Flat Lake in Winter Page 16

  But if that part made sense, what of the comment that Jennifer had been an unhappy girl? Why had that been so? What was it that had driven one son of a wealthy, privileged family to a life of drugs, alcohol, crime, and finally prison? What was it that had brought a full measure of physical beauty and material comforts to a daughter, only to leave her unhappy enough to disappear with hardly a trace? And where in the strange puzzle that was Jonathan Hamilton did that particular piece fit in?

  It was, as they say, something to think about.

  AS IT TURNS OUT, there are two New Hampshires. One is the New Hampshire of picture postcards, movie backdrops, and travel videos. It is the New Hampshire of the north, dominated by the sprawling White Mountain National Forest, an area that covers tens of thousands of acres and contains some of the most ruggedly beautiful terrain in all of North America. Here the traveler comes upon such sights as Mount Washington, the tallest peak east of the Rockies, which boasts the highest wind velocity ever measured on the face of the earth, and which each year claims the lives of climbers foolish enough to underestimate its dangers. Here, too, are the state’s world-famous tourist attractions, bearing names like the Old Man of the Mountains, the Cog Railway, the Flume, Franconia Notch, Cannon Mountain, Mount Conway, Tuckerman Ravine, Lost River, and Castle in the Clouds. Here lakes and rivers of every imaginable size, shape, and temperament abound, from the raging white water of the Androscoggin to the vast expanse of Winnipesaukee.

  But there is another New Hampshire as well.

  To the south, no mountains soar. No flumes, ravines, notches, lost rivers, or castles in the clouds are to be found. Wake up in Manchester or Concord or Keene or Jaffrey or Derry, and you might as well be in suburban New Jersey or Long Island. Here the mother-daughter houses sit side by side on quarter-acre lots, the blacktop driveways sprout basketball hoops, and the fastest-moving water can be found down at the local car wash. Here the sights have names like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Texaco, and Jiffy Lube, and the prime attractions tend to be shopping malls, bowling alleys, and pizza joints. And it is here that the city of Nashua is to be found, less than ten miles from the Massachusetts line, and light-years away from the White Mountains.

  Matt Fielder hadn’t known any of that, of course, when Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson had come to him to announce that they’d located Jennifer Hamilton in Nashua, New Hampshire, living at someplace called 14 Nightingale Court. Since it had been Gunn and Munson who’d made the journey to Atlanta, Matt Fielder had argued that it was now his turn for a road trip. “Besides,” he’d pointed out, “I need a break from working on motion papers.”

  “‘Besides,’ my ass,” Gunn laughed. “You just want to go ‘cause you hear this Jennifer is a babe.”

  “Leave him alone,” Hillary said. “If anyone needs a babe, it’s Matt. Trust me.” Fielder shot her a look, and she’d said no more.

  Two days later, he was on the road.

  NIGHTINGALE COURT, WHICH held such promise with its fetching name, turned out to be a small trailer park located off Route 3A, on the northern outskirts of town. Fielder pulled up to the place around three, having been on the road for almost five hours. He spotted number 14, a small but well-kept white trailer, its cinder-block foundation tastefully hidden by white wooden trelliswork, and decorated with potted red chrysanthemums.

  Fielder had passed the time on the way over trying to come up with the best plan on approaching Jennifer. Gunn, ever the sleuth, had advised him to “sit on the place” until she either came out or showed up. Then, once he saw her, if he had any doubts about whether she was the right person, he had several choices: He could call out her name and watch to see how she responded. He could find a cop to pull her over on some pretext and, in the process, check her identification. Or he could drive up behind her car and tap her just hard enough so that they’d have to get out and exchange licenses.

  All of this seemed a bit too cloak-and-dagger for Fielder, however, and he’d decided instead on a more direct tack. He climbed down from his Suzuki, and was about to head for the trailer, when a slowing school bus pulled up so close to him that he had to step back to avoid being brushed by it. The door hissed open, and five or six children, ranging in age anywhere from around six to sixteen, poured out and dispersed in the direction of various trailer sites. One of them immediately caught Fielder’s eye. He looked to be about twelve or thirteen, with striking facial features capped by blond hair that fell across his forehead. Even before he got close to his destination, Fielder knew exactly where he was going. He watched as the boy passed numbers 11 and 12 - there was no number 13 - and headed directly for the small white trailer with the trelliswork and the red mums. Just before he reached it, the door swung open, and out stepped Jennifer Hamilton Walker.

  Despite his desire to avoid staring, Fielder found himself incapable of looking away from her. She was tall, perhaps five-eight or -nine, and slender. Like the boy, she was blonde, with hair worn long and straight. And, like both her brother and her son, she was beautiful, arrestingly beautiful. Pearson Gunn’s prediction that she’d turn out to be a “babe” failed to do her justice. P. J. Hamilton’s characterization of his sister as “drop-dead gorgeous” was closer to the mark, perhaps, but even his phrase fell short. It didn’t capture the evenly tanned skin, the wide-set blue eyes, or the mouth that was just a bit too full for the rest of her face. It didn’t take into account the way she cocked her head just so, causing her hair to fall to one side. Or the way she instinctively drew her son around behind her, so that she ended up standing protectively between him and the stranger. And it didn’t say anything about how she stood her ground, almost defiantly, as Fielder began approaching them.

  IT IS DIFFICULT to be a serious student of sports without at the same time being a firm believer in momentum. For the easiest lesson on the subject, simply turn on a basketball game on your TV. You’ll soon learn that teams don’t tend to trade baskets so much as they do to score in spurts. “The Knicks are on a 17-2 run,” the announcer will tell you, or, “The Bulls have scored twelve unanswered.” There even is a tailor-made antidote for such sprees - a momentum-stopping device called the twenty-second timeout.

  As far back as high school, Fielder had learned firsthand how crucial it was to seize control of the flow of a baseball game, and how hugely and decisively doing so could affect the outcome.

  He’d been playing in a Saturday-afternoon pickup game, batting with one out in the bottom of the third. Fielder’s team was down 6-0. In fact, they didn’t have a single hit to that point. Fielder’s best friend, Whitey Ryan, had just earned a walk, and had advanced to second on a wild pitch. Fielder, batting next, worked the count to two-and-two. The pitcher, a tall, gangly kid with a big-league fastball, threw him a high hard one. With a different count, Fielder would’ve taken it. But, with two strikes on him, he knew he had to protect the plate. He chopped at it and managed to get his bat on it, but could do no better than to send a soft grounder between first and second. The second baseman, a little kid called Goober Wilson, scooped it up cleanly. But instead of throwing Fielder out at first, he decided to get cute and make the play at third. His hurried throw sailed over the third baseman’s head and on into the parking lot. Whitey Ryan scored, and Fielder was awarded second. But far more significantly, in that instant, Fielder’s team had seized the momentum. The next eight batters reached base safely, five of them tagging the previously untouchable pitcher for clean base hits. By the time the inning was over, Fielder’s team had scored seven runs. They went on to win the game 8-6.

  Afterward, Fielder boasted that it had been his hit that had broken the ice. But Whitey Ryan, who knew even more about the intricacies of the game than Fielder did, was quick to correct him. “That doesn’t get scored as a hit,” he said. “Goober coulda got you at first, easy. So it goes down as a fielder’s choice, is all. Same as an out.”

  Never mind that for weeks, Fielder had gone around thinking the term was a personalized one, custom-t
ailored to whoever happened to have been at bat. As he understood it, it got called a “Fielder’s choice” because he’d been the one who’d hit the grounder; had it been Whitey, it would have been a “Ryan’s choice.”

  But the real lesson he’d learned that day wasn’t about which base to throw to, or about the virtue of playing it safe and going for the sure out. It wasn’t even about the strange language of official scoring. It was about momentum - about how a snap decision on a routine play could decide not only the fate of a particular batter, but could sometimes change the course of the entire game, and determine its very outcome.

  It was a lesson he’d never forgotten.

  TO MATT FIELDER’S way of thinking, the point at which the momentum in Jonathan Hamilton’s case first began shifting toward the defense will always be the instant he first locked eyes with Jonathan’s sister, Jennifer.

  It is entirely possible, of course, that the initial look that crossed Jennifer’s face at that moment reflected nothing more than the predictable level of concern a mother might be expected to feel at the sight of a total stranger staring at her and her child. Who was this man? What was he doing there? Did he mean them some harm? Was he a police officer of some sort? Had he followed her boy home from school? Had he spent the past week stalking one or both of them?

  Any of those reactions would have been ample cause for alarm. But to Fielder, Jennifer’s look went way beyond mere alarm; it went almost to the point of panic. And in the weeks and months that followed, Fielder would find himself drawn back again and again to the moment, as he struggled to fathom this strange and striking young woman who would have such a profound effect on both the case and him personally, and as he tried his best to understand just where she fit into the growing mystery of the Hamilton family. And the answer that he would eventually come to settle on went something like this: It had been nearly a decade since Jennifer had left home. She’d moved two states away, changed her name, and begun life all over again. In the years that followed, she hadn’t gone back home once for so much as an afternoon’s visit, picked up a phone to call, or even dropped a postcard in the mail to say that she was alive. She’d taken a life of plush comfort and certain affluence, and traded it in for a concrete slab in a trailer park.

  And she’d stuck it out.

  But now, hard as she’d worked to put her former family behind her, it was suddenly apparent that they’d succeeded in hunting her down and finding her. For Jennifer no doubt had heard the sound bites and read the news stories. She’d seen that her younger brother had been arrested in connection with the brutal murders of her grandparents. And she’d known it would be just a matter of time until they came to her. The police, the press, the defense - it didn’t matter who. What mattered was that her ten-year struggle to recreate her life had come to nothing. Despite everything - her flight and her fight, her adopted state, her new home and her changed name - the sight of the stranger standing there staring at her, told her that she was about to be drawn back into the web of the family she’d tried so hard to leave behind.

  For in the split second in which Jennifer had looked up and locked eyes with the tall, dark man standing by the funny-looking car, she’d known full well that whoever he was, it could be only Jonathan that he’d come about. And for Matt Fielder, his response to her reaction, as he later would put it, was, “There was something there, all right. I knew right away I hadn’t driven all those hours for nothing.”

  THEY SAT AROUND a fold-down aluminum tabletop and drank tea from mugs that didn’t match. The boy had gone out back to play with friends, promising earnestly to be back before dark. He was nine, it turned out, and his name was Troy. People took him for older because he was tall for his age, she explained.

  “My name is Fielder,” he’d told her when he’d first walked up to them. “Matt Fielder. I’m the lawyer for your brother Jonathan.”

  He’d half expected her to deny that she had a brother named Jonathan, to tell him there must be some mistake. Or, at very least, to feign surprise that her brother would need a lawyer. But she hadn’t. Instead, she’d simply turned to the boy and told him to go inside and wash up.

  Now Fielder sat sipping his tea. It was bland and lukewarm, but he was grateful to have something to distract him from the face he found so hard to look away from.

  “How long have you lived here?” he asked her, taking in the interior of the trailer. It was all Formica and plastic and aluminum, benches that opened into beds and hid storage bins beneath them, tabletops that swung up to reveal cooking surfaces, and chairs that folded flat for stowing. The best that could be said about it was that it was compact, functional, and clean.

  “About two years,” she said, without apology.

  “And before?”

  “Different places.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. They both knew he hadn’t come to talk about her travels.

  “How’s my brother?” she finally asked.

  He assumed she meant Jonathan. Fielder figured there was enough family tragedy to talk about without bringing up P. J. and the thirty years he was doing for the feds in Atlanta. “About as good as can be expected,” he said. “He seems to share your ability to survive in small spaces.”

  “We share lots of things,” she said.

  “Yes,” Fielder agreed. “The resemblance is quite striking.” But it came out sounding much too formal. What he wanted to tell her was how pretty she was, how absolutely gorgeous. He wanted to tell her how he found it all but impossible to keep from staring at her. But a tiny voice in his head whispered to him to slow down, lest he make a total idiot of himself. He couldn’t be certain, but the voice sounded remarkably like that of Hillary Munson.

  Jennifer turned and peered out the window, to where a group of children were busy kicking an old soccer ball around. She would continue to repeat the gesture every few minutes, for as long as the two of them sat there talking.

  “Your husband must be blond, too,” Fielder said.

  “I’m not married,” she said.

  “The boy’s father, then,” he corrected himself. “Mr. Walker.”

  “There is no Mr. Walker. It’s just a name I took, to help me . . .”

  “To help you disappear.”

  “Yes.”

  He sipped at his tea. It was almost room-temperature by now, and he was tempted to ask her for an ice cube or two to complete the transformation to iced tea. But looking at the motel-type refrigerator tucked underneath the countertop, he doubted that it would be large enough to include much of a freezer compartment, let alone ice-cube trays.

  “Why the disappearance?” he asked her.

  She laughed, but it was a dry, humorless laugh, as though in response to some long-ago joke at her own expense. “Are you familiar with the phrase ‘dysfunctional family’?”

  It was his turn to say yes.

  She sighed deeply. “You can’t really want to hear about it,” she told him.

  “You may be right,” he said. “But I need to. It may be all I have to work with to try to save your brother’s life.”

  She looked out the window again. “Could they really kill him?”

  “They sure intend to give it their best.”

  When she looked back at him, her eyes had filled, and as he watched, a single tear spilled over and ran down one cheek. He wanted to reach out and brush it away. He wanted to come around to her side of the tabletop and put his arms around her. He wanted to do whatever he could to make things better. Instead, he sat with his hands locked tightly together in his lap, afraid that any gesture he might make would be taken the wrong way. The truth was, Fielder had no way of knowing if the tear was shed for Jonathan’s plight, or for Jennifer herself as she permitted her thoughts to reach back to her own past, a past she was now about to unlock - not only for him, but for herself as well - after nearly a decade of determined, deliberate denial.

  Perhaps, he decided, it was for both of them.

  THE WAY SHE TOLD it,
Jennifer Hamilton had grown up in a household dominated by a controlling and sometimes abusive father, who rendered almost irrelevant a timid alcoholic of a mother. As for her grandparents, they’d thrown up their hands and abandoned the house to the younger generations, preferring to live under their own roof in the cottage that would eventually become Jonathan’s. They would join the family at mealtimes, but otherwise they kept mostly to themselves. Maybe, Jennifer speculated, they’d seen too much already.

  With an older brother who seemed born to raise hell, and a younger one who came into the world smiling but damaged, Jennifer tried her hardest to find a place for herself in the family dynamic. But, as many middle children of troubled homes find, the pickings were slim. With their father often physically absent, and their mother emotionally removed, what little energy the parents did bring to the business of child-rearing was largely devoted to keeping P. J. in check or Jonathan occupied. Jennifer, by far the soundest of the three children, was rewarded with neglect.

  And yet she thrived. She made friends at school (though she didn’t dare invite them home), got good grades in her subjects, and immersed herself in the hundreds of books that filled the shelves of the study - books the rest of the family regarded as part of the decor. She read everything from Shakespeare to Salinger, from Hawthorne to Hemingway. She read of faraway places, of tall cities and vast oceans, and of people who laughed and loved and lived happily ever after. And all the while, she dreamed of the day when her own prince would come riding up to the door on a white horse to carry her off. He wouldn’t even have to be handsome, she told herself. She’d already seen enough of handsome, in her short life.