David Handler - The Bright Silver Star

“They are not big. They’re long.” Twelve and a half double A, to be exact. “Besides, Mitch likes them-especially my toes.”

Bella made a face. “Genug shen!” Which was Yiddish for No mas. “I don’t want to hear these things about you two.”

“Don’t blame me, girl. You’re the one said I should snag me a Jewish gentleman.”

“And did I steer you wrong?”

“Nope. Just don’t tell him that-I don’t want his ego swelling.” Des tilted her head at Bella curiously. “Real, if I stick around long enough will I ever dig Danny Kaye?”

Bella puffed out her cheeks in disgust. “No one appreciates true talent anymore.”

“Oh, is that what you call it?” she said sweetly.

“If you want to put on your Jill Scott, go ahead. It’s your house.”

“It’s our house. And I’m just woofing on you.” Des started out of the kitchen, then stopped. “We can’t save them all, Bella.”

“I know that,” Bella said tightly.

Des went out onto the deck, closing the French doors behind her, and sat down at the table in front of her Grape Nuts, skim milk, and blueberries from Mitch’s garden. It was a drowsy, humid morning. A young couple was paddling a canoe out on the lake, their giddy laughter carrying off the water as if they were right there next to Des. Otherwise, it was quiet enough that she could hear the cicadas whirring.

As she ate, she flipped through her drawing pad, looking at her latest work. Her figure drawing professor at the Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, a brilliant and maddening guru named Peter Weiss, had urged Des to take a complete break from her crime scene portraits this summer and draw nothing but trees, an exercise that he claimed would prove highly beneficial to her. He wouldn’t explain why this was so, merely said, “You’ll find out what I mean.” Leaving Des tosolve the mystery on her own. She’d tried to do what he said. Spent the past six weeks working on trees and trees only.

And, so far, the results had been a total disaster.

Page after page of her drawing pad was filled with one crude arboreal rendering after another. Her lush, midsummer oaks and maples looked like stick figures topped with meatballs. Her evergreens resembled television aerials. It all looked like something an eight-year-old kid would do. She’d tried graphite stick, vine charcoal, conte crayon, pen, pencil. The results were all the same: dreck.

Bella had been the soul of tact when Des showed them to her. “I like everything you do,” she said.

Mitch, who was always brutally honest, had said, “Jellystone National Park-they look exactly like the background drawings from the old Yogi the Bear cartoons. Remember Yogi and Boo Boo?”

To which Des replied, “Back slowly out of the room while you are still able to.”

Knowing full well that he was right. For some reason she kept drawing her way around the trees as opposed to getting inside of them. She wasn’t grasping them. She’d tried to learn her way out of her personal abyss. Pored over book upon book by arborists and nature photographers. Studied the Connecticut shoreline’s grand masters such as Childe Hassam, George Bruestle, and Henry Ward Ranger, landscape painters whose works she admired tremendously. But it was no use. Not any of it. She could not translate what her eyes saw into lines and contours and shapes. Her trees were two-dimensional, lifeless, and crude, her drawing hand stubbornly blind.

She slammed her sketch pad shut, boiling with confusion and frustration. Because there was no instruction manual for this, no road map that could direct her to her inner soul. There was only her. The wisdom was within her.

The enemy was within her.

All she could do about it now was punish herself physically. She stormed back down to her weight room. Out went the cats, in came the crazed artist. First, she stretched for twenty good minutes on her mat, freeing her mind, feeling the blood flow through her as she worked thekinks out of her lithe, loose-limbed body. Then she did one hundred pushups and two hundred sit-ups. Then she hit the irons-two full circuits on her pressing bench with the twenty-pounders, two sets of twenty-four reps each time around. Pushing herself. Working it, working it, working it. Pump, breathe… Pump, breathe… Muscles straining, veins bulging, the sweat pouring off of her. Pump, breathe… Pump, breathe… Pump, breathe…

Why did Martine tell her about Dodge?

Des could not imagine. These blue-blooded locals genuinely perplexed her. They did not believe that the shortest way between two points was a straight line. They did not believe in lines-only negative space. And she did not know what to do about this. Mitch raved about Dodge Crockett day and night. Should she break it to him his new walking buddy was a snake? Or should she keep it to herself?

She made it through her last set of reps on adrenaline and fumes, and collapsed on the bench in a heap, gasping. She gulped down a bottle of water, then showered off.

Des spent very little time in front of the bathroom mirror these days. She wore no war paint. She needed none. She had almondshaped pale green eyes, smooth glowing skin and a wraparound smile that could melt titanium from a thousand yards. She kept her hair so short and nubby that it was practically dry by the time she’d put on her summer-weight uniform and polished black brogans. She strapped on her crime-girl belt, complete with top-of-the-line SIG-Sauer semiautomatic handgun, and called out good-bye to Bella. Then she jumped into her cruiser and headed out.

Des lived in was what was considered a mixed neighborhood by Dorset standards, which meant it enjoyed a highly diverse white population. There were tidy starter houses owned by young professional couples. There were rambling bungalows bursting with multiple generations of blue-collar swamp Yankees. There were moldering summer cottages rented by old-timers from New Britain who played bocce out on their lawns. Right now her mail carrier, Frank, was out walking his golden retriever, and a pair of young mothers were on their way to the lake with a brood of kids, complete with pails, shovels, and water wings. They all waved to Des as she drove past. She raised a hand in response.

Summer was her busy season. Dorset’s seaside renters nearly doubled the town’s year-round population of less than seven thousand, plus the inns, motels, and campgrounds were filled to capacity. More people meant more traffic and more trouble. So did the warm weather. During the cold months, people did their drinking and their fighting behind closed doors. Now it all spilled out onto the front lawn. Dogs barked, tempers flared, neighbors started throwing punches at one another. It could get a little ugly.

And then, dear God, there were the tourists.

First, she headed for the historic district. The lawn in front of the old library on Dorset Street was being set up with chairs for a noon summer concert by Dorset’s town band, which was quite accomplished if you happened to be into oompah music. Des rated their sound one solid notch below Danny Kaye on her own personal hit parade. The concert was part of a full day of quaint small-town activities. Crafts stalls were being erected next door on the lawn in front of Center School, where local artisans would be offering their handcrafted candles and soaps, their driftwood sculptures and wind chimes made of seashells and bits of broken glass. Des pulled in at town hall to see if there was anything of interest in her mail slot-there wasn’t-and to work on Mary Ann, First Selectman Paffin’s new secretary, a lonely widow who desperately needed to adopt two healthy, neutered kittens and just didn’t know it yet. Then she resumed her patrol of the historic district, with its lovely two hundred-year-old homes, steepled white churches and graceful old oaks and sycamores. Trees again. Trees, trees, and more trees…