Which in turn made me melancholy in a new way, as it brought to mind the people who had lived here ages before my fellow whites came and broke the quiet with our progress. I wondered what the valley had been like before it was carved up for ski trails and jacked full of monsters like Katie in brash synthetic clothing and discontented people like me, whisking along on iron seats through the silence of the trees. I decided that the Indians most likely never saw the mountain with snow on it. The Indians might have padded through here in moccasins, hunting mule deer in the summers, but through the frozen months, the mice and the trees would have had the mountain to themselves. Had the trees and tiny rodents felt the giant earthquakes Hugh Buttons spoke of? What would that have been like? In the winters, strong shaking might have loosed avalanches, but there would have been no one here but the mice to suffer. The ancestors of these trees might have swayed, and a few rocks might have rolled from the heights, but there were no brick homes or soaring skyscrapers to fall on the first Americans.
Jack was still talking. “See, in that pine tree there. Nice little chickadee. They stay all winter. Sometimes you can get ’em to eat outta your hands.”
I watched the little bird flit from one branch to the next. It stopped and tipped its head to get a better look at us as we went by. “I’ve had them land on my hand when I was cross-country skiing,” I countered, “but not here where there are so many people.”
“True enough. So that’s what’s eating you? You don’t like people?”
“I don’t like the woman who isn’t my sister-in-law,” I answered. “Ms. Personality. The one you just got a load of.”
Jack tipped his head like a chickadee himself. “Well then, it’s a good thing she ain’t your sister-in-law.”
I sighed. “Maybe.”
Jack gave me a smile. “We’re almost to the top. Tips up,” he said, raising the tips of his own skis. “Stand up when I say.”
I did, and glided easily off the top of the chair.
“Now, let me see what you got,” he said. “I used to teach this stuff back in my ski bum days.”
I showed him. I planted my feet about twelve inches apart and parallel and started down, twisting my skis into a snowplow wedge every time I tried to turn, leading mightily with my downhill shoulder. After we had descended through the first meadow, I stopped and waited for him.
He came to a sedate stop and considered me. “Not bad, not bad. Except those poles aren’t just for ornament. You got to plant them, and turn around them. Like this, see?” He demonstrated. He moved nicely for a big guy.
I tried it too, approximating his form.
“That’s good. That’s good. Now, let’s work on keeping your shoulders faced straight downhill. This ain’t no place for the football tackle. So you prefer cross-country skiing, huh?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Cross-country skiing goes somewhere, not just up and down, up and down; it’s goal-oriented, like me, not process-oriented, and it isn’t a fashion show. It offers privacy, nice views, and plenty of exercise.” I laughed. “And on cross-country skis, I never get going fast enough to hurt myself when I fall.”
But now I was actually being taught, and in spite of myself, I began to learn. And enjoy it. By the third run I took with Jack, he was clapping his gloved hands in congratulations. “Now here’s the next little tip,” he called as we started off the top the next time. “Keep you hands where you can see ’em!”
“What you say! That feels all off balance.” My sore leg was getting tired by then, and I wasn’t sure I could do much more.
“No, ma‘am! You’re off balance the way you are skiing. Now keep both mittens where you can see ’em and see if it don’t help!”
He was right. Suddenly, I was truly on my skis, whizzing down the slope, my boots close together, my butt swaying to and fro, bouncing over the bumps like a regular ski bunny. I laughed and fell, then got up and skied again.
At the bottom of that run, Jack clapped me on the shoulder and drew me toward the next lift down to the west, saying, “Time to get you on some steeper slopes.”
Experiencing a sudden panic, I said, “Wait a minute,” and pulled Faye’s radio out of my pocket. I was about to press the talk button, when I spotted Faye sitting out on the deck of the lodge. I pointed at the second lift.
Faye gave me a thumbs-up. Then she held up both index fingers, jiggled them along to indicate a pair of people walking, and pointed farther west twice. Ray and female two lifts over, she was saying. Go ahead.
“Okay, Jack,” I said, and we got in line.
Just then, I saw Logan cruising down the slope. He waved, and I waved, and, as this lift was a triple chair, he joined us and we settled in for a nice swing up the mountain. In fact, I was looking forward to showing off to Logan what I had just learned.
But it was on that ride up the mountain that Katie dropped her bomb.
23
I went down to the Marina District [in San Francisco just after the earthquake] with a friend who lived there, and I did a stupid thing. I went with her into her house. It was like going into a fun house room, not a square angle in the place … . I wound up bringing a number of people home with me, because they had no place to stay; so I had strangers living in my apartment.
A thing they don’t tell you is that it’s not over right away; it’s just the start. There are aftershocks, and things keep falling down. I remember a few days later watching the TV in my apartment. They were showing people being evacuated from their houses, carrying their bedding, their clothes, because their houses were about to slide down the hill. The thing was, I was watching that scene on TV and I looked out the window and there it was, right next door.
—Cassandra Shafer, recounting the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake
“I DON’T KNOW IF I TOLD YOU THAT LOGAN’S AN ENGINEERING geologist,” I told Jack as the chair swung away from the loading point. “He goes out looking at landslides and earthquakes and such.” I did not tell Logan what Jack did.
Jack gave Logan a “Hey, dude” smile, as if he were just Joe ski bum making small talk. “Yeah, I felt that shaker we had the other morning. What went wrong? I thought you geologists got that earthquake business all figured out and fixed up.”
Logan nodded. “You bet. Superman had a little time on his hands after his last movie, so we’ve been having him go round and stick rock bolts through all the big cracks, keep things from moving so much. We just hadn’t gotten to the Wasatch yet.”
Jack chuckled appreciatively. “Just as I thought. All’s you really need is the right glue.”
“You’re so right,” Logan agreed. “The right glue, and we need to repeal the laws of thermodynamics. All that claptrap about heat flux downstairs setting up convection currents that keep pushing those crustal plates around and causing earthquakes. Damned law’s no good, and I say if a law’s no good, throw it out. Get on with things.”
I tipped back my head and smiled, tickled by Logan’s indignant summation of plate tectonics theory. I was having fun in spite of myself. The day was looking up, even though my bum leg was beginning to stiffen up from the ride up a longer lift ride.
Then my jacket pocket began to talk. The radio said, “So, Jenna, how are you liking skiing with my brother? Are you having a great time or what?”
The voice was somewhat faint, but I knew it instantly. It was Katie’s. Jenna? That wasn’t one of her sisters, and it sure wasn’t her mother. There was only one person it could be: the woman from Saint George. And the brother was, of course, none other than my engaged to be engaged sweetheart, Ray.
I began to claw at my mittens, trying to get the right one off so I could plunge my hand into my breast pocket and turn the radio off. Or turn it up, key the microphone, and scream something I was damned well not going to be sorry for. But my mittens were suddenly like bales of hay, and I didn’t want to drop my ski poles from the lift. Worse yet, we were within two towers of the upper end of the lift, and I’d soon have to see i
f I could once again get off without killing myself, death and murder being very much on my mind. Katie memorized my radio channel and set hers to match it, I realized. It must have taken her this long to find the mysterious Jenna and change her channel, too, without Ray noticing. Because that’s precisely how Katie does things, underhandedly and with stealth!
As the connections between the erosion of my relationship with Ray and Katie’s obvious complicity in it—the unflattering sweater at Christmas, the importation of the “old friend” from Saint George, and now the radio—began to click together in my mind, I heard Jenna’s reply. First, she giggled. “Oh, he’s a wonderful skier, just like you said, Katie. I’m so glad you suggested I come back to Salt Lake with you all. I’m just having a wonderful time!”
“Terrific!” Katie exulted. “And I’m not kidding, you should really move up here. I’m sure I can get you a job at Hayes Associates, Ray’s having a wonderful time skiing with you, too; I can tell by the way he smiles. I haven’t seen him so happy in months and months. And you know the family just loves you!”
My heart was racing. I had my right mitten off finally, but now the zipper over my pocket was jammed. And there was no more time to turn off the radio, because we had arrived at the unloading position. I stuffed my mitten in my mouth and grasped my poles, ready to jump off the lift and race to the bottom, where I hoped to find Katie’s car and jam the points of the poles into her tires.
“Well, you’ve been right so far!” Jenna’s chirpy voice exulted from the front of my jacket. “It’s being just the perfect day! Oh! Here he comes now! He’s so beautiful on skis!”
“Oh, I know. Isn’t he?” Katie crooned.
Overhearing the conversation, Logan said, “Stupid bimbos get on the radio and yak. Mind turning that thing down, Em?”
“I’d ruv to,” I told him inelegantly through the clenched mitten. “Trutht me on this.” I shot off the top of the lift, off balance on my stiffened leg, scanning wildly for a place where I could stop and get at the offending radio.
“I’m talking to Katie!” Jenna’s voice warbled from my jacket. “Got anything to tell her, Ray?”
Oh God! I thought, Don’t say what I’m afraid you’re going to—
Ray’s voice came over the radio. “I owe this day to you!” he said, with more cheer than I had, in fact, heard from him in months.
I skidded awkwardly to a stop, stabbed my poles into the snow, whipped off my other mitten, dropped both of them on the ground, and yanked at the zipper on my breast pocket. Just as I was about tearing my jacket apart to get at the offending radio, a kid in a racing helmet careened past me and I began to slide forward wobbling on my bad leg. I slipped over an edge, hit a rock, and fell, tumbling sideways like an eggbeater through half-whipped meringue. Even in the confusion of the fall, I could hear Katie’s deceitful voice prattling on. “You’ve been so lonely, Ray. Two years since your wife died, and no one’s given you a moment’s happiness except you, Jenna. You’re his miracle sent by Heavenly Father.”
I lay on my back, no dignity left, no sanity. I yanked the zipper up, down, and got it loose. Wrenched the radio out of my pocket. Threw it as hard and as far as I could.
Logan skied to a stop next to me and leaned down on his poles. “Are you all right?” he asked, his great dark brows crushed together into one short line. “I mean, darling sweetheart, I asked you to turn the damn thing off, but I didn’t mean—”
Jack had now arrived on the other side of me, and he lowered himself to the ground all in one motion. His face was tight with concern. I looked up into his eyes, tried to take a breath, but found that I could not control it. It was stop breathing entirely or break into tears. I held my breath and shook.
“Take it easy,” he said gently. “I used to be a medic once, back in the before times. Tell me where it hurts.”
I realized that it did in fact hurt. Badly. “My ankle,” I said miserably. “The right,” I added as Jack began to press and probe at my legs.
Logan’s face had vanished from my field of view, and I thought, Makes sense. Why hang around a loser like me? I lay on my back, staring up into the sky, amazed that it was still blue. I felt Jack’s hands supporting my leg, and a distant, painful throbbing in an ankle I no longer wanted to own.
“Can you wiggle your toes?” Jack asked.
High above me in the sky, the tiniest puff of a cloud floated into view. I tried to wiggle my toes. Couldn’t find the will to do so. Logan’s face reappeared. He showed me that he had found the radio, showed that he was turning it off, pantomimed shooting it with a pistol. “Shall I call Faye on this thing?” he asked, trying to think of some way to comfort me.
I shook my head vehemently. I didn’t want Katie to know that her arrow had so keenly found its mark.
“Call the ski patrol,” Jack said, his voice completely changed from the down-home good old boy to that of a man used to being obeyed. Switching back, he smoothed my hair and said, “You just lie still, sweetheart. You’ve had about enough for today anyhow.”
24
I WAS LUCKY THAT MY ANKLE WAS ONLY SPRAINED.
That was what I kept telling myself all the way down the mountain, riding behind a ski patrolman on a growling, stinking snowmobile, but I didn’t feel lucky at all. I felt cursed.
I begged everyone else to go back up the mountain, insisting that I could take a bus home or something, but by the time the patrol was done with me, it was past two, Faye had been ready to leave for hours, Ted seemed pleased as punch to be able to quit early, Jack was sticking to me like glue, and Logan was damned if he was going to let me ride a public bus when he had brought me in his car.
So off we went. We dropped Faye off first, and, as I needed someone to blame for my ineptitude, I was glad to see her back. Jack hopped into the car he had parked at her house and followed the rest of us to my place. When we got there, Logan and Jack made a chair for me with their arms, and I let myself be carried up the stairs as Ted scrambled along behind.
Mrs. Pierce was aghast to see three men helping me up to my apartment. “Exactly what is going on here?” she demanded. Then she saw the brace on my leg. “Oh. Well. But I should come along to supervise.”
I was more than a little bit perturbed to discover that Mrs. Pierce thought she could impose such rules on my residence. I almost asked her why she had waited four months to tell me, but then I realized that I had never brought a man upstairs before. Ray had never come up to my rooms. The matter had not previously been put to the test.
Ergo, and with a mixture of fury and a bitterness I could no longer deny, I told my landlady, “With respect, Mrs. Pierce, my apartment is not big enough for that many visitors. Besides, I’m too old and dissipated for a chaperone to do me a damned bit of good. And trust me, none of them is staying. My apartment is a mess and I’m—” I had almost said, I’m not staying, either. I let it hang. Beyond anything else just then, I could not believe that I had been foolish enough to move to Salt Lake City in the first place.
Once up in my apartment, the men got busy getting me comfortable. “Sure you don’t want me to make you an appointment to get that x-rayed?” Logan asked.
“I am certain,” I said. No X rays, no Rays, no nothing. Just leave me here to suffer in peace.
Jack tidied the bed, got me up on it, and arranged everything remotely resembling a cushion under my head and back and wounded foot.
Ted got busy making me some tea.
Logan checked out my refrigerator and cupboards to make sure I had food in the place, and then started washing my dishes.
“This is humiliating,” I said.
“If you’d be so kind as to quit fighting it, you might find you like it,” Jack said in a voice that would suit a British butler. He had run down to his car and returned with an EMT kit and was now undoing the temporary brace from my ankle.
Ted brought me the tea and a plateful of cookies, put them down on the bedside table, and brought the phone over where I could reach it.
Jack worked my pants off over my wounded appendage, leaving me in thermal underwear that looked a bit like the pajamas I wore as a kid.
Jack’s hands were sure but gentle as he worked. He peeled the sock off my foot, produced an elastic bandage and some adhesive tape, and began to wrap it. “Doesn’t look like it’s going to swell too badly,” he commented.
“You play football or something?” I asked.
“How’d you know? Must be my artistry with the bandage. That, and I was a medic in the army. I wasn’t just making that up.”
Logan was watching from the kitchenette. “What do you do now?” he asked, finally getting around to wondering about Jack’s particulars.
I smiled cheerfully and waited, ready to hear what kind of story Jack was going to produce. So far, I had seen at least three regional varieties of consanguineous good old boy, a butler, and an army medic, so what was it going to be this time? A college student working his way through school as a nightclub strip act? Idle rich? Door-to-door Bible salesman?
“I’m a field agent with the FBI,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Cool,” said Ted.
“Oh,” said Logan.
Ted’s face lighted up. “Hey, so maybe you’re into figuring out who killed Sidney Smeeth,” he gushed. “Wow! Hey, so you tagged along skiing ’cause you were hoping one of us would say something that would be, like, a clue, and then you could pass the information on and—”
“Who ever said she was murdered?” Logan asked.
“Ted did,” Jack replied.
“Of course she was,” Ted said.
“You’re paranoid,” Logan insisted.
“Anyway, that would be a matter for the city police,” Jack said, keeping his eyes focused on his bandaging job. “I’m just stationed here in Salt Lake, but I go all over. And the FBI seldom gets involved with murder cases.”
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