Free A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror by Larry Crane Page A

bottom up on a table and was running her fingers over the gently sculpted stretchers. With the sunlight behind her, the outline of her hip showed dark against the shimmering white of her robe.
     
    “I can feel the difference in these turnings, Lou. Some old craftsman did them by hand.”
     
    “Yeah,” he said. “Some old craftsman. Come on back to bed. I’ll see to your turnings.”
     

     
    Chapter Eight
     

     
    Euphoria filled Lou on the ride back from Candlewood Lake, something like the feeling induced in him five years before on the banks of the Donau River in Germany, when he saw brigadier general stars coming his way. Nothing could deflate him, and all the constants in his life became subject to review.
     
    Start with the car. Halfway home, the mileage on the odometer rolled to zeros all the way across. Imagine: 100,000 miles and only three exhaust pipe replacements, two new water pumps, and a rebuilt alternator. It was a noisy car, the Subaru; not only the tires on the road, but also the rubbing sound from the left front that had begun about two years before. He wasn’t sure, but it seemed that at some point during the trip, a new sound, a ticka-tick-tick , began scolding like an angry squirrel beneath the floorboards on the right front.
     
    * * *
     
    This one was like all their springs. At the first hint of warmer days, Mag was at him to go to the garden center. Only this year, somewhere between the sphagnum moss and the wood chips, he met Donald Klink and hatched what he called “Klink’s Amazing Pink day lily experiment.”
     
    Klink ran the greenhouse, raising everything from cactus to orchids, but day lilies were his specialty.
     
    “I learned hybridizing at my father’s knee,” he told Lou, lovingly aspirating a flowering orchid hanging at head height from a piece of bark in Row B. “Dad actually bred several new flowers, but the crowning glory is Klink’s Amazing Pink.”
     
    “A thoroughbred,” Lou said.
     
    “Yes, a cultivar, actually. You know, day lilies are one of your lowest-maintenance, most drought tolerant perennials, and they offer a long season of bloom.”
     
    “Really?” Lou said.
     
    “They’re nothing but a bulb at this time of the year. You plant them about this time and forget about them, and through the summer months they sprout a nice green stem that stands up about two feet. Then the bud starts developing, and before you know it, a flower appears. It only stays open for a day, maybe two at most, then it’s gone for another year and another bud blooms. It’s extraordinary.”
     
    “A lot of trouble for one day.”
     
    “What you do is plant yourself a dozen bulbs of different lilies, and all the way to October, you have another flower coming to bloom. The Amazing Pink is a late season bloomer. You might prefer a round flower with pleated ruffles, such as Lachman’s Golden Cameo over here, or the simple, graceful Hanna Jane by Barth, here.
     
    “I just pop the bulb in the ground?”
     
    “Just pop it in the ground, and sometime late September, for the Amazing Pink, you’ll have your first bloom.”
     
    “What if I got two and raced them; planted them side by side; one gets Vigaro, the other fends for itself?”
     
    “Dunno,” Klink said. “Never tried racing bulbs. It’s an interesting experiment.”
     
    * * *
     
    He began thinking of ways to help out Pete and Oliver beyond their tuition bills. He was drawn to the ads in the last few pages of the New Yorker ; the ones pitching summer camps. In Monroe, just across the border in New York, there was a traditional camping, canoeing, exploring kind of deal. Jory would get a kick out of it, and it would undoubtedly yield some very cute letters home. But then Lou spotted the ad for Chewonki, up in Maine.
     
    “Never mind. I’ll pay for it. You’re only a kid once,” he told Peter, after a long, involved discussion.
     
    “Dad, we appreciate it. We do. But... well, maybe in a couple of years.