Linda Fairstein - Entombed

"Miss Cooper? Morning. I'm Gerry McCallion, from the Thirteenth-"

"Where's Wallace? Where's Chapman?"

"They were gone when I got here, about oneA.M. Don't worry, ma'am. You were never alone. There was an interim shift-"

"I'm not worried about that. It's not like them to leave once they told me they'd be here."

"It's the one from Homicide, Miss Cooper. Around midnight, he got a call with some bad news."

"What-?"

McCallion spoke over me. "His ladyfriend was in some kind of accident up in Canada. Broke her neck in a fall is what I was told. The girl is dead."

"Where are you?" I asked Mercer. "Can you talk?"

"Yeah. I just stepped out of the car when my phone rang. Mike's out cold. He fell asleep about fifteen minutes ago. What time is it?"

"Almost eight o'clock. What happened? Where-"

"Val's brother called Mike on his cell phone. I had gone to the other room to put my head down for an hour or so-must have come in around twelve. This ski business, you know about it?"

"Val talked about it a bit. A helicopter flies them out somewhere in the wilderness, drops them on top of a mountain. Pure powder, that kind of thing. Experts only."

"Yeah, well, one of the dangers is that those uncharted runs can be pretty unstable," Mercer said, pausing. "The group of them jumping, or something the chopper did letting them down, set off some kind of cataclysmic reaction."

"She fell, is that what did it?"

"Three of them, Alex, they went off into a crevasse. The snow shifted and exposed an enormous break in the surface. Val and two others just-just went over the edge. Her brother was in the pack behind them. He watched it happen."

I thought of the courage with which Valerie Jacobsen had fought to conquer the cancer that had ravaged her body, only to lose her life to a treacherous sport.

"This happened yesterday?"

"The day before. It took them twenty-four hours to recover the bodies."

"And Mike only got the call last night? What are those people thinking? Don't they have any idea how much he loves her?"

"His fix on it? He's sure Val's parents didn't want him out there. I don't think they knew how serious the relationship was. He thinks they just didn't want to know."

"The funeral?"

"First thing this morning. Nine o'clock, in Palo Alto. Family only. He couldn't have gotten there in time if he wanted to. Maybe they planned it that way."

I always thought it was one of the things the Jewish religion dealt with best. Don't sit with the body in a room for a week. Get the burial done before the next day's sundown and then get on with the grieving. It was so at odds with the practices Mike had grown up with in the Catholic Church, and so foreign to his personal experience.

"There's going to be a memorial service in two weeks, according to the brother," Mercer said. "I'm telling you, Alex, Mike's in a blind rage. He doesn't know who to lash out at."

"Where are you?"

"That's a good question," Mercer said. "Ever hear of Jamestown, Rhode Island?"

"Sure, right over the bridge from Newport. Why?"

"We're parked behind a gas station here," Mercer answered softly. "We've been jackassing all over the place since we left Manhattan. It's like he's trying to find a piece of Val, something concrete to hang on to. I can't explain it any better than that."

"But there?"

"When his phone vibrated, he left your room so he wouldn't wake you up. Of course, he had no idea who was calling or why. He came in and woke me up-must have been just after he got the news."

"What'd he do?"

"He-he was just out of control. He was angry-he knew he had to get out of the hospital before he turned the place upside down. I'd say he was more furious than he was sad."

"Mike will have all the time in the world to be sad."

"Then he started calling the airlines. See what time he could get a flight. Val's brother called back to talk him out of that."

"Have you stayed with him the whole time?"

"Most of it. He needed to go to Val's place. That's the first thing he wanted to do. And he wanted to go there alone. I thought he needed that."

"I'm sure he did."

"He was up there about an hour. When he came downstairs he told me he wanted to take a ride, to drive somewhere. He's got a pocketful of pictures of her and an armful of her favorite books. I told him he wasn't going anywhere without me."

"Thank goodness."

"Mike insisted on taking the wheel and I just let him do it. He went north up the Taconic Parkway for about an hour and a half, to some little inn where they'd spent the night once. Just parked in front, got out and walked around the grounds, without saying a word to me. Then he cut back across upstate New York to Connecticut, over to New Haven."

Val's architectural firm had been working on Yale's master plan. He loved to look at the buildings, the physical structures she had envisioned and created. "Yeah, they'd been up to the campus together a number of times."

"When we hit I-95 at five this morning, I assumed we'd be headed south, back to the city. But he came up this way. They spent a weekend together here, at the wedding of one of Val's friends, last fall."

"Mercer, I've got an idea. Jamestown isn't much more than an hour from the ferry. Take him to the Vineyard. I'll call my caretaker and he can run over and open the house by the time you get there," I said, calculating the driving time plus the forty-five-minute boat ride from Woods Hole.

"I don't know, Alex. He's kind of flailing about. He doesn't know what-"

"Mike loves it there. And Val liked being there, too. There's a wonderful photograph of her in one of the guest rooms, from a day we spent at the beach. It's deserted this time of year. It's the most peaceful place on the face of the earth-and, well, there's something so spiritual about it. Besides, he can grieve any way he needs to without anybody getting in his way."

"He doesn't know what he wants. He's just paralyzed with pain."

I didn't speak for almost a minute. "I know exactly how he feels, Mercer. You tell him I said that this is one thing I can help him with."

Mercer and Mike knew all about Adam Nyman, my fiancé who had died the day before our Vineyard wedding, driving to reach the island.

"Yeah, but-"

"I can fly up through Boston and be there by early afternoon. I'm not supposed to be working today anyway, am I? It would be the perfect medicine for me, too."

"He may fight me on this, Alex. All I can do is try."

My suit was dirty and musty, but dry. I was dressed by the time Dr. Schrem arrived and approved my release. "Give it a few days before you go back to work," he said. "Bed rest, plenty of fluids, don't use the painkillers unless you absolutely need to. Going directly home?"

"Right now," I said. He didn't know I meant Martha's Vineyard when I said "home."

Officer McCallion had orders to get an RMP to take me uptown to my apartment. On the way there, Mercer called to tell me that Mike agreed that some time on my secluded hilltop in Chilmark might help him deal with the tragedy that had taken Val's life and so violently disrupted his own.

I changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. I scrounged around in my dresser drawer for some cash, ID, and a credit card and called a car service to take me to La Guardia to catch the shuttle. I made the ten-thrty, landed at Logan within the hour, and was on a nine-seater Cape Air at noon. There were only two other passengers on the twin-engine prop plane, and the February headwinds tossed us around above the low clouds, slowing our speed so the trip across to the islands took almost fifty minutes.

Unlike the line of minivans that greeted planeloads of summer commuters, there was only one taxi awaiting incoming flights from Boston, New Bedford, and Hyannis. The driver agreed to make a stop while I ran into the up-island supermarket for some staples, then took me to my home, ten miles farther west to the most glorious part of the tranquil island.