Carl
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
It was nearly dark when the four volunteers arrived. Their vehicle—an International Harvester brush fire truck that they’d gotten cheap, just before Schenectady retired it—was having an issue that month with its muffler, and it roared as they came up the drive.
Before they’d departed, Carl had filled the others in on what he knew—which was limited, actually. The conversation with Mr. Van Laar had been brief.
“The Van Laar boy’s missing,” Carl told them. “This afternoon he left for a hike up the mountain with his grandfather. Turned back around on the path to the trailhead, because he forgot his pocketknife in his room. Never rejoined the old man.”
“How far from the house was he when he turned around?” said Bob Lewis.
“Don’t know,” said Carl.
“How long did Van Laar wait there,” asked Bob Alcott, “before he went looking?”
“Don’t know.”
“What’d the kid want with his pocketknife?” asked Dick Shattuck.
“Don’t know,” said Carl, limply. “I guess we’ll hear more when we get there.”
It was then that a memory sprang forcefully to the front of his mind: something the boy had said once about his grandfather, in passing, that Carl had brushed aside.
• • •
The truck came to a stop at the top of the drive. Dick Shattuck killed the engine.
Then there was silence. All over the Preserve: a great quiet.
Carl, who was riding in the back, didn’t know what he had expected to hear—footsteps, maybe, or hollers, or crying; the pet name of the boy, Bear, called over and over—but it wasn’t this.
He hoisted himself painfully onto his feet. Jumped down from the truck bed with a thud. He’d gained sixty pounds in the past several years, and it slowed him down. His wife was concerned.
Behind him, his three companions were descending from the cab.
Ahead of them, a shape on the lawn shifted. It was a human, Carl saw; he saw next that it was Vic Hewitt, the groundskeeper. Carl’s boss.
Vic was silhouetted by the low light cast out from the inside. He was tall and broad and had the odd habit of standing with his arms straight down at his sides, strangely formal, a soldier at attention.
He was waiting for them.
• • •
Carl had been inside the main house exactly once, upon his hiring five years earlier. That day, he had entered through the kitchen door; inside, the housekeeper had set out lemonade and cookies while he talked with his future boss.
“It’s hard work,” Hewitt had said. “I won’t lie to you. Lotta land, not much staff. Runs all year, too, not just in summer.”
Carl had nodded, but he couldn’t focus. It was his good luck that he’d even heard about the job from a cousin who knew the last gardener—and that the last gardener had finally retired. Carl had only a small amount of experience with gardening, but he had a library card. He would have taken any job that was offered him. He had a sick kid, and no money. He’d worked at the paper mill in town until recently, when the plant closed down, releasing sixty-odd men from their longtime employment.
“I like to work,” said Carl. He was hungry: he thought about taking one of the cookies, a lacy brown thing that looked more decorative than nourishing. At last, he decided against it. Hewitt hadn’t taken one.
“Do you know about flowers and that?” said Hewitt.
“Oh, yeah,” said Carl. “I grew up on a farm.”
“But flowers,” said Hewitt, doubtfully.
Again, Carl nodded. “My mother grew them. Won contests at the county fair.” The last was an embellishment: his mother, still alive, had entered contests annually, and annually complained about her failure to place.
“Taught me everything she knew,” said Carl. His tone, he understood, was bordering on desperate.
“You’re Joe Stoddard’s cousin, are you?” said Hewitt.
Carl nodded.
Hewitt rapped the tabletop with his knuckle, at last, and told him the job was his if he wanted it.
He did.
He found out later that his cousin Joe had told Hewitt he had a kid in the hospital in Albany, a fact that neither he nor Vic Hewitt ever acknowledged. By 1961 Carl had been working there half a decade, five years of fast learning that had only this year produced the desired results. It was a miracle, frankly, that he hadn’t been fired by Hewitt or by Mr. Van Laar himself—though he had the suspicion that the former had at times fallen on the sword when the latter complained.
• • •
It was Vic Hewitt, now, who greeted the four of them as they walked up the lawn in his direction.
He lifted one of his hands wordlessly into the air. Let it drop again at his side.
“You heard, I guess,” he said to them, when they were in earshot.
