beautiful than on the night he had taken her to the stars and back. He
hovered three feet above the ground; the mighty and fearsome glow
around him emanated power. From his eyes he struck a jagged and
noisome bolt of lightning at the clumsy, stumbling feet of Detective
Crandall.
"Behold, the judgment of the Almighty," he commanded, his voice lifting
to the rafters of the old carriage house.
Spellbound by the terrible majesty of Ezekiel, Avenging Angel of the
Lord, Robyn watched Crandall slumping to the ground, sobbing for mercy,
for his life to be spared, begging to be allowed to turn himself in.
The awesome specter of the angel Ezekiel faded, and in the place where
he had rendered the judgment from on high, Kiel stood staring at the
pitiful visage of a cop who no longer held himself above the law of his
fellow mortals.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, a beautiful fall Monday morning in one of the
most visually stunning and spiritually bereft places on the earth, Kiel
and Robyn went to the press conference set up by the district
attorney's office.
The word had been Put out far and wide that there was a new and
stunning development in the old murder case of Spyder Nielsen. Kiel
didn't want to make a spectacle of it, but Trudi Candelaria had lately
been the woman the public most loved to hate, and the story was big
news. Also, the integrity of Keller Trueblood was at stake.
Kiel moved around, feeling more wooden than Pinocchio had been. He was
stiff, lifeless and without a single excuse, a solitary reason, why
Robyn should trust him or believe in a benevolent God.
He knew she was close to snapping.
He knew her heart was broken and bleeding.
He knew, now, what he had long suspected. That it had been the
cruelest of deceptions to try to hide from her the fact that he had
been Keller Trueblood. It was true that he had only intended to spare
her losing her soul-mate twice in one lifetime, but the purest of
intentions had not saved her from that fate.
What he should have done was to tell Angelo to take a flying leap at
another universe. There was no way that Robyn Delaney was going to
fail to recognize her soul mate in whatever guise.
No way.
But he'd gone along with it, and he knew why--be-cause he was just an
un evolved-enough angel that there was no way in heaven or hell he was
going to pass up another chance to be with the woman who was his
soul-mate. The decision had been his, not Robin's, and the
responsibility for putting her through this--again--weighed squarely on
him.
Robyn was taking it all like the class act she was. She could have
flatly refused to let him speak at this press conference. She could
have refused to stand by his side while he explained that Trudi
Candelaria, the target of the special prosecutor in the case of
Colorado v. Candelaria, had in fact been an innocent woman. These were
things, as Keller Trueblood's widow, that she had a right to express on
his behalf.
Kiel needed to do this because it was his immortal soul and his
integrity, human or angel, that needed restoring. The truth needed to
be told, and he was the one to tell it, to clear the names of Trudi
Candelaria and Stuart Willetts.
People still whispered. Aspen was still known as the place where John
Denver lived and Don Johnson gave wildly expensive parties and Indian
princes built gargantuan houses that were a blight on the earth... and
where Trudi Candelaria bashed in the head of the great Spyder Nielsen.
That lie demanded to be set to rights.
Kiel turned to Robyn at the last second before he stepped up to the
podium. She looked so hauntingly beautiful to him it made his sore
heart ache. Her shining black hair was pulled back tightly in a French
braid.
She wore a deep blue suit and a high-necked, but-toned-down,
don't-touch-me white blouse. Everything about her said to him and to
anyone looking at her, don't-touch-me. Don't hurt me. Don't dare hurt
me again.
He didn't know what to say to her. He knew she didn't know what to say
to him. It was killing her, having Keller, not having Keller.
"Just make your statement, Kiel."
He could only nod and look for forgiveness in her. She rolled her eyes
and swallowed hard and pursed her lips to keep from crying, and reached
to fuss with the knot in his tie. "Don't forget to make yourself
photographable
The knot in his He was less than perfect. He hadn't cared. But he
would have forgotten about the cameras until it was too late, and then
he'd have to go around to countless photographers, imprinting his image
where it should have been but wasn't on their negatives. Even now this
mortal woman was looking after his best interests.
He trapped her hands with his against his chest. "Robyn, you know if
this is the injustice I was meant to resolve, I will ... I won't be ...
I'm trying to say I can't stay when this is all over."
She hadn't cried. Not once, but her beautiful doe brown eyes filled
now and a tiny noise caught in her throat. She tried to take back her
hands but he couldn't let her go.
"I w-won't grieve for you again, Keller. I won't do it. I won't."
'
He knew it was a lie.
"Robyn."
"Oh ... Keller." Her eyes brimmed. "Don't go. Please." Her voice
was useless, a whisper. An agony. A prayer. "Don't go again, don't
leave me again. I won't be able to stand it." /
He bowed his head and shut his eyes and clung to her hands. How could
he say to this brave and good and honest woman whom he loved beyond
life, who loved him, that he must turn away from her and do what he
must do to restore justice--because although the pain in him was more
fierce than the instant of his death in that accursed mine more than a
year ago, he wasn't human and couldn't stay?
"Robyn."
She knew then. Knew he would leave her again. He wasn't human, but
dear God, his hands were, and his lips and his eyes and his body,
surely they were.
Just as surely, not.
She straightened her shoulders and sniffed and accepted this ultimate
blow to her heart and took her hands away. This time he let her go.
She touched her fingertips to her lips and then to his, and to her
credit, through her own human strength, not that of the power vested in
an Avenging Angel, Robyn backed away.
Kiel Alighieri knew to his core, then, what Dante knew--all about the
inferno, about paradise lost and the bonfire of vanities.
He had to find the strength Robyn had, and so he turned to speak to the
assembled crowd, to say into the microphone and on camera, on Keller
Trueblood's behalf, the truth.
That the office of the special prosecutor in the matter of Colorado v.
Candelaria had determined that the defendant, Trudi Candelaria, had
stood wrongly accused of the murder of Spyder Nielsen, that this fact
had been raised and unflinchingly supported by Trueblood's co-counsel
Stuart Willetts, and
that the woman whom they now knew had in fact
committed the murder had driven off the road in Eagle County that
fateful night and been killed herself.
Kiel went on to state that an investigation had shown Detective Ken
Crandall had obstructed justice in this matter, and that his
prosecution would be upcoming in the district attorney's office. He
thanked Judge Vincent J. Ybarra, the Aspen police department, the
county sheriff's department, and lastly, he thanked Trudi Can-delaria
and Stuart Willetts, who would not be filing civil suits for any and
sundry damages to their reputations.
At every moment, in every syllable he spoke, Kiel followed the progress
of Robyn Delaney through the assembly of media to her car. She waited,
listening, until he was finished. When she left, when she drove away,
he was finished. He turned and shook hands with Ybarra and Willetts
and Trudi Candelaria, and after he walked away and turned a corner down
a long empty echoing hallway in the county courthouse, no one saw Kiel
Alighieri again.
Chapter Fourteen
Robyn drove back to The Chandler House Bed and Breakfast in a blur of
tears. Her hosts, a seventy-year-old man and his seventy-two-year-old
wife, having listened on the radio to the announcement Kiel made, each
gave her a hug. Neither understood her tears.
She let herself into her suite with the key, tossed it on the hearth,
then picked it up and put the key in the dish on the table by the door
because that's what neatnik Keller would have wanted her to do.
More empty and alone now than in her worst nightmare, her tears dried
up. She paced back and forth, and everywhere her glance happened to
fall was a memory of Kiel waiting to clean her emotional dock again.
She should have packed her things and left, but she couldn't make
herself change a single thing from the way it had 'been before she and
Kiel left it this morning. Three hours into nothing to do, nowhere to
go, no one to talk to, no angel to berate, she pulled out her notebook
computer and sat down to do the only thing that ever took her outside
herself.
She began to write. Furiously.
It began as a Dear God letter, akin to a Dear John one, and grew from
there. A cutting indictment against the system whereby injustice
flourished and justice was rendered by his Avenging Angels in what
appeared to her to be the most random and haphazard of manners.
But, seventeen single-spaced pages into spilling her venom, emptying
her soul, of bellyaching and preaching and blistering invective, three
hours after she had begun, she stopped.
Her head throbbed and her eyes burned, but worst of all, she knew this
Dear God letter was wrong. Keller had not been murdered. The collapse
of the Hallelujah was a terrible freak accident, nothing more.
Kiel had been sent to save her life and redeem the injustice
perpetrated by Detective Crandall on an innocent woman wrongfully
accused--and on Stuart Willetts. Kiel had done both, and she hadn't
gotten such a raw deal.
She had loved and been loved and made love with an Avenging Angel. With
Kiel. Her heart was still broken, but her mind was clear.
With a few keystrokes, she obliterated the scathing Dear God letter
from her computer. In a few days, a few weeks at most, she might take
up her vocation and begin again. But there were details here to clean
up, like the office in Lucy's building. She shut down the power on the
computer and put it away, then changed quickly into slacks and a
sweater and walked in the bright midday sun down. to Main Street.
She stopped in the Treat Boutique, bought herself a latte, and then
walked across the street. On impulse, she turned aside from the door
into Lucy's building and continued on instead another three blocks down
Main to the newspaper office.
Though the office door had a Closed sign in the window, she tried the
door and it opened. She poked her head in. A bell hanging over the
door rang out. The owner and editor, Margaret Honings, came around
from behind an old mahogany partition.
"Robyn, hello! I was so hoping you would stop in this morning. Where
is your friend Kiel? What a stirring speech he gave this morning!"
"It was, wasn't it," Robyn murmured. "From the heart. I'm not really
sure where Kiel went to." She did, but how did one explain that an
Avenging Angel moved on? "He's not one to hang around."
"Well, we need his kind around here. To keep our moral compass, you
know," Margaret pronounced, serious as could be. "Let me get those
photocopies for you, while I'm thinking about it."
She ducked back around the partition and invited Robyn to join her.
Enjoying the sights and scents, the ambience of the old newspaper
office, Robyn went happily.
"Here's the file of articles I copied for you. Why don't you sit down
and go through them--then if there's anything else you want, we can dig
out the microfilm now."
Margaret offered her a chair at an antique rolltop desk. "Are you sure
I won't be in the way?"
"Most definitely not. I've work to do.in the back, and everybody knows
we're closed on Mondays. You just sing out if you need anything."
"Thanks, Margaret. I'd love to get started." She hadn't intended to
stay. The boxes in Lucy's offices needed packing up, but they could
wait a little while. The distraction for a few hours couldn't hurt.
She sat down and began to go through the articles dating from December
1892 through April 1893. The passions and rhetoric ran high those
days. Amused by the overblown tone of the reporting, which was as
blatantly partisan as any she had ever seen, Robyn started a time line
on the back of one of the less-informative copies.
She read through all the articles quickly, then settled in to read each
again with an eye toward filling in her time line and keeping tabs on
how the quotes attributed to Lucien Montbank on the side of the side
liners and Jerome Clarke for the apexers, changed in those months.
In sociology, the technique was called caving. The acronym "CAVE stood
for content analysis of verbatim explanations. Robyn used CAVE as a
sort of time machine where what people said could be proven to predict
what they would do. Despite losing the lawsuit in Denver to the
superior claims of the apex claimants, which should have been a
devastating blow, Lucien Montbank, in his comments to the press, seemed
to become more and more optimistic, even elated, over the possibility
of a compromise and a return of prosperity to the town of Aspen.
Just why he'd been so optimistic puzzled her. Conversely, Jerome
Clarke's statements went downhill over several weeks, from victorious
to downright hateful. As far as he was concerned, no compromise would
be made. Though such words never appeared in print, Robyn could almost
hear Clarke's attitude toward compromising. Over my dead body... KIEL
SOARED AROUND the heavens for a long time after he departed the earthly
dimension of the county court-house--but he found no peace of mind. He
; knew that he had not only saved Robyn Delaney Trueblood's life but
corrected an injustice done to Trudi Candelaria and Stuart Willetts.
Neither act was insignificant or beneath the attentions of an Avenging
Angel, especially not Robyn's life, but he couldn't shake the feeling
that his work in Aspen was not done.
He dropped into the DBAA offices on Logan Street, out of respect for
Gracie's wishes, materializing out of sight of any mortals hanging
around. Grace, however, was on some errand to do with an update of
Policies and Procedures.
Bureaucracy, Kiel thought, he could live without. He dashed off an
irreverent note to her with a pen only he could see flying across a
page of Gracie's notepaper, then bounded up the stairs to Angelo
office.
Kiel was in luck. Angelo was just polishing off the heavenly paper
trail transfer to the mortal family that the littlest Avenging Angel
Ariel had requested. Jay and Shanna were going to make great
parents.
"Ezekiel." He cocked a bushy white brow. "Enjoy your little trek
around the heavens?"
Kiel shot hLm a look. "I know there's plenty to be done around
here--"
"Yes, and you're desperately needed. We're critically shorthanded
around here what with Samuel getting himself banished to another mortal
existence and Dash doing what I told him to do for the first time in
recorded history."
"Imagine Dash following orders." Kiel grinned. Dash was notoriously
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