Hunter's Moon Read online

  “You’re early,” she says with a chipper lilt.

  He turns around, the mug raised to his lips, and gazes briefly at her over the rim. “Hey! Good morning! Yeah. Early. You know what they say—sleep is but a slice of death.”

  She’s never heard that aphorism, finds it weird. She motions at the sideboard, which he’s blocking. “I need to get in there.”

  Clyne moves aside, but not very far, half a foot, so that when she bends slightly to retrieve a napkin and flatware from a drawer, her shoulder presses against his arm. He doesn’t pull away to give her more room. This touching doesn’t feel quite right. Too familiar, damn near intimate. A low current of apprehensiveness flows through her. Alone in this big house with a strange man. He could be a serial rapist for all she knows, a thought she immediately dismisses as melodramatic, the result of watching a true-crime show last night.

  She sets his place, then brings out the pancake on a tray and announces with a ceremonious flourish, “First breakfast to my first guest of the—”

  He interrupts, riffing on the once-common practice for merchants to frame their first dollar and hang it on a wall.

  She laughs a bit nervously. “You have a beau—” She blocks the word “beautiful.” “A rich voice, like you’re in broadcasting?”

  Clyne twirls an index finger and points it at her. “Bingo. Radio commercials, some TV, voice-overs mostly. Ever see that one for Dodge pickups? ‘This is only the beginning,’” he recites, his already resonant tone dropping half an octave to a man’s-man rumble. “‘Guts. Glory. Ram.’”

  “That’s you?”

  “Nope. It’s Sam Elliott. The actor? But I did an audition for that gig. Which reminds me…”

  He pushes away from the table, goes to his room, and comes out with a manila folder, which he hands to her. Inside is an eight-by-ten black-and-white of his Mount Rushmore face, turned a little aside while he fixes an intense stare on the camera. He looks striking. Accolade Talent Agency is stamped on the bottom margin.

  “It’s yours. I’ve got lots more.” Then, replying to the question on her face: “You could hang it on a wall instead of your first dollar.” He spreads his hands, as if unfurling a banner. “Gaetan Clyne—First Guest.”

  Was he serious?

  “I’m afraid you misunderstood. You’re my first guest of the fall. I’ve been open since May.”

  He blushes at his vanity.

  “Better eat before it gets cold.”

  Deciding to put off cleaning until he’s gone for the day, Lisa crosses the backyard to the cottage and tucks the photo in a dresser drawer. She makes her bed, tidies up, and is relieved when she sees him, through a rear window, load his dog and gun into his truck—a Dodge Ram—and drive away. That low-wattage current coursing through her the brief time they spent talking stays with her. Although she’s unable to identify the sensation, she does know now that it’s not fear or apprehension. It’s something else.

  * * *

  With no one around but the two of them, the situation feels oddly domestic, as if they’re playing house. She serves him breakfast every morning at eight and on two occasions eats with him. They exchange small talk—she loves listening to him, no matter how banal the conversation. Then he goes off with Klaus, returning in the early evening.

  On the second-to-last day of his stay, he tells her that he’s decided to extend for three more days; the hunting has been better than he’s seen in years. The grouse and woodcock he’s shot are in freezer bags in the refrigerator, heads and claws cut off but still dressed in their feathers. Refrigerating game birds unplucked, he mentions, has the same effect as hanging them: it ages the meat, bringing out its full flavor. She knows this, she responds. Her husband used the same method. Clyne, probably noticing that she did not say “ex-husband,” gives her an inquiring look.

  “He died three years ago this month,” she answers, managing to state the fact with no show of emotion.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” says Clyne, and manages to sound as if he really is. “You’re young to be a…”

  “It was an accident. I’m thirty-eight, by the way.”

  She’s at ease with him now. They have developed something of a personal relationship in the past week, and these disclosures, sketchy as they are, deepen it. She’s delighted that he’ll be staying longer. It softens her disappointment with the slow business. That is what she tells herself.

  But with only one person to tend to, she doesn’t have a lot to occupy her time. The next morning, Clyne’s seventh, she inspects his room after the housekeeper, Gayle, tidies it up. She checks her voicemail and email for reservation requests (there are none), inventories the pantry and linen closets, and, following a lunch of tuna salad on whole wheat, changes into sneakers and sweats and goes out for her thrice-weekly run on the beach. She’s a woman whom ads and commercials would diplomatically describe as “full-figured.” Her height—five-ten—permits her to wear her weight well; still, since she quit smoking, she’s struggled to stay at size fourteen.

  She drives a few miles to a campground on the national lakeshore, noticing as she passes through a brilliant gold tunnel of birch and oak that the fall colors are at peak. If the people Jake D’Agostino called leaf peepers are to come, they had better come quickly.

  The beach on which she jogs is called “Twelvemile” for unknown reasons—it’s a lot longer, stretching westward from the mouth of the Windigo River to the painted rocks near Marquette. It’s deserted for as far as the eye can reach, fringed by wooded bluffs on one side, white breakers on the other. Seagulls hover above the waves, two quarreling over possession of a crab. She jogs two miles to a lighthouse, then back toward the campground. Approaching two big driftwood logs she’d dodged on the first leg, she breaks into a sprint and leaps over them. She ran hurdles in high school, twenty years and thirty pounds ago, and is pleased that not all of her teenage agility has left her.

  The drive and the run consume about two hours. Showered, changed, she again checks for reservations and is thrilled to discover that a mother and daughter have booked a long weekend through an online travel agency. It’s not quite three in the afternoon, and the rest of the day yawns before her, a void she can’t think how to fill with useful activity. She tries reading for a while, but she couldn’t call that useful unless she was reading the painfully dull publications put out by the hospitality industry. The listless afternoon drifts into dusk, dusk into night.

  * * *

  She looks in on Clyne as he reads in the library, an extravagant term for the room (it had been a sitting room before her renovations) that has only one bookcase, half empty, the other half taken up by paperback thrillers, with a few serious hardcovers thrown in. Clyne is seated in one of the club chairs Lisa bought online, reading under a floor lamp with a fake Tiffany shade. A log crackles in the fireplace; a glass of whiskey sits on the lamp’s end table.

  “All you need is Klaus at your feet,” says Lisa, standing in the archway between the library and the dining room. He removes his reading glasses and lays the book in his lap. Alice Munro’s Runaway, an odd choice for the deep-voiced sportsman but one that speaks in his favor.

  “Excuse the interruption,” she continues. “What would you like for breakfast? Bacon and cheese omelet or a redo of the apple pancakes? Or something else? I made up the menu for the week, but now the week’s up.”

  “Oh, surprise me. I like surprises.”

  “All right, then. A surprise it’ll be.”

  “Hold on,” he says—commands, really—as she turns to leave. “Would you dine with me tomorrow night?” He delivers the line, which sounds like one from a Jane Austen novel, in a half-joking way, as if to show that a refusal won’t disappoint him.

  She laughs. Is her guest asking her on a date?

  “What do you have in mind? You can’t dine in this town. Eat, sure, but not dine. The only decent places are in Marquette, and that’s a two-hour drive.”

  “Right here is what I have in
mind. The birds in the fridge. I’ll do the cooking.” There is an audacity in his gaze and a directness that makes her think of those optometrist’s instruments, the ones whose light penetrates to the backs of your eyeballs. “You were married to a hunter, so I figure you don’t object to eating wild game.”

  “No.” Lisa is a bit flummoxed. “Well, okay. Dinner. Why not? What will you need?”

  Apples, he tells her. Also brandy, wild rice, green beans, and mushrooms, preferably porcini. She has everything in stock except the porcini, which she doubts can be bought at the local IGA. Will ordinary mushrooms do?

  Clyne nods. “You said you lock up at seven. So let’s make it for seven-thirty.”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, after he returns from hunting, he takes four grouse and a woodcock from the refrigerator and plucks them in the backyard over a trash can, so feathers won’t make a mess in the kitchen. Watching him through the cottage window, she recalls the autumn days when Bill performed the same task, the sun on his bright-blond head. In the evening, wishing to pitch in, she throws a salad together and volunteers to help with the prep work. He assigns her to chop the apples, sliver the mushrooms, trim the green beans. They have donned aprons because Clyne, who appears to have a sense of occasion, has asked that they dress for dinner, that being understood as any improvement over jeans and hiking boots. He’s wearing khaki slacks, a tattersall shirt, and a corduroy jacket with suede elbow patches; Lisa is in a knee-length black dress and ankle-strap low heels retrieved from the cedar chest where she’s stowed the clothes from her former life. The dress, which she’d last worn to an industry conference in Las Vegas, is a little snug in the waist and hips, but with her makeup on and her hair brushed to a sheen, she’s confident in her looks.

  Clyne’s movements in the kitchen are smooth, economical, not a wasted step. Lisa is impressed.

  “You must do the cooking at home,” she remarks, not without ulterior motive. He isn’t wearing a ring, but that is not unimpeachable evidence.

  “I took courses at the CIA,” he replies, fixated on the grouse he’s browning in a skillet. “Not the CIA—”

  “I know. The Culinary Institute of America.”

  Then he banishes her from the kitchen with an imperious wave, leaving her end-run inquiry unanswered.

  Within the hour, they are at the table. The overhead light, on a dimmer switch, is turned low; two candles burn in brass holders. The rice casserole steams, and the golden-brown birds, with green beans on one side, gobs of red-currant jelly quivering on another, are a cookbook photograph. Clyne fills her wineglass from a bottle he’s supplied. 2004 Frescobaldi Mormoreto, the label reads.

  She’s never heard of Frescobaldi or Mormoretoi, but the wine is like none she’s drunk before. Where did he get it?

  “A wine shop in Chicago,” he answers. “I always stock up before heading into the boondocks.”

  Chicago. Lisa remembers from the guest book he signed that he’s from a suburb. Barrington. She slices off a piece of grouse breast, savors it.

  “Heavenly. Gaetan Clyne must have been on the CIA honor roll.”

  “It’s the bird. If you don’t overcook it, the ruffed grouse is the el supremo of game birds. Beats the hell out of pheasant. It was Gaetano, originally. Still is on my birth certificate.”

  “So you’re Italian? Clyne doesn’t sound—”

  “Italian on my mother’s side,” he interrupts. “She was from Florence.” He spears an apple slice from the bird’s cavity, then mashes it on a piece of meat with his knife. She observes that he uses his utensils in the continental fashion, fork in the left hand, knife in the right. “But I was born in Rome, back in the La Dolce Vita days.”

  Lisa refrains from asking when that was, but the question must show on her face, because he adds, “The early sixties. Sixty-one.”

  So that would make him … forty-six.

  “My father was in the foreign service, political officer at the U.S. Embassy, and my mother was working there, in Rome, for UNESCO when they met. She insisted on balancing my Anglo surname with an Italian first name. Lobbied hard for Marcaurelio, but the old man balked at that and they eventually settled on Gaetano. I had it legally changed to Gaetan after I went to college. She’s never forgiven me.”

  Interrupting himself, he picks up his grouse with both hands and rips off a chunk with his teeth, as if he’s in some Elizabethan banquet hall.

  “Best way to eat these exquisite little buggers,” he says, noticing her reaction. “Tastes better, too. Try it. Don’t be shy.”

  She does, delicately wiping her mouth with her napkin afterward. If there’s been any enhancement in the taste, she hasn’t noticed it. The taste doesn’t need improving in any case.

  “To put the cherry on the gelato, I was baptized in Saint Peter’s,” he says, resuming the saga of his entry into the world. “And the Marchese and Marchesa Frescobaldi were my godparents.” He delivers the last sentence with a clear note of self-mockery, as if aware of just how ridiculously pretentious he would sound without it. “My mother’s family knew the Frescobaldis, and she never let anyone forget it. She can be a helluva snob.”

  “So, this wine? It’s a present from your godparents?”

  “Oh, hell no. Like I told you, I got it at a liquor store in Chicago. The only time I’ve seen the marchese and marchesa was in the photograph of them holding me outside the basilica.”

  Again, the tone of sardonic self-effacement. But Gaetan’s attempts at modesty have an effect opposite the one intended: the more he makes light of his upper-crust background, the more attention he calls to it. Nevertheless, Lisa is charmed. She’s always been a sucker for men with glamorous histories. Bill’s had been interesting enough—Navy flyer, war hero, son of a two-term state senator and newspaper publisher, grandson of a timber-and-mining magnate—but Gaetan’s (it is Gaetan now, not Clyne) was a different order of magnitude entirely. She learns as they graze on dinner that he lived all over the world in his childhood and adolescence—Rome, Cairo, Nairobi, Paris—and later in Washington, where his father had been an assistant secretary of state and Gaetan went to school with the children of illustrious people. He graduated from Columbia University Journalism School, and more globe-trotting followed. He became a foreign correspondent with NBC Radio—that deep-pitched voice made him a natural—covering what he calls “dark events in sunny places.” Small wars in Central America. A bigger war in Bosnia. The Rwandan genocide.

  It could be a turnoff, all this talking about himself, but Lisa is fascinated. She has the impression, without knowing how she acquired it, that Gaetan is not an egoist; he wants her to know about him.

  “Rwanda was the end of my career,” he says. “Nineteen ninety-four. I quit.”

  He gnaws on his second grouse. Lisa, feeling stuffed, leaves hers for tomorrow’s lunch.

  “Quit why?”

  “I was the network’s go-to guy for covering wars, and I was sick of it, so I packed it in and eventually got into doing commercials. The money’s good, it’s a stretch to call it work, and it’s a lot safer. Rwanda was what did it. I won’t tell you, at dinner, what I saw there. I wouldn’t tell you at any time.”

  The censorship, naturally, is a tease, whetting her curiosity. She asserts herself. She’s not some delicate little blossom. She knows what happened in Rwanda. Tribes murdering each other. She forgets the names …

  “The Hutus and the Tutsis. The Tutsis got the worst of it.”

  “I saw it on the six o’clock news, the bodies…”

  “Oh, the six o’clock news. You saw it on the six o’clock news.” Narrowing his eyes, he leans over his plate, his left hand cupping the fist of his right. “Did you smell anything on the six o’clock news? Hundreds of corpses, hacked by machetes and piled up like trash in a landfill. Rotting in the heat for days. Did the six o’clock news broadcast what that smells like? The stench makes your eyes water and gets into your clothes so you can’t wash it out. You have to burn them.”
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br />   She does not say anything. The change from mellow to severe has been swift and disconcerting. He can be intimidating when he wants to be.

  “I’m sorry,” he adds, softening. “It’s just that … It’s … Oh, hell, it’s not the kind of conversation I’d like to have with someone like you.”

  A flush has come to Lisa’s cheeks, not from embarrassment for upsetting him or from the wine.

  “All right, then. What kind of conversation would you like to have?”

  She’s flirting now, a little with her eyes, a little with her voice, subtly but unambiguously flirting.

  “I’ve been wondering about you. And, no, I’m not interested in what sign you are.”

  “Leo.”

  “What did you do before you opened this place? Were you born up here? How did you end up here if you weren’t?”

  The radio reporter in him has come out.

  “Boring,” Lisa says. “Compared to you, boring as a pair of sensible shoes.”

  “Oh, come on…”

  “Okay, you asked for it. I did marketing and publicity for the Northern Suns casino. The one down in Manitou Falls? You know it?”

  “I’ve seen the signs for it. Don’t gamble myself.”

  “I quit for the same you reason you quit your job. I got sick of it. Sick of enticing people to blow their money on blackjack and Texas hold ’em. Made me feel like a shill for a tobacco company. How did I end up here? Not real sure. I had to get out of the house I’d lived in with Bill—it felt haunted, I guess. Want to hear more?”

  Gaetan nods.

  “You were born in Rome; I was born on a dairy farm downstate, near Port Huron. A small dairy farm. We grew some corn, too. Been in the Williams family since the 1890s, and my parents had to work other jobs to keep it—my father in an auto distributorship in town, my mother clerking now and then at a Walgreens. We had linoleum floors and plywood cabinets and an old pickup truck with parts my dad cannibalized from two older trucks. We ate roast chicken for Sunday dinner, and it was always one of our chickens, just like our eggs at breakfast were from those chickens, because the chickens and eggs at the supermarket were too expensive. But we did have indoor plumbing.” She speaks sharply, laying emphasis on words like “linoleum,” “plywood,” “cannibalized,” as if to shame his glittering childhood with the dull poverty of hers. “I was the first one in my family to go to college, and only because I’d won a scholarship. Michigan State, class of 1991. Married Bill six years later, and seven years after that he was hunting with two of his old high school friends and he tripped and fell and his gun went off and blew a hole in his chest big as a rabbit hole. I think that about wraps up my résumé.”