by Dale Mayer
“Then you go snowboarding today,” he said, “and, on the very last run of the day, you headed straight across the mountain, even the uphill part, so that you could end up hanging on that peak.”
“Well, … wait.” She stopped, looked at him, and said, “What do you mean, across the mountain?”
“Did you not see the direction you were going?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t understand. Why would I go there?” She frowned.
“I don’t know,” he said, his own voice going quiet. “But if ever a hill to catch everybody’s attention on, it’s that one.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“How long have you been in town?”
“Since the first of October,” she said.
“Oh, so then you haven’t heard the rumors?”
“No,” she said, raising her hands in frustration. “Rumors about what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He was tempted to believe her, but he’d been gullible before, and his years on the force had made him anything but stupid at this point in his life. “Look,” he said. “That particular peak? One of the reasons it is considered so dangerous is because we’ve already had a suspicious death there.”
“When?” she asked. “Who?”
“It was a long time ago,” he said evasively, not wanting to give her anything more salacious to help her work her con or whatever it was she was pulling.
“Okay,” she said, “so, if I keep digging, I’ll find it?”
“Probably,” he said, “I don’t know.” And, with that, he added, “I don’t want you going back up the mountain and pulling another stunt like that.”
“As I said, I didn’t pull this stunt,” she shot back, and he could see the anger building in her eyes. “I have no problem with not repeating it.”
He frowned. “Look. We have a lot of good people working ski patrol up there,” he said. “It’s very traumatizing when somebody ends up dead.”
“Yeah. Same could also be said about the person who ended up dead,” she said, her gaze wide, yet holding a hint of sarcasm.
“I don’t think that’s as much of an issue as it is for the people who are left behind,” he said. “But these ski patrol people spend a lot of time and energy trying to keep idiots safe, and, when the idiots won’t comply and end up dying, despite the best efforts of the rescuers, well, it’s hard on them.”
“You know something? I can actually see that,” she said in a quiet voice. “However, I wasn’t planning on being stupid or difficult or dying.”
“No,” he said. “I’m half inclined to believe you on that. The trouble is, I can’t decide if you’re just a fool or somebody who just likes trouble, or if you’re just a silly schoolgirl.”
At that, his barb hit home, and, with a visible wince, she clammed up.
He nodded. “Stay away from the mountain for a while, would you? And, if you do ever go back up there,” he said, “be smart about it.” And, with that, he turned and walked out.
Chapter One
Gabby walked through the hospital out the front door. She didn’t know where Wendy was, she’d expected her best friend to be waiting here at the hospital. She pulled out her phone, surprised that it had survived, feeling way better than she apparently had any right to. When she called Wendy, her girlfriend answered right away, asking about her mountain tumble.
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Are you okay?”
“Sure. Then I was okay up on the mountain,” she said, “so this doesn’t exactly change anything.”
“Maybe not,” her girlfriend said, “but I was really worried about you.”
Yet you weren’t here. Why is that? “Well, I came to the hospital to placate you guys,” she said, “and the detective is still pissed off at me.”
“Yeah, he sounded like it when he was here,” she said. “As cranky as your boss is, will he think this is another publicity stunt of yours, which just makes his bookstore look bad again? Do you think you’ll lose your job over it?”
She winced at that. “I hope not,” she said. “I came here to snowboard for the winter. Arriving a couple of months before the season, I really got going to find work so I could pay my way. The last thing I want to do is end up in so much trouble that I don’t even have a way to support myself here. Aspen is not exactly a place for the faint of heart.”
“No, it certainly isn’t,” Wendy said. “Are you coming home?”
“Well, I’d like to,” she said. “Would you mind coming to pick me up?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” she said.
“Fine. I’ll be sitting outside.”
“It’s cold out,” she said. “You should wait inside.”
“I’m good. I’m fine,” she said.
“Good for you,” Wendy retorted. “I can’t get warm since we got home.”
“Yeah, well, I probably should be freezing or in shock or something. Even the doctor seems to think I’m in better shape than I should be.”
“Well, after that fall, you must admit that you are pretty lucky to have walked away from it.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “But I can’t really do anything to change things, now can I?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “It’s just really lucky that you have the opportunity to rethink your life now.” At that, her friend hung up.
Gabby was left staring at her phone. “What are you talking about? Rethinking my life?” she said. “I just wanted a winter to snowboard. Is that really so much to ask for?”
Apparently it was because, ever since Gabby had started work at the bookstore, it seemed like everything had gone off-kilter somehow. She didn’t understand why nothing ever seemed to work out. It was frustrating as heck. As she stood here in the front entrance, leaning against the hospital’s brick wall, she took several long slow deep breaths, not sure if it was just her weird clarity at the moment or if everybody else was in a fog.
She didn’t understand this clarity, but she did feel different somehow. She rotated her neck slowly and stretched her arms high above her head. As she brought her arms back down again, the detective drove by, staring at her. She flushed and gave him a quick little wave of friendship, hoping that he wouldn’t see her as any more of an oddball than she already was in his eyes.
She figured from the glare he sent her way that she’d failed.
She wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, but something had set him off too. Then some people thought her odd here in Aspen. She didn’t know why. What was wrong with being a happy-go-lucky person? Despite her circumstances, she had always been like this.
However, something about this place deemed her a little weird to everybody. It wasn’t Aspen itself. It wasn’t the bookstore. Not really. Just sometimes. And now the fact that she had survived that tremendous fall without so much as a scratch would just add fuel to the fire. She didn’t know how to combat that, except to do what she’d always done, which was ignore them.
She really wasn’t insensitive to other people; it’s just that either people really got her or they didn’t. Finding her tribe was something she had hoped to do a long time ago, but instead here it seemed like she’d ended up with a whole group of female misfits, who Gabby felt a lot older than, only to find out they all thought she was younger. She shook her head at that.
“Now I’ll just be even more of an oddity,” she said. “Pretty soon they’ll come into the bookstore just so they can see me. That would be a heck of a deal.” And not something she even wanted to think about. If her boss ever thought that would work, he’d be all over it.
By the time Wendy arrived to pick her up, Gabby was bored and tired of waiting. She jumped into the front seat and let her girlfriend drive her back home again. Once there, the other women, her roommates, were exclaiming, and some were even crying over her.
She just gave them all a smile and said, “I’m fine. Really. I’ll go have a bath and get to bed.”
Immediately the
y shared commiserating looks, and one of them spoke up. “Yes. Yes, that’s a good idea. You need that.”
Gabby went in to have her bath, but, instead of soaking and relaxing, she found herself full of energy and all keyed up. Instead of that fall wiping her out and shaking her up, it seemed like it had energized her. That worried her more than anything. Once in her small bedroom, the only space that was hers alone, she closed the door, pretending to need to sleep, when really she just wanted to be alone to think things through.
She hadn’t told anybody about the crazy message she’d received while she was on the mountain, and now she wasn’t even sure if she had actually heard it. It was just too far-fetched to believe. At the same time, if she had heard correctly, then somebody had whispered in her ear, in her head, and she needed to figure out how that worked, what that meant.
He’d said that he was Death. But since when did Death speak? So that part made no sense. She frowned, as she lay here in bed, looking on her phone, surfing for anything about the person that Damon had said died up on the mountain. It took a good hour, trying to stay quiet, hoping that her friends would all leave her alone.
Finally she found it. Or at least she had found out about one death on an Aspen mountain. Just a small article about this woman who had been hiding out in Aspen just seven years ago. After her death, the authorities found out she had been accused of murder in another state, although nothing could ever be pinned on her. The article didn’t explain how she died, just that it happened on the local mountain. The gossip about her took the forefront of that piece.
Immediately chills went up and down Gabby’s back. Murder? Since when did somebody come to Aspen to get away from murder charges?
She always thought of this as a resort town, a place where everybody came for fun and a holiday. Maybe that’s what a murderer had done? Maybe that’s how she enjoyed life and was coming here to get away? Gabby couldn’t find any of the details on who this woman supposedly murdered, only that she had died in a bad fall up on the mountain. And with one puzzle solved in her world—yet more murders happening here than she liked to know about—Gabby closed her eyes and somehow fell asleep.
*
Damon walked into the office several hours later, after checking out a stuck vehicle and some party revelers who were a little too drunk to make their way home safely. Damon was tired and fed up. He didn’t even know why he was here. He should have gone straight home. But something about that Gabby woman had him keyed up.
“What are you doing here?” asked his partner, Jake Perkins.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I should be home, sleeping.”
“Especially after boarding all day on ski patrol duty. And I hear you had quite an incident on your watch.”
“Bad news always travels fast, doesn’t it?” he muttered, shaking his head. “If you can believe it, she was that same idiot passing off the tarot card readings as being real.”
“Oh, her,” Jake said, then laughed hysterically. “That’s funny.”
“I don’t think it’s very funny,” he said. “Matter of fact, it feels very unfunny.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jake said. “For the rest of us, that whole tarot deal is bad news. But it’s not ugly news.”
“I get it,” he said. “She’s probably just fleecing a few bucks off some people. But more than that, she’s setting off a raging panic with those readings.”
“Sure, I suppose,” he said. “But it sounds like the mountain tried to teach her a lesson today. And you and I both know how ugly that mountain can get when she’s in a pissy mood,” he said. “The last thing we need is any more deaths.”
“I know. We were all hoping to get through a winter without any for once. Hasn’t happened yet.”
“Nope, it sure hasn’t. But we keep trying.”
“True enough,” he said. “It’s hard though. Out of nowhere, she just went flying, so badly I thought for sure she was a goner. When she took that last drop down, I couldn’t believe it when I came up over the rise to see her, sitting up, tucked against the mountain, petrified at where she landed. Any other person would have gone over the cliff.”
“True enough,” his partner said. “Obviously it was one hell of a lucky fall.”
“I know, and then she had the nerve to blame it on a ghost.”
Jake looked at him and sniggered again.
“It’s not funny,” Damon snapped. “When I asked her what the hell happened, she said she was pushed.”
“Pushed?” Jake stared at his partner in surprise.
“I know,” he said. “And I did see her out snowboarding, not that I knew who it was immediately, but I didn’t see anybody around her at the time, when suddenly she was careening off the mountain.”
“No, you’re right,” he said quietly. “That’s really strange.”
“It is, and I just don’t know what the hell is going on.”
“Well, you already thought she was two bricks short of a load after the tarot card stunt, right?”
At that, Damon rolled his eyes. “Can you believe it?” he said. “Like we haven’t got real crimes here to worry about.”
“Well, apparently not,” Jake said with another snigger.
Damon glared at his friend and said, “What? Am I supposed to put that ghost remark in the report?”
“Why not?” he replied. “It’s what she said.”
“True.” He thought about it, then shrugged. “Well, I can put it in italics at least. They can laugh all they want, but it’s the truth.”
“Exactly. Besides, we must be truthful. And, hey, maybe she’s setting up an insanity defense.”
“It’s not like she’s ripping people off though by almost falling to her death from the mountain,” Damon said, suddenly feeling the need to defend her. “And we only had the one anonymous complaint on her readings.”
“But what were they complaining about then?”
“Well, the woman lost her husband,” he said. “So she’s obviously acting out of grief. But she feels like Gabby should have known that what she said in the reading was the truth and should have done something to protect the woman’s husband.”
“Really?” Jake stared at him. “How does somebody protect somebody else from death? If she could bottle some of that, she’ll be a trillionaire in a heartbeat, right?”
“It just didn’t bear thinking about. And that’s assuming Gabby’s even correct in any of these premonitions, which, so far, we haven’t seen any actual proof of.”
“So what do tarot card readings have to do with her flying down the mountain? Or being pushed?”
“Well, that’s the part that doesn’t make much sense,” Damon said. “Because, if she was pushed, you would think that somebody would have seen something.”
“Did you get a chance to interview anybody at the scene?” Jake asked.
“No, I was bringing her down off the precipice, then to the ER. I do know a few people who were out there, but I’m not sure I know anybody there at that time.”
“We still have to follow up, work our due diligence,” Jake said.
“You mean, head off any complaints about us not doing a thorough job, even though it’s all for the loony bin?” A note of humor was in Damon’s voice because even he could see just how ludicrous it was. But the fact of the matter was that Gabby remained convinced that somebody had pushed her. Damon frowned and then nodded. “Even if she hadn’t said that and even if I didn’t know she was part of that tarot card mess,” he said, “you know we would have done everything we could to reassure her that she hadn’t been pushed.”
“And, if she were,” he said, “you know it’s a crime, so we need to follow it up anyway.”
“Right,” Damon said. “So I’ll have a talk with the mountain safety officers and see if they have any idea of who all were around there at the time of her fall.”
“You said her friends were there too, right?”
“Yes, one for sure was at her side when I
arrived. I can question her and ask what she saw,” Damon said.
“I’d question everybody, just to make sure our backs are covered,” he said.
With that, Damon nodded. “You know what? For now, I think I’ll head home.”
“I think you should. I doubt you got any sleep, did you?”
“What’s sleep?” he said, “Especially these days.”
“Grief won’t last forever,” Jake said.
“I’m not sure about that,” Damon replied. “It feels like a life sentence.”
“Man, it’s been two years. It’s time to cut loose.”
“Yeah, but I’m not ready,” he said instantly.
“You only keep saying that because it’s a reflex,” he said.
At that, Damon stopped, thought about it, and then shrugged. “You know what? That may be true,” he said. “Or maybe it’s still the way I feel.”
With that, he walked out and headed home. Two years and four days. Couldn’t forget the four days. Everybody thought he was overcome with grief. Nobody knew the hell he’d endured for the four years of his marriage and how relieved he was that she was gone. Not relieved enough to have had a hand in her accident because that just wasn’t his way. But every time he brought up divorce or any attempt to get out of the situation that was choking him, she’d tried to commit suicide.
Damon knew that the psychologist had said it was an attention-grabbing action, but Damon couldn’t just sit there and let her go down the tubes because of his need to be free. He’d been caught in a nightmare that he’d found no way out of. And the two years since had been even worse. Survivor’s guilt? Or PTSD? Or just plain not letting go of the trauma of those years? It took time to get back to normal. And he felt he would get there. Eventually.
Damon knew Jake was probably right in the sense that Damon should get back into the dating game and have some sort of normal life, but he just didn’t want to. Not yet. Absolutely nothing inside him said he should either. Maybe the truth was that he was too damn scared.
After all, he’d hooked up with somebody he thought was the most brilliant person in the world, and she ended up being so emotionally unstable that he’d been living a nightmare the entire time with her. He just didn’t want to repeat something like that. And every time he met somebody like Gabby, it reminded him of how many people in the world were just a little off, and he didn’t even know Gabby well. It wasn’t that he was trying to judge her, but dealing with her so far made it easy to do so.