Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  “Julian,” she said.

  “Hello, Kate.”

  “How are you?”

  “Surprised, at the moment. I didn’t realize you’d be here.”

  He understood the lay of the land immediately. Kate’s family must have bought the only remaining property on the Ridge. Presumably to indulge her, to assuage any lingering grief; the Blackbird was far too small to make more than a very modest profit. Nothing like the Vaughns’ resort hotel in Telluride or the two in Vail and Crested Butte. Kate had probably finagled this tiny property out of her father like a kid with her heart set on a fancy tree house.

  He’d met Justin Vaughn once or twice. A sweet, shrewd guy with three daughters and a knack for keeping them happy. Kate was the youngest by fifteen years, and she could wrap her father around her little finger simply by adding an extra syllable to his name: Dad-dy, can you lend me the car? Dad-dy, will you buy me a hotel of my own, the Blackbird Hotel, we can’t let them tear it down...

  “Oh, you two know each other?” Emma said, affecting an air of cool disinterest.

  “We used to,” Kate said. “In the biblical sense. Kate Vaughn.”

  Emma’s face was blank as she took Kate’s outstretched hand. “You went to church together?”

  Kate’s mouth twitched at the corner, a dimple winking in her cheek. The moment swelled as Julian realized he should introduce them and couldn’t, because he didn’t know Emma’s last name and wasn’t entirely sure of her first one. Emma could be Ella, or Anna, or Abby, or Eve. He had resorted to an assortment of pseudo-endearments over the past few days, waiting for her to repeat her name—which, maddeningly, she never did.

  Kate turned to Julian.

  “You heard about the reopening, I take it? Did you get our email? I blasted it to everyone in my contacts.”

  He nodded. It had given him a shock to see the Blackbird’s photograph appear on the screen. He’d shut the window down immediately, unable to open it again for more than a week. When he finally gathered the courage, he pored over every page and all the fine print on the hotel website.

  THE HISTORIC BLACKBIRD HOTEL

  GRAND OPENING

  JAWBONE RIDGE, COLORADO

  Nowhere had the flyer mentioned the Blackbird was now one of the Vaughn family properties.

  “I didn’t realize—” he said again.

  “Yeah, that’s my dad’s thing. I think he doesn’t want people to realize it belongs to us. Not our finest business investment, by a long shot. He probably wants to save face if the whole thing folds or falls off the cliff or something.”

  She walked over to a small desk, where a computer sat next to a stack of unopened mail. Insects buzzed from outside the half-open windows.

  “So, what’s up? Do you need a room?”

  “No,” said Julian.

  “Yes,” said Emma at the same time.

  “We just wanted to see the place,” he said. “We don’t need a room. Probably stay at the Adelaide.”

  It was a foolish thing to say, with two suitcases at his feet and this fluffy blonde hotel accessory clinging to his elbow. But seeing Kate here unnerved him, gave his anger a point around which to coalesce.

  “It looks good,” he said, glancing around. “Very...tasteful.”

  A deep flush rose up her neck. “Yes, well, I’m not sure the whole bohemian thing would have worked out that well in the long run.”

  “I think it would have worked fine.”

  “Do you? Would you have me leave it as a shrine?”

  “I would have had you leave it alone.”

  “Ah. And is that what you’re doing? Leaving it alone?”

  Julian pressed his lips together.

  “They were going to tear it down,” Kate said. “I’m trying to save it. I would have thought you’d approve. They were your friends, too.”

  “What friends?” Emma said.

  “You didn’t tell her about the murders?” Kate said.

  “She doesn’t need to hear about that,” Julian said.

  “Murders!” Emma said. “Of course I need to hear about it. When was this?”

  “What’s it been now, Julian?” Kate said. “Five years?”

  A slow prickle crept up Julian’s back, under the collar of his cotton shirt. His ears seemed to fill with sound, a low, almost electrical hum that muffled the sound of her voice.

  Five years. An anniversary, a number that meant something, that indicated something might happen again. Five. Dangerous, sharp-sounding, like a blade or the edge of a stony cliff.

  “Five,” he said, carefully.

  “Wait, you were here?” Emma said.

  “We were both here,” Kate said. “Staying in the hotel, that is. We didn’t witness the crime or anything.”

  A sour taste convulsed Julian’s mouth. No, he wanted to say, I didn’t see a thing; it’s nothing to do with me. But the words were swimming in water and he couldn’t get them out.

  “Oh,” Emma said. “So who was murdered?”

  Kate slid behind the desk and switched on the computer. “My friends. My three best friends.”

  Emma was taken aback. “Oh. I’m sorry, I thought...if you don’t want to talk about it...”

  “Celia Dark. Celia’s stepbrother, Rory McFarland, and her boyfriend, Eric Dillon.”

  The computer chattered to life, an alien presence in the gothic gloom.

  “We don’t need to go into it.” Julian’s temple ached from gritting his teeth.

  “I don’t mind.” Kate smiled and gave Emma a little half shrug. “It was a long time ago. And anyway, there’s no escaping the topic here on the Ridge. It was all anybody talked about for months. You couldn’t get away from it, not if you lived here.”

  Julian walked to the other end of the room, where the boxy new furniture was arranged around the fireplace. It looked nothing like it had five years before, nothing like the way he remembered it.

  After the murders, Kate had sent snapshots of the common room and kitchen, along with a bundle of newspaper clippings she’d carefully packed and mailed to his mother’s address in New York. Block headlines at first with thick chunks of text, then smaller, sketchier pieces, featuring standard-issue high school pictures of the three victims and a bigger photo of the Blackbird Hotel. The news petered out at last to a single column of newsprint from the obituaries page: Eric Dillon, Rory McFarland. Their faces grinned out at him, blurred as if by smoke, the ink like soot on his hands.

  There was no obituary for Celia. Julian never knew whether the paper hadn’t run one or whether Kate had simply forgotten to include it with the others.

  “So did they catch the murderer?”

  “There was no one to catch.”

  “You mean, one of them killed the others?”

  “Maybe. It’s hard to tell for sure. We know that Celia’s stepbrother, Rory, was killed first. He was in the kitchen, shot once in the chest. The room was in a shambles—broken dishes everywhere, chairs overturned. Apparently he and Eric had been fighting. There was a broken bone in Rory’s hand and two in Eric’s face, blood everywhere. Which was exactly what you’d expect from any fight Rory was involved in. The police assumed at first that Eric had left the fight and came back with a gun to finish it. But that didn’t seem to make sense when they looked at everything else.”

  “Why’s that?” Emma asked.

  “Because Celia was the one left holding the gun.”

  It occurred to Julian that Kate must have told this story a hundred times. It had the rhythm of a recitation, a prayer-like cadence. He wondered what it was like here on the Ridge, afterward, what the locals made of it. He had almost no memory of the town itself. Its residents were part of the peripheral setting in his mind rather than personalities in their own right. Reddened, sn
ow-scrubbed faces, thick hands, everyone booted and stomping in doorways, swallowed up by their winter clothes. No one outside the Blackbird had penetrated his consciousness far enough to leave more than a faint impression.

  He went to the window. From the sun-dried slopes, crossed with lift lines and dotted with dusty snowplows, the mountains stretched north for hundreds of miles. Though the hills and valleys were covered with trees, they felt barren to Julian, motionless and devoid of life. He wished he’d come back in the wintertime, to see the mountains caked with snow and everyone outside enjoying it.

  Kate went on.

  “So they thought maybe she was trying to stop the fight and shot Rory by accident, then blamed Eric for what happened and killed him, too.”

  “And where was she?” Emma said. “Your friend?”

  “Upstairs, in her bed. Shot through the heart. The gun was still in her hand.” Kate’s gaze fixed on him. “Julian’s gun, actually.”

  Emma looked at Julian doubtfully, and Kate laughed.

  “He was with me at the time,” she said. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

  “So it was all an accident, in a way,” Emma said. “Why do people always fight when they go on vacation?”

  “Oh, they weren’t on vacation.” The computer had booted up, and Kate sat down in front of it. “They owned this place, the three of them together. They were in the process of renovating to turn it into a B&B. There was a little tray of spackling paste in the kitchen, still wet. Celia had been prepping the walls for a coat of paint when the trouble started.”

  “What were they fighting about? Money?” Emma looked disappointed, as if the ghost story had let her down.

  “That’s a good question. The only question that matters, really. But it wasn’t money. They weren’t like that. No one could understand what had changed, why they suddenly imploded that way. It didn’t make sense.”

  A memory crept into Julian’s mind: a dead sparrow in the grass, its legs curled like dried twigs, and the revulsion on Celia’s face as she looked at it. Celia hated death. She was terrified by it. Yet she’d taken her own life and the lives of her two best friends. She loved them and she killed them and she killed herself. What they were fighting about didn’t explain a thing.

  Across the room, a jingle. Kate was trying to give them a room key.

  “No,” he said. “I told you—we’re going to the Adelaide.”

  “Oh, but I want to stay here,” Emma said. “Maybe we’ll see a ghost.”

  Kate handed her the key. Emma turned to him, grinning, dangling the key chain over her thumb.

  “Why did you buy this place?” he said. “What was the point?”

  Kate sat back, light from the computer washing over her face.

  “I don’t know, Julian. I guess I just couldn’t let it go.”

  He held his face impassive, but his throat was tight with grief and something akin to fear. He picked up their bags. They seemed much lighter now than they had ten minutes ago; he could barely feel them.

  As they reached the foot of the winding staircase, Emma paused to look back.

  “What were they like?” she said.

  “Oh,” Kate said, as if this was something she’d never considered. “They were...”

  Silence crept into the room. From far away, Julian could hear the echo of laughter, the bright crackle of the fire, a murmur of music and voices.

  Dead. All dead, and they had taken him with them.

  Kate turned her head toward the kitchen, the half-open door. Her answer came just as Emma started up the stairs, leaving only Julian to hear.

  “They were really young.”

  * * *

  Kate stayed at her desk as Julian and his girlfriend disappeared into the upstairs hallway. She could hear the girl’s voice, still chattering, exclaiming over the old hotel, and Julian’s grumbled responses. A door opened and closed, leaving Kate alone in the silence.

  For a few minutes she sat where she was, staring out the window. A blue jay hopped along the gnarled branch of a spruce tree, tipping its head to get a look at her. She imagined herself from the bird’s point of view, framed by the windowpanes, alone at her desk, how she’d still be here when the bird looked down from high above.

  I’m lonely, she thought, surprised.

  She opened the right-hand drawer of the desk. Under some folders and a stack of bills, she found a photograph, still in its heart-shaped frame. Eric had taken that picture. She remembered looking back at him, with the whole snowy mountain laid out at their feet and Julian’s arm snug around her shoulders. Both of them grinning so hard at some joke of Eric’s, Celia and Rory flanking the camera, doubled over with laughter. She wished she could remember what they all had found so funny, two months before the laughter died.

  She had hardly recognized Julian today, he’d changed so much. Even his voice, once smooth and self-assured, now had climbed in pitch and developed a petulant whine like a child’s. And his face, though still tanned as it was in the photograph, seemed sallow and pinched, with a furrow between his brows and a strange new habit of dragging his gaze around the room as if the sight of it exhausted him.

  She wondered what Julian had been doing over the past five years. The last time she saw him was the night of the murders, when he had taken her home with some vague promise to check on her the next day. But he never did that. Like the others, he was simply gone.

  She had heard about him from time to time: Julian was in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia. Hot places, sunny and flat. An odd itinerary for a skier.

  She had nearly forgotten him until last winter, when she’d run into Zig Campanelli at a bar in Telluride. Zig was Julian’s best friend—if Julian had one of those. They had known each other since they were teenagers. It would have seemed strange not to ask after him, and after a few minutes she did. But even Zig seemed puzzled by the changes in Julian.

  “He’s not skiing anymore,” Zig said. “Hasn’t for years. I don’t know whether he busted something important or got bored or what. Last time I heard from him, he was in Bali, said he was sick of the snow. That’s all I could get out of him. He sounded...”

  “What?”

  But Zig only shook his head.

  * * *

  “This is it,” Emma said. She shut the door behind them and leaned back with an ecstatic sigh. “This is where she died. I can feel it.”

  The buzz in Julian’s ears had built to a dull roar. Who was this girl to say she felt something from Celia? As if she knew anything at all about what had happened, had even a sliver of an idea what it was all about. He ground his teeth in anger.

  Shut up. Stupid girl.

  What had he been thinking to bring her here? Here, of all places. She was nobody special, a friend of a friend, the tail end of a long chain of acquaintances that had started, as far as he could remember, with his buddy Zig Campanelli. The two of them had worked together for a time at ESPN and maintained a sporadic friendship over the years, which was built more on a mutual need for points of contact than true affection.

  Zig had a way of introducing Julian that set them both up for admirers.

  “This is my good friend Julian Moss,” he’d say. “Used to make a living carving up the ski slopes, kicking my ass most of the time. Swept the championships more than once, went to the Games and came home with a bronze in downhill. Then somebody noticed he’s not all that bad-looking, under the helmet.” Here he’d give Julian a friendly little clap on the shoulder. “My boss gave him a job anchoring the championships at ESPN. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

  And he’d saunter off, drink in hand, leaving Julian with another chance to parlay that biography into something truly worthwhile.

  Julian hadn’t seen Zig in years, but, like the Olympic medal, he was the gift that kept on gi
ving. When Julian had surfaced again in Colorado three weeks before, there wasn’t a scene in which he wouldn’t have known someone who knew someone else.

  In fact it was Emma, her girlfriends giggling and clutching at each other in the background, who had approached him. They must have talked at some point, to some end, but if so the conversation had been so perfunctory that he couldn’t remember a word of it. She was in his bed the next morning. He had fucked her and she was willing to be fucked again and was not inclined to complain about the fact that his head was not with her for a moment. He was a status lay for her. The thrill, if there was one, was in his name.

  It was a fair trade. When he asked her later that day to come up here with him, she agreed happily, possibly imagining herself as Julian Moss’s girlfriend, a further bump in status. She could write about it on Facebook, or send a Tweet, or whatever was the latest venue for the humblebrag: Driving up to Telluride with Julian. First time in an F-Type, OMG!!!

  She was entitled to that. It was his end of the trade. He was aware that the ache in his jaw was not Emma’s fault. She couldn’t help the nasal drone of her voice or the fact that it bored into his ear like a hungry beetle. It was irrational to blame her when she was clearly doing her best. But every time he looked at her vapid face—features so like Celia’s but put together all wrong—he wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake until something came loose.

  He set down the suitcases and walked slowly back to her. Emma gazed up with a fatuous smile as if she thought she was too goddamned irresistible for words. He unbuttoned her shirt. She was wearing some sort of push-up bra, with a hard lace-encrusted pad that scratched his palm.

  Celia had never worn anything under her shirt. The shallow swell of her breast made barely a ripple in her clothing, so he supposed she didn’t need one. But he’d once caught a peek through the armhole of a loose-fitting blouse, where her ribs laddered up the side of her bare chest, and he’d sprung so fast he had to leave the room.

  “Take your pants off,” he said to Emma. She wriggled out of her jeans and stood against the wall with her hip cocked, grinning as if she expected him to take her picture.