The Hunt Club (44 page)

She'd pitched her tent on a level spot back a ways into the trees. Campfires weren't allowed here, but previous campers had left a clearing surrounded by large rocks for seating; as the far eastern end of the lake grew into shadow, she touched a flame to her small gas stove.

For longer backpacking trips, Gina tried to keep her pack to under thirty-five pounds. Besides her portable stove, she'd carry a Girl Scout–style mess kit and a bear canister filled mostly with dehydrated fruits and ready-to-cook meals. But she'd planned this trip to be day hikes out of this base camp. She'd come up on Friday and would go home tomorrow morning. Beyond that, the camp was only a couple of relatively level miles from the Echo Lake trailhead. She didn't need to worry about her pack's weight for this type of trip, and she'd loaded up her canister with GORP—good ol' raisins and peanuts, and added M&M's—for quick energy, then for her lunches a couple of small loaves of San Francisco sourdough, a block of cheddar cheese, a chub of Italian dry salami.

Heaven.

For dinner tonight, she had even thought to carry a half bottle of decent white wine. Using the mess kit's covered pot, she'd boil her fresh green beans in a little lake water, finishing them with fresh minced garlic, pepper and salt, and olive oil. The trout was far too big for the mess kit frying pan, too long in fact for the ten-inch Calphalon from her own kitchen, so though the concept offended her, she was forced to cut it in half. A squeeze of olive oil from its little plastic container, salt and pepper, mixed Italian herbs, a few drops of Tabasco sauce.

Beat that, Farallon, she thought as she laid the halves of trout into the oil and spices. Eat your heart out, Boulevard—Farallon and Boulevard being two of San Francisco's finest restaurants.

When she finished eating, she took some boiling water and the dishes she'd used down to the lake to wash them. Back at the camp, she settled back against her rock and sipped at the last of her wine from her Sierra Cup. The moon was up, and so was Venus, in a wine-dark sky.

The diamond in the ring on her left hand caught a glint from the bright moon and for a second she looked at the thing as though its presence there surprised her. There was no rational explanation for this reaction—she'd worn the ring now for almost three years, but in truth she didn't often think of it because it was too painful.

Now she stared at it for a long moment. Putting her wine down, she reached over, twisted it off her finger, and held it up in front of her. The facets in the diamond caught more moonlight as she turned it around and around, as though she were trying to find some secret magic within it.

But she knew there was no secret. There was no more magic in her life anymore, not as there had been when David Freeman had stunned her by proposing marriage to her, and then placed the ring on her finger. Freeman, much older than she was, and a legend in the law world of San Francisco, was a slovenly dressed, big-living, profane, cigar-smoking genius in an ancient gnome's body, whom, much to Gina's initial surprise, she'd come to love.

She often felt that he'd literally cast some spell on her. She would look at his ill-fitting brown suits, his scuffed shoes, the rheumy eyes under unruly and wiry eyebrows, the rosacea-scarred nose—Freeman didn't appear to be joking when he said that he liked to think of himself as mythically ugly—and during the six months she had lived with him she couldn't think of a more attractive man of any age. Objectively, he was a frog, but she could see only the prince. It had to be sorcery. But whatever it was, it had worked, and she had fallen under his spell, satisfied and happy in love at forty-four, for the first time in her life.

And Freeman, for his part, a seventy-something lifelong bachelor and notorious womanizer, apparently felt the same way about her. When he'd proposed, nervous as a schoolboy, this man who could be eloquent in front of the Supreme Court could barely get the words out. They were already living together most of the time in David's apartment, although Gina had kept her own place as well, and they decided to have a small, no-frills civil ceremony within the week.

But then David, who considered himself “bulletproof,” had decided to walk home from work one night that week after he'd finished at the office. At the time, he'd been embroiled in some highly contentious litigation with a local mobster, and the gang leader's men had set upon the old barrister and beaten him into a coma from which he never recovered. When he died three days later, Gina felt a part of herself die with him.

But unknown to her, in those last months of his life, David had changed his will, and Gina found herself the owner of the Freeman Building, downtown on Sutter Street. The large, gracious, recently renovated three-story structure, complete with underground parking, housed the forty-odd employees of David's firm, Freeman & Associates, as well as one rogue Of Counsel tenant named Dismas Hardy. In the months following David's death, Gina, Dismas, and another colleague named Wes Farrell had reconsolidated the firm as Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, and it had become somewhat of a power player in the city.

But, although Gina had been a practicing defense attorney for her entire career, and was a name partner in FFH&R, as time passed she took on less and less of the firm's law work. Her heart had gone out of it. She preferred to spend her time with physical exercise, with hikes and solitude, with the slowly accumulating pages of a novel—a legal thriller—that she was struggling without much passion to finish.

“Oh David,” she whispered, sighing. A tear hung in the corner of her eye. “Help me out here, would you?”

And suddenly, as she stared through the prisms of her engagement ring, she felt her shoulders relax as though relieved of a great load. She felt David's hovering ghost as an actual physical presence and realized that he was letting her go, telling her that she had mourned him enough.

He was gone, never coming back, and it was time to move on. The writing, the constant exercise, the long, lonely hikes—even the beautiful moments such as this one—she all at once came to see what David would have had to say about all of them. “That's not you, Roake. That's avoidance. That's not what you do. You always attack life. You engage. Something's beating you up, you take it on and wrestle that motherfucker to the ground. Why are you still wearing that ring, anyway? So guys won't hit on you? You want to get old and live alone? I don't think so. You've got good years to live, so don't wimp out now by not living them.”

She
was
young, she told herself, or at least not yet old. Perhaps she was even desirable.

She brought the ring up to her lips and pressed it against them. Then she put it on the third finger, but of her right hand this time, and stood up. Walking to her tent in the moonlight, she let herself in, crawled into her sleeping bag, and almost immediately was asleep.