“Is she with the high school boyfriend?” Ken Jacob asked. He’d been tormented ever since Ivy disappeared; he’d always assumed he could right whatever went wrong and he had assured his wife he would do so again, but he’d begun to have doubts.
“Noah Brinley? Nope. No way. He’s at Harvard. She’s with this Joel Davis character. The one that runs the Community. He says he studied at Harvard, but the only records I found for him were over at the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. He did time at Bay State Correctional Center, there on assault charges.”
“Well, she won’t be with him for long.” Ken Jacob had had just about enough. This was no longer teenage high jinks; it was the total ruination of a life.
“Ken,” the detective said. He was an affable guy who had seen terrible things in his line of work. He only used a client’s first name when delivering bad news. “She married him.”
Ken Jacob nodded. “Okay,” he said. He sounded calm, but the truth was, he was in a panic. He’d been trained to always think of a backup plan in his investment career and as a boy had learned not to allow his feelings to show by his mother and his nanny. Ivy had turned eighteen, but there were ways around things. “Can we get the child?” He had been so convinced the baby should be placed for adoption when he first learned Ivy was pregnant, but now he believed they could undo some of the damage. They’d have a granddaughter. One perfect child. They’d protect her and take care of her. He didn’t dare think, the way they hadn’t protected Ivy.
“Unlikely,” the detective said bluntly. “Davis is listed on the birth certificate as the father. So, we’d have a fight, and it wouldn’t be pretty. From what I’ve heard, he’s a son of a bitch.”
A fight meant articles in the Boston Globe. It meant lawyers and courthouses. Ken wasn’t certain his wife could take going through that sort of battle.
“We could snatch the child,” Ken said. A gang of men could swoop down in the middle of the night; they could leave a truck idling outside the Community’s gates.
“If you want to acquire the child, I have the guys for it. It would cost thirty grand. But there’s always the risk that something could go wrong,” the detective informed Ken. “You’re spending money, but you have no guarantees.”
It wasn’t the money that bothered Ken Jacob, it was the idea of leaving his wife on her own if he were to be caught and sentenced. And so, tormented by all he could not do, he wedged the photographs he’d been given into the top drawer of his desk. He paid for the detective’s services, and he never mentioned his daughter’s whereabouts to his wife, even though he heard Catherine crying late at night. He thought the truth of what had happened to their girl was worse than most of the things Catherine could imagine. He couldn’t bear for his wife to see the photographs of their brilliant little girl dressed in austere gray clothing, as if she were a Puritan. Ken used to go skiing and snowshoeing in that vicinity when he was a young man, stopping at the rustic Jack Straw Tavern; he’d gone to see what local people call the Tree of Life, planted by Johnny Appleseed himself on his way out west. One winter he discovered that the folklore about the tree was true, it really did bloom in winter. It was a wonder and a marvel, one that could make a person believe in magic, at least for a time.
He couldn’t help but wonder if Ivy had even thought about them. He wondered if she’d known that after she left, he sat by the front door most nights, waiting for her to come home. Well, now he knew, she wouldn’t be returning. She was married and she wasn’t their girl anymore. There was no need for Catherine to be told anything. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Some things that had been done could not be undone, and Ken Jacob was convinced that their daughter was a lost soul. If he had gotten into his car and driven three hours, Ivy might have run to him with the baby in her arms, grateful beyond measure. She might have cried and told him she’d made a mistake. She might have forgiven him for slapping her and refusing to help her when it mattered most. They could have forgiven each other, and the future could have been something they shared, but instead Ken Jacob went into his study, and he locked the door, and he never said her name aloud again.
* * *
WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS HAD ONCE been wilderness, and there were times when it still appeared to be a wild land, especially in January, when the snow was so high it was impossible to walk down the road, or in October, when the mountains were ablaze, as if the whole world had caught fire. The Community owned two hundred acres of land just outside the town of Blackwell, which had been founded in 1750. Residents of Blackwell had been unhappy when a trickle of strangers began to appear ten years earlier. The first group pitched their tents not far from the edge of Band’s Meadow, they bathed in the Last Look River, and ate fiddlehead ferns and corn meant for livestock. They were a ragtag bunch, and all newcomers were greeted with love and kindness, even though many owned nothing more than a backpack slung over one shoulder and had arrived in town straight off the Greyhound bus. Others had left established lives to become searchers for beauty or truth, often arriving in BMWs or Audis, which were soon enough sold off at the Car Mart near the highway to Lenox, since possessions were not valued among the group and personal wealth was shared.
The Community’s first bleak winter was spent in a pure sort of poverty with months of backbreaking work that left dark circles under the recruits’ eyes. Before long, fifteen small houses had been built, and then the Community Center and the dining hall went up, and finally the dormitories for the children, with their white iron beds and neat cubbies for shoes and clothes. The barns were all raised in a single day by forty men, most of whom knew nothing about farming and so little about building that several accidents occurred that afternoon, including a broken leg and a nail rammed through the palm of a young man’s hand.
After ten years, the locals had to admit the Community people worked hard, and when the mayor had sent the entire police force of Blackwell, three men and a lone woman, out to the farm to search for evidence of criminal activity, they found none. The town had no choice but to accept the likelihood that the Community was there to stay, whether or not they agreed with Joel Davis’s philosophy. Davis was thought to be cunning and shrewd, but even those who were dead set against the Community found themselves being won over, at least a little, when they came face-to-face with Davis at the hardware store, or at town meetings, which he attended to make certain his land was not encroached upon. He was handsome, with dark hair and even darker eyes, but it was more than his good looks that were so appealing; it was when he spoke to you it seemed as if you were the only person in the room. He was focused and intense. Can I be honest with you? he often said in that deep voice of his, which made you stop and listen and give him a chance, even if you were opposed to the whole concept of what he was doing out there on the farm. He had those impenetrable, watchful eyes and many of the local women looked at him in a way that made their husbands uncomfortable when he spoke up against pesticides or new road construction at town meetings.
Joel proclaimed that every individual had to free himself from the sins of his ancestors, and that the only cure for the damage birth families caused to the psyche was to escape traditional relationships and form a new sort of family. Children did not live with their parents or attend public school. The women were obliged to appear plain, no matter how good-looking they might be, with their hair in braids, outfitted with work boots and jackets that didn’t seem quite warm enough in winter. You should be judged by what is inside you, not on how you look, Joel always proclaimed. You are starting anew. You are leaving one world for the goodness of another.