Chapter Four
Candles
Vin
examined the bottles on the medicine rack in the pantry. “Doxycycline.
Ivermectin. Diazepam.” Then
“Gentamicin. Nicky Hayes, DVM. Spray affected area twice per day for 7-10
days.
Kelsey
had stepped further into the room during his absence, and she smiled weakly at
his approach. From a discreet distance
she’d been studying the photo of Lee and K. Elgin on the table top. “That looks like an old shot of
Her
voice sounded thinner, almost strained.
“Sure,” Vin said, handing it to her.
“I found it behind some planks in an old wall.” He felt a transient annoyance that he’d left
it lying face up on the table. Why does
that bother me, he wondered. Was he
already feeling attached to Lee and the girl?
Or was it because he knew nothing about this woman standing in his
house?
“This
is interesting,” Kelsey said, her normal voice returning. “I’m a photographer and I’ve taken lots of
pictures of the Falls. You can tell that
this wasn’t shot from the observation deck on the
“We
just moved here, and we haven’t been out to
“You
should take the walkway out to the observation deck,” she said. “It’s spectacular.”
Trying
to redirect the conversation, he held out the Gentamicin. “I think this is what Nicky wanted me to give
you.” As she scanned the label, he
processed her previous words. “Are you a
professional photographer?”
She
glanced up and nodded, then told him that most of her work involved events like
weddings, graduations, and Bar Mitzvahs.
When Vin said he and Nicky were getting married in the D.C. area next
fall and needed a photographer, she asked if they’d chosen a date. He shook his head; both the date and place
were still up in the air. But they
wanted to be married outdoors, at a venue where they could hold both the wedding
and the reception. Kelsey told him
popular venues were booked a year in advance, and photographers were quickly
slotted into those dates. She already
had a few weddings booked for next fall.
“Right,”
he said glumly, realizing how much remained unplanned. “Do you have a card?” She had one in the car, so he walked her out
to the driveway and watched her retrieve her purse from a charcoal-gray Audi
with dark tinted glass. She fished out a
business-card holder and handed him a card, telling him to schedule a visit to
her studio. He waved as she drove off,
then looked at the card in his hand. The
address was a listing on
By
the time Nicky’s car pulled into the driveway a little after four, Vin had
drilled the required holes and connected the limbs of the driftwood letters
with bolts.
“Gimme
an N!”, he said, holding up the N with both hands as she emerged from the car.
Nicky
laughed. “Looks like you already got
one.” He could hear the fatigue in her
voice as she approached.
“Welcome
home,” he said, kissing her lightly on the lips. “Long day, considering you were expecting a
day off.”
She
exhaled and told him that her day had started off with a cat with a compound
fracture, and the pace had accelerated from there. She felt lucky to escape by four. How was his day? “Kind of interesting.” He told her about his visit to the old shed
on the hillside and his discovery of the drill and photograph behind the
planks. They walked inside and headed
for the living-room couch. Vin let Randy
in from the deck as Nicky read Lee Fisher’s note.
“Swains
Lock. We were there yesterday,” she
said. “And ‘I may be buried along with
the others’? What a creepy
thought.” She examined the photo,
turning it over to read the notation on the back. “K. Elgin is the girl?”
“That’s
my guess. Assuming the guy is Lee
Fisher.”
“She
reminds me of someone, but I can’t think who.”
“I forgot
to mention…the dog-fight lady came by this afternoon to pick up the meds. Turns out she’s a professional
photographer. Kelsey Ainge. She handles weddings and events. I got her card, for what it’s worth.”
“Hmm,”
Nicky said. “You never know.”
Vin put his legs up on the table and asked when they were due at the Tuckermans. “Seven,” Nicky said, rocking back into the cushion beside him, “but first we can open your presents and nap for a bit. Then you get to meet the natives.”
Sitting on a bone-colored leather couch, Vin
watched Doug Tuckerman lean forward in his armchair to carefully balance a slab
of soft cheese on an overmatched cracker.
Doug interrupted his sermon to wash the cracker down with scotch on the
rocks. He’d been expounding on the obstacles
his firm faced in its efforts to convert idled farmland on the periphery of the
city into condominiums and office parks.
Doug’s wife Abby said something about schools and Nicky asked what she
thought. No one wanted to send their
kids to public schools in D.C., Abby said.
Only the lobbyists and the lawyers needed to work downtown, and they
could afford to live in
Vin
liked Abby right away. She had an open,
earnest manner and an animated mien.
Brown eyes and light brown hair that swayed and caught the light and
made him think of horses. Her husband
was representative of the forty-something parents Vin saw prowling around
“It
was at the end of last summer, on
Nicky picked up the thread. “I was just starting the last year of my residency at Tufts, so I didn’t have much free time, but he was persistent.” She smirked at Vin, who deflected the expression with open palms and addressed Abby.
“I
was smitten. We dated while Nicky took
her exams and finished up her residency, and then we spent six weeks in late
summer hiking in
“You
did not.”
“When’s
the wedding?”, Doug asked.
Vin
looked at Nicky and she raised her eyebrows, allowing him to answer. “Sometime next fall,” he said. “We still need to pick a date and a place,
but we’ll get married here. My parents
are in
“Makes
sense, if you’re doing all the planning,” Doug said.
Nicky
elbowed Vin. “Hear that, honey? You can do all the planning!”
“Rejoining
the work force suddenly seems a lot more alluring,” he said, fending off her
elbow as Abby laughed.
After
refilling drinks, Doug steered Vin out to the deck, where he laid pork
tenderloins on a flaming grill and asked about Vin’s career in
Had
Vin been laid off?
“No,
I could have stayed -- I just didn’t want to work for those guys. We used to call them Rottweiler.” He explained that Rottweiler wanted to retain
engineering and sales, and since his little group wrote QA software and test
scripts, it was considered part of engineering.
But he was ready to move on and he knew that one of his employees could
handle his job.
“I
thought you techy guys got hooked on that startup culture,” Doug said, wrestling
the sizzling tenderloins. “You know,
building gizmos, working weird hours, playing ping-pong while you strategize…”
“I
don’t know,” Vin said. “It all sounds
good… building a product that makes it easier for our users to get stuff
done.” The crackle of the fire and the
smell of grilled pork were creating a soothing ambience. He took another sip and felt his shoulders
relax. “But then I would think about
what my job actually was,” he said.
“Manage the process of writing software that tries to find flaws in a
product whose purpose is to find problems with computer networks. It all seems second or third-order, relative
to other issues in the world.”
Doug
asked if that meant he was changing careers and Vin said he didn’t know. He’d convinced his old boss to put his name
on the downsizing list so he got the same severance package that Rottweiler was
offering the employees they axed. And
he’d been able to exchange some of his stock options for Rottweiler stock,
which he immediately sold. Together that
amounted to a few months worth of salary.
If he couldn’t find something else, he had a standing offer from
Rottweiler. They wanted to start using
the Web for customer support, so they needed someone to build a database that
would track customer questions and problems, and then they needed some code written
to glue the database to their website.
“It
doesn’t sound like you’re too thrilled about it.”
Vin
leaned his elbows on the deck railing and gazed at the tree silhouettes beyond
the pool and the fountain. The world
extended tens of thousands of miles beyond the dark horizon of Doug’s backyard
and his fingers had scarcely touched it.
Maybe he could help people in
“Maybe
you could save the whales,” Doug said, draining his scotch. He started to laugh while swallowing,
triggering a spasm of coughs, so he bent at the waist and pounded his
chest. Vin turned to watch him cough and
sputter.
“Or
maybe I could look for Emmert Reed’s albino mule.”
“How’s
that?”, Doug said after regaining his breath.
“Just
an expression.”
“I
think the pork is ready to go.” Doug
twisted the tenderloins off the grill and led Vin back inside.
Abby
and Nicky were laying out grilled asparagus and roasted new potatoes with dill
in a kitchen studded with granite counters, cherry cabinets, and brushed-metal
appliances that went on forever. Vin was
asked to open two bottles of wine and take them to the dining room, which
crouched nearby with low-lit amber walls, pleated paper shades, and a cherry
table and chairs. How the other half
lives, he thought with a sigh.
“Cheers,”
Doug said when they were all seated, raising his glass. “To new friends.” Their glasses clinked. During dinner Nicky asked the Tuckermans
about their children.
“Coconut,”
he said. “My favorite. The last half of my thirties is off to a
decadent start.” He cut slices and
passed the plates around. As Abby poured
coffee, he turned toward Doug. “I just
remembered something I meant to ask when we were talking about the wedding.”
“Shoot,”
Doug said through a mouthful of cake.
“Exactly,”
Vin said, smiling. “We need someone to
do some shooting for us at the wedding.
I ran into a photographer on the towpath yesterday…”
“You
mean your dog ran into her dog,” Nicky interjected.
“Right. That’s how I meet a lot of people. Anyway, she mentioned that she does weddings
and other events, and that she has a studio in
“What’s
the name of the studio?”, Abby said, retaking her seat.
“The
studio is called Thomas, Ainge, and her name is Kelsey Ainge,” he said.
“Sure,”
Abby said. “Her studio has been around
for years. They’re good but
expensive. And most people find Kelsey a
little strange.”
“Strange
how?”, Nicky said.
“Well,
she’s kind of…”, Abby said, and then paused.
“What’s the right word? Unorthodox,
maybe. Unpredictable.”
“She’s
lived through some tough times,” Doug said.
“Her husband was a big-time neurosurgeon at
“Was
he driving drunk?”, Nicky asked. “Icy
roads?”
“Neither,”
Doug said. “But they found high levels
of valium in his blood -- enough that he never should have been driving. His family said he’d been drugged.”
“Did
they have kids?”, Nicky said. Abby shook
her head.
“Still,
that must have been pretty hard on Kelsey,” Vin said.
“Well,
maybe,” Doug said. “She didn’t seem to
grieve very long. The rumor at the time
was that her husband was having an affair with a surgical resident. Kelsey inherited a few million and a mansion
off
“So
maybe things haven’t been so tough for her after all,” Vin said.
“Not
recently, anyway,” Doug said. “Her close
scrape was a long time ago. I remember
it was in the papers when I was in college, just before the flood of ‘72.”
“Flood,”
Nicky said. “On the
“Huge
flood,” Doug said. “The kind that
happens once a generation or so. Usually
from a tropical storm or the remnants of a hurricane that dumps rain over the
whole
Vin
shook his head in disbelief. “Seventy
feet?”
“Or
go twenty miles upstream to Whites Ferry on the
“I’ve
seen the mark on the wall,” Abby said.
“It’s hard to imagine.”
“That’s
where her accident was,” Doug said.
“You
mean Kelsey?”, Nicky said.
Doug
nodded. “She was with another girl and a
guy -- friends from college I think -- when their car drove off the back of the
ferry in the middle of the river and sank to the bottom.”
Vin
issued a low whistle. “How could that
have happened?”
“I
guess the car got shifted into reverse and blew through the retaining gate or
something,” Doug said. “Rumor was they
were smoking pot.”
“But
they got out OK?”
“Kelsey
got out OK,” Doug said. “She was pulled
out of the water by a rescue boat.”
“What
about her friends?”, Nicky said.
“They
drowned,” Doug said. “A diving team went
out for them and they recovered the guy’s body from the car later that
day. They kept searching for the other
girl, but the river started rising and they had to suspend the search. They never found her. She disappeared in the flood.”
“That’s
horrible,” Nicky said.
“It’s
strange that Kelsey was able to get out and the other two weren’t,” Vin said.
Doug
nodded. “Strange is a good word for
it. When they raised the car, the
windows were open. Maybe the other girl got
out but couldn’t swim. Or maybe she was
knocked unconscious and drowned.”
“How
about the guy?”, Vin asked. “Why
couldn’t he escape?”
“He
never had a chance. He had a seatbelt
knotted around his ankle.”