the relationship-it's as clear to me now as it was back then-because Skeeter was a homosexual, and if I stayed with him that would mean I was a homosexual too.'
'Yuck. Arrgh.'
'So I broke it off.'
'You never saw him again?'
'I didn't accept his phone calls in the dorm, I didn't answer his letters, I didn't go home for Thanksgiving, and at Christmas I faked the flu and never left the house. He phoned twice a day for three weeks, and I told Mom I was too sick to come to the phone. Actually, I was in my room writing a paper on Teilhard de Chardin and reading City of Night, which was camouflaged inside the cover of A Stone for Danny Fisher. Talk about confused.'
'Your parents never caught on?'
'I'm sure they were baffled, and worried. They could see that I wasn't all that sick. I'm sure I was consuming an awful lot of baloney sandwiches with mayonnaise for a flu victim.'
'And then there was Skeeter baying outside your window. It must have been hellish for him. For both of you.'
'It was.'
We came to the house and Timmy, his key out of his pocket and aimed like a derringer for the previous half block, led the way in.
'I imagined,' Timmy said, 'that after Christmas, when Skeeter finally stopped calling and writing, he'd found somebody else. At least that's what I made myself think.' We headed for the kitchen, where I got a beer from the fridge, and Timmy said, 'I guess I'd better have one too.' We pried open the back door, abloat in the wet heat, and sat out on the moonlit deck with the petunias.
I said, 'If you imagined Skeeter with someone else, weren't you jealous?'
'Absolutely. It was excruciating. But I was only getting what I deserved, I believed. And I was right. In fact, after what I'd done to Skeeter I deserved even worse.'
'Nah.'
'I did.'
'You only did what a lot of people do at the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood: You leave your childhood sweetheart because you're both about to become grown-ups, and your lives and circumstances are going to be different. It's hard and it's cruel, but it's a necessary part of life.'
'No,' Timmy said, 'the main reason I cut Skeeter off was I was afraid of not being normal. Mainly, not being thought of us normal.'
'Yes, but that's all you did in the name of normality-end a high-school infatuation. You didn't-you weren't like Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Conformist. You didn't commit murder for the fascists in order to fit in.'
Timmy raised his bottle. 'Well, let's drink to that. No, at least I didn't do that-assassinate a liberal for the fascists. At least, as far as I can recall I didn't.'
We drank.
I said, 'And however much you may have rejected abnormality back in the sixties, Timothy, you certainly made up for it in the seventies. As so many of us did.' I gestured salaciously.
Timmy didn't seem to notice this. Gazing at the red moon, he was deep in thought. Finally, he said, 'I can never undo what I did to Skeeter back then. It's obvious that the pain I caused him was so deep and terrible that it will be a part of him until he dies. And it's going to make his dying too young even worse than it would have been, which is mean and stupid enough.'
'Timmy, you're being far too hard on yourself.'
'But you know,' he said, giving me a weird, feverish look I wasn't sure I had ever seen on him before, 'maybe I can make it up to Skeeter in a small way. I can do this by helping with the thing that's most important to him now: by finding out who killed Eric, and by keeping Janet safe if she's in any actual danger. And by saving the Herald from the bad chain, the chain of fools.'
He had lit a citronella candle to keep the bugs away, and its light flickered across his fine-featured Irish mug and in his suddenly brighter eyes. He seemed almost possessed by this sudden notion, which to me felt vaguely but surely like trouble.
I said, 'Hey, Timothy. I'm the detective, and you're the pragmatic but idealistically motivated social engineer. Remember?'
This didn't seem to register. 'I'll hire you,' he said, 'and I'll take time off from work-the Assembly is in the August doldrums now-and I'll help you out. Anyway, Don, you're-'between projects' is the euphemism, I believe. It's something we can do together, and it's something I can do for Skeeter. One last thing.'
I thought this over, but not for long. 'Timothy, I don't know. Your impulse is worthy. It's your decent heart asserting itself. But as for our working together, that sounds risky. Often you don't like the way I operate. My methods have sometimes left you despondent. Outraged, even. The whole thing could become… awkward.'
His face glowed in the strange moonlight. He said, 'I'll take that chance. I certainly can't think of anybody I'd rather hire than you, Don.'
'No, Timmy, you can't think of anybody you'd rather share a roll of dental floss with than me. Detective-client relationships are different. Anyway, Skeeter might want to hire me, or Janet Osborne might.
Either would make a lot more sense. This whole business of Eric's unsolved murder being connected to any possible attempts on Janet's life is highly speculative. Janet wasn't all that sure that the so-called Jet Ski attack that Skeeter was blithering about was even an attack on her at all. I'll talk to Janet tomorrow-I've agreed to do that with no charge or obligation to anybody. But how about if we just take this thing one step at a time?'
'Okay,' he said, 'but if it's all right with you, I think that tomorrow I'll just come along for the ride. We can decide later on who'll pay.'
This was unprecedented This was not good I said, 'Well, I think you just won't come along for the ride tomorrow Timmy, even if you were my client, I don't generally take clients along while I'm working on an investigation They tend to get in the way, and you would not want to do that. Look, how about if I don't come to work with you and you don't come to work with me' How's that?'
'I've helped you out plenty of times,' he said levelly, 'and on cases that were just as murky in the beginning as this one is. I've done my share of cleaning up the murk. I've never-as you put it-gotten in the way. Admit it. Have PI have only been helpful-sometimes extremely helpful-and occasionally in dangerous and ugly situations.'
'This is different,' I said, knowing exactly where this was heading. 'You are emotionally involved.'
'Well, of course, I'm emotionally involved,' he said, throwing up the hand that wasn't tightly clutching a bottle of beer. 'Skeeter is going to die, for God's sake' And since I hurt Skeeter very badly at the beginning of his adult life, I think I owe it to him to make things easier, if I can, at the end of his life. I'm in a position to help Skeeter and ease my own guilty conscience over the hell I put him through thirty-two years ago. And damn it, Don, I want to do it!'
I thought, Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter.
3
The Edensburg Herald had been founded in 1895, when young Daniel Lincoln Osborne, a fire-in-the-moral- soul Eugene Debs progressive, borrowed $11,000 from Hiram Young, his father-in-law, a foundry owner esteemed for his fair-labor practices, and merged two weekly newspapers of no particular distinction into the town's first daily. The new paper soon made a name for itself-not a good one, according to local mossback Republicans. From the beginning, the Herald railed against the depredations of the robber barons, supported labor and trustbusters, and was passionate in its editorials favoring the preservation of the Adirondacks' water, air, wildlife, and rugged natural beauty. It was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of six state and two national parks, one containing what is now Lake Osborne, New York, and another Osborne Falls
Later, the Herald welcomed FDR's New Deal, which the Eden County Republican Committee branded 'the triumph of the Bolsheviks.' When Hiram Young was in his eighties, he was still shunned by Edensburg families prominent in banking, real estate, and canoe manufacturing who never forgave him for bankrolling his son-in-law's renowned and apparently indestructible purveyor of-in the words of the president of the Eden County Savings
