First Tracks

by Catherine O'Connell

  For some reason, this led me to think of my lunch with Zuzana McGovern at the Jerome this afternoon. Given the choice between dealing with her and Hera, I’d take Hera any time.

  When class ended three hours later, I deftly slipped out the door before Professor Dale could corner me to ask me any questions. I grabbed a copy of the local paper on my way out of the building and tucked it under my arm. Snow was coming down harder than ever and everything was blanketed in white, including my car. I tossed the newspaper and my backpack on to the front seat before brushing it off.

  The windows were fogged up when I climbed into the car, so I turned on the defrost. Switching on the interior light to read while waiting for the windows to clear, I was jolted upright in my seat upon seeing the photo of a young woman gracing the front page. The copy underneath said she had not taken her flight as scheduled on Sunday and no one had been able to locate her since. Looking back at the picture, there was no doubt in my mind who the missing person was. It was the young woman who had been at the Bugaboo with Dr Duane Larsen on Saturday night.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I read the article squinting under the Wagoneer’s dim interior light. According to the girl’s roommate at the Snowflake Inn, Kim Woods hadn’t made it back on Saturday night. Which her friend didn’t find terribly odd in and of itself. She just assumed Kim had hooked up with someone. But when she hadn’t returned by the time they were supposed to leave for the airport on Sunday, she called the police as well as Kim’s parents. It hadn’t taken her parents long to push the panic button and now the missing girl was front-page news. Further down in the article Dr Duane made his appearance. He told police he had dropped Kim off at her hotel before making his way back to his down-valley home. The article went on to explain that he was a family friend and felt absolutely horrible that she had gone missing.

  I put the paper down, beyond weirded out that I had spent my entire Sunday with the guy who was perhaps the last person to see Kim Woods before she disappeared. My fertile brain started scrolling through options that didn’t involve Duane Larsen. The young blond found a guy and ran off. Unlikely. She’d left the Bugaboo around one a.m. and since town shuts up tight as a drum at two that didn’t give her a lot of time to make a new friend. Unless it was the guy she was talking to in the Bugaboo before she and the doctor left. Or maybe she’d decided to go for a late-night walk, made a drunken mistake and wandered off to parts unknown. Not impossible. There were plenty of places to wander off the beaten path and fall victim to cold and wilderness. Her lodge was one of the last old-fashioned ones on the edge of town. It was also walking distance to the river.

  My heart skipped, thinking of the banks of the Castle Creek and how steep and slippery they could be. There had been a sad story the year before of a young New Zealander who up and disappeared. There had been all kinds of talk of foul play until his body turned up at the base of the Maroon Creek bridge a week after the alarm was sounded. It was determined he had somehow stepped over the edge of the bridge in a snowstorm.

  I’d been on the volunteer search party, but wasn’t there when his body was recovered. Instead I was with his parents when the bad news was delivered. They had flown from New Zealand to help in the search, and it was utter heartbreak to watch the couple clinging to each other with all hope gone, trying to digest the loss of their only child.

  Could something so bizarre have happened to young Kim?

  I pulled from the college lot on to eighty-two and headed into town with thoughts of both Kim Woods and Duane Larsen occupying my mind. OK, I barely knew the guy, but something about him was compelling. Don’t get me wrong, there was still a huge block of sadness left by Warren’s death, but much as it seemed premature, my day with Duane had created a wedge towards moving that block along. And while the loss of Warren hurt, the stark reality was that Warren wasn’t mine, never had been and, thus, wasn’t mine to lose. He was a great ski, bike and hike buddy who had been killed in a bizarre, inexplicable ski accident leaving behind a widow and an unborn child. His death was a true tragedy that may have belonged to me, but he didn’t.

  So now, I was admitting to myself that maybe subconsciously, I had been thinking things could go someplace with Dr Duane. He ticked all the boxes. His looks for one, his comely face and strong jaw, those lovely mismatched eyes behind the wire rims, his calm manner. The fact that he not only had a regular job, but it was one that helped people. He was cute, he was fit, he had a career and a life. He lived here, he was available, and he could ski. In truth, though I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself, somewhere in the recesses of my mind maybe I was thinking there were possibilities with him. With forty looming in the not-too-distant future, it might be time to think about where the rest of my life might be going. Right now it was a one-wheeled cart on a one-wheeled street. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great life, and you would literally have to crane me out of this valley. But I’d reached the age where you might give up some things for the right person. Had I actually been flirting with the idea that Duane Larsen could be a right person? A guy who now turns out to be the last person to see a missing girl?

  When I reached town, I headed straight to City Market. I may have been weirded out about Duane Larsen and Kim Woods, but that didn’t stop me from being hungry. It takes more than utter disaster to ruin my appetite. I parked and went inside.

  The store was its usual seasonal packed chaos and I had to squeeze past a group of Argentines in the entrance who were clearly oblivious to the existence of people in the northern hemisphere. I went straight to the sushi counter at the back of the store and picked up a tuna roll and a sashimi package, my mind churning in multiple circles as I went through the self-pay.

  The Bundy guy and his cameraman were outside the store again looking for fresh victims. As far as I could see, they had hit the mother lode. They were interviewing a long-time local who was not only a hotshot skier, but a local journalist. I remember he’d had his own Ted Bundy story in the paper a few years ago. He’d been around ten years old the day Ted jumped out the courthouse window. And like all little boys, his imagination had filled up with possibilities. So when he came home one day and reported that he had ridden his bike past Ted Bundy wearing lederhosen, no one believed him. Later, it was learned the house of a local Austrian guy had been broken into during Bundy’s disappearance and his lederhosen stolen. The apologies from adults had flown like the river filled with snowmelt.

  I brushed the snow off the windshield and climbed into the car. MISSING GIRL screamed at me from the front seat. I picked up the newspaper and threw it into the back seat.

  I pulled up in front of my home with stories of Ted Bundy filling my mind, of how all the local girls had been terrified and how no one had gone anywhere by themselves the entire time he was unaccounted for. Though my solitude meant the world to me, I got out of the car thinking of how truly isolated I was. Maybe it was the resurrected Bundy stories, maybe it was the missing girl, but suddenly the idea of getting a new dog didn’t seem such a bad idea.

  I’d eaten my carryout sushi dinner and was in the loft reading the next week’s Mythology assignment. Zeus had just impregnated Danae in the golden shower of all time when the landline rang. I picked up the cordless phone next to me. It’s hard to say whether I was more freaked out or excited to hear his voice.

  ‘Hi. Duane Larsen here.’ He sounded nervous, like a nerdy high-school junior building up confidence to ask the most popular girl to the prom. There was vulnerability present in his voice that had not been there before. An unfamiliar trill of excitement ran up my spine.

  ‘Dr Larsen,’ I lobbed back, putting the realm of conversation in his hands, trying to sound flippant, as if I had no knowledge that he was the last person to see a girl who went missing in the early hours of the morning.

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve read the paper or not.’ He left it dangling. I had no option but to pick it up.

  ‘Uh, yeah, I did. I saw about your friend’s daughter. That’s terrib
le,’ I added swiftly, stuck for better words.

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’ And without any further mention of the missing girl, he said, ‘I could really use a friend right now. Could you meet for a bite?’

  It was eight o’clock and I was dressed in my pajamas. Well, the oversize T-shirt I sleep in. My grocery-store sushi was just making its way along my digestive tract. The last thing on my mind was more food.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘You like sushi?’

  ‘Love it.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  I was on my way into town for my second sushi meal of the night, and my third in two days, questioning the wisdom of a rendezvous with a man who was the last person to see a young girl before she went missing. But my curiosity was in full thrust and I figured there could be no danger in meeting him in a public place. Not wanting to put Jimmy Finkle at risk of aggravating his well-heeled clientele again, I told Duane to meet me at the second most popular sushi place in town, a place half as expensive as where Toby and I had dined the night before.

  He wasn’t there when I arrived, so I took a seat at the sushi bar thinking that was safer than a table. He walked through the curtained door five minutes later, brushing snow off his jacket and hair in the entry. He saw me watching him and smiled. My smile back was manufactured. After all, there was no way of knowing for sure if he was a good guy or a predator.

  ‘Hello, Doctor,’ I said, holding out my hand as he sat down in order to avoid any intimate gesture such as a hug. He took my hand and held it a bit too long, one green eye, one brown, intent upon mine. He looked rattled.

  ‘Greta, I’m so glad you came. You’re looking at a guy who could really use an ear.’ A Johnny-on-the-spot waiter appeared to take a drink order and we both ordered a beer. The waiter disappeared and with the first round of business taken care of, he proceeded to the second. ‘So you read about Kimmy disappearing?’

  The intimate use of the girl’s name threw me a little. The paper had referred to her as Kim. ‘It just defies imagination,’ he continued. ‘I dropped her off in front of the Snowflake and watched her climb up the stairs. What happened from there is a total mystery. Her roommate said she never came inside.’ He bowed his head in frustration and a thatch of hair fell across his forehead. He brushed it back with his hand. ‘You can’t know how responsible I feel. I’ve known Kimmy since she was born. Her father was my college roommate at Cornell. I was an usher at her parents’ wedding.’

  He paused to sip his beer. It looked like he was having trouble swallowing. Nerves, I decided. He continued his story. ‘Dave and Nancy flew in this morning and spent the day with the police. I just left them at their hotel. They didn’t want to eat anything. They’re completely distraught.’

  ‘I would guess so. But what about you? What are they saying to you?’ I asked frankly, wanting to spit the question into open air as quickly as possible.

  ‘Dave and Nancy?’

  ‘Them too. But I’m talking about the police.’

  His face turned incredulous that I would even pose the question, like he’d just been summoned to testify against his best friend. ‘You mean, because I dropped her off? They asked what we were doing together and I explained that I’m like an uncle to her. She’d asked me to take her and her friend to the Bugaboo because she read in People about all the celebrities there. But her friend decided not to come at the last minute. I guess she’d strained a muscle skiing and wanted to stay in the room and watch TV.

  ‘Anyhow, she found her celebrities. She pointed a couple of them out to me, one guy she said was a famous rapper. She was excited about that.

  ‘When I told her it was time to leave, Kimmy wanted to stay, but I told her she had to take a ride home from me. I didn’t want her walking home alone in the cold with her hotel on the edge of town like that. Dave and Nancy told me the police asked a couple of leading questions about me and they set them straight right away. They know how much I love that kid. This is as upsetting to me as it is to them.’

  ‘Maybe there’s some explanation,’ I offered lamely. ‘Maybe she met a guy or something and will turn up.’

  ‘I don’t know. I have a bad feeling. When I left Dave and Nancy at their hotel I felt so bad I didn’t know what to do. That’s why I called you. I didn’t want to be alone after leaving them. I didn’t want this sick feeling to gel any thicker than it already has.’

  One of the sushi chefs leaned over and asked in broken English if we wanted to order. Duane turned towards me and asked, ‘How hungry are you?’

  ‘Medium?’ Actually, I wasn’t hungry at all, but I’m always good once food is put in front of me. Especially good food. He turned back to the sushi chef and to my utter astonishment started speaking in Japanese. They went back and forth a couple of times before the chef smiled and began to work on a fish, his knife rapidly rendering it into perfect slices.

  ‘Were you just speaking Japanese?’ I asked, realizing the absurdity of the question the moment it left my mouth.

  ‘Bad Japanese, I’m sure. But I like to sharpen my tongue once in a while. Studied for a semester in Kyoto.’

  The chef laid a tray of sashimi on the ledge of the sushi bar. Duane picked up his chopsticks and began deftly sliding pieces into his mouth. I noticed he ate without any compunction, his appetite unaffected by being on the cutting edge of a disaster. Like mine. I ate too, my appetite healthy for someone who had already eaten dinner.

  After demolishing half the tray, he put his chopsticks down and turned to me, his eyes luminous in the low overhead lights. They were warm enough to melt me. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d just rather not talk about Kimmy anymore. There’s nothing I can do other than what David and Nancy are doing. And that’s wait. Who knows, maybe she’ll turn up tomorrow. She did have a small wild streak,’ he added.

  One would hope she’d turn up, but to me it wasn’t looking good.

  He played with his chopsticks for a minute and looked at me, putting on his professional face, probing my face with doctorly concern. ‘And how are you holding up? I mean after your two near misses?’

  ‘You asked me that the other day. And like I told you before, I feel fine. Physically anyhow.’ Without giving it proper thought, I blurted out, ‘Mentally is a whole other story. I’m having trouble with the widow.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘She’s got it in her head that I was having an affair with Warren and we were out of bounds for some kind of sexual tryst.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘Was I what?’

  ‘Having an affair with him.’

  ‘Only in my mind.’ Had I actually said that? I sure wanted to grab those words out of the air and shove them back in my mouth. But they had already gone to wherever sound goes when it brainlessly slips out of the hole you eat with. I hurried to clarify. ‘I might have had feelings for Warren, but it was totally one-sided and he never knew. It was never a topic of conversation and it never went anywhere except in my imagination.’

  I couldn’t believe I was confiding in this relative stranger like this. I mean, all said, it wasn’t like we were long-time buddies. I’d known him for less than a week. But there was something about him that was reassuring, a steadiness, an even keel. And he was safe to talk to. He didn’t know Zuzana or any other of the town’s players. It was a kind of safety net to have an unprejudiced third party to bounce things off. ‘If I could just remember, I could explain everything to her. There had to be a reason we were there. There had to be.’

  ‘Now I have a sense for what you’re going through. You know, the feeling something bad has happened and it’s somehow your fault.’

  ‘I don’t think that Warren’s death was in any way my fault. In fact, now I think I may have followed him out of bounds.’

  ‘You’re getting more memory back?’

  ‘Pieces. But each time they appear the time line goes farther.’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Remember how you got more memory back wh
en you were relaxed after skiing?’

  I nodded yes.

  ‘Then I suggest you relax more.’

  The rest of the meal passed amicably, and I think both of us were able to escape the pressures of circumstances beyond our control for the time being. We shared a little sake, but not too much, because we were both driving. I ate too much, kind of like the way early humans used to gorge until they were ready to explode since they could never be sure when or where the next meal might come from. He continued to blow me away with his command of Japanese as he went back and forth with the chef and then several other members of the staff. He would say something and they would laugh and nod, and I was starting to feel privileged just being with him. I’m usually not that kind of person at all. Maybe it was the sake. Or maybe it was him. All I know is I was feeling the best I had since Kayla’s death – not to mention Warren’s.

  After he paid the check, he insisted on walking me to my car. Which cracked me up since I’m a girl who can ski downhill with a 200-pound man behind me in a sled, carry seventy pounds on my back, throw a stick of dynamite thirty yards. I would dare anyone to mess with me. Plus the last thing in the world anyone needs to worry about is being attacked on the streets of Aspen, probably one of the safest places in the world. But I accepted his offer because I think we both wanted to prolong the moment.

  It was still snowing lightly, the gentle fluff that floats so very slowly it almost seems suspended in the air. The night was crisp and still and the streets silent as we walked side by side to the edge of town where I’d parked. There was a half-inch of new snow on the windows and the two of us brushed it off together with gloved hands.

  The door opened with a heavy metallic squeal, and I climbed into the driver’s seat. Then I rolled down the window, extending my time with him just that little bit. ‘I really enjoyed myself tonight,’ I said. ‘You gave me a vacation from my brain.’