Blackmail Earth

Chapter 3





Jenna boarded a train at Penn Station, joining an early Friday afternoon crush of commuters eager to flee the compressing heat and burgeoning violence of New York City. Two more murders had made the news in the past forty-eight hours, including the savage knifing of a twenty-two-year-old woman whose terrifying screams had been heard by hundreds of West Side residents. Photos of her wholesome, hopeful face were still splashed across the Web, TV, and newspapers; and a sad shrine of flowers, pictures, handwritten notes, and teddy bears now rose inches from the doorstep where she’d been slain.

The summer and fall were living up to the macabre moniker the Daily News had headlined back in July, SUMMER OF SAM 2, in recognition of the grisly parallels to the searing months of 1977 when David Berkowitz went berserk and every imaginable strain of violence escaped the city’s soul like the foul steamy funk that slipped out of the sewers and tunnels lurking beneath the broiling blacktop of the Big Apple. As Jenna had said in an interview with the up-and-coming correspondent from the Northeast Bureau only two days ago, “Everybody’s got to take a deep breath and try to stay calm because heat and horror sometimes go together.”

Simple as sunshine and dark as death, she reminded herself as she made her way to the club car.

Not that the dairy country she was heading to was any paradise: crops dying, water rationing, ugly struggles over state and federal disaster aid. Upstate New York looked as crispy as California’s Central Valley, which looked as parched as Illinois, Iowa, Alabama, and Georgia. Drought, distress, and despair across the country. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse saddling up.

At least it was cool on the train. She lucked out with a stool at the bar, and ordered white wine. She needed a cold drink, preferably cold enough for condensation. Few things felt better in the swelter than pressing chilly dampness to her brow, even if she were passing through Hades—her eyes alighted on the blighted South Bronx—in air-conditioned comfort.

She’d be riding plenty of trains over the next few days. This afternoon, she was off to meet Dafoe—and stay at a B&B after politely declining his offer of a spare bedroom. They’d talked twice on the phone in the past two days, and she’d sensed very quickly that she wanted to see him under more agreeable circumstances. Then, on Sunday, she would return to Penn Station, where she’d promptly board another train to Washington.

The network would have paid for a flight to the capital but the carbon footprint of train travel was a fraction of flying the same distance. And the hassles of struggling through airports and cramming herself into a shuttle bus made a train trip seem like a vacation. She would have to do some cramming on the train—as in study hard for the first meeting of the Presidential Task Force on Climate Change. She had received word just that morning that the network had no objection to her taking the appointment, further underscoring her nonstatus in the news division. But she’d taken great delight in calling Vice President Andrew Percy’s office to say that she’d be coming aboard. Percy himself got on the phone to tell her how much he appreciated her willingness to serve. There was that word again—“serve”—that made her feel so good about joining the task force.

In her heart of hearts, Jenna knew she wasn’t a dispassionate observer of the Earth’s steady demise, but an advocate of responsible environmental policies. And, in all honesty, she was excited to take an appointment from President Reynolds, who looked likely to be around long enough for the task force to have some effect: He’d increased his lead to a five-point margin in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, a boost fueled by the racy revelation that his opponent, Roger Lilton, had indulged in an affair in graduate school with a woman who was now a leader of the nation’s Pagan community.

Give the guy a break, had been Jenna’s initial reaction. It was forty years ago. But even Jenna had become fascinated by the growing scandal. Not by the sex, though from published accounts it was boldly outré, even by the loose standards of that rabidly libidinal era, but by the woman’s alleged influence on Lilton in the here and now. If he wasn’t careful, his old paramour, a strikingly tall, self-described witch who went by the name GreenSpirit, would become the Jeremiah Wright of his campaign.

Even after the scandal broke, Jenna had been leaning toward Lilton, but then he called the task force “a dog-and-pony show by a president who’s shown a callous disregard for the environment.”

President Reynolds, about to board a helicopter for Camp David, was asked about the dog-and-pony comment. He responded, “Is that what the candidate said? Aren’t those the words that his old girlfriend used just last week?”

Which, to the Lilton campaign’s profound embarrassment, was true.

President Reynolds had continued: “At least we know the name of somebody in his kitchen cabinet.” Then the president offered his hand-in-the-cookie-jar smile, waved, and climbed aboard.

A low blow, but Lilton had it coming, Jenna thought. Don’t his people vet what he says? To further hammer the “candidate as puppet” charge, the president’s supporters immediately debuted a YouTube video of Lilton and GreenSpirit, their statements roughly synced so that the audio track echoed “dog-and-pony show” as the words WHO’S THE LEADER HERE? crawled across the bottom of the screen.

One point three million views … and counting. Washington did love a wild and woolly sex scandal, and this one looked to have legs. Four of them, Jenna quipped to herself.

She waved off the bartender’s offer of more wine, wanting her wits about her when she saw Dafoe. She would have been scandalized if, in the wake of that run-in at the reservoir, anyone, especially Nicci, had suggested that Jenna would have ended up accepting a date from the armed and agitated stranger. On his turf, no less.

Yet, she had returned his call, on the theory—or so she had assured herself—that a few conciliatory words might save the network from a lawsuit and herself from endless depositions. Won’t take more than a minute or two. The call had turned into a two-and-a-half-hour conversation. What struck her most was the fluid ease of their give-and-take and the genuine interest that he’d shown in her, as opposed to the paint-by-number questions that so many guys felt obliged to ask before indulging in their favorite subject: themselves.

So it all came out: Jenna’s family-farm childhood in Vermont, which had included a Guernsey cow called Hoppy; two acres of vegetable garden; chickens; turkeys; rabbits; and two pigs, whose names and shapes changed, but whose number remained constant.

She’d talked so much about herself that she’d experienced a weird role reversal when she finally thought to offer her own queries.

Toward the end of the call, Dafoe revealed that he’d spent his boyhood summers on his grandparents’ farm in southern Illinois, and his early adulthood as a notorious computer hacker. Right then she remembered whom he looked like: Hugh Jackman in Australia, minus the star’s facial scruff.

Perhaps the memory of Jackman’s lean, alluring face prompted her to say yes, with nary a pause, when Dafoe asked if she’d like to go out. Almost as swiftly, he began to explain why it was tough for him to get down to the city this time of year. He needn’t have, not to a woman who’d grown up with the incessant demands of roots and leaves and livestock.

“So I’ll come up there,” she’d said, speaking quickly again.

Now she looked at the passing terrain—his turf, indeed—and wondered if she’d been a little rash. The answer came with the force of a heat wave: You sure were. What do you really know about him? Not much. No, not true: You know that he carries a frickin’ rifle and pistol when he goes for a hike. And your best friend had huge misgivings. “Are you crazy?” Nicci had blurted out. But her producer didn’t trust men on principle. Hey, you Googled him, right? Jenna insisted to herself. And he’s the president of the Organic Dairymen’s Association. That sounds reasonable, so chill.

She glanced at her watch. If the train was on time, he’d be meeting her at the station in less than five minutes.

Jenna took out her black leather case, the one that resembled a notebook, and used the small mirror to carefully reapply her lipstick; her wineglass bore mute testimony to the need. If you’re going to see this through, by God, see it through.

She wore little makeup away from the set of The Morning Show, and had kept her clothes to weekend getaway casual: jeans, powder blue top, and cream-colored ostrich leather cowboy boots. Modest. Nothing flashy. She’d had her more elegant outfits shipped to the hotel in Washington where she’d be staying.

But Jenna knew she would have looked striking in rags. With her white-blond hair and blue-eyed Icelandic heritage, she’d come up a winner at the genetic roulette wheel. And she was grateful. She had no illusions about the reason she’d succeeded so quickly in television, and it wasn’t spelled “P-h-D.” But she wouldn’t have minded an end to those phone calls from male viewers—With the possible exception of present company, she thought as the train slowed and she spied Dafoe on the waiting platform.

Please don’t let him be crazy.

He looked more relaxed than he had on their first encounter. A good sign. Then again, she realized with a start, Hannibal the Cannibal at his hungriest would have appeared more relaxed than Dafoe Tillian in those first few moments after the chopper almost hit him. Still, she was looking for normalcy and was reassured: clean khaki cargo pants, crisp white tee, sunglasses that weren’t duct-taped together. Handsome enough that if she’d seen him in fine threads in the city, she would have been more inclined to wonder if he was gay than whether he was a horror. Not that he’d said anything that had registered on her gaydar, just that he was, in fact, good-looking, clean, and shaved. And let’s face it, she told herself, the benchmark for straight guys isn’t real high these days. Clean and shaved? Come on.

Jenna was grateful for her gay friends, including Nicci, but she knew without question that she wanted a husband and children. Now, at thirty-seven, she’d become focused on this. Not panicked about her prospects, but clear of mind and motive.

She shut off her BlackBerry before she stepped from the train. No calls this weekend; Nicci could handle anything that came up. Dafoe took her hand, letting go after they hugged gently. Not too awkward, as such things went. Then he took her bag. He did not attempt further contact while they made their way to his dusty old pickup, which sat right by the station, completely charming in its lack of pretense.

“What’s your preference?” he asked once he closed the door for her, resting his arms on the open window. “I can take you to the B&B, or I could take you to my farm, give you an icy beer, and show you around.”

Decisions, decisions. If she went with him now, they’d have daylight for their first hours together.

“I’m not one to turn down a cold beer on a hot day.”

“You’re a wise woman,” he shouted as he rounded the front of the truck, moving with ease. Like an athlete, she thought.

He drove with the same confidence; and despite the drought, the countryside looked pretty. Dafoe’s twenty-two acres could have been a photo in Sunset magazine, the golden hues of the pastures so enticing that they almost obscured the tindery conditions.

He turned onto a dirt and gravel driveway, and they rolled down the two-track for a quarter mile, cattle fencing on both sides of them. She oohed and ahhed at appropriate moments, knowing enough about farm life to appreciate a tidy and well-maintained operation—and hoping that it wasn’t evidence of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

His home sat on a slight rise, a classic square farmhouse with a veranda on the main floor, and two dormers and a balcony on the upper level. Celery green with white trim and a white roof.

“Hey, that’s smart. I was just reading about white roofs but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen one.”

“I had to replace the old one,” he said as they climbed out of the cab, “so I figured why not? Send some of that sunlight back up where it belongs. I should warn you that I don’t have air-conditioning, so even with that roof the house might be a mite warmer than you’re used to.”

If so, she wouldn’t find out till later; he stepped up onto the veranda and grabbed two pilsners from a green minifridge that blended artfully into the wall. “Saves me from having to take my boots off every time I want something to eat.”

Then he led her on a leisurely stroll to a nearby pasture, reduced by the drought to dead grass and dust. His herd had congregated near the barn under the sparse shade of two withered maples.

Bowser, as she’d dubbed his border collie at the reservoir, kept his vigil by the cows, eyeing the two-legged intruder warily.

“I had those fields in hay,” Dafoe pointed past the barn, “till the crop burned up two years running. Seedlings never got higher than half a foot.”

“What are you doing for feed?”

“I’m buying hay by the truckload, and this year I started supplementing with alfalfa and flaxseed, which kind of mimics the wild grasses they used to get in the spring, before everything dried up. Their methane’s down seventeen percent.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Not a bit, and they like it. They’re hungry right now. That’s why they’re hanging around near the barn. Bayou.” He whistled to the dog and gave him a hand signal. “Watch this,” he said to her.

Bayou darted through the cows to the gate, clearing a view. Jenna watched him rise on his hind legs and use his long narrow snout to flip open a latch. Then the dog scrambled aside and the cows finished the job by pushing the gate open and filing toward the barn. Only a calf failed to move. Bayou worked her toward the opening.

“You just get the one this year?” Jenna nodded at the reluctant calf.

“Two, but I almost lost that one. You see the way I’ve got her back leg all wrapped up over the hock?”

“What happened?”

“Damn coyotes almost dragged him off. Bayou about went nuts with the pack of them, but he did a good job saving her. I’m just lucky that little guy there didn’t get torn up any worse. We were tracking those creatures”—he referred to the coyotes like a curse—“when your idiot pilot damn near killed us.”

The force of his words startled Jenna, but then he smiled and raised his hands as if to quell his own outburst.

“I’m not complaining, not anymore. People have met under stranger circumstances. I meant to tell you when we were on the phone that I don’t usually carry around a rifle and handgun, in case you were wondering. It was for the coyotes.”

The news came as a relief. “You get any of them?”

“Nope. A big bird put a stop to that.” He was still smiling.

When they turned back to the house, their hands brushed. A second later their fingers knitted a pleasing pattern. She wasn’t aware of her role in this, and could scarcely believe that she’d let it happen; but the simple act of holding hands with him felt better than a lot of kisses she’d known.

Trust your instincts, she said to herself, putting off any consideration of an early check-in at the B&B.

He took off his boots in the mudroom and helped with hers. She was struck anew by the oddly intimate act of letting a man take hold of your leg so he can tug on the heel.

The house felt cooler than he’d suggested, a pleasure after the hard rays of late afternoon. She eyed an airy bathroom and slipped inside to wash up. Clean towels, floor, commode, and a newly enameled claw-foot tub. Not bad.

“In here,” he called when she stepped out.

She followed his voice to a dining room filled with natural light, and eyed blueberry earthenware and a white tablecloth. “This is so nice. You do like your light colors.”

“It’s the farming,” he replied. “You can go either of two ways, it seems to me. You can do what a buddy of mine did, which was take a sample of mud from his farm to the carpet store so he could match up the colors perfectly; or you can try to have a nice clean place to come home to at the end of the day.”

“Option number two for me,” she laughed.

He gave her a thumbs-up on his way into the kitchen, returning with a smoked turkey salad. “Sorry, but it’s too hot for turning on the range. Hope you like Gorgonzola. I traded a couple of gallons of milk to a cheese maker in town. Everything else,” he filled her plate, “used to come from my kitchen garden; but there’s no sparing water for that now. Another beer? Wine?”

“I’ll stick with this.” She was still nursing the pilsner. “So it’s off to Safeway these days?”

“That’s way too big city for us. We’ve got the Alverson Natural Food Coop. But the turkey’s mine. I’ve got a smoke shack back there.” He glanced out a wide window but all she noticed was the strong line of his chin.

“The turkey’s really good. So’s everything. Thank you.”

By the time they finished dinner, Jenna felt fully at ease. They cleared the dishes, and at his suggestion moved to the veranda to watch the sunset, an idyllic notion that lasted about thirty seconds before Bayou stood up next to Dafoe’s deck chair and barked as sharply as a car alarm.

Dafoe hurried around the corner of the house, Jenna trailing at a slower pace. Two attractive young women—early twenties, Jenna guessed—were climbing out of a salt-eaten Subaru wagon. Jenna hoped this wasn’t about to turn weird; she’d experienced more than one jealous girlfriend in her time.

“Come on, join us,” Dafoe called to the pair as he walked toward them. The taller one, sporting black braids and a brilliant sunflower tattoo that sprouted from under the shoulder strap of her fully filled tank top, called to Bayou and rubbed his ruff.

Jenna drifted over, and Dafoe introduced Forensia as his “number-one farmhand.”

“Your only one,” she quipped.

“And Sang-mi is her friend,” Dafoe added.

Forensia looked up from Bayou. “Hey, you really are Jenna Withers. You do the weather in the mornings.”

“That’s right,” Sang-mi said with a Korean accent.

“Guilty as charged,” Jenna said.

“Well, you’re good at it.” Forensia shook her hand. “I mean, even before you almost landed on my boss, we always caught your first weather report of the day. Working on a farm and all you kind of have to.”

“Forensia’s my chief troublemaker,” Dafoe said.

“More like your chief slop hauler,” the young woman replied.

“What’s up?” Dafoe asked her.

“I left my pack by your computer and I’m going to need it for the weekend.”

“And you wanted to meet Jenna?”

“Could be that, too,” Forensia said good-naturedly.

“Go on, grab your pack. You’re probably running off to a midnight meeting of your coven.”

“It’s not a coven,” Forensia harrumphed playfully. Jenna sensed that this wasn’t the first time they’d had this exchange. “It’s a gathering, and we’re not officially witches.”

“Not yet,” said Sang-mi in all seriousness.

“Pagans,” Dafoe explained after the young women drove off and he and Jenna settled back on the veranda.

“Really? They’ve been in the news enough lately. Do they know anything about that GreenSpirit woman, the one who’s landed Lilton in all that hot water?”

“I asked them but they wouldn’t say much. I got the feeling that they like all the cloak-and-dagger stuff of having people think that GreenSpirit might be around here, but I really doubt it. Here?” He shrugged. “Reminds me of the Dylan rumors from twenty years ago: ‘Hey, Dylan’s renting a place up the Deben Valley.’ That sort of thing. Now it’s Paganism.”

“Not your everyday belief system, at least not where I come from.”

“Vermont? Are you kidding? There are lots of Pagans up there.”

“Not when I was growing up.”

“World’s changing, but I’m fine with them. They care about the land as much as I do. And despite the rumors in this little burg, they’re not sacrificing babies and goats.”

“There’s actually talk like that?”

“Oh, yeah, Forensia and Sang-mi aren’t the only Pagans around. There’s a bunch of others in their twenties, late teens, and new ones checking it out all the time. You take in a twenty-mile radius around here, and you’ll find quite a few of them living on small farms or in town. Some are even younger and still at home with their folks—who are freaking out, if the letters to the paper and what you hear around town mean anything.”

“We’re not that far from the city; it’s hard to believe that people are getting so riled up about it.”

“We’ve got more churches per capita in this county than anywhere else in the state, so this Pagan stuff is really stirring up the pot. There have been some harsh words thrown around. The sheriff even held a town hall meeting to try to calm everybody down. Which is amazing because I would have pegged him as somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. He’s got two teenage girls himself, and Forensia says they’ve been slipping away at night to go to their gatherings.”

“What a place of intrigue. Who’d have thunk?” Jenna joked.

“The thing is, I get a little worried about those two, especially Forensia. Religion can bring out the crazies, and I’ve tried to warn them to be careful, but Forensia’s attitude is ‘Screw them. I’m Pagan and I’m proud.’”

“You’re not a Pagan, are you?” She could accept Paganism, even admire aspects of it; but she didn’t think she was ready for a Pagan boyfriend.

He laughed heartily. “Me? God no.”

“So you won’t be running off to some gathering on Sunday morning?”

“I’ll be running to the cows, like I do every day, to worship at the udder altar.”

“That was bad,” she said, but she was laughing, too.

“I’m just not a joiner.”

“Hold on there, you’re president of the Organic Dairymen’s Association.”

“God bless Google.” He laughed again. “But that’s it. You won’t find any pentacles hanging around my neck. What about you?”

“I’m a scientist. I believe in the betterment of the species through evolution,” she said with feigned hauteur, then added more seriously, “although the species Homo sapiens has me a little worried of late.”

“Here’s to our betterment.” He raised his glass, and Jenna followed suit.

She canceled her reservation at the B&B, taking Dafoe up on his offer of a spare room. The arrangement felt comfortable and safe, and she luxuriated in waking to find her new beau priming the espresso maker.

Before she left late on Sunday morning, they found themselves back in the kitchen, making out like a couple of teens. That’s certainly how her passion felt: fresh and alive—a great unknown all over again.

She was tempted to go further, but told him that she wanted them both to get tested. Her words sounded breathless; and she held his hips firmly against hers, savoring the sweet pressure. When he started to speak, she put her finger on his lips and said, “No arguments, Mr. Dafoe Tillian.”

“You worried?”

“About you or me?” she asked.

“Either.”

“I’m not worried about me but fair is fair.”

Still aroused, and still sorely tempted, she belted herself next to him in the pickup, feeling like a cowgirl as he drove her back to the train station with his arm wrapped around her shoulders.

“Look,” she said, once she’d unbuckled to face him, “I don’t have a lot of time for games. That’s why I don’t waste my time dating much. But I like you, Dafoe. If you’re serious about getting to know me, call me again, or e-mail me”—she pecked his lips impulsively—“whatever you want, but be in touch. I’m putting it to you straight: I like you a lot. It’s in your court.”

With that last word—verb as much as noun—she put her finger on his nose. For what reason, she had no earthly idea, but in the next instant he kissed it, and she was back in his arms till the train rolled in.

She watched him on the platform, waving until he passed from view. She leaned back in her seat, sighing with delight. Our first weekend together. She told herself to hold on to these memories. So I can tell our kids someday.

Aghast at what she’d thought—that sneaky unbidden words could arise from such an unknown place—she started leafing through a discarded section of the Sunday New York Times, finding little to engage her until she saw a story datelined “the Maldives,” covering the bombing two days earlier. When she skimmed down the column and spotted Rafan’s name, she almost cried out, but he was described as a survivor whose sister had been killed by the first blast.

Basheera. Jenna had known her as a shy girl of thirteen, smart and funny in her quiet, mischievous way.

Jenna thought of other terrorist attacks over the years, and all the times she’d sat in sad wonder, shaking her head over the enveloping tragedies; but this was unfathomable because the Maldives had always been so special. Not just to her. Not just because of the precious months she’d spent with Rafan ten years ago. The Maldives were special because the Maldives were paradise. And paradise had been brutally, ruthlessly bombed.

The Times quoted Rafan: “My little sister died in my arms on the way to hospital. I heard the second bomb and saw the others dying, too.”

Jenna pulled her BlackBerry from her bag. She’d kept it off all weekend, and now knew another regret.

Tons of calls, but there was the message she was hoping for: Rafan’s on Saturday morning. In a desperate voice, he’d pleaded with her to come, “Or send someone to do this story, or we’ll all drown in…” A pause, and she was sure he’d say “the sea,” that they’d all drown in the rising, frightening, murderous sea.

But when he regained his voice, it was so heartbroken that his words could have been pitted with shrapnel: “… in blood.”

We’ll all drown in blood. She said this to herself, head still shaking. And then her eyes pooled, salty and swelling like the waters of the world.