Aspen Gold

by Janet Dailey

  “Aspen had a reputation for being fairly open about drugs, especially cocaine, back when you lived here, didn’t it?” John tossed his unfinished cone in a trash receptacle next to a brick planter mounded with sunny yellow mums.

  Kit smiled. “Come to Aspen and have a good time-in the modern sense of the word. That’s what they used to say. To a certain extent, it was true when I was in school.”

  “How did you manage to avoid being swept into that scene?” he asked, thinking how quick she was to embrace most things.

  Her shoulders lifted in an idle shrug. “I never liked the idea of giving up control for a quick buzz. Besides, I’ve always been high on life. Who needs something artificial when you have the real thing?”

  “True.” John wondered why he hadn’t guessed that as she bit into the cone.

  “Fortunately, the craze over white powder has become a craze for the kind of white powder you ski on.” Kit nodded at Aspen Mountain, called Ajax by the locals, standing tall before them, dominating the view as it dominated the town nestled at its base. Its famed ski runs cut wide, tan swaths down its broad slopes, weaving in and out among the stands of evergreens and autumn-burnished aspens.

  John lit a cigarette, comfortable with the silence that fell between them as they strolled along. Finished with her cone, she wrapped both arms around his arm, then sighed, something in the sound arousing his curiosity.

  “What was that about?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I’m amazed by how much Aspen has changed. I know it happens in every city in the country, buildings go up, businesses change hands. But you don’t really expect it to happen in your own hometown, I guess.” She tipped her head to one side. “Do you realize that when I was a girl, Aspen had dirt streets. Only Main Street was paved because of the highway. There was a definite small-town feel to Aspen. Now the whole character of it has changed. I mean, just look.” She waved a hand at the expensive shops lining the streets. “It’s more like Rodeo Drive in the Rockies except all the buildings are designed to look like something from the turn of the century.” She stopped and sighed again. “It isn’t that I don’t like it. I just miss the old Aspen.”

  “A case of nostalgia will cause that, I’ve heard.”

  She laughed. “And I think I have a severe case of it. But there is a cure for it.”

  “Really?”

  “Window-shopping,” she said decisively, then grinned. “And don’t tell me you don’t do that. Men window-shop every time they look at a pretty girl.”

  With Kit setting the pace, they drifted from window to window, inspecting the wares displayed in each. John spent more time watching her than he did looking in the windows. Her reactions were unguarded, expressive, her thoughts revealed not just in her face but her body language. She drew back, shaking her head and laughing at an antlered chair in the window of a specialty shop, then frowned in deep concentration at the abstract paintings in a gallery window. He observed the disinterest in her eyes and the failure to finger over a full-length sable coat in a furrier’s window, the rapt study she gave to a display of Havilland, Limoges, and Cartier china settings, leaning close to the window, and the provocative smile she sent him when they paused before a lacy and racy lingerie display.

  As they came to a store offering the ultimate in western wear, Kit grabbed his arm. “Look at those boots. They are wild,” she declared, her mouth staying open in a look of incredulous delight. “Let’s go inside.”

  Without waiting for him, Kit pushed through the shop’s leaded glass door and walked straight to the tall, fire red boots on a display shelf next to a heavily ornamented western saddle. She picked the right boot up and ran her hand over its gleaming side, feeling the broken texture of its lizard-skin hide.

  “Can I help you?”

  “No thanks.” Kit turned to the clerk. “I-Donna,” she gasped in surprise when she saw the sandy-haired clerk was a former high school classmate. “My God, this is like old-home week. I just ran into Angie last night.”

  The boots were forgotten while Donna sketchily brought Kit up to date on her life: she and her husband lived in Glenwood Springs now; they had just the two girls and both were in school. When John joined them, Kit introduced him to Donna and immediately noticed the almost visible withdrawal of her former classmate and friend, her smile turning into the pleasant kind meant for customers.

  “If you like those boots, wait until you see this coat we have,” she said, moving away.

  Kit waited until Donna was out of earshot before whispering to John, “I think she’s self-conscious with you here.”

  “Get used to it,” he murmured back. “It’ll be your turn next, once your face gets splashed all over the big screen.”

  “I suppose.” But she didn’t particularly like the idea that people might stop acting natural around her the way they sometimes did around John. Idly she turned the boot up and saw the price. “Four thousand dollars?” She stared, then laughed faintly in amazement. “Rodeo Drive is right.”

  Donna came back with a beaded Indian blanket coat to show her, then a hat, a stenciled-suede top. The articles kept coming; Kit kept looking and admiring and shaking her head. Finally, out of guilt, she bought a scarf she thought Maggie would like. She started to leave, then remembered she’d left the sales receipt on the counter.

  When she went back for it, Donna was by the cash register with another clerk, her back turned to the door. Kit started toward them.

  “I can’t believe it,” Donna muttered to the clerk. “All she brought was that lousy scarf. I thought I had a huge sale when she walked in.”

  Donna had seen her as a sale? Suddenly Kit had the same sick feeling that she’d had last night with Angie. She turned and walked out with John, not bothering with the receipt.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  On Monday morning, Kit paused in front of the turn-of-the-century Victorian cottage on Main Street. She caught the tantalizing aroma of freshly brewed coffee and yeasty sweet rolls coming from the house to the left of the cottage, a combination bookstore and coffeehouse. The structure on the right had been converted into a boutique.

  Kit paid no attention to either as she gazed at the cottage’s familiar gabled front and the finials soaring from its peaks. Box hedges lined the sidewalk leading to a front porch adorned with airy latticework trim and flower boxes filled with red geraniums at the windows. It looked just as she remembered it when Mrs. Hatch lived there except for the sign suspended from the brackets on the post by the porch steps.

  Ignoring the noisy squabbling of the magpies in the cottonwoods, Kit walked up the bricked path and stopped to read the sign. Black letters on a white board spelled out the words

  Attorney at Law

  Elias A. Bannon (deceased)

  Thomas E. Bannon

  A smile edged her mouth at the rightness of it, at the feeling of life coming full circle. Over one hundred years ago, a young Elias Bannon had arrived in the rough and raw mining camp of Aspen, his saddlebags packed with law books and a few belongings. He’d started his law practice first in a tent, then rented a four-by-six space on the second floor of a saloon on Durant where the miners gathered. Five years later, he’d built this modest cottage to serve as both his office and his town home. Now his grandson practiced law from the same building. Bannon had always said he would someday, Kit remembered.

  But that thought recalled other memories that still hurt. With a quick lift of her chin, Kit climbed the steps and crossed to the front door of walnut and etched glass. It opened directly to the parlor. Only now the parlor had been converted to a combination office and reception area. A reed-thin woman with gray hair piled atop her head in a knot looked up from her computer screen when Kit walked in.

  “Yes? May I help you?” The woman removed her steel-rimmed granny glasses and let them hang by their chain down the front of her navy suit.

  “You must be Agnes Richards.” Kit thrust a hand across the desk in greeting. “We’ve spoken a few times on the
phone. I’m Kit Masters.”

  “Miss Masters, of course.” Bannon’s legal secretary rose from her chair, a smile filling out the gauntness of her cheeks. “Bannon said you’d be stopping by this morning. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. I should have, after seeing your picture in today’s paper.” She glanced at the phone on her desk, missing Kit’s look of surprise. “I think he’s through with his long distance call. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  As she reached for the receiver, a connecting door swung open and Bannon stepped out, dressed in a tan corduroy jacket with suede patches at the sleeves and jeans faded from numerous launderings rather than expensive acid-wash. He had a clutch of papers in his hand and a distracted frown on his face, and his brown hair showed the tracks of combing fingers. “What happened to the McIntire file, Aggie? I can’t-Kit.” He stopped, his look brightening to a faint smile.

  Grinning, Kit cocked her head to one side and said, with a touch of whimsey, “Once there was a man named Bannon. He lived in the mountains and never came out. I heard he grew a beard and started talking to himself. I wonder what ever happened to him?”

  Bannon smiled crookedly. “He became a lawyer. Now he spends half his time behind a desk and writes a twenty-five-thousand court motion and calls it a brief.”

  She laughed, a little surprised at how easy it was to slip back into that old pattern of light, touch-and-go humor that had marked their relationship in the past. It had been a way to cover serious feelings-at least in her case.

  Sobering slightly, Kit let a small smile remain in place as Bannon walked over and pushed the sheaf of papers at his secretary. “Clean this up for me, Aggie.”

  “I always do,” she murmured and raised her glasses to inspect the document. “By the way, Pete Ranovitch called while you were on the phone. He said he had to see you right away. It was urgent. I told him you would be free around eleven and to-come by then. Is that all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “I suppose you’ll want me to log this in as a pro bono case,” she said in a voice dry with disapproval. When Bannon nodded affirmatively, she added, even more dryly, “That’s what I thought.”

  Bannon ignored that and motioned toward his office. “Come on in, Kit.”

  She followed him into the room, absently observing the muscular ease of his walk and the width of his shoulders beneath the corduroy jacket. His boots, she noticed, bore the scars of spurs and stirrups and rough use. Justin boots probably, or Tony Lama’s, but they definitely weren’t in the luxe category of the four-thousand-dollar pair she’d seen yesterday. By the same token, Bannon wasn’t a Coca-Cola cowboy; he was the real thing.

  “You look more like a rancher than a lawyer, Bannon.”

  “On court days, I go the suit-and-tie route. The judges like that.” He walked over to a brown-stained coffee maker and lifted the glass pot, one third full. “Want a cup? It’s strong,” he warned.

  “You haven’t tasted coffee on the set after it’s simmered in a giant urn for fourteen hours or more. That is strong.”

  The corners of his mouth indented, bringing into play the slashed lines in his cheeks. How many times had her fingertips traced those smile grooves? Disturbed by the wayward turn her mind had taken, Kit pulled herself up abruptly and turned to examine the room, in one glance taking in the patterned wool rug on the maple floor, the wainscoting of ash, and the glassed in bookcase.

  “This room was your grandfather’s law office, wasn’t it?” Kit deposited her purse on the leather seat of a straight-backed chair and wandered to the bookcase, made of ash with a walnut finish. She heard the clatter of cups and swung back to look at Bannon. “Now it’s yours.”

  “Yes.” He filled two ceramic mugs with coffee, draining the pot. Picking them up, he used one to gesture toward the heavy walnut desk. “I even dragged his old desk down from the attic. A couple of the drawers were warped, but Dad fixed them for me. I thought about refinishing it, then decided to leave all the scratches, gouges, and stains just as they were.

  Kit nodded agreement. “They add character.”

  “And they encourage my clients to pay their bills so I can afford a better desk.” He held out one of the mugs and she looked at his hands, large-sized yet deft, his fingers long and his nails neatly trimmed. Hands that were gentle enough to pick a fragile wildflower and tack it behind her ear without bruising a petal, yet strong enough to lift a saddle with one hand and swing it onto a horse’s back. She took the mug from him and immediately took a sip, nearly scalding her tongue. “It’s hot,” he said.

  “Very,” she murmured and bit her lips together, waiting for her tongue to stop burning. “I think I’ll let it cool awhile.” She set the mug on his desk and noticed the manual typewriter, a black relic that had to be forty or fifty years old.

  “Haven’t you joined the computer age yet, Bannon?” She punched one of the keys, but not hard enough to make it strike the platen.

  “I joined it, but I think better on this old Royal.”

  “No wonder Aggie has to clean up your paperwork.” She continued around his desk, then paused when she caught sight of the large framed photograph on the wall directly above the fireplace. “That’s a picture of your grandfather Elias Bannon.” She walked over to stand in front of the ebonized Eastlake mantel and tilted her head back to study the grainy black-and-white photo. “I’ve seen this before. You had it at the ranch.”

  “I thought it belonged here.”

  “It does.” She looked at the head-and-shoulders shot of a man in his late twenties. His brown hair was cut short and parted off center, and a mustache shadowed all but the curve of his lower lip. He had the look of a rugged New Englander, bones protruding under bronze skin, cheeks gaunt, and eyes set deep in the sockets. “I remember looking at his picture and thinking how fearsome he looked. I can readily imagine him standing up to the likes of Jerome Wheeler. Yet, other times, his eyes seemed warm and kind, full of understanding, and I knew why people turned to him when they were in trouble.” She smiled in remembrance and glanced idly at Bannon. “Remember how we used to sit around and listen to Old Tom tell us stories about your grandfather, the old days in Aspen, the silver mines?”

  Nodding, Bannon leaned a hip on the corner of his desk. “Once he got started, there was no stopping him.”

  “True. But the picture he painted of Aspen back in the late 1880s and early 1890s,” Kit recalled with a wondering shake of her head, “a modern mining town with electricity, telephones, streetcars, a magnificent opera house, a grand hotel, Victorian houses with gingerbread trim, fancy barouches pulled by matched teams of high-stepping horses, men in top hats, elegant morning coats, and striped trousers, ladies in high-necked silk gowns with wagging bustles, shaded by lace parasols, and-”

  “-the constant din of machinery running twenty-four hours a day,” Bannon inserted, “smoke from the concentrators and smelting works hanging over the town like a pall, streams polluted with wastes from the mines and the sawmills, the surrounding mountains stripped bare of their forests to supply the mines with needed timber, dirt streets that were either clogged with dust, a quagmire of mud, drifted with snow, or jammed with freight wagons and pack trams, miners blackened and sweaty after an eight-hour shift, the gamblers and card sharks, the saloons and bawdy houses with their painted ladies-”

  “Wait.” Kit raised a hand in protest. “Old Tom never told us anything about ‘ladies of the evening’ or bawdy houses.”

  “Probably not.” He dipped his head, conceding the point. “But most of my grandfather’s clients came from Aspen’s class. Miners, small merchants, prospectors with undeveloped claims, and labor unions-and few of them had the money to pay for legal services. Most prospectors gave him an interest in their claims in return for representing them. Occasionally that paid off. The rest he traded out when he could, and wrote off when he couldn’t.”

  “Didn’t he own shares in the Smuggler or Mollie Gibson at one time?” Kit frowned, trying to recall.
/>
  “The Mollie Gibson,” Bannon confirmed between sips of his coffee.

  “Yes, the Mollie.” Nodding, Kit wandered back to the desk and retrieved her coffee mug. She wrapped both hands around the mug and carried it to her lips. The coffee had cooled to a drinkable temperature. “I used to have nightmares about all those gruesome stories Old Tom told us about miners killed in accidents-especially the ones where a miner pushed a loaded ore cart to a shaft to be raised to the surface, not knowing the platform had been moved to another level. He’d push the cart into the empty shaft and get pulled in after it, falling hundreds of feet to his death. Old Tom used to scare me to death with those stories,” she recalled with a shudder.

  “He did it on purpose.”

  Her head came up. “Why?”

  “To keep us from exploring that old mine on the ranch,” Bannon replied with a faint smile.

  “The Keyhole Mine,” Kit remembered. “I’d forgotten all about it.” She shook her head and laughed. “If that was your father’s motive, it worked. You never could get me to go more than ten feet inside that mine.”

  “And I had to drag you to get you that far.” Bannon grinned.

  “You’re damn right,” she retorted, then sighed in bemusement. “I’m surprised I had the nerve to set even one foot inside that mine.”

  The entrance had been boarded up, but that hadn’t stopped them, not with visions of finding a giant vein of silver ore to lead them on. Bannon had pried a couple boards loose, creating a hole wide enough for them to crawl through. She remembered the dank, musty odors of a fecund earth, the scurrying sounds in the darkness, the spider webs that caught at her arms, face, and hair, and the distant drip-drip of water. “That flashlight you had was almost worthless. I just knew the batteries were going to go out on it and we’d be trapped in that blackness. The walls were so rough and slimy, and the timbers-pieces of them crumbled in my hands. Do you realize how dangerous it was, Bannon?”