The man smiled and shook Logan’s hand. “Glad you can still recognize me.”
“You’ve hardly changed.” And it was true—although Logan hadn’t seen his friend in two decades, Randall Jessup didn’t look all that much different than he had during his undergraduate days at Yale. The sandy brown hair was a little thinner, perhaps, and the tanned face and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes spoke of a life lived mostly outdoors, but there was still an almost palpable sense of youth emanating from the tall, slight man with the perpetual expression of thoughtful concern.
“They told me you were here, but they wouldn’t tell me where you were staying,” Jessup said. He was dressed in the olive shirt and pants and sand-colored, trooper-style hat of a forest ranger, and he wore a heavy service belt with a holster. “Just that you were in one of the cabins. Security here is like Camp David.”
“It’s not far. Follow me—we can catch up inside.”
Logan led the way across the lawn, then down the path to his cottage. He opened the door, waved Jessup in with one hand.
“Nice place,” Jessup said, looking around as Logan turned on a light just within.
Luxuriant monasticism, Logan thought. “I haven’t unpacked yet, so I have no idea where anything is. I had the foresight to bring along a bottle of vodka, though. Share a glass with me?”
“Love one,” Jessup said as he let his satchel slide to the floor.
Logan dug the bottle of Belvedere out of his small pile of luggage at the base of the stairs, took it into the kitchen, searched the cupboards for a minute until he found a couple of cut-glass tumblers, then filled them with handfuls of ice from the freezer and poured a few fingers of vodka into each. Carrying them back out of the kitchen, he handed one to Jessup, cracked open a window, and they sat down on a leather couch that wrapped around one corner of the room. A standing lamp with a shade made of painted birch bark stood at one end, and Logan pulled its chain, casting a pool of tawny light across the corner of the room.
As they sipped their drinks, Logan thought back over his memories of Jessup. They had been fairly close their junior year at Yale, when Logan had been a history major and Jessup was studying philosophy—and taking himself, as often happens with budding philosophers, rather seriously. That year, he’d discovered a particular school of writers—Thoreau, Emerson, Octavius Brooks Frothingham—and became deeply interested in transcendentalism. He spent a part of his senior year off campus on an unusual program in the Yukon. When he’d gone on to Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the two had lost touch.
“Tell me about yourself,” Logan said. “Are you married?”
“Yes. I’ve got two kids, Franklin, twelve, and Hannah, nine.”
Logan smiled inwardly. Even the children were named after philosophers.
“How about you?” Jessup asked.
“I was.”
“Divorced?”
Logan shook his head. “She died several years ago.”
“Oh. God. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” Logan nodded at his friend’s uniform. “I should have guessed you’d end up a ranger. Far from the madding crowd and all that. Did you join right out of Yale?”
“No.” Jessup removed his hat, placed it on the sofa between them. “I bummed around the world for a year or two—India, Tibet, Burma, Brazil, Nepal. Hiked through a lot of forests, climbed a lot of mountains. Did a lot of reading, did a lot of thinking. Then I came home. I grew up about fifty miles from here, you know, in Plattsburgh. I knew the Adirondacks pretty well from half a dozen summers spent at camp on Tupper Lake. So I joined the forest rangers.” He gave a funny, self-deprecating smile.
“And you’ve risen to lieutenant, or so I hear.”
Jessup laughed. “Sounds more important than it is. Actually, I’m about halfway up the totem pole. Technically, I’m supervisor for Zone Five-A of Region Five. I’ve got six rangers reporting to me.” He paused. “I can guess what you’re thinking. I should have been a captain by now. I mean, it’s been over fifteen years. Oh, I’ve had the opportunity. But I just don’t want to sit behind a desk. We live outside Saranac Lake, part of my jurisdiction. Built the place myself. You don’t need a lot of money to live well here, and Suzanne and the kids are happy.”
Logan nodded. Sounded like the self-reliant, self-directed Jessup he remembered.
He knew his old friend had something on his mind—the fact that he’d come by twice today to see him said as much. Logan had a gift for empathy—he had an instinct that, when he chose to use it, let him sense, to a greater or lesser degree, the emotions and thoughts of the person he was with. But he chose not to employ it now; Jessup would, he knew, get around to it when he was ready.
Instead, he took another sip of his drink. “How did we ever become friends, anyway? I don’t recall.”
“We were rivals before we were friends. Anne Brannigan—remember her?”
“No. Yes. She had a moon and star stitched on her backpack and was a vegan even before the term was invented.”
Jessup laughed again. “That’s right.” He sipped his drink. “So you stayed at Yale.”
“Got my doctorate at Magdalen College, Oxford. Spent a few years of my own wandering the world, but not places as exotic as Nepal or Burma—mostly old libraries, monasteries, and the churches of England and the Continent. Then I came back to teach a colloquium on the Black Death when the Yale professor who’d been planning to give it fell ill.” He shrugged. “Never left.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard,” Jessup said, in a quiet voice.
“You’re referring to my, ah, avocation.”
Jessup nodded.
“The strange one. The one that tends to get my picture in the papers now and then.”
Jessup nodded again. “You were doing that even back at Yale. I remember our senior year, when you proved how that ghost that supposedly haunted Saybrook was just a secret tradition, handed down from one graduating student and entrusted to another.” He paused. “I read that profile of you in People a year or two ago.”
“Terrible photo. Made me look fat.”
“And you call yourself an…?”
“Enigmalogist. Somebody else came up with the term, actually, but it seems to have stuck.”
“I remember how the article described it. It said you study phenomena beyond the bounds of regular science: investigate the strange and inexplicable, prove things most people would label occult or supernatural.”
“Or disprove them—as with the Saybrook ghost.”
“Right.” Jessup hesitated a moment, seemed to come to some kind of decision. “Look, Jeremy—you’ve probably guessed my stopping by isn’t just to renew an old acquaintance.”
“Although it’s nice to see you again, the thought had occurred to me.”
“Well, do you mind if I share something with you? Between ourselves—for the time being, anyway.”
“Of course.”