Russell Banks - The Reserve

“You’re not listening to me,” Vanessa said. “Either of you. If you take my mother’s body in and report her death, no matter how you tell it, I am definitely going to jail for a long, long time. Or I’ll spend the rest of my life in a mental hospital. There’s no way around it. Please, you two, help me with this. I need you both. Please help me. We can bury her in the woods, and then you both can leave, and tonight after it gets dark I’ll take the guide boat and go back to the Club and drive away. No one will see me leave. That’ll be the end of it. Nothing will happen to either of you. Nothing will happen to me.”

“How will you explain her disappearance?” Jordan asked.

“I won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll just say she was fine when I dropped her off in Tuxedo Park after our trip to the Adirondacks with Daddy’s ashes.”

“There’ll be a search. Up here, especially. Where she was last seen alive.”

“The only people who’ll know where to look will be you two. And me. And I’ll never tell anyone. If you never tell anyone, Mother’s disappearance will remain a mystery, pure and simple. Of course, I’ll stay under suspicion for years, maybe forever. But I can live with that. I’ve lived with worse.”

Hubert said, “No one would think to ask Jordan about it, probably. Nobody knows he’s been here. Me, though, they would ask. Since it’s known I brought supplies in yesterday.”

“You’d have to lie, then. You’d have to say she was fine when you last saw her,” Vanessa said.

“I don’t like lying. I’m not much good at it.”

Jordan gave a short, hard laugh. “I’d say you’re damned good at it.”

The three stood with their backs to the lake and the boat and Vanessa’s mother, and were silent for a long moment. Jordan put his jacket on, took his tobacco and papers from the pocket and rolled a cigarette and lighted it and smoked.

Finally, Hubert sighed and said, “She wouldn’t be the first person who’s buried in these woods and nobody knows it.”

“I expect not,” Jordan said.

“There’s always been stories about hunters going into the Reserve alone and not coming out and no body ever found.”

“That right?”

“Yes. Some of it might’ve been funny business, some of it not. When it’s local people, of course, everybody pretty much knows what’s what.”

“But you wouldn’t call Mrs. Cole local people.”

“No. Not really.”

“She’d have to be buried deep, with rocks on her,” Jordan said. “To keep the animals from digging her up. You understand I’m just speculating here.”

Vanessa looked at the ground and was silent.

Hubert said, “You’d need someplace high, where there’s no brook or stream. Snowmelt moves the banks around a lot in spring and washes out any low places.”

Jordan said, “You’d have to replace the sod, make it look natural again. No tracks.”

“Yes,” Hubert said. “You would.”

For a long moment neither man said anything.

“You know the land hereabouts,” Jordan said to Hubert. “Any good ground high up that’s not covered with trees, where there’s rocks close by?”

Again, neither man spoke. Then, as if he’d had the spot in mind for a long time, Hubert said, “There’s a bluff about a quarter mile east of the house.”

The three of them looked from one to the other, each to each. Jordan picked up the shovel and pickax and passed the shovel to Hubert. With the shotgun in one hand, the shovel in the other, Hubert led Jordan and Vanessa up the slope toward the tall pines and into the woods beyond. Behind them, the guide boat, half in the water, half out, rocked gently on its keel, and Evelyn Cole’s cold dry eyes stared at the morning sun.

The American woman sat alone in the dining saloon on Level A of the airship. She was dressed in the same brown tweed jacket and skirt as when she’d first boarded, except that the wide-brimmed hat and veil had been replaced by a green chenille head scarf knotted in back and worn low on the forehead, like a flapper of a decade ago. Not having eaten dinner the night before, she was evidently hungry and ordered a full breakfast off the menu. She looked with mild interest at the silk-covered wall opposite her. Twenty-one panels were painted with scenes illustrating last year’s flights of the Graf Zeppelin, the Hindenburg’s sister ship, to South America. She looked at the pictures in sequence from left to right, one at a time, as if they were sections of a mural, instead of a collection of individual pictures. During the night the Hindenburg had passed over England, and at a nearby table three middle-aged men in business suits and an elderly, silver-haired lady, Americans, were discussing the coronation next week of George VI. One of the men had gotten the news of the day early this morning from the airship’s radio operator. They agreed that the abdicated king’s forthcoming marriage to Mrs. Simpson, whose divorce from her previous husband had been granted a day ago, was scandalous. Imagine an American president behaving like that, said the lady with the silver hair. She spoke with a crisp Connecticut accent. Seated at a banquette in the corner of the dining room, a German woman with two small blond boys waited to be served. The younger boy got down on the carpeted floor to play with his windup toy, a tin car driven by Mickey Mouse. He wound the key and set the car on the floor. It ran under the table and came out the other side, making a whirring noise and giving off metallic sparks. Quickly, the steward crossed the room, grabbed the toy, and stopped the wheels from spinning. In German he said to the mother, I’m sorry, Frau Imhoff, but I must confiscate this. We take no chances with sparks. The Americans, meanwhile, continued to discuss the news of the day. Franco’s advance against the republic is going swimmingly, said the man who had visited the ship’s radio operator. His air force destroyed a Basque town called Guernica, near Bilbao. The man next to him said, That’s only thanks to the Germans, of course. Who the heck do you think was flying those airplanes? Certainly not Spaniards or Italians. The third man said, In the future the main use of airplanes will be in war. As airborne artillery. And all the casualties of war will be civilians. Mark my words, it won’t be like the last one. The lady from Connecticut said, Oh, dear, I do hope you’re wrong. This is so depressing a subject. Can’t we talk about something else? She turned then and smiled at the young woman seated alone by the window. Would you like to join us? she asked. Do you speak English? I’m afraid none of us speaks German. Before the woman could answer, the waiter arrived with her breakfast. He set the plate before her, and she began to eat at once. For a few seconds the silver-haired lady and her three companions watched her, waiting for a response. Finally, they turned away. The lady raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. No speaka da English, one of the men said, and the others smiled uneasily and quickly resumed their discussion of the news of the day.

THE SITE WAS A FLATTENED PATCH OF AN ANCIENT GLACIAL esker where tall red pines grew straight as masts and there wasn’t much ground cover, other than a warm, fragrant bed of pine needles. A spill of boulders from a shifted brook lay close by, and while the men dug the hole, Vanessa busied herself lugging rocks and piling them at what she felt was the foot of her mother’s grave. Then she sat down on the ground a few feet away to watch, her arms across her knees, her chin resting on her arms. Jordan, in shirtsleeves, his leather jacket on the ground nearby, swung the pick and loosened the gravelly soil, and Hubert shoveled the dirt into a neat, conical pile. Vanessa was silent and dreamy seeming. While they worked the men spoke to each other in low voices, as if to keep from waking her.