Pro Bono

Chapter 29

29

M ay and Rose arrived at Peter’s lake house together in a Kia rental car that looked nothing like the Mercedes Rose had been driving in Los Angeles for a month and a half. The truck delivering the three kayaks was right behind them. The driver pulled it over to the side of the road far enough so that a skilled driver would have a hope of getting a normal automobile past it. He got out of the truck and opened the back doors, then pulled the first kayak out onto the hydraulic lift, then the other two, and lowered the lift to the ground. He used a two-wheel dolly to move the three to the side of the boathouse. He reloaded the dolly and handed Rose a clipboard with the order receipt uppermost of the papers. She took the pen, signed, and handed it back to him. He got into the truck and began to back it up toward the last wide area along the road so he could turn around.

Peter appeared at the door a minute later beside a younger woman wearing a creamsicle-orange tank top, tight white jeans, and short boots. She had both hands up behind her head sliding an elastic band over the ponytail she was using to confine her blond hair. She leaned close to Peter to kiss him, went down the steps, walked to the side of the house, lifted a helmet onto her head, started the motorcycle parked there, drove it slowly out onto the road, and off in the direction the truck had gone.

May got out of the Kia and went up to Peter. “Is it my imagination, or are they getting younger?”

“Probably just that I’m getting older.” He kissed her cheek. “Thanks to them I’ll have something to regret about dying.”

Rose said, “Whichever one is on duty that day will pull your gold fillings and sell your organs.”

“If she’s any of the current ones she’ll have earned them. You two must know by now that you’re not going to shame me out of being a man and liking the things that men like. Give up.”

“We will for now, but only because we need you for the Linda Warren thing. As your male-gaze-sharpened eyeballs must have told you already, we’ve brought the kayaks. We’re probably going to be set a week from tomorrow, but we’ll be in touch by phone up to the actual time. Can we put the kayaks inside the boathouse? They’re plastic, so it won’t hurt them to be out, but it would be best if nobody sees them.”

“Sure. Let’s do it now.”

“By ‘we’ I meant ‘you,’ May said. “We need to go into civilization and buy supplies, so they’ll already be here.”

“All right,” he said. “Remember to pay cash.”

“Yes, sir,” Mary said. “You need any supplies for yourself and your lady friends? Breath mints? Birth control? Coloring books?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “See you later.”

As Rose was driving the Kia back out toward the highway, she said, “Do you think he’ll come through if we need him?”

“He’ll be adequate for our needs. He’s providing his lake house.”

Rose said, “Do you know how many lakes there are in the Sierra Nevadas? Thirty-two hundred. We could have taken our pick. Still can.”

“There’s another thing he’ll be helpful with. Remember, this woman fell for Danny and married him. Danny looked a bit like Peter, if you think about it. The same type—tall, with those eyes, and the earnest face. But he’s better looking than Danny. Nothing against Danny, it’s just true.”

“I know,” Rose said. “It’s also true that he doesn’t want any part of this. He’s been trying to talk it down since he heard of it. He’s got all the money he wants, and apparently, it’s enough to keep him happy. He’s out on his boat or hiking up here every day, and has a different little escort scheduled to show up every second day, and that’s enough.”

May said, “I don’t give a crap if he wants this or not. He’s a Rickenger. That means he’s got to help us. It also means that in time he’ll get over this and remember he likes money, as much as he can get. Now let’s get into Reno, buy the groceries and supplies, get them stored in his house, and head for the airport.”

Three days later the women calling themselves Wendy and Mary were back in the club in Los Angeles. They were swimming lengths when Linda Warren came outside in a bathing suit, slipped into the water, and swam, as she had been doing every day for two months. Wendy and Mary knew that Linda would swim between ten and twenty lengths today because she had already done her elliptical, treadmill, and weights in the women’s gym and was now mostly cooling off and relaxing her muscles.

When Linda got out of the pool and dried herself with a club towel, the two women knew, she would walk to the same space with the table under the umbrella. They knew there would be a psychological effect to her joining them that put her at a perfect level. She would come to them rather than having them come to her. That meant she hadn’t been invited, but their greeting would reinforce the feeling that she didn’t need to be invited because she was one of the gang. They got to it as soon as she had received a tall iced tea with a lemon slice and no sugar, her pulse seemed to be about sixty, and her breathing was around twenty. She was calm, relaxed, and feeling good after her workout.

Mary said, “We agreed weeks ago that Linda has proven herself, right?”

Wendy said, “Sure.”

Linda said, “Proven myself to be what?”

Mary looked around them, craning her neck to see who else was nearby. Then she said, “This is not something we talk about out loud. There are people you can go places with and everybody has a good time, everybody relaxes, there’s a lot of laughter, but not so much that it’s exhausting and your face hurts. Then there are others who can be perfectly nice, but none of those things are true when they come along. I’m not talking about whiners or complainers or people who don’t do their share or something.”

“Come on, you know what she’s talking about,” Wendy said. “It’s mostly mysterious. They just aren’t any fun to have along.”

Linda laughed. “Yes, I guess I do. I hope you’re saying I’m not one of those people.”

“You’re the opposite,” Wendy said. “We don’t want to sound like the mean girls in high school or something. That’s why we spend time with people before we invite them on one of our trips. This way everybody fits and there are no hurt feelings. We’re going up north soon, to this beautiful small lake in the Sierras for a few days. We hike on trails in these incredible tall pine woods that smell like nothing else on earth, and kayak on this glassy lake. There’s a house. It looks like a ski lodge, and it’s luxurious, but we cook on an outdoor grill—a stove, really. It’s just a heavenly place to refresh and renew yourself, to think and talk about life and the things that matter. We’d like you to come with us.”

“I feel as though I just got a very high security clearance.”

Mary laughed. “It’s nothing like that.”

Wendy said, “Yes it is.”

“When are you planning on going?” Linda said.

“If you’re in, then it’s negotiable and you get a say,” Mary said. “We don’t have jobs anymore, and our husbands are used to us going places when we feel like it, as long as we don’t miss some big occasion that matters. On a trip like this one, we drive up, and leave on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday to stay out of weekend traffic.”

Linda thought about it. She enjoyed their company and had not yet found much to occupy her time in Los Angeles except the club, and going back to Maui still felt depressing. She had lost friends there, but also several people who weren’t even acquaintances, just nice people she saw around, or worked in businesses where she went. A short trip to a forest lake in the mountains sounded like a good way to spend a few days. “I could leave on any of those days next week.”

“Wonderful!” Wendy said. “It’ll be fun. Today is Friday. Want to make it Tuesday?”

Linda said, “Tuesday’s fine. That will give me time to pick up some clothes. Most of my play clothes are in Hawaii.”

Mary said, “Hiking boots and good socks, swimsuit, sun hat, water-resistant pants, rain jacket with a hood, and tops and fleeces as you like. Think about how you’ll feel, not how you’ll look. People are scarce, which is part of the point, really. It’s hard to rest your brain when you think people are looking at you all the time.”

That afternoon Linda looked online to find out where the best sporting goods stores were these days, picked three, and went shopping. She managed to make it to all three before she had what she wanted. She expanded the list to include some things that were merely sensible—a compact first aid kit, sunscreen, insect repellent, a pocketknife with six blades and tools, a flashlight, a compass, a pack of three disposable lighters, and a water bottle. As an afterthought she bought a day pack to carry them in.

That night after dinner she called Charlie. After the “How are you?” and the small talk she said, “I’m going up north for a few days next week to the Sierras.”

“What’s up there?”

“Tall, fragrant pine trees, mountains, a blue lake, a luxurious house that supposedly looks like a ski lodge. That sort of thing.”

“Who are you going with?”

“You don’t know them. Two women named Wendy and Mary. I met them right after I joined the club. They work out about the same time of day I do, so we got to know each other. They’re at least ten years younger than I am.”

“I’d be interested in meeting them.”

“Probably not, but I appreciate your willingness. Sometime when it’s in the natural course of things you and Vesper can come to the club for lunch. I don’t think I’m ready to have a dinner party for you two and them and their husbands, but I may get around to it. We’re leaving Tuesday, so there’s not really time anyway.”

“Can you give me a call after you get up there and let me know you made it?”

“Okay,” she said. “I do have to ask, though. You know I went to all sorts of places while I was living in other parts of the country, right? Europe, Asia, Australia, and so on?”

“Yes. But since then, you can get signal bars almost anywhere, and it’s easier to catch me when I can talk.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll try to make up for all the calls I owe you.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“You can call me too, you know,” she said.

“That’s true,” he said. “I just may.”

The Mercedes arrived at Linda Warren’s house at six A.M. on Tuesday, and Linda came out with her bag as Mary opened the trunk. Linda had looked up the distance and time from Los Angeles to Lake Tahoe, which seemed to her to be the general vicinity of their destination, and found it was 441 miles. That meant they would be on the road for eight hours and likely arrive around two P.M.

As she reached the car, she said, “Maybe I should take the first turn as driver. It’s all freeway for the first few hours, right? You don’t have to actually know the way until the end.”

“You’re a great addition to the crew,” Mary said. “Take the wheel. If you can find your way to the Golden State Freeway—the Five—you will have us pointed in the right direction.” She got into the passenger seat.

Wendy was in the back. As she lay down on the seat she said, “Thanks. That means I can get a couple more hours of sleep so I can wake up charming and companionable.”

Linda hadn’t spent much time driving in any of the places where she had lived in recent years, particularly on Maui, but she was still a good driver because of her years as a commuter in Los Angeles. She got them onto the northbound entrance and then onto the right strand of the tangled freeway as it passed through the narrow space between hills and gradually spread out and took several directions. She guided the Mercedes out on the right one and continued northward toward Santa Clarita and Castaic and Gorman, heading up the long state with the eighteen-wheeler trucks for Merced and Modesto and Sacramento. For four hours Mary dosed off beside her, so Linda’s companions were both unconscious. She was comfortable with the silence. The Mercedes smothered the road sounds and the wind, and it left her time to think.

The solitude was preferable to the bright, mostly cynical chatter that the other two had learned in whatever their normal lives were. They seemed to have spent the past fifteen years in cocktail parties or the sort of dinners where the guests were expected to demonstrate whether they should be judged among the quick or the dead. She didn’t blame them, but she wasn’t surprised that they needed to rest in nature. The big thing that she had noticed about all the places out there in big nature—forests, oceans, mountains—was that they held long periods of deep silence. She had grown comfortable with that, partly because, once she had thought about it, she realized that it was a reassertion of the normal proportions. The world, at least in the vast spaces between cities, didn’t need words, and simply swallowed them.

Linda had not transcended the human need to be accepted, liked, and admired, so she spent some of this free time thinking about ways to accomplish and preserve this effect. Often it was simply not talking too much or too little, appearing to like everything, and smiling frequently, so she reminded herself to do those things.

Wendy woke up first. “Hi, Linda. Where are we?”

“Just past Merced,” Linda said.

“Wow. You’ve taken us so far.”

“It’s a start, anyway.” Linda said.

“If you see a coffee shop or gas station, make a stop and I’ll take the next shift.”

The rest of the drive was harder for Linda, because the others were both wide awake and talkative. It occurred to her that she had probably made a mistake by taking the first driving shift, because it created a difference in their bodies’ schedules. She had driven for four hours, about half the trip. When they reached their destination, it would only be midafternoon. They would be alert and she would be tired.

They stopped for lunch at a Denny’s near Sacramento. In a way it made Linda feel more comfortable. They were two middle-aged women who didn’t need to worry about money, but at least in this instance they weren’t going to be pretentious and hold out for an expensive restaurant in the state capital, where politicians and lobbyists ate. They were more interested in the practical and efficient. They were well-fed and back on the road in forty minutes.

The rest of the trip was increasingly interesting to Linda, partly because as they were moving out of the long stretch of farmland in the middle of the state and into the zone of mountains and forests, there was more for her to see. It was also partly because her companions were talking about their lives. Wendy was a couple years older than Mary. They were both very attractive and vain, but they were in a lighter mood today, and willing to laugh at themselves. Wendy said she was having a hard time getting to know the controls on her new fitness watch. She couldn’t make the watch give her credit for the exercise she got during sex with her husband. The watch seemed only to recognize footsteps and the motion on an elliptical trainer. Mary said maybe she should get her husband to chase her. Linda learned that she had been right about them. They had met in an acting class about twenty years ago, had gotten a few minor roles, most of them in commercials, and had stayed friends during the years when their careers didn’t get better, when they’d married, divorced, and remarried, when they had been busy raising young children, and now, when they didn’t seem to know what they should be doing, but knew whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be work.

When they reached the turnoff onto the road to the lake, Mary was driving. Linda was attentive and curious, craning her neck to look out the windows on both sides and then leaning back to look up through the rear window to see the tops of the trees, and then, when they’d gone farther in, to see the first flashes of blue water through the spaces between the pines. The place was as beautiful as her two companions had promised.

The house was much as they had described. The part facing the road was a two-story rectangle, but the part that faced the lake rose into a tall A-frame. It was built on a grassy bank right above the lake, with a garage on one side and a boathouse on pilings over a dock jutting out above the water on the other.

The biggest surprise was the man who came out the front door to greet them as Mary glided to a stop. He was about six feet two with blond hair that was just beginning to shade off into silver at the temples. His straight posture made him seem taller, and his face had a sculpted look and a tan that made his blue eyes stand out.

Wendy got out of the car on that side and hugged the man, which was a profound shock to Linda until she saw it was quick and perfunctory, and said, “Linda, this is Paul, our landlord for the trip. Paul, Linda is a stray person we found at our club in LA and recognized as a kindred spirit, so here she is.”

Paul nodded and smiled and said to Linda, “I hope your trip up here was pleasant.”

“Yes, it was, thanks.”

“Go ahead and hug her, Paul,” Mary said. “Otherwise, she’ll feel left out.”

Paul leaned forward and gave Linda a brief, gentle hug, clearly only to play along, then endured a hug from Mary. Wendy said, “We’ve known Paul for years, and I’m astounded he’ll still put up with us.”

Paul said, “Let me give you a hand with your bags.” Wendy pressed the key fob and the trunk opened. He slipped the strap of Linda’s bag over his shoulder and lifted the other two bags and carried them inside. He carried them up the stairs and set them on the second floor in the hallway. “I’ll let you sort out the bedrooms.” He went back down the stairs as they were climbing up.

A few minutes later when the women came back down, he was standing in the big living room looking out the tall window past the deck at the water. He heard them come into the room and turned around. He said, “The keys are over there on the counter. I’m afraid there are only two sets, but I can get another made and drop it off tomorrow, if you think you’ll need it.”

Linda said, “I won’t need a key. I’m sure they’ll let me in.”

Wendy reached into her purse and pulled out a leather checkbook. She opened it and took out a check that had already been filled out and detached and handed it to him. “And here’s the rent.”

He looked at it and put it into his shirt pocket. “Thank you. Paid in full. I’m going to go now and let you recover from the trip. If you need anything, you have my number.”

“Thanks, Paul,” Wendy and Mary said in unison. He reached the door and went out. The others were drawn in the other direction, toward the big window overlooking the lake.

Linda heard him lock the door from the outside, then heard the garage door roll up, and then a car engine. She heard his car pull out, then drive off down the road.

“What did you think of Paul?” Mary said. Her eyes were gleaming, as though she knew something.

The look struck Linda as presumptuous. “He seems nice.” She said it with less enthusiasm than she might have if she hadn’t been repelled by that look.

“He’s more than nice,” Wendy said. “She and I are both married, and I, for one, will never again get distracted by a man like that. That weakness was what obliterated my first marriage. But you’re single, right?”

“Got me there,” Linda said. “But I’m not looking for a relationship, just a few days outdoors with the girls.”

“Okay,” Mary said. “Who wants to go for a little hike? I feel like stretching my legs after sitting in a car all day.”

Linda’s mood crept up. “That sounds just perfect,” she said. “We’ve got at least five hours of daylight left.”

Wendy said, “I think I’ll just unpack and get a shower for now.”

The walk began on the road, which almost immediately began to lose its stretches of asphalt and was left with a layer of coarse gravel, and then lost even that and became two bare streaks the width of a pair of tires. After a couple hundred yards there was a path that veered off to the left through the trees while the road continued around the lake. Linda said, “Do you know where this goes?”

Mary said, “It’s kind of interesting. I’ll show you.” They turned onto it and very soon it was too narrow for them to walk side by side. It wound a bit to avoid stands of particularly big trees, and it rose as it went on, forcing them to climb an incline that made their walk feel more virtuous to Linda. The air up here was cleaner but thinner, and so it took a bit more effort.

“Does this go to somebody’s house? It seems to be pretty clear of small plants and things.”

“That’s sort of two questions. Yes, it originally led to somebody’s house. We’ll be there in a minute. But I think it is and always was a deer run. Or maybe elk. We’ve seen some on a meadow up there, so they’ve probably been here forever. My theory is that the people who built a house up there probably walked around the lake, saw the path, followed it, and picked a place where they could cut down some tall, straight trees to make a house.”

“When was this?”

“I asked Paul, but he doesn’t know. It would have to be a long time ago, before building codes and things like that. Maybe even in the days when you could go to a wild place and just decide to live there. You’ll see.”

They climbed another hundred yards and reached a space that was mostly flat. “There it is,” Mary said.

They skirted the site. They could see an area about twenty by twenty feet marked out by large stones laid down as a foundation. Linda said, “They must have carried those stones up here from the lake. What do you suppose happened?”

“Paul doesn’t have any real information. He said he’s found old, rusted nails, and they’re round, meaning mass-produced, not the square kind that were made by blacksmiths in the nineteenth century. There’s a streambed over there that leads down to the lake, but I’ve never seen it except when it was dry in midsummer or later. Paul thinks it was probably either a fire—you’ll notice there’s no chimney—or maybe disease. If you got sick up here before there was a road, you’d have a hard time taking care of yourself.”

“I suppose the winters up here are pretty brutal too.”

“We’ve never been up here then, but I’ve heard they are.”

They climbed up the trail for another fifteen minutes before they reached the meadow Mary had mentioned. It was about the size of a football field, and Linda imagined that the vanished people who had lived in the house had probably seen the large open place covered with weeds and wildflowers with tiny blooms and thought they could farm it. There were no animals visible at the moment, but she could hear a bird call from beyond the first row of trees on the far side.

“I suppose we should start back,” Mary said.

Linda looked at their lengthened shadows and said, “You’re right.”

They walked back the way they’d come. At the top of the trail, just where the meadow ended, they could see the full length of the lake, like a blue shoe print pressed down into the mountains. “That’s a beautiful sight,” Linda said. “Nobody has said what the lake is called. What’s its name?”

“Blucher Lake,” Mary said. “It’s kind of ugly, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t do it justice, but maybe it’s the name of that poor family who built the ruined house.”

They walked the rest of the way down the path to the road, and then the house. The front door was locked, but Mary had her key, so they entered. Linda could see Wendy through the tall window on the lake side of the house. She was sitting on a long chair with a drink in one hand and the other hand holding a cell phone to her ear. As soon as she heard them come in, she quickly lowered her hand and the phone disappeared. She got up and set her drink down, then went to join them at the door from the living room onto the deck. “I was just having a little drink, now that the sun is sinking below the yardarm.”

Mary said, “Houses don’t have yardarms, but I think I’ll make myself an ice-cold martini.”

“I think I’ll get a quick bath and come back for the drink,” Linda said. She turned, went back inside, and climbed to her room on the second floor. Wendy had looked as though she felt guilty for making a phone call. Linda hadn’t heard anything about an agreement not to use their phones, so she laid out some clean clothes on the bed, slipped her phone into her pocket, went into the bathroom, and dialed her son Charlie’s number. The phone rang a couple times and then went to voicemail. She said, “This is your mother. We’ve arrived safely at a place called Blucher Lake and two of us took a hike. I don’t see any other houses, and it’s very pretty. There’s one road that rings the lake. I’m going to send you a Google map, and it should show my exact location. I’m going to get a bath and a drink, and I suggest you do the same if you ever close your office. Love to Vesper. I’ll talk to you in a day or two.”

She sent the image to his phone and started the bath. In a few minutes she was feeling better than she had all day. She dressed in clean clothes and then looked at her phone. She had set it on the floor by the tub in case Charlie called her back right away. She had an odd feeling about it. She was almost sure the others must have an agreement that they wouldn’t use cell phones on their trips to enjoy nature. She wasn’t somebody who liked rules, but she could see the point of trying to keep a trip like this nonelectronic. She turned the sound of her ringer off, stopped the sound notifications, and then slid it behind two books in the bookcase at the head of her bed so she would hear it vibrate but nobody else would.

She went back downstairs and out to the deck. Mary held up her martini and then pointed to another stemmed glass on the bar across the deck. “I made one for you too.”

Linda walked over to it and took a sip. “Perfect. Thank you very much.” She sat on one of several empty chairs near the others. “And thank you both for inviting me to tag along. It’s really a special spot. The walk we took was exactly the right thing.”

“I agree,” Mary said. She looked at Wendy. “You should have come.”

“In a little while you’ll be glad I didn’t. The halibut is defrosting, the spinach and the baking potatoes are washed, and the peach cobbler dessert is already in the oven. I also unpacked, did an inventory of the meals for the next few days, got a bath, and locked the car in the garage.”

“Thank you,” Linda said. “That doesn’t leave much for us. I’ll clean up and do the dishes tonight, and cook tomorrow night.”

Later, when they’d had the dinner that Wendy had prepared and Linda and Mary had cleared the table, done the dishes, and cleaned the kitchen, they turned on the gas fire in the center of the conversation area on the deck and talked while the flames coming up through the sand warmed them. The sky was as clear and cloudless as it had been during the day, and they could lean back in their chairs and see thousands of stars that were invisible in the city lights of Los Angeles. The other two women talked a lot about their children, but she noticed that they had little to say about their husbands. After an hour or two Wendy asked Linda about her husband. She said simply, “I don’t have one. I’m a widow.”

“I think I remember you saying you had children,” Mary said.

“Just one. He’s the reason I came back to LA for a while.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a lawyer.”

“What kind?”

“Civil. The boring kind. It’s good, because I don’t have to worry that he’ll starve, but his job is to make sure nothing exciting happens to any of his clients, so he never has much to talk about.”

They all seemed to Linda to be tired beginning around ten P.M. , but the talk persisted for another two alcohol-fueled hours. She managed to avoid talking too long or specifically about herself or her past life by laughing when something one of them said was funny or particularly clever, and by reliable strategies she had picked up over a lifetime, such as mirroring the speaker’s expressions. At midnight she gave herself permission for a sincere yawn. “I’m afraid it’s past my bedtime,” she said. “I can hardly keep my eyes open. I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”

She climbed the stairs, went into her room, turned down the covers of the bed, and climbed in. She moved the two books hiding her phone and looked at the screen. Her message to Charlie was there, and the notation said, Received . She plugged the phone in to charge, and slipped it under her pillow.