The Fourth Perimeter Read online

  “The boys don’t want a girl to be smarter than they are,” her father would grumble. His life’s ambition had been to have her brother grow up to run the bakery, and her to marry a rich Jewish boy like Ivan Mendelson, a regular customer whose parents owned a large kosher chicken-processing plant.

  The more her father said it, though, the more Jill had been determined to be the smartest woman any of them had ever seen. She studied and she read and she worked in school with a grim determination that sometimes left her alienated. The normal distractions for a young woman didn’t seem to apply to Jill, maybe in part because she had been a gawky thing with a rail of a body, glasses, wild hair, and teeth slightly big for her face. She had won an academic scholarship to Cornell, where she earned degrees in both math and physics before getting her master’s and then her doctorate in computer science. At the same time, she bloomed. Her body filled out. Her face caught up to her teeth. She shed her glasses for contact lenses, and for the first time her unruly hair became an alluring asset rather than a liability.

  That was when she met her young husband, a point guard for the basketball team who would graduate from the school of hotel management. Suddenly, she was vindicated for all the hard work her father had chastised her for. She was where she wanted to be in life, married to a popular, handsome man, but still a thinking woman with both hands on the wheel. That was until her marriage fell apart and she became haunted by the imaginary vision of her father’s derisive smirk. She didn’t look so smart then.

  Still, it was her position at Safe Tech and her prodigious intellect that had ultimately led her to Kurt, so she was vindicated again. But now, really for the first time, she felt she understood the adage that linked ignorance with bliss.

  The sun, now golden, boiled up over the far hill in a blinding haze. As it cleared the distant treetops, it illuminated the placid deep green lake below and the rich dark carpet of trees on the steep-sloping hills. She marveled at each of the earth’s elements: earth, water, fire, and air, and how they flaunted themselves around this lake in a vivid pageant that was never the same from one day to the next.

  Without warning, the summer heat bit into the cool morning air. Jill had one brief glimpse of a meadow teeming with insects brought to life by the warmth before she plunged down into another shadowy ravine cooled by a thick wood of towering pines on either side of the road. With the majestic view gone from sight, her mind returned to its musings. She huffed at the notion, but she was thwarted by the sense that somehow her father had been right. She was so smart, she was stupid.

  She began her climb out of the ravine, breathing hard, her legs on fire again. The incredible whining vacuum of a tractor-trailer suddenly jolted her from her meditation. The truck, a big white behemoth with New Jersey plates, had come up behind her doing seventy. Jill’s surge of fear was doubled when the truck took the rise and veered to the left, gobbling up half of the other lane. A pickup truck coming the other way hit the rise at the same time and swerved off the road toward the deep ditch on the opposite side. When the pickup’s driver spun the wheel back to regain the road, he overcompensated, crossed the yellow line, and headed straight for Jill.

  It all happened in the space of a second, but the moment was inexplicably sluggish and Jill was actually able to mourn the man she loved for the second death he would have to endure in just three days. And in her mind, she could actually hear his reproach. It was the same long slow monologue he recited to her regularly about the insanity of riding her bike along that lonely rural highway.

  Then came the impact.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jill swerved and hit the guardrail just as the pickup smashed into her bike and careened back out onto the road before screeching to a stop a hundred feet away. While country music drifted indifferently from the truck, a big man escaped from the cab and raced back to where the broken bike lay mangled about the rail. A low moan escaped his throat when he saw the inert figure of a woman lying fifteen feet off the road on the gloomy needle-covered ground at the base of an immense tree. The plastic shell of her lime green helmet had been shattered and marred by the tree’s bole.

  The man leaped the rail and lumbered down the slope to her side. His chin, like the rest of him, was big and square, and tears streamed silently down his swarthy face. His yellow hair was thin and receding. He wore the faded greasy jeans and grungy salmon-colored T-shirt of a farmer, and his boots, like his clothes, were covered with dust and cow dung. He felt her neck for a pulse and uttered a sharp report that sounded something like laughter when he found it, strong and steady. He wanted to make sure she was breathing as well. Carefully, he rolled her onto her back and inhaled sharply. She was like an angel with her beautiful face resting peacefully amid a tangle of golden brown hair.

  The farmer, Jeremiah Mann, was also a state trooper. He knew how slow the emergency response was at the south end of the lake, but he was afraid to move the woman any more than he already had in case her neck was broken. He ran back to his truck and dialed the dispatch on his cell phone. By the time he got an answer, he was climbing back over the guardrail huffing unintelligibly. At the same time, he noticed the girl was sitting groggily, rubbing her temples.

  Jeremiah snapped his phone shut and knelt down beside her. “Are you all right?”

  Jill looked at him dazedly. “I think so.”

  “My God, I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was incongruously soft for a man so large. “That truck came right at me. I had to swerve and I lost control. I didn’t see you until it was too late. Are you all right?”

  “I think I’m fine,” she said. She started to rise. Jeremiah took her arm and hoisted her to her feet like an overturned chair. He began nervously to dust her off until he realized with horror that he was pawing the Spandex that covered her compact rump.

  “I . . .” he muttered. “I didn’t mean— Can you walk?”

  Stiffly Jill started up the slope toward the road. “Yes, I’m fine,” she said shakily.

  Jeremiah walked beside her, helping her with one hand on her upper arm and another resting gently in the middle of her back.

  “My God,” she said when she saw her twisted bike.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again feebly. “I feel terrible. Let me take you to the hospital.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “No, I’m fine.”

  When she looked into his pale blue eyes, however, her stern look seemed to falter. People would regularly confess to Jeremiah that he was one of the biggest human beings they ever met. But they would also just as likely swear that the effect was only temporary and completely offset by the way his twinkling eyes would practically disappear into his chubby red cheeks when he broke out into his easy smile.

  “I’m a police officer,” he blurted out.

  That didn’t look as if it surprised her at all. She merely nodded.

  “A state trooper,” he continued. “I have a farm up the road a piece . . .” He floundered with his words. She was looking at him now and her long-lashed eyes were the deep blue of a bluebird’s wing. A handful of freckles were cast about her straight, small nose. Instead of looking angry, she gave him an uncertain smile, and that planted an irrational thrill in Jeremiah’s heart.

  “I’m Jeremiah Mann,” he muttered uncertainly.

  “I’m Jill. Jill Eisner.” Jill cleared her throat and said, “Would you mind taking me home?”

  Jeremiah looked behind him as if he’d forgotten that he was the only person there she could speak to and said, “Do you want to wait and file a report? I’ll have to call my supervisor anyway to report the accident. You didn’t get a license number or anything on that truck, did you?”

  “No. I didn’t see anything, just a big white truck. Can’t you just do it without me?” she asked, rubbing her elbow where she’d hit the ground. “I’d like to just get home.”

  She was shaking and it pierced his heart. “Yeah, I can do that,” he said. “I’ll call it in after I drop you off, sure. You wait here, I’l
l get the truck.”

  He jogged to his pickup and whipped it around. Pulling past the mangled bike, he hopped out again. While he tugged at the bike to free it from the guardrail an old man in a faded green cap driving a brown Plymouth Duster came up the road and stopped beside them, his engine spewing pungent blue smoke into the air.

  “Everything okay, Jeremiah?” the old man said in a kindly rattle.

  “Everything’s fine, Mr. McGurdy, thank you,” Jeremiah said without pausing in his effort. Without looking up, he asked, “How’s Mrs. McGurdy?”

  “She’s healing up fine, son,” came the answer, “and we appreciate the eggs you brought by.”

  “My pleasure, Mr. McGurdy,” Jeremiah said. “I’m glad I could oblige you folks.”

  “You see this, Jeremiah?” the old man said archly, holding up the morning’s newspaper as if the two of them were having coffee at the counter of a diner rather than stopped beside the road at the site of an accident. “The president is coming to our lake!”

  Jeremiah nodded, still without looking, and said, “I saw that this morning, Mr. McGurdy. It’s something.”

  “And you’ll probably be guarding him, won’t you? You being a trooper and all. You’ll probably get to shake his hand, son. You’ll be a hero around New Hope.”

  Jeremiah blushed and looked with embarrassment at Jill. New Hope was a crossroads made up of about thirteen farms, two dozen houses, and a firehouse in the middle of nowhere—a place that no more than seventy-five people called home.

  “Nothing like that, sir,” he said and turned back to the bike.

  “Anything I can do to help?” Mr. McGurdy said, curiously eyeing the pretty young woman in her foolish-looking getup.

  “No, thank you, Mr. McGurdy,” Jeremiah said, freeing the bike with a horrible screech. “There was a slight accident. One of those damn interstate trucks.”

  Mr. McGurdy shook his head in disgust. “There was a day . . .” he began, but then thought better of it and simply said, “All right then. Good day, miss.”

  Jill nodded to him as he rattled off.

  “You want to get in?” Jeremiah said quietly, holding the door open as if he were picking her up for the prom. She unsnapped the battered helmet and removed it from her head. With the expression of someone who realizes they’re lucky to be alive, she gave the bike one final glance where it lay destroyed in the pickup’s bed. When she looked up and saw Jeremiah’s painfully embarrassed face, however, she offered him half a smile and climbed up into the truck.

  “Your truck looks pretty bad,” she casually observed as they pulled away. The front corner was crumpled back.

  Jeremiah only nodded. He was more worried about what it looked like on the inside. It was his work truck and it was unkempt enough to provide a habitat for spiders. At that moment, one was scurrying past on the dashboard. He took a furtive swipe at it, then said, “I hope you wouldn’t mind if I just swung by the house real quick.” He cast a nervous glance her way before saying, “It’s on the way and you see, I was on my way back from picking up a lightbulb from a neighbor’s.”

  Jill wrinkled her brow and stared at him dubiously.

  “It’s a kind of special bulb,” he explained in his soft voice. “It’s for my niece. Well, not for her really, but for these eggs I’ve got for her. It’s an incubator. My sister-in-law won’t let her have any pets of her own. She’s a lawyer over in Auburn. She doesn’t like pets and it wouldn’t surprise you, to know her. But my niece comes out to the farm whenever she can and she just loves animals. And, well, this morning I noticed the incubator light was out and she’d have her heart broken if anything happened to those chicks. We marked them special just for her, with a pencil of course. You don’t want to use a pen. They’re eggs now, but they’re gonna hatch real soon. So . . .”

  Jeremiah’s cheeks reddened. He knew he must sound foolish prattling on about an eight-year-old girl’s chicken eggs. He wasn’t much of a talker most of the time. But for some reason, he felt compelled to fill the silence.

  “Do you mind?” he asked tentatively. “Her name is Sara. Oh, you’d love her. She’s cute as anything you’ve ever seen. I really like kids. There’s something about a farm too, you know. It’s a place for kids, I think. It’s right up this way, do you mind? I’d hate to have those chicks die. It’d break her heart.”

  “I don’t mind,” Jill said after a slight hesitation.

  Jeremiah smiled shyly at her and swung the truck down a side road that dipped slightly then wound its way gradually up until they turned off onto a gravel drive that went straight uphill to a white farmhouse with black shutters. The house and its three giant maple trees stood atop the highest point for miles around. From the cab of the truck, Jill could see ten miles all the way to the end of the lake where the town rested like the painted scenery on a game board.

  “This is a beautiful view,” Jill said placidly.

  The old white farmhouse was immaculate. On the porch an old collie rested beside a rocking chair without bothering to get up. The grass was close cut and the gravel drive looped down behind the house to where two old barns stood bright red with fresh coats of paint. Birdhouses on thin posts dotted the grass everywhere and iridescent tree swallows swooped about them in the morning sun chirping shrilly with their liquid calls.

  Jeremiah looked at her nervously and flushed again. “I’m glad you like it. Back in the late seventeen hundreds, my great-great-great-grandfather made a trade with the Greenfields. You see Mandana? The little cove where the marina is? Well all the farm fields you can see between there and town used to be the Mann farm. But my great-great-great-grandfather was going to marry a girl from New Hope and their great-great-great-grandfather who lived in New Hope was going to marry a girl from town and the two of them just decided to trade farms.

  “It was a bad deal for us Manns as it turned out. When the rich people from New York City started to come here the property values down near town went through the roof. The Greenfields are millionaires now, but they still farm. The Manns, well, we just farm. I do, anyway. There really aren’t any more Manns but me. Like I said, my brother married a lawyer and well . . .”

  Jeremiah blushed even harder. “I’m sorry,” he said, and after grabbing a small dusty box containing the lightbulb from the seat between them, he hopped down out of the truck and jogged awkwardly up to the house. While he was gone, Jill continued to stare at the breathtaking view.

  Soon Jeremiah came striding back out of the house. He stopped to pat the old dog’s head before bounding down the steps. When she caught him looking at her furtively, Jill smiled back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as he climbed back into the truck. The cab shifted beneath Jill as Jeremiah settled in with his three-hundred-plus-pound frame. His meaty hands engulfed the steering wheel like it was a toy. “But my niece, she’ll be awful happy.”

  He drove past the house and started down toward a large barn where there was room to turn around.

  Suddenly, Jill said, “My God! Cows!”

  Jeremiah regarded three black-and-white heifers staring blandly at them from the small pasture fenced off behind the barn and looked back at Jill in surprise. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Those are cows.”

  “These are my favorite, the black and white,” she said in a somewhat embarrassed tone. “What kind are they?”

  “Gateways,” Jeremiah said blankly.

  Jill began to nod, then looked at him sharply and said, “No, really, what are they?”

  “They’re Holsteins,” Jeremiah said with an impish grin. “The brown ones you see around are Jerseys,” he continued pleasantly as he swung the truck around and back up past the house. “Now, where is it I’m taking you? I imagine someplace close to town?”

  “We’re off West Lake Road,” she said contritely as they bounced down the gravel drive. “Fire lane fifteen.”

  Jeremiah looked at her sharply. “The old Randal place?”

  “Randal?”

  “Sure
,” he said, swinging out onto the country road. “Fire lane fifteen. Old man Randal made his fortune building the Thruway, paved it from Buffalo all the way to Albany, they say. The big white house down the hill right on the lake? Yeah, that’s the Randal place, or it was.”

  “Oh,” was all Jill could apparently think to say.

  As much as Jeremiah had talked before he delivered his incubator bulb was as little as he talked on the way back. His smile, however, remained indefatigable so as not to make Jill more uncomfortable than he suspected she already was.

  “The Randal place,” he said quietly as they pulled in. “You folks sure fixed it up nice,” he added as the house came into view through the trees.

  “Thank you,” Jill said. “And thank you for the ride home.”

  Jeremiah got out and hoisted her mangled bike out of the back. “Um,” he said, “you want me to put this somewhere?” He held the bike out as if it were nothing more than a Christmas tree ornament, his huge arms bulging like five-pound bags of flour. Jill shook her head.

  “I can drop it at the dump for you if you like,” he said, examining the twisted metal. “I didn’t know if you wanted your insurance company, or my insurance company to look at it.”

  “No, that’s fine,” she quickly replied. “I’m just glad to be breathing. I’m not worried about the bike. If you could just junk it that would be great. I’ll get a new one.”

  “Um, I’ve got your name and now I know your address. I’ll take care of the accident report and everything and I’ll try not to bother you with anything if you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine,” Jill said warmly. “It was an accident, so please don’t worry about it.”

  “Do you do that a lot?” he asked, tossing it back into the bed of his truck. “Ride around the lake, I mean?”

  “I’d like to do it every day if I could,” she said. “Normally, we’re only here on weekends, but I have the feeling we’re going to be around a lot more this summer, so I’ll be out there all the time. It’s really beautiful, you know. But I don’t have to tell you, not with the view you’ve got from your farm.”