Left Turn at Paradise

by Thomas Shawver

  We walked on, chatting among the roses while bees and butterflies flittered about our heads. Her voice was so matter-of-fact when describing the trials and joys of dealing with livestock and nature that I didn’t realize until she turned her face up to me that her cheeks were streaked with tears.

  “It must be difficult for you,” I said. “Your relationship with Pillow, I mean.”

  “You saw the look in her eyes. She’ll never forgive me for being such an irresponsible mother.”

  “Why not ask?”

  “It’s easier for a victim to forgive than for the offender to ask. Pillow is not that generous, and I’m not that brave.”

  “I understand, Esme. My daughter used to blame me for her mother’s death. But things can change. Don’t discount the pardoning power of the human heart.”

  She nodded politely, without conviction. A cloud crossed the sun. Its shadow made her face look all the more skeletal and forlorn.

  We proceeded uphill in silence. At some point, not sure that my presence was still welcome, I stopped to admire the soaring flight of a falcon. The raptor made a startling cry, stretched back its wings as if it were an arrow, and dove in a direct vertical line to snatch a hare four times its size. Snapping the victim’s neck with its curved beak, the bird began to pluck its quivering flesh.

  Esme was far ahead by the time I resumed the uphill walk.

  Ten minutes later I found her standing on a ledge of crumbling rock, her toes hovering over the precipice and arms extended as if they were wings. The turquoise waters of the glacial runoff rippled like fluttering ribbons five hundred feet below.

  * * *

  *1 Thank you

  *2 The tallest tree in New Zealand, it can grow to 150 feet.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I’d have been too late to grab her had she truly intended to jump. As it was, my howl got her to turn away from the edge.

  She stared at me without expression. I wondered if the years of drinking had addled her brain.

  Finally, I said, “I thought you meant to harm yourself.”

  She blinked. Gradually, the color seeped back into her face.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, walking toward me. “I wasn’t in danger. It calms me to stand here and gaze out as if I were a bird, free and light as air. I didn’t even realize you’d come up until you shouted.”

  She took hold of my arm.

  “What do you think of Mr. Hart?” she asked unexpectedly.

  “He’s a first-rate bookman,” I answered, shrugging, “but about as modest and trustworthy as Mussolini.”

  “I agree. The man’s face has dishonesty written on it like a hieroglyphic.”

  “Pillow cares for him in ways I can’t understand.”

  “She’s a hard one, Michael. Not just with me.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  Esme released her grip, sat on a small boulder, and motioned for me to join her.

  “How much do you know about Penelope?” she asked.

  “She’s not been particularly forthcoming about her past.”

  “That sounds like her.”

  “Cattley filled me in on some things. Pillow wasn’t keen on seeing you again.”

  The skin under Esme’s eyes turned even paler.

  “An unwed mother who also happened to be a drunk wasn’t exactly a formula for parenting success,” she said softly.

  How well I knew. Trade “unwed mom” for “widowed dad” and she’d described my relationship with my daughter.

  “She jumped at the chance to escape, not only me, but New Zealand. Ivo provided her with everything she needed financially, but not emotionally. The school was strong on scholastics and discipline, perhaps too much for a girl not used to either. Penelope rebelled, finding solace in trips to London, hanging out with toffs like Alistair Wilkes-ffolkes, fifth baronet of Dalhousie. Are you aware she was married to him?”

  “Hart briefly mentioned it, but Pillow’s trust in me apparently doesn’t extend that far.”

  Esme paused, a painful recollection transforming her face into a bitter mask.

  “Wilkes-ffolkes decamped for the south of France a year after their wedding, having become infatuated with a South African fashion model. He left Penelope with a pile of gambling debts owed to a London-based oligarch named Goshenkin. When Wilkes-ffolkes ignored the threats, the Russian looked to her for payment. The amount wasn’t insurmountable—fifty thousand pounds or so, a sum Ivo could have covered without a hiccup. But such was her embarrassment she didn’t tell him.

  “She agreed to settle the account by becoming Goshenkin’s mistress. But after a month of that, the Russian offered her to an oil official in Azerbaijan with whom he was trying to close a deal. This time she refused. Goshenkin sent two henchmen to teach her a lesson. After raping her they tossed acid at her face. She squirmed at the last second so that it splashed down the right side of her neck and chest.”

  Esme stood and returned to the edge of the cliff.

  I started to speak, but she raised her hand for silence. For a long minute the only sound I heard was the schuss of the wind as it spiraled up from the river.

  “You see, Mr. Bevan,” she said, gazing back at me, “it’s not only physical scars that have made my daughter what she is.”

  “Has she had therapy?”

  “I suppose her healing, such as it is, has been a result of part ownership in The Book and Bell.” Esme’s expression brightened. “Pardon me for asking this, but have you been intimate with Penelope?”

  “She can be very friendly when the mood is upon her.”

  “Well put, Mr. Bevan. I’m glad that her taste in men has improved, but I do wish she would stop calling herself Pillow. It has such a negative connotation.”

  “All things considered—”

  “Listen to me,” she interrupted. “You’ve seen how fragile she can be. She needs protection, if not from Hart, from the people who surround her father. Something is terribly wrong up there. I’ve asked Tane to watch out for both of you. But he’ll need help.”

  “I’ll do what I can. I promise.”

  “Good. I once hoped this fellow Hart would be the antidote to her misery, but having met him, I know that isn’t possible.”

  She picked some more wildflowers and we started down the steep slope.

  * * *

  At dawn the next morning Hart, Pillow, and I ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, rack of lamb, and porridge while listening to Tane explain what lay ahead. It basically came down to a rugged two-day hike, weather permitting, once the chopper dropped us off at Pearl Flat. After that, he didn’t know.

  We drained our last cups of coffee, hit the restroom a final time, and grabbed our gear.

  While the others proceeded down the stairs of the porch, Esme took me aside to deliver an odd-looking pendant. The flat jade object was three inches high and a couple of inches wide. The rudely carved figure on it resembled a human embryo. A leather string was attached to it through a hole at the top.

  “Wear this,” she told me, as the helicopter approached. “It’s a heitiki made of the most highly prized variety of greenstone. It has strong powers and will protect you.”

  She clutched my hand, then turned and walked briskly back to the lodge. I slipped the leather string with the jade object around my neck so that it rested against my breastbone.

  Then, before joining the others, I checked my cell phone for the last time before losing service in the mountains.

  On it was a text message sent an hour earlier:

  Regarding that headless trunk washed up at Point Reyes. A weird bow tie found around stump of neck. Rubber ducks on it. Mean anything to ya? Luv! Josie.

  * * *

  A sane person would have done an about-face to the lodge, rung up the jet boat for return service, spent another pleasant interlude among Esme’s wildflowers, and speeded back to civilization before nightfall. But those damn words Josie had said back at the bookshop about lifeboats still
rattled in my brain. I was going to see this thing through. For Riverrun. For Josie. For me.

  I no longer doubted that Hart conspired to have Billy Bartow sneak into my room at the Marines’ Memorial Club. Afterward, he killed him and made up the story that his journal had been stolen as well as mine.

  Even if I believed Pillow wasn’t in on the murderous business, I wasn’t ready to share my suspicions with her. It was hard enough to conceal my own knowledge of Hart’s guilt. Two of us could never pull off the charade.

  Chapter Twenty

  The bright red twin-engine Squirrel helicopter, specially adapted for taking trekkers up to the remote valleys and glaciers, was piloted by a yellow-bearded pakeha from Christchurch named Lars Jensen. The man looked more suited to the prow of a Viking longship than the cockpit of a flying machine.

  “It’s a short but bumpy ride,” he said, once we’d belted in and clamped on our earphones.

  Seconds after receiving confirmation from the control station in Queenstown, the engines started and the blades began to turn, slowly at first, then blindingly fast to form a solid blur above us. When the rotor speed indicator reached 200 RPMs, Jensen gradually pulled back the pitch lever and the machine leisurely lifted as if reluctant to leave the earth. At fifty feet he checked clearance of the nearby trees, then pushed the joystick forward. The chopper lurched slightly before beginning its swift climb toward the towering peaks.

  It was a six-seater with wide Plexiglas windows for sightseeing. In my college days I once spent a harrowing afternoon stuck on a knife-edge ridge below the summit of Mount Wilson in Colorado, and would have conquered the Grand Teton in Wyoming had I not broken an ankle near the summit. Although I felt an aversion to enclosed spaces, ballroom dancing, and texting teenagers, fear of heights wasn’t one of my phobias. I love the mountains.

  Interspersed among the high ranges, massive glaciers spread below us like the rumpled carpets of giants. A spiderweb network of cascading waterfalls, streams, and deep valleys filled every crease. I pressed my face to the window and, between glances to my map, matched names to the summits and ice plateaus as we scuttled past them at 140 knots: Whitbourn, Snowball, Mercer, Bonar, French Ridge, Aspiring. Smaller locales read like a litany of past adventures and disasters: Shotover Saddle, Shovel Flat, Rough Creek, and Gloomy Gorge.

  The service ceiling of the twin Squirrel was 11,000 feet, so we weren’t flying so much above the peaks as between them. Even then the Squirrel’s rotors struggled to maintain height in the thin air as the pilot skillfully maneuvered through the gaps on an east-northeast course toward the Haast Range. The crown jewel of the chain was the massive snow-bedecked triangle of Mount Aspiring, known to the Maoris as Tititea.

  At one point Jensen turned his head to me and shouted over the rotary blades, “You say your name is Bevan?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’ve got something in common with that peak six clicks ahead.”

  At a mere 7,000 feet, Mount Bevan’s cone of snow and rock was cloaked that morning in the shadow of the larger Aspiring, but it was impressive enough to claim as a good omen.

  Two kilometers south of my namesake mountain, we began a stomach-flopping descent into a mist-shrouded canyon where the helicopter battled crosswinds whipping down the gorge from the higher elevations. Jensen maintained control, however, feathering the propellers above the cobbled river stones of Pearl Flat. He let the machine hover for a moment before its final direct descent. Then he worked the joystick, and within a minute we settled gently next to the rushing waters of the Matukituki River.

  The rotor arms slowed gradually to a stop and, after our pilot’s warning to mind the back blades, we stepped out and unloaded our gear.

  “Good luck,” Jensen called, before revving up the rotors again. “I’ll see you here in twelve days.”

  Protecting our faces from the spray churned up by the ascending helicopter, we shrugged on our packs and gathered around Craddock, who had unfolded his Ordnance Survey over a boulder. The map’s sharply meandering contour lines—orange for the mountains and blue for glaciers—were tightly spaced, indicating dramatically steep elevations on either side of the river.

  “We’ll head up the valley for a bivouac at the Scotts Rock hut,” he told us. “In the morning we’ll ascend 1,600 meters to the Matu Saddle and, if the weather holds, cross over and descend to the lake.”

  He pointed on the map to a blue oval far below the Bonar Glacier. It was a mile long and a quarter mile wide at either end, but so isolated it didn’t warrant a name on the map, only its elevation: 517 meters.

  “Then what?” Hart asked.

  “We follow the western edge where the Waipara River flows into it, then follow the rapids up the gorge for four or five kilometers to where I’ve unloaded supplies in the past. I expect we’ll be met by scouts from the compound. After that, we’ll just have to see if we’re allowed to go further. I’ve never been allowed past that point.”

  * * *

  We arrived at the Scotts Rock shelter hut after a leisurely four-hour hike swatting sand flies the entire way. It was a good warm-up for the grueling vertical ascent that followed, taking us from the valley floor through moss-covered beech forests to the tree line.

  I was in the lead, breaking the path through knee-deep snow, when I edged around a jagged escarpment to come face-to-face with a simian-faced demon straight out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Balanced on a six-inch ledge, the creature peered down at me with wide-set orange eyes beneath a pair of stumpy horns. Completing the satanic image was a mane of reddish fur that extended from neck to cloven hooves.

  I shouted out my discovery, but the tahr bounded away before the others rounded the corner.

  * * *

  It was late afternoon when we spotted the Matu Saddle still high above us. The ground ahead involved verglassed rock slabs and a thin coating of snow that blew away with every gust. Hard to manage under any circumstance, but not the kind of ground you can get four people over safely with daylight fading.

  It was Adrian Hart who led us in these worsening conditions. He may not have had the classical physique of an athlete, but he had shown remarkable endurance and agility on the rougher patches.

  At one point we encountered an extremely narrow and exposed ledge where the steep slope seemed to angle outward. There was an alternate route, but this one was considerably shorter and, with night approaching, we wanted to get to the relative safety of the saddle. Roping up, we watched Hart inch along the tapered shelf. It went well for about six feet until his ax struck a crack in the wall hidden by a thick sheet of ice. It gave way abruptly, causing him to teeter backward toward the void.

  We braced for the belay, but he pivoted on a thin outcrop of rock and leapt back to where we stood.

  It was a move worthy of Baryshnikov.

  “Indeed,” he said, with no more irritation than if he’d stepped in a cow patty, “perhaps it’s best to take the other option.”

  The other option was only slightly better. Sidestepping on slippery crusts of ice that crumbled beneath our crampons, it was close to midnight when we staggered into the lee shelter of a ten-foot-high slab of rock. Although exhausted, we got little sleep as we lay huddled in a snow cave listening to enormous chunks of ice crashing off the Bonar Glacier.

  Toward sunrise, I noticed Pillow had laid her head against Craddock’s shoulder. When she thought no one was looking, she used her glove to affectionately brush off a crust of frozen snot clinging to his mustache.

  * * *

  The next morning rose clear except for a high white cloud approaching from the north in an otherwise blue sky. After linking up with the half-inch-thick static rope, we headed upward with heads down, keeping ten yards’ distance between us.

  Craddock opted for a route that had looked promising the day before, but by noon we were questioning that decision. We clawed our way seven hundred meters up a steep scree slope, gaining two meters for every one sliding back. It was like s
kating uphill on ball bearings, amplified by exposure of a thousand meters on either side.

  My lungs felt packed with concrete for the first hour and my calves were burning from the steady exertion over the loose surface. But when I caught my second wind, something strange happened—I suddenly felt downright exhilarated, as if I’d been injected with a powerful drug.

  It must have been a combination of the altitude and lack of sleep that caused the hallucination, but “floating on air” began to take on a literal meaning for me. Sparked by the weird adrenaline high, I heard myself demanding to take the lead from Craddock.

  His judgment must have been suffering from the altitude as well. Over the irate objections of Hart, he agreed to switch positions on the rope. We stopped on a reasonably comfortable ledge to slip the 150-foot-long rope through the harnesses around our waists and clipped our carabiners to it. Pillow maintained her place behind me, with Craddock linking his oval ’biner behind her. Hart remained at the rear.

  I surged ahead, keeping the line taut as the others struggled to match my pace. We were less than a hundred meters from the ridge marking the col when I paused to look over my shoulder at my fellow climbers.

  “What’s with you feather merchants?” I shouted. “Can’t handle a little exercise? Why, once on Mount Wilson, I—”

  And that’s when a powerful gust of surprisingly warm air launched me off the slope as if I were a character in Marvel Comics.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  They’ve named it the foehn in Europe. It’s the chinook or snow-eater in our Rockies. New Zealanders call the warm hurricane-force wind that rolls without warning over a summit the Nor’west Arch.

  The hundred-mile-per-hour hammer inflated my rucksack cover like a sail and sent me flying through space. The rope made a zinging noise as it ran through the carabiner attached to my waist harness until the free fall abruptly ended with an excruciating jerk.