Peter Spiegelman - Death's little helpers

We took the Henry Hudson into the Bronx, to the Saw Mill River Parkway, and we took that into Westchester. Traffic was heavy all the way. I put on a Steely Dan disc, and when Fagen started singing “Janie Runaway,” Jane talked about vacation plans.

“I was thinking about Europe- maybe Venice or the lake countrybut then I thought that’s too much work, and maybe what we could use is some serious vegetable time. To me, that means ocean.” She glanced over. I nodded. “It’s late to find something on the Vineyard or Nantucket, but we could get something on the Maine coast or maybe farther north, like Nova Scotia. Or we could go out West- northern California maybe.” She glanced over and I nodded once more. “Bermuda’s nice too,” she added.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I knew by the silence that followed that that wasn’t enough. Or maybe it was too much.

Traffic thinned when we got on the Taconic Parkway, and it thinned some more as we drove in silence through Briarcliff and Ossining. As we crossed the Croton Reservoir, Jane spoke again, and the sound of her voice startled me.

“I’m getting tired. You better drive.”

We pulled off the Taconic in Jefferson Valley and switched places in the parking lot of a shopping center. Jane tilted her seat back. She kicked off her loafers and tucked her feet beneath her. I adjusted the driver’s seat and checked the mirrors. Jane looked at me and spoke very softly.

“Do you want to go on this vacation with me?” she asked. “Just tell me, yes or no.”

“Yes, I do… sure I do. We just need to see about the timing, that’s all. I’ve still got this case-”

“But you want to go?”

“We just need to work out the timing.”

Something crossed Jane’s dark eyes, too quickly for me to read. She looked out at the parking lot and then at me, expressionless, for several moments. And then she yawned hugely and closed her eyes.

Jane was asleep before we got back on the parkway. I fiddled with the CD changer until I found a Pharoah Sanders disc. “In a Sentimental Mood” came on, and Jane murmured. I turned the volume down. We crossed into Putnam County, and the Taconic grew darker and altogether empty. The Audi threw a cone of hard blue-white light on the road and on the heavy curtain of trees alongside. I thought about Joe Cortese and his nephew and Gregory Danes, and I tried not to think about what I might find at Calliope Farms.

Jane sighed and shifted on the passenger seat. The scent of her filled the car. I looked over. She had one hand wrapped around a slender ankle, and the other beneath her head, like a pillow. Her face was pale in the instrument lighting, and very beautiful, and I was filled with an aching want.

Light rippled across the western sky and a peal of thunder followed. Jane shifted on the seat again. Her brow furrowed for a moment and her lips moved silently, and then she drifted into a deeper layer of sleep. My throat was tight and I shook my head and drove on, through an ever-receding tunnel of light, through the pitch-black wood.

The Lenox town center is just a few blocks square, and it’s a New England postcard of massive trees, handsome houses, and neat sober storefronts and churches. The houses are a mix of white clapboard and painted Victorian, and though many were long ago converted to inns, they are confident nonetheless on their well-groomed lots. The granite and red-brick storefronts were uniformly dark when we drove by at ten forty-five. The churches looked smugly on the empty streets.

The Ravenwood Inn was a turreted Queen Anne, just south of the obelisk in the center of town. It was large and pink and laden with ornamentation, and there was a light on above the wide front porch. I put my hand on Jane’s knee and shook gently until she opened her eyes.

A bleary-eyed girl, barely out of her teens, checked us in and led us to our room. It was in the turret, on the top floor, and it had a high beamed ceiling and a smell of musty lavender. The furniture was dark and elaborately carved, and the windows looked out on black clouds and thunder.

The storm came at 2 a.m., in bursts of blue light that seared through my eyelids, and in rolling explosions of sound that shook my bones, and whose aftershocks rippled in the walls. The wind thrashed wildly through the trees and the sky was an ocean of madness. I stood at the window and watched the world come apart.

“Jesus,” Jane said softly. She came up behind me, and her body was bare and smooth against mine. The air sizzled and the whole room was lit for an instant and then was black. The floor shook. Jane shuddered and gripped my arms. “I don’t like lightning.” I felt her lips and her breath and her nipples on my back. Her hands were very warm, and she slid them across my belly. “Come back to bed,” she whispered.

I bought coffee and doughnuts on Tuesday morning, from a place that made them fresh and that had managed to eke out a few batches in the intervals between power failures. The old-timers behind the pink Formica counter had a Pittsfield station on the radio, and the announcer told us that the storm had downed trees and power lines all over Berkshire County. We were advised to expect sporadic blackouts throughout the day and- based on the latest forecasts- more storms by evening. In the meanwhile, he said, road crews were out in force, making what progress they could with chain saws and cherry pickers.

I’d passed some of those crews earlier that morning, when I’d driven north and east of town to case Calliope Farms. I’d found the place on an otherwise empty stretch of muddy washboard, off something called Roaring Brook Road. It was near the Housatonic River and at the base of a steep, densely wooded hillside that I knew from the map I’d bought in town was part of October Mountain State Forest.

The house and barn sat on a rise, well back from the road, behind a ragged stone wall and beside an unmown meadow. There was a white wooden post with a white wooden sign at the head of the gravel drive. The blue script letters were faded but legible: Calliope Farms. The drive was rutted and empty but for puddles, and the house looked closed up. I’d driven by slowly and kept on going for a mile or so. Then I’d turned the car around and waited ten minutes and driven by again. Nothing had changed when I passed the second time except my stomach, which felt tighter and more uneasy.

Jane was getting out of the shower when I returned with breakfast.

“The lights keep going on and off,” she said, as she wrapped herself in one of the inn’s terry robes.

“Reliable sources tell me they’ll be doing that all day.”

“That’s what the spa people said when I called. And without power they can’t heat the seaweed or something, so it’s no wrap for me- and no real estate either. It looks like it’ll be a bonbon day after all.”

“Sounds appealing.” I put the coffee and doughnuts on the bedside table and picked up my overnight bag. I unzipped the side compartment and took out the black waist pack. Jane blew on her coffee and watched me carefully. “I just need you to give me a lift,” I said.

It was after two when we turned off Roaring Brook Road and onto the washboard track. I killed the music and a few minutes later we rolled slowly by Calliope Farms. The driveway was still empty. Jane pulled over about a quarter mile past the white sign. Her face was tense.

“Leave your cell phone on,” I said. “I’ll call when I’m done and I’ll meet you back here.”

Jane flipped her phone open. “My signal’s spotty.”

I opened mine. “I’m okay if I point in the right direction.” I reached behind my seat and grabbed the waist pack.

“If you want me to, I could wait,” Jane said. “In case you knock and he happens to be there.”