Desire Lines (41 page)

It’s from Hunter, of course. Kathryn studies it for a moment, trying to make sense of it.
I think we’re beginning to understand each other.
What does that mean? She turns off the car and goes into the house, scrounging in a kitchen drawer for the slip of paper she’d put there with his number on it. Then she picks up the receiver and dials.

The phone rings three times, four. Then a male voice says, “Hello?”

For an awkward moment she realizes she’s never called him anything but Mr. Hunter. “Hello,” she says finally. “This is Kathryn. Campbell.”

“I know who you are. That was fast.”

Shit,
she thinks, closing her eyes, I should’ve waited. “I’ve got a lot going on,” she says briskly. “I wanted to get back to you before my day fills up.”

“Glad you could fit me in.”

I sound ridiculous, she thinks. Calm down. Relax.

“I thought you might come by the school. I’ve been half expecting you.”

“I didn’t want to push anything. I figured if you wanted to see me, you’d call.”

He laughs, a dry sound in the back of his throat. “I thought you said you weren’t playing games.”

“I’m not,” she says. But
you are.
She pauses. “To tell you the truth, I’m a little afraid of you.” She means it—she is a little afraid of him. But she also knows that by saying it she might take him off guard.

“Why?”

“You can be intimidating.”

“Really? I don’t mean to be.”

“Oh, I think you do,” she says.

For a moment he doesn’t answer. Then he says, “There’s something I want to show you. Let me tell you how to get to my place.”

A FEW HOURS
later, clutching in one hand the directions she scrawled on a napkin, Kathryn is in her car driving to Pushaw Lake with a microcassette
player in her bag on the seat beside her. After ten miles or so the roads narrow, three lanes to two lanes to one. She turns onto an unpaved tributary that seems to have been carved haphazardly out of forest, identified by a wooden marker: Sunshine Way. This strikes her as funny; though it’s the middle of a bright, cloudless day, trees shade the road so completely that little sunlight can get through. After what seems like miles but is actually, according to the odometer, just under one, the road forks and Kathryn bears left, onto Birch Lane.

The road is deeply rutted, as if an eighteen-wheeler had barreled through on a rainy day. But a big truck would never make it. The road takes sharp turns at odd angles; trees press close on each side. Kathryn begins to feel a creeping panic—where the hell is she? what is she doing here?—and she stops the car in the middle of the road, holding on to the steering wheel with both hands to calm herself. She’s all alone, miles from anywhere, and no one knows where she is. She peers up through the lattice of leaves to the blue sky beyond. “What are you
thinking?”
she says aloud, and she laughs at the insanity of taking such a risk.

She’d called Jack before she left, but he wasn’t at his desk. The message she left was vague and halting. She hadn’t wanted to say too much; she didn’t want him to try to stop her. “Hi, it’s me,” she said. “I’m going to be gone this afternoon, on old business. If you don’t hear from me by this evening … But I’m sure you will. This is a good thing. I know what I’m doing.” Now she wishes she’d been more specific.

She shuts her eyes and starts to reason with herself. She’s being paranoid. She’s never seen Hunter do anything remotely violent; why would she imagine he’d ever try to hurt her? It occurs to her that maybe this whole thing—this idea that Hunter had something to do with Jennifer’s disappearance—is some kind of fantasy, a story she’s concocted because she can’t accept that Jennifer just vanished. Because she needs an answer, any answer, whether it’s the truth or not. Maybe this is all a stupid, laughable mistake, and Rick Hunter is simply a charismatic young teacher who had a relationship with one of his students ten years ago.
So what? Kathryn thinks. He wasn’t much older than they were—six or seven years, maybe. He might have been twenty-five when they were seniors. Jennifer was a wise child, older than her age. She wasn’t about to share the details of her difficult life with some immature boy. If she loved this man, if he filled a need for her, what crime was there in that?

A horn sounds loudly on the road behind her, stantling Kathryn out of her thoughts. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she sees a dirty white sedan and in it a man wearing tinted glasses, chewing on a toothpick. He nods and lifts his hand to get her attention. “You okay?” he hollers out the window.

“Yeah. Sorry,” she yells back. She starts the car, and he follows behind her until she turns into a driveway marked by a small wooden plaque that says
HUNTER’S LODGE
. He beeps his horn again and keeps going.

Fifty yards down the drive the trees fall back, and Kathryn finds herself in a large, grassy clearing. Straight ahead and slightly to the left is a neat shingled cottage; beyond that the sparkling lake, a wedge of shoreline, and the deep-blue sky make a vivid terrine. She parks beside Hunter’s black Jeep and gets out with her bag, experiencing the slight vertigo one can feel after an arduous journey to an unfamiliar place. She leans against her car for a moment to steady herself.

“You made it.”

Hunter is standing by the door to the cabin. He’s wearing a faded green T-shirt, khaki shorts, and tan hiking boots. Kathryn is struck again by how young he seems out of his teaching uniform of starched shirts and ties and pressed pants. He looks like anyone she knows, any of her friends from graduate school.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like to get out of here in the winter,” she says. “How do you make it to school every day?”

“It’s not bad. You just need four-wheel drive and a shovel.” He smiles, and she smiles back. He seems different, somehow—more relaxed. It makes her feel more relaxed, too. “C’mon, I’ll show you around,” he says.

She follows him to the front of the cabin, which is surprisingly modern, a wall of glass opening onto a broad, high deck. “I’m facing south, so I get the sunrise and the sunset,” he says. “I designed it so I’d be able to see both.”

“This is not what I expected,” she says.

“I used to live in a little shack on this same spot with a woodstove and no phone, but I got sick of roughing it.” He laughs. “That’s my dirty little secret, I guess. I like a good hot shower now and then.”

“I won’t tell.”

“I knew I could trust you.” Leading her up the steps and through the sliding glass doors into a big, sunny room with a high ceiling and exposed beams, he explains how he cut trees on his own property to build the cabin, selecting them carefully so there wouldn’t be a gap in the woods.

Kathryn looks around at the simple furnishings: two Adirondack chairs, a Danish modern off-white couch, a wrought-iron lamp with a parchment shade, a coffee table fashioned from a tree trunk, Bose speakers. An old black rotary phone. Low, built-in bookshelves line the walls; interspersed among the rows of books are pieces of handcrafted pottery, old clocks, and some scattered Americana—an old Coke bottle, a handmade doll, a worn wooden shoe form. “You have good taste,” she murmurs.

“Surprised?” he says, an amused lilt in his voice.

She walks through the living room, setting her bag on the couch, and peers into the immaculate modern kitchen at the far end. “I was envisioning a few deer heads on the wall, maybe a varnished fish.” Wandering over to the fireplace, she scans the framed snapshots on the mantel. There’s a close-up of a lily, a long shot of a woodpile, a mountain stream. “You don’t have any personal photos,” she remarks.

“No,” he says. “I don’t see much point.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe in fetishizing people. Photographs do that.”

“Oh. I thought they just helped you remember.”

“You don’t need a photograph to remember,” he says. “What’s important stays in your head. In your heart.”

The sentimentality of these words startles her, and she turns to look at him, but she can’t read his expression. “Are you close to your family?” she asks.

“No,” he says.

“Why not?”

He pauses before answering, a small reprimand for her nosiness. “My mother is unstable, and my father died when I was young.”

Like Jennifer, she thinks. “Do you have any siblings?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they?”

He shrugs. “It’s not so much where they are as who they are. I have nothing in common with them.”

“Have they ever been here?”

“No.”

“Has anyone ever been here?” She smiles to show that she’s kidding, but he takes the question seriously.

“I’m not a total recluse, but I’m also not afraid of being alone. What about you, Kathryn?” he asks abruptly. “How do you feel about being alone?”

She walks over to the wall of glass overlooking the water. Outside, the colors seem artificially heightened, like a colorized movie: a robin’s-egg-blue sky, a navy-blue lake, emerald-green trees. “I used to hate it,” she says.

“What changed?”

“I changed.”

“Ah,” he says, “back to our old debate about whether people change. I guess we have a fundamental difference.”

“You don’t think you’ve changed at all in the past ten years?” she asks, turning back to look at him.

He shakes his head. “People learn to tolerate things, or hide things. Our essential natures stay the same.”

“So if you met Jennifer today—” she begins.

“Whoa,” he says, stepping back. “Where did that come from?”

“I just wondered,” she says quickly, her eyes innocently wide, as if the question had randomly occurred to her.

“Why?”

“I wondered if she’s your type.”

He studies her face as if trying to figure out how it works.

“Not that she’s a type,” she adds. “But if she came back—”

“Kathryn, she’s dead,” he says bluntly.

She blinks. “I—How do you know?”

“Everybody knows.”

“What do you mean?”

He rolls his eyes. “C’mon. The girl vanished ten years ago and hasn’t been spotted since. What’d you think, she ran off to be a movie star?”

“But there’s no proof—”

“What proof do you need? At some point you just have to accept the empirical evidence.”

Taking a deep breath, she says, “Okay, then. What happened to her?”

He shrugs. “Oh, everybody has a theory, don’t they? I don’t think it really matters. The point is”—he flips his fingers out aggressively—“she’s gone. That fact alone renders idle speculation meaningless.”

“I don’t agree,” she says. “It does matter.”

“But there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”

“What they can do is find out the truth.”

The corners of his mouth turn up slightly. “My. I never knew you were such a crusader.”

That night by the river flashes through her mind.
Come on, Jen. Don’t get deep on me.
“I never was,” she says.

He stands there looking at her for a moment, with his hands on his hips. Then he rubs his chin. “Let’s define our terms,” he says. “I’m not sure I believe there is such a thing as the truth. There are facts. But truth is variable, open to interpretation.”

“Facts, then,” Kathryn says. “Facts would be enough.”

“Ah,” he says, “but facts will only take you so far. You can have all the facts and still not know what happened.”

This is going in circles, she thinks; I’m not going to get anywhere this way. “Jennifer was in love with you,” she says. “Is that a fact? Or is it the truth?”

“She was young. She didn’t know what it meant to be in love.”

“She didn’t know,” Kathryn persists, “so it wasn’t true?”

“She wasn’t in love with me,” Hunter says abruptly, turning away. “If she’d been in love with me …”

“What?”

The telephone rings, a burbling, old-fashioned sound. They both jump.

“Just a minute,” he says. He goes over to pick it up. “Hello?” Kathryn watches his face.

“Um. It’s for you,” he says with a questioning look.

“Me?”

He nods, holding the phone out.

She walks over, as if she’s in a trance, and takes it from him. “Hello?”

“Kathryn? It’s me, Jack.”

“Oh.” She looks at Hunter, who’s watching her impassively.

“Are you okay? Is everything all right?”

Her head is light with panic, and she needs a moment before she can answer. She takes slow, shallow breaths. “How did you find me?”

“Give me a break,” he says. “It was obvious where you were headed. I’d be pissed as hell right now if I weren’t so concerned.”