by Cindy Myers
Rick turned to Maggie. “Do you have Jake’s trophies?”
“His what?”
“His Hard Rock trophies. We’re putting together a display of all the trophies we can find. They’re all different, you know, and we thought it would be interesting for everyone to see them.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Maggie asked.
“The Hard Rock Days committee. Jake won three of the things. Can you bring them to the office tomorrow?”
“I don’t remember seeing anything like that at the cabin,” she said. “What do they look like?”
“They look like trophies. One of them has a guy with a hammer, I think. Another may have a miner’s helmet. I don’t know. But they’ve got to be somewhere in Jake’s things.”
“I’ll look,” she said. “But I can’t promise they’re there.”
“They’re somewhere. Jake wouldn’t have just thrown them away.” He paused, then added, “Maybe you should go now. We don’t have time to waste.”
“Stuff it, Rick. I’ll look for them tonight.”
He opened his mouth as if to argue, then shook his head, turned, and left, slamming the door behind him. The other women waited until he was gone, then burst out laughing. “Maggie, I didn’t know you were so feisty,” Lucille said.
“I didn’t use to be, but I’ve decided I’m through with men ordering me around.”
Lucille smiled. Jake’s daughter was definitely coming into her own. She glanced across the room at Olivia, who was bent over the iron, lost in thought. If only Lucille could find a way to get through to her. She didn’t want to lose Olivia again, but she hadn’t a clue how to keep her.
Chapter 22
The cabin definitely seemed bigger without those boxes of glass taking up room. Maggie wondered if she should have kept one or two of the nicer pieces. The teardrop candlesticks, or the lotus vase, maybe . . . She shook her head. Better to make a clean break. She had a new life now; she’d collect new memories.
Her father certainly hadn’t been one to accumulate a lot of souvenirs and knickknacks, unless you counted the rocks, fossils, and ore samples scattered about. Just the other morning she’d found more of the little blue stones, tucked into a coffee mug at the back of a kitchen cabinet.
Now she was searching for the mysterious Hard Rock trophies. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t looked through Jake’s things already; she’d have noticed three trophies if they were here. But Rick could nag worse than any woman when he had an idea in his head, so she’d look again and hope the trophies would magically turn up.
The only place she hadn’t explored was the trap door under the stairs. She assumed it led to the crawl space—an unlikely storage space. Weren’t crawl spaces damp and cold— and full of spiders and other creepy crawlies? If Jameso was here, she’d ask him to go down there.
But of course he wasn’t here, the bastard. Running out of town without a word to her, and why? What had she done wrong? Nothing. But that was just like a man. You couldn’t depend on them. She didn’t need him, not even to go down in the damn crawl space.
She shoved a toolbox out of the way to reveal the trap door. Standing behind the door, she grasped the ring and tugged. It came open much easier than she’d expected, flying back and landing against the floor with a bang. She jumped back and waited, staring at the opening. But no monsters, or spiders, crawled out. She tiptoed to the edge and aimed the beam of a flashlight into the opening.
A metal footlocker sat to one side of the opening, army drab beneath a layer of dust. Maggie’s heart pounded as she studied it. Why was this hidden down here? Simply because it was convenient—or because Jake hadn’t wanted to be reminded of his army days?
If she lay on her stomach, she could just reach one handle on the side of the footlocker, but one tug told her it was too heavy to haul through the opening. She’d have to go down to it. She played the light all around the area, but saw no signs of bugs, rats, snakes, or other undesirables. The space was cold, but dry, lined with rock. She studied the footlocker again. It looked as if it hadn’t been disturbed for a long time.
Curiosity won over squeamishness. Flashlight firmly in hand, she lowered herself into the opening and knelt in front of the trunk. It wasn’t locked; the lid lifted easily.
In the very top of the box lay a rifle—black and sinister, with an army green sling. Maggie balanced the light on one side of the box and carefully lifted out the weapon. It was heavy and cold in her hand. She shuddered and set it to one side, the barrel pointing away from her. Next came an army jacket, with a sergeant’s stripes on the shoulder and a patch that read MURPHY over the breast pocket. She stroked the jacket, then put it to her nose. It smelled of musty canvas, no trace of the man remaining.
She laid the jacket across her knees, then reached into the locker and took out at leather case. It turned out to contain a row of medals: a Purple Heart, a small silver medal with a target on it, and a bronze medal with the image of a dragon and the words Republic of Vietnam Service. Why did he hide these away down here?
A brittle brown envelope proved to be Jake’s discharge papers. He received an honorable discharge on July 11, 1973. She’d have been ten months old; why hadn’t he come home after he got out of the army? What had happened to drive him away? The mystery tainted everything, unanswerable but demanding an answer all the same.
Next came a yellow envelope full of photographs. Jake as a skinny young man, posing in uniform with a rifle. The rifle she’d just taken from the locker? He grinned at the camera, all youth and bravado. Longing clutched at her—longing to have known her father when he was so young and happy. How would her life have been different with him in it?
Some of the pictures were labeled with unfamiliar names and places. Son My, Ngãi, and My Lai.
My Lai. The name rang a bell; some fragment from highschool history classes and those papers she’d written about the Vietnam War. My Lai was the site of a horrible massacre, American troops killing Vietnamese civilians. Had her dad been there?
She set the pictures aside. Near the bottom of the locker she found two photographs of herself, tucked into an envelope with a folded sheet of paper. The photos had been taken several years before. One was before a formal banquet—her and Carter. They were standing arm in arm near an arrangement of flowers. She was looking up at her husband; he was looking off to the side, out of the picture. How telling that pose seemed now; she’d spent so many years focused on that man, while he looked everywhere but at her.
The second photograph was of her alone. It was her favorite picture of herself, taken in her mother’s backyard on a summer day. She was seated on the steps, legs stretched out in front of her, looking over her shoulder at the camera and smiling. She looked young and happy and almost beautiful. She stared at the image, feeling a great tenderness for the woman in the photo. She’d been through a lot since that image was captured; her mother’s death, divorce, the revelations about her father. She was a different person now, and yet the same. She still wanted that happiness.
She tucked the pictures back in the envelope. These must be the photographs her mother had mentioned in her letter. Why had her father put them here, at the bottom of this box—because they were memories that were too painful to contemplate?
She removed the paper from the envelope and smoothed it out. The sheet had obviously been torn from a spiral notebook, with a ragged fringe down one side. Crooked writing covered half the page—looping, leaning letters a barely decipherable scrawl. She squinted and shone the flashlight on the page.
Dear Maggie, the letter began. She sat back on her heels, heart pounding.
I’ve written a lot of times over the years, but never had the guts to send the letters. I don’t know if I’ll send this one. You probably think I’m an asshole, and I guess I am. You probably think I never cared about you and if you think that, you’re wrong.
The first time I held you in my arms was the biggest miracle of my life. I couldn’t get over how beautiful and perfect and pure you were
. And all I could think of as I looked at you, lying there in my hands, was all the awful things those hands had done. I didn’t deserve something as innocent and wonderful as you in my life.
I told myself if I went away for a while, I could get my mind together and make things right. Then I’d come home and be a good dad to you and a good husband to your mother. But things didn’t happen that way. I wanted to come home, but I never could. The longer I stayed away, the easier it was to never go back.
I don’t expect you to understand it. I don’t understand it either. It was another terrible thing I did, another thing I have to live with.
The letter ended there, the words trailing away. Maggie stared at it, tears making hot paths down her face. She wasn’t crying for herself this time, but for the man who’d spent his life so tortured. “You should have sent the letter, Dad,” she whispered. “Maybe I could have found a way to make things better.”
After a while the tears stopped flowing. She tucked the letter back into the envelope with the pictures and set it aside with the jacket. Then she leaned over and took the last items from the trunk: the three Hard Rock trophies, each wrapped in an old T-shirt. One depicted a miner with a pick, one was a miner’s helmet mounted on a stand, and the third was a miniature hammer. Hard Rock Champion, 2010, this last one proclaimed.
She replaced the rifle and the medals and all the photographs except those of herself in the trunk, and carried the trophies, jacket, and the letter and pictures up into the cabin. The trophies made a whimsical display, set in a row on the table. Maybe after Rick was through with them she’d keep them up here. They fit the cabin—and her life now—better than the Steuben.
“People! People! Our first performance is less than a week away and I can’t believe you all still don’t have your lines memorized.” Cassie climbed onto the set that served as the front porch of the general store, on the stage of the Eureka Opera House, and scowled at her cast. Doug Rayburn slumped in a chair in the middle of the stage, looking half asleep. Bob preened in the reflective glass of the storefront, Toby Mercer had a cell phone to his ear, and Lucas stood with his back to her, reading old advertisements taped to the wall. “Don’t any of you care about this play?” She raised her voice, her throat tight, eyes stinging.
“Aww, Cass, it’ll be all right.” Toby hung up the phone. “It’ll all come together opening night. You’ll see.”
“I ought to cut your part from the play altogether,” she said. “I warned you about stealing scenes.”
“I can’t help it if I’ve got all the best lines,” Toby said.
“You can’t cut his part,” Tamarin said from her seat on the front row. “The programs have already been printed.”
“Not to mention he has half my cues,” Doug said.
“Why don’t we take a little break.” Bob moved over from the window to stand beside Cassie. “You go freshen up a bit and when we come back it’ll be better. You’ll see.”
She turned away, mortified that he’d recognized she was on the edge of losing it. “Ten minutes,” she called over her shoulder. “You might use the time to study your lines.”
She stalked off stage and out a side door that opened into a hallway leading to the lobby. Her great-grandmother had been the president of the committee that raised the money to build the Opera House back in 1898. The granite had been mined near Gunnison and hauled over the mountains by mule. The original stage lights had been oil-filled smudge pots, and the red velvet stage curtains had been special ordered from Denver. The building had been closed for thirty years when the historical society, led by Cassie, badgered the town council into setting aside funds for its restoration. Cassie knew her great-grandmother would have been proud.
But there was nothing to make Emmaline Wynock proud in the train wreck of a production due to debut on the Opera House stage in four nights. Half the actors hadn’t learned their lines, and the other half looked ridiculous. Cassie was so nervous half the time she forgot her own part, which only flustered her more. And despite her best efforts to lose a few pounds, her grandmother’s suit was still so tight she could scarcely breathe.
She’d intended to head straight for the ladies’ room to bathe her face with cool water, but the scene in the lobby diverted her. Rick Otis had emptied out the front display case—which had held a tasteful collection of antique opera glasses, ladies’ fans, a silk top hat that had purportedly belonged to Horace Tabor himself, and an original brass spittoon from the Opera House—and was arranging a motley assortment of figures on the shelves. “What are you doing?” she demanded, marching toward him.
“Hey, Cassie.” Rick grinned at her—her first clue that he was up to no good. Rick never grinned at anyone.
“What are you doing?” she asked again, eyeing the items on the shelves. On closer inspection, they appeared to be trophies, though no two looked alike. They were gold and silver, tall and short, featuring human figures and inanimate objects. Rick had arranged some framed pictures among the trophies: front and center was a large photograph of Jake, looking much as he had the first time she saw him, strong and virile, an ax slung over one shoulder.
“The committee thought it would be a great idea to showcase the history of the event,” Rick said. “So we got together as many trophies as we could from past winners, along with some photographs. It’ll fit in well with your play about the history of the town, don’t you think?”
She couldn’t keep her gaze from the photograph of Jake. Looking at him still made her heart beat faster. “I didn’t give you permission to use that display case,” she said.
“The building—and the display case—belong to the town, not you.”
“Almost everything in that case belonged to my family,” she said. “And I am president of the historical society, which oversees the operation of the Opera House.”
“You don’t have to worry about the stuff in the case.” Rick nodded to a cardboard box and a pile of tissue paper on the floor beside him. “I’m going to box it up and store it until after Hard Rock Days. Then I’ll put everything back. I promise.”
The plan seemed sensible enough, and it wasn’t as if anyone would miss the antiques, except her. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Jake Murphy was horning in on her big moment. The man was dead, and he was still stealing attention for himself.
“Who’s the guy in the picture?” Lucas Theriot wandered out of the men’s room and over to them. He leaned toward the case, squinting in that nearsighted way of his. Cassie noted he came just past the top of her head, and his jeans were an inch too short at the ankles, as if he’d just had a growth spurt. “Did he win all these trophies?”
“Just three of them,” Rick said. “That’s Jake Murphy. He died earlier this year, but he was quite a character.”
“What did he do?” Lucas asked.
Rick arranged the last trophy in the case and shut the door. “Jake did a lot of things, though I guess, officially, he was retired. He had a cabin way up on Mount Garnet, and he owned the French Mistress Mine.”
“He owned a mine?” Lucas’s eyes lit up. “A gold mine?”
“Well, I don’t know if there was any gold in the mine or not, but Jake owned it.”
“There wasn’t any gold in the mine,” Cassie said. “And Jake was just a man who drank too much and liked to make trouble.”
“Now, Cassie—”
She turned away. Rick could say what he wanted in defense of Jake, but having a charismatic personality and an imposing body did not make a man a good person, and certainly not one to hold up as an example to an impressionable boy like Lucas.
Before Cassie could reach the hallway leading back to the stage, the front door of the Opera House opened and Maggie came in, camera around her neck. “What took you so long?” Rick called. “I want you to get a picture of this display.”
“Hello, Cassie,” Maggie called. “What do you think of the Hard Rock trophies? Aren’t they a hoot?”
“I think they’
re ridiculous.” Even though she was Jake’s daughter, Maggie seemed to have a little sense. Maybe she could persuade Rick to move his display out of the Opera House. “They certainly don’t belong here,” she said. “Why don’t you display them at the newspaper office?”
“Nobody comes to the newspaper office if they don’t have to,” Rick said. “I don’t even like to go there.” He moved the carton of antiques out of the way. “Back up for a wide shot, Maggie. And angle the flash. You don’t want it bouncing off the glass.”
“Rick, why don’t you take the picture?” Maggie handed over the camera and stepped back next to Cassie. “That’s what he wanted anyway,” she whispered.
“I guess Jake’s trophies were at the cabin,” Cassie said. Despite her best intentions, her gaze kept straying back to the photograph of Jake, in the center of the case. Even in a picture he looked more alive than everyone else.
“I found them in the oddest place,” Maggie said. “Wrapped up in some old shirts in the bottom of his army footlocker, along with some old pictures and medals.”
“Jake was in the army?”
Cassie thought Lucas had wandered away, but there he was again, the little eavesdropper.
“You know Jake?” Maggie asked.
“Mr. Otis was just telling me about him. He said he owned a gold mine. What did he get medals for?”
“I’m not sure. He had a Purple Heart and a Vietnam campaign medal. I think the other might have been some kind of marksmanship medal.”
“He fought in Vietnam? I’ve been reading about Vietnam in some old newspapers my grandmother gave me.”
“I thought you were interested in local history,” Cassie said.
“I like all kinds of history.” He turned to Maggie. “Can I see the medals some day?”
“Maybe one day,” she said.
The door into the auditorium opened and Doug leaned out. “Are we gonna finish rehearsing today or not?” he asked.
“Of course we’re going to finish,” Cassie bristled.
