Jericho's Fall (15 page)

“What about Jimmy Lobb?”

“What about him? He had an accident.”

“And you don’t think it’s a little strange? Just as your father gets sick, his best friend up here goes over a cliff? A man who’s been driving on these roads for who-knows-how-many years?”

Pamela put her fork down. She looked like a predator spoiling for a fight, but her voice remained calm. “I’m sorry Mr. Lobb is dead, Rebecca. But actual accidents happen sometimes. Real crashes, with real cars, and real people.” She lifted her chin toward her sister. “Otherwise, Audrey and her friends wouldn’t have anybody to pray for.”

The nun blushed, rather prettily. “Oh, don’t worry about us. If God decided tomorrow never to allow another auto accident, we’d still have enough of the dearly departed to keep us busy.” She crossed the kitchen to get the book. “Here it is.”

A brand-new novel by a writer of whom Beck had never heard. She turned it over in her hands. The binding was fresh and uncracked. Nobody had read this book. She was certain of it. She checked the due dates in the back, and found to her delight that the town library still used the old-fashioned system of stamps. And, just as she guessed, Jericho had been the first one to check it out.

He had checked the book out but had not read it. The press of other business? The effect of his illness? Or—

The telephone rang. Audrey scooped it up, said hello, and for once did not smile. “Hi, Sean,” she said, in a voice calculated to be heard at the table. Pamela almost sneered in derision, and gave Beck a disgusted look. Beck dropped her eyes and broke off a piece of the delicious but forbidden bread.

“Yes,” said Audrey. “Uh-huh. Sure. Yes. You know we will. Yes. How’s Hayley? Is that right? Wow. And the— Oh. Sure. Well, tell her happy birthday from us. We’ll pray for her. Uh-huh. Oh, she is? And I guess Kara is ten. Eleven? That’s such a blessing.”

Pamela leaned toward Rebecca, her tone conspiratorial. “She doesn’t believe that for a second.”

“Believe what?”

“That children are a blessing. That’s why she left dear Teddy Gould—”

“That’s not what happened. She doesn’t hate children.”

“Oh, right. You’ve been here two days, and you know my sister better than I do.” She let this sink in. “Audrey hates them, believe me. She thinks they’re nothing but trouble. And let me tell you something.
She’s right. My Madeira? She’s an absolute pistol.” Another of Jericho’s expressions. It took Beck a moment to realize that Pamela meant her daughter, not a fortified wine. “Madeira’s fourteen, right? So she comes home one night with a double pierce in her lip. In her lip! Can you imagine?”

Beck could not. She tried to think of Nina that way, saw only her sweet little smile.

But Pamela’s question was rhetorical. “So I say to her, I said, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ She says, ‘It’s my fucking body, and it’s my fucking freedom of expression.’ I say, ‘You know what? You’re an idiot. You think any boy’s gonna want to kiss you like that? Not to mention, you could get a nasty infection.’ She says, ‘All the boys want to kiss me.’ Then she marches up to her suite and slams the door. Well, fine. So I don’t know how to talk to kids. My husband took care of it, though. Hank’s very good with her. He says, ‘If those things aren’t out of your lips in five minutes, or if they ever go back in, you don’t get the BMW convertible.’”

Beck was a second catching up.

“I thought you said Madeira’s fourteen.”

“She gets it on her sixteenth birthday. We promised it to her last year, to get her to stop going out with this college guy.” She shook her head. “I love her to death, but, believe me, kids aren’t a blessing. That girl is going to be the death of me.” A grimace. “So—how’s yours?”

Beck was spared having to answer by Audrey’s intervention. She was holding the portable phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

Beck reached for it.

“Not Sean. Jericho.”

(ii)

“So—what did Dak tell you?” said Jericho. They were on the deck, enjoying the afternoon sun. He wore a thick parka and a scarf that hid half his face. Audrey had insisted. “Last night, when you got together.
What did he want? Did he tell you I was paranoid? Threatening the nation’s security? Something like that?”

“Something like that,” said Beck, sipping her cocoa. The trip down the mountain with Audrey had been postponed by Jericho’s summons. Another part of her was brooding over Sean’s snub of her on the telephone, and wondering what the sisters thought.

“Did he happen to say what my threats were?”

Clouds scudded across an eggshell sky. The peak was brilliant and crisp in the mountain brightness. “Not really. Just that you had information you were planning to reveal—”

“Disclose.”

She looked at him. “Sorry?”

“I’m disclosing it. Not revealing it. Humans disclose. Only God can reveal. Typical of the way the language has deteriorated in this era of—- Never mind.” But his brief descent into wordplay heartened her: another sliver of the old Professor Ainsley peeking through. Whatever Audrey might think, Jericho’s mind seemed to be working fine. “And Dak is right. I have secrets. And I’m going to let them out if any harm comes to me. To you. To any of my family.” There was a bowl of shoyu soup beside him. He had yet to touch it. “You don’t mind, do you? That I think of you as one of the family?”

“Of course not.”

He seemed pleased. “You loved it up here, Becky-Bear. Remember how you loved it?”

“I was lonely.”

“Lonely? You had me.”

“Not really. You were always on the phone, or playing cards, or you had people in, working on one of your projects—”

He cut her off. Gently. “And we used to walk. Remember our walks? We walked all the time, Beck. In the woods.” He pointed. “Even up the peak now and then. Remember? And down there. The valley.”

She turned to him in surprise. She was the one who had walked all the time. Jericho had only rarely joined her, and although they had once climbed the peak, they had never hiked down into the valley
behind the house. Was his mind slipping away after all, or was he trying to tell her something? She was about to correct the record when he put a finger to his lips.

“I remember,” she said. “Of course I do.”

“We were quite the couple in those days,” he continued. A guffaw, then a cough. Maybe twenty minutes of fresh air were enough. “Aspen. Vail. The parties. The glitter. Admit it, Becky-Bear. I could be hell on earth, but sometimes we had fun.”

“We did.” Except there had been no glittering parties in Aspen or Vail, or anywhere else. They had tried, once, the New Year’s Eve festivities of a venture capitalist in Snowmass. But even in that sophisticated crowd, people had stared and whispered, until Jericho, to shield them both from embarrassment, made his excuses. The ride back to Stone Heights in the stretch limo was three hours. On the way, pressing her head into his strong shoulder, she cried herself to sleep.

“And your birthday. Remember how we celebrated your birthday? The time I led you into the garage and there was the Ferrari?”

Beck was ready to cry again. For a life never lived. The world Jericho was describing sounded so much more delightful than their actual days. “Yes, Jer-Bear. Sure. I remember.”

“Still, these times were the best,” he said, still gazing up at the mountain. “Sitting out here at the end of the day, just the two of us. We always took the time to relax like this. We were all we needed in those days—remember?”

“I remember.” No. I don’t.

“But it didn’t last. It never does. We had all these hopes and dreams, but they melted away, didn’t they? Dreams are like the snow. They have their season, and then they’re gone.” He was holding her hand. “I’m sorry, Becky-Bear. Sorry I didn’t do better for you.” Jericho coughed. “I want you to see Dak for me. I want you to tell him”—a pause, and she could almost hear the gears whirling—“tell him it’s not his fault. Tell him I have to do what’s best. He’ll understand.”

Beck reached out, took his chin in her hand, made him turn to look at her. “It won’t work, Jericho. You know it won’t.”

“What won’t work?”

“They won’t let you get away with it. Come on, Jericho. These are the nation’s secrets. Maybe the secrets of other nations, too.” The golden eyes just watched her. She grabbed his shoulder, shook him. “Don’t you understand? They won’t all wait around to see what you do. Somebody’s going to kill you. Can you get that through your head? They’ll kill you, Jer-Bear. Do you want that to happen?”

She thought for a moment that she had reached him. Those hunter’s eyes widened, and he flushed. Then his expression hardened, and she knew that she had only sparked his anger.

“I see.” He lifted a hand, removed hers from his shoulder. “You’re saying you won’t help me.”

“Help you! You haven’t even told me what you want me to do!”

Another station break while he thought this over. When he spoke, his tone was again one of reminiscence. “I always adored your mind, Beck. From the very first. Back at Princeton, in the seminar. I loved your mind before I loved the rest of you. Boundless potential. Ambitious as any politician.” That small laugh. He stood up, shakily, but on his own. He kissed her cheek, and whispered. “What I’m saying is, you’ll figure it out.” He straightened again. “I hear you’re leaving us.”

“Day after tomorrow. I have to go to Chicago—”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Excuse me?”

“I want you to stay longer, Beck. I miss you.”

“But—”

“At least one more day. Stay till Friday.”

But another day in the madhouse sounded like a prison sentence. “I can’t, Jericho,” she said kindly. “I have a meeting. It’s my job.”

A dismissive gesture. “Not to worry. Your boss—not that fool Pfister, but his boss’s boss’s boss?—he worked for me at Defense. I covered up a scandal for him. He owes me. If I tell him he can spare you another day, he can spare you another day.”

“Please don’t do me any more favors.”

A chuckle, then a cough. “I’m not doing it for you, my dear. I’m doing it for me.”

And that was that.

(iii)

When Beck went upstairs to get her jacket and her wallet for the ride to town, she took a moment to stand by the window, looking down past the stone deck where she had sat with Jericho. It was nearing two. The sun was still almost precisely overhead. Every feature of the lawn should have been bright. Yet she imagined shadows. The view seemed somehow gauzy and insubstantial. She felt as if she were looking into a dream.

Movement.

The play of gray against green and brown, winking into her vision, then vanishing as soon as she shifted her gaze.

An animal, she told herself, pulling on her jacket as Audrey called from downstairs. A bear, maybe. The season was right. Up here, one even saw the odd elk, or, now and then, a mountain lion. So that was what she had seen out there: an animal, surely, and not a man.

Nevertheless, as she crossed the forecourt beside the happily chattering nun, Beck felt a fresh surge of loyalty to the man whose warm yet powerful arms had been, for a while, her entire world.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Their affair began in the spring of her sophomore year. By the following fall, they were living in Colorado. But first came the seduction. Beck, fascinated by her professor and well aware of the significance of his sneaking glances, had little experience of men. She had done more fighting off than giving in. She took to dropping by Dr. Ainsley’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study. Each time, she would prepare a list of thoughtful questions, but she discovered, to her chagrin, that she was merely enhancing her reputation as a hardworking, perhaps overzealous student. She decided to flirt a bit, but, alas, she was not
quite sure how it was done. At nineteen, she had little practice, because her mother had taught her that boys chased girls. In Jacqueline’s universe, the only girls who chased boys were the bad girls.

Which was what Beck longed to be: a bad girl.

Then the opportunity arose. During one of her visits to Dr. Ainsley’s office, watching his face for evidence of interest, she mumbled some nonsense about wanting to know him better, and the distinguished professor, after thinking it over, told her he was having some of his graduate students to dinner at his house. Would Miss DeForde, as his star undergraduate, care to join them?

Miss DeForde would.

Miss DeForde consulted her wealthy roommate, Tish, without telling her just why. A gleeful Tish, who got around, took her to a boutique in Philadelphia and helped her pick out a budget-busting but terrifically slinky dress. Beck spent the rest of the week rehearsing lines she suspected she would be too shy to use, and moves she knew she would be too intimidated to make. Tish schooled her with care, pretending all along to be in the dark about the object of Beck’s affection.

She arrived at five minutes past eight, very nervous, and Professor Ainsley told her she was the first. He gave her a glass of wine, sat beside her on the sofa, and asked about her dreams. He was very smooth about the whole thing. By the time it occurred to Rebecca that she was the only guest, he had her half undressed. None of her plans turned out to matter, because Jericho did all the seducing.

It sounds like he took advantage of you
, said Dr. Eisenstadt, some years after.
He was older and experienced, you were younger and you had a crush. He took advantage
.

He did
, Beck agreed.
But I absolutely wanted him to
.

Your desire has nothing to do with it
, said the doctor, with unexpected firmness.
Jericho Ainsley abused his position, and he abused your trust. You shouldn’t be too quick to forgive him
.

After the first time, they agreed there could not be a second. After the second, they were adamant that there must never be a third. After the third, they began plotting to keep it secret. As the secret slipped
out—in part because of their carelessness, in part thanks to the delighted Tish—they decided to hold their heads high. Even when the Institute informed the Ambassador that they would be needing his office next year for some little-known behavioral ecologist from Europe who was taking a year to write a book about how humans were a cancer on the planet.