The Croning (19 page)

“Okay. Here we are in the countryside at night in the middle of even Daniel-Boone-wouldn’t-know-the-hell-where. Peasants locked in their cottages, windows shuttered. That’s how we lived for centuries. Huddled around fires, listening to the howls from the wilderness.”

“Take a ride with me into the non Anglo-world one of these days. Business as usual for a lot of folks.”

“Kinda my point. Baby. The night hasn’t changed. It’s the same as it was a hundred years ago. A thousand.” He didn’t enjoy how the headlights seemed dim and yellow against the dark and the fog. The dashboard panel flickered ominously. It was a quarter past eleven. The lighter popped and he pressed its glowing coil to the tip of his cigarette. Despite, or because of, the pleasant fuzzy aftertaste of whiskey in his mouth, he wanted a drink; a single malt scotch, cooking sherry, shoe polish, anything. Nerves did that to him—excited his desire for booze and smokes. “How’d the Wolvertons get so rich? How come Paul and Naomi don’t brag about this relative?”

“They aren’t braggarts, dear. It’s the kind of clan where having a job as a banker is hopelessly plebian. Wolvertons aren’t supposed to work, they’re supposed to lounge around and admire their statuary. The original fortune was made by the family industrialists. Big wheels during the late nineteenth century. This was their bolt hole from civilization.”

“Railroads? Bombs? A zeppelin manufacturing company?”

“Rivets and doorknobs. The family died out, mostly. There’s only a couple of them left. The guy who owns the property is one. He doesn’t do anything. Lives in South America, or something. Rents the mansion out for tours and special events. They shot a movie on the estate last year.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
rip-off.” Michelle coughed and waved her hand to clear the air. “Aww, damn. That’s enough of that. Go ahead, and get some air in here.”

“You promise not to hurt me?”

“Never mind. You bruise easily. Just drive.” She lighted a cigarette and cracked her window. The wind whistled eerily. “Ha! Funny you should mention it, but yeah, they made parts for zeppelins too. On the side.”

“No kidding?”

“I think it was a short-lived venture. I didn’t do much research on that angle.”

Don tapped the wheel and frowned. “I read something about that house. Damn it…a bunch of murders.”

“The place has a bloody history. One of the Wolvertons got pissed outta his gourd and shotgunned the gardener back in the 1920s. There was a jealous mistress and a hatchet murder around World War Two—”

“This was more recent. The past couple of decades for sure. And a high body count.”

“You’re thinking of that bloodbath in Amityville. Guy slaughtered his family in that big old house.”

“I’m not feeble, woman. Recent, but not last year.”

“Huh. It’s possible, I suppose. After what I’ve seen I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a Lizzie Borden style massacre on the Wolverton property at some point.”

“Oh. It sounds lovely. That black book got anything about a kitten torturing festival? We could hit that next.”

Her eyes were large and dark. She placed her hand on his thigh.

They emerged into a stretch of field in a massive, glacier-dug valley. With the fog and darkness pressing against the windows, it felt little different than the previous tunnels of forest. A moment later the road curved and they were in the firs again. Don resisted the urge to press harder on the pedal. Already the car floated as if unmoored from the pavement. If a deer jumped into his path, he’d never have time to brake.

He said, “My dad hit a deer with our truck once. I was a tyke. I hate driving in this weather.”

“Want me to take over for a while?”

Don remembered how erratically his wife drove, and shuddered. “No, no. That wasn’t a hint. Just thinking aloud.”

Their weekend tour of the Wolverton estate might be the very thing to kick-start his ambition, galvanize a final push to completing the cursed book.

Don glanced sidelong at his wife, taking in her “civilization camouflage” as she called it: bouffant hair and hoop earrings, lots of eye shadow, a slinky dress, heels, all a far cry from the pith helmet, mosquito netting, pants and hiking boots that often comprised her field attire. A strong, lean woman, Michelle appeared much as she had during college. She wore the same yellow-tinted starlet glasses day or night, the same indistinct perfume from the same unlabeled bottle.

She said, “There should be an intersection in a mile or so. Go right. It’s about fifteen miles after that—the place is above the snow line. Too bad we got such a late start. Damned thing is mostly over by now. There was a fancy dinner and a slide show.”

“A slide show!” He chose not to remind her that the reception was to be spread over the entire weekend. Very likely the mind-numbing biopic of Plimpton and his life poking and prodding surly country folk to get access to their burial grounds was yet to come. At least there’d be a boatload of free booze to dull the pain.

“Hmm, yes… So I’m mistaken that your eyes glaze when I show mine to my friends from the institute?”

“I’m a victim of bad lighting. Not to mention a bit glassy-eyed by nature.”

The intersection was a T illuminated by a blinking amber caution light that seemed a forlorn reminder of civilization here among miles of peaks and evergreen forests. Don turned right and continued along a steadily ascending grade. Except for his impulsive adventure on the Yukon he hadn’t strayed far from the suburbs for what had it been? Five, maybe six years? So, not only had he lapsed into the role of prune-dry fuddy-duddy with the sense of adventure God gave a stick, he’d slipped into a sedentary routine like a foot into a comfortable old boot. Gods, the crow’s feet around his eyes and the softness of his belly weren’t just cosmetic; atrophy was spreading throughout the entire mechanism. Dashing Don the Caver out to pasture with nary a whinny of protest. This gloomy realization heightened the sense of mystery and danger plaguing him since Michelle plucked that skinny black book off the tourist shop rack.

Despite that warning in the back of his skull, he did as he’d become accustomed and followed Michelle’s marching orders, cliffs be damned.

6.

And he laughed ruefully a few minutes later to see that the Wolverton Mansion indeed perched upon a cliff. The cliff overlooked a swath of forest and the rocky sandbars of a shallow river. The house was a truly palatial cabin hewn from massive timber, huge as the wood and rock castle of a Viking lord. Don recognized it instantly from his recollection of at least a half dozen exterior shots in low budget films, although its majesty deserved the cinematographic genius of an artist such as Bergman.

He was surprised to see a handful of smartly dressed guests standing around the colonnaded porch, drinks in hand, sweaters drawn up to their chins. The double doors were open and warm light from a chandelier illuminated their faces, rendered their figures soft around the edges in a bloom effect.

A valet trotted over and took the keys. The young man pulled the car down a side drive and disappeared into well-groomed ranks of hedges. Don breathed in the bitter pre-dawn air. Michelle winked at him and moved toward the congregation. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel and Don had a vision of a carpet of dried yellow finger bones snapping beneath his shoes.

Michelle introduced him to a man in a turtleneck—Connor Wolverton himself. He was a few years younger than Paul with a full head of black hair, the crow’s feet just beginning to set in around his eyes. He smelled of good whiskey and fir needles and his entire demeanor was that of Christopher Lee welcoming victims to his castle. Don hated guys in turtlenecks. Guys in turtlenecks reminded him of the ivy tower princelings who’d lorded it over their domains during college years. Middle-age had tenderized him in many ways, but it hadn’t dampened his fire-hot antipathy for preppie assholes.

Connor said, “Ah, you made it! Paul was getting worried. These roads are hell at night. One of my boys will come around to escort you to your rooms. Meanwhile, permit me to show you a much more important feature of Wolverton Mansion.” He led the way through a foyer with a ceiling that vaulted to imposing heights and into a drawing room. He left them at the bar with a bartender in a white tuxedo. Michelle handed Don a Canadian Club and clinked glasses hard and the liquor splashed onto his fingers.

Standing there near the bar, slightly apart from his wife, Don watched guests trickle in to refresh their drinks. He inclined his head toward Michelle and said, “How many guests are there anyway?”

She sidled closer and hooked her arm with his. “I don’t know the roster. Not many. Twenty, twenty-five. It’s an exclusive club.”

“Damn, what am I doing here?”

“Hanging onto my coattails. And Argyle’s. Speaking of the devil, he doth appear. Argyle, my dear!” She extricated herself with the efficiency of a serpent and intercepted Argyle Arden as he entered the parlor, shining like a subdued star in his cream-colored suit and golden nose cone. They kissed and Argyle introduced his chauffeur, a brawny lad with short black hair and eyes perhaps a scooch too close together. Don thought all of Argyle’s young, strapping companions were “sorts” as opposed to real people, and they blurred into a composite of beautiful and sullenly aggressive American masculinity. Winter would bring a new class and a new companion for the white-haired aristocrat.

This new fellow, Mickey Monroe, as Don soon learned, was working his way through graduate school at Saint Martin’s. “Mick’s going to be a librarian when he grows up,” Argyle said in his thunderous voice as the second round of introductions were made. “Almost as boring as licking stamps or sorting rocks, hey, Donald?”

“Stamp-lickers and frog dissectors and sorters of index cards have me beat by a country mile,” Don said with a broad smile. “Luckily, I’ve lost the craving for traipsing about bogs and falling down mineshafts.”

“He isn’t kidding,” Michelle said. “Except, it’s worse. Can’t get him to budge from the sofa without a red hot poker to the ass.”

“Oho! Is that how you chivvied him along this arduous wagon trail?”

Michelle grinned at Don. “Honey, bend over and show Uncle Argyle the handle.”

“To the moon,” Don said, making a loose fist, but the others had already turned from him, Michelle quickly changing the subject to her most harrowing and infamous hike through a stretch of jungle ruled by headhunters and jaguars. The expedition had been organized by several foundations and included photographers, journalists, guides, and a small army of porters. The expedition leader, a Russian anthropologist named Boris Kalamov, had made his bones unearthing Aztec temples and other ruins and he’d claimed to possess documents legitimizing legends of a city in the heart of the Congo. The team never located Ophir, but three porters were dragged away by leopards or jaguars, two knifed each other in a dispute, and everybody down to the pack mules contracted dysentery and almost died.

No great success story for Kalamov or his backers. On the other hand, Michelle landed on her feet as usual and documented a connection between the local headhunters (some of whom actually came down from the hills for a friendly campfire chat) and two other large and modernized tribes dwelling thousands of miles away. The connection was tenuous and compilation and collation of data remained for the drones who performed such labor, and given the glacial pace of such work it would be years before she received any real recognition; nonetheless, here in the latter half of her highly decorated tenure, she continued to produce the goods, so to speak.

A third book was doubtless in the works, if only she’d relent on her most recent passion—the Mock genealogical survey—long enough to get the manuscript typed. Or her clothes changed and hair washed. Her elegant and admittedly sexy coiffure for the Wolverton shindig notwithstanding, Michelle was the picture of a crazed Macbethian crone when she emerged from lengthy stays in the den in the Olympia farmhouse, her hair in disarray, her dark eyes wild with chaos and malignant rapture, fingers cracked and ink-stained from pen and quill. Sometimes she wrapped herself in a filthy, tattered robe, sometimes not, and skulked through the kitchen and pantry in the small hours of morning, foraging like any wild animal.

Don missed his children. He also thanked the gods that they weren’t often around to test their mother’s patience these past several years. Kurt especially might’ve suffered a grievous injury.

Leaving his wife, Argyle and friend to their devices, he went into the parlor where many of the guests had gathered chatting quietly, then ducked out again, following strains of chamber music. Don floated in a decaying orbit of that murmuring magnetic cloud, content to exile himself to an antechamber populated by a handful of disaffected partisans and bastard princes. Don was no stranger to many of them. His presence provoked a visible ripple of unease. Many had known him off and on since his youth and noted a dramatic change in his demeanor over the last few years. He’d become tougher and more reckless, his humor sardonic.

None of the dandies, playboys or pampered dilettantes that comprised this particular subset of the elite strata could be completely certain where he roosted in the pecking order. It was quietly acknowledged that while being a lowly middle-class lout, he possessed entirely too many connections to be dismissed outright. They settled for exchanging brittle smiles and hollow pleasantries and watching from the corners of their eyes for signs of weakness. Then, because Plimpton’s influence had extended to the academic spheres, a motley collection of professors, administrators and civil engineers mixed freely among the nobility, albeit with gawky discomfort. This latter consortium were guzzling champagne and wolfing down the smoked salmon and cheese with fanatical zeal and surreptitiously (or not) ogling the décolletages of simpering trophy wives.

Don had ignored the ritual for years, grown a thick skin, cultivated a wary obliviousness. He frequently swiped drinks from the trays of circulating waiters, which made the proceedings a touch more palatable, and shortly the crowd resembled clockwork automatons bunched in awkward groves, smacking glasses of Glenlivet and blurting cynical apothegms by rote as their glittery, lifeless eyes rolled about like ball bearings.