After I got off the call and slipped my cell phone into my pants pocket, I looked around, as if emerging from a deep sleep, to find myself standing in the middle of the field below my house. Then I remembered why I was here. In an impromptu effort to keep my conversation with Atticus Moore private from my family, I had wandered past the garden, halfway to the edge of the woods. Because the signal was often stronger outdoors, neither Meghan nor Maisie—Nicole had run to town briefly on an errand of some sort—if she happened to look out the window, would think I was up to anything unusual. That is, unless rather than rejoining them in the farmhouse I simply put one foot in front of the other and marched off into a missing-persons file, not unlike what Agatha Christie did back in the 1920s after learning her husband, Archie, had fallen in love with another woman.
Poor Agatha, I thought. How must she have felt when she later learned that a thousand officers and fifteen times as many volunteers took part in the desperate search to find her? Even Arthur Conan Doyle got involved, presenting a spirit medium with one of Christie’s gloves in the hope of tracking her down. When she was finally located eleven days later at the Harrogate Hydro, a luxury hotel spa in North Yorkshire, she claimed to have no memory of how she got there or what had happened, but clearly she had staged the whole disappearance to shame her gallivanting husband. Either way, a dangerous business. And it didn’t save her marriage.
My story would run along different lines, I thought, watching a swallowtail butterfly flit over the tall grasses. No worried armies of police would bother to hunt for me. Nor would my disappearance generate international media attention. Unlike Archibald Christie, whose infidelity drove his wife over the edge, Meghan hadn’t done me the slightest wrong. On the contrary. And rather than landing in some run-down New Age spa, nursing my misery in a fugue state, I could imagine myself winding up in a holding tank somewhere far upstate, having had too many Jamesons in a blue-collar bar near the Canadian border, say, and looking more suspicious than circumstances otherwise warranted.
No, I thought. When you run away, people are rarely mistaken in viewing you with mistrust. Why flee if you’ve done nothing wrong? And the only people I would end up hurting were those who deserved it the least. Deserved it not at all.
So rather than light out into the woods, I followed the meandering path of the butterfly toward the garden, contemplating my exchange with Atticus.
“Why didn’t you come over and say hello?” he’d inquired, speaking as if two decades hadn’t passed, his tone of voice altogether amiable, that of the Atticus I’d known for many years before everything went south during an overseas call from Kenmare to Providence. A call during which the unthinkable—at the time, in any case—became clear to me, and Atticus’s unsuspected collusion with Slader reared its hideous head.
“I suppose I could ask you the same question,” I told him.
“You were with your beautiful daughter, and I didn’t want to interrupt the two of you. Besides, I knew that after I met with Henry, I’d be calling you today anyway, so thought it best to let life take its course.”
I opened the rickety gate and lingered inside the garden. Persistent rains had made for a tough vegetable season this year. Meghan’s harvest of tomatoes, I saw, was barely half its usual size, and many of the lower leaves on the stalks were yellowed, with brown spots not unlike the coloration of the wings of the butterfly that presently abandoned me.
“So how do you see life taking its course, old friend?” I’d said, without an ounce of sarcasm shading my use of the word friend. What I imagined we needed to negotiate was far too weighty to be polluted by quips, jabs, posturing.
“That is going to depend on certain contingencies, some of which are out of my hands. How, by the way, is Meghan doing these days?” he asked. “From my provincial corner of the universe in Providence, I have to say how impressive she is, with her book business flourishing the way it has over the years.”
“That’s kind of you to say, and I wholeheartedly agree. But as for how she’s doing these particular days? Not so well, as I think you might expect. Before Slader burst into our lives, she and the rest of us were doing fine—”
Atticus’s response was quick and crisply intoned. “Slader’s insane antics had nothing to do with me, but I apologize for any of his misbehavior that upset your family.”
“He needn’t have leaned so heavily into the faux-gangster angle, terrorizing my girl out of her wits. I probably would’ve cooperated without all the hysterics.”
“You’ll forgive me if I doubt that,” Atticus replied. “But his behavior toward Maisie was unforgivable, and I’ve given him a piece of my mind about it. Now we’re at a different place, and you won’t be having to deal with him if I can help it. We need to talk, alone, as you’ve probably guessed. Much as I’d love to see Meghan and your girls, I think it’s best we get together in a more neutral environment than over there at your finca.”
“That works in theory,” I agreed. “Forgive me, though, if I wonder whether meeting with you could result in my ending up like Slader’s accomplice, Cricket?”
“What or who is Cricket?” he asked with such manifest puzzlement that I believed he had no idea what I was talking about. “Actually, no, please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. In answer to your question, you needn’t worry about ‘ending up’ like anything, aside from quite a lot better off than you already are.”
Having no idea how to respond to this claim, I waited.
“Do you know the old hotel they renovated overlooking the river, down near the train station in Rhinecliff?” Atticus continued, interrupting the silence. “Adjacent to an iron footbridge over the tracks?”
“I know the place,” I said.
“The hotel bar is quite empty during the daytime, especially on a Sunday, and there’s a shaded porch patio just off the bar that looks out on the Hudson. All very civilized. Can you be here in an hour?”
Now, standing among the waning summer plants, I picked one of the last of the cherry tomatoes, whose earthy scent was a reminder of how richly peaceful life had been two short weeks ago, before my earlier sins had caught up with me. I popped the tomato into my mouth, bit into its warm tartness, and closed the garden gate before hiking back to the house.
Meghan was in the study going through more of the volumes in the collection she had bought. How I wished I could simply sit down with her and trade thoughts on Mark Twain’s Celebrated Jumping Frog—a debut markedly different from what Poe had experienced, one that brought its author widespread success not quite forty years after Tamerlane came out. The copy she was examining, with its fat gilt leaping frog on the front cover, looked a little the worse for wear but, still, it was always a good book to have in stock, if only because it wouldn’t remain there long. When, instead, I informed her that I was going out for a little while, she understandably replied, “Please, tell me it’s not Slader again.”