Indefensible by Lee Goodman Page B

“He’s the leak, probably blabbing to anyone who sets foot in the library, telling just enough for them to make the wrong conclusions.”
    She nods. Then she has her mouth at my ear: “But he seems so sweet.”
    â€œNot malicious,” I yell. “Never malicious. Just foolish.”
    We’ll have answers pretty soon. Agents arrived to question the staff before Tina and I were even off the roof. Poor Kenny. I’ll have to fire him, and what will he do then? I can probably set him up with something. Maybe a lawn-care business.
    The pilot hands me a headset, and I put it on.
    â€œCan you hear me, Mr. Davis?” the pilot asks.
    â€œLoud and clear.”
    â€œI’ll need you to guide me in once we’re close. Think of someplace I can land.”
    I watch out the window. It’s mostly woods, and I catch sight of our shadow riding the contours of the land like a roller coaster.
    From way up here, it looks like the mills and factories might still be running, the homes might be kept up, and the jobs might not be gone. We’ve taken such pains building and improving all of this: society, infrastructure, government, economy. The whole shebang. It ran with the gentle hum of oiled parts spinning at a blur, until everything went to hell in the seventies and eighties. The last of the mills closed, and the disrupters, as Upton calls them—the bad genes, the pathogens, the criminal element without whom it might all be so simple—thrived.
    â€œIt should all be so simple,” I yell cryptically, and the hand comes back to my knee.
    Realistically, there’s not much to worry about, because even if Kenny’s injudicious blab was early this morning, it needed to work its way along the gossip tree—morphing into the misperception that Lizzy or Flora actually witnessed the grisly deed. Then it had to find its way to whatever hypothetical traitor delivers it to the dark side, and then they, the evildoers themselves, would have to track down Lizzy and her mom—no easy feat, especially with the two of them at the lake for the week. And finally, anyone wishing to pay Flora and Lizzy a visit would have to drive several hours north, because it’s unlikely they’d have access to a jet Ranger like we do.
    Tina is watching out her window, and I know she’s worried, so I lean in close to her and explain my reasoning of how it’s all okay.
    She gives me a perplexed look for a couple of seconds, then comes back and puts her mouth against my ear. “But Nick, Kenny was back in the office Friday afternoon. Remember? You were gone all day at the reservoir, but he and your daughter came back just after lunch. What if he committed the indiscretions then? They’ve had all weekend.”
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    The lake surface is pounded into droplets by the blades. Saplings on the shore try to uproot and run. But through the dragonfly eye of the 407, I see no sign of human life around either Flora’s cabin or mine. We ascend again, and as we pivot, I catch sight of someone watching from Sammel’s dock, far down the shoreline.
    We dart over the road. “There’s local, just arriving,” the pilot says, and we settle down on a Christmas-tree field as two cruisers pull up. One’s a trooper, and the other is a local cop. I get in the front seat of the trooper car. “I’ve been briefed by Captain Dorsey,” the driver says, and he sprays gravel pulling back onto the main road, but then turns slowly into my driveway and creeps down the long gravel path. The trooper from the helicopter is in the backseat, and Tina seems to have disappeared.
    We stop. “Wait here,” the driver tells me as the other trooper walks around the corner of the cabin to the door. The driver and I lean against the car, which idles in the sun. There’s no wind, and the black flies find us and add their electric drone to the crackling of the