Читать книгу The Undoing - Averil Dean - Страница 9
ОглавлениеTHE TOWN OF Jawbone Ridge started life around a copper mine. No more than a diggers’ camp at first, a ramshackle collection of pine-log boxes that flanked the road, which snaked through the treacherous San Juan Mountains to feed the community and shift the copper ore. The camp was soon fortified by a mercantile and a saloon, legitimized by two brick hotels and a post office, and for a time the people thrived. But eventually the price of copper plummeted and the miners moved on, leaving the hollowed-out detritus behind them.
The slope was steep on that side of Deer Creek, and a century’s worth of Colorado snow had exhausted the town, which was gradually losing its grip on the mountainside, collapsing down the embankment to the riverbed below. The surviving buildings had gone swaybacked and frail, propped up on nests of two-by-fours and tied to the trees around them like elderly relatives on life support.
The slow spectacle was a draw for visitors to nearby Telluride, who skied in to the Ridge for lunch and dumbstruck pictures—Can you even believe this place is still standing?—and returned along the network of ski lifts to the cloud-laced peak, then down again on Telluride’s side of the mountain, trailing perhaps a new set of poles or a scarf with the town’s tagline in bloodred letters, listing sideways as if toppling down the fleece: The Crookedest Town in the West.
It was a living. Barely. A few overbuilt homes were nestled among the aspen, the ultimate in inaccessibility, but for the most part the charm of Jawbone Ridge was lost on the masses. The town’s precarious situation made visitors uneasy and anxious to get away. The ground there felt uncertain, and the year-round residents had a strange way of moving, never stepping too hard on the frozen ground, their eyes sliding warily uphill as if waiting for the mountain to let go and finally finish them off.
At the far end of town, the road curved sharply along the edge of the ravine, then split off and turned abruptly uphill. The windshield of Julian’s car filled for a moment with pine boughs against a flat blue sky—then, as the road leveled off, the scene was replaced as if by magic with the roof, walls, windows and doors of a dark, narrow building.
Julian turned the car aside on the gravel lot and killed the engine.
Next to him, a woman’s voice filtered back into his mind.
“...two years ago. And it was beautiful weather. We didn’t even want to stop. We were the last ones on the gondola, and by the time we got to the top I had to pee so bad I didn’t think I’d make it to the bathroom.”
Emma giggled, a soft purring sound. She stretched widely, seeming to notice for the first time that they had arrived. She pressed her hand to the window, fingers spread like a spindly starfish.
“What is this place?” she said.
After the blocky cabins and rugged lines of Jawbone Ridge, the hotel next to them was strangely proportioned, crouching on the edge of the ravine as if driven there by the cluster of buildings below. A tall, crooked little place, with two steep arches flanking the portico and a roof like a hat smashed down over the top. The age-blackened walls imposed a sort of gravitas, and the leaded windows a sense of romance, but the hotel gave Julian the impression of a child at the edge of the playground who has not been asked to play.
Dark, neglected, unloved and unremembered.
No. Not true. Celia had loved the Blackbird. And Julian sure as hell remembered.
He popped the trunk and pulled out their bags: his, in sleek charcoal gray, hers a candy-apple red, studded around the handle with rhinestones that bit into his palm. A damned silly color for a suitcase and exactly the sort of thing Emma would choose. She had a passion for bling and kept herself well glazed: lip gloss, diamond earrings, a satin headband to hold back her wheat-blond hair. The effect was so convincing that he had only noticed her weak chin yesterday morning when she got out of the shower, her hair slicked back and face bare of makeup. This girl hadn’t even been given orthodontics, and here he’d taken her for money, for one of his own. Now he noticed the overbite all the time and held it as a sullen resentment against her, as though somehow she’d deceived him.
She was smiling up at him now, her rabbity head tilted to one side.
“Used to be part of the copper town.” Julian nodded toward the sign in black and red above the door: blackbird hotel. “Built by the mine owner so he’d have someplace to stay when he was in town, above the stink of it all. It’s changed hands many times since then, been modernized and all that.”
He faced the hotel with their bags in his hands.
An unexpected thrill of anticipation expanded in his chest. Any second now, Celia would open the door, or lean out an upstairs window, her hair lifting out like a banner, that slow smile on her face to show she’d been waiting for him. The sensation was so strong that for a moment he found himself searching the windows for movement, straining to hear her voice.
A second later, the excitement subsided. She wasn’t here. She never would be again.
Emma was waiting for him. She seemed to occupy too small a space in the scene, as if he were seeing her through the wrong end of a telescope.
“Are we going inside?” she said.
Too late now to change his mind. A cold knot of dread replaced the warmth of his original response. The Blackbird didn’t want him here any more than Celia had.
They crossed the rutted gravel lot and mounted the front steps. Julian opened the heavy wooden door and held it with his foot as Emma went inside. A bell hanging from the brass knob jingled as the door swung shut behind them.
Beyond the tiny vestibule, the room opened with surprising expansiveness to a tall, narrow space with a massive stone fireplace towering like a sentinel on the opposite end of the room. To their left was a winding staircase with a curved wooden banister, soaring up to the second floor. At its foot, a heavy door stood half-open; through the doorway, he could see a couple of hammered copper pots hanging from a rack and the edge of the long kitchen table. Celia had sanded that table to a beautiful sheen and finished it in a rich chestnut brown. She used to rub it down with an oiled rag after every meal; you’d catch the scent of it sometimes while you were eating, a faint bite of lemon where the warm plates sat.
As he watched, the kitchen door opened farther. A woman came halfway through the doorway and stopped. She was wearing a dark T-shirt and a pair of designer jeans so tight they had set into a series of horizontal creases up her thighs. On the front of her shirt was a screen-print image of the Blackbird Hotel, in white lines like a child’s drawing on a chalkboard.
Julian caught his breath.
Again he felt vaguely disoriented, thrown back in time. Yet Kate Vaughn was unmistakably part of the present. Her brown hair was lighter now, longer and fashionably streaked, but she looked much older than when he’d last seen her five years before. The babyish roundness of her face had gone, leaving a sharper line at her cheekbones and chin. It was the face of a beautiful woman now, evolved and polished. Cute little Katie, he used to call her. But it seemed that girl, like so many other things, was gone.
He thought at first that she was going to come forward and embrace him. She took one step, then hesitated as if she’d changed her mind.
“Julian,” she said.
“Hello, Kate.”
“How are you?”
“Surprised, at the moment. I didn’t realize you’d be here.”
He understood the lay of the land immediately. Kate’s family must have bought the only remaining property on the Ridge. Presumably to indulge her, to assuage any lingering grief; the Blackbird was far too small to make more than a very modest profit. Nothing like the Vaughns’ resort hotel in Telluride or the two in Vail and Crested Butte. Kate had probably finagled this tiny property out of her father like a kid with her heart set on a fancy tree house.
He’d met Justin Vaughn once or twice. A sweet, shrewd guy with three daughters and a knack for keeping them happy. Kate was the youngest by fifteen years, and she could wrap her father around her little finger simply by adding an extra syllable to his name: Dad-dy, can you lend me the car? Dad-dy, will you buy me a hotel of my own, the Blackbird Hotel, we can’t let them tear it down...
“Oh, you two know each other?” Emma said, affecting an air of cool disinterest.
“We used to,” Kate said. “In the biblical sense. Kate Vaughn.”
Emma’s face was blank as she took Kate’s outstretched hand. “You went to church together?”
Kate’s mouth twitched at the corner, a dimple winking in her cheek. The moment swelled as Julian realized he should introduce them and couldn’t, because he didn’t know Emma’s last name and wasn’t entirely sure of her first one. Emma could be Ella, or Anna, or Abby, or Eve. He had resorted to an assortment of pseudo-endearments over the past few days, waiting for her to repeat her name—which, maddeningly, she never did.
Kate turned to Julian.
“You heard about the reopening, I take it? Did you get our email? I blasted it to everyone in my contacts.”
He nodded. It had given him a shock to see the Blackbird’s photograph appear on the screen. He’d shut the window down immediately, unable to open it again for more than a week. When he finally gathered the courage, he pored over every page and all the fine print on the hotel website.
THE HISTORIC BLACKBIRD HOTEL
GRAND OPENING
JAWBONE RIDGE, COLORADO
Nowhere had the flyer mentioned the Blackbird was now one of the Vaughn family properties.
“I didn’t realize—” he said again.
“Yeah, that’s my dad’s thing. I think he doesn’t want people to realize it belongs to us. Not our finest business investment, by a long shot. He probably wants to save face if the whole thing folds or falls off the cliff or something.”
She walked over to a small desk, where a computer sat next to a stack of unopened mail. Insects buzzed from outside the half-open windows.
“So, what’s up? Do you need a room?”
“No,” said Julian.
“Yes,” said Emma at the same time.
“We just wanted to see the place,” he said. “We don’t need a room. Probably stay at the Adelaide.”
It was a foolish thing to say, with two suitcases at his feet and this fluffy blonde hotel accessory clinging to his elbow. But seeing Kate here unnerved him, gave his anger a point around which to coalesce.
“It looks good,” he said, glancing around. “Very...tasteful.”
A deep flush rose up her neck. “Yes, well, I’m not sure the whole bohemian thing would have worked out that well in the long run.”
“I think it would have worked fine.”
“Do you? Would you have me leave it as a shrine?”
“I would have had you leave it alone.”
“Ah. And is that what you’re doing? Leaving it alone?”
Julian pressed his lips together.
“They were going to tear it down,” Kate said. “I’m trying to save it. I would have thought you’d approve. They were your friends, too.”
“What friends?” Emma said.
“You didn’t tell her about the murders?” Kate said.
“She doesn’t need to hear about that,” Julian said.
“Murders!” Emma said. “Of course I need to hear about it. When was this?”
“What’s it been now, Julian?” Kate said. “Five years?”
A slow prickle crept up Julian’s back, under the collar of his cotton shirt. His ears seemed to fill with sound, a low, almost electrical hum that muffled the sound of her voice.
Five years. An anniversary, a number that meant something, that indicated something might happen again. Five. Dangerous, sharp-sounding, like a blade or the edge of a stony cliff.
“Five,” he said, carefully.
“Wait, you were here?” Emma said.
“We were both here,” Kate said. “Staying in the hotel, that is. We didn’t witness the crime or anything.”
A sour taste convulsed Julian’s mouth. No, he wanted to say, I didn’t see a thing; it’s nothing to do with me. But the words were swimming in water and he couldn’t get them out.
“Oh,” Emma said. “So who was murdered?”
Kate slid behind the desk and switched on the computer. “My friends. My three best friends.”
Emma was taken aback. “Oh. I’m sorry, I thought...if you don’t want to talk about it...”
“Celia Dark. Celia’s stepbrother, Rory McFarland, and her boyfriend, Eric Dillon.”
The computer chattered to life, an alien presence in the gothic gloom.
“We don’t need to go into it.” Julian’s temple ached from gritting his teeth.
“I don’t mind.” Kate smiled and gave Emma a little half shrug. “It was a long time ago. And anyway, there’s no escaping the topic here on the Ridge. It was all anybody talked about for months. You couldn’t get away from it, not if you lived here.”
Julian walked to the other end of the room, where the boxy new furniture was arranged around the fireplace. It looked nothing like it had five years before, nothing like the way he remembered it.
After the murders, Kate had sent snapshots of the common room and kitchen, along with a bundle of newspaper clippings she’d carefully packed and mailed to his mother’s address in New York. Block headlines at first with thick chunks of text, then smaller, sketchier pieces, featuring standard-issue high school pictures of the three victims and a bigger photo of the Blackbird Hotel. The news petered out at last to a single column of newsprint from the obituaries page: Eric Dillon, Rory McFarland. Their faces grinned out at him, blurred as if by smoke, the ink like soot on his hands.
There was no obituary for Celia. Julian never knew whether the paper hadn’t run one or whether Kate had simply forgotten to include it with the others.
“So did they catch the murderer?”
“There was no one to catch.”
“You mean, one of them killed the others?”
“Maybe. It’s hard to tell for sure. We know that Celia’s stepbrother, Rory, was killed first. He was in the kitchen, shot once in the chest. The room was in a shambles—broken dishes everywhere, chairs overturned. Apparently he and Eric had been fighting. There was a broken bone in Rory’s hand and two in Eric’s face, blood everywhere. Which was exactly what you’d expect from any fight Rory was involved in. The police assumed at first that Eric had left the fight and came back with a gun to finish it. But that didn’t seem to make sense when they looked at everything else.”
“Why’s that?” Emma asked.
“Because Celia was the one left holding the gun.”
It occurred to Julian that Kate must have told this story a hundred times. It had the rhythm of a recitation, a prayer-like cadence. He wondered what it was like here on the Ridge, afterward, what the locals made of it. He had almost no memory of the town itself. Its residents were part of the peripheral setting in his mind rather than personalities in their own right. Reddened, snow-scrubbed faces, thick hands, everyone booted and stomping in doorways, swallowed up by their winter clothes. No one outside the Blackbird had penetrated his consciousness far enough to leave more than a faint impression.
He went to the window. From the sun-dried slopes, crossed with lift lines and dotted with dusty snowplows, the mountains stretched north for hundreds of miles. Though the hills and valleys were covered with trees, they felt barren to Julian, motionless and devoid of life. He wished he’d come back in the wintertime, to see the mountains caked with snow and everyone outside enjoying it.
Kate went on.
“So they thought maybe she was trying to stop the fight and shot Rory by accident, then blamed Eric for what happened and killed him, too.”
“And where was she?” Emma said. “Your friend?”
“Upstairs, in her bed. Shot through the heart. The gun was still in her hand.” Kate’s gaze fixed on him. “Julian’s gun, actually.”
Emma looked at Julian doubtfully, and Kate laughed.
“He was with me at the time,” she said. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
“So it was all an accident, in a way,” Emma said. “Why do people always fight when they go on vacation?”
“Oh, they weren’t on vacation.” The computer had booted up, and Kate sat down in front of it. “They owned this place, the three of them together. They were in the process of renovating to turn it into a B&B. There was a little tray of spackling paste in the kitchen, still wet. Celia had been prepping the walls for a coat of paint when the trouble started.”
“What were they fighting about? Money?” Emma looked disappointed, as if the ghost story had let her down.
“That’s a good question. The only question that matters, really. But it wasn’t money. They weren’t like that. No one could understand what had changed, why they suddenly imploded that way. It didn’t make sense.”
A memory crept into Julian’s mind: a dead sparrow in the grass, its legs curled like dried twigs, and the revulsion on Celia’s face as she looked at it. Celia hated death. She was terrified by it. Yet she’d taken her own life and the lives of her two best friends. She loved them and she killed them and she killed herself. What they were fighting about didn’t explain a thing.
Across the room, a jingle. Kate was trying to give them a room key.
“No,” he said. “I told you—we’re going to the Adelaide.”
“Oh, but I want to stay here,” Emma said. “Maybe we’ll see a ghost.”
Kate handed her the key. Emma turned to him, grinning, dangling the key chain over her thumb.
“Why did you buy this place?” he said. “What was the point?”
Kate sat back, light from the computer washing over her face.
“I don’t know, Julian. I guess I just couldn’t let it go.”
He held his face impassive, but his throat was tight with grief and something akin to fear. He picked up their bags. They seemed much lighter now than they had ten minutes ago; he could barely feel them.
As they reached the foot of the winding staircase, Emma paused to look back.
“What were they like?” she said.
“Oh,” Kate said, as if this was something she’d never considered. “They were...”
Silence crept into the room. From far away, Julian could hear the echo of laughter, the bright crackle of the fire, a murmur of music and voices.
Dead. All dead, and they had taken him with them.
Kate turned her head toward the kitchen, the half-open door. Her answer came just as Emma started up the stairs, leaving only Julian to hear.
“They were really young.”
* * *
Kate stayed at her desk as Julian and his girlfriend disappeared into the upstairs hallway. She could hear the girl’s voice, still chattering, exclaiming over the old hotel, and Julian’s grumbled responses. A door opened and closed, leaving Kate alone in the silence.
For a few minutes she sat where she was, staring out the window. A blue jay hopped along the gnarled branch of a spruce tree, tipping its head to get a look at her. She imagined herself from the bird’s point of view, framed by the windowpanes, alone at her desk, how she’d still be here when the bird looked down from high above.
I’m lonely, she thought, surprised.
She opened the right-hand drawer of the desk. Under some folders and a stack of bills, she found a photograph, still in its heart-shaped frame. Eric had taken that picture. She remembered looking back at him, with the whole snowy mountain laid out at their feet and Julian’s arm snug around her shoulders. Both of them grinning so hard at some joke of Eric’s, Celia and Rory flanking the camera, doubled over with laughter. She wished she could remember what they all had found so funny, two months before the laughter died.
She had hardly recognized Julian today, he’d changed so much. Even his voice, once smooth and self-assured, now had climbed in pitch and developed a petulant whine like a child’s. And his face, though still tanned as it was in the photograph, seemed sallow and pinched, with a furrow between his brows and a strange new habit of dragging his gaze around the room as if the sight of it exhausted him.
She wondered what Julian had been doing over the past five years. The last time she saw him was the night of the murders, when he had taken her home with some vague promise to check on her the next day. But he never did that. Like the others, he was simply gone.
She had heard about him from time to time: Julian was in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia. Hot places, sunny and flat. An odd itinerary for a skier.
She had nearly forgotten him until last winter, when she’d run into Zig Campanelli at a bar in Telluride. Zig was Julian’s best friend—if Julian had one of those. They had known each other since they were teenagers. It would have seemed strange not to ask after him, and after a few minutes she did. But even Zig seemed puzzled by the changes in Julian.
“He’s not skiing anymore,” Zig said. “Hasn’t for years. I don’t know whether he busted something important or got bored or what. Last time I heard from him, he was in Bali, said he was sick of the snow. That’s all I could get out of him. He sounded...”
“What?”
But Zig only shook his head.
* * *
“This is it,” Emma said. She shut the door behind them and leaned back with an ecstatic sigh. “This is where she died. I can feel it.”
The buzz in Julian’s ears had built to a dull roar. Who was this girl to say she felt something from Celia? As if she knew anything at all about what had happened, had even a sliver of an idea what it was all about. He ground his teeth in anger.
Shut up. Stupid girl.
What had he been thinking to bring her here? Here, of all places. She was nobody special, a friend of a friend, the tail end of a long chain of acquaintances that had started, as far as he could remember, with his buddy Zig Campanelli. The two of them had worked together for a time at ESPN and maintained a sporadic friendship over the years, which was built more on a mutual need for points of contact than true affection.
Zig had a way of introducing Julian that set them both up for admirers.
“This is my good friend Julian Moss,” he’d say. “Used to make a living carving up the ski slopes, kicking my ass most of the time. Swept the championships more than once, went to the Games and came home with a bronze in downhill. Then somebody noticed he’s not all that bad-looking, under the helmet.” Here he’d give Julian a friendly little clap on the shoulder. “My boss gave him a job anchoring the championships at ESPN. And the rest, as they say, is history.”
And he’d saunter off, drink in hand, leaving Julian with another chance to parlay that biography into something truly worthwhile.
Julian hadn’t seen Zig in years, but, like the Olympic medal, he was the gift that kept on giving. When Julian had surfaced again in Colorado three weeks before, there wasn’t a scene in which he wouldn’t have known someone who knew someone else.
In fact it was Emma, her girlfriends giggling and clutching at each other in the background, who had approached him. They must have talked at some point, to some end, but if so the conversation had been so perfunctory that he couldn’t remember a word of it. She was in his bed the next morning. He had fucked her and she was willing to be fucked again and was not inclined to complain about the fact that his head was not with her for a moment. He was a status lay for her. The thrill, if there was one, was in his name.
It was a fair trade. When he asked her later that day to come up here with him, she agreed happily, possibly imagining herself as Julian Moss’s girlfriend, a further bump in status. She could write about it on Facebook, or send a Tweet, or whatever was the latest venue for the humblebrag: Driving up to Telluride with Julian. First time in an F-Type, OMG!!!
She was entitled to that. It was his end of the trade. He was aware that the ache in his jaw was not Emma’s fault. She couldn’t help the nasal drone of her voice or the fact that it bored into his ear like a hungry beetle. It was irrational to blame her when she was clearly doing her best. But every time he looked at her vapid face—features so like Celia’s but put together all wrong—he wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake until something came loose.
He set down the suitcases and walked slowly back to her. Emma gazed up with a fatuous smile as if she thought she was too goddamned irresistible for words. He unbuttoned her shirt. She was wearing some sort of push-up bra, with a hard lace-encrusted pad that scratched his palm.
Celia had never worn anything under her shirt. The shallow swell of her breast made barely a ripple in her clothing, so he supposed she didn’t need one. But he’d once caught a peek through the armhole of a loose-fitting blouse, where her ribs laddered up the side of her bare chest, and he’d sprung so fast he had to leave the room.
“Take your pants off,” he said to Emma. She wriggled out of her jeans and stood against the wall with her hip cocked, grinning as if she expected him to take her picture.
He put his hand between her legs. Right away she started to sigh and coo, wriggled into his hand with that eager camera-smile on her face, cupping her breasts in her hands so that the ridge of her implants stood out beneath her skin.
An easy girl. The kind of girl he used to enjoy. He’d tell her what to do and she’d go along, eager to please, those vacant, colorless eyes blinking up at him while she sucked him off like she’d seen the pretty girls do on cable TV. She might throw in some move of her own, some tease of her fingers across his balls or a knuckle to the perineum, something she’d read about in Cosmo and could claim for her own. Probably she’d swallow when he came, going mmmm like his semen was the best thing since mint chocolate chip. And it would be good for the moment. But in a week or a month, she would recede with the rest of them, who existed in his memory like the cities in a traveler’s diary, dreamlike and insubstantial but determinedly annotated:
—the dreadlocked woman whose breasts dripped like ripe fruit into his open mouth (Burning Man, milk lady)
—the French virgin with skin so dark she seemed to melt into the shadows, disembodied, her scent mingling with the briny perfume of the sea (Samudra Beach, Venus blunt—holy fuck what was in that?)
—that sloe-eyed whore who gave him head in Amsterdam, whose little-girl voice had sent him running, terrified, back to the rose-tinted sidewalks and right the hell out of town (blue pigtails, Daddy issues)
Et cetera, et cetera.
And now Emma. He searched her face for something to remember her by. A few freckles on her nose, glitter in her mascara and nail polish. He kept glancing away, then quickly back, as if he could startle her face into his memory by sneaking up on it.
After a moment she pulled away, frowning. “Are you okay?”
He tried to smile.
“I’ll be more okay if you get on your knees.”
She grinned, confidence restored. Everything would be okay, her expression implied, once he’d done her. And she might be right about that.
Assuming, of course, that he could get it up. At the moment he felt nothing, nothing at all. His body was curiously soft, vacant as Emma’s blond head, the blood floating down his arms and legs without the faintest inclination to gather and pool into a hard-on. Even when she unzipped his jeans and took him in her hand...
Nothing.
Maybe it was the Blackbird. Being in Celia’s room, with this girl who could be described on paper in similar terms but was as unlike Celia in personality as it was possible to be. The woman he remembered, eccentric as she was on the surface, was even more so underneath. There was a quiet force to Celia, a sense of the unknowable. She was real, warm, terrifyingly alive.
Only she wasn’t anymore. Now she was only bones, or maybe ash. He wished he’d thought to ask Kate what they’d done with Celia’s body. He could have visited the cemetery to see her name carved in stone. He could have learned her middle name, her birthday. He could finally have brought her flowers.
None of these ruminations was going to solve the immediate problem. He stepped back, zipped up his jeans and pulled Emma to her feet.
“Sorry,” he said.
“What happened? You were really into it yesterday.”
“Into it. Yeah.”
“We were doing good. I mean, that thing you did in the elevator...”
“Yeah, you liked that?”
“I liked that we might get caught.” She eased forward, one hand on the front of his jeans. “I wanted to, kind of. I like being watched. It feels like that here, doesn’t it? Like the ghosts might be watching...”
“Nobody’s watching,” he snapped.
“There could be. You were here then. You met them. Maybe they know you’re back—maybe they can see us. I’m pretty intuitive, my mom always said so. Maybe I can call them.”
He caught her hand and pushed it away. “You might be the least intuitive person I have ever met.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Her head tilted to one side. Though there was a fighting spirit in the words themselves, her eyes were big and soft, head tilted again in that befuddled way, as if she couldn’t quite believe he meant to insult her.
Julian felt a rush of words surge up his throat, unstoppable and bitter as bile.
“It means that I couldn’t be less ‘into it’ if you paid me. If you were swinging a dick. If yours were the last pair of plastic tits on planet Earth and if yours was the last ass I could ever grab and if you were the owner of the last hole between the last pair of legs, I still would not be ‘into it.’”
Her face crumpled, as suddenly and completely as a child’s. Tears welled up at the rims of her wide-open eyes and rolled in wavy gray lines down her cheeks, bearing specks of glitter in their wake.
Julian raised his eyes to the ceiling.
“Why did you even bring me here?” she said.
He dug his car keys from the pocket of his jeans and held them out to her.
“No idea,” he said. “Go home. You can take my car.”
“I—I can’t drive your c-car. Where would I leave—” She teetered around the room, pulling on her clothes, hopping into a boot.
“It doesn’t matter. Go home.”
“How can I—”
“Get out,” he roared, and she snatched the keys from his hand and darted out the door. He heard her feet pounding down the hallway, and she was gone.
Julian stood for a minute looking down at the bed. He smoothed the covers, straightened the pillows and tucked the bedspread underneath. This wasn’t Celia’s bed, he realized now. Her room had looked much different from this, filled with candles and books, and her mattress sat right on the floor without a frame and with only an old door for a headboard. She had a piece of fine silk hung on the wall, embroidered with brightly colored birds sporting long tails that curled like bouquets of flowers at the ends. He had asked where she found it.
“A friend gave it to me,” she said. “This nice old guy who used to come in for coffee every afternoon—black, no sugar, no nothing. He liked to talk. He told me stories about the Blackbird, people he remembered from when he was young.”
That was her. That was Celia all over. He imagined her nodding gently, encouraging the old man’s nostalgia, revealing nothing about herself.
His throat ached. He couldn’t lie here in Celia’s room, where she’d lived and fucked and wept and died. The walls still smelled like her, that peculiar warm scent of her, that smoky vanilla mixture of sex and incense and Celia’s own sweet skin.
He went out to the hallway, down the row of doors. Four on each side, counting the one he’d closed behind him. A tiny hotel by anyone’s standards, but Celia had dreamed of it since she was a little girl. She and Rory and Eric had played here as children during the years when the hotel stood vacant, and Celia had fallen in love. He imagined her wandering down this hallway, her tawny hair made dark by the shadows, fingers trailing along the walls. She would have skipped down the curved staircase, her little feet pattering on the floor. She would have been humming, craning her neck at the pine trees outside the leaded windows. Would have laid her hand on this very banister and felt the smooth wood warm to her touch.
Later, after Eric had bought the place, they had stripped the pine floors and waxed them to a lustrous amber glow. Celia brought in low couches lined with pillows and blankets in rich colors and contrasting patterns and arranged them around the river-stone fireplace with a copper-sheathed coffee table at the center—a contribution from Rory, a nod to the hotel’s mining days. Everywhere there were candles and old brass lamps, dropping pools of golden light that flickered and danced when anyone walked by, and from the ceiling hung a chandelier made of elk antlers. But the brightest light came from the fireplace itself, and this was where they gathered every night after dinner, cradling cups of mulled wine or cold mugs of beer. Rory always sat nearest the fire, stirring at it lazily with a long green stick. Then Kate in the chair next to him, and Julian directly across. Celia would stretch out on the divan, facing the hearth, her long legs draped across Eric’s lap, her eyes sparkling with firelight.
Sometimes, rarely, Eric would bring Celia her guitar and she’d play them a song. She had a book of old children’s poems and had composed some simple melodies around them.
My age is three hundred and seventy-two,
And I think, with the deepest regret,
How I used to pick up and voraciously chew
The dear little boys whom I met.
I’ve eaten them raw, in their holiday suits;
I’ve eaten them curried with rice;
I’ve eaten them baked, in their jackets and boots,
And found them exceedingly nice.
But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare,
I think it exceedingly rude
To do such a thing, when I’m quite well aware
Little boys do not like to be chewed.
She was not particularly musical and the chords were uncertain, but her voice carried with it a sort of enchantment that held him frozen and breathless, hardly daring to blink. She had a slow, throaty drawl, a holdover from her father’s Cajun heritage, and she’d set the melody to a gentle waltz rhythm that rocked her body in small circles as she played. He remembered thinking that she should have been somebody’s muse, an artist’s lover, but had the misfortune to be born and raised among athletes.
He would have watched her for hours. But she’d see something in his face and she’d hesitate, pressing her fingers flat over the strings to silence them.
The fireplace was dark now, and the room had been redecorated. The velvet divan had been replaced by a leather sofa, so slick and firm that he almost slid out of it when he sat down. The side tables were ye olde lodge style, made of logs and twigs; a pristine iron coffee table had been sanded around the edges to make it look worn. Celia’s collection of local art had been replaced by matted nature prints in thick frames, and next to the door, a brass plaque declaimed no smoking in neat black letters. No copper bin full of logs, no scent of pine sap in the air—and, cruelest of all, the hearth had been fitted with an electric fire and a pile of fake ceramic logs.
Julian crossed his arms to warm himself. He hadn’t realized the hotel would be so different. In a thousand years he wouldn’t have guessed that it now belonged to Kate Vaughn.
I couldn’t let it go, she’d said, and that much he did understand. This had been a magical place with Celia in it. But the hotel was dead now. Celia had gone cold inside these walls and she was gone.
Julian leaned his head back on the unforgiving sofa and closed his eyes.
* * *
In the morning, he walked to the gas station, the only one in Jawbone Ridge. He bought a red plastic gas can and filled it at the pump.
A pickup truck had stopped beside him. The driver, a young man with sleep-flattened hair, asked if Julian needed a ride.
“No, thanks,” Julian said. “I don’t have far to go.”
Back up the hill. His feet pounded a rhythm on the gravel, the weight of his body seeming to be all in his feet while his head and torso floated helium-light up the curve of the road. To his right, the mountain rose in scrubby lumps of rock and patches of grass, where a season’s worth of pine seedlings bristled in soft pale green swaths across the earth. The ground fell steeply away left of the road, then rose again in bounding ridges along the banks of Deer Creek. He could hear the water moving—not in a rush of snowmelt, but with the runoff from an overnight storm, the water flowing rapidly in humps of white and brown.
He rounded the last bend in the road and started up the long, steep drive to the vacant Blackbird Hotel.
The first time he’d come here, it was with Celia alone. He had been familiar with nearby Telluride, having trained and competed there several times over the years, but had never found a reason to go around Bald Mountain and turn up the side road for Jawbone Ridge. But when he started seeing Kate, and spending time with her circle of friends, he began to be curious about the place. He wanted to see for himself what was going on inside the Blackbird Hotel.
Celia was sweet that day, eager as a child. She showed him through the rooms, each one littered with sawhorses, hand tools and buckets of paint. An unwieldy industrial sander was sitting in front of the fireplace. Wrappers from someone’s lunch lay crumpled on an overturned pail by the window. But as she described their plans in detail, Julian began to see it come alive.
“I like this place,” he said, looking around. “Good bones.”
Her face lit up.
“It’ll be beautiful when we’re finished,” she said. Then laughed, ducking her head. “Or, not beautiful exactly, but handsome. Proud of itself, you know? The poor thing’s been sitting up here alone for as long as I can remember. I want to fill it up.”
“You talk about the hotel like it’s a person,” he said.
She ran her hand down the sanded banister.
“Not a person, exactly. But personal.”
Afterward they went outside to sit on a slatted pine bench overlooking the river. A breeze moved through the aspen, rustling their coin-bright leaves, and from overhead they could hear the wind sighing through the pines and the occasional caw of a hidden crow. For a while, Celia was silent. Then she said she liked the sun.
“You’re not very tan, though,” he said.
“No. I only get freckles.”
Her skin was lovely in the clear light—a smooth, velvety white like the petals of a speckled flower.
“You bought this place together?” he said. “You and Eric and Rory?”
“On paper, yes. But it’s Eric’s money. His dad died a couple of years back and left him what he had.”
“You all went to the same school, I think Rory said.”
“He and Eric were in the year ahead of me.”
“Did you enjoy school?”
She considered a moment before replying.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Again she paused, thinking it over. “It’s too hard to know what the teachers want you to say.”
“They want you to say what you think.”
“Do they?”
She was quick with that, her eyes wide-open. For the first time, he began to see the guile of this girl.
“Sometimes,” he said.
They sat for a while in companionable silence. Celia didn’t rush to fill it. She was quick to catch a mood, poured herself into it like water.
“Have you always lived here?” he said.
“Since I was four, when my dad and Rory’s mom got married. He came out here on a contract to do some construction work on a new hotel—actually it was the Adelaide, one of the Vaughn properties. Didn’t you say you were staying there?”
Julian nodded.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? One of the best views around, I’ve always thought.”
“You like it up here?” Julian said. “You’re happy?”
“Yes.”
It struck him then how rare it was to receive monosyllabic responses. Most people would say, “I love the mountains” or “It’s home” or “The skiing is amazing.” This girl was content to simply say “Yes.” But her replies had weight, a forceful impact. She really meant yes; it was a firm and definite assent. She gazed down at the water, nodding gently.
Her placidity surprised him. With her wild tangle of hair and gypsy’s clothing, he would have suspected a more nomadic spirit. But Celia never expressed—to Julian, at least—a desire to travel. She sat next to him in the sunshine with her hands folded in her lap, that sweet faraway expression on her face, as if she’d left her body unattended while her mind was elsewhere.
Impossible even now to imagine a girl like that with a gun in her hands.
Julian’s gun.
He passed now through the hollow vestibule, up the curving staircase to Celia’s room. His footsteps made a slow heartbeat of sound as he came through the door, which in turn gave a tiny scream on its hinges, but when he paused at the foot of the bed—silence.
He opened his suitcase, felt around under his clothes and pulled out an old book of poems. The pages fell open to the verse that had been running through his mind since they’d arrived last night in his car. He read through the poem to the last stanza, the only one he couldn’t remember:
And so I contentedly live upon eels,
And try to do nothing amiss,
And I pass all the time I can spare from my meals
In innocent slumber—like this.
He ran his hands over the pages, the delicate drawings. Then he ripped the pages from the book, tossed the cover on the bed and twisted the papers tightly into the shape of a cone. He set this aside, uncapped the gas can and doused the bed. He splashed gasoline on the walls, opened the window, soaked the curtains and the carpet. The rest of the gasoline he carried down the hall. He turned the can upside down as he descended the staircase, leaving a small pool of fuel on the old floorboards at the bottom and another on the smooth leather cushions of the sofa. The fumes rose to his face, toxic and fragrant as perfume. He tossed the gas can aside and went back upstairs.
He retrieved the paper cone, pulled a lighter from his pocket and flicked it at the tip of the pages. Flames licked at the edge of the paper and bloomed from the cone, a fiery bouquet. At a touch, the fire sprang across the covers in looping lines that melted into a pool of blue-tipped flames. He backed away slowly, the heat rising over his skin in breathy gusts.
The tune continued to trail through his mind, fragmented and disconnected: Oh, I used to pick up and voraciously chew, the dear little boys whom I met...
From the end of the hall, he heard the room ignite in a groaning rush. A few seconds later, the first flames leaped through the open door. He dropped the fiery cone at the foot of the stairs and watched as the fire retraced his steps, up the curve of the staircase and into the hall.
He went outside and stood looking up at the old hotel. The window at the end was bright orange, the first long flames licking at the window frame as the smoke began to roll in thick clouds from the front door. An image of himself filled his mind. Walking through the burning doors, up the staircase, down the fiery hallway to Celia’s room. He would lie down in a bed of flames and rise again like the Blackbird, like a phoenix straight to the sky, absolved and reborn.
But even at this distance, the smoke was acrid and sharp in his lungs. People didn’t burn to death quietly; they went screaming and flailing.
He thought of Rory and Eric, who had died here with Celia. Their faces had dissolved in his memory, features interchanging in his mind’s eye. He’d almost forgotten now what their voices sounded like, couldn’t always be sure which conversation had taken place with Rory and which with Eric. They had become a single entity, two halves of a whole. They had lived and died and were remembered as they had lived: together.
Rory and Eric would approve of what he’d done. The Blackbird belonged to Celia. Julian was returning it to her, sending it heavenward on a cloud of billowing smoke.
It was the only apology he could think to offer.
