Porter waved him off. “We told the captain we’d call him back after we spoke to Talbot.”
Nash tugged the wheel hard to the left and raced past a minivan dutifully driving the speed limit. They drew so close, Porter spotted Angry Birds on the iPad screen of a little girl secured in the back seat. She looked up and grinned at the flashing lights, then went back to her game.
“I shot him a text back at Wheaton. He knows we’re going to Flair Tower,” Nash said.
Porter thought about the little girl with the iPad. “How do you hide a daughter for fifteen years in today’s world? It can’t be easy, right? Birth records aside, how do you keep that secret online? All the social networks? Press? Talbot’s on the news all the time, particularly since he started that new waterfront project. Cameras follow him around just waiting for him to fuck up. You’d think someone would have caught a picture or something.”
“Money can hide a lot of things,” Nash pointed out, squealing around a hard left back onto the highway.
Porter sighed and returned to the diary.
11
Diary
The summers on our little piece of earth could be quite warm. By June I would find myself spending most of my time outside. Behind our house there were woods, and deep within the woods was a small lake. It froze during the winter, but during the summer its water would be the clearest blue and the most soothing temperature.
I liked to visit the lake.
I would tell Mother I was going fishing, but truth be told, I wasn’t one to fish. The idea of piercing a worm with a hook and tossing the creature into the water only to wait for something to come along and nibble at the creepy-crawly did not appeal to me. Did fish eat worms in the wild? I had my doubts. I had yet to see a worm enter the lake of its own accord. As I understood it, fish ate smaller fish, not worms. Perhaps if one were to fish with smaller fish in hopes of catching a larger one, one would be more successful? Regardless, I never had the patience for such silliness.
I did enjoy the lake, though.
So did Mrs. Carter.
I remember the first time I saw her there.
It was June 20. School had been out for seven glorious days and the sun was high in the sky, smiling down upon our little patch of earth with bright yellow love. I walked to the lake with my fishing pole in hand and the whistle of a smart tune on my lips. I was always such a happy child. Right as rain, I was.
I plopped down at my favorite tree, a large oak looming with the kind of size that can only come with age. I imagined if I sliced the tree’s belly and counted the rings, there would have been many, perhaps a hundred or more. Years came and went as the oak stood its ground and looked down upon the rest of the forest. It was a fine tree indeed.
As the summer progressed, I wore a nice little spot at the base of that tree. I always placed my fishing pole to my left and my lunch bag (containing a peanut butter and grape jam sandwich, of course) to my right. Then I would pull my latest read from my pocket and get lost within the book’s pages.
On this day, I was researching a theory. The month before in science class, we had learned that Earth was 4.5 billion years old. We’d previously learned the human race was only 200,000 years old. After I’d heard these factoids, a thought raised its hand at the back of my mind. Hence the reason I had picked up this particular book from the library the day before—a book about fossils.
You see, objects embedded in rocks are “fossilized” and stay that way for . . . for—I don’t know, but it’s a very long time, millions of years, in the case of dinosaurs. And most animals don’t even become fossils at all. After all, an animal would first have to get trapped in the rock to become fossilized. If the elements destroyed it before that could happen, the evidence would disappear without a trace.
The month before, I had killed a cat and laid the stiff body out at the edge of the lake to see what would happen.
Don’t worry, it wasn’t someone’s pet, only a stray cat. A little tabby that lived in the forest. At least, that is where I found it. If the animal did, in fact, belong to someone, it did not wear a tag. If it was a pet and they allowed it to roam free without a tag, any blame for the creature’s demise should fall upon the careless owners.
The cat did not look well. It hadn’t for some time.
The remains smelled something awful the first few days, but that quickly passed. First the flies came, then the maggots. Something larger may have picked at it some night during those early days. Now, though, after only a month, nothing remained but bones. Wind and rain would surely take those. Then it would be gone.
I imagine a person would disappear just as quickly.
At first the noise startled me. In all the time I had been coming to the lake, I had yet to spot another person. Nothing is forever, though, and here one stood less than a hundred feet away at the lake’s edge, gazing out over the water.
I shuffled around to the side of my tree so as not to be spotted.
Although her angle prevented me from seeing her face, I immediately recognized her hair, those long chocolate curls at her back.
She glanced in my direction and I ducked back. Then she turned to her right, surveying her surroundings. Finally content she was alone, she reached into a large bag, pulled out a towel, and spread it on the shore.
After she looked one more time in all directions, her hand went to the back of her dress and untied it at the neck. It fell from her body and pooled at her feet in a puddle of white, flowered cloth.
My mouth dropped open.
She wore nothing else.
I had never seen a naked woman before.
She closed her eyes and turned her head up to the sun and smiled.
Her legs were so long.
And breasts!
Oh my. I felt my face blush. It blushes to this day.
I saw a tiny tuft of hair at that spot, that special little spot.
Mrs. Carter walked to the water and stepped in, hesitant at first. No doubt it was cold.
She went farther still, slowly disappearing with the increasing depth.
When the water climbed above her knees, she bent down, took a handful, and splashed it over her chest. She dove in a moment later and swam toward the center of the lake.
From the safety of my tree, I watched.
The night came and went and proved to be quite restless.
With summer also came the heat, and my room became rather toasty once spring shrugged off its coat.
It wasn’t the heat that had kept me up, though; it was thoughts of Mrs. Carter. I dare to say, they were most unpure and very new to me. When I closed my eyes I still saw her standing in the lake, the water glistening on her damp flesh in the bright light. Her long legs . . . so long and tender. It made blood rush to a place it never had before, made me feel—
Let us say for a young boy, I was smitten.