The Glory Hand (18 page)

Then her hand stopped, her finger tracing two familiar letters that seemed to have been cut more deeply into the wood than the others:
A. C.

She leaned back against the trunk, into the enfolding embrace of the gnarled roots, and looked up at the branches, so enormous they blocked out the sky, remembering the game she had played with her mother:
The first patch of blue you see through the leaves, you get one wish - wish for adventure, or wish for love.
Her mother must have wished for love, Cassie thought, and her wish had come true, until it had been cruelly cut short. She looked up into the branches, searching for the sky behind the leaves.

But she never found a patch of blue. Her eyes were drawn to two charred nooses, frayed strands of blackened rope that hung from the branch above her. From Consecration night, she thought. The wind stirred and the charred nooses moved, swayed like the pendulums of clocks in a dream.

And there was a sound. It wasn't the groan of the ropes against the bough, or the wind rustling the leaves. The sound came from the top of the ravine. Footsteps crashing through the brush.

Cassie froze, her back pressed against the trunk of the oak. If it was Abigail and the seniors . . .

Did they follow me here? Will they drag me back to the lake and throw me in?

The footsteps echoed heavily on the trail, too heavily, she judged, to belong to the girls.

The ice men?

She didn't intend to find out. She considered dashing
back
up the trail towards camp, but to get there would mean exposing herself to whoever was approaching. The footsteps were coming closer. Whoever it was, she was sure they were coming for her.

Impulsively, she bolted away from the protection of the tree and scrambled up the opposite side of the ravine, ignoring a sign: OFF LIMITS. Grasping roots that pierced the crusty earth, she pulled herself up the sheer face. One root gave way, and she grabbed another, clawing up a few more feet.

No time to glance over her shoulder; no time to see who was following her. The sandstone wall of the cliff was crumbling underfoot, her tennis shoes slipping on shards of flint, her hands clinging to red clots of earth. Below her, the footsteps had reached the hanging tree, and were rustling the thick carpet of leaves.

She gripped another root that twisted out of the cliff wall, as coarse and black as the charred nooses dangling from the tree. One final lunge and she collapsed on top of the cliff, her body pressed against the mossy ledge, gasping for breath.

Don't raise your head.

She crawled away from the brink, towards a dense thicket of brambles, and only when she reached it, when she was certain she couldn't be seen from below, did she stand up slowly.

The climb up the face of the cliff had somehow been a climb through time as well, for the wall of brambles here stifled the sunlight, bringing her to the brink of nightfall. This forest had no lacy green leaves, no pastel flowers, just thorns and a gray moss that seemed to soak up what little light filtered down through the branches. Here, beyond the 'Off Limits' sign there were no neatly tended trails, no trails at all. She tested the ground with the tip of her tennis shoe. Even the soil was different: sharp blocks of obsidian sparkled in the black earth. Hadn't Sarah told them that the lake had once been a volcanic crater? Cassie wondered whether this ridge were somehow closer to the source of that first eruption, closer to some smoldering lava pit.

Tendrils of poison ivy snaked over the ground,
their
scarlet-tipped leaves like tiny arrowheads dipped in blood. Ancient ... it felt ancient in this forest, as if prehistoric creatures that were extinct everywhere else might still
be
hunting here. She stopped and studied the sole of her foot. A thorn an inch long had pierced her tennis shoe and pricked the skin of her heel. She removed it carefully and took a few more steps. There was no smooth carpet of leaves as there had been below, just the lichen, and the thorn branches bristling like barbed wire, clawing at her ankles.

She headed towards the glimmer of light. Was that
a
clearing up ahead?

One more step.

She stumbled and fell . . .

The swarthy, bearded man stood over her, his axe raised in both fists, and there was not even time to scream.

Chapter 14

Cassie flattened against the ground, staring up at him. Sweat matted the hair on his naked chest and stained the khaki shorts that hung low on his hips. His eyes gleamed wildly from above the shaggy beard, and glinting, sharp, the axe wavered in his hand.

'You scared the hell out of me!' He spoke quickly, his thick New York accent unmistakable. When he let the axe fall to his side, it nicked his ankle. 'Great!' Blood trickled from the cut. 'With my luck I'll probably get gangrene.'

'I . . . I'm sorry.' Cassie pulled herself to her knees, her legs still shaky from the jolt of adrenalin.

He stared at the blood on his fingers for a moment as if the sight were enough to turn his stomach. Then he wiped his hand on his shorts and leaned over her. 'You all right?' His stubbly face was so close to hers that she could smell the whiskey on his breath.

'I'm fine.' She stood up and started to back away from him-

'No . . . Wait a minute. I mean, except for a sex-crazed racoon and a couple of rats, you're the first living thing I've seen in weeks.'

He didn't seem so threatening when he laughed, Cassie realized. Besides, he was a lot shorter than he had looked from the ground. His wiry body was anything but muscular, and he had been so clumsy with the axe . . .

'I don't think I could stand another hour alone here with all this goddamn scenic beauty. If I lay eyes on Bambi, I think I'll. . .'He raised the axe and she backed away again. 'Sorry. Just kidding. I chop a lot.' He threw the axe onto a pile of kindling behind a rickety split-rail fence. 'Of course, I don't burn any of the wood. I mean it's summer, right? But it beats going inside and facing . . .' He considered continuing, then evidently thought better of it, and steered the conversation in what must have been a safer direction. 'I mean, look at it from my point of view. For a kid from West 89th and Columbus, this is worse than a padded cell. No soot ... no bag ladies. Just those goddamn birds singing all the time . . . worse than Muzak. The only semi-human beings around here are at Casmaran, and they told me if I went near the place, they'd have Miss What's-her-name . . .'

'You know Miss Grace?'

'Never had the pleasure. But they said if I made a pass at her, she'd run me over with her wheelchair. So I'm stuck all alone in my charming villa . . .' He stabbed his thumb towards the dilapidated shack behind him.

'You live in
thatT
The cabin was a cruel parody of the cottages at camp. Instead of geraniums, the windowbox was heaped with crushed beer cans, and the paint had blistered over time to reveal the rotting plywood beneath.

'I know what you're thinking . . . What kind of a genius would rent a summer house like that? Don't ask me . . . ask my noble slumlords at Casmaran.'

'Casmaran?'

'Casmaran owns the cabin . . . the camp . . . the lake.

C.H.-E

Casmaran owns every blessed tree for fifty square miles.' He eyed her Casmaran T-shirt. 'I see they own you, too.'.?

'Well, I. . .' Cassie felt the need to explain, although she wasn't sure quite what, but he cut her off with his manic patter, as if all the words that had been stored inside him for weeks were tumbling out, as if he were so thrilled to have someone to talk to that he couldn't wait to let her answer one question before asking another.

'What can I say? The place seemed like a steal when I saw the ad posted at Columbia. Two months for two hundred bucks. Who could beat it? Rustic charm, the ad said. Rustic charm? I mean, renting me this dump ... if that wasn't anti-Semitism, I'd like to know what is.'

She took a closer look at him: the prominent nose, the full, sensual lips, the dark, heavy-lidded eyes. She wondered whether blue-blooded Casmaran was afraid of him snooping around because he was a man - or because he was a Jew.

'If you hate it so much, why don't you go home?'

He sighed. 'Ah, but that would be admitting defeat.' Limping from his wounded ankle, he gestured for her to follow him. She hesitated, then caught up with him. There was something about him that she trusted - maybe it was that he seemed more vulnerable than she was.

The rusty screen door stuck and he kicked it open. 'I like to think of this as my condo. No gold-plated plumbing . . no plumbing, period, just hot and cold running angst.'

The cabin was a shambles. The glass panes in one of the two tiny windows had been replaced with wadded-up newspaper, leaving the room so dark that Cassie could barely make out its furnishings: a mattress on the floor in the corner, pillows and blankets heaped on it as if someone had thrown a fit; crumpled sheets of paper and broken pencils cluttering a plywood board spread across two sawhorses. The smell of sweat and whiskey mingled with a singed-hair scent that Cassie had smelled in Robin's bedroom - marijuana.

He gestured grandiosely around the room: 'Was he a latter-day hippie, scorning civilization, living off the land?' he intoned. 'The Hershey Bar wrappers and empty cans of Chef Boyardee spaghetti told her nothing could be further from the truth. A fugitive from the law? He seemed too overjoyed to see her. No, despite generations of guilt, the only known felonies he had committed were against himself.' He daubed at the blood on his ankle with a towel. 'Self-inflicted wounds are my speciality.' He tossed the towel into a rusty bucket that served as a sink.

On one wall steel panels were aglow with red and green lights. 'What's that?' Cassie asked.

'The death ray. Ming the Merciless will turn it on before your amazed eyes.' He flipped a switch and another bank of lights flashed on. 'Watch as he turns the rich kids at Casmaran into Puerto Ricans with only one pair of designer jeans apiece.'

She laughed. 'Anything but that.'

He sat down on the stool facing the console and slid out a double keyboard that reminded her of an electric organ. She stepped closer. 'My secret weapon . . .' He twisted a dial and an electronic hum echoed off the walls of the cabin. Then he fingered a few chords on the keys, adjusting a row of knobs until the sound had the timbre of violins.

'Ming the Merciless - merciless most of all with himself, mind you - a full-fledged, but mediocre, professor at Columbia . . .' He turned another knob, raising the pitch of the violins until they reminded her of Hawaiian strings. 'And then one day the poor devil heads for tropical paradise in the Maine woods . . .' With a flick of a knob on the console, they were back to the violins. 'Lo and behold, he realizes that any damage by the death-ray to his moral fiber has been totally self-generated and richly deserved . . .'He leaned over to push another switch and the music shrilled to an ironic fanfare of trumpets: 'Voila . . . Creative sterility . . . artistic impotence. And a rotten lay.'

Cassie wondered whether he was drunk, or stoned. Maybe he was just lonely. Watching her father after her mother's death, she had learned it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. Whether he was drunk or not, she decided that the reason he was acting this way was becau|
_s
the only way he could tell the truth was to make a joke of it

'Are you some kind of composer?' she asked.

'Painfully accurate, your choice of words:
some kind
oj
composer.
I've been trying to figure out
what
kind for the past ten years.' The sarcasm, the self-deprecating humor -it reminded Cassie of the jokes her father had made about the failure of his investigation. Maybe that was why she wasn't smiling. He picked up on it: 'Sorry, I'll turn off the spigot of self-pity.' Almost apologetically he switched off the bank of red lights. 'The truth, since you asked, is that I schlepped all this
chozzerai
- it's technically called a Moog electronic synthesizer - up from New York. The woods, the lake, they were supposed to perform some sort of miracle. Ever hear of Lourdes?' Cassie nodded. 'Then you know the bit: Throw away the crutches. But sometimes, there are just too goddamn
many
crutches.'

Cassie could see the sadness etched around his eyes, and switched the subject: 'Have you done any records?'

'Sure, ten years ago. RCA was hot to sign me. Deutsche Grammophon . . . It's called the "early bloomer syndrome." You know, the wunderkind who - how do they put it? -"peaks too soon." ' He extended his hand to her. 'Jake Lazarus.'

'I'm sure I've heard of you,' she lied as she shook his hand.

'It's not exactly a household word. Even when I was twenty-five, even when they called me the next Aaron Copland, it wasn't.'

'There's nothing so hot about having your name be a household word.'

'Let me guess.' He studied her face. 'Cabot? Lowell?' She shook her head, laughing. He clapped a hand to his mouth in mock amazement: 'Oh, my God, you're not a
Kennedy?' I

'Broyles.'

'No kidding? As in Senator Clayburn?'

'As in Cassie.'