“You drove here from Providence?” he asked, incredulous. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“Because there were no flights until two o’clock this afternoon,” she said.
“I mean why are you here at all?” he said. “You were going to fly back to LA tomorrow.”
“Change of plans,” she said. “Like I told you, we need to talk some serious shit. Get Laura on the line. I’m going to give the phone to the registration girl. She needs to tell her it’s okay for me to come up to your room.”
“What is this about?” Jake asked.
“I’ll tell you when I get up there,” she said. “And call Celia and have her come meet us. Suzie too.”
“What?”
“If my information is correct, they’re in the same room anyway. Just do it.”
“All right,” he said with a sigh. There was a feeling of dread and disaster starting to creep into the fibers of his being. He did not enjoy the sensation. He handed the handset to Laura. “Tell the registration girl that Pauline can come up here.”
“What’s going on?” Laura asked.
“I guess we’ll find out shortly, whether we want to or not.”
Chapter 4: Revelations
Moosehead Lake, Maine
May 16, 1996
Jake and Laura wanted to be alone with each other during the seven days of her tour break and they accomplished that quite literally. They awoke on this morning in the master stateroom of a large houseboat Jake had rented in Greenville, Maine, on the southern tip of Moosehead Lake in the isolated north-central region of the most northeasterly state in the contiguous United States. From Greenville, they had motored the boat twenty miles north, anchoring it in a moderate-sized cove fifty yards offshore of a seven-hundred-foot-tall slab of ancient volcanic rock known as Mount Kineo, which rose from a large peninsula that jutted out into the lake. The peninsula itself was a state park but it was a state park that was only accessible by watercraft or helicopter. There were no roads to drive to it and there was no airport to land at. There were occasional boats that came in to explore the cove during the day, but they tended to keep their distance. There was no cellular phone coverage and the only communication device they had access to was the marine radio in the cockpit of the vessel, which they kept turned off. For all intents and purposes, Jake and Laura were utterly, wondrously, and intimately alone in one of the most isolated places in the continental United States.
They had been here for three days and three nights now and were thoroughly enjoying themselves. The days were pleasant and sunny, and the nights were chilly and quiet, with only the sound of the gentle waves lapping on the boat. The water itself was far too cold to swim in, but Jake had rented them a pair of jet skis and dry suits and they spent a good portion of each afternoon tooling around and exploring. At night, Jake would make dinner for them and they would share a bottle or two of wine and then spend some time in the hot tub up on the upper deck, looking at the stars and talking. It was therapeutic for both of them. They had agreed not to discuss the impending article in the New England Reports in which Laura would be outed for dallying with female groupies. Laura, working through Pauline, had already denied the accusations, calling them ridiculous storytelling. Jake had refused to comment at all, other than to say that the accusations were not even worthy of a response from him. There was nothing that talking about the issue, or even thinking about it, could accomplish at this point, so they didn’t.
“Good morning,” Laura said now as she sat up in the queen-sized bed they shared in the master stateroom. She was naked, as was Jake, and smelled of sex, as did Jake, but the bedding was relatively unruffled since they had done their pre-retirement fucking the night before on the foldout hide-a-bed in the entertainment room. Their goal was to fuck in each of the eleven beds on the vessel before they returned it. So far, they had used six of them, plus the hot tub.
“Good morning,” Jake returned with a stretch and a yawn. He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the side of her jaw. “How’d you sleep?”
“Like a baby,” she said contentedly. “This was a great idea.”
“It was, wasn’t it? I think we should make a habit of doing something like this at least twice a year from here on out. Find some out of the way place and isolate ourselves for a few days there. Get away from everyone and everything and just be.”
“I’ll vote for that,” she said, pushing the covers off of herself and standing up. She stretched a little and then headed for the tiny bathroom attached to the stateroom. “It should be pretty easy to find places like that once we get the new plane, right?”
“Uh ... right,” Jake said, careful to keep any inflection out of his voice. He did not want to talk about the plane right now.
But Laura did. She sat down on the toilet, leaving the door open, and began to pee. “Didn’t you say it’s going to be entering escrow soon?” she asked.
“Yes,” Jake said. “Uhhh ... escrow starts today, as a matter of fact. Jill was supposed to fly down to Bogota yesterday with that property lawyer Paulie set me up with.”
Laura giggled a little. “And to hook up with that Colombian pilot, no doubt.” Jake had told her the story of Jill getting herself laid.
“No doubt,” Jake said, giving a little chuckle in return. “She was very enthusiastic about the trip. Told me it was no problem at all, that whenever I needed her to go to Bogota for something, she was on it.”
“Wow,” Laura said. “That from the woman who grumbles when you ask her to fly down to Los Angeles for a meeting.”
“I guess that pilot knows his way around her cockpit.”
She looked at him in confusion. “How’s that?”
“Cockpit,” Jake explained. “As in, a pit for him to place his cock. It’s kind of a pun, you see.”
She shook her head and gave him a little eyeroll. “I don’t think puns are your thing, sweetie,” she said dryly.
“I thought it was funny.”
“I’m sure you did,” she said, finishing her business and standing up. She wiped and then pushed the flush button on the toilet. It gave a noisy whoosh like an airplane toilet and then silenced. “Anyway, since the plane is going into escrow today, I’m assuming you finally nailed down the final price?”
Fuck! Jake thought miserably. I thought the cockpit joke might steer her away from this. “Uh ... yeah,” he said softly, trying to find a way out of sharing the information and failing. “We did.”
“How much was it?” she asked, turning on the sink to wash her hands.
“Well ... uh ... it was a little more expensive than I thought when I first started looking into this whole thing.”
“How much more?” she asked, soaping up her hands. “You said you could probably get one for around half a million, right?”
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “That’s what I thought at first. It turns out I underestimated the value to some degree.”
“That’s a bummer,” she said, now rinsing. “How much more? Like eight hundred thousand or so?”
“Uh ... well ... I sent Jill with an authorization to wire nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars into the escrow account.”
“Nine hundred and fifty?” she asked, surprised. “That is quite a bit more than half a million.”
“Yeah,” Jake said miserably.
“But still, I guess it’s not that bad. I mean, you really love the plane, right?”
“I do,” he admitted.
“And it does have a bathroom, like I asked.”
“Yes, it certainly does,” Jake agreed.
“And it’s not like we can’t afford nine hundred and fifty.” She turned off the sink and reached for the towel hanging on the rack.
Jake sighed. “Actually, babe, there is one thing I really think I need to confess right now.”