First Tracks

by Catherine O'Connell

  When we got off the lift, Dr Larsen skied over to the trail map, oblivious to the giggles of some teenagers who were too cool for their own good. ‘To be honest this is my first skiing since I got here,’ he said, staring out over the rope that marked the edge of the ski area. ‘These views are breathtaking.’

  ‘I never get tired of them,’ I said honestly.

  He scrutinized the trail map, turning his head first one way and then the other, as if he were examining a museum piece. ‘Just blues over here?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t blue intermediate?’

  ‘Thought we’d start out easy. There’s a little blackage in the glades if you feel up for it later,’ I ventured. Before I had a chance to add anything else, his skis slipped off the ledge where we were standing and he started sliding downhill backwards, his body rotating back and forth as he fought against physics and gravity to turn himself around. Helpless to do anything other than watch, I held my breath as he sailed across the run into a pile of virgin snow on the other side, and landed unceremoniously on his butt. It was hard not to laugh, much less cringe at the reality that the day was going to be far worse than I’d imagined. I skied over to where he was working to pull himself out of the deep snow.

  ‘You OK?’ I asked, getting ready to take off my skis to help him.

  ‘I’m fine. No, leave your skis on,’ he commanded. After some effort, he managed to get himself upright and brushed the snow from the one-piece suit. ‘That’ll wake you up.’

  ‘Look, maybe I got you in a bit over your head,’ I lamented, watching my perfect day go all to hell. ‘Just follow me and take it slow. We’ll do something easier from here.’

  He slid unsteadily back on to the groomed slope and followed me as I started making wide gentle turns, the type I’d employed during my years as a beginning ski instructor when my students would follow like a row of penguins. After executing a half-dozen of the controlled turns, I looked back to see how he was doing. He had stopped and was standing uphill from me on trembling legs. Oh God, he’s terrified, I thought.

  ‘Just take wide turns,’ I encouraged him, preparing to sidestep back up the hill to help. Without warning, his skis pivoted downhill and he shot right past me. I took off in pursuit, praying he’d be able to stop without hurting himself. Most of the area was groomed, making it easy to pick up speed, and he was quickly out of sight. Chasing after him, I broke all the rules I lecture skiers on regularly, like skiing without making any turns and not skiing too fast, in hopes of catching him. Occasionally, he would come into my sightline and then disappear behind a rolling bank. It wasn’t until we were halfway down the run that I realized he wasn’t out of control, but was actually skiing, and with a good deal of finesse I might add. He had been gaming me all along.

  He was waiting at the bottom when I did a hockey stop behind him. ‘That was a nice warm-up,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s go ski.’

  What do they say about not judging a book by its cover? I guess it’s never too late to learn. It turned out that Dr Duane Larsen was not only a good doctor, but a damn good skier as well. When he said he had grown up in the east, he failed to mention that it had been Vermont and that his family had owned a small ski lodge in Stratton.

  ‘So what’s with all the old gear?’ I asked after we settled on to another chairlift, this one servicing the more challenging terrain. ‘Those skis have to be collectors’ items.’

  ‘They’re not that old. I bought them in the nineties, just before starting med school. That was the last time I skied before moving here. They are shaped, you know?’

  I looked at his skis resting on the footrest. ‘Yah. Probably the first year of shaped skis.’

  He ignored my slight. ‘Anyhow, wasn’t really much time for skiing in my life after starting school. You know, internship, residency, fellowship in the Midwest. That kept me busy for around twenty years. Besides, my parents got old and sold the lodge. They’re gone now,’ he said, bowing his head briefly. Then he bounced back up. ‘Hey, these skis’ve only got about twenty days on them and I am vehemently against waste. Besides, I never put a whole lot of stock in having the “latest” equipment.’ He used his fingers to put ‘latest’ in quotation marks.

  ‘Well let me give you directions to the Thrift Shop, so you can at least get some ski clothes that don’t make you look like you belong in the dinosaur museum here.’

  ‘Dinosaur museum? There were dinosaurs here?’

  ‘Yep. This whole area was a big watering hole for Mastodons. Of course, no one knew how big until some contractor was digging a new reservoir and saw a big bone sticking out of the earth. He stopped to investigate and realized it might be something important. They ended up digging up dozens of Mastodons. Just imagine if he just kept going and plowed all those bones back under the surface. Probably never would have known they were there.’

  ‘I bet there are a lot of buried bones around here that no one knows about,’ he said.

  We skied expert terrain the rest of the morning, the double black diamonds of the Cirque and the Headwall. While he wasn’t as strong as I am in the deepest snow, he qualified as competitive. Unlike Warren, however, he was tired by early afternoon and, being a physician, he recognized that most ski accidents happen because of fatigue. Contrary to my custom, we stopped for lunch.

  He filled his tray with an edible from just about every food group in the cafeteria line, and I opted for a turkey chili. He insisted on paying, and we carried the trays to a table near the window with a view of skiers heading towards the lift. It was obvious he had been ravenous. The moment we sat down he started eating and didn’t come up for air until he was halfway through his tuna melt and sweet potato fries.

  He put the sandwich down and took a huge drink of water. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you how you’ve been feeling after your CO incident. Any after-effects?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I mean, I felt a little strange for a couple of days, but nothing too serious. Why do you ask?’

  ‘You mean for what other reason than being an MD? None really. Just doing a little follow-up. You know a lot of people suffer memory loss, not to mention poor coordination after CO poisoning. Anything like that happen to you?’

  I started to shake my head and then thought of losing the sled on Kristi. I pushed back a pang of anxiety.

  ‘What about the avalanche? You getting any memory of that back?’

  I started to shake my head no again when a new image came to me. I was standing at the shed watching Warren get off the Ruthie’s chair. I’d called out, but he hadn’t heard me. My heart dropped as I watched him ski over to the boundary. I heard myself calling ‘Wait’ as I skied towards him. And then the memory stopped, once again pushed to its edge. I looked up at the doctor and said, ‘Wow. I just remembered a little more. I think I was trying to stop him from going out of bounds.’

  His smile was like a mother’s caress, soft but not overwhelming. ‘Sometimes memory starts coming back when you’re relaxed,’ he said.

  We took it easy for the rest of the afternoon and skied less challenging terrain, and I could tell he was struggling on the final run back to Base Village. But all in all, it had been a great day. For both of us. His car was parked at the intercept lot on Highway 82, so I offered him a ride down so he wouldn’t have to wait for the shuttle. He made a sound that could only be described as a chuckle when he saw the Wagoneer.

  ‘And you’re picking on my skis?’

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, this thing is a tank in the snow. At risk of sounding like someone’s grandfather, they don’t make them like this anymore.’

  ‘They sure don’t. We had one in Stratton. But it rusted out after twenty years of salt back east. If it’d been here, it’d still be running.’

  We rode in exhausted silence down the road to the highway, the January sky still deep blue, framed against the white of the surrounding mountains. We pulled into the intercept lot and I asked him where he’d parked. He looked a little embarrassed and
then directed me to the far row of cars. We stopped in front of a steel-gray Porsche SUV.

  ‘How’s it in the snow?’

  ‘Not as good as the Wagoneer,’ he confessed.

  SEVENTEEN

  The day had gone so unexpectedly pleasantly that I’d almost forgotten I had a hungry soldier in the house. Toby had always been a huge eater, and so I stopped at City Market on my way home to stock up on supplies. I lucked into a rare space in the parking lot and was climbing out of the car when a down-clad man in a black watch cap trailing a cameraman behind him came up and stuck a microphone in my face. The cap was pulled low on his forehead, his round cheeks pink with cold, a thick brown moustache curling over his upper lip.

  ‘Hi there,’ he greeted me in a sing-song of forced friendliness. ‘We’re making a documentary about Ted Bundy and we’re wondering if you could answer some questions for us?’

  ‘Sorry, but I’m in a hurry,’ I said, shutting the door for emphasis.

  ‘It wouldn’t take long. We’re looking for stories about him. Were you around when Ted Bundy escaped from the County Courthouse building?’

  ‘Look, I’m not sensitive about age, but I was about three when Bundy made his appearance here in Aspen. And I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, thank you. But this car was probably around. Too bad you can’t interview it.’ The interviewer’s eye slid from the Wagoneer to give me a better look. Considering the age of my vehicle, he must have assumed his interviewee would have been older.

  He laughed. ‘Never hurts to ask,’ he said. He signaled to his cameraman that I was a no-go. I watched them move on to their next victim, an older woman with time-weathered skin getting out of a Jeep. She was deep in conversation with them as I went into the store.

  Wheeling my cart down the aisles, I thought about the story I could have shared with them about the serial murderer, and I would have had I not been in a hurry to get home to my brother. Nearly everybody in town had a Ted Bundy story and I was no exception even though I wasn’t here at the time. It wasn’t my story, it was Sam’s, but it was a real hair-raiser.

  You see, serial killer Ted Bundy had made his first appearance in Aspen in 1975 when he abducted a twenty-three-year-old nurse from the hallway of a resort hotel in Snowmass. The woman had left her fiancé in the room to go retrieve something from her car and was never seen again. Alive, that is. Her naked body showed up the next spring. His next victim was a young woman in Vail. Same thing. Disappeared not to be seen again except as a corpse.

  Of course women disappearing makes everyone a bit skittish, and Ted had already left a trail of victims behind him in Utah. The women who went missing were all young women with long dark hair parted down the middle, which could have described half the female population of Aspen at the time. Sam told me that following the nurse’s disappearance, the whole town was so on edge, girls were afraid to go anywhere without companions, some of them even dubious of their own boyfriends.

  Bundy was finally arrested in Utah and tried for the murder of a young Utah woman, and the whole town took a deep breath. But there was no body in Utah, so it was impossible to pin a murder charge on him. Not so in Aspen. Caryn Eileen Campbell’s body had turned up, the twenty-three-year-old nurse who disappeared in Snowmass. Her corpse was tied to Bundy from hair fibers found in his car, and he was extradited to Colorado to face charges for her murder.

  Now a slick guy like Bundy didn’t get as far as he had gotten without having some high-performing brain cells, however evil they were. Insisting on representing himself, he asked to use the library in the vintage 1880s courthouse on Main Street. One day when the deputy guarding him turned his back, Ted jumped out a window and stripped off the black and red lumberjack shirt he wore to a less obvious blue shirt underneath. A witness saw the whole thing, but nonetheless, Bundy disappeared into the mountains for five days. Sam told me the whole town was on its ear. Even guys were afraid. The sheriff put a road block on the only road out of town in the winter and refused to take it down long after everyone was sure Bundy had fled.

  This is where Sam comes into the story. At the time, he was living with another ski bum just on the edge of town. In those days no one thought a thing about leaving their keys in the cars, so when a cold and hungry Ted Bundy came upon their driveway, he thought he’d found the mother lode. He stole Sam’s car. Since the road block prevented him from escaping the valley, he drove into town, in search of what, no one was ever sure. For some reason he was weaving. Hunger? Trying to keep his head low? No one knows, but luckily Aspen was a smaller town at the time. An Aspen cop pulled him over, ready to lecture Sam about driving after a few drinks too many. Sam said in those days the cops would just give you a lecture and let you walk home. When the cop approached the car, Ted grabbed a pair of sunglasses from the dashboard and kept his head low. The cop walked up to the car, and what does he see but an unshaven man cowering behind the wheel. ‘Hi Ted,’ was all he said.

  That could have led to a happy ending, but unfortunately the cagey murderer went on to escape the Glenwood Spring jail a few months later out of a heat duct. He made his way down to Florida where he murdered three more women in a sorority house. The sicko bit one of the women on the ass and it was his dental impressions that eventually sent him to the electric chair.

  I shivered and not because I was in the frozen section. Reliving Sam’s story and the thought that that kind of evil could be present in a place as beautiful as Aspen was as frightening as things got.

  I loaded up big time from the protein section with two large T-bones, and then headed to produce for potatoes and spinach. Back out in the parking lot the documenter and his cameraman were interviewing yet another victim, Martha Binyon, a local who had been an Aspen teenager in those days. She would remember Sam’s Ted Bundy story well. I graced Martha with a wink and a nod and fired up the Wagoneer.

  She was pointing at my car as I drove away.

  EIGHTEEN

  Toby was sitting in the Barcalounger watching television when I walked in, a Heineken perched on the table beside him. He was wearing a sweater and jeans, his stocking feet crossed at the ankles in a picture of ultimate relaxation. A pair of damp boots at the door testified to a walk some time earlier. The History Channel was playing, a program about trench warfare on the screen. He muted the volume when he saw me.

  ‘War is such a fucking waste,’ he said. ‘Did you know that over twenty million men died in World War One? Of disease if they weren’t blown to pieces?’

  ‘If war’s so bad, and I agree, then why do you do it for a living?’

  ‘Because man has been a predatory creature since the beginning of time and somebody’s got to play the good guy.’

  He got up and took his anger into the bathroom. I put the groceries down on the kitchen counter next to several empty beer cans. No judgment to be passed here. I just hoped the fresh six-pack I’d bought would be enough to get us through the night. When he came back, he left the TV muted and perched himself on a bar stool at the counter that divided the kitchen and living area and served as my table. He watched me unload the groceries.

  ‘How was your day?’ I asked.

  ‘Best one I’ve had in a long time. Didn’t get up until after noon, fixed up some of your eggs, and then I went out and hiked for a while. Jeez, it’s beautiful here, but it’s sure fucking cold!’

  ‘Not when you get used to it. Besides, there’s no humidity so it doesn’t go to your bones the way it did in Milwaukee.’ I stopped unloading groceries and unloaded a smile on my brother. ‘Sorry to be so late. Time sort of got away from me.’

  ‘Yeah? How’d the date go?’

  ‘It wasn’t a date,’ I said emphatically. ‘Though it did go better than I thought it would.’ My mind flashed to floating through the powder of the Headwall with Duane Larsen in my periphery. As heartless as it may sound, Warren’s loss had been muted for that period of time by the foot of fresh snow. I went back to unloading the groceries. Toby’s eyes rested on the overpriced steaks I
’d bought.

  ‘I’m sorry you went to all that trouble,’ he said, ‘but I’m really not in the mood for meat.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, mentally putting the steaks into the freezer. It would take me forever to eat all that beef. ‘Since when don’t you eat meat? And you are in the mood for what?’

  ‘Since I’ve seen a lot of what I’ve seen I’m not into red meat. You know what? I’m really craving sushi. Let’s go into town. I’ll take you out.’

  My brother eating sushi. That was a first.

  Thirty minutes later, after a hot shower and a change of clothes, I was riding beside Toby on our way into town. Toby was driving despite having consumed nearly a six-pack of beer. He wanted to drive and I let him. Which didn’t particularly bother me. I figured the danger of him driving after a few beers was nothing compared to the danger he faced from incoming weaponry.

  ‘Can’t tell you how good it feels to be behind the wheel and not worry about the road blowing up,’ he said as if reading my mind. He followed the headlights’ path down the road toward the Greenes’ cabin, the lights burning bright from within, smoke curling from the chimney, the air scented with the familiar smell of burning wood. The way the house was lit up made it seem like the perfect place for an elderly couple to cocoon. ‘They friendly?’ he asked, giving the cabin a nod.

  ‘I wouldn’t say they’re unfriendly. We’re just not close. Sam was never too keen on them.’

  ‘Well you really should strike up a friendship. I hate to think of you all secluded at the end of this road.’

  ‘You’re putting me on,’ I said, actually laughing out loud. ‘You’re driving around a hostile country in armored vehicles being shot at by people who would love to send you to the far end of eternity, and you’re worried about me being alone in what is probably the safest town in the country?’ Then I thought about Ted Bundy. Weird stuff can happen anywhere I guess. ‘I forgot to ask you how long you’re staying.’