Blinded

by Stephen White

  Not a cloud. Not today-maybe tomorrow we’d get blasted.

  I said, “How are you doing, Sam?”

  He didn’t exactly respond. He said, “There’s somebody I have to talk to in Gold Hill. Want to come with? Bet it’s pretty up there.”

  Lauren and Grace were at some weekly mother-child yoga event that Adrienne thought was the greatest thing going. I was tempted to go some Saturday morning just to watch. Grace had the not-so-svelte physique of a well-fed, chunky baby. My daughter could no more do yoga than I could fly. I left them a note about my plans and headed to Sam’s house.

  Depending on the weather, on a typical weekend before Thanksgiving the ten-mile drive from Sam’s house on the west side of Boulder up the Front Range to Gold Hill can take as little as twenty-five minutes or as long as-well, a long, long time. The road that curls up Sunshine Canyon into the mountains was paved for a while and then it isn’t paved for a much longer while. In some places the dirt and gravel portion of the track is particularly steep and curvy, and in winter, with the sun low in the sky, some of the canyon stretches don’t see the direct rays of the sun for months at a time. After a heavy snow and a deep cold snap, ice on the road can freeze as hard as a traffic cop’s eyes.

  The final descent into the valley that was home to the pioneer mining enclave of Gold Hill is a particularly spectacular section of trail. The road drops a few hundred feet in altitude-and about 150 years in time and attitude-in less than a minute.

  Very few villages in the Rocky Mountains have managed to check the natural progression that leads from Old West town to Old West ghost town. Some of the ones that have managed to freeze themselves in time have become polished tourist magnets like Telluride and Georgetown, but only a precious few of the surviving nineteenth-century burgs have managed to remain invisible to the hordes of annual visitors who show up clutching tour books. Gold Hill was one of those few. Gold Hill was hard to get to, its fewer than two hundred full-time residents didn’t exactly lay out a welcome mat for guests, and any attempt to find a location for a Golden Arches or Starbucks within the range of a.30-06 from town would likely be met by a crowd of passionate locals prone to carelessness with torches.

  The Gold Hill Inn, the town’s enduring fine dining destination, was open only during the summer months because too few Front Range residents could be counted on to make the drive up to nearly nine thousand feet in the inevitable springtime slush or the usually predictable autumn ice. Winter? For most people, casual travel to Gold Hill was too risky during an average snow year. I’ve always had the impression that four or five months of regular visits by curious flatlanders were about the maximum the residents of Gold Hill could tolerate anyway.

  I hadn’t asked Sam about his business in Gold Hill. The mountain enclave was in Boulder County, and Sam was a city cop, not a sheriff’s deputy, so I suspected that his business was personal, not professional. But I also knew Sam well enough to know that if during the course of an investigation he wanted to talk with somebody who happened to reside a few steps outside the city limits, he would usually find a way to do so. The solution might be by-the-book legal, or it might be less-than-by-the-book creative. But the job would get done.

  The fact that he was on medical leave from the police department? That would be no more of an impediment to him than the countless potholes we dodged in the dirt lane up to Gold Hill. Or the fact that I was certain he was under orders not to drive for a while after his heart attack.

  Did I mention that to him? The driving restrictions? I didn’t. When I arrived at his house, I had offered to drive. He had declined. That’s as far as it went. I knew from experience that I could strongly encourage Sam’s sense of self-preservation. But insisting on it only put my own at risk.

  We parked on Gold Hill’s main street across from the Gold Hill Inn. The street may actually have been called Main Street, but I didn’t look for a sign. I was enjoying the gorgeous day and was reveling at being up in the mountains in a town that was so charmingly frontier yet didn’t look as though it had been imagined by Disney set designers. As soon as I stepped out of the car onto the dusty dirt lane, I knew that, despite the fine autumn day, the air in Gold Hill-three thousand-plus feet above Boulder in altitude-held a chill that warned of imminent winter.

  It should have felt ominous to me, but it didn’t.

  Sam led me across the road toward the ancient building I’ll probably always think of as the home of the original Lick Skillet Café. My first wife and I had made frequent treks up the hill to the Lick Skillet for memorable meals in the late eighties before Dave Query packed up and trucked his culinary imagination down the mountain to Boulder and Denver.

  The destination Sam had in mind was packed with locals. About half of the patrons seemed to make Sam for a cop before the cleft of his substantial butt cleared the jamb of the doorway. He pointed me toward an open deuce in a far corner. On the way we passed tables covered with platters that were plastered rim-to-rim with eggs and bacon and potatoes and flapjacks as big as hubcaps.

  “Breakfast is hard for me,” Sam said. “I miss meat that’s been treated with nitrates. Outside of cheese, that’s what I miss most. Brats, bacon, salami…”

  I thought the waitress was just the slightest bit tentative as she approached our table. Sam waved off the menus and ordered an egg-white omelet, sans cheese, sliced tomatoes, and dry wheat toast. He asked her to be sure that the omelet was made with very little butter. Almost speechless, but eager to endorse his choices, I told her I’d have the same.

  Although we both knew that we had just done the equivalent of going into a fine steak house and ordering steamed broccoli and brown rice, the waitress took the order with casual aplomb, as though the entire town of Gold Hill were already on the Ornish diet and our order was par for the course that morning.

  “Wait here,” Sam told me. “I have to go to the head. I won’t be long.” He stood and walked toward the bathrooms. Although I hadn’t been back that way for most of a decade, I was guessing that the odds were about fifty-fifty that the plumbing Sam would find was still the kind that didn’t involve copper pipes, or flushing.

  I watched the choreography of turned heads that followed Sam’s departure from the dining room. Just as the faces returned to their plates and their stained stoneware mugs of coffee, the waitress who had taken our order-a pleasant-faced young woman with close-set eyes and stringy brown hair-took the short walk toward the back of the house, too. She glanced over her shoulder before she turned the final corner.

  Sam returned to the dining room first. He had been gone no more than ninety seconds total. The waitress followed him about ten seconds later and resumed her tasks behind the counter.

  “Had to pee,” he said as he sat down across from me. “Like to wash my hands before I eat.”

  “Yeah. You met with our waitress, too.”

  He nodded. “Wanted to remind her that the toast had to be dry. I’m off butter, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. You want to tell me-”

  “Maybe later.”

  Breakfast was bland, but then, we’d ordered it that way. Sam dug into his without complaint. I used the hot sauce on the table to add some zip to mine.

  “Remember when we took the kids to Rocky Mountain National Park in September?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. Elk mate in the early autumn, and the beautiful dance concerts they produce at dusk prior to copulating draw hordes of human observers. Rocky Mountain National Park, northwest of Boulder, is prime territory for Front Range elk voyeurs. Sam, Sherry, Lauren, and I had taken the two kids, Simon and Grace, up the previous September for a cold picnic dinner and a visit to the annual elk show.

  The elk had done their courting thing that night with philharmonic aplomb. Although the dance steps of the majestic bulls and their harems of cows were difficult to discern during the prime dusk time period, the acoustics that night were perfect. The bugling bulls sent their baritone calls bouncing off the granite faces in th
e park, and the eerie echoes quieted even the most restlessHomo sapiensin the audience.

  “That’s when it hit me that Sherry was kind of unhappy. That night.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He had wiped his plate clean and held up his mug for a refill of decaf before I realized he’d said all he planned to say about that night in the park. Me? I had a feeling there was more to discuss.

  The waitress hustled over and topped off Sam’s coffee mug. “There are a lot of rules after a heart attack. No caffeine for a while-that’s one of them,” he said. “As far as things I miss, it would be hard to choose between caffeine and nitrates.”

  “Sex?”

  “I hope that’s not an offer. If it is, you’re a dead man.”

  I offered a grudging smile. Were I with a patient, clinical protocol would have had me waiting silently, feigning patience, for Sam to return to the topic of his troubled marriage. But with Sam I didn’t have to follow any protocol. I said, “So that’s it? That’s all you’re going to say about Sherry? That you knew she was unhappy?”

  “She was showing me something. Maybe I wasn’t able to see it. What more is there to say?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Did you notice anything?” he asked me.

  “That night? No.”

  Sam caught the waitress’s attention and pantomimed a request for the check. “Sherry said she was restless. That’s the word she used. She was thinking of selling the flower shop. Maybe going back to school.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “That’s because she said it to me, not to you. You and Lauren and the kids were running ahead of us.”

  “ ‘Restless’ for Sherry meant unhappy with you?”

  “You know, you go back and look for clues. That’s what I’ve been doing, anyway. I wonder what I missed. Whether I should have done something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Something different. Maybe I let stuff slide that I shouldn’t have let slide. Anyway, that’s one of the things I’m thinking I did wrong. Other times I think it’s all her shit. I go back and forth. I have a lot of time on my hands.”

  “That night? What did you say to Sherry?”

  “Probably not the right thing.”

  I sipped some water. “Why? What did you say?”

  The waitress brought our check, sliding it to an empty spot on the table pretty much exactly halfway between us. She stacked all the plates and mugs in a careful cascade up one forearm. I watched closely; not even a glint of recognition flashed between her and Sam.

  He said, “I don’t remember exactly. I’m sure it wasn’t what she wanted me to say.”

  I grabbed the check. Sam dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table.

  “You’re paying. That’s the tip,” he said.

  “What about you, Sam? Are you happy?”

  Did I get an answer?

  Did Gold Hill have a Starbucks?

  Almost halfway back to Boulder I asked, “What’s the story with the waitress? Your meeting in the back of the café?”

  A quarter of a mile of contemplation later he apparently decided that he was going to answer me.

  “Four weeks ago last night she was with some girlfriends at a club downtown. One of those places on Walnut, not far from your office. I’m not going to say which one. You can probably guess. Maybe you read about it in theCamera. But she was on my turf. She got drunk-she admits that. She met some guys-she admits that-and she agreed to go to an after-party at some frat house by CU. She admits that. She decided to let them drive her over there in their car. She admits that. Crappy judgment after crappy judgment after crappy judgment, and she admits every bit of it.”

  His left hand snaked from the steering wheel to his upper abdomen, his thumb pressing on his sternum.

  “On the way over to the Hill for the after-party, she was sexually assaulted in the back of a Chevy van.”

  “Raped?”

  “Sexually assaulted.”

  The distinction was obviously important. I was curious why. Prurient interest? No. Just enduring curiosity about the perverse imagination of assholes on alcohol. But I didn’t ask for any more details. Sam wouldn’t have wanted me to know any intimate details of the waitress’s horror. I liked that about him.

  “And?”

  “And it turns out that of all the people she’s had to deal with about what happened that night, she trusts me the most. Go figure.”

  Sam paused. I think he was giving me the opportunity to make the mistake of saying something snide. I didn’t.

  “I’ve been concerned that if I wasn’t around to hold her hand as this thing got closer to trial, she might get shy and drop the charges. The cops and the DA? We try real hard to make it okay, but the truth is that it’s a bitch to be a sexual assault victim in the system we have. So I wanted to tell this girl personally about the heart attack and let her know that I’d be gone for a while but that I’d be back on the job to, you know, help her before this thing went to court.”

  I wasn’t surprised at Sam’s generosity, though his sensitivity sometimes snuck up on me.

  That moment a sharp gust of wind exploded out of the west, which was behind us. The heavy car seemed to levitate like an amusement park ride about to careen down some ersatz mountainside. The sheer eighty-foot drop five feet from my window served as a reminder that this particular mountainside wasn’t exactly ersatz.

  I craned my neck to look behind us and saw that a thick bank of clouds had popped up and begun to shroud the highest peaks on the Divide.

  Sam didn’t turn around.

  He said, “Told you. We’re going to get blasted. Weather here is goofy.”

  We beat the approaching front down the mountain, though not by much. From our vantage on the street in front of Sam’s house where he had parked his Cherokee, the army of clouds marching over the Divide had the determination of the Allies assaulting Normandy.

  We were about to get blasted.

  “You have rehab today?” I asked.

  “Not until Monday. You know what they do there? These young kids in these dorky matching sweatsuits hook me up to all this heart monitor crap, and I do calisthenics with a bunch of old people, then they watch me walk on the treadmill, and then-then-they act like I’m lying when I tell them what I ate the day before. That’s the entire drill. I don’t see how that’s supposed to help my heart, unless terminal aggravation is their frigging goal.”

  “You’ll give it a chance, though? The rehab? I’m sure a big part of rehab is attitude.”

  “Don’t talk to me about attitude. I’m feeling a little better every day. I think the medicine is helping. The beta-blockers. I’m more mellow, you know? That can’t be all bad, right?”

  I recognized that he hadn’t answered my question about giving rehabilitation a chance.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  He changed the subject once more. “I heard you made an unscheduled appearance at the execution of that search warrant yesterday.” After he spoke, he punctuated his words by finally pounding the shift lever forward into park. I noted that he wasn’t terribly kind to his transmission.

  “Is anything a secret in this town? Jeez. I’m surprised my picture’s not in this morning’sCamera.”

  Sam laughed, first time all morning. I liked the sound of it, even if the joke was at my expense.

  “I got a personal invitation from the search warrantee, Sam. Nobody knows that my friendly neighborhood cop gave me a heads-up. Did they find what they were looking for?”

  He gazed at me over the top of his sunglasses. “You really think I’m going to tell you that?”

  “Probably not. You wouldn’t happen to know when she’s going to, you know…”

  “Accost you? No. But she will.”

  “Maybe not. I told her everything I know.”

  “No, you didn’t. You told her everything you think it’s okay for her to
know. If Reynoso knows what she’s doing, she knows damn well that you have more. And she’s going to want to know what it is.”

  “What have you heard about her?”

  He didn’t answer that question, but he did answer my earlier one. “The search at the house didn’t go too well. There’s still plenty of stuff to go over-couple of computers and file cabinets full of paper-but they didn’t find anything damning. That can’t have been too much of a surprise after all these years, though, right? You got to look.”

  “What about her-the detective? Do you know anything? Is she sharp?”

  “I’m on medical leave, remember? Totally out of the loop. Trying to keep my stress level down.”

  “Okay, then tell me what you hear from Sherry.”

  “Simon’s missing too much school. And I’m missing him way too much. That’s all I know.”

  “Come on, pick, Sam. Carmen Reynoso or Sherry. Tell me something about somebody.”

  “Okay. Word is that Reynoso has a chip on her shoulder. Some incident in San Jose a few years back forced her to leave that department before she had her fifteen. She’s about as happy chasing tourists around Laguna Beach as I would be chasing tourists around Aspen.”

  That wasn’t very happy.

  “What kind of incident in San Jose?”

  “Won’t tell you.”

  “Can’t tell me?”

  “Won’t tell you.”

  “Do you even know?”

  “No. But I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  By the time Detective Carmen Reynoso tracked me down for an interview, her outfit of wools and leathers was perfect for the weather.

  The front that was carrying Pacific moisture over the mountains had collided with some supercold air that was blowing down from Saskatchewan, and together the two weather systems became a fast and furious snow machine along Colorado’s Front Range. What had likely been the season’s final Indian summer interlude was history before anyone had a chance to bid it adieu. I’d managed to drive only halfway from Sam’s house to mine before the winds moderated below gale force and snow started falling in fat flakes that left melanoma rings in the dust on my car. I looked at the time.