“For weeks we have been absolutely wracking our brains for the iteration of our planting plan,” she had declared excitedly. The planting plan was for the Hillview Reservoir. The city of New York was capping it against airborne contamination, which was a polite way of saying bird shit. Her firm had been hired to make it look nice. “And guess who thought of the Fibonacci Series-moi!”
“Congratulations!” he had exclaimed. “Maisie…?”
“Yes, my sweet baboo?”
“What is the Fibonacci Series?” The influence of German Expressionism on the noir films of Robert Siodmak Mitch understood. Maisie’s work he never did.
“Why, it’s a variation of the Golden Section.”
“Which is…?”
“A basic mathematical system of proportion dating back to the Greek temple structures. Le Corbusier based his Modular system on it. It’s defined geometrically as a line that is divided such that the lesser portion is to the greater as the greater is to the whole.”
“And the Fibonacci Series…?”
“Is a variation using whole numbers. Each representing the sum of the two preceding numbers. So instead of counting out one, two, three, four, five, you count out one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen and so on. Just imagine it as a planting pattern of grasses spanning some two hundred acres. Imagine it from the air.” Maisie sighed. “If only one were a bird.”
“If only.”
Maisie Lawrenson was in a landscape architecture firm down on Duane Street with four other young women, all of them Harvard Graduate School of Design alums. All of them were smart, which was not necessarily synonymous with being a Harvard graduate. All of them were pretty, although in Mitch’s opinion Maisie was far and away the prettiest. She was a tall, slender blonde who dressed in loosely flowing linen and silk things and was in a perpetual hurry.
He had met her on Fire Island at the Fair Harbor dock. The first words he said to her were, “Are you waiting for the ferry?” The first words she said to him were, “You’re not supposed to call them that anymore-they prefer to be known as alternative water craft.” Within three weeks they had moved in together. They had been married nearly two years when they went away to Mohonk that weekend. They did not believe each other to be perfect. She felt he was among the socially lost, a brooder, a screening-room rat, a slob. He felt she could be impulsive and rash-Polyanna in Arche sandals. But she was his Maisie.
Until that Monday morning when they got back from Mohonk and he found out he was going to lose her. It was ovarian cancer. The silent killer, they called it, because there were no early warning signs. First they removed her ovaries. Then they put her on chemo. When her lovely blond hair fell out Mitch bought her a Yankee cap to wear. To this day whenever he saw a kid on the street wearing a Yankee cap he would start crying. She was gone in six months. She was thirty years old.
Mitch had a sister in Denver, parents in Florida, colleagues, pals. He had nobody. It was Maisie who had brought him out of his shell. She was his lifeline. Without her, he was achingly, crushingly alone.
Some mornings, he could barely will himself to get out of bed. The future terrified him. On several occasions, he had awakened with a gasp in the night, his heart racing and fluttering out of control. His doctor had diagnosed it as anxiety. He advised Mitch to seek counseling. Which Mitch had. His counselor had advised Mitch to find some way to relax. That was how he’d ended up with the Stratocaster. He had taken up the guitar in high school, briefly, in the hope that it would enable him to meet girls. Another fervid illusion shattered. But he had enjoyed the playing.
As he inched his way now over the Triborough Bridge onto the Bruckner Expressway, Mitch helped himself to a cupcake and glanced at the travel kit he’d been given. His destination was the historic Frederick House Inn in historic Dorset, which was situated on the Long Island Sound at the mouth of the historic Connecticut River.
It does not take very long, Mitch reflected grumpily, for the word historic to get old.
It started to drizzle when he was crawling along outside of swank Greenwich on I-95. By the time he had made it to Westport he had managed to figure out how to work his windshield wipers, which was a good thing because it was pouring now. And the temperature had dropped markedly. Beyond Fairfield, upscale suburbia gave way to the downscale rust belt of Bridgeport and New Haven, where he ran out of cupcakes. Then Mitch crossed the Quinnipiac River and officially entered Southern New England. The foliage got thicker, the traffic thinner. It was getting dark by the time he reached Exit 69, which was the last exit before the Connecticut River. He wanted Exit 70, but he got in the wrong lane and instead of crossing the river he somehow ended up on Route 9, heading due north toward Hartford. He was halfway to East Haddam before he figured out what he’d done and managed to double back. As a result, it was pitch black by the time he finally set eyes on Dorset.
The town was utterly asleep. Mitch had a funny feeling it would look exactly the same when it was wide awake.
A stand of trees shielded the Frederick House Inn from the road. A broad circular driveway led to the front door of the three-story house, which had been built in 1756. There were eleven rooms, each furnished with antiques. There was a fireplace in the dining room. Chilled, Mitch warmed himself in front of the fire with a generous jolt of Bushmill. He was too late for dinner. In fact, the dining room was technically closed. But the innkeeper managed to assemble a plate of cold sausages, lentil salad and rolls for him.
Afterward, he went upstairs to his snug little room and drew a bubble bath for himself in the claw-footed tub. As it filled Mitch stripped off his clothes and gazed at himself in the mirror. He was not terrible-looking. He was not bald. He was not short. His weight generally fluctuated between burly and pudgy, depending on his intake of sweets. Right now, pudgy was winning out. Still, he was not in bad shape for someone who spent most of his waking hours sitting in a dark room on his butt. He sucked in his stomach and puffed out his chest and flexed his tattooed right bicep in the mirror. His tattoo said: Rocky Dies Yellow. He grinned at his reflection, a brave, jaunty grin reminiscent of Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. This was something he had taken to doing lately. His way of assuring himself that he was going to be okay.
I am laughing in the face of danger.
After his bath Mitch burrowed into his canopied bed with a collection of Manny Farber’s film columns from the fifties. Briefly, he was absorbed by the cranky iconoclast’s brilliant dissection of the films of Budd Boetticher. But before long Mitch found his mind drifting and he set the volume aside and lay there listening to the rain and thinking the same thing he thought every night as he lay in bed alone:
I am so glad I do not own a gun for my personal protection. Because if I had one I would shoot myself.
CHAPTER 2
Scary Spice woke up Des at 3:59 A.M. It had taken the little vixen less than a week to master the subtle complexities of the textbook head-butt technique: First, climb directly onto human target’s chest. Next, knead said human’s chest firmly and insistently with front paws. Purr. Then tickle target’s face with whiskers. And, finally, butt heads until target groans.
Des groaned, feeling as if her own head had only just hit the pillow. It had. She’d worked late and squeezed in only four hours of sleep. Maybe she was too wedded to her job. Maybe there was no maybe about it. Yawning hugely, she fumbled for her horn-rimmed glasses and flicked on the nightstand light, blinking at the rest of the original Spice Girls-Ginger, Sporty, Posh and Baby. Tabby shorthairs, all of them. Predominately gray. Three months old. And maddeningly perky and bright-eyed, considering the hour. She and Bella had rescued them from the parking lot of an Outback Steakhouse in Shelton two weeks ago. Within days they had become snug muffins.