“A big one!” Queenie yelled.
The wilderness was awe-inspiring but only at your peril could you convince yourself it was friendly. In the Roaring Fork Valley each year several people died in avalanches. When tumbling snow came to rest, it settled in chunks that had the consistency of concrete. Last March some of that lovely white powder, hurtling downhill at speeds reaching a hundred miles an hour, had flung one cross-country skier into a grove of trees with sufficient force to decapitate her.
Not friendly.
The searchers began the long upward traverse around the cirque leading to the Continental Divide. The wind flung whirling wisps of snow along the surface of the track.
Soon after 9 A.M., Harold Clark raised a mittened hand and pointed. “Down there!” Larsen and Queenie cut their engines and dismounted. Larsen’s wrist altimeter read 12,840 feet. They strapped their boots into snowshoes and moved downhill, Bimbo yipping and jumping at Larsen’s heels.
An hour later, when Queenie called a halt, Harold Clark shrugged helplessly. “Sure looked like it was round here. We could see the Bells over there.” Clark glanced round in all directions. “Might be upvalley a ways.”
Clouds gathered and shadows fled. In the high country such changes could happen in the space of a few minutes. A few thousand feet below them, the winter sun shone through the mist, but near timberline the wind and whirling snow scoured exposed flesh. Reaching into a drift where Bimbo had floundered, Queenie gathered the terrier into her arms. I shouldn’t have brought you, she thought. I was a wiseass. As usual, I knew more than anybody else.
An outcropping blocked their path. A dangerous cornice along the east side prevented the searchers from taking the lee, so they had to tramp around the west side in the full sweep of the wind.
Bimbo began to bark, then squirm. At first Queenie thought the terrier was frightened. But she wasn’t quivering or whining.
“Bimbo, baby …” Bimbo kept squirming. “Cool it!”
But Bimbo refused to cool it. And then Queenie smiled. “You smell a dead dog, sweet girl?”
She let go and was struck by a rush of fear as the dog catapulted from her arms. Crusts of ice had been blown clear of the week’s heavy fall. If the terrier slipped on one of those crusts, she would slide and keep sliding until she crashed into a tree.
“Bim-bo!”
The dog was white and small: difficult to see against fresh powder. She vanished into the forest of spruce, swallowed by dark blue shadows. Queenie plunged down after her, snowshoes ripping into the soft surface, with Larsen following and Clark lagging behind. The air was full of blown snow.
A small flash of white finally split the shadows. Queenie followed it. She heard a shout from behind. When she turned, Larsen was down, half of his body out of sight. Queenie plodded back through the chopped-up path of her own snowshoes and grabbed Larsen’s wet parka with her glove. His mouth and mustache had filled with snow. He was no longer wearing a hat.
Larsen gasped. “That fucking dog of yours could kill us all!”
Using his poles, he wrenched himself to one knee.
Queenie set out downhill into the forest of shadows. High in the cloudy sky above her a pair of dark red eagles rode the thermals. They had been known to hunt mountain goats and deer. Eagles, like the snow, were not always friendly.
From off to the left, Bimbo barked. Queenie yelled, “I’m coming, girl! Stay, Bimbo! You hear me?”
She reached the dog at a clearing on the edge of a meadow where a mound of snow about eight feet in diameter rose above the angle of the slope. Much of the snow had been torn away.
Not by Bimbo, Queenie realized. As soon as she was close she smelled something sickly sweet. Bimbo wheeled, whining, and dug with her small claws into a patch of exposed brown dirt. The wind moaned through the clearing.
Queenie hauled her avalanche shovel from her backpack. She began to dig. In a few minutes a stronger smell befouled the cold forest air. A bit of dark cloth showed. Queenie kept digging.
By the time Larsen reached her, she had scraped away a pack of dirt from dark blue nylon cloth. Chewed-on flesh appeared. Teeth gaped in what had been a mouth.
Larsen gasped, “You found it. I apologize to your mutt.”
“No, I didn’t find it,” Queenie said.
Larsen looked puzzled. “I can see it.”
Queenie said, “You’re not seeing an it. Not a dog. Two mouths. And the teeth in one of them have gold fillings.”
Above them stretched a lifeless zone of rocks and cold silence. Light sleet began to fall. Queenie said, “I’m declaring this a crime scene. Nothing to be touched within a distance of fifty yards. Not even a tree trunk. Got it?”
She was operating under what was called the Federal Incident Command System. She knew only that there were two human bodies in a stage of decomposition. Until it was proved otherwise, under the guidelines of the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office all unattended and unclassified death was considered homicide. In a black leather holster on her belt, besides a Smith & Wesson .357, a speed loader, and a pair of handcuffs, Queenie carried a two-way radio with fourteen channels. Her first signal on the emergency channel bounced off a repeater site downvalley and from there to the day-shift dispatcher in the Sheriff’s Office in the Aspen courthouse.
“Josh there?” Queenie asked.
In less than twenty seconds she had the sheriff on the radiophone. “Where are you, boss?”
“Men’s Club luncheon at the Little Nell. Between the burritos and the chocolate mousse, with fifty citizens of the Aspen business community hanging on my every golden word.” She heard a ripple of laughter in the background. “What’s up, Deputy?”
“I’m about three miles from Pearl Pass,” Queenie said, “and I have what appears to be two dead human bodies buried at a depth of four feet. The grave seems to have been disturbed by animals, and the bodies look to have been chewed up. Hard to say how long ago.”
The sheriff grunted. “How’s the weather?”
“Getting colder by the minute. I don’t recall any reports of missing people last summer, or even last winter.”
“Neither do I. Anyone was missing, we found ‘em. Who’s with you?”
She told him.
“Queenie, I’m appointing you incident commander. I’ll go set up a management page from the courthouse. What do you need up there?”
“Food, the coroner, and a couple of insulated tents.”
“Can a chopper get in to you?”
“Negative. I think we’ll need CBI. And the IAI people.”
CBI was the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, headquartered in Denver. IAI was the International Association for Identification. A Rocky Mountain division had been formed in 1976 after the Big Thompson Flood.
“Any ID on the bodies?”
“None visible.”
“In about ten minutes,” the sheriff said, “I’m going to get hold of all the available snowmobiles in the county, and send the coroner, and a deputy coroner, and pretty damn near all the people in our office that I can haul out of their beds and comas. Six of ‘em will spend the night with you. Can you handle that, O’Hare?”
“Sure,” Queenie said. “We can have a good party if someone brings beer.”
Chapter 6
The Bear
EXCITED, APPREHENSIVE, NOT listening to anyone’s advice, Dennis felt his heart pound as he sold his house in Westport quickly and cheaply. His real estate broker said, “Mr. Conway, the market is soft. If you were willing to wait another six months or so …”
Dennis said, “Don’t you understand that I don’t really care?” He sold his furniture to the first person who answered his ad in the Timesand made an offer. There would always be money. He had a recession- proof profession, and there was nothing wrong with his health except twinges in one knee from the Vietcong mortar grenade fragment. He sold his Mercedes because he had already bought a stick-shift red Jeep Cherokee at Berthod Motors in Glenwood Springs. He shipped everythi
ng else, including mahogany desk, paintings, books, CD collection, law library, and an entire container full of children’s toys, to Springhill.
He was upset when at almost the last minute his German housekeeper declined to make the move with him. His children were six and eight years old when they all moved West to live with Sophie Henderson. He sensed it would not be the easiest of adjustments. But if I’m happy, he reasoned, so will they be.
“Kids, the winter’s long, but there’s lots to do. We’ll ski and ice- skate. You’ll like the school—Sophie’s one of the teachers. I know you’ll miss your friends here, but you can call them, and when we come East you’ll see them. And there’ll be new kids. New friends.” Lucy and Brian seemed a little glum about these prospects.
Sophie’s house was large and old, with separate bedrooms for each of them. It was warm, dry, and comfortable, with fireplaces and wood stoves that could burn without polluting the Rocky Mountains, deep easy chairs, sofas, and an oak dining room table large enough to seat a dozen people. Sophie kept a freezer in the garage—after the hunting season, village friends or family would give her part of an elk to keep there. Reading glasses parked on the end of her nose, with the aid of French cookbooks she cooked venison stews.
Oil paintings and watercolors hung in the house among sporting prints and Hockney and Matisse calendars, and Dennis thought the oils were as good as anything he had seen lately in the better New York galleries. One of the oils—nude bathers on the edge of a river in a dreamlike fire-consumed summer landscape—hung in their bedroom.
“There’s a little combination-lock wall safe behind it,” Sophie said, “where I keep a few bearer bonds. And my private papers.”
“What’s the combination?” Dennis whispered in her ear.
“It’s in my will,” she said.
But it was the painting that held Dennis’s attention. “Who did it? And the others? There doesn’t seem to be a signature except that funny little green bird in the corner of each one.”
“My former father-in-law,” Sophie explained, “is named Harry Parrot. He’s the town painter and eccentric. That bird is his signature. He’s not terribly social, but I like him.”
The children had brought their cats with them, a neutered male named Donahue and a spayed female named Sleepy. As soon as they were freed from their traveling cages, Donahue and Sleepy began sniffing their way around their new domain. Sophie already had a cat door installed in the kitchen.
Before school opened Dennis took the children to ski at Snowmass, where there was easy terrain. Sometimes, with Sophie, they went cross-country skiing on a trail that led into wilderness.
“Don’t worry about them,” Sophie said. “They’ll adjust. Once they make friends you’ll wonder why they’re never home.”
They had hired a nineteen-year-old girl to clean and be there when the children came home from school. Her name was Claudia Parrot; she was the painter’s granddaughter. She had just graduated from Carbondale High.
“I’ll be working most days in Aspen,” Dennis said to her, “and Sophie’s still going to teach at the school. The kids will need a lot of tender loving care. Can you do that, Claudia?”
“I love kids,” Claudia said. “You know, if I didn’t have this job I’d be working at the quarry, or down in Glenwood Springs as a supermarket checker. I’m grateful to you.”
“She’s perfect,” Dennis said to Sophie.
“I remember when you talked about bringing in an au pair from Switzerland. I told you: you can have everything you want in Springhill except the New York Giants.”
Dennis was a man of great optimism. “I’ll have them too,” he said, “when it comes time for the NFL play-offs.”
He asked about her husband, Ben Parrot, who had been killed in an avalanche while heli-skiing in Canada. “You hardly ever mention him.”
“It’s been six years,” Sophie said, pulling her hair back. “I don’t want to sound cold, but his death was a shock, and I grieved for two years, and then I got over it. He was my second cousin. At a certain age we became sexually aware, and the other one just happened to be at hand and available. Sex led to marriage, marriage led to continuity … but there was something missing. It wasn’t a passionate marriage. Ben was a good man, but he was far from a great mind, and he could be a bore.”
Sophie had told Dennis that she and Ben had tried to have a child and failed. “Do you want to try with me?” Dennis asked.
“I’m sure it would be great fun trying”—Sophie’s broad mouth curved in the smile that always touched his heart—”but I’m not really up for it. I feel too old.”
“You’re only thirty-seven. These days women have children well into their forties.”
“I know, but …” She loosened her hair, letting it cascade around her face. “Lucy and Brian are enough to satisfy my maternal instinct. I love them, Dennis.”
He was disappointed but it was not an issue he could press. Let it be, he instructed himself. You love her. Don’t try to change her.
Almost right away Brian and Lucy cleaved to her and seemed to benefit from the harmony that was at the heart of her nature. She read to them from Dr. Seuss books, hauled them with her when she went shopping in Carbondale, and sent them on errands to the little general store in Springhill. She thanked them for helping, and hugged them. One day after school she had a snowball fight with Brian, and they banged into the house through the kitchen door, red-faced and laughing. She began teaching Lucy to play the violin.
Scott and Bibsy Henderson fell immediately into the role of grandparents and spoilers. Dennis was delighted, realizing that the children had lacked all that in Westport. He had been both father and mother to them for too long. Bibsy said to him, “We never thought it would happen. Sophie was so standoffish with men. Thank you, dear Dennis.”
In February of 1994, a month after Dennis moved to Springhill and a year after he had met her on Aspen Mountain, he and Sophie were married at the Interfaith Chapel in Pitkin County. No honeymoon until spring, they agreed—let’s give the kids time to settle in. Then they would board an Air France jet in Los Angeles and spend two weeks on the island of Mooréa in the South Pacific. “I fell in love with the name when I was a child,” Sophie said.
“I’m glad you weren’t taken by the cadence of Timbuktu,” Dennis said, though he would have gone there or anywhere with her.
He drove to Aspen four or five days a week to his wood-paneled office at Karp & Ballard. On the wall he hung his law degree from Yale and his framed certification of membership in the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. All that winter in the early mornings he heard the distant boom of explosions as ski patrols set off avalanches to clear the mountain slopes. By early March he was in court defending the seventeen-year-old son of a visiting film star on a drug-sale charge, and then a local bar owner on a DUI. He plea-bargained both cases before Judge Florian, the local district judge. Both his clients received suspended sentences. Dennis was pleased, and so were the clients.
New clients began to call. He began to feel he could make a living here—not a fortune, but enough to live on. That was enough. His ambitions and his vision of the future had changed.
In Springhill Dennis spent so much time with Sophie—talking, making love, listening to Mozart and Verdi in front of the log fire on winter and spring evenings—that he had little time for anyone else besides the children. Occasionally some friends came to dinner: Hank and Jane Lovell or Edward Brophy. The mountain hamlet was small. Life was simple. He had never seen a Springhill man wearing a jacket or tie, and the women, including Sophie, wore jeans not only to work but at home and in the evening. Yet there was nothing tawdry or common about them. In New York and Connecticut he had been accustomed to a physical cross-section of Americans, from the slim, beautiful, and fashionable to the weird, plain, and frighteningly obese. The inhabitants of his new hometown, however, were almost uniformly attractive and well formed. There seemed to be a simplicity about them and their
lives that he grew more and more to admire. Within a few weeks Dennis had met all of Sophie’s friends, neighbors, and family. She told him she had at least a dozen first and second cousins who lived in the town. “In fact, Oliver Cone is one of them.”
“What does the town do about inbreeding?”
“As much as it can. Oliver is the result of inbreeding—the positive side of it. He’s got a master’s in hydraulic engineering. He’s smart as a whip, although you wouldn’t know it unless he trusts you, and the only people he trusts are Edward and those pals of his he goes hunting with. He’s a first-rate bow hunter, did you know that? He supplies me with most of the venison every fall. He only works at the quarry because … well, because the quarry is a town-owned enterprise, and everyone pitches in.”
Sophie paused. “But of course you’re right. When I was younger I remember a girl who had an epileptic fit and died, and then there was a twelve-year-old boy who we couldn’t control, and he had to be sent away. That was all unfortunate. Since then, as far as I know, we don’t have any feebleminded Snopeses locked away in padlocked barns. We keep a good check on the family trees. We try to keep the bloodlines separate.”
“Who was ever able to deal with teenagers in rut?”
“In a community like this, if there’s a genetic risk, we have no misgivings about encouraging abortion. Obviously the kids can say no, and then there’s nothing we can do. But they usually listen to reason.” Something about the concept, and the way Sophie expressed it, troubled Dennis. At first he didn’t grasp it. Then it came to him.
“Who is the we you talk about? The we who keeps a check on family trees? The we who can ‘do nothing about it.’ Don’t tell me it’s part of the mayor’s job.”
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller Page 5