“Twenty bucks,” I said. “Everybody plays.”
“Speaking of birds, you got anything to eat? Cheese and crackers?”
“Not even that. Sorry. I’ll order in from P. J. Bernstein’s whenever you’re ready.”
“Known as the Lord God bird for its stunning plumage and great wingspan, it was thought until recently to be extinct,” Trebek read aloud from the square blue answer board.
Two of the contestants couldn’t even fake their expressions into a bluff. The third scrawled a short answer on his screen.
“You got it, Coop?” Mike asked, leaning in the doorway of the room.
“Not a clue.”
“Peking duck,” he said.
“Great wingspan and stunning plumage?”
“Not Trebek’s bird. The question is, what do I want Mercer to buy me for dinner?”
“You two need to get a little more religion in your lives,” Mercer said as Trebek subtracted two thousand dollars from the winnings of the Nashville firefighter who had taken a stab at the dodo. “What is the ivory-billed woodpecker?”
“The Lord what?” Mike asked. “You bird-watching on the side?”
“You have to know the swamps and tupelos of Alabama,” Mercer said. “My granny Wallace told me all about it when I was a kid. Got its name ’cause that’s what folk use to cry out when they saw the creature. She had a stuffed one in the attic that she got at a flea market, used to scare me half to death. Lord God bird is right.”
“You can do better than dinner from the deli, can’t you now, Mercer? Shall we upgrade to Chinese?” Mike asked.
“Fine with me,” Mercer said, and I opened the drawer of the side table to find the Shun Lee Palace menu.
Mike’s beeper vibrated on the bar as I took a food order from each of them. There was no point in placing it until he returned the call. He stepped into the living room and came back several minutes later.
“Don’t light any candles or dust off the crystal, Coop. I’m out of here.”
Mercer was on his feet at once. “Where to?”
“Westchester County Sheriff’s Office. Two guys were picked up an hour ago at the Kensico Dam,” Mike said. “It’s a major stop on the Croton Reservoir system that brings water to the city. Used wire cutters to get through the chain-link fence.”
“Sandhogs?” I asked.
“Hardly. Saudi nationals. One of them had a map of the entire system, right down to the hole on West Thirtieth Street.”
“Explosives?”
“No sign of any blast equipment on or around them, and the driver who was waiting for them got away. They’re not talking, but someone called in an anonymous tip fifteen minutes ago. Says the men were planning a chemical attack-dumping a bacterial pathogen in the New York City water supply.”
15
I had cleared security for the nine-thirty flight from La Guardia to Martha’s Vineyard. It was Friday morning-still no update from Mike-and although I had looked forward to my friend Joan Stafford’s wedding for several months, it was hard to think about anything except the events of the last twenty-four hours.
Most of the passengers in the lounge were watching the television monitor that was mounted on the wall. The same reporter who had covered the tunnel-explosion story, Julie Kirsch, was now on location on a thickly wooded hillside in Valhalla, the Westchester suburb in which Kensico was located.
“Too early to know yet,” Kirsch said, in response to a question that the anchor had posed. “New York City police officials have been working through the night with local authorities to get answers to some of those questions, but there’s just no way to say whether the two incidents are connected.”
Glancing at her notes, Kirsch went on, “While the threat of biological and chemical terrorism has been of great concern to the government, most experts are telling us today that the risk of individuals succeeding at some kind of deadly mass dissemination is quite small.”
“Why is that, Julie?” the studio voice interrupted.
“Simply because of the enormous volume of water that flows into the city from upstate. The counterterrorist agents I’ve talked to this morning agree that the toxic effect of the chemical would most likely be diluted by the billions of gallons before any real harm was done. I’d like to take the viewers back to the news of the grim discovery made inside the tunnel in Manhattan yesterday.”
Most likely were not the two most encouraging words I’d rely on before drinking from the tap in my apartment anytime soon.
Julie Kirsch’s cross-examiner pressed for more detail. “Before you do, would you tell us exactly what kind of agent might be used for such a chemical attack? We all recall the deadly sarin gas in Tokyo.”
“Well, I’ve been asked not to alarm our viewers unnecessarily,” she said, hesitating before she went on. “For example, one gram of typhoid culture dropped into a water system would have an impact roughly equal to forty pounds of potassium cyanide. Or, a person drinking a few sips of untreated water from a reservoir this size that had been contaminated by Salmonella typhi would become deathly ill.”
I was grateful when the U.S. Airways gate agent interrupted the news program with her boarding announcement.
The fifty-minute flight over Long Island Sound on the cloudless morning offered spectacular views of the seascape that was so familiar to me from years of commuting to my favorite retreat-the coastline of the North Fork, Montauk Point, the short hop to Block Island, and the descent to the Vineyard as the forty-two-seat turboprop crossed Cuttyhunk and circled the cliffs of Aquinnah.
My caretaker had parked my convertible at the airport, and I put the top down for the short ride to my home. The path curved alongside the bike trails that cut through the forests of West Tisbury, then climbed the gently winding slopes of Chilmark, lined with stone walls that had been built hundreds of years ago to separate each farmer’s land from the next.
I was so pleased to be hosting the wedding for Joan and Jim, even though it was a bittersweet reminder that my own engagement had ended so tragically shortly after I’d graduated from law school. Once it wouldn’t have been possible for me to think of standing on the site where Adam and I were to have been married and celebrating someone else’s happiness. But in the last couple of years, I had found solace and strength in great friendships, and fortitude from the experiences of the women who entrusted their lives to me every day that I went to work.
I parked next to the barn, pausing before going into the house, looking out over the meadow and the sea, a view that never failed to restore my spirit.
The answering machine was choked with messages. I kicked off my shoes, opened the French doors that led to the deck, and sat on the steps surrounded by pale blue hydrangea bushes while I played them back.
“It’s me. We got here last night. Call me the very minute you get in.” Joan’s voice was as vibrant as she herself had been ever since Jim had proposed.
Her second message asked whether I had room at my house for one extra guest, a friend of Jim’s who had, at the last minute, decided to make the trip from Europe.
There were the voices of the caterers and the florist, well-meaning mutual friends who didn’t want to miss any of the events that Joan had planned for the weekend, the photographer who was going to shoot the ceremony, and the captain whom Jim had hired to take his friends shark-fishing in the afternoon. An update from Max, at the office, was sandwiched in the middle.
The final call had come in moments before I arrived. My beloved college roommate and best friend, Nina Baum, had phoned as she boarded the 8 a.m. flight from Los Angeles to Boston. I hadn’t seen her in months, and as with Joan, I could confide in her about everything that was going on-or not going on-in my life. Nina confirmed that she’d make the connection to Cape Air and be with us by the time dinner ended. Her husband had a screenplay in production and couldn’t accompany her after all.