IT 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.”
McFetridge could have been considering the many different possibilities for using that word. He was trying to get me to look at him, trying to read my eyes. “So you’re what, just doing your job, Georgie? Going around talking to possible leaks?”
I didn’t answer.
“That sucks, Georgie.”
“I know it does,” said George Becket, who was not just doing his job, who didn’t even have an assignment, who had come across the country to exploit a friendship, quiz his old roommate about his possible involvement in a murder.
The silence grew oppressive again. I wanted one of us to say something reassuring to the other. It didn’t happen. I wondered if I could just get up, tell McFetridge it was good seeing him, slap hands, ask what the rafting was going to be like tomorrow.
“Look,” he said after about three very long minutes had passed, “I think I’m gonna stay here a little longer. Why don’t you go back now, catch your dinner, let those guys clean up.”
The message was clear: Fraternity brothers or not, my company was no longer desired.
At this point, I didn’t even desire it myself.