“No. I don’t see it.”
“Because you daren’t, Dennis. Not yet. Listen to me carefully. Think before you answer. Can you do that?”
Dennis nodded. He could try.
“If you”—Sophie leaned forward—“you, Dennis Conway—today, at your present age of forty-nine, were given the opportunity—barring accident or foul play, or any nasty disease that your body might already be harboring—to live to the age of one hundred, in a harmonious environment among your loved ones—to live with physical vitality and sexual power and a ripening intelligence, right through to the very end of your days on your hundredth birthday—provided that you would vow to submit to a humane, peaceful death at that end— would you say yes or no? Would you make that bargain? Or would you rather take your chances like your Aunt Jennie?”
Dennis stared at her.
“Your look speaks volumes,” Sophie said. “It’s not the devil asking Faust to give up his soul for eternal life. You’re getting a hundred-year guarantee of health. It costs you nothing.”
Still Dennis did not reply, and Sophie went on: “Another codicil to the bargain is this. You’d be ensuring that your children would have the same opportunity to live that way, and that long. Barring the unforeseen accidents that make this an imperfect and often cruel world, you’d be guaranteeing them a hundred years of healthy life. What they make of it, of course, no one can guarantee. Think about it! Is there any evil in that bargain? Where is the wrong? The injustice? You tell me. I don’t see any. Except perhaps for this one thing: that when your time came to depart, your friends and family would have to help you on the journey, because you can’t really do it alone. Yes, in the eyes of the law of the state of Colorado and the other forty-nine states and the federal government and all those other wonderful governments the world over, the loyal people who helped you to keep your promise to depart at the age of one hundred would be committing the crime of murder under section such-and-such of the penal code. How sinful. How inhumane. But is it, Dennis? Is it murder most foul? Or is it life most fortunate and death most enlightened? And if it were offered to you—you personally—would you say yes or no?”
“I’m not sure,” Dennis said. “It’s hard to answer something like that in theory.”
“In theory?” Sophie laughed with great gusto; he loved her laugh, even now, at a moment like this. “What makes you think it’s a theoretical question? We don’t take strangers into the community often. There have only been three in my lifetime. One died relatively young, of leukemia, which we found out he’d had before he began drinking the water from the spring. The second one is Harry Parrot, your friend and my former father-in-law, who’s just about at the end of his hundred years now—in fact, we’re going to talk to him and plan the departure ceremony this week. And the third one, my darling, is you.
We decided a long time ago that we wouldn’t accept immigrants. Couldn’t control them. But if anyone came into our midst through marriage, that was a different story: we would welcome them. We would have a kind of probation period of a year, and if we saw by then that they measured up to our pretty moderate view of what a civilized human being should be, we’d offer them the same opportunity as if they’d been born and bred in Springhill. They would be offered the water. They’d be offered the same pact we were offered when we were younger. One hundred years.
“So it’s not theoretical, Dennis. It’s real. Your year has already passed. The offer wasn’t made to you on time because it didn’t seem wise to bludgeon your mind with all those facts while you were getting ready to defend my parents for a murder they didn’t commit but would certainly have committed if they’d had to. ‘Wait,’ everyone said, ‘until after the trial.’ I had to abide by that. I had to be silent, even though I hated every moment of it.
“Not theoretical. Real. You can choose. Go back into the world and take your chances with biology, or stay with me in Springhill, in ourworld, and live to be a hundred. And then die voluntarily. You’d be starting late on the water, so you might only make it into your mid-nineties. No guarantee on that. Is it a hard choice? I doubt it. You just haven’t confronted it yet as reality—you’re still viewing all this as a kind of fantasy. But it’s not. Soon, when you’ve spoken to more people among us and asked more questions, it will become real for you. And when you’re ready to choose, you’ll tell me.”
“Wait,” Dennis said, “before we get to that—if I’m able to get to it, because I’m reeling—I need to ask you something. You said a minute ago that the offer wasn’t made to me before because it didn’t seem the right time to do it, while I was getting ready to defend your parents for a murder they didn’t commit. A murder they didn’t commit? Sophie, I know they committed it. I fought for your mother in court, and I won, but I knew she did it. She told me she didn’t, but I knew she was lying. She was guilty under the law I’ve sworn to uphold. And you’ve admitted to me today, right here, that they did it. They harped, you said, but everyone knew there could be only one outcome. Your mother gave a lethal injection to the Lovells. The trial’s over, there’s no double jeopardy. Why bother to deny it now?”
“Shirlene Hubbard hadn’t really wanted to go along in the first place,” Sophie said, “and my mother finally decided she didn’t want to do it, even though by that stage of the proceedings both Henry and Susan were willing—although not what I’d call thrilled at the idea. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be facetious. It was an extraordinary discussion that took place in that tent at Pearl Pass. It clarified all the ideas we’d ever had. But Bibsy went through a kind of crisis. She’d known Susie Lovell too long.”
“Nevertheless,” Dennis said, his glance shifting away to probe the shadows cast by the fire, “she overcame her reluctance. She hastened their departure, to use your euphemism.”
He looked back at Sophie then—at his thirty-eight-year-old wife who was claiming to be sixty-four.
“No.” Leaning forward, Sophie clasped her hands over her knees, like a child. “My mother didn’t have to. There was someone else there who could do it, and was willing to do it and save that wound to my mother’s conscience. I was there. I had the training from her, years ago. I injected both of them. First with the sedatives, then with the potassium. By your law, I murdered them.”
Chapter 26
Choice
DENNIS ATE FOOD and hardly tasted it; he played hearts and chess with Lucy and Brian and tutored them in American history and studied the solar system with them; he drove back and forth between home and his office in Aspen. He found time one morning, after they had agreed not to discuss the trial or the case, to ski the back of Aspen Mountain with Josh Gamble. (“It’s not my job to be pissed off at lawyers for doing their job,” the sheriff said. “It’s my job to do my job.”) He began work on two new run-of-the-mill cases—but all the time he felt that he was elsewhere: he was with Sophie, the snow silently falling, listening to her tale and watching the pale oval of her face against the blackness of the forest. Or framed against the crackling of the fire. Or in the spring, where he had taken his first sip of the water that could keep him alive for another fifty years.
Was it possible? Was it a dream?
Whenever he was alone he talked to himself aloud. He asked questions and struggled to answer them. He had studied her Colorado birth certificate. The date was November 5,1930. She snapped off the rubber band and unrolled her A.B. degree from Cornell University— the graduation date was June 1952. She handed him a magnifying glass and he bent in the brilliant halogen glare of her desk lamp to once again inspect the sepia-tinted photograph of William Lovell’s sixty-fifth birthday party. Unless she was identifying the faces falsely, they were exactly as she had described them. A yellowed, brittle, and well- thumbed copy of the Tunisian Sheikh Nefzawi’s The Perfumed Gardennested in the back of the safe. It had been published in London in 1846, its translator unnamed. In the flyleaf Dennis traced a scrawl in turquoise-colored ink: This marvelous book is the property of Larissa Orlov McKee.
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He thought again about the Lovells’ teeth—the gold fillings and the old-style amalgam that the forensic odontologist swore had to have been put in before 1910, at a time when Susan Lovell, born Susan Crenshaw, and Henry Lovell Sr., were in their teens. Henry Lovell Sr.—Caleb’s son, and William’s grandson …
If Dennis decided not to believe, then he was married to a charlatan, a woman with a twisted mind and the resolve to accomplish her ends at any cost. A fantasist and a murderer. If he elected to believe that his wife, the woman he loved, was sixty-four years old, then a door swung open into an amazing future. A new world beckoned. He could reject it, slam shut the door, and walk away to a normal life with its risks and possibilities—or walk through the portal and be part of a hitherto undreamed-of destiny: live to be a hundred, then willingly die. And until that moment of departure, not only guard the secret of the town, but ensure that it remain a secret. He understood he would have to help, because that was part of the pact: everyone helped. In the matter of the Lovells’ death, everyone had helped cover up the truth. None believed they had done wrong.
If he accepted everything that Sophie had told him, there had been no murder. Assisted suicide, yes—and in such a case, whose law prevailed? The law of the state or the law of the community? That answer was clear to him. The state was an abstraction; the community was made up of live human beings. She was not a murderer.
He sat with Sophie again in front of the fire and pulled the cork from a good bottle of red zinfandel. There was so much he had to know.
“What do you do,” he asked, “if a young person doesn’t agree to the pact? Doesn’t choose longevity and an eventual departure at the age of one hundred?”
“A few have done that,” Sophie said. “They left Springhill.”
“You let them go?”
“This isn’t a prison.”
“You didn’t worry they’d betray you? “
“They left because they didn’t believe what we told them. We asked ourselves: What’s the worst-case scenario? Wherever they went, they would tell people there were these crazy people in the Elk Mountains who believed they’d discovered the fountain of youth. We think that happened once. A dozen fresh-faced long-haired people from Oregon came about six or seven years ago and asked if there was such a place. They used those words: ‘A fountain of youth.’ We laughed at them. Oh, we had a good cackle! We made them feel like fools who’d been sold a bill of goods by kids who’d smoked some mighty powerful dope. The poor people camped over by Indian Lake for a week or so, ate their granola, tried to swim there but nearly froze to death, and then cleared out. They haven’t bothered us since.”
“No one else has ever come to investigate?”
“No one.”
“What about the state of Colorado? The federal government? Haven’t any of you in Springhill ever been caught out on discrepancies?”
“Now and then. The county commissioner can be nosy, and we’ve had a few inquiries from the state Department of Health. They treat us like hillbillies—not very bright people who don’t know how to keep records like good Americans. But we usually come up with whatever documentation is needed. Driver’s licenses have to be renewed in person every five years, and you need to bring a photograph—so if there’s a problem, we send someone else who looks the correct age. And every year we register a few extra births so that we have a supply of backup birth certificates. Grace is the present custodian. The Water Board keeps track of the paperwork.”
Dennis asked, “Has it ever occurred to you that you could be mistaken about the cause of the longevity? That there might be other factors?”
“Of course. We know other things contribute to healthful longevity. Orderliness of life, for one. Farmers live longer than people in any other occupation. Mountain people tend to live longer. There are an unusual amount of centenarians in Kazakhstan and Armenia. For a while it was ascribed to eating yogurt, which of course was nonsense.
The truth is the long-lived Kazakhs were physically active peasants— goatherds and shepherds who climbed mountains seven days a week. That’s a natural form of aerobic exercise. They ate sparingly and they breathed unpolluted air. A few lived to be a hundred. But plenty of them died in their sixties and seventies and eighties too. There was no consistent longevity. What we’ve always had in Springhill is consistency. More than that. Unanimity.”
Dennis nodded; he grasped it.
“And remember,” Sophie said, “just down the road in Marble we have a control group, although they’re hardly aware of it. Same genetic stock, same occupations, same altitude and climate. The only difference is they don’t drink from the spring. They’re pretty healthy, but on the average they don’t live more than a few years longer than people down in Carbondale.”
“What about diet? Couldn’t it be a factor?”
“You think my mother’s French cooking with all that home-churned butter is conducive to long life? And my father’s love for chateau-bottled burgundy?”
Dennis frowned.
“You still have a hard time believing it.”
“Yes.”
“What bothers you most?”
“The how and why of it,” he said. “If chemical analysis doesn’t reveal the unique element in the water that produces the phenomenon—then what does produce it? And how can it possibly be? Don’t you see? Why here? Why nowhere else?”
“It might exist somewhere else,” Sophie said, “and in that somewhere else they might have come to the same conclusions that we have—to keep it quiet. But you’re right. We don’t know the how or why of it. If we did, everything would be different. We would share the secret. I told you there’s a theory that a meteorite struck here thousands of years ago and is buried near the spring, and that’s what’s supposed to account for the skewed gravity and the other weird goings-on. Maybe that’s also what affects the water. Maybe not. We don’t know. We’ve come to accept all of it as a kind of miracle, although I personally detest that word because I believe that if we had full knowledge we would see that everything has a logical, chemical cause. I prefer to think of it as a gift. A blessing is the word I always use.
From what or from whom, I don’t dare speculate. What I do know is that gifts and blessings can be used wisely or foolishly. I believe— given the fact that we’re human, and limited in our knowledge—we’ve used ours wisely.”
That night, in bed, Dennis set all debate aside and made love with his beautiful sixty-four-year-old wife. Numbers were abstract, and Sophie was touchable, real. Her body glowed in the April moonlight as it had two years ago when for the first time they made love in this same bed. He heard her wild cry, felt her body tremble under his. Into her he poured the full measure of his passion.
In her arms, drifting toward sleep, he murmured, “It will be all right. We will be all right. No matter what.”
He woke in the morning with a feeling that he had crossed a bridge. What he had said was true. Sophie’s words came back to him. You can choose. Go back into the world and take your chances with biology. Or stay with me in Springhill, in this world, our world, and live to be a hundred.
And then die voluntarily.
It’s true, he thought. It’s not a fantasy. I believe it. I’ll stay, drink the water, swear whatever oaths have to be sworn. I’ll live to be one hundred years old, and so will my children. How can that be wrong?
Later that day Dennis remembered his promise to Harry Parrot. After the trial was over, he’d said, they would talk. He would call friends in the East, prepare the way for Harry’s trip. He also remembered what Sophie had told him: Harry was at the end of his hundred years. They were going to plan the departure ceremony this week. So much was working in Dennis’s mind that the significance of this penetrated only slowly. Harry was slated to die—but Harry had told him that he wanted to go to New York to show his paintings.
Dennis left the office early and drove straight to Harry’s house, the first house as the road entered Springhill. It had begun
to snow again. Every day in the warm April sun the snow turned to mush, and every evening it iced. County snowplows were working overtime. Dennis had four-wheel drive and studded snow tires, but his big red Jeep skidded on the packed ice as he entered Harry’s driveway.
There was no doorbell. When Dennis knocked loudly, Harry yelled from afar: “Come in!”
In the overheated living room Harry was sunk into an old leather chair near the fire, one paint-stained, big-knuckled hand maintaining a firm grip on a half-empty bottle of vodka.
“Knew it was you. You want a drink? Get yourself one. You been here before. You know where I keep the glasses.”
Dennis brought a tumbler from the kitchen and sat down on the gnarled pine coffee table in front of Harry.
“I know everything,” he said. “Sophie told me about the water. The pact. The whole story of Springhill. It’s a little hard to believe.”
“Well, it’s true, my friend. All of it. She tell you about boning?”
“That too.”
“That’s what they’re doing to me now. Go gracefully, your wife says. They all say it. They’ve got a right to say it. I agreed to it a long time ago. And they’ve been good to me. Couldn’t have been better.” Harry grunted; he even laughed. “The sons of bitches.”
“You told me you were going to New York.”
“To the big city. Never been there. Take my work. Slides. Meet the right people. You know them, don’t you? Wha’d you say once? ‘Pity if you blushed unseen the rest of your life.’ I thought about that. Rest of my life’s not a hell of a lot of time, though. I’m a good painter—I might damn well be a great painter. Hard to say. Not up to me. You know when it was I turned a hundred?”
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller Page 26