Sacrifice (2 page)

“Nah, screw that,” Bob said. “This is
our
reunion. The Dirty Half Dozen are getting together Labor Day weekend.”

A mental picture formed of the six of them, the inseparable high school band of brothers. Jeff’s smile reignited. “Really, everyone’s coming home?”

“Once you sign on, the crew’s complete,” Bob said. Bob did a half-assed job of muffling a cough on the other end. “Unless you’re still a wuss.”
Wuss
had been the ultimate derogatory way back when. Better to be a traitorous pedophile cannibal than be branded a wuss.

“Hey,” Jeff said. “I’ll have to check my calendar…”

“You’re the fucking CEO.” Bob had apparently retained the ability to use the f-bomb as an adjective in virtually any conversation. “You
write
the calendar. You going to tell me everyone can make it but you?”

“I guess I can make it.”

“How fucking hard was that?” Bob said. “Two weeks from today at my house. The party starts at seven and runs all weekend. I booked you all rooms at the Village Green Inn. I’ve got to go. Rest up, Wussie Boy.”

Bob hung up. The Village Green Inn was an old bed and breakfast that had been in business since the American Revolution. It sat on the edge of the old village green in the snooty, historic part of Sagebrook. In high school, the closest any of them came to being at the inn was a summer stint Paul once did doing dishes. The irony was wonderful.

Jeff hadn’t made a spur-of-the-moment decision like that in a long time. It felt pretty good. He took a seat in the kitchen and turned his back on the wall of stainless steel appliances and black marble counters. He looked out across the golden, rolling hills behind his house, most of which he owned.

Bob was right about one thing. Jeff did write the schedule. He’d been going non-stop the last few months getting the Arizona project on line, and this week it made all its milestones. He had also just cut the ribbon on his latest philanthropic effort, the Block Geriatric Research Center in San Diego. He was due for a long weekend off.

And he didn’t have to clear his plans with anyone. Wife Number Three was working hard on becoming Ex-Wife Number Three. Terri had filed for separation and was living in a condo off the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. At his expense, of course. He was the first to admit his mistake of being attracted to neurotic, damaged women. At least he never made the further mistake of having kids with any of them.

Thinking about it, he realized he really hadn’t spoken to Bob in over thirty years. After graduation, the Half Dozen went in different directions, like a clock that had been wound too tightly through those final weeks until one last twist sent the main spring flying.

He hadn’t thought about that last twist in a while. Or was it that he thought about it so often he no longer separated it out, and it had become a permanent thread running through the fabric of his life? Had the others? His memories were no doubt faded by time—were theirs as well?

Jeff’s initial excitement at reuniting with his friends of old rolled back in. He couldn’t worry about that. This reunion was going to be a good time.

Chapter Three

“So who was that on the phone?” Liz called from down the hall of their house.

Marc Brady was slow to answer his wife. He gave his thick, full beard a thoughtful scratch and stared at the phone he had just returned to its cradle. “That was Bob.”

“From the Physics Department?”

Marc had to stifle a laugh. His old pal had barely graduated high school. The idea of him teaching in the Washington State University Physics Department was hilarious. Not as funny as Bob teaching with Marc in the English Department, but still hilarious.

“No, it was Bob Armstrong.”

“From Long Island?” Over the course of twenty years of marriage, Liz had assembled a patchwork quilt of the bits of Marc’s pre-college life he’d let slip. Marc never ceased to be amazed at what she remembered.

“Yep, old Smokin’ Bob himself.” Of the Dirty Half Dozen, only Bob had taken up the nicotine habit and had done it at the ripe old age of twelve. “He’s getting a bunch of the guys together on the Island over Labor Day.”

“Wait,” Liz said as she entered the bedroom. Her T-shirt and shorts were
still
stained brown with the peat she had been shoveling into the backyard garden. She tucked a strand of her short, frosted hair behind her ear. She pointed a plastic trowel at Marc. “Wasn’t he the one that was an arsonist?”

Of course she’d remember that, Marc thought. He leaned back into the bed. At a thin 5”6”, he was swallowed by the king size. He had short black hair that matched his beard in length and was speckled gray. He closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose where his glasses rested. Paranoia about lasers on his eyeballs kept him from shedding the glasses that had recently converted to bifocals.

“That was pled down to vandalism.” Marc sighed. “And it was thirty years ago.” Marc doubted anyone still called him Smokin’ Bob after that.

“He’s still a felon,” Liz said. “How would that look to have a tenured professor spending the weekend with convicted criminals?”

“
Criminal,
in the singular, dear,” Marc said, looking up at the ceiling. “He’s inviting friends from high school, not from Attica.”

“Still,” Liz said. “Labor Day is the last weekend before classes start. Dr. Martins always has some last-minute project he dumps on you, and last year there was the over-enrollment problem…”

“Don’t sweat it,” Marc said, his voice ratcheted up one frustrated notch of volume. “I told him I couldn’t make it for just those reasons.”

“Well, that’s good,” Liz said.

Wait for it, Marc thought. Three…two…one…

“Because the start of the year is just the worst time,” she finished.

She turned and left the room. Marc gave himself a sad, triumphant smile. He knew her like the back of his hand. Even when she won a confrontation, she always had to restate her victorious position just one more time, in case Marc didn’t know what it was. Just another endearing trait.

Of course he wasn’t going to go back to Long Island. He hadn’t been back for thirty years for a reason. The same reason he guessed the rest of them hadn’t been back. Pullman, Washington was as far from Long Island as he could get in the lower forty-eight, and that wasn’t an accident. How any of the Half Dozen could have stayed there after the weeks around graduation was beyond him.

It had taken Marc six years of therapy up through his doctoral degree to get himself straightened out. Since then he’d carved himself out a nice life on the eastern Palouse. His little ranch house wasn’t much, but cozy and close to work were big selling points given his salary limitations.

Marc had sealed every bit of the shit that had hit the fan in 1980 into a nice, airtight container so he’d never have to deal with it again. No way was he going to open that back up again.

Chapter Four

“If you think the address is impressive, wait until you check out the view.”

That was what Ken Scott told clients when they swooned over the address on his business cards. Nothing said you’d made it like having your real estate office in the Empire State Building, former hangout of King Kong and the only building in the city with a zeppelin mooring. Ken’s office was on the seventy-ninth floor, the exact spot where a B-25 bomber had plowed into the building in a heavy fog in 1945. He figured it was the safest spot in the building. What were the odds of two major accidents in the same place?

And Ken did have a stellar southwest view, where on a clear day he could see the World Trade Center site, where a new tower was rising to replace what had once been the tallest buildings in the city. It wasn’t possible to look down on the expanse of lower Manhattan and not feel like you were on top of the world. That was one of the reasons the partners selected this expensive address. That attitude attracted the kind of clients they wanted. Rich ones.

His office had all the expected high-end trappings; an expansive, dark mahogany desk, expensive and indecipherable artwork, overstuffed leather chairs to impress the clients who sat in them. Two computer monitors ran behind Ken’s desk, one scrolling through live streams of mortgage and financial data. Whether the client was looking for commercial, residential or undeveloped property, Ken wanted them to know he was ready to react to market changes in an instant.

Ken sat at his desk alone and pored over several printouts of new listings. He wore a bright red tie and a tight, tapered white shirt that was crisp enough to deflect bullets. His Armani jacket hung on the back of his chair. The sun highlighted his muted red hair and gave an extra sparkle to his green eyes. Right now those eyes showed panic.

It was here somewhere. He knew he’d read it earlier in the day. Some apartments were going condo with a shady valuation process he didn’t like. Now where the hell…

He wasn’t used to not having information at his beck and call. But not just the misplaced paper. There was a time when he would not have even needed the paper. From an early age he had a photographic memory. With one glance, he could save and later recall nearly any information. The gift had made school a breeze. But the last several months it had failed him.

He’d had some forgetfulness, usually names and places. But the time he forgot how to write a check was what prompted him to make the doctor’s appointment. Ken attributed it to the stress of his job and the short daily hours of sleep. He guessed a sleeping pill would make things right. But a bunch of tests later, he had a different answer.

Early onset Alzheimer’s. How could he have that? He was just forty-eight. Of course that’s why they put the “early onset” in the title. Some single whacked chromosome from back in his family tree had delivered this bundle of joy. The cure for this relentless destruction of his mental capacities? Death. That was all that could stop it.

Instead, there was treatment. He swallowed a battalion of pills each day: DHEA, omega-3 fatty acids, a half-dozen vitamins and some new wonder drug that had been on the market for three months. None was a cure. These soldiers could only fight a tough rear-guard action, covering the withdrawal of Ken’s diminishing brain cells. The war would still be lost. So far the impact had been minimal, but every mental misstep spawned a ripple of panic about the disease’s advance.

His phone startled him as it rang.

“Robert Armstrong on line one for you,” his assistant said.

Bob Armstrong? That was way too much of a coincidence. He’d been thinking about the old days out on the Island some after his diagnosis. How long had it been since he talked to Bob? He did a bit of math. Wow, had it been thirty years?

“This is Ken,” he said into the phone.

“I’m looking for a condo,” Bob said. “Central Park West with a pool. You a fancy enough Realtor to find that for me?”

“Bob Armstrong,” Ken said. “How the hell have you been?”

“No worse for the wear.” He coughed away from the phone. It sounded deep and painful. “Living the good life near Lake Ronkonkoma. How’s the real estate business?”

“A little slow, but the beauty of Manhattan is that it has finite space. Eventually demand always exceeds supply.”

“Come on home at the end of the month for Labor Day weekend,” Bob said. “Everyone’s coming by for a get-together at my place.”

“Everyone?”

“The whole Dirty Half Dozen will be there unless you wuss out. If you’re the only one missing, we might have to take the fucking train into the city and haul your ass out here.”

Ken smiled. Bob’s empty bluster hadn’t diminished over the years.

“Sounds great,” Ken said. And it really did. He’d been flashing back to those days a lot, wondering how the old gang ended up.

“The party starts at seven p.m. Friday and goes on ‘til whenever,” Bob said. He read Ken a Selden address. Bob wheezed a little as he spoke. “I booked you all rooms at the Village Green Inn starting Friday. So, I gotta go. We’ll catch up when you get here. Bite me sideways.” Bob hung up.

“Bite me sideways” was one of the classic responses they had in high school, interchangeable between a statement of exhilaration and one of frustration. It hadn’t occurred to Ken in years.

Driving out Friday night to Long Island on Labor Day weekend would be a major nightmare. He’d need to duck out of here early or he’d be entombed on the motionless Long Island Expressway until Monday. His house was in Westchester, so the hotel for the weekend was a good idea.

Ken hadn’t been back to the old stomping grounds since he left for college. He’d kept up with the real estate market there, and the place had come to define urban sprawl. It would be good to see what things looked like now, while he still had a good grip on what things looked like then.

He also hadn’t seen any of his old friends since graduation. In a way their estrangement was hard to believe since they had been Siamese sextuplets since the sixth grade. In another way, it was easy to believe when he thought about graduation weekend.

He’s certainly thought more about those last few weeks of high school since the doctor asked about any physical traumas he might have suffered in the past that could have precipitated his declining present. Ken left out the water tower lightning incident in his medical history, the same way he’d left it out of his internal personal history. Poetic justice if one dumb decision at age seventeen lit the match that set fire to his memory.