“Stay here, boys. Someone’s here,” she said and told them to keep practicing the songs. “But be careful handling the records. You know what they mean to Papa. No scratches or fingerprints.” She went through the kitchen to the door, roiled by anxiety mingled with anger. What on earth was he thinking, coming here like this? Was this his response to her letter? Or had Jordan confronted him somehow, threatened him or even physically attacked him? Or maybe Jordan had simply told him, Go ahead, you want her, she’s yours.
It didn’t matter. It was too late for that now.
She hushed the dogs, opened the door, and was relieved that the guide had a downcast expression on his face, shoulders slumped. A defeated man, she thought, though his face showed no signs of having been attacked by her husband. Defeated by her letter, then.
“You read my letter, Hubert,” she said. “Oh, Hubert, why did you come here?”
“No, no. What letter? I…I haven’t been home. Not since yesterday, actually. Not since right after you left my place. I…I need to talk with you, Alicia.”
“Jordan could come home any minute, Hubert. You shouldn’t be here. He knows…about us. I told him last night. I didn’t mean to, but I thought he’d already found out about…about us, and it just came out.”
“Yes, he told me. I know where he is. He won’t be back till after dark.”
They were silent for a moment, as if registering the visible changes that had occurred in each other’s face in the past twenty-four hours. They weren’t the same man and woman they had been yesterday afternoon, and it showed. Their faces were drawn and tightly held. They looked years older.
Finally Alicia said, “Hubert, I wrote you a good-bye letter. I put it in your mailbox, and Jordan saw me. He flew over, and I thought he knew about us. Because of that girl, and—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he interrupted. “I just need to talk with you,” he said again. “About us, yes. But something else.”
“Not here. Not in the house. Come down by the garden,” she said and led the way, the big red dogs bounding ahead, and as they walked, Hubert began telling Alicia what had happened at the Coles’ camp at the Second Tamarack Lake. He told her everything.
She heard him out without stopping him and was first shocked and then dismayed, and then frightened — frightened for him and also for her husband. They sat in the shade of a large maple tree in the Westport-style Adirondack chairs Jordan had copied from one he’d first seen several years back on the porch of a Westport summer cottage on the shore of Lake Champlain. He had rented a barn and organized a crew of local unemployed carpenters to manufacture the chairs and sell them to tourists. But the tourists never materialized, and the project, like so many others, had fallen apart, leaving Jordan with a dozen of the wide-board chairs to distribute around the grounds and porches of his own house. Jordan had loved the clean, geometric simplicity of the design and their ease of construction and comfort, and couldn’t understand why so few other people, especially people with the money to buy them, had the same appreciation.
“Do you realize what you and Jordan have done?”
“Well, yes,” he answered. “It was illegal. But it wasn’t wrong. Was it? Like hunting off-season on the Reserve, that’s illegal, too. It’s against the rules. But I do it. Lots of folks do it. They have to, most of them.” Hubert was exhausted. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt this many strong, conflicted emotions. He wanted to disappear into the woods and stay there alone for as long as it took until he and everyone else had forgotten all about Dr. Cole’s widow, Evelyn Cole, who had mysteriously disappeared way back in the summer of ’36, and the secret love affair he’d had those many long years ago with the wife of the artist Jordan Groves.
“Yes, it is wrong,” Alicia said, her accent growing more noticeable as she spoke. Even she could hear it, but when her feelings ran high she couldn’t do anything about it. “You didn’t have to do it, you know. Bury that woman out there and make it so that now you have to lie about it, lie about how she died and what you did afterward, just to protect the daughter. How did she convince you to do it?” she asked, incredulous. “Especially Jordan. How did she talk him into going along with this scheme?”
“What do you mean, ‘especially Jordan’?”
“Nothing. It’s just that he’s more skeptical of people than you are, I guess. Less trusting. Particularly of women. Rich women.”
“You think I trust rich women?”
“You trusted me.”
Hubert was silent for a moment. “What do you think I should do?”
“Oh, Lord, Hubert, I don’t know.”
“What will you tell Jordan?”
“Jordan? Nothing. Unless he first tells me what you and he did today. And he won’t do that.”
“No, I guess not. He wouldn’t have any need to do that,” he said. “I’m the one who needed to tell you. Is he going to leave you, Alicia? Because of us?”
“I don’t think so. Not as long as we stop seeing each other, you and I. And we will stop, Hubert. This has to be the last time we can be together.”
“I know.” He shook his head slowly from side to side, as if saying no with great reluctance. “Everything’s a damned mess, isn’t it? Everything.”
“Yes.”
“What should I do?”
“Is that why you came here today, to ask me what you should do?”
“No, I came…I came because I love you. And I trust you to tell me the truth. I need to know the truth, Alicia, because it’s the only way for me to tell right from wrong. For maybe the first time in my life since I was a kid, I don’t know if what I’ve done is right or wrong.”
“You know what I think, don’t you?”
He was silent for a moment. “Yes, I suppose I do,” he said. “I guess I knew all along what I should do. I just needed to hear it from you. You think I should go and tell Russell Kendall what happened, and show him where we buried the body.”
She didn’t answer him.
He stood slowly, like a tired old man. With his back to her, he said, “I should leave now.”
“Oh, Hubert, I’m so sorry that it all came down to this. I wish I had known back…back when it first started.”
“Would you have turned me away, if you’d known it was going to end like this?”
“No. I wouldn’t.”
“Me neither.”
“Good-bye, Hubert. I loved you very much.”
“I love…I loved you, too. Very much.”
He walked alone up the stone steps to the back of the house, and when he passed by the kitchen door on his way to his car, he saw the two little boys standing there, somber and worried looking. He was a stranger to them. Alicia’s sons. They were Jordan Groves’s sons, too. And this was the house that Alicia and Jordan Groves had built together, the life they had made together, man and woman, husband and wife, father and mother and children, and the evidence of all their years of work together was here in front of him. It came home to him then — the foolish, deluded thing that he had done these months with Alicia, the strangely passive state of mind it had gradually induced in him, transforming him without his knowledge into a man made foolish and deluded by no one but himself. The love affair with Alicia Groves was why he had agreed to help Vanessa Cole keep her mother a prisoner. It was why he had ended up this morning struggling over the gun with the woman. It was what had caused her death. It was why he helped bury her on the Reserve.