Skinny Dipping (6 page)

“You know Prescott?” Joe asked, breaking his silence.

“Nah-uh,” Hank said. “One of the local guys doing the landscaping—and,
come on
! This is the North Woods, for the love of God. Who landscapes the
North Woods
?—told us his name.”

Joe turned to Gerry. “Have you met him?”

“Nope. The guy’s a hermit,” Gerry said.

“I think he may be agoraphobic,” Mimi put in, turning her shoulder to Debbie. Birgie would deal with her later. “He’s a computer genius, a professor on sabbatical from Berkeley or MIT, I think. He invented some sort of Web application he gets millions in royalties for and decided to build that place as a retreat. There he is now.” She pointed up at the third-story turret window, where a pale, pudgy face looked down at them.

“He looks so young,” Joe murmured.

“Yeah,” Mimi said. “He can’t be much more than twenty-three or twenty-two. Probably one of those kids who graduated from college at twelve. He’s always up there looking down like some weird little male Rapunzel. I’d feel sorry for him if I didn’t have to look at this eyesore every day. Kind of kills the sympathy reflex, you know?”

“He’s pathetic,” Gerry agreed. “I mean, what kind of guy pays God-knows-what to build a house as big as most resorts, then never has anyone up to visit and never comes outside?”

Joe sighed, his gaze fixed on the face in the window high above. He lifted a hand in a weak salute. “My son.”

Prescott Tierney looked down as his father gave him a brief two-fingered salute. He flushed with embarrassment and attempted to melt back into the room and out of sight. Unfortunately, Prescott’s was not a physique given to melting.

What the hell was Joe doing down there amongst
his
neighbors? Joe was
supposed
to be visiting him. Not that Prescott gave a damn if or when Joe visited, but it was just common courtesy to show up when you said you were going to show up. Seeing Joe down there, ecstatically not with Prescott, brought back all his adolescent anger. God knew, it was an old pattern.

Even before his mother’s death, Joe hadn’t been around much. He was always somewhere else, becoming rich, worldly, and important. Oh, he showed up during holidays and birthdays, always toting some wildly inappropriate gift. The man apparently never talked to his wife or looked at his son, or he would have known that Prescott had no discernable athletic ability.

Why couldn’t Joe have just celebrated the fact that Prescott was a genius? He wasn’t bragging; it was fact. He’d been a boy genius who liked math and physics and
The Lord of the Rings
and would have preferred his own computer to some stupid hockey stick. Besides, who was supposed to show him how to use a hockey stick? Not Joe, not in the five minutes every few months he was around. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to be his mom. She, like him, was an academic. She, like him, was a genius (IQ 165). She, like him, lived a cerebral life.

And
she
was proud of Prescott.

Proud of
them
, he amended. His mother’s single-minded dedication to his welfare had seen that he’d had the best possible educations. Since that obviously meant home-schooling—for, as she’d often said, who better to teach a genius than a genius?—it also meant constantly preparing herself for what she’d called “the sacred task of molding a brilliant mind.” Her faith in herself was not misplaced, either. At nine, he’d nailed the SATs.

Then she’d died, hit by a bus as she was crossing the street talking on her cell phone in a heated debate with the chancellor of Harvard University over whether or not Prescott would be admitted as a full-time student at age ten. Prescott had never forgiven Harvard. He’d done his undergraduate work at Princeton.

Joe had shown up in time for the funeral looking confused—the only time in Prescott’s memory he could recall Joe looking so. After a week of staring at each other, Joe had come up with the outrageous suggestion that Prescott tag after him when he returned to work and attend schools in other countries. Prescott had wasted no time in shooting down that halfhearted proposal. And it was halfhearted. Even at ten Prescott recognized relief when he saw it.

Prescott proposed instead that he go to the elite boarding school he and his mother had occasionally toyed with the idea of his attending while they waited for him to reach the chronological age supposedly erudite institutions required of their students. He didn’t so much propose as insist.

Thank God, Joe had let him go. The only mildly surprising part was that Joe had actually continued showing up on holidays and birthdays, and persisted in taking him out of school for a month each summer to live in whatever luxurious short-term rental he was then currently occupying. It must have become an ingrained habit, because Joe was still showing up periodically even when it should have been clear to him that Prescott did not need Joe to play daddy. He didn’t
need
Joe at all.

He supposed Joe’s ego could not stand the idea that his only child didn’t care for his company. Especially when everyone else did. After all, Joe was handsome, debonair, and charismatic.

Prescott’s lip began to twitch. He banged his forehead once against the wall next to the window—but not too hard, as he bruised easily. Plus it had taken him hours to get his Diane Arbus originals perfectly aligned. He looked down.

How
had
Joe come to be there?

Knowing Joe, by now the Olsons had discovered he was some sort of prodigal son or better yet, the uncrowned king of the Olsons and invited him to be guest of honor at their little shindig. That was typical of Joe. Somehow, he always managed to fit in. Despite looking like he just stepped out of
GQ,
he seemed perfectly comfortable amongst the Nordic types standing around admiring Bombadil House.

Okay, he knew it was a little sketchy, but Tolkien had been his hero since he’d been five. And so it was fitting that he should name this place, which he’d designed, with some help from
Architectural Digest
and
Adirondack Home,
to be his refuge from the outside world, after
The Lord of the Rings’
famous happy hermit. He briefly wondered whether anyone at MIT realized he’d gone into self-imposed exile. He doubted it.

Except for some of his students at MIT, no one had even asked where he was going on the year sabbatical he’d taken following the college’s sale of his Internet security program. Fine with him. He didn’t feel any compulsion to share his personal life with the school’s second-gen Silicon Valley greedmeisters and relentlessly ambitious grad students. They could jockey all they wanted for the second rung on the genius ladder. He knew he stood at the top. Still, it was hard standing alone at the top of the heap. He needed a break; he needed to find himself a simple place where a man could contemplate whatever it was he wanted to contemplate and not be made to feel like an outcast by even so little as a walk across the campus grounds.

Here, at Fowl Lake, he felt he more or less belonged. No one expected anything of him. They didn’t ask him stupid questions like what his favorite football team was, or what he was working on that would make his next million. Here, he just was part of the scenery. Like the Olsons. Oh, he realized he wasn’t here as a part of the Olson milieu—he wasn’t delusional. They were more like sea lions and penguins in the South Pole, cohabiting on a rock atoll, separate but equal.

Prescott’s eye caught a motion below and he looked down at the scrawny red-haired woman who’d joined the group below. He wondered whether Joe had told the Olsons he was his son. He leaned sideways and peered closer. Nope. Prescott knew this because no one’s face betrayed the startled expression people always got upon hearing this news. He’d seen the look countless times before.

Cool it, he told himself, all this alpha male bullshit was understandable when he was a teenager, but Prescott was twenty-three. He was independently wealthy due to the sale of a revolutionary Internet application he’d invented, he had a higher IQ than anyone he knew and a fabulous house, and he didn’t make a living screwing with people’s lives like Joe did.

“Damn.”

None of those things could cancel out the fact that Joe stood beside Mignonette Olson. Prescott pivoted his head against the wall and gazed forlornly down at them.

When Prescott had moved in three months ago, he’d asked one of the workmen about the abandoned resort next door. He’d assumed it was a resort because of the old sign with a wood-burned Daffy Duck–like creature squatting at the bottom of the drive. It read
CHEZ DUCKY
. To his surprise, he’d learned it wasn’t a resort at all, and despite appearances, not abandoned. It was apparently some sort of enclave belonging to a family named Olson, a huge extended family whose members drifted in and out all summer long as the spirit moved them.

Prescott, who had never done anything without adequate preparation and plenty of forethought, and whose only relatives consisted of a set of ancient maternal grandparents, an elderly second cousin he’d never met, and Joe, was enchanted. Watching them from his tower—something he admitted he maybe spent a
little
too much time doing—was as good as reading a Dickens novel. Not the maudlin ending, but the cheery, warming middle part describing all the good and decent people who would soon be snatched away from whatever pathetic little lisper Mr. Dickens was tormenting. The only constant, the only fixture in the ever-changing cast of characters populating that tumbledown compound, was
her
.

The first time Prescott had seen her, she’d been sitting under one of the big pine trees cutting her toenails and singing an Abba tune. Loudly.

He’d cracked the window open to hear better, even though he knew it would play hell with the state-of-the-art HEPA filtration system he’d installed in the house’s ductwork. Not to mention the havoc it would play with his allergies. She didn’t have a very good voice.

As Prescott had listened, wincing, a teenage kid came up to her. Prescott hadn’t been able to hear what he’d said, but he’d assumed it was a question about life or love or some other weighty matter because the woman had taken the kid’s hand, looked soulfully up into his eyes, and said, “Oh, honey, just let it slide.”

Prescott could see the tension seep out of the kid, and, as weird as he knew it sounded, he felt some of his own melt away. The woman had smiled her Madonna-like smile and gone back to trimming her toenails.

He was smitten.

Here was a woman who didn’t care that her voice was lousy or the song she warbled even lousier. She apparently didn’t care that she would never be young again or that she must have no money because she spent her summers in what was little more than a shack. He didn’t know how he knew these things, but he did. She was a little disheveled, she didn’t have much of a wardrobe, but she obviously didn’t care about those things, either.
This
woman had it all figured out.

She spent hours (and there were a lot of them) floating on the lake in an inner tube, likely contemplating some bottomless well of inner tranquility. She was probably some sort of Zen yoga master. That she was the center point around which the Chez Ducky world revolved was evident. She was the only one who’d been up here every day since he’d moved in.

“Let it slide.” To someone who had dedicated his short life to excelling, no words had ever resonated so loudly. He saw her constant presence here as a beacon, guiding the way home for all her family. The only constant Prescott had known in his life had been his 4.0 grade point average. Joe’s seasonal visits didn’t count because they were merely duty calls.

Joe was big on duty. But as far as Prescott was concerned, Joe’s visits were a waste of time. He and Joe had nothing in common. Prescott
did
have a lot in common with the woman at Chez Ducky. They were both conscientious, both environmentalists (Prescott had decided this was a likely reason she wore vintage clothing), and both spiritual rather than physical beings.

Prescott had discovered that her name was Mignonette Olson.
Mrs
. Olson, he assumed because, first of all, being short and dark, she didn’t look anything like the big blond Olsons, and second, he couldn’t imagine her not sharing her life with someone. She was a sharing sort. He could only conclude by the absence of a Mr. Olson worshipping at her feet that she was a widow. A childless widow.

And he was an orphan. Or as good as one.

He released a gusty sigh and pushed away from the wall. He wondered what she was saying to Joe. Were they talking about his house? Was Joe trying to charm her? She didn’t look charmed. She looked frankly disgusted.

Take that, Joe,
Prescott thought, mentally pumping his arm.
Your sleep-aid-commercial voice and used-car-salesman charm aren’t going to cut it with a woman like Mrs. Olson. She’s not so easily bamboozled.

A shout drew his attention back outside. He looked down to see a teenage boy racing out of the woods, gesticulating wildly.

Prescott gnawed his thumbnail. He wanted to hear what was going on but he didn’t want the Olsons to think he was eavesdropping, and he was afraid they might see him if he lifted the window sash. On the other hand, everyone had turned their attention to the kid.

Prescott dropped to all fours and crawled under the window, reaching up and shoving the sash up an inch or so. He was going to pay for this tonight when his allergies kicked in, but it was worth it. Observing the Olsons had become more than an idle pastime. He’d invested so many hours watching them, he felt he’d adopted them.

“—a funeral pyre!” the giant blond male was bellowing.

Prescott curled his fingers over the lip of the sill and peeked over. The people had circled around the kid.

“Yes, sir! She’s down at the dock right now pouring kerosene over a stack of kindling in the center of the pontoon.”

Prescott snatched the binoculars he kept by the window and rose to his knees. He trained the lenses on the small area of the beach visible in front of the blistered old two-story house at Chez Ducky. Sure enough, an older woman wearing some sort of white drapery stood knee-deep in the water, upending a red gallon can of liquid on top of a pile of branches in the middle of some sort of raft. He lowered the binoculars and pressed his ear to the window opening.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” the skinny redheaded woman next to Mrs. Olson was saying. “There isn’t any Ardis to burn.”

“She’s got a poster of Ardis on top of the wood,” the kid exclaimed.

“Aw, geez,” the blond guy muttered.

Prescott adjusted the focus on the raft. Yup. A life-sized, grainy picture of an old woman carrying a golf bag stuck out of the branches. As Prescott watched, the woman in the water struck a match and threw it onto the twigs. Fire flared up, followed by a black belch of smoke.

He wasn’t the only one to see the smoke. Mrs. Olson spied it, too. “Holy shit,” she said. “We better get over there before she burns the whole place down.”

She struck off into the woods with the others close behind.

Including, Prescott noted with a hollow sensation, Joe. But then, what did he expect? That Joe would have preferred his company?

Not likely.