“Believe it or not,” Sophie said, “the town Water Board does it.”
“The Water Board? Are you serious?”
“It’s a small town. Just three hundred and fifty of us—anywhere else, we’d be a wide spot in the road. We don’t have committees or agencies for every little thing. The Town Council handles the finances, the legislation, and the school and the quarry. The Volunteer Fire Department deals with emergencies, organizes holidays, and does avalanche control in the town and even on the road down to Redstone. So everything else, like pollution control, and even genetics, got dumped on the Water Board. It just fell out that way. Kind of elegant, I think.”
Dennis nodded, silent. What did it matter? What did it have to do with the new heart of his life?
Some evenings Sophie read poetry aloud. She read Wordsworth and Mallarmé to him. She had taught herself French with videos from the Pitkin County Library. He loved the sound of her voice; its clarity was like that of a lightly struck gong. And at least three or four times a week she played the lovely dark violin kept in the battered leather case. She caressed its gleaming wood and its taut strings. Her playing captivated Dennis. Whatever cares the world still inflicted on him vanished. He was borne away to a womblike place where he seemed to drift in warm, slow-moving water.
“Sometimes,” he admitted, “when I shut my eyes, I could go to sleep while you play.”
“Do,” Sophie said, her eyes bright with pleasure. “I wouldn’t mind. Music can take you to another world. And it can reach you while you sleep.”
Dennis had sometimes watched television at night when he lived alone, and before, when he had been married to Alma, but he realized one day that here in the mountains he rarely turned on the TV except for a movie on PBS or a sporting event that he couldn’t resist. His real world was sunny and celebratory—entertainment enough.
Before meeting Sophie he had considered himself a sexually sophisticated man. He had been a bachelor for many years before his marriage to Alma, had made love to many women. One of his longterm partners in New York had been a French art magazine editor, another a dark-skinned psychiatrist from Brazil. He had always been willing to experiment, and on several occasions had made love with two women together. But he was never arrogant about his sexuality. Like most men, he believed he was a good lover. Women had told him so—why doubt it? Even more, he had been fortunate in having experiences with women who were skilled in the arts of love. It was a skill, he’d begun to see. It was not always enough to follow your instincts. You could learn. You could experiment. You could go beyond the ordinary.
And now there was Sophie. Whatever he thought he knew before about womanliness and sex, with Sophie he was reeducated. There seemed to be nothing that she wouldn’t do or didn’t know how to do. The bedroom was her dominion. By candlelight, they romped. In the dark, she whispered in his ear and conjured images of all his fantasies. And yet despite her skills, everything was achieved with the delight of carnal freshness. He wondered where such knowledge came from.
After making love, if it was not too cold they would walk out on the deck together. “To let the starlight wash our eyes,” Sophie said. At 9,000 feet the darkness was absolute. The stars were diamond hard in their brilliance and seemed to give off a faint hum. From the mountain fastness came the howl of coyotes, which occasionally woke the children. On starry nights a nesting owl hooted, and on warmer nights as spring moved toward summer they heard deer or elk moving through the brush.
“Are there grizzly bears around here?” Brian asked.
“Black bear,” Sophie said. “In the winter, they hibernate. Now that it’s spring you can see tracks and fresh droppings. And in summer you might spot one or two young ones on the other side of the creek. They won’t come near the house unless they’re really hungry.”
One night in April Dennis was awakened by a series of thuds behind the kitchen. The heavy-duty green plastic garbage cans stood unprotected in the snow next to Sophie’s Blazer and his Cherokee. A quarter moon hung clear and brilliant above the mountains. Dennis peered out from the upstairs window and saw a large animal nuzzling at one of the garbage cans. A neighbor kept cows and often forgot to close the barn.
He looked at his watch: not yet midnight. The remains of a log fire glowed in the living room fireplace, and the room was still warm. He put on his toweled bathrobe and padded downstairs. Shadows danced on the walls as he took a flashlight off the kitchen counter. Hearing a soft footfall above him, he turned. Brian stood on the staircase, wearing his red flannel pajamas with pictures of Mickey Mouse and Pluto.
“I heard something, Daddy.”
“I think a cow’s poking around in the garbage. We threw out all those delicious chicken teriyaki bones from supper, remember? Let’s go look.”
With Brian at his side, Dennis opened the kitchen door—the bitter cold night air struck them a solid blow. He stepped outside, flicked on the beam of the flashlight, and said, “Shoo!”
A black bear turned its great head toward him. It crouched on all fours by the laden garbage cans. Its eyes, crimson buttons in the yellow cone of the flashlight beam, suddenly and unaccountably blazed with what struck Dennis as malevolence. Dennis smelled the animal’s meaty breath. It took a shuffling step toward them. Dennis shoved Brian behind him. The boy screamed and wet himself.
Dennis could never afterward recall where he had read or heard what to do, but some clear memory lay rooted in his mind. The white toweling bathrobe was only loosely knotted. Rising on tiptoes, he thrust his arms up and to the sides. Look larger, he remembered. At the same time he lowered his eyes to avoid challenging the animal.
The bear turned and shuffled off quickly into the darkness of the forest.
For a month, whenever Dennis spoke to friends and family in the East, he related the story, although he left out the part about Brian’s wetting his Disney World pajama pants. He began to feel like some kind of modern-day mountain man—nearly naked under the moon and sharing the turf with Neighbor Bear. An adventurer, a former city boy happily out of his element: this image pleased him.
Chapter 7
Trust Me
BRIAN REMEMBERED HIS stepmother had told him the town of Springhill was named after a nearby warm-water spring.
“You said it was a special place, and you promised to show it to us. Why is it special?”
“When we go there, I’ll show you.”
Brian kept nagging, and early on a Sunday morning in May Sophie announced that she would escort him and his sister and his father through the woods to the spring.
“Grab your snowshoes, gang.”
During the night it had snowed four inches of corn snow. The snowshoes had been Sophie’s Christmas present to everybody. The family tramped through the property and across the creek and onto a path that led into the forest. There they halted and strapped on the snowshoes. A hundred yards deeper into the forest they came to a sturdy wire gate set into a four-foot-high barbed-wire fence that snaked between the trees as far as they could see. The gate was padlocked with a combination lock.
Sophie twirled the dials. With a snap, the lock sprang free.
“This isn’t your land, is it?” Dennis asked.
“No, this is village land.”
“How come you know the combination? Is that one of the mayor’s privileges?”
“Every adult in Springhill knows it.”
“If every adult knows it, why bother locking the gate? To keep out the children?”
“The path leads to the spring, and then beyond to Indian Lake. We don’t want strangers poking around here.”
“Sophie, in case you haven’t noticed, strangers don’t come to Springhill.”
“Valley people go hiking in summer. Do you think they know which creeks contribute to a drinking water supply and which don’t? They can contaminate without realizing it.”
She plunged ahead in the snow, where drifting powder had piled up in some places as high as her head. The pines were hung
with tufts of snow and the blue sky shone through branches like a winter postcard on a drugstore rack.
“There,” Sophie said, pointing to a small hill, a thin waterfall that dropped perhaps a dozen feet from a rocky ledge, and a stream below. Only three feet wide, the stream coursed turbulently along its bed for fifty feet, widened briefly into a pool of five feet in diameter, and then disappeared in an abrupt dogleg into the hillside. Its surface carried moss and ferns, some rotting branches, and dark vegetation.
“That’s the spring?” Dennis asked. “That skinny waterfall and rivulet? And the hill? That’s what the town is named for?”
“The spring is hidden. The water you see is about eighty degrees Fahrenheit. In summer it goes up to eighty-five. That pool you see used to be quite a bit bigger, and people sometimes bathed there. Come. I’ll show you something else.”
There was no path, but she knew exactly where she was heading. Dennis and the children followed. A tumbledown cabin showed itself suddenly against a small mound of dirt.
Lucy said, “The wicked witch lives here!”
“No,” Brian cried. “She lives in a castle! This is a poor woodcutter’s cabin.”
“No one lives here now,” Sophie explained, smiling. “But many years ago, a miner did. William Lovell, an ancestor of Hank Lovell, our friend who manages the quarry. That man, Hank’s ancestor, was one of the first settlers in this part of the range.”
Brian’s eyes grew wide. “Is there still some gold here?”
“Mr. Lovell mined copper, not gold, and his little mine, which used to be on the side of that hill, was called El Rico—Spanish for ‘the rich one.’ The copper gave out about twenty years ago. No one works the mine anymore. Now I’ll show you some of the reasons it’s special. Sometimes, odd things happen around here.”
“Scary things?” Brian asked quickly.
“No.” Sophie put one gloved hand on each of the children’s shoulders. “Take off your snowshoes. Come into the cabin with me.”
The children followed her. Dennis, lingering a few feet behind them, watched. The old cabin was dark. Its sod roof had been replenished several times during its more than century-old lifetime. The floorboards creaked.
“Which one of you is taller?” Sophie asked.
“You know I am,” Brian said. “By two inches.”
“One,” Lucy said.
Sophie nodded. “Stand back-to-back.”
The children stood inside the cabin in winter morning shadow on the old plank floor, which seemed perfectly level. Sophie pressed the backs of their heads together.
“Dennis, you be the judge. Which of them is taller?”
“Whatever they’re standing on,” he said, “makes them seem the same height.”
“I’m two inches taller,” Brian insisted. “Well, maybe one and a half.”
“The floor must slope,” Dennis said, puzzled.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” Sophie asked. From the deepest pocket of her parka she took out an old tennis ball. Bending, she placed it on the floor just a few inches past Brian’s feet. The ball rolled slowly toward Lucy and bounced against her heel.
“If the ground slopes the way that ball rolls,” Sophie said, “then Brian should look a lot taller than Lucy. Even more than two inches.”
“The whole cabin must be on a slant,” Dennis said. But even as he said it, he knew that the words and the concept made no sense. He was baffled.
Sophie picked up the tennis ball. “Look at me.”
Clasping her hands high in the air, she leaned far to the left. Her body canted at an angle that seemed impossible; it seemed that she should fall to the floor.
“Cool,” Brian said.
“Wait a minute,” Dennis said. “That’s weird. How are you able to do that?”
Sophie straightened up again, offering no explanation of the impossible angle she had assumed. “Come outside.”
There in the woods she said, “Strange things happen here. And strange things don’t happen here. In summer, for example, there are no birds. They don’t fly over these trees and they don’t land in the branches. They make a detour around the whole area. And look at the trees. What do you see?”
Some of the aspens were twisted like gray corkscrews.
“In the summer,” Sophie continued, “squirrels jump from one of those trees to another, and often they miss the branch they’re jumping for.”
“You’ve seen this?” Dennis asked.
“Yes, I have.”
“Give me a rational explanation. What’s the nature of this place?”
Sophie led them back through the snow toward the distant gate. “Some say the deep veins of copper cause all these odd things to happen. Others say that thousands of years ago a dense meteorite struck here. It’s supposed to be embedded not too far below the surface. There’s a magnetism we can’t explain. The gravity is out of whack.”
“Who told you that?” Dennis asked.
“A geologist from the University of Colorado came here. That was before my time, but I heard all about his conclusions. I imagine he’s right, but who knows?”
“You’re a teacher,” Brian said. “You should know why this place is funny.”
“You’re right. I should know, but I don’t.” She touched Brian’s cheek. “There are some things in life you can’t explain. You can theorize, you can speculate, but you can’t reach a scientific conclusion. Maybe it’s all an optical illusion.”
Brian turned to the supreme authority. “Dad, what do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Dennis said. “I’ve lived in New York and I thought I’d seen it all. Obviously I haven’t.” He laughed, and so did Sophie, and it was infectious: the children began to jump around in the snow and fall down and say, “I’m a squirrel and I can’t find my branch!”
But Dennis’s laughter hid his puzzlement. It was more than puzzlement: he couldn’t yet find a name for what he felt. Something about the place disturbed him deeply, and he was glad to go.
The huge snowpack on the back range melted so slowly that even in late May it was still piled to a height of four or five feet in the forest surrounding the Conways’ home. Lucy came to Dennis at the breakfast table in the kitchen, where he was having a Saturday midmorning cup of coffee and doing the crossword puzzle in the national edition of the New York Times.
Lucy said mournfully, “Donahue is gone.”
“Are you sure?” Dennis put his pen down and looked up. “He could be in one of the sweater drawers, like the last time you thought he was missing.”
“No, Daddy, he’s gone. He didn’t sleep with me last night. I’ve looked everywhere.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Last night after supper. I fed him and Sleepy.”
“And where is Sleepy now?”
“On your big chair that you like to watch football in.”
“If Donahue was really gone, do you suppose Sleepy would just go to sleep like that? Wouldn’t she be out looking for him?”
Lucy began to cry. “Daddy, you’re making fun of me, and I’m trying to tell you that Donahue is gone.”
Dennis hugged his daughter, then got up and tested the cat door to make sure it hadn’t jammed. It swung freely.
“Let’s go look for him, sweetheart,” he said.
Sophie was in town at a Town Council meeting. Dennis and Lucy, soon joined by Brian, searched the house. They looked everywhere, including a chest of drawers that contained T-shirts and long johns, and the tops of Sophie’s closets where soft woolen sweaters were piled.
In the nearby meadow and forest Dennis showed the children how to conduct a logical search in ever-widening ovals. They tramped through snow and mud, searching for paw prints, calling Donahue’s name and making hissing noises. They peered up trees and poked under bushes. They found nothing.
“He’ll turn up by nightfall,” Dennis said, “as soon as he gets hungry.” In the evening when Sophie returned home they all went roun
d to their various neighbors to ask if anyone had seen a gray-and-white medium-sized cat without a collar. Sophie’s parents, Scott and Bibsy, lived just to the north along the creek. They had seen nothing.
The neighbor with the cows was an older woman named Mary Crenshaw. Her husband had run the town’s tiny funeral parlor and been part-time police chief. He had died several months ago and his son had inherited both jobs. Mary Crenshaw rarely came out except to shop for food and quantities of port wine that the general store carried on its back shelves. Dennis had noticed that few Springhillers drank to excess; this sobriety had impressed him.
“Better let me talk to her,” Sophie said. “She’s odd.”
Dennis and the children waited outside on Mary Crenshaw’s porch. They heard Sophie inside asking about the missing cat. Dennis thought he heard her say, a little louder, “The tweeds’ yank tomker, Mary. Zacky and grease…” He could make even less sense out of Mrs. Crenshaw’s reply.
Sophie came out of the house. “She hasn’t seen Donahue, but she’ll keep her eye peeled.”
“What was it that you asked her?” Dennis asked. “I couldn’t make head or tail out of it.”
“She’s an old woman,” Sophie said. “She slurs her words.”
“It was you I heard, Sophie. It was like gobbledygook.”
The children had gone off to make hissing and clicking noises among the pines behind Mary Crenshaw’s house, hoping the cat would respond.
“Dennis, darling, please. I’ve had a long day and I’m upset. I don’t think we’re going to find Donahue.”
In the next few days Dennis scoured the woods in the search for a body, or remains, or even for a bit of fur. He found nothing.
Lucy came to him a week later, with Sleepy cradled in her arms. “Maybe,” she said, “Donahue fell in love with another girl kitty and she lived somewhere else, like you did with Sophie. So he went there to be with her. Do you think so, Daddy?”
“That’s a definite possibility.”
“And he might come back one day to visit.”
“Yes, he might.”
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller Page 6
