Russell Banks - The Reserve

“I don’t know, Mr. Kendall. The body’s not—”

The manager interrupted him. “You would be handsomely paid for the service, believe me. I have a discretionary fund available for…discretion. Do you think Miss Cole would agree to that?”

“Well, to tell the truth—”

“There are favors I could grant in exchange. She wanted her father’s ashes placed in the Reserve. I could allow it. There might be other favors.”

Hubert shook his head. “She doesn’t want anybody to know what happened, all right. Just like you.”

Kendall brightened. “Really?”

“For different reasons she doesn’t want anybody to know what happened. But she doesn’t want her mother’s body brought out, neither.”

“Why not, for heaven’s sake? We can’t leave it there. She’s dead, Hubert. It’s a human body.” He started to say that Ambassador Thomas Smith was thinking of buying Rangeview and might change his mind if a scandal were associated with the place, but thought better of it. Kendall didn’t want anyone getting between him and the ambassador in this transaction, and who knows whom Hubert might tell? If word got out, one of the other members might cut into line without relying on the manager to act as broker. There was a premium on camps in the Reserve.

“Well, for one thing, she’s scared,” Hubert said.

“Scared! Why? She didn’t do it, did she? Shoot her mother. I thought it was an accident. Mrs. Cole dropped the gun, and it went off accidentally, you told me.”

“Well, that’s more or less how it happened.”

“More or less?”

“Yes.”

Kendall narrowed his eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing important.”

“Whatever happens in the Reserve has to be reported to me. Especially when it’s something…untoward. As this certainly appears to be.”

“I know.”

“Hubert, I could make it so you’d never work in the Reserve again.”

“I know.”

“You’d starve without the Reserve. You and half the people in this town,” he added.

“I know,” Hubert said, and sighed. He leaned forward in the chair and looked at the floor and without raising his eyes proceeded to tell the manager the rest. Or most of the rest. He did not tell him about Jordan Groves’s being at the Second Lake, and he did not tell him that Vanessa Cole had kidnapped her mother and kept her a prisoner in the camp for days.

The manager heard him out in silence. When Hubert had finished, Kendall sat up straight in his chair and brushed invisible crumbs from his shirt and straightened papers and pencils on his desk for a few seconds. The thunk of the tennis ball and an occasional hearty male laugh drifted through the open window.

The manager inhaled sharply through his nose. “You are a fucking idiot,” he declared. “You’re a fucking idiot twice over! First, for going along with the Cole girl and burying the mother on the Reserve, when you should have simply come here immediately and told me about the accident. We could have handled the matter discreetly, with no one the wiser. So you’re an idiot for having gone along with her, and God only knows why you did that, and second, you’re an idiot for coming here now and telling me what you’ve done with the woman’s body. And God only knows why you did that !”

“What should I have done, then?” Hubert asked. He genuinely wanted to know. “I’m not an idiot, Mr. Kendall.” He sat back in the chair and gave the manager a hard look.

“Really?” The manager laughed without smiling and shook his head. “What you should have done is refuse to cooperate with that girl and instead come to me right away so I could do the thinking for both of us. Now I’ve got no choice but to play it by the book. The Reserve rule book. I’ll have to call in the sheriff and tomorrow send a crew out there to dig up Mrs. Cole’s body and bring it in. The county will probably want an autopsy before issuing a proper death certificate. It’ll be in all the papers. Oh, they’ll love it. And not just the local papers, either. Kaltenborn will have it on the radio. It’ll make the newsreels. And the Cole estate, that’ll be tied up for years. Or else in the hands of that crazy girl. And who knows what she’ll do with the property.”

“The property?”

“Yes. Rangeview. Certain parties have expressed an interest in purchasing Rangeview from Mrs. Cole. It could have been a quiet, private transaction, handled by me. These are socially prominent people, Hubert. They don’t like their names or activities or their financial affairs in the newspapers or associated with people like Vanessa Cole, who does want her name in the newspapers and her pretty face up on the ‘March of Time’ screen. I don’t expect you to understand that. But I do expect you to act rationally. Or at least I did . And to leave the business of being discreet to me. That’s supposed to be my business, Hubert. That’s my special skill. It’s why I have this job. Your business, your skill, is to guide and protect your clients here on the Reserve and take care of their property for them. Your employer, don’t forget, is the Reserve. Your clients pay the Reserve for your services, and the Reserve pays you. Your allegiance, therefore, is first and foremost to the Reserve and only indirectly to your clients. The rules we follow here, all of us, you as well as I, are the Reserve’s rules, written into law years ago, generations ago, by men like Dr. Cole’s father, when they first created the Reserve as a private sanctuary for themselves and their families and friends. Remember that. And when you obeyed Vanessa Cole and helped her bury her mother on the Reserve, which is practically sacred ground to these people, especially those members like Ambassador Smith whose parents and grandparents created it, when you did that, Hubert, you broke the Reserve’s rules. There shall be no grave sites anywhere in the Reserve. None. That’s the rule that applies here, Hubert. While I might have bent that rule a little for Vanessa Cole regarding Dr. Cole’s ashes, in exchange for her agreeing to move the site of her mother’s unfortunate accident to someplace else, now, thanks to you, it’s too late for that. We’ll have to go up there tomorrow with a crew and dig up the body in daylight. How deep did you bury her?”

“About five feet, I guess.”

“Oh, my. Five feet deep. Well, there you are. There’s really no way this can be done quickly, unofficially, off the record. Discreetly.” Kendall reached for the standing phone with one hand and dismissed the guide with a backhanded wave of the other. “It’s too late to do anything today, it’ll be dark in a few hours. Be here tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. I’ll have two or three men who’ll go in with you. And probably the sheriff.”

Hubert nodded and pulled away from the sticky embrace of the chair. When he stood, he felt strangely tall, as if he were outside his body and looking down on it from above. The man he saw below was a small man, shrunken and frail, prematurely aged — a man who used to be an Adirondack guide.

THE SUN PASSED BEYOND THE RANGE, AND THE BROAD SHADOW of the mountains spread across the lake from west to east, and the light in Cinderella’s Suite quickly faded. Jordan Groves and Vanessa Von Heidenstamm did not notice the approaching darkness. They were still immersed in their lovemaking. It had begun slowly, tenderly, face-to-face, with long, lingering looks at each other, like devoted siblings at the start of a long absence taking their last leave of each other, gathering in all the details they had neglected to notice up to now. They removed their clothes, their own and each other’s, delicately, precisely, as if preparing to model for an artist, and once naked, seated side by side on the bed, they turned to face each other, and with their hands on each other’s bare shoulders, they kissed — sweetly, as if in relief and gratitude for having come to the peaceful end of a painfully protracted argument. And then they embraced and with their hands caressed each other’s breasts and backs and arms — her skin smooth and creamy and soft as fine silk, his alabaster white and tautly drawn over muscle and bone — and their separate bodies gradually lost their boundaries and merged into a third body, one that contained all their female and male differences and erased all their anatomical contrasts and inversions.