by Dan Simmons
Syd used both palms now to calm him. “Yes, yes… I know that. Road rage has everything to do with how the news anchors enjoy the alliteration and almost nothing to do with facts. But Dickweed might still have brought charges just because road rage is a popular topic these days and it would have got him TV coverage…”
“Road rage,” muttered Dar, sipping coffee so as not to say what he felt about the assistant district attorney and his political ambitions.
“Anyway,” continued Syd, “I sold them all on using you as…well…as bait in uncovering this larger fraud ring that the state has been after. Dickweed and his boss saw that as an even bigger media plus than a road rage trial. But it meant that you either had to be kept under constant surveillance or protective custody…”
“Or be watched by you,” said Dar.
“Yes,” said Syd. She sat in silence for a long moment. Then she said, “And I know about the Fort Collins crash.”
Dar just looked at her. Part of him was not surprised—she had access to a hell of a lot of background dossiers, and his background would be important for her to check on in her ongoing case, but another part of him curled up in pain at the mention of something he never spoke about to anyone.
“I know it’s none of my business,” Syd said, her voice even softer than before, “but it said in the report that you were actually called to the scene of the crash. How could that be? How could they have done that?”
The muscles around Dar’s mouth twitched an imitation of a smile. “They didn’t know that…that my wife and baby were on that flight when it went down. Bar…my wife had planned to come back from Washington the next day, but her mother had recovered faster than anyone expected. She just wanted to get home a day earlier.”
There was a silence, broken by loud laughter from the bar. A young couple walked by on their way out. They were holding hands.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” said Syd.
“I know,” said Dar. “And I haven’t. Even to Larry and Trudy, although they know the basic facts of it. But I’m answering your question…”
Syd nodded.
“So that’s it—my wife and the baby were supposed to arrive the next day…but they boarded this earlier flight—a 737 that went nose first into a park on the outskirts of Fort Collins.”
“And you were called,” said Syd.
“I was on the NTSB GO-team that staged out of Denver,” said Dar, his voice without emotion. “We covered any crash in a six-state region. Fort Collins is only about seventy miles from Denver.”
“But…” Syd began, and stopped. She looked down at her coffee cup.
Dar shook his head. “That was my job…looking at plane wrecks. Luckily, someone in the Denver office got a first look at the flight manifest and noticed my wife’s name. They notified my team’s supervisor only about half an hour after I got to the scene. But there wasn’t much to see anyway. The 737 went in nose-first. The crater was almost twenty feet deep and sixty feet across. There was a lot of the usual crash detritus—shoes, always many shoes, a burned teddy bear here and there, a green purse—but most of the human remains had to be retrieved by archaeologists.”
Syd looked up. “And it’s one of the few accidents that the NTSB didn’t solve…didn’t find a clear cause for.”
“One of four, counting TWA 800,” said Dar softly. “Wind shear was suspected…and the FAA recommended changing certain control connections to the rudder of the Boeing 737s after that…but nothing seemed to explain such a sudden and complete loss of control. When they came to get me, I was actually interviewing a teenaged girl who lived in the apartment building right next to the park—a hundred feet shorter and the casualty list would have been doubled—and this girl said that when she looked out her fourth-floor window, she could see the faces of the people in the plane…upside down as the 737 augered in. The faces were quite clear because it was just after dark and the people had their reading lights on…”
“Stop, please,” said Syd. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I brought it up.”
Dar was quiet for a moment. He felt as if he were returning from somewhere far away. He looked at the chief investigator and realized with a shock that she was crying. “It’s all right,” he said, stifling the impulse to pat her hand where it lay on the white tablecloth. “It’s all right. It was a long time ago.”
“Ten years isn’t a long time,” whispered Syd. “Not for something like that.” She turned toward the window and wiped away the tears with two angry swipes of her hand.
“No,” agreed Dar.
Syd looked back at him and her blue eyes seemed infinitely deep. “May I ask one thing?”
Dar nodded.
“You didn’t resign from the NTSB and move out to California until almost two years after that crash,” she said. “How could you…stay? Continue doing that work?”
“It was my job,” said Dar. “I was good at it.”
Sydney Olson smiled very slightly. “I’ve read your whole file, Dr. Minor. You’re still the best accident reconstruction person in the business. So then why do you work primarily with Stewart Investigations? I know you’re fairly well off and don’t need a huge salary…but why Lawrence and Trudy?”
“I like them,” Dar said. “Larry makes me laugh.”
They arrived at Dar’s cabin just after sunset, twilight hanging in the soft summer evening air like a muted tapestry. The cabin sat by itself up a half mile of gravel road, south and east of the town of Julian, on the very edge of the Cleveland National Forest. Its view looked down broad meadows and across great valleys of grass to the south. Above and behind the cabin, the ponderosa pines and Douglas fir grew thicker, ending in a rocky ridgetop.
Syd stared in admiration. “Wow,” she said. “You say ‘cabin’ and I picture caulked logs and mice scurrying around.”
Dar glanced at his trim stone-and-redwood structure with its long porch looking south. “Nope,” he said. “It’s only six years old. I bought the property when I first came out here; lived in the sheep wagon before this place.”
“Sheep wagon?” said Syd.
Dar nodded. “You’ll see.”
“And I bet you built this all by yourself.”
“Hardly,” said Dar with a chuckle. “I’m incompetent with a hammer and saw. A local builder—seventy years old—named Burt McNamara did most of the work.”
“My God,” said Syd as she came around to the front of the building along the open porch, “a hot tub.”
“It has a nice view. On a cold winter’s night you can sit in the tub and see the few lights out on the Capitan Grande Indian Reservation way across the valley there.” Dar unlocked the front door and stood aside to let Syd enter first.
“I see why you don’t have…ah…guests too often,” said Syd softly.
The last of the evening light illuminated the large, single room. Dar had not partitioned the cabin except for the bathroom area, and only groupings of furniture and carpet delineated one area from another. Most of the walls were lined with bookshelves, but there were several huge French original posters—one advertising a fishing line and showing a woman catching a trout from a canoe, the art stylized in wonderful 1920s negative-space blacks and bold lines. The southeast corner held a large L-shaped desk under twelve-over-twelve paned windows. The view from that area was amazing. A huge fireplace took up much of the west wall, the windows on either side were soft with twilight, there was a scattering of comfortable leather chairs and couches near it, and the single bed, covered in a Hudson’s Bay blanket, was just behind the long couch.
“I like to watch the fire from bed,” said Dar.
“Uh-huh,” said Syd.
Dar dropped his own bags. He picked two lanterns off hooks on the wall. “Come on, I’ll get you set up in the sheep wagon.”
Dar led her back out onto the porch in the fading twilight and about a hundred feet along a well-maintained trail. Japanese snow lanterns made of stone lined the path at twenty-foot intervals. Af
ter walking through a small stand of birch, they entered a grassy clearing, and the wagon came into sight.
The old Basque sheepherder’s wagon had been completely renovated with ancient wood and glass. Now the wheeled structure had a small porch, a screen door, and a canvas awning on the south side. Near it, several Adirondack chairs had been set facing a view even more incredible than the cabin’s.
Dar gestured and Syd walked up the four steps, opened the unlocked doors, and stepped into the small space.
“This may be the coziest room I’ve ever seen in my life,” Syd said softly.
The sheep wagon was only eighteen feet long and seven feet wide, but the space was used with great ingenuity. There was a tiny bathroom to the right as one entered, a small sink under a window on the north side, a tiny eating booth on the south side, and the entire west end was comprised of a built-in bed under a hemisphere of old windowpanes. The barrel-vaulted ceiling was low, but it gleamed with slats of honey-colored old wood. Various pegs and hooks lined the walls, and Dar hung the lanterns on two of them. The high bed looked impossibly comfortable with a homemade patchwork quilt on it and several huge pillows at either end. Drawers were built into the wainscoting under the mattress area.
“There’s no electricity,” said Dar, “but the plumbing works… We ran a line down from the same cistern that serves the cabin. No shower or tub, I’m afraid…there just wasn’t room, but there’s no charge for using the big shower in the cabin.”
“Did your Mr. McNamara build this as well?” asked Syd, sliding into the wooden booth and looking through the small panes at the last of the sunset. The tiny space gave the impression of being below decks in a very tiny but cozy boat.
Dar shook his head. “We…my wife and I had this built the summer before the crash. In a magazine—Architectural Digest—we read about an interior designer and an old rancher and builder up in Montana who were buying up old Basque sheep wagons and converting them into…well, this. They built the thing according to our plans and then disassembled it, shipped it to Colorado, and put it together again. I did the same thing when I moved it out here.”
Syd looked up at him. “Did the three of you ever use it?”
Dar shook his head again. “We’d bought some property in the Rockies, not too far from Denver, but that was the winter that David was born, and then…well, we never got to spend time in it.”
“But you did,” said Syd. “Out here. Alone.”
Dar nodded. “But I had to do more and more work on the weekends,” he said. “Mostly on the computer. So I had the cabin built rather than electrify the sheep wagon.”
“Good choice,” said the chief investigator.
“Fresh sheets and pillowcases in those drawers under the bed,” said Dar. “Also clean towels. And no mice. I was up here last weekend and checked.”
“I wouldn’t care if there were mice,” said Syd.
Dar opened a drawer, removed a box of kitchen matches, and lit the lanterns. Instantly the old wood everywhere and especially in the vaulted ceiling began to glow with a honeyed warmth.
“The little two-burner stove is propane,” he said. “Like a camp stove, really. There’s no fridge, so perishable things I keep in the cabin. You can leave the lanterns on when you leave—they’re safe—but bring this to find your way back.” He opened another drawer and pulled out a flashlight.
Dar went to the door. “You’re welcome to just settle in here or to come over to the cabin for some hot tea or something.”
“We’ve still got a lot of files to go through,” said Syd.
Dar made a face.
“You go on,” said Syd. “I’m going to settle in—as you say—and just enjoy this perfect little place for a while before I come down.”
Dar took some matches. “I’ll light the snow lanterns so the path will be illuminated.”
Syd just smiled.
She came down the trail to the cabin about an hour later. She had changed out of her professional-looking suit into jeans, a flannel shirt, and cross-trainer sneakers. Her nine-millimeter pistol was holstered to her belt.
It was full dark now and a mountain chill had set in. Dar had started a small fire in the huge fireplace and his old reel-to-reel tape player was playing classical music—he had not thought about the selection, merely flipped on the player as he usually did when alone in the cabin—but the music was an assortment of lovely pieces—the Adagietto fourth movement from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, the second movement from Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, the second movement from Beethoven’s Seventh, the third and fourth movements from Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, Kyoko Takezawa playing Mendelssohn’s andante movement from the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, op. 64, Kyrie Eleisons from both Beethoven’s Mass in Solemnis and Mozart’s Requiem, some Mitsuko Uchida and Horowitz piano solos (including Dar’s favorite, the Scriabin Etude in C sharp minor, op. 2, no. 1 from the extraordinary Horowitz in Moscow album), Ying Huang singing opera arias with the London Symphony Orchestra, and lighter pieces with Heinz Holliger on oboe with orchestra.
At the last second, Dar was afraid that the chief investigator would think that he was trying to set a romantic mood, but he saw at once from her expression that she simply liked the music.
“Mozart,” she said, listening to the amazing voices in the Requiem. She nodded and came over to join him by the fire, sitting in the other leather club chair across from his.
“Would you like some hot tea?” Dar had said. “Green, mint, Grey’s breakfast, regular Lipton’s…”
Syd’s gaze had moved to the antique “hoosier” by the kitchen counter. “Is that a bottle of Macallan?” she said.
“It is indeed,” said Dar. “Pure single-malt.”
“It’s almost full,” she said.
“I don’t like to drink alone.”
“I’d love a whiskey,” she said.
Dar went over to the counter, retrieved two crystal whiskey glasses from the cupboard, and poured.
“Ice?” he said.
“In good single-malt?” said the chief investigator. “You go near an ice cube and I’ll draw down on you.”
Dar nodded. The glasses of amber liquid glowed as he came back close to the fire. They savored the Scotch in silence for several comfortable minutes.
Dar was shocked to realize that he was taking great pleasure in this woman’s company and that there was a slight but growing physical tension—awareness might be a better word—between the two of them. It shocked Dar, who had always known he was different from most men. The sight of a nude woman could arouse him, did arouse him still in his dreams. But beyond mere physical arousal, Dar linked true, deep desire with specificity. Even before he had met his wife, Barbara, he had never understood desiring a person not known, not understood, not…central.
And then he had loved Barbara. He had desired Barbara. It was Barbara’s face and voice and red hair and small breasts and pink nipples and red pubic hair and pale, white skin that became and remained the source of his love, attention, and desire. In the past decade since her death, he had seemed to move further and further away from finding or being able to feel such specific desire toward any other person. But now Dar Minor found himself sipping Scotch and looking at Chief Investigator Sydney Olson as she sat comfortably in the club chair, the red Indian blanket behind her head and the firelight soft on her. He noticed the weight of her breasts against the fabric of her shirt, and the brilliance of her eyes above the sparkling crystal of the Scotch glass, and…
“…reminds me of?” Syd was saying.
Dar shook his head—literally—to clear it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”
Syd looked around the glowing room. Small halogen spots illuminated bookcases and works of art. The firelight was reflected in the many windowpanes. A single swing lamp put a circle of light on Dar’s worktable at the far end of the long room.
“I said, do you know what all this reminds me of?”
“No,” Dar sa
id softly. Still feeling the tides of the sexual and emotional tension between them, he had the overwhelming feeling that Syd was about to make a personal comment that would bring them a step closer, would change both of their lives forever, whether he wanted it to or not. “What does all this remind you of?”
“It reminds me of one of those stupid action movies where a cop is put in charge of guarding the life of some witness, so they head far off to the woods, far from any backup. They set up camp in a house full of huge picture windows, to make it easy for a sniper,” said Syd. “And then the cop is totally surprised when someone takes a shot at them. Did you ever see Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard?”
“No,” said Dar.
Syd shook her head. “It was silly. The script was originally written for Steve McQueen and Diana Ross…that might have been better. At least McQueen seemed to be thinking when he was on screen.”
Dar swallowed some Scotch and said nothing.
She paused for a second; she seemed far away. Then she shrugged. “Do you keep any weapons in the cabin?”
“You mean firearms?”
“Yes.”
“No,” said Dar, stating the literal truth, but lying just the same.
“I take it from your earlier comments that you frown on handguns.”
“I think they’re the bane and shame of America,” said Dar. “Our worst sin since slavery.”
Syd nodded. “But you aren’t offended with me keeping my weapon handy?”
“You’re an officer of the law,” said Dar. “You’re required to.”
Syd nodded again. “But you have no shotguns, hunting rifles?”
Dar shook his head. “Not in the cabin. I have some old weapons stored away.”
“You know what the best home-defense weapon is?” asked Syd. She took a drink of whiskey and held the glass in both hands.
“A pit bull?” ventured Dar.
“Nope. A pump-action shotgun. Doesn’t matter what gauge.”
