Crime of Privilege: A Novel (18 page)

I
N MIDAFTERNOON WE FLOATED INTO CAMP NEAR LOON CREEK
. The five people who had gone swimming weren’t sure they wanted to go on. McFetridge
had his hands full, trying to convince them how difficult it would be to get them
off the river.

I watched from afar, impressed with the way McFetridge was handling the situation,
not denigrating the guests’ fears but trying to assuage them, make them seem unreasonable
without being unfounded. It must have been hard for him; McFetridge had never been
a sensitive guy.

The rafters who had not done the inadvertent swim had set off on a two-and-a-half-mile
hike to some hot springs. McFetridge, when he was done wheedling, cajoling, promising,
looked up and saw I was there, waiting for him. After a while, he made it over to
me, shaking his head, speaking quietly. “I guess now you see why I wanted you in Bonnie’s
boat.”

“Because you wanted to see me drown?”

McFetridge had not expected such words to come out of my mouth. “Bonnie’s a damn good
rafter,” he said. “Things just got away from her on that one. It happens.”

“She been guiding long?”

He looked as though he was thinking of lying and then changed his
mind. “It’s her first time. Although I’d rather the others not know that.”

“She your girlfriend?”

McFetridge hesitated. “I guess. Things are kind of different out here.” He glanced
back at the distraught rafters, his excuse for getting away. They were sitting up
now, speaking quietly to one another. The man who had been positioned across from
me and his wife were leaning forehead to forehead, and every now and then the two
of them glanced up. From what I could tell, they were glancing at me. As if I were
somehow to blame because they went out of the boat. As if I were at fault for not
going out.

The husband seemed to be doing his best to convince his wife of something and she
was resisting. In my married experience, it was usually the other way around. But
I recognized the dynamics.

“We really should talk, Paul,” I said.

He sighed and cast one more longing look back at the unhappy guests. “If we’re gonna
do that,” he said, “I’d rather not do it around camp. Most of the people will be coming
back from the hot springs in a little while so they can get ready for dinner. So here’s
what I’m thinking. I’ve got to finish up with these folks, take care of them, convince
them everything is going to be okay. You head on up there now and I’ll join you as
soon as I can. I’ll get the kitchen crew to set aside a couple of plates for us. Okay?”

Can’t talk here. Go 2.5 miles into the wilderness and wait for me there. Got it, George?
Sure, Paul, no problem. I just walk straight until night and then turn left, is that
it?

TO GET TO
the hot spring, I walked along the Salmon on a narrow dirt path that bore the footprints
of my colleagues and went up and down little rises and around bends that opened into
groves of Douglas firs and lodgepole pines. Most of the way I was accompanied by a
pair of yellow-and-red-and-black western tanagers, who constantly zoomed ahead of
me and then dashed back as if they were border collies out for a walk. Then I went
up a somewhat sharper incline and found myself in a big meadow filled with blue spruce–like
bushes that stood about
five feet high and were spaced far enough apart to make me feel I was at a Christmas
tree farm. And it was then that I first heard the Loon, sounding vaguely like a great
wind or crowd noise emanating from a giant stadium, growing louder with each step
I took.

The trail bent to the right as I left the Salmon and headed along the tributary and
the noise took on a crushing tone as if it were a waterfall. I would have had to raise
my voice to be heard, if anybody had been around to hear.

There was a footbridge leading to what looked like a small ranch, which I figured
must be some sort of fishermen’s retreat. It had a windsock, indicating an airstrip,
but I saw no indication of aircraft. As I passed the bridge my fellow rafters were
coming back in the other direction. “Hey, George, you just getting here?” called one.
“It’s still a quarter-mile,” shouted another, cupping his mouth. “You’re going to
miss cocktails!” cried a third.

I counted them: thirteen. I made fourteen. There were at least four who stayed in
camp. Who else was there?

After what seemed to be considerably more than the allotted mileage I had been given,
I encountered two more rafters coming up from a steep path that dropped down to the
creek. “Right down there, George. You’ll love it.”

At the creek’s edge, someone had built a stone box at least twenty feet long and six
feet wide. A pipe projected from the hillside, and a constant stream of hot water
flowed into one end of the rectangle. It was a lovely setting, with Loon Creek swirling
by, and I had it all to myself.

I wondered if I should get in naked. It was just me and the great outdoors. But of
course McFetridge would be along soon and it would be weird, me waiting for him like
that, so I kept on my bathing suit. I sat in the hot water and I waited.

I
DON
’
T KNOW IF THE WORD
“
ELOPE
”
IS STILL IN USE. YOU DON
’
T
hear it much anymore. But that is what I convinced Marion to do. She had friends,
relatives, even co-workers she wanted to invite. I had my mother. I told Marion that
it would be more fun, more romantic, just to run off.

We went to the Berkshires, stayed at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, which was fun
but not particularly romantic. We saw the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, saw the Alvin
Ailey dance troupe at Jacob’s Pillow, saw an obscure Tennessee Williams play at Williamstown.
I talked her into renting bicycles with me, but her idea of riding was to stop at
every art gallery and antiques shop, and so that did not work out particularly well.

We returned home and she did not leave her job. She was supposed to leave, but she
had not yet secured anything on the Cape and there was a big project her firm had
going, a class action, and they needed her. We moved into the house in Centerville,
but she kept her apartment in Boston. It would just be for a little while, she said.
A month or two. Three at the most.

Three grew into six, and six into a year. They gave her a big raise, she said. They
promised she wouldn’t have to work weekends.

Okay, I said, and a year grew into two before she told me she wasn’t coming down anymore.

I
T MAY HAVE BEEN 6:00 WHEN I GOT TO THE HOT SPRING. IT
definitely was closer to seven when I heard McFetridge, walking in river sandals,
step down the path. He was carrying something over his shoulder that looked like a
small canvas mailbag. He looked at me, looked at the creek, and placed the bag carefully
on the ground. Something inside it clinked metallically as though two heavy objects
had bumped against each other. He took off his T-shirt and sandals and stepped into
the box in his rafting shorts.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“How those people doing?”

“They’re going to stay.”

“Good. You handled them well.”

He cut me a quick look to see if I was serious. Then he glanced around as if he had
never been in this place before. “Pretty nice, huh?”

“Awesome.”

He laughed. “Wicked awesome. You’re beginning to talk like a Cape Codder.”

“I’ve been there awhile now.”

Of course, I had also been
here
awhile. Forty-five minutes is a long time to sit in a box of hot water, even if the
setting was as superb as this
one. My skin was beginning to pucker. The water was no longer as warming as it had
been.

McFetridge swirled his arms, leaned back, closed his eyes. “You said you called my
mother,” he said. “What was that all about?”

“Just wanted to know how you were doing.”

“Bullshit.”

I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes on the river.

“Look,” he said, “my name’s not on any letterhead, in any brochures, on any website.
You’d have to go to a fuck of a lot of trouble to find me. But here you are, not even
pretending it’s a coincidence. So what’s going on? That’s what I’m asking.”

“You remember a girl named Heidi Telford?”

I would wonder later if it was good to have come right out with it like I did. I had
planned subterfuge, sneaking up on the subject, working around from college days to
the Gregorys to the Cape, to the race, to the party, and then to the missing girl.
Hey, how about that girl with the golf club in her head? Remember her?
Somehow, sitting in a pool of water in the middle of the wilderness with a guy with
whom I had shared houses, rooms, vacations, parties, countless bottles of beer, I
ended up skipping all the preliminaries.

When McFetridge didn’t answer I turned my head to look at him. He, too, was staring
at the river and what I saw was a rather grizzled profile, causing me to wonder what
had happened to the handsome preppie, the sophisticated master of country-club sports,
the young man who at one time had known all the right people, all the right places
in New York, Palm Beach, Cape Cod. As I watched, he sank beneath the water.

Perhaps he thought he could stay down forever. But I was still there when he surfaced.
He spit water, gasped, blinked. “She’s dead,” he said.

I nodded.

“Why you asking me about her?”

“I’ve got the case.” It wasn’t quite true, but it was close enough.

“You told me you were a lawyer. Didn’t tell me you were a D.A.”

“Assistant.”

“Senator get you the job?”

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

He nodded, putting something together, not sharing it with me.

“What’s that guy’s name? Marshall? Marshall Black? White?”

“Mitchell White.”

“Yeah, that’s him. I always thought he was a nerd.”

“Still is.”

“Yeah. Used to be a staff member on the Senate Judiciary Committee in D.C. Figured
he must have had something on somebody. What did you have, Georgie? Was it that girl
down in Florida?”

I wondered if sitting in the water all that time had made my testicles shrink into
nothing.

McFetridge waited for an answer.

“I guess.”

“And now what? Senator sends you to check on me?” There was a sneer in his voice,
the kind he might have used if we were brothers and he was talking about Mom.

“He didn’t send me. Fact is, outside of meeting him that one time you introduced us
at the party in Palm Beach, I’ve never even talked to the Senator.”

McFetridge thought. He apparently had a lot to think about because it took him a long
time. Then he said, “It was Chuck-Chuck, then, wasn’t it?”

“Chuck Larson? Why do you say that?”

“You’re in the circle now, Georgie. They obviously want to know if I’m still in it.
Who better than you to find out?”

McFetridge went under the water again. He did not stay down so long this time, but
he did come up wiping his eyes. “Senator gets you a job in the D.A.’s office. D.A.
puts you to work on the Heidi Telford case, and Chuck-Chuck tells you to come talk
to me.” His mouth was set somewhere between a smile and a smirk. “Well, you can tell
them I’m good, Georgie. Tell ’em all I’m good, just living out west, river-guiding
in the summer, ski-patrolling in the winter.
La dolce
fucking
vita
, baby.” He went under the water again.

This time when he resurfaced I said, “Your name is on a list, along with Peter Martin,
three of his cousins, and a guy named Jason.”

“Stockover.”

“That’s right.”

“That isn’t news, Georgie. We were the crew on
The Paradox
that weekend. Cops wanted to know if we saw Heidi Telford.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Never did. I was out here by the time they got around to asking. But I heard they
talked to Peter, Jamie … Ned.”

“If they had talked to you, what would you have said?”

Paul McFetridge put both his hands to his head and pulled his hair back. I was struck,
once again, by how different he appeared now, how foreign he seemed to be from the
guy I once knew. “Who’s asking?” he said, and his question conveyed very much the
same displacement I was feeling.

Somehow, in whatever half-assed planning I had undertaken for this journey, I had
not prepared for this moment. And now two men who had been possibly best friends in
a different place at a different time sat in a makeshift hot tub in the middle of
the wilderness, miles from any other human being, trying to figure out who each other
had become.

I looked at the Loon as it bubbled and frothed and raged past me. “I talked to Cory
Gregory,” I said. I wanted to let him know he wasn’t the only one being singled out.

“What did she say?”

“Said there was some kind of party after you got back from Nantucket.”

“She wasn’t even there. She took off for school.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“So that’s it, then. She doesn’t know anything, none of the rest of us know anything.”

Except he did. He knew that Heidi Telford was dead.

The silence became palpable. I wondered if it was possible for the two of us just
to stay in that little pool and never move on, never exchange another bit of information
about the Gregorys and Heidi Telford and what the two of us were doing in Idaho twelve
years after we had last spoken, hugged our goodbyes. I wondered if we could start
talking about Quaker basketball, Fiji Island parties, whether Ellis had ever gotten
into medical school.

“Do you know something different, Georgie?” he said at last. “Is that why you’re here?”

“Apparently Peter’s been linked up with Heidi that day.”

“Linked up how?”

“Linked up like maybe inviting her to a party at the Gregory house.” I was surprised
by my courage in saying what I didn’t know to be a fact, surprised by my cowardice
in using the word “maybe.”