The Deed (35 page)

“Mmm.
Smell
that rain,” she said. “Sit down; let’s have some wine.”

The hanging, heavy stench of the rain was all out of proportion to its volume; the light sprinkle dusting the porch barely seemed capable of keeping Amanda’s garden moist. It put him in mind of the spray mister in a vegetable aisle.

Amanda appeared again in the kitchen doorway, this time carrying only a wine opener, and he smiled from his seat, amused by just how far away she apparently kept it from the wine itself. As she passed, he surreptitiously inhaled her sweet scent.

“Do you realize I met you about a week ago?” he called after her. “Isn’t that insane?”

“It’s happening fast,” she admitted from the other room.

“It’s happening
really
fast,” he replied, eyes distracted outside, where a sudden increase in the rain had been followed by an almost imperceptible glow of heat lightning.

“You know, I saw you almost get hit by that cab,” Amanda confessed, bringing wine and glasses at last—
hallelujah!
—and taking the seat opposite.

“Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”

“That first day I called you,” said Amanda. “You almost got hit by a cab, at Columbus Circle.”

“Could be,” he said. “That shit happens to me all the time.”

Amanda uncorked the bottle and poured their glasses too fast and too full, passing one to Jason.

“Seriously, Amanda,” said Jason. “Think about how improbably quickly this has all come together.”

“What’s your point?” she wondered. “That it’s not really happening?”

“I don’t know what my point is anymore,” said Jason.

“Then shut up and drink,” Amanda replied, raising her glass in toast. “Here’s to stanza four.”

By the time they’d strewn the small table with chopsticks, duck sauce, and little white pagoda boxes, the storm had begun in earnest, sounding its approach over Amanda’s battlements in a rumbling overture heavy on the bass. Reflected white lightning slivered the half-open windowpanes and thunder rolled in answer, a long, ponderous cannonade of a hundred celestial bowling balls marching sloppily down a flight of stairs. Then came the wind, and behind it the first glassy marbles, bright with the reflected light from the moon and the kitchen, spattering into the parched plastiblades of Astro Turf on her porch. A happy, wet-dog smell blew in through the open windows.

“Phenomenal,” said Jason, meaning the food. Amanda nodded, entranced by the storm, her pretty mouth chewing without her. The rain battered the porch mercilessly, skittering up and down her little stretch of rooftop in a mad frenzy, as if egged on by its own maddening sound. Beyond Amanda’s exquisite shoulder the downspout coughed out a steady trickle.

Viewing the deluge from inside the open doors, Jason felt a primal sort of apprehension. He was Cro-Magnon man in the mouth of a dry cave, wondering how he could have angered his horned penis gods enough to get the cosmic coffeepot emptied into the lap of the world. The sheer decibel level of the thunder, when it cracked, seemed to trumpet his insignificance.

“I feel like we should be gathering up animals, or something,” he murmured, and Amanda smiled politely.

Between the storm’s interruptions and their appetites, no small-talk conversation would kindle. When even a long pause to retrieve and uncork a new bottle of wine failed to break the silence, Jason sighed and capitulated; there was obviously only one appropriate discussion.

“You said the reservoir was built in 1840?” he said.

Amanda nodded, filling their glasses.

“We may as well start putting a rough time frame in place,” he replied.

“If we’re right on all counts here, the deed was hidden in the fort in, say, the mid-to late 1600s, then moved somewhere else at some point, then moved
again,
this time after 1840, when the reservoir was built. When did it get torn down?”

“Just after the turn of the century,” she supplied, her reply absurdly punctuated by a terrifyingly loud thunderclap.

“Let’s call it 1900, for the sake of argument,” said Jason. “That’s the latest it could have been moved on to its final resting place, cataloged in the elusive stanza four.”

“Which you’ve figured out, right?” she asked wickedly.

“Nooo…but I think the place in stanza two is a church,” he replied, hoping to surprise her, and jumping up to retrieve the translation. “‘My walls enclose the blue sky itself,’” he read on the way back. “What other buildings had big airy spaces before we had big ugly corporate lobbies? And that part about people dying outside—every church you’ve ever seen has a graveyard out back. So far we’ve got a fort and that reservoir, which looks for all the world like a fort. That got me thinking: What else looks appealingly fortresslike? And a church—especially in those days—would definitely do it.”

“That’s excellent, Jason,” said Amanda appreciatively, looking over the stanza in question. “‘I sleep outside, above the first to fall.’ Buried under the oldest gravestone in the churchyard—that sounds perfect. But which church?”

“Well, again, I don’t suppose it matters now,” said Jason, “if we’re right and the deed’s not there anymore. Maybe Trinity, on Broadway at Wall Street? Seems nice and symbolic.”

“It burned to the ground during the Revolutionary War,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Not my problem,” said Jason. “If it was buried under a gravestone, it would have survived, right according to plan.”

“You’re starting to scare me,” Amanda said, grinning.

He nodded. “And that brings us to the last stanza.”

They read it together:

“The only thing I’ve been able to come up with so far is a firehouse,” he intoned after reading it aloud.

Amanda continued chewing, but her eyes waited for more.

“I picked up on an elemental progression in the four stanzas—land, sky, water, and fire,” said Jason. “So I started thinking, could the red god be fire itself?”

“I don’t know,” said Amanda. “That four-element thing is a European concept.”

“Well, I didn’t make that up—it’s in the poem, like it or not,” he said.

She shook her head. “But remember, we’re theorizing that this wasn’t written all at once. Some guy wrote a paragraph, and a generation or two later someone added to it, et cetera.”

“Just…let me finish my firehouse defense,” Jason argued. “Firehouses are pretty solid buildings you could reasonably expect to last. They’re usually red, and made out of bricks. And if the thing you’re trying to keep safe is a piece of paper, wouldn’t you put it in the place least likely to burn down in the entire city?”

She paused in her chewing, considered this.

“Okay, maybe.”

On the couch after dinner, armed with the last of the wine, they discovered another pattern. The three stanzas they now considered more or less solved, if they were correct, traced a progression up the island: from the fort, down in Battery Park, to Trinity Church at Wall Street, to 40th Street in Midtown. Though it made him feel a bit curmudgeonly, Jason felt duty-bound to point out that the deed’s gradual move northward made sense even if it wasn’t by design: The city had begun at the southern tip and gradually developed in a northerly direction.

“There’s not much in the way of old firehouses north of Forty-second Street anyway,” Amanda warned. “Only fifteen or twenty more blocks before Central Park.”

Jason shrugged. “Probably just a red herring. Get it?”

“Central Park,” Amanda repeated.

“What?”

“There’s a castle in the middle of Central Park,” she said, frowning. “Did you know that? It’s called the Belvedere, I think. Just north of the Great Lawn.”

Amanda rose and crossed toward the door as if leaving, then bent and began digging through a stack of books. After three or four false starts, she stood up.

“Here it is,” she said, crossing back toward him, finger pinning open the book. “It was built by Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect who built the park itself. It went up in 1854.”

“The timing works,” said Jason, reaching for the page she was pinning open for him. The washed-out watercolor print showed a small, almost childlike yellow castle rising two or three stories against the park’s familiar spiky cityscape curtains.

“It’s not red,” said Jason. “That’s the only thing.”

“Maybe it was,” she said hopefully. “Get your shoes—let’s go scrape some paint off right now.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

She grinned. “I could do tomorrow morning.”

The rain continued to batter the porch, a fierce counterpoint to the pleasant haze the wine had draped over what was left of the conversation, and Jason began to grow acutely conscious that it was just the two of them, alone in her apartment, and now after eight o’clock. Time for the start of the “So am I staying?” conversation. His brain was alert and buzzing, having caught the scent of the hunt.

There was a general sense of relief once they’d settled on the Belvedere castle solution; it was as if a wave had crested. He and Amanda had traced back his bloodline, and now had possibly solved the riddle, and if that was true then all that remained was to follow the clues and try to find the actual deed. Could they really have taken a step closer to holding the paper in their hands? Either way, there was nothing else they could do tonight. Nothing decent, anyhow.

Jason ached to bust some kind of a move, to spin this moment out for all it was worth and turn her adrenaline thrill to the dark side. And there she was, for all her obvious excitement, sitting quietly now on the couch just a few feet away, deep in private thought or just peacefully listening to the rain.

The storm winds howled in ghoulish encouragement, and he had just begun rifling through his mind for the proper segue when Amanda put her hands on her knees and stood up. Unable to scramble the words that would hold her, he reached out instead with his foot and stepped lightly on her foot. But momentum had the upper hand, and his similarly unshod foot caught only the toe of her sock, yanking it off her retreating foot.

They both stared dumbly at the shrunken sock curled under his big toe like a shed skin, and then at her naked foot, smooth and adorably knobbly and extremely vulnerable. Jason looked up to find Amanda already looking at him, transfixed by an unspeakably sexy look. If ever there’d been a now-or-never moment in his life, this was it—and so he closed the gap between them at the speed of light, catching her by the shoulders just as she reached toward him, locking up her gently parting lips with his own.