aside. He made a moaning sound, like a ghost, then laughed, short and sharp, trying to twist it into a joke.
