“A gardener?” I asked, smiling, “For the family?”
He looked at me blankly with milky blue eyes like sucked sweets. I wondered if maybe he didn’t speak English.
And then he intoned in a gentlemanly crackle (twice as charming for being in Franglais), “I take care of school and, as well, this house while the family …” He thought for a moment, then flapped his hands like birds flying.
“Are away.” I nodded. Take care of school. I remembered reading something about a school in the reports on Quinn. “You the caretaker?”
I fished for a cigarette so that he saw no trace of surprise or anything else on my face. “When do you think they’re coming back?” I flicked my lighter wheel, eyeing him through the smoke. From my years of interviewing people, looking for the real stories under their words, I know everyone has little tics, little tells. For most, it’s easier to tell if folks are lying when you know them. But actually, when you’ve been at it a while, you find yourself cold-reading people all the time without meaning to. You had the money for a ticket all along, old lady at the métro stop—yeah, you. And, taxi driver, I see you in your rearview, and no, you don’t know the way.
But as far as I could make out, Monsieur Raymond was not lying. He shrugged. “They go away often. Are you a friend of theirs? I only live over there, yet I have never seen you.” He pointed to the primeval forest, its dark shapes gathering form and substance as the dusk crept in.
“You live in the woods?” I asked in the hope of distracting him.
He smiled. He liked that question. In my experience, professional weirdos work hard to generate notoriety—locally he is Raymond, that crazy man living in the woods. I bet he’s the one who originally spread the rumors about what he gets up to out there all alone.
“On the edge of those,” he said, pointing vaguely, “that very far edge of school field. You look hard you just see my chimney—she’s smoking.”
Straining my eyes, I did see it, though before it seemed like just another dark point in the tree line. I felt an involuntary little shiver of glee rattle up my neck at the idea of a childhood myth made flesh—the creepy old guy in the shack in the woods. I’d finally met him.
As if he could read my mind, he said, “Yes, I am there always. Keeping my eyes in things. I see a lot of things here.”
“Like what?”
Tapping his nose. “Everything.”
I dragged on my cigarette, letting the smoke burn and twirl in my lungs, exhaling. “Did you see her—the American girl—when she came out of the forest?”
He looked at me strangely, cutting his eyes at me under snowy lashes. Very blue eyes, betraying a much sharper mind than he let on.
“L’Américaine?” He patted his pockets, pulled out a packet of Drum Gold, took a pinch, and flicked it into a paper, rolling and licking in one seamless gesture so that the cigarette seemed to grow out of his thorn-pricked, nicotine-stained hands like pale elongated fruit. “Sometime I feel sorry for that girl.”
I flicked my lighter and he dragged hard, cheeks puffing out to show the impressive spider veins of a lifelong drinker. “Why’s that?”
He shrugged. “Sais pas. Just … well, there was something about her. How you say? Soft? Like a fruit, that you know.” He gouged his fingers as if he were squeezing a peach. “But then I only met her possibly twice.”
“Sweet girl,” I said, smiling.
“Ouais. But then so are all the girls they keep here, aren’t they?”
JULY 30, 2015
For the first part of my life, I grew up in a family that, to the casual onlooker, resembled a Norman Rockwell painting. Dad was a senior partner in a Boston practice who could afford not only an apartment on Beacon Hill, but the beachfront house in Maine where my sister and I spent the best summers of our childhood. Mom was a part-time paralegal secretary and domestic goddess of Martha Stewart proportions. My sister, Claire, and I were brats: she the mean teen homecoming queen; me the band-camp-loving nerd.
The summer I turned thirteen, a letter arrived. I never knew exactly what it said, but I remember Dad’s hands shaking as he read it, Mom’s angry nagging curdling the hot August air. I was used to their ups and downs. I think I took my bike out for a ride around the coast instead of worrying. In any case, the malpractice suit that ate up everything we owned took its sweet time. It was another year before we’d gone from living like princes to crowding into my Jewish grandmother’s stuffy brownstone, torturing her cats. When she threw us out and we began a stint with my Catholic paternal grandparents in Boston’s South End, I began to notice the comments friends and relatives whispered as they sat around the big kitchen table: “Col’s losing his way and he needs our prayers”—a Catholic way of saying that my father had gone nuts.
We moved back to Maine, to the northern woods that smell of hemlock and balsam, the setting for Dad’s new purpose of refashioning his bankrupt life in the image of Thoreau’s. By which I mean that he tumbled, babbling, into Grandpa Swift’s old timber cabin on Chesuncook Lake and used what money remained to stockpile AK-47s and all the canned creamed corn you could stand. Out in those woods, while Dad snared rabbits and speared trout, Mom discovered a taste for home-brewed beer and I became a delinquent. It was easy to do since my dad’s transformation into a wild-eyed survivalist meant that the materials for mischief—knives, rope, power tools—were all around me. By the time I was Quinn’s age, my favorite hobby was stealing weed killer and a bag of sugar and rolling my own fuses from cigarette papers so I could blow the fuck out of the earth that trapped us in that madhouse. My sister—through a rock solid combination of grit and conformity—came out of that life pretty normal. She learned to blend in, to agree, to hide the crazy. I didn’t, or couldn’t. I’ve always been the black sheep, though over time, life has sanded the rough edges off me.
On the positive side, Dad’s questionable parental supervision taught me three crucial things: how to blaze a trail, how to hot-wire a car, and how to pick the toughest locks. Joyriding in cars, carving arrows in trees, and breaking into barns to scare sheep haven’t been all that useful in furthering my journalistic career, but the ability to pick locks? Handier than you might think. Filing cabinets, abandoned warehouses, creepy Silence of the Lambs lockups are not a problem as long as you’ve got a bobby pin, or in my case a little black bag of hook picks, pins, and paper clips. I pulled it out, ready to take a look in the Blavette house.
I needn’t have bothered. My evening’s trespassing was made a whole lot easier by the fact that either the police or the caretaker had left the back door open. It was pitch outside now, the stars sharp and bright as police spotlights. It didn’t quite look like a crime scene yet, but you could tell the police had been poking around from the big-booted footprints scattered around the floors, the occasional coffee cup left to stain surfaces. Once I was sure Monsieur Raymond wasn’t still lurking around, I took a deep breath, peeled away from the doorway, and crossed the hallway to the stairs.
At the top of the stairs was a bedroom. The large bed told me it was probably the master, and the matching rose-pattern wallpaper and curtains suggested a woman had decorated it. I tiptoed over the pastel rug towards the bed, as cautious as if I might find someone sleeping there. On the nightstand sat a framed picture of the Blavette family, when the husband was still on the scene. I snapped an iPhone photo and moved on, flicking my torch over the ointments and powders on the antique dresser, illuminating the dark spots freckling the mirror. Without its people, the house felt frozen in time, like the ballroom of some lost ocean liner.
I crept out into the dark well of the hallway and walked on, identifying