The Undoing
The Undoing
Averil Dean
On a bitter January evening, three people are found murdered in the isolated Blackbird hotel.Best friends since childhood, Eric, Rory and Celia have always been inseparable. Together they’ve coped with broken homes and damaged families, clinging to each other as they’ve navigated their tenuous lives. Their bond is potent and passionate—and its intensity can be volatile.When the trio decides to follow Celia's dream of buying and renovating the Blackbird, a dilapidated hotel that sits on the perilous cliffs of Jawbone Ridge, new jealousies arise and long-held suspicions start to unravel their relationship. Soon they find themselves pushed to the breaking point, where trust becomes doubt, longing becomes obsession, and someone will commit the ultimate betrayal.An unflinching story of ambition, desire and envy, The Undoing moves backward through time to tracethe events leading to that fateful night, revealing the intimate connections, dark secrets and terrible lies that wove them together—and tore them apart.“Smart, gripping and thoroughly absorbing. Dean’s The Undoing had my brain twisted for hours.” —New York Times bestselling author Chelsea Cain
On a bitter January evening, three people are found murdered in the isolated Blackbird hotel.
Best friends since childhood, Eric, Rory and Celia have always been inseparable. Together they’ve coped with broken homes and damaged families, clinging to each other as they’ve navigated their tenuous lives. Their bond is potent and passionate—and its intensity can be volatile.
When the trio decides to follow Celia’s dream of buying and renovating the Blackbird, a dilapidated hotel that sits on the perilous cliffs of Jawbone Ridge, new jealousies arise and long-held suspicions start to unravel their relationship. Soon they find themselves pushed to the breaking point, where trust becomes doubt, longing becomes obsession, and someone will commit the ultimate betrayal.
An unflinching story of ambition, desire and envy, The Undoing traces the events leading to that fateful night, revealing the intimate connections, dark secrets and terrible lies that wove them together—and tore them apart.
Praise for THE UNDOING (#ulink_b889af1c-2915-5e08-bcaa-fa928a4834a0)
“Beautifully imagined and beautifully written, hypnotically suspenseful and truly chilling…this is a very superior thriller.”
—#1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child
“Smart, gripping, and thoroughly absorbing. Dean’s The Undoing had my brain twisted for hours.”
—New York Times bestselling author Chelsea Cain
“Averil Dean’s The Undoing is a tense, suspenseful tale that pulls the reader down a twisted path to the spine-tingling conclusion.”
—New York Times bestselling author Heather Gudenkauf
“Dark and haunting…a beautifully disturbing character study. And the writing itself—this isn’t simply good prose. The words are poetic and painful and unforgettable. The Undoing is a superb novel. Dean’s career as a suspense writer is going to be great fun to watch.”
—New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison
Praise for ALICE CLOSE YOUR EYES
“Chilling, riveting, intriguing, surprising and compelling, and I can’t think of a debut that kept me turning pages faster or more breathlessly.”
—M.J. Rose, international bestselling author of Seduction
“Alice Close Your Eyes is a crisply written, wickedly suspenseful debut…a dark, sensual nightmare.… Don’t miss it.”
—David Bell, author of Cemetery Girl and Never Come Back
“Alice Close Your Eyes will have readers on the edge of their seats. Promising newcomer Dean spins a web out of the deepest human obsessions…to reveal a haunting story.”
—Booklist
“Dean’s marvelous debut is dark, gritty and relentless… This psychological thriller borders on the erotic as it draws the reader into its web.”
—RT Book Reviews, 4 stars
“A haunting, intense novel that is at once psychologically compelling and emotionally unsettling. Taut pacing and skilled storytelling support a breathtaking plot and characters that are heartbreaking and horrifying yet somehow still accessible and sympathetic. It’s scorching, disturbing and tragic, but well-crafted and impressively written.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An absorbing, deeply disturbing, darkly erotic psychological thriller of tragedy and revenge. Fans of…Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)…will love this disquieting novel.”
—Library Journal, starred review
The Undoing
Averil Dean
A NOVEL
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For Andy
Contents
Cover (#u160699fe-8a67-54da-97a3-9b85a886a3d7)
Back Cover Text (#u8d87f955-666c-5bff-87ca-9ba9936f1b5c)
Praise (#u1896111c-80eb-507b-805c-33573c3dc232)
Title Page (#ua9d54540-7d08-5e24-8a8a-e8a8ea585481)
Dedication (#u51819329-72eb-5e46-a1ce-edc2033ea9e1)
Quotation (#u48965e5e-badc-5a62-8dd1-3c0add9941e0)
August 2014 (#ucfec714a-9466-5fb4-a355-e4a36bcb36cf)
One Day Earlier (#u2002d777-c644-5bc3-9d3c-7f3e8eb990bf)
January 11, 2009 (#u31bfe4c4-7f9f-509a-8808-cf3d8935e427)
One Day Earlier (#u2fb8e844-1b1c-543f-a647-b6b7f18e95c1)
Two Days Earlier (#u4a37b8f5-1272-5b19-8c43-225519d876f3)
Three Days Earlier (#litres_trial_promo)
December 24, 2008 (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Days Earlier (#litres_trial_promo)
Five Days Earlier (#litres_trial_promo)
September 2008 (#litres_trial_promo)
December 31, 2007 (#litres_trial_promo)
July 2007 (#litres_trial_promo)
January 2003 (#litres_trial_promo)
November 2002 (#litres_trial_promo)
June 2002 (#litres_trial_promo)
November 2001 (#litres_trial_promo)
July 1998 (#litres_trial_promo)
January 11, 2009 (#litres_trial_promo)
August 2014 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Reader’s Guide (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
A Conversation with Averil Dean (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend,” I shrieked, upstarting:
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
Edgar Allan Poe
August 2014 (#ulink_6e60a693-9dca-521e-a7f0-333ef5c7d83c)
JULIAN MOSS UNFOLDED the note and pressed it over his face with both hands. With his fingertips he molded the paper to his eyelids. His thumbs pushed the edges to his cheeks. The paper smelled like money now, like old leather and sweat. He wished he had a mirror so he could see whether the ink had transferred to his face, the opening line like a blue tattoo across his forehead:
Julian
I know what you did.
He eased forward, the note dangling from his fingers. Gravel crunched under his boot and skidded over the ledge, clattered on the rocky outcropping at his feet, then plummeted in silence to the river far below.
A long-ago conversation trailed through his mind: his father’s voice, describing a friend who had dived from the penthouse suite of a Seattle high-rise. The guy had gone there with a real estate agent as if he were looking to buy the place, making polite conversation throughout the showing, checking the taps, full of jokes about the owner’s choice of flooring and all the mirrors in the master bath. When it came time to leave, the agent glanced back and saw his client’s feet disappear over the railing.
A quick death, according to Julian’s father. From that height it would have been like dropping a water balloon.
Not that it would be that way for Julian. The ravine was not that deep, and the slope dropped off in a series of rocky shelves. There would be no spectacular burst at the end, no terrible, literal emptying of his head. For him it would be more concussive, like a pumpkin tossed down a flight of concrete stairs.
The agent said he’d heard his client laughing, right at the end. Julian could understand the guy’s state of mind. He felt the same giddiness, a lightening of the senses, as if the air itself were pulling him skyward, the pine trees standing like spectators with their arms out ready to clap.
His eye was caught by a yellow wink of light at his wrist. His watch. He imagined his mother, signing for his possessions at the county morgue, finding the watch among them. Knowing or coming to know what it meant.
A dizzying relief poured through him at having remembered in time. He unclasped the band and pulled off the watch. The hands had long since stopped turning. A diamond had come loose from the face and rattled around behind the glass like the bead in a Cracker Jack toy. Easing back from the ledge, he wound up and threw the watch as far as it would go. The band turned itself inside out as it went, flashing and wriggling in the air. It sailed across the ravine and disappeared into the scrub on the other side.
His arm seemed lighter without it. A faint stripe showed at his wrist, the skin there tender and pale where the sun hadn’t reached and where the dark hair of his forearm had worn away. Strange to think how much the watch had meant to him once. The heft of it, the shine. How was it that he’d never realized how heavy the thing was? For the first time in years, he felt the weight of both arms equally, one no lighter than the other, neither side dragging him down.
A fine feeling, balance. He wished he’d tried it sooner.
He steadied himself with one hand around the branch overhead. The rough bark was gummed with sap, releasing the astringent scent of pine into the morning air. To his right, at the tip of a crescent-shaped shelf of rock, a veil of white smoke lifted into the sky. Through the haze he could see the skeletal outline of the Blackbird Hotel. Its spine and ribs stood in jagged black lines against the sky, and at the far end, the old stone chimney teetered unsupported, leaking smoke from both ends. As he watched, an arc of water rose over the ruins, undulating gently as the fire hose swept back and forth. A subtle rainbow formed in the mist, appearing from the ground, then fading, unfinished, just before the apex.
He raised his eyes and looked out the mouth of the ravine, past the smoldering hotel to the bank of the mountain range beyond. Wide swaths of the hillside had been cleared and were thick with late summer grass that gleamed in the sunshine like new-fallen snow. The lifts were still now, spidery black cables trailing post to post up the hill in shallow arcs, the chairs swaying gently in the breeze. He imagined himself hurtling downward, the air whistling in his ears, the far-off roar of the crowd tugging at the tips of his skis. A rise in the snow, liftoff, his body tucked up tight as the chatter of the skis was silenced.
It had been years since he’d felt the wind that way, self-generated, in evidence of his own physical power. Already he could feel his body weight, the inexorable tug of gravity against the soles of his feet, the mindless acceleration. He wondered whether his father’s friend had laughed all the way down for the sheer joy of falling.
The note fluttered in his hand as if calling for attention.
He let it slip from his fingers. The paper drifted down and caught on a thorny bush, opening and closing in the breeze like the beak of a duck. He could see the words inside—I know what you did—abruptly superimposed with the memory of Eric’s voice in that dead-on mimic, quacking like Donald Duck.
Julian laughed, a wide, billowing sound that swelled around his ears and made him sway on his perch like a bird in high wind. The wave of hilarity lifted him to his toes, drew his head and shoulders steadily back. But once started, the laughter wouldn’t stop. It began to grind through his torso, shred his throat, until he was drawn stiff as a bow on the edge of the ravine and racked with pain. He loosened his grip on the branch and opened his hand, let the bark scrape over his palm and all the way down his fingers. Then he let go.
His hands filled with air, a gentle kiss over the sting.
Oh, Celia.
How she would love to see him now.
One Day Earlier (#ulink_abb01b4c-738e-515b-afba-f9452d2e8d48)
THE 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.
January 11, 2009 (#ulink_917c7b88-7e21-5d57-9330-2172caa9b273)
CELIA WAS BURNING. From the minute he walked into the room and settled his gaze on her, from the first sunshiny flash of teeth in his smooth, tanned face, the squeak of floorboards under his weight, getting closer. From even before that. Years before that. This longing had simmered in her belly since childhood, when she would admire the straight line of his shoulders and the thrilling vertical channel between the muscles of his abdomen, and feel some unnamed stirring that made her long for the bright swing of his attention, as if without it she were standing underdressed in a storm. Now the fire raged between them in waves of all-consuming heat. It was him inside her, both of them in the heart of the Blackbird, a crackling hot inferno that exploded down her thighs and raced beneath her skin and tore through her throat like a flame.
In the hour before her death, Celia had never felt more alive.
* * *
If Celia ever had to explain what it was like to be living out her childhood dream, she would talk about the walls. Miles and miles of walls, the Blackbird had, and every one of them covered with wallpaper or cheap vinyl paneling, or spiderwebbed with tiny cracks, or pockmarked with holes in the plaster or the doors. Sometimes, as here in the kitchen, all of the above. She imagined the listener—a sympathetic motherly type like Mrs. Kirby at the post office—who would someday come to stay in one of the rooms they were renovating. You wouldn’t believe such a small hotel would have so many walls, Celia would say. I never thought we’d see the end of them.
Some of the rooms had been too much for her. In Two, she’d seen right away that the wallpaper was not going to budge and had papered over it with nubby grass cloth the color of summer wheat. That was Rory’s room, calmly masculine, with a punched tin lamp and curtains made from lengths of painter’s cloth, a pinstripe in chocolate brown that Celia had sewn around the edges.
“I’m still gonna throw my socks on the floor.” Rory had run his hand over the walnut dresser and the Hopi blanket across the foot of the bed.
“You can lead a boy to a hamper,” said Eric, whose room even in high school was aggressively neat, “but you can’t make him use it.”
In Eight, where Julian Moss was staying, joined some nights by Kate, Celia had started strong but been foiled halfway through. Some of the wallpaper glue had hardened over time to the color and consistency of amber, and no amount of chemicals or steam would remove it. She was forced to leave the clover-green wallpaper in ragged vertical patches, but had discovered by trial and error that she could glaze those walls with a tinted wax and leave them as they were, with the pine boards showing through the strips of paper. The effect was strangely pleasing. She hung a huge copper clock over the headboard and some unframed oils on the walls and moved on to other projects.
The kitchen, though, was special. It was Celia’s space, her private sanctuary, a big shabby square room with open shelves above and cavernous cupboards below, and for this room nothing would do but walls of robin’s egg blue. She had stripped every last shred of the wallpaper here—a tedious, finicky job that took a solid week—and now the cans of paint stood ready on the floor, the dishes and crockery shifted to the countertops in order to clear the space. Tomorrow she would open the first can of paint and roll it over the naked wall, a luxurious task she had long anticipated.
She scooped up a dollop of spackling paste and pressed it into a nail hole next to the pantry door frame, smoothing it over with the end of the putty knife. She stood back to inspect her work, pushing a strand of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand.
Miles of walls. I had help, of course. I had Rory and Eric.
Always when she thought of her stepbrother and his best friend, their names went in that order. Said quickly, the syllables blended into one word: Roreneric. You couldn’t say them the other way around. She wasn’t sure why.
Rory and Eric could do anything. Together they’d repaired the roof, sealed the windows, replaced the gutters and the faucets, refinished the floors. Huge, impossible jobs, but they tackled them together, cheerful and undaunted. Celia would hear Eric’s tuneless voice ringing through the old hotel, the beat of his music thundering from the stereo: Do ya, do ya want my love, baby, do ya do ya want my love... A crazy falsetto, cracking over the high notes, punctuated by Rory’s rumbling baritone urging him to keep his day job. Eric would laugh, cranking up the volume just to piss him off. They filled the empty rooms with the sound of power tools, hammers, the clatter of boards and nails, heavy thumps of their boots on the floor. The most beautiful sounds in the world.
Rory and Eric. Their names formed an impression in her mind that was less about the way they looked than about the way they felt, their dual presence like a pair of moons swirling elliptically around her: one near, the other far, then switching, accelerating, swinging away and moving heavily back. She felt the weight of them physically, a cosmic tug that kept her always wobbling slightly off balance.
No one who knew them casually could believe they’d be such good friends. Eric seemed like the antithesis to Rory’s golden-brown solidity. His pale skin was the canvas for a collection of tattoos, an ongoing attempt to illustrate his identity in a way that Rory had never needed to do. Eric was dark, pierced, mercurial, with an IQ approaching genius and a blatant reluctance to use it, as if he were too smart even to think up the things that would challenge him, too smart to keep his own brain ticking. He could easily have become frustrated with Rory, who had struggled for years with undiagnosed dyslexia and hadn’t read a book cover to cover in his life. But Rory was not unintelligent, and he had a commonsense canniness Eric lacked. When Eric wandered off course, Rory provided ballast.
Celia set down the spackling paste tray and made a wide stretch. A hot ache pressed at the back of her eyes. She had lain awake the night before, her thoughts all scraps and snippets: a flash of someone’s face, a fragment of conversation, memories like the pieces of several different puzzles all laid out on a table, impossible to assemble. At dawn she rose and went up the narrow back stairs, through the dollhouse door to the attic—a long, slanted room with one dingy window at either end and a century’s worth of accumulated junk, once so thick you had to turn sideways even to get through the door. Over the months they had sifted through it, had carried down pieces of furniture, paintings with cracked frames or rips in the canvas, boxes of books and musty old clothes, an enormous elk’s head mounted on a wooden plaque. Eric had hung this in the kitchen, as a joke, because Celia didn’t eat meat—which had upset her at first because she didn’t realize it was a joke and thought he meant for it to stay. But he took one look at her face and laughed, kissed her head and hauled the poor thing down to the truck with the other flea market items.
From the mudroom, she heard the door open and close, a thud of boots on the floor and the nylon whisk of someone’s coat. A moment later, Rory came through the kitchen door, pulling off his cap as he ducked beneath the lintel. The ends of his hair were dusted with snow, his eyebrows threaded with ice. His bootless feet in purple socks made no sound, but the floorboards creaked a little under his weight.
He looked around the room, hands slung low on his narrow hips.
“Looks like a bomb went off in here,” he said.
Celia held up the tray. “I’m spackling. It’s a dirty job, et cetera...”
Rory hunted briefly for a glass, settled for a coffee cup and went to fill it at the kitchen sink. He drank off the water in five or six long swallows, his head tipping slowly back, then refilled the cup and stood with his hip leaning against the counter.
“Finally got the shed organized,” he said. “And I hung the new door. You would not have appreciated the spider situation out there.”
“Body count?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Yikes.”
Rory grinned. Nothing fazed him. Spiders, leaks in the roof, faulty plumbing, snarls of electrical wire. He tackled every job with the same easygoing confidence; it was all in a day’s work, whatever the day might bring. He had a way of jollying Celia and Eric along, his blue eyes crinkling around the corners, mouth curving open around the white gleam of his teeth.
Captain America, Eric called him. Here to save the day.
And Rory did seem unambiguously heroic at times. He radiated good intention and that comforting solidity a strong person brings into the room. It was almost impossible to imagine a situation Rory would not be able to handle, or that anything awful could happen while he was around. He made everything seem simple.
Celia waited while he drained his cup for a second time and set it in the sink. Now would be the time to bring up the topic of Julian. Knowing Rory—and her own inability to articulate the problem—this conversation could take a while. “I’m glad you’re here, because I want to talk to you.”
He came through the pantry doorway. She felt him approach and knew without turning her head that his mood had shifted. His cool cheek pressed against her temple.
“You can talk, but I’ll hear you much better in twenty minutes.”
He took the tray from her hands and set it aside, slid his hand around her head to turn her face to his. His mouth opened over hers, cold inside as if he’d been eating snow. His teeth felt sleek and hard under her tongue.
She shivered. “You’re freezing.”
“Warm me up, then.”
“Here? Don’t we know better than that?”
“Yeah, we definitely do,” he said.
She expected him to lead her out of the pantry and up the winding stairs. But he slipped his hand around her wrist, thumb to forefinger like a bracelet.
“They won’t be back for a while,” he said. “We have time.”
He pulled her against him so she could feel his erection at the small of her back. He traced the line of her neck with his lips and teeth, buried his nose in the hair behind her ear. His hands began a slow descent down the front of her body, then up again, under her sweater, a ticklish chill across her ribs. His palms were rough and calloused, so big that with both his hands over her breasts it felt as if she’d added a layer of chilled fresh clothing.
She sighed and turned her cheek to his lips. Easier—much easier—to set aside the conversation about Julian and just go along. Later she would tell him everything and they would figure out together what to do. It could wait a few minutes longer.
He reached down and unbuttoned her jeans. Hand-me-downs from Kate, painting clothes, so baggy that they dropped to her hips before Rory had even touched the zipper.
“Don’t turn around,” he said.
* * *
The lifts had been running sporadically all afternoon, stopping and restarting as inexperienced skiers skidded over the ice trying to round the tight corner at the end of the ramp. A wall of clouds poured like wet concrete across the sky and hardened around the mountaintop, leaking tiny pellets of hail that stung Eric’s cheeks and clattered over the vinyl seat of the chairlift.
He shouldn’t have come out today. It was Julian really who wanted to ski. He said that Kate was getting clingy and he needed a third wheel.
“I keep thinking I’ve got to cut her loose, but I’m not ready to have that conversation. I need a reason to procrastinate. You know how it is.”
Eric wasn’t eager for the day. There were a hundred projects waiting for attention at the Blackbird, and he’d barely gotten home after almost a month away. He’d felt guilty about it this morning, but Celia had only kissed his cheek and told him to go, have fun, nothing was so urgent that it couldn’t wait another day.
He had explained his reluctance to Julian as they sat in the mudroom pulling on their boots.
“Stay if you want, man,” Julian said. “But if she’s telling you to go...”
Outside they could hear the thud of Rory’s ax chopping wood. From the kitchen, the splash of running water and the clatter of dishes. Eric hesitated, elbows on his knees. Julian had paid for his trip to Alaska, for the cabin and the helicopter and the tickets and the food. It seemed ungrateful after only a few days back not to do him this one favor in return.
His thoughts spun in circles: go, don’t go, a dozen chattering reasons for and against. Impossible to think through the noise.
Julian got to his feet and pulled his cap down over his ears.
“In my experience, if a woman really wants to put you to work, you’ll know it. Today you’re getting a pass. I’d take it if I were you.”
He opened the door in invitation. A gust of frigid air blew into the room.
“Arctic,” Eric said. “Go ahead. I think I’m gonna add another layer.”
“Sure you are.”
“Give me five minutes. I’ll meet you at the bottom of Prospect.”
Julian went out, shaking his head.
Eric sat for a minute after he left, listening as he said goodbye to Rory. When the sound of chopping resumed, he kicked off his boots and went into the kitchen, where Celia was drying the last of the breakfast dishes. She was wearing a cotton nightgown and an ancient, enormous cardigan of moss-green wool. Her hair trailed down her back in a day-old braid.
He stole up behind her and slipped his hand under the sweater to cup her breast.
“Come upstairs,” he said.
The side of her cheek curved upward as she turned off the faucet.
“I’ve got exactly one hundred and forty-two things to do today,” she said.
“Hundred and forty-three.”
He kissed her warm ear. She tucked up her shoulder and turned to face him, smiling, but with one hand flat to his chest.
“Later, okay?”
“That’s what you said last night.”
She wobbled her head, acknowledging this.
“Are we fighting?” he said.
“No.”
“Then come upstairs and prove it.”
A flash of impatience crossed her face, so quickly he couldn’t be sure it had been there at all. She had pressed a kiss to his cheek and shooed him along, and he’d let himself be sent away because of the kiss and the smile—but now, on the stalled ski lift, it was that swift exasperation he couldn’t get out of his mind.
He tried to remember the tools of self-control: Think before acting. Count to a hundred, or five hundred. Talk it out. Call for help if you think it’s going sideways.
He peeled off a glove with his teeth and pulled out his cell phone. He dialed Celia’s number. It rang four times and went to voice mail. And not even her voice, but the canned response the cell came with.
He shoved the phone back into his pocket.
One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, four...
The lift hummed to a start. It traveled a few yards, then stopped again with a jerk that set the chairs swinging. Eric could just make out the lift operator in his box at the top of the run—only forty yards to go, but it may as well have been a mile.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered.
Julian sat back comfortably, his arm around Kate’s snow-dusted shoulders. If Eric was there to circumvent trouble with Kate, he was doing a fine job; she had been bubbly and easygoing all day, in spite of the weather.
“No point stressing, man,” Julian said. “You have somewhere else to be?”
Eric ground back the answer with his teeth. Though they’d been sedentary for almost an hour, his heartbeat was tripping like a snare drum. His eyes burned with cold, with the chain of sleepless nights that had started in Alaska and continued at the Blackbird Hotel.
From his breast pocket he pulled out a flask of whiskey, unscrewed it and took a burning slug. Julian and Kate waved it off, so he took a couple more swallows himself, then more after that since the flask was nearly empty.
The exchange with Celia nagged at him, became tangled in the threads of previous conversations, as if the words had come untethered from their context. He couldn’t remember who said what, or when, or whether certain comments were a response to something someone else had said. He couldn’t put the pieces together. He couldn’t think. That was the problem—he couldn’t think. His mind was a freight train, fast and unsteerable, pushed by its own weight and momentum with Eric like a panicked conductor trying to keep the fucker from jumping the tracks.
He stared into the whiteness, rocking back and forth with the energy leaping in his chest.
That impatience on her face. She wanted him to go, didn’t she? Wanted to be rid of him. He remembered standing in the hallway—was that last night or the night before? He couldn’t be sure. But definitely he remembered standing in the hallway with his hand on the doorknob, and finding it locked.
At least...he thought he remembered.
He blinked into the snowstorm. On every side, the snowflakes whirled and dissolved into a fine white mist, like a cloud.
I’m losing it, he thought helplessly.
Kate was chattering on the seat beside him. Her voice was painfully bright, a needle in his ear.
“I’ll bet Celia was glad to see you,” she said.
“Got that right.” Julian laughed. “I thought there was an avalanche last night, but it turned out to be Celia’s headboard banging on the wall.”
Eric’s racing mind skidded to a halt. A hard tremor shook his body, locked his jaw.
Last night.
Time had gotten slippery again. He couldn’t remember whether it was last night or some other when he’d awakened to find himself on the couch downstairs, blinking into the dying embers of the fire. He’d gotten very drunk—he remembered that. All of them sitting around the hearth, and Celia plucking out a melody on her guitar while Julian lounged back in his chair, laughing with Rory and Kate. Eric had watched with a drink in hand, but he’d kept himself distant. Once he’d met Celia’s eye and she’d smiled—a blank kind of smile like she meant it for someone else and Eric just happened to be in the way.
He must have fallen asleep soon after. Someone—Celia, of course—had covered him with a blanket, and they all went upstairs and left him alone beside the cooling hearth.
He’d never gone upstairs last night.
If it was last night.
He glanced over the edge of the chair at the crazy swirling flakes. Surely there weren’t enough snowflakes in the sky to fall this way for so long; they must be cycling around, like the inside of a snow globe, the same flakes falling and rising again—how could you tell?
He dragged his mind back to Celia, trying to focus through the haze. But her face appeared again with that fleeting glance of impatience, that thousand-yard smile, turned away and with her eyes shut tight as he fucked her, like she was imagining someone else in his place. The memories rose like specters in the storm.
Panic rose to bursting in his chest. He had to see her.
Right now.
“There’s no place like home.” Kate was laughing. Shrill peals of hilarity, driving the needle into his brain.
As if she knew.
As if they both knew. And thought it was funny.
Maybe everyone was in on the joke. Maybe Celia was making a fool of him. Celia and Rory both, making fun, making other people laugh at him.
Eric pressed his hands over his ears, rocking back and forth. The chair swung wildly through the snow. Overhead, the cable creaked in protest.
He had to see Celia. Now, right now, right fucking now.
He could just make out the surface of the run thirty feet below the lift. The snow was falling up, burning cold against his face.
He swung himself out of the chair, dangling over the snow by one hand. As he dropped to the ground, he heard voices from the white mist overhead, disembodied, calling his name.
* * *
Julian heard Eric land with a muffled thud on the snow. The kid didn’t pause to pop into his rear binding, just slid into the whiteout without a backward glance. The snow folded behind him like a curtain.
“Something tells me that wasn’t Eric in Celia’s bed last night,” he said.
Kate turned to him. Her eyes were hidden behind silvered goggles that reflected his own image back to him, warped as a funhouse mirror.
“As if you didn’t know,” she said.
* * *
Always afterward, with the blaze of orgasm retreating into embers, Rory expected relief. Temporary, maybe, and only physical, but there should have been some period of minutes or hours when his skin felt tougher, when his mind stopped chasing itself in circles and found a reason to rest.
“Insanity,” Eric once said, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Or maybe that’s stupidity. They’re not that far apart...”
Not that he was talking about Rory when he said it.
Under his palm, he could feel Celia’s heartbeat, quick as a bird’s wing, her slender collarbone at his fingertips. He nuzzled into the downy hair behind her ear. The scent of her flooded his nose.
Minutes passed with neither of them moving. Celia would always wait, as long as he wanted, letting him soften and slide away before she’d ever make a move to free herself. He traced her spine, his fingertips rasping gently against her skin. His jaw had left pink stains on her shoulders and neck, but his fingers were too rough to soothe them away. He used his wrists and the backs of his hands.
She was waiting, patiently, not complaining about the hard floor or the chill in the air, or the work she needed to get back to, or the way he’d been just now—too hard and fast, too eager to get inside her and not at all eager to leave. She didn’t talk about Eric, but Rory wondered if she’d been with him, too, that morning, whether she was exhausted trying to keep up with them. Exhausted by the secrets they were keeping.
Eric was their friend, after all. The three of them had been together since they were children. He remembered the first time they came here, hearing Celia run up and down the hall overhead and Eric’s footsteps racing up the steps to join her. Rory had stood in almost exactly this spot, plucking at the peeling wallpaper and failing utterly to understand what Celia saw in the place.
To her it was magic. She said no one would ever leave a place like this.
It didn’t seem that way to Rory. Not at the time and not now. The only magical part of the Blackbird was the girl who lived in it.
He helped Celia to her feet. She lifted her face and kissed him. It was a woman’s kiss, openmouthed and generous. Her lips were cool and fresh; her arms twined delicately around his neck. It was like being kissed by a flower.
It almost decided him. The words crowded up to the base of his throat.
He couldn’t say it. He had to say it.
The decent thing would be to leave Jawbone Ridge. Just get in his truck and keep driving. In the summer, on his way back to town, spent and filthy from his job with the forestry service, he’d sit behind the wheel at the foot of the mountains and think, Turn around. Go the other way. But somehow he never could do it.
He should never have let it come to this. He should have stopped, could have stopped a hundred times. They could have gone on being family to each other, the way his mother always intended. He could have found someone else.
But those possibilities were behind them. This was where they were, and he wanted Celia with a single-mindedness that wiped away any mental image of his life but the one that included her. His desire had become laced with a possessive greed, so powerful that he’d lain awake night after night, twisted in the sheets, pulling at his dick like he could milk out some peace of mind, some resolution at the thought of Celia in the room next door, asleep in his best friend’s arms. He’d allowed the jealousy to grow, sick with shame at his own weakness. It was unfair to change the rules, he told himself. This was how they’d always played it. He understood that. He tried to accept his role in her life. In the beginning he’d even encouraged it.
“This is a small town,” he’d told her. “People think of us as siblings. They won’t tolerate it. Go and be with Eric. No one has to know about...this.”
“We won’t be able to hide it,” she had said.
But he had overridden her, patronized her. So sure always that he knew what was best for Celia.
Now he had to admit that she was right. He couldn’t hide it. Every time he glanced in her direction, it was like looking through a mask, a parody of brotherly affection. He had to keep his eyes on her face, forget the live feeling of her nipple in his palm, the texture of her skin, the damp heat of her mouth. He had to watch with gritted teeth as Eric teased her, kissed her publicly, while Rory could only wait and scheme and smile, smile, smile.
What Celia felt about it he never could guess. On the surface she seemed unchanged, but he gathered small evidences in the things she said, in an indecipherable expression or sidelong glance, in the way she clung to him and cried his name. (Had she held him that way the last time? Had she come as hard? Did she want him more or less than before?) He examined every word and gesture, aware with each passing day that the unfairness of the situation had begun to rankle: he was tired of being the odd man out. He wanted to know where he stood.
He wanted her to break a promise. It was selfish and unreasonable and unlikely. Celia didn’t break her promises.
He’d rehearsed this moment so many times in his head, piecing together what sounded like a convincing string of words until he said them aloud, alone in his room, the reproachful hotel groaning and snapping around him as if it knew he was scheming to steal its mistress away.
Fuck the Blackbird. Fuck Jawbone Ridge and brotherhood and promises. He had to put it out there. He needed her to himself.
The words that had long been boiling in his chest surged upward. As they spilled from his mouth, Eric walked through the door.
One Day Earlier
KATE OPENED THE top drawer of Julian’s dresser. It was half-full of socks and folded-up boxers. The next drawer had things in it, too, but probably there was room to combine them. Kate hadn’t been home in more than a week, and her clothing had begun to accumulate. She’d been using hangers, tossing laundry into her duffel. Waiting for Julian to offer some space for her to settle in. But he was absentminded that way.
She gathered up his clothes and began to shift them to the right-hand drawer.
He wouldn’t mind. They had been dating for months now; they were a couple. Everywhere Kate went, people asked, “Where’s Julian?” and their heads would swivel around, scanning the room. She’d roll her eyes and say that they were not joined at the hip, but secretly she’d feel a warm little glow at the association. Julian was somebody, not like most of the men from Telluride. He came from generations of money, but when she asked him where it all started, he was vague. Investments, he said, not looking at her, bored as if she’d blundered into some obvious question he’d answered a hundred times before.
That was the problem with Julian. It was so easy to irritate him and set his attention wandering.
It hadn’t always been this way. When they first met, it seemed that Julian wanted nothing more than to make her happy. She wanted the same, or thought she did. They treated each other cordially. Never argued or took a stand on principle, never made demands, as if they were both afraid one really ugly fight would tear the whole thing apart. They built a careful stockpile of goodwill, as if saving it up against some future calamity.
It used to be fun, being with Julian. Sophisticated fun. She was always aware of her age and his, like when they stood side by side in the bathroom mirror, or when he pulled out his wallet and paid the tab in cash, always in cash, his long fingers beautifully manicured with nails like polished rock. His age was one of the things that made him interesting. His age, and his name.
After all, this was Julian Moss, who’d brought home the bronze on what turned out to be a fractured tibia, only five-hundredths of a second out of the lead. Julian Moss, whose calf swelled so badly afterward that he wasn’t able to put on a boot and had to sit out the rest of the Games from the broadcast booth, the start of a new career.
Julian was wonderful. Everybody thought so. He’d put his fingers to his temple and lean in confidentially, as if the conversation you were having was the most important one he’d had in years. He gave you a full-on spotlight of attention, dark brows furrowed, his eyes moving slowly over your face as if memorizing it as part of some crucial inventory.
In return, he expected to be listened to. Early on he had told her, with that slow, half-pleading smile of his, “I like my own way, you know, Katie.”
Well, that was all right. She always tried to give in, agreeing automatically and without complaint. And for a while that seemed to work.
Sweet little Katie, he called her. That’s what she tried to be.
But lately he seemed to feel they had enough goodwill to last them. He began to spend it on cheap shots, unguarded glances, eye rolls that stopped just shy of full circle so that she could never be sure whether he meant them in anger or loving impatience. His lips had taken on a permanent sneer of amusement—or disdain, it was hard to tell. He said cryptic things that he refused to explain, as if it didn’t matter what Kate read into them, only what he meant to himself. His moves in the bedroom were less playful, and he seemed constantly distracted, like Kate was in the way. Yet he used to be a considerate lover. Even the first time, hushed and hurried in a frigid stairwell, he had taken the time to make her come. He was experienced, patient, dominant. He’d bought her lingerie and sex toys, said it was all a game he wanted to play with her, that some women took it too seriously but he was glad to see that Kate was not one of them.
Now nothing she did was right. Last night was awful. Awful! The things he wanted her to do...
Tears of self-pity sprang to her eyes. She wiped them away with the heel of her hand.
It could be nothing. Could even be the start of something good. Maybe this was a last line of defense in what Kate’s mother called “terminal bachelorhood.” Maybe Julian just needed a little push, something from Kate to let him know that she would agree to whatever he had in mind. She told him, offhandedly, in the course of conversation, that she loved to travel, though she was perfectly content here in Telluride. She thought marriage was great but was also up for cohabitation. She didn’t mind his age. She liked children, though she didn’t think her life would be incomplete without them. Loved sex but was happy to give an unrequited blow job. She laughed at his jokes; she sang his praises.
Really, thinking about it, she was perfect for Julian Moss. Why, then, did she get the feeling he was slipping away?
As she got to the back of the drawer and the last handful of clothing, she stopped, staring at what she’d found.
She stood that way for several seconds, her pulse pounding in her throat. Then stiffly, methodically, she began to put his clothes back into the drawer, exactly as she’d found them. She let herself out of the room and closed the door behind her.
* * *
The lights kept flickering on and off.
Celia lifted her face and let the hot water stream down her neck, rinsing away the soap and shampoo. She screwed her eyes tight shut. She didn’t want to think about what new problem might have arisen with the wiring in the past thirty minutes, what new task she’d have to lay on Rory and Eric. She laid her hands against the walls as if the Blackbird might be soothed and stop its twitching.
The lights flickered again, and the room fell into darkness.
“Really?” she said.
She’d been looking forward to a few extra minutes to work out the strain in her shoulders and legs, the knotted bruise-like ache in her thumb that flared at the end of any long day spent with a paintbrush in her hand. But the old claw-foot tub was oddly shaped, treacherous even with the lights on, and the steam felt dense and pressurized in a darkness as complete as this.
She turned the faucets and pushed back the shower curtain. Water streamed with a metallic patter around her feet as she reached blindly for a towel.
The lights came back. Celia flinched in surprise and nearly fell, grabbing at the towel rack to steady herself.
Eric had come into the bathroom. He was leaning against the chipped tile counter, one hand in his pocket and the other on the light switch.
“Jesus,” she said. “You scared me.”
“Sorry.”
She stepped over the edge of the tub, wrapped the towel around her body and tucked it under her arm. Eric took a second towel from the rack and started to dry her hair, gathering it in one hand to squeeze the water to the tip. His face in the mirror was thin and haggard, a specter moving through patches of fog. Over his fingers, the four tattooed letters he’d gotten years before:
, now sideways and reversed by the mirror.
.
A moment later his reflection was swallowed completely by the steam.
She turned to face him.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” she said.
His eyes shifted to meet hers—wide, beautiful black eyes, the whites as pure and smooth as milk. He opened his mouth and closed it again, deciding what to say. There were harsh lines like cuts running down between his eyebrows.
“Eric—”
“Tell me something. I want you to tell me something and be honest.”
She nodded. The steam burned at the back of her throat.
“I want to know if you’re happy here,” he said. “With...with all of this.”
“Of course I am. This is what I always wanted.”
“What you always wanted. I thought you promised me an honest answer.”
“Maybe it’s a little more—”
“A lot more. What I’m asking is whether you’re happy.”
“I am.”
The steam had gathered along his eyebrows and beaded at the tips of his lashes. He tilted his head.
“I can’t tell,” he said. “I just never can tell whether you’re telling me the truth.”
“Do you want that to be a lie?”
“Maybe.”
“It isn’t.”
“Whatever you say.” He plucked a strand of wet hair from her face. “I notice you don’t wonder why I’m asking. Don’t you want to know whether I’m happy?”
A suffocating weight pushed at her chest. She wished they could go outside, where the air was thin and light.
“I...I thought...”
Eric ducked his head to get closer to hers.
“You thought what? That if you’re happy, everyone else is, too?”
“No, no—”
“Yes, yes. I think it hurts your tender little heart to imagine anything else. Easier not to look too close. That’s what I think.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No. Maybe not.” He laid the towel aside and reached for her hand. His thumb traced a small nervous pattern on the inside of her wrist. “But you have to see that this place is no good for us. I think we should leave. Just leave, right now. Tonight.”
A lump of panic rose in her chest.
“What are you talking about?”
“I just think, all of this, it’s too much.”
“You’re tired,” she said. “We’re all tired. We knew it would be this way at first. Probably jet-lagged, too...”
She drew her hand away, fussed over an open drawer and found a bottle of sleeping pills. She shook out two tablets. But Eric curled her fingers with his palm and held them closed.
“I don’t need another pill,” he said. His words, which had started uncertainly, tumbled out. “I need you. I need it to be just you and me. We can go someplace warm, someplace with palm trees and sand, where we can listen to the ocean every day, lay under the stars every night. We can get one of those big hammocks, baby, we can live someplace new, and you wouldn’t have to work so hard, and there wouldn’t be so much goddamn snow...”
His voice raced on, a current of words sweeping him far away from her. She looked at him, light-headed, as if some crucial underpinning had come loose; they could be sliding right now, down the Ridge as so many others had done before. She gripped the edge of the sink.
“I like the snow,” she said.
He drew back as if she’d struck him.
A slow anger bloomed in her chest. How like Eric to throw down something this impulsive and expect everyone else to follow.
“You want us to leave here after all this work?” she said. “Leave the hotel half-finished. Just walk away, with no reason and no explanation—”
“Oh, I’ve got my reasons.”
“No,” she said.
He dropped her hand. The sleeping pills clattered to the floor. He backed away a step.
“You won’t come,” he said.
“How can you even ask? This is our home. This is what we’ve always talked about. You and me and Rory. How can you think of leaving him behind?”
“Easily.”
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you two—”
“Because you don’t want to know.”
“Because I don’t need to know. It’s not my business. If you and Rory had a fight, go to him and work it out, because I sure as hell am not going to leave in the middle of the night and go off to sip mai tais on the beach with you.”
“I see,” he said. “You choose him over me.”
Celia sighed. She reached up to stroke the hard line of his jaw, as though it might soften if she were patient enough to smooth it away.
“I choose us,” she said. “The Blackbird. Like it always has been.”
He shook her off, his mouth set in an unhappy line. His gaze traveled down her body, and he reached for the towel she had tucked closed against her chest.
She caught it first. Her fist curled across the knot of terrycloth.
“Let’s rest tonight,” she said.
He laughed bitterly, peeling off his shirt as he turned to start the shower.
“And so it begins,” he said.
* * *
Celia changed her clothes, pulled her damp hair over her shoulder and opened the door. Julian was standing just outside the bedroom door, in the dim hallway. His shoulders blocked the light from the staircase and cast his face in shadow, but even so she could see the smile creep across his lips as he bent toward her.
“Trouble in paradise?” he said.
His voice was low and rich with amusement, as though they were sharing an inside joke at the back of a crowded room. He propped his hand on the wall behind her head. She couldn’t look him in the eye without stepping aside or craning her neck; either choice felt like a concession, so she willed herself not to move, not to lift her face to him. She stared past the shadowy bump of his collarbone at the wall sconce near the end of the hallway.
“Let me by, Julian.”
He leaned in closer, lowered his head to speak from just above her ear. His breath was warm on her temple.
“What are you going to do when they leave you—tell me that. Do you even know?”
A shiver crawled up her neck. Don’t speak. He doesn’t know us; he doesn’t know what we’re about. But the question in her mind bubbled through the tarry silence and burst from her lips before she could stop it.
“Why do you hate me, Julian?”
For a moment she imagined a flash of surprise in his expression.
“I’ve been nice to you,” she said.
The surprise, if it had been there, was gone. His face hardened. He pushed back from the wall and turned away.
“You haven’t been,” he said. “You haven’t been nice at all.”
Two Days Earlier (#ulink_462134b5-47c0-5d35-965d-a1dc7e417103)
“CLOSE YOUR EYES.”
“I’m a grown man, Katie.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Only that years of experience have made me wary of surprises.”
“You shouldn’t be wary of this one, because it’s excellent.”
“Hmm. What are you up to now?”
“Five foot three.”
“Seriously. What.”
Kate sighed as Julian leaned back in his chair. His friends had turned back to their drinks and conversation, lost under a low din of chatter and the chink of plates and cutlery from the open kitchen behind them. She had tracked them down to Paco’s, finally, where they sat amid a detritus of ski clothes and half-eaten lunch.
“Come with me—I’ll show you.”
“I’m eating,” he said. “And we haven’t paid the bill yet.”
“You can come right back.”
He took an enormous bite of pulled-pork sandwich and pointed at the plate of fries.
“This is meant to be a hot meal,” he said.
“Okay, okay. But hurry up.”
He raised his eyes to the ceiling. Not quite an eye roll, but almost.
He didn’t know what she’d gotten him, though. Once he saw it, he’d understand why she was so excited to show it to him. She helped herself to his Coke, tapping her foot while he finished the last bites of his lunch. He wasn’t in any hurry at all. With every bite he looked up as if to point out the fact that she was watching him eat.
“You’re driving me crazy,” she said around a mouthful of fries.
“That makes two of us.”
“Don’t you even want to know what it is?”
“What what is?”
“The surprise, for fuck’s sake, Julian. Try to follow the plot.”
He wiped his hands on a paper napkin, which tore as he used it, leaving shreds of paper all over his fingers. He summoned the waiter by holding up his sticky hands. “Cheap-ass paper napkin. Bring me a real one, will you, please? Like, out of cloth?” And to Kate, “Okay, honey, lay it on me.”
“You have to close your eyes first.”
“I’m not doing that.” When the napkin came, he wiped his hands, tossed some bills on the table and zipped his wallet back into the breast pocket of his jacket.
“Jesus. Fine. Come on then.”
She took his hand and led him outside, leaving everyone else behind with their coffees. Through both sets of double doors, down the icy steps and into the snow. At high noon the sky was so flatly blue that it looked like plastic. All the shadows stood narrow and hard under the glare of the sun, the pine trees spiked and dripping.
When they reached the corner of the lodge, Kate stopped.
“Ta-da!”
Parked beside the building was a brand-new snowmobile. Glossy red, sleek as an apple, with a fine spray of snow over its bonnet. Kate held out the keys.
“Happy birthday,” she said, an unstoppable grin spreading into her cheeks.
Julian’s face didn’t change at all. He didn’t take the keys.
“You are unsurpriseable,” she said.
“Ye-ah.”
“You don’t like it?”
“Oh, I like it. It’s just...a lot of present, Katie.”
“Well, it’s your birthday—”
“How did you know about that? Nobody else does.”
“Well, somebody does, obviously.” She tried to smile.
“Nobody.”
She felt her face redden. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.
“Have you been snooping around my stuff?” he said. “My wallet, maybe?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then how did you know.”
“Your mother told me, last month.”
“My mother told you.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t even know my mother.”
“Well, I do now, a little.”
“How did you even get her number?”
“From my phone, of course. When you borrowed it to call her a couple of months ago.” No need to explain how she had dialed and hung up twice before she found the voice to introduce herself and strike up a conversation. And how awkward it had been, as if Kate was the first person the woman had talked to in years. She kept asking whether Julian knew Kate was calling, in a hopeful voice like the phone call would have meant more if he had instigated it.
Which it would have, of course, but why point it out? Why treat Kate as though she were being dishonest when she was only trying to do something nice for Julian?
“Let me get this straight,” Julian said. “You called my mother, weaseled my birthday out of her—”
“Saw it was coming up and scored you a prezzy! I know—clever me, right? It’s really sweet, too. I rode it up here to meet you. I thought we could play on it this afternoon.”
He stood back, eyeing the snowmobile as if it were still on the lot and he couldn’t decide whether to take it home.
“Come on—let’s go for a spin,” she said.
“I’d love to, but I have plans for the day.”
“Just with Zig.”
“I have plans, Kate.”
“Why are you being such a dick right now? This is a present that I bought you for your birthday. It’s supposed to be fun.”
He looked at her as if bewildered by the concept.
“But, I mean, what am I supposed to do with it? I don’t live here. I don’t have any place to store it.”
“You can leave it in our garage. There’s plenty of room.”
“Then really it’s yours, isn’t it?”
“No, of course not.”
“But I’d have to ask to take it out, right? Someone would have to let me in to get it?”
“Sure, but—”
“So then it’s yours.”
“Well, you don’t have to keep it at our place, obviously. Stash it wherever you want. I’ll ship it for you, if there’s somewhere else you need to be.”
She was offended now, and Julian sighed.
“That’s not the point. And I do appreciate the thought, truly. But let’s just call it a loan. We can go out on it tomorrow, okay? I promise. Not today.”
“You have plans.”
He stepped closer and chucked her under the chin with his forefinger, smiling indulgently as if he’d just granted her a huge favor.
“I’m not trying to be a dick. It’s just too much right now.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”
But her throat was tight and the back of her mouth stung with bitterness.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back inside. I’ll get you a hot chocolate and schnapps.”
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Averil Dean
On a bitter January evening, three people are found murdered in the isolated Blackbird hotel.Best friends since childhood, Eric, Rory and Celia have always been inseparable. Together they’ve coped with broken homes and damaged families, clinging to each other as they’ve navigated their tenuous lives. Their bond is potent and passionate—and its intensity can be volatile.When the trio decides to follow Celia's dream of buying and renovating the Blackbird, a dilapidated hotel that sits on the perilous cliffs of Jawbone Ridge, new jealousies arise and long-held suspicions start to unravel their relationship. Soon they find themselves pushed to the breaking point, where trust becomes doubt, longing becomes obsession, and someone will commit the ultimate betrayal.An unflinching story of ambition, desire and envy, The Undoing moves backward through time to tracethe events leading to that fateful night, revealing the intimate connections, dark secrets and terrible lies that wove them together—and tore them apart.“Smart, gripping and thoroughly absorbing. Dean’s The Undoing had my brain twisted for hours.” —New York Times bestselling author Chelsea Cain
On a bitter January evening, three people are found murdered in the isolated Blackbird hotel.
Best friends since childhood, Eric, Rory and Celia have always been inseparable. Together they’ve coped with broken homes and damaged families, clinging to each other as they’ve navigated their tenuous lives. Their bond is potent and passionate—and its intensity can be volatile.
When the trio decides to follow Celia’s dream of buying and renovating the Blackbird, a dilapidated hotel that sits on the perilous cliffs of Jawbone Ridge, new jealousies arise and long-held suspicions start to unravel their relationship. Soon they find themselves pushed to the breaking point, where trust becomes doubt, longing becomes obsession, and someone will commit the ultimate betrayal.
An unflinching story of ambition, desire and envy, The Undoing traces the events leading to that fateful night, revealing the intimate connections, dark secrets and terrible lies that wove them together—and tore them apart.
Praise for THE UNDOING (#ulink_b889af1c-2915-5e08-bcaa-fa928a4834a0)
“Beautifully imagined and beautifully written, hypnotically suspenseful and truly chilling…this is a very superior thriller.”
—#1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child
“Smart, gripping, and thoroughly absorbing. Dean’s The Undoing had my brain twisted for hours.”
—New York Times bestselling author Chelsea Cain
“Averil Dean’s The Undoing is a tense, suspenseful tale that pulls the reader down a twisted path to the spine-tingling conclusion.”
—New York Times bestselling author Heather Gudenkauf
“Dark and haunting…a beautifully disturbing character study. And the writing itself—this isn’t simply good prose. The words are poetic and painful and unforgettable. The Undoing is a superb novel. Dean’s career as a suspense writer is going to be great fun to watch.”
—New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison
Praise for ALICE CLOSE YOUR EYES
“Chilling, riveting, intriguing, surprising and compelling, and I can’t think of a debut that kept me turning pages faster or more breathlessly.”
—M.J. Rose, international bestselling author of Seduction
“Alice Close Your Eyes is a crisply written, wickedly suspenseful debut…a dark, sensual nightmare.… Don’t miss it.”
—David Bell, author of Cemetery Girl and Never Come Back
“Alice Close Your Eyes will have readers on the edge of their seats. Promising newcomer Dean spins a web out of the deepest human obsessions…to reveal a haunting story.”
—Booklist
“Dean’s marvelous debut is dark, gritty and relentless… This psychological thriller borders on the erotic as it draws the reader into its web.”
—RT Book Reviews, 4 stars
“A haunting, intense novel that is at once psychologically compelling and emotionally unsettling. Taut pacing and skilled storytelling support a breathtaking plot and characters that are heartbreaking and horrifying yet somehow still accessible and sympathetic. It’s scorching, disturbing and tragic, but well-crafted and impressively written.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An absorbing, deeply disturbing, darkly erotic psychological thriller of tragedy and revenge. Fans of…Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)…will love this disquieting novel.”
—Library Journal, starred review
The Undoing
Averil Dean
A NOVEL
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For Andy
Contents
Cover (#u160699fe-8a67-54da-97a3-9b85a886a3d7)
Back Cover Text (#u8d87f955-666c-5bff-87ca-9ba9936f1b5c)
Praise (#u1896111c-80eb-507b-805c-33573c3dc232)
Title Page (#ua9d54540-7d08-5e24-8a8a-e8a8ea585481)
Dedication (#u51819329-72eb-5e46-a1ce-edc2033ea9e1)
Quotation (#u48965e5e-badc-5a62-8dd1-3c0add9941e0)
August 2014 (#ucfec714a-9466-5fb4-a355-e4a36bcb36cf)
One Day Earlier (#u2002d777-c644-5bc3-9d3c-7f3e8eb990bf)
January 11, 2009 (#u31bfe4c4-7f9f-509a-8808-cf3d8935e427)
One Day Earlier (#u2fb8e844-1b1c-543f-a647-b6b7f18e95c1)
Two Days Earlier (#u4a37b8f5-1272-5b19-8c43-225519d876f3)
Three Days Earlier (#litres_trial_promo)
December 24, 2008 (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Days Earlier (#litres_trial_promo)
Five Days Earlier (#litres_trial_promo)
September 2008 (#litres_trial_promo)
December 31, 2007 (#litres_trial_promo)
July 2007 (#litres_trial_promo)
January 2003 (#litres_trial_promo)
November 2002 (#litres_trial_promo)
June 2002 (#litres_trial_promo)
November 2001 (#litres_trial_promo)
July 1998 (#litres_trial_promo)
January 11, 2009 (#litres_trial_promo)
August 2014 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Reader’s Guide (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
A Conversation with Averil Dean (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend,” I shrieked, upstarting:
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
Edgar Allan Poe
August 2014 (#ulink_6e60a693-9dca-521e-a7f0-333ef5c7d83c)
JULIAN MOSS UNFOLDED the note and pressed it over his face with both hands. With his fingertips he molded the paper to his eyelids. His thumbs pushed the edges to his cheeks. The paper smelled like money now, like old leather and sweat. He wished he had a mirror so he could see whether the ink had transferred to his face, the opening line like a blue tattoo across his forehead:
Julian
I know what you did.
He eased forward, the note dangling from his fingers. Gravel crunched under his boot and skidded over the ledge, clattered on the rocky outcropping at his feet, then plummeted in silence to the river far below.
A long-ago conversation trailed through his mind: his father’s voice, describing a friend who had dived from the penthouse suite of a Seattle high-rise. The guy had gone there with a real estate agent as if he were looking to buy the place, making polite conversation throughout the showing, checking the taps, full of jokes about the owner’s choice of flooring and all the mirrors in the master bath. When it came time to leave, the agent glanced back and saw his client’s feet disappear over the railing.
A quick death, according to Julian’s father. From that height it would have been like dropping a water balloon.
Not that it would be that way for Julian. The ravine was not that deep, and the slope dropped off in a series of rocky shelves. There would be no spectacular burst at the end, no terrible, literal emptying of his head. For him it would be more concussive, like a pumpkin tossed down a flight of concrete stairs.
The agent said he’d heard his client laughing, right at the end. Julian could understand the guy’s state of mind. He felt the same giddiness, a lightening of the senses, as if the air itself were pulling him skyward, the pine trees standing like spectators with their arms out ready to clap.
His eye was caught by a yellow wink of light at his wrist. His watch. He imagined his mother, signing for his possessions at the county morgue, finding the watch among them. Knowing or coming to know what it meant.
A dizzying relief poured through him at having remembered in time. He unclasped the band and pulled off the watch. The hands had long since stopped turning. A diamond had come loose from the face and rattled around behind the glass like the bead in a Cracker Jack toy. Easing back from the ledge, he wound up and threw the watch as far as it would go. The band turned itself inside out as it went, flashing and wriggling in the air. It sailed across the ravine and disappeared into the scrub on the other side.
His arm seemed lighter without it. A faint stripe showed at his wrist, the skin there tender and pale where the sun hadn’t reached and where the dark hair of his forearm had worn away. Strange to think how much the watch had meant to him once. The heft of it, the shine. How was it that he’d never realized how heavy the thing was? For the first time in years, he felt the weight of both arms equally, one no lighter than the other, neither side dragging him down.
A fine feeling, balance. He wished he’d tried it sooner.
He steadied himself with one hand around the branch overhead. The rough bark was gummed with sap, releasing the astringent scent of pine into the morning air. To his right, at the tip of a crescent-shaped shelf of rock, a veil of white smoke lifted into the sky. Through the haze he could see the skeletal outline of the Blackbird Hotel. Its spine and ribs stood in jagged black lines against the sky, and at the far end, the old stone chimney teetered unsupported, leaking smoke from both ends. As he watched, an arc of water rose over the ruins, undulating gently as the fire hose swept back and forth. A subtle rainbow formed in the mist, appearing from the ground, then fading, unfinished, just before the apex.
He raised his eyes and looked out the mouth of the ravine, past the smoldering hotel to the bank of the mountain range beyond. Wide swaths of the hillside had been cleared and were thick with late summer grass that gleamed in the sunshine like new-fallen snow. The lifts were still now, spidery black cables trailing post to post up the hill in shallow arcs, the chairs swaying gently in the breeze. He imagined himself hurtling downward, the air whistling in his ears, the far-off roar of the crowd tugging at the tips of his skis. A rise in the snow, liftoff, his body tucked up tight as the chatter of the skis was silenced.
It had been years since he’d felt the wind that way, self-generated, in evidence of his own physical power. Already he could feel his body weight, the inexorable tug of gravity against the soles of his feet, the mindless acceleration. He wondered whether his father’s friend had laughed all the way down for the sheer joy of falling.
The note fluttered in his hand as if calling for attention.
He let it slip from his fingers. The paper drifted down and caught on a thorny bush, opening and closing in the breeze like the beak of a duck. He could see the words inside—I know what you did—abruptly superimposed with the memory of Eric’s voice in that dead-on mimic, quacking like Donald Duck.
Julian laughed, a wide, billowing sound that swelled around his ears and made him sway on his perch like a bird in high wind. The wave of hilarity lifted him to his toes, drew his head and shoulders steadily back. But once started, the laughter wouldn’t stop. It began to grind through his torso, shred his throat, until he was drawn stiff as a bow on the edge of the ravine and racked with pain. He loosened his grip on the branch and opened his hand, let the bark scrape over his palm and all the way down his fingers. Then he let go.
His hands filled with air, a gentle kiss over the sting.
Oh, Celia.
How she would love to see him now.
One Day Earlier (#ulink_abb01b4c-738e-515b-afba-f9452d2e8d48)
THE 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.
January 11, 2009 (#ulink_917c7b88-7e21-5d57-9330-2172caa9b273)
CELIA WAS BURNING. From the minute he walked into the room and settled his gaze on her, from the first sunshiny flash of teeth in his smooth, tanned face, the squeak of floorboards under his weight, getting closer. From even before that. Years before that. This longing had simmered in her belly since childhood, when she would admire the straight line of his shoulders and the thrilling vertical channel between the muscles of his abdomen, and feel some unnamed stirring that made her long for the bright swing of his attention, as if without it she were standing underdressed in a storm. Now the fire raged between them in waves of all-consuming heat. It was him inside her, both of them in the heart of the Blackbird, a crackling hot inferno that exploded down her thighs and raced beneath her skin and tore through her throat like a flame.
In the hour before her death, Celia had never felt more alive.
* * *
If Celia ever had to explain what it was like to be living out her childhood dream, she would talk about the walls. Miles and miles of walls, the Blackbird had, and every one of them covered with wallpaper or cheap vinyl paneling, or spiderwebbed with tiny cracks, or pockmarked with holes in the plaster or the doors. Sometimes, as here in the kitchen, all of the above. She imagined the listener—a sympathetic motherly type like Mrs. Kirby at the post office—who would someday come to stay in one of the rooms they were renovating. You wouldn’t believe such a small hotel would have so many walls, Celia would say. I never thought we’d see the end of them.
Some of the rooms had been too much for her. In Two, she’d seen right away that the wallpaper was not going to budge and had papered over it with nubby grass cloth the color of summer wheat. That was Rory’s room, calmly masculine, with a punched tin lamp and curtains made from lengths of painter’s cloth, a pinstripe in chocolate brown that Celia had sewn around the edges.
“I’m still gonna throw my socks on the floor.” Rory had run his hand over the walnut dresser and the Hopi blanket across the foot of the bed.
“You can lead a boy to a hamper,” said Eric, whose room even in high school was aggressively neat, “but you can’t make him use it.”
In Eight, where Julian Moss was staying, joined some nights by Kate, Celia had started strong but been foiled halfway through. Some of the wallpaper glue had hardened over time to the color and consistency of amber, and no amount of chemicals or steam would remove it. She was forced to leave the clover-green wallpaper in ragged vertical patches, but had discovered by trial and error that she could glaze those walls with a tinted wax and leave them as they were, with the pine boards showing through the strips of paper. The effect was strangely pleasing. She hung a huge copper clock over the headboard and some unframed oils on the walls and moved on to other projects.
The kitchen, though, was special. It was Celia’s space, her private sanctuary, a big shabby square room with open shelves above and cavernous cupboards below, and for this room nothing would do but walls of robin’s egg blue. She had stripped every last shred of the wallpaper here—a tedious, finicky job that took a solid week—and now the cans of paint stood ready on the floor, the dishes and crockery shifted to the countertops in order to clear the space. Tomorrow she would open the first can of paint and roll it over the naked wall, a luxurious task she had long anticipated.
She scooped up a dollop of spackling paste and pressed it into a nail hole next to the pantry door frame, smoothing it over with the end of the putty knife. She stood back to inspect her work, pushing a strand of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand.
Miles of walls. I had help, of course. I had Rory and Eric.
Always when she thought of her stepbrother and his best friend, their names went in that order. Said quickly, the syllables blended into one word: Roreneric. You couldn’t say them the other way around. She wasn’t sure why.
Rory and Eric could do anything. Together they’d repaired the roof, sealed the windows, replaced the gutters and the faucets, refinished the floors. Huge, impossible jobs, but they tackled them together, cheerful and undaunted. Celia would hear Eric’s tuneless voice ringing through the old hotel, the beat of his music thundering from the stereo: Do ya, do ya want my love, baby, do ya do ya want my love... A crazy falsetto, cracking over the high notes, punctuated by Rory’s rumbling baritone urging him to keep his day job. Eric would laugh, cranking up the volume just to piss him off. They filled the empty rooms with the sound of power tools, hammers, the clatter of boards and nails, heavy thumps of their boots on the floor. The most beautiful sounds in the world.
Rory and Eric. Their names formed an impression in her mind that was less about the way they looked than about the way they felt, their dual presence like a pair of moons swirling elliptically around her: one near, the other far, then switching, accelerating, swinging away and moving heavily back. She felt the weight of them physically, a cosmic tug that kept her always wobbling slightly off balance.
No one who knew them casually could believe they’d be such good friends. Eric seemed like the antithesis to Rory’s golden-brown solidity. His pale skin was the canvas for a collection of tattoos, an ongoing attempt to illustrate his identity in a way that Rory had never needed to do. Eric was dark, pierced, mercurial, with an IQ approaching genius and a blatant reluctance to use it, as if he were too smart even to think up the things that would challenge him, too smart to keep his own brain ticking. He could easily have become frustrated with Rory, who had struggled for years with undiagnosed dyslexia and hadn’t read a book cover to cover in his life. But Rory was not unintelligent, and he had a commonsense canniness Eric lacked. When Eric wandered off course, Rory provided ballast.
Celia set down the spackling paste tray and made a wide stretch. A hot ache pressed at the back of her eyes. She had lain awake the night before, her thoughts all scraps and snippets: a flash of someone’s face, a fragment of conversation, memories like the pieces of several different puzzles all laid out on a table, impossible to assemble. At dawn she rose and went up the narrow back stairs, through the dollhouse door to the attic—a long, slanted room with one dingy window at either end and a century’s worth of accumulated junk, once so thick you had to turn sideways even to get through the door. Over the months they had sifted through it, had carried down pieces of furniture, paintings with cracked frames or rips in the canvas, boxes of books and musty old clothes, an enormous elk’s head mounted on a wooden plaque. Eric had hung this in the kitchen, as a joke, because Celia didn’t eat meat—which had upset her at first because she didn’t realize it was a joke and thought he meant for it to stay. But he took one look at her face and laughed, kissed her head and hauled the poor thing down to the truck with the other flea market items.
From the mudroom, she heard the door open and close, a thud of boots on the floor and the nylon whisk of someone’s coat. A moment later, Rory came through the kitchen door, pulling off his cap as he ducked beneath the lintel. The ends of his hair were dusted with snow, his eyebrows threaded with ice. His bootless feet in purple socks made no sound, but the floorboards creaked a little under his weight.
He looked around the room, hands slung low on his narrow hips.
“Looks like a bomb went off in here,” he said.
Celia held up the tray. “I’m spackling. It’s a dirty job, et cetera...”
Rory hunted briefly for a glass, settled for a coffee cup and went to fill it at the kitchen sink. He drank off the water in five or six long swallows, his head tipping slowly back, then refilled the cup and stood with his hip leaning against the counter.
“Finally got the shed organized,” he said. “And I hung the new door. You would not have appreciated the spider situation out there.”
“Body count?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Yikes.”
Rory grinned. Nothing fazed him. Spiders, leaks in the roof, faulty plumbing, snarls of electrical wire. He tackled every job with the same easygoing confidence; it was all in a day’s work, whatever the day might bring. He had a way of jollying Celia and Eric along, his blue eyes crinkling around the corners, mouth curving open around the white gleam of his teeth.
Captain America, Eric called him. Here to save the day.
And Rory did seem unambiguously heroic at times. He radiated good intention and that comforting solidity a strong person brings into the room. It was almost impossible to imagine a situation Rory would not be able to handle, or that anything awful could happen while he was around. He made everything seem simple.
Celia waited while he drained his cup for a second time and set it in the sink. Now would be the time to bring up the topic of Julian. Knowing Rory—and her own inability to articulate the problem—this conversation could take a while. “I’m glad you’re here, because I want to talk to you.”
He came through the pantry doorway. She felt him approach and knew without turning her head that his mood had shifted. His cool cheek pressed against her temple.
“You can talk, but I’ll hear you much better in twenty minutes.”
He took the tray from her hands and set it aside, slid his hand around her head to turn her face to his. His mouth opened over hers, cold inside as if he’d been eating snow. His teeth felt sleek and hard under her tongue.
She shivered. “You’re freezing.”
“Warm me up, then.”
“Here? Don’t we know better than that?”
“Yeah, we definitely do,” he said.
She expected him to lead her out of the pantry and up the winding stairs. But he slipped his hand around her wrist, thumb to forefinger like a bracelet.
“They won’t be back for a while,” he said. “We have time.”
He pulled her against him so she could feel his erection at the small of her back. He traced the line of her neck with his lips and teeth, buried his nose in the hair behind her ear. His hands began a slow descent down the front of her body, then up again, under her sweater, a ticklish chill across her ribs. His palms were rough and calloused, so big that with both his hands over her breasts it felt as if she’d added a layer of chilled fresh clothing.
She sighed and turned her cheek to his lips. Easier—much easier—to set aside the conversation about Julian and just go along. Later she would tell him everything and they would figure out together what to do. It could wait a few minutes longer.
He reached down and unbuttoned her jeans. Hand-me-downs from Kate, painting clothes, so baggy that they dropped to her hips before Rory had even touched the zipper.
“Don’t turn around,” he said.
* * *
The lifts had been running sporadically all afternoon, stopping and restarting as inexperienced skiers skidded over the ice trying to round the tight corner at the end of the ramp. A wall of clouds poured like wet concrete across the sky and hardened around the mountaintop, leaking tiny pellets of hail that stung Eric’s cheeks and clattered over the vinyl seat of the chairlift.
He shouldn’t have come out today. It was Julian really who wanted to ski. He said that Kate was getting clingy and he needed a third wheel.
“I keep thinking I’ve got to cut her loose, but I’m not ready to have that conversation. I need a reason to procrastinate. You know how it is.”
Eric wasn’t eager for the day. There were a hundred projects waiting for attention at the Blackbird, and he’d barely gotten home after almost a month away. He’d felt guilty about it this morning, but Celia had only kissed his cheek and told him to go, have fun, nothing was so urgent that it couldn’t wait another day.
He had explained his reluctance to Julian as they sat in the mudroom pulling on their boots.
“Stay if you want, man,” Julian said. “But if she’s telling you to go...”
Outside they could hear the thud of Rory’s ax chopping wood. From the kitchen, the splash of running water and the clatter of dishes. Eric hesitated, elbows on his knees. Julian had paid for his trip to Alaska, for the cabin and the helicopter and the tickets and the food. It seemed ungrateful after only a few days back not to do him this one favor in return.
His thoughts spun in circles: go, don’t go, a dozen chattering reasons for and against. Impossible to think through the noise.
Julian got to his feet and pulled his cap down over his ears.
“In my experience, if a woman really wants to put you to work, you’ll know it. Today you’re getting a pass. I’d take it if I were you.”
He opened the door in invitation. A gust of frigid air blew into the room.
“Arctic,” Eric said. “Go ahead. I think I’m gonna add another layer.”
“Sure you are.”
“Give me five minutes. I’ll meet you at the bottom of Prospect.”
Julian went out, shaking his head.
Eric sat for a minute after he left, listening as he said goodbye to Rory. When the sound of chopping resumed, he kicked off his boots and went into the kitchen, where Celia was drying the last of the breakfast dishes. She was wearing a cotton nightgown and an ancient, enormous cardigan of moss-green wool. Her hair trailed down her back in a day-old braid.
He stole up behind her and slipped his hand under the sweater to cup her breast.
“Come upstairs,” he said.
The side of her cheek curved upward as she turned off the faucet.
“I’ve got exactly one hundred and forty-two things to do today,” she said.
“Hundred and forty-three.”
He kissed her warm ear. She tucked up her shoulder and turned to face him, smiling, but with one hand flat to his chest.
“Later, okay?”
“That’s what you said last night.”
She wobbled her head, acknowledging this.
“Are we fighting?” he said.
“No.”
“Then come upstairs and prove it.”
A flash of impatience crossed her face, so quickly he couldn’t be sure it had been there at all. She had pressed a kiss to his cheek and shooed him along, and he’d let himself be sent away because of the kiss and the smile—but now, on the stalled ski lift, it was that swift exasperation he couldn’t get out of his mind.
He tried to remember the tools of self-control: Think before acting. Count to a hundred, or five hundred. Talk it out. Call for help if you think it’s going sideways.
He peeled off a glove with his teeth and pulled out his cell phone. He dialed Celia’s number. It rang four times and went to voice mail. And not even her voice, but the canned response the cell came with.
He shoved the phone back into his pocket.
One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, four...
The lift hummed to a start. It traveled a few yards, then stopped again with a jerk that set the chairs swinging. Eric could just make out the lift operator in his box at the top of the run—only forty yards to go, but it may as well have been a mile.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered.
Julian sat back comfortably, his arm around Kate’s snow-dusted shoulders. If Eric was there to circumvent trouble with Kate, he was doing a fine job; she had been bubbly and easygoing all day, in spite of the weather.
“No point stressing, man,” Julian said. “You have somewhere else to be?”
Eric ground back the answer with his teeth. Though they’d been sedentary for almost an hour, his heartbeat was tripping like a snare drum. His eyes burned with cold, with the chain of sleepless nights that had started in Alaska and continued at the Blackbird Hotel.
From his breast pocket he pulled out a flask of whiskey, unscrewed it and took a burning slug. Julian and Kate waved it off, so he took a couple more swallows himself, then more after that since the flask was nearly empty.
The exchange with Celia nagged at him, became tangled in the threads of previous conversations, as if the words had come untethered from their context. He couldn’t remember who said what, or when, or whether certain comments were a response to something someone else had said. He couldn’t put the pieces together. He couldn’t think. That was the problem—he couldn’t think. His mind was a freight train, fast and unsteerable, pushed by its own weight and momentum with Eric like a panicked conductor trying to keep the fucker from jumping the tracks.
He stared into the whiteness, rocking back and forth with the energy leaping in his chest.
That impatience on her face. She wanted him to go, didn’t she? Wanted to be rid of him. He remembered standing in the hallway—was that last night or the night before? He couldn’t be sure. But definitely he remembered standing in the hallway with his hand on the doorknob, and finding it locked.
At least...he thought he remembered.
He blinked into the snowstorm. On every side, the snowflakes whirled and dissolved into a fine white mist, like a cloud.
I’m losing it, he thought helplessly.
Kate was chattering on the seat beside him. Her voice was painfully bright, a needle in his ear.
“I’ll bet Celia was glad to see you,” she said.
“Got that right.” Julian laughed. “I thought there was an avalanche last night, but it turned out to be Celia’s headboard banging on the wall.”
Eric’s racing mind skidded to a halt. A hard tremor shook his body, locked his jaw.
Last night.
Time had gotten slippery again. He couldn’t remember whether it was last night or some other when he’d awakened to find himself on the couch downstairs, blinking into the dying embers of the fire. He’d gotten very drunk—he remembered that. All of them sitting around the hearth, and Celia plucking out a melody on her guitar while Julian lounged back in his chair, laughing with Rory and Kate. Eric had watched with a drink in hand, but he’d kept himself distant. Once he’d met Celia’s eye and she’d smiled—a blank kind of smile like she meant it for someone else and Eric just happened to be in the way.
He must have fallen asleep soon after. Someone—Celia, of course—had covered him with a blanket, and they all went upstairs and left him alone beside the cooling hearth.
He’d never gone upstairs last night.
If it was last night.
He glanced over the edge of the chair at the crazy swirling flakes. Surely there weren’t enough snowflakes in the sky to fall this way for so long; they must be cycling around, like the inside of a snow globe, the same flakes falling and rising again—how could you tell?
He dragged his mind back to Celia, trying to focus through the haze. But her face appeared again with that fleeting glance of impatience, that thousand-yard smile, turned away and with her eyes shut tight as he fucked her, like she was imagining someone else in his place. The memories rose like specters in the storm.
Panic rose to bursting in his chest. He had to see her.
Right now.
“There’s no place like home.” Kate was laughing. Shrill peals of hilarity, driving the needle into his brain.
As if she knew.
As if they both knew. And thought it was funny.
Maybe everyone was in on the joke. Maybe Celia was making a fool of him. Celia and Rory both, making fun, making other people laugh at him.
Eric pressed his hands over his ears, rocking back and forth. The chair swung wildly through the snow. Overhead, the cable creaked in protest.
He had to see Celia. Now, right now, right fucking now.
He could just make out the surface of the run thirty feet below the lift. The snow was falling up, burning cold against his face.
He swung himself out of the chair, dangling over the snow by one hand. As he dropped to the ground, he heard voices from the white mist overhead, disembodied, calling his name.
* * *
Julian heard Eric land with a muffled thud on the snow. The kid didn’t pause to pop into his rear binding, just slid into the whiteout without a backward glance. The snow folded behind him like a curtain.
“Something tells me that wasn’t Eric in Celia’s bed last night,” he said.
Kate turned to him. Her eyes were hidden behind silvered goggles that reflected his own image back to him, warped as a funhouse mirror.
“As if you didn’t know,” she said.
* * *
Always afterward, with the blaze of orgasm retreating into embers, Rory expected relief. Temporary, maybe, and only physical, but there should have been some period of minutes or hours when his skin felt tougher, when his mind stopped chasing itself in circles and found a reason to rest.
“Insanity,” Eric once said, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Or maybe that’s stupidity. They’re not that far apart...”
Not that he was talking about Rory when he said it.
Under his palm, he could feel Celia’s heartbeat, quick as a bird’s wing, her slender collarbone at his fingertips. He nuzzled into the downy hair behind her ear. The scent of her flooded his nose.
Minutes passed with neither of them moving. Celia would always wait, as long as he wanted, letting him soften and slide away before she’d ever make a move to free herself. He traced her spine, his fingertips rasping gently against her skin. His jaw had left pink stains on her shoulders and neck, but his fingers were too rough to soothe them away. He used his wrists and the backs of his hands.
She was waiting, patiently, not complaining about the hard floor or the chill in the air, or the work she needed to get back to, or the way he’d been just now—too hard and fast, too eager to get inside her and not at all eager to leave. She didn’t talk about Eric, but Rory wondered if she’d been with him, too, that morning, whether she was exhausted trying to keep up with them. Exhausted by the secrets they were keeping.
Eric was their friend, after all. The three of them had been together since they were children. He remembered the first time they came here, hearing Celia run up and down the hall overhead and Eric’s footsteps racing up the steps to join her. Rory had stood in almost exactly this spot, plucking at the peeling wallpaper and failing utterly to understand what Celia saw in the place.
To her it was magic. She said no one would ever leave a place like this.
It didn’t seem that way to Rory. Not at the time and not now. The only magical part of the Blackbird was the girl who lived in it.
He helped Celia to her feet. She lifted her face and kissed him. It was a woman’s kiss, openmouthed and generous. Her lips were cool and fresh; her arms twined delicately around his neck. It was like being kissed by a flower.
It almost decided him. The words crowded up to the base of his throat.
He couldn’t say it. He had to say it.
The decent thing would be to leave Jawbone Ridge. Just get in his truck and keep driving. In the summer, on his way back to town, spent and filthy from his job with the forestry service, he’d sit behind the wheel at the foot of the mountains and think, Turn around. Go the other way. But somehow he never could do it.
He should never have let it come to this. He should have stopped, could have stopped a hundred times. They could have gone on being family to each other, the way his mother always intended. He could have found someone else.
But those possibilities were behind them. This was where they were, and he wanted Celia with a single-mindedness that wiped away any mental image of his life but the one that included her. His desire had become laced with a possessive greed, so powerful that he’d lain awake night after night, twisted in the sheets, pulling at his dick like he could milk out some peace of mind, some resolution at the thought of Celia in the room next door, asleep in his best friend’s arms. He’d allowed the jealousy to grow, sick with shame at his own weakness. It was unfair to change the rules, he told himself. This was how they’d always played it. He understood that. He tried to accept his role in her life. In the beginning he’d even encouraged it.
“This is a small town,” he’d told her. “People think of us as siblings. They won’t tolerate it. Go and be with Eric. No one has to know about...this.”
“We won’t be able to hide it,” she had said.
But he had overridden her, patronized her. So sure always that he knew what was best for Celia.
Now he had to admit that she was right. He couldn’t hide it. Every time he glanced in her direction, it was like looking through a mask, a parody of brotherly affection. He had to keep his eyes on her face, forget the live feeling of her nipple in his palm, the texture of her skin, the damp heat of her mouth. He had to watch with gritted teeth as Eric teased her, kissed her publicly, while Rory could only wait and scheme and smile, smile, smile.
What Celia felt about it he never could guess. On the surface she seemed unchanged, but he gathered small evidences in the things she said, in an indecipherable expression or sidelong glance, in the way she clung to him and cried his name. (Had she held him that way the last time? Had she come as hard? Did she want him more or less than before?) He examined every word and gesture, aware with each passing day that the unfairness of the situation had begun to rankle: he was tired of being the odd man out. He wanted to know where he stood.
He wanted her to break a promise. It was selfish and unreasonable and unlikely. Celia didn’t break her promises.
He’d rehearsed this moment so many times in his head, piecing together what sounded like a convincing string of words until he said them aloud, alone in his room, the reproachful hotel groaning and snapping around him as if it knew he was scheming to steal its mistress away.
Fuck the Blackbird. Fuck Jawbone Ridge and brotherhood and promises. He had to put it out there. He needed her to himself.
The words that had long been boiling in his chest surged upward. As they spilled from his mouth, Eric walked through the door.
One Day Earlier
KATE OPENED THE top drawer of Julian’s dresser. It was half-full of socks and folded-up boxers. The next drawer had things in it, too, but probably there was room to combine them. Kate hadn’t been home in more than a week, and her clothing had begun to accumulate. She’d been using hangers, tossing laundry into her duffel. Waiting for Julian to offer some space for her to settle in. But he was absentminded that way.
She gathered up his clothes and began to shift them to the right-hand drawer.
He wouldn’t mind. They had been dating for months now; they were a couple. Everywhere Kate went, people asked, “Where’s Julian?” and their heads would swivel around, scanning the room. She’d roll her eyes and say that they were not joined at the hip, but secretly she’d feel a warm little glow at the association. Julian was somebody, not like most of the men from Telluride. He came from generations of money, but when she asked him where it all started, he was vague. Investments, he said, not looking at her, bored as if she’d blundered into some obvious question he’d answered a hundred times before.
That was the problem with Julian. It was so easy to irritate him and set his attention wandering.
It hadn’t always been this way. When they first met, it seemed that Julian wanted nothing more than to make her happy. She wanted the same, or thought she did. They treated each other cordially. Never argued or took a stand on principle, never made demands, as if they were both afraid one really ugly fight would tear the whole thing apart. They built a careful stockpile of goodwill, as if saving it up against some future calamity.
It used to be fun, being with Julian. Sophisticated fun. She was always aware of her age and his, like when they stood side by side in the bathroom mirror, or when he pulled out his wallet and paid the tab in cash, always in cash, his long fingers beautifully manicured with nails like polished rock. His age was one of the things that made him interesting. His age, and his name.
After all, this was Julian Moss, who’d brought home the bronze on what turned out to be a fractured tibia, only five-hundredths of a second out of the lead. Julian Moss, whose calf swelled so badly afterward that he wasn’t able to put on a boot and had to sit out the rest of the Games from the broadcast booth, the start of a new career.
Julian was wonderful. Everybody thought so. He’d put his fingers to his temple and lean in confidentially, as if the conversation you were having was the most important one he’d had in years. He gave you a full-on spotlight of attention, dark brows furrowed, his eyes moving slowly over your face as if memorizing it as part of some crucial inventory.
In return, he expected to be listened to. Early on he had told her, with that slow, half-pleading smile of his, “I like my own way, you know, Katie.”
Well, that was all right. She always tried to give in, agreeing automatically and without complaint. And for a while that seemed to work.
Sweet little Katie, he called her. That’s what she tried to be.
But lately he seemed to feel they had enough goodwill to last them. He began to spend it on cheap shots, unguarded glances, eye rolls that stopped just shy of full circle so that she could never be sure whether he meant them in anger or loving impatience. His lips had taken on a permanent sneer of amusement—or disdain, it was hard to tell. He said cryptic things that he refused to explain, as if it didn’t matter what Kate read into them, only what he meant to himself. His moves in the bedroom were less playful, and he seemed constantly distracted, like Kate was in the way. Yet he used to be a considerate lover. Even the first time, hushed and hurried in a frigid stairwell, he had taken the time to make her come. He was experienced, patient, dominant. He’d bought her lingerie and sex toys, said it was all a game he wanted to play with her, that some women took it too seriously but he was glad to see that Kate was not one of them.
Now nothing she did was right. Last night was awful. Awful! The things he wanted her to do...
Tears of self-pity sprang to her eyes. She wiped them away with the heel of her hand.
It could be nothing. Could even be the start of something good. Maybe this was a last line of defense in what Kate’s mother called “terminal bachelorhood.” Maybe Julian just needed a little push, something from Kate to let him know that she would agree to whatever he had in mind. She told him, offhandedly, in the course of conversation, that she loved to travel, though she was perfectly content here in Telluride. She thought marriage was great but was also up for cohabitation. She didn’t mind his age. She liked children, though she didn’t think her life would be incomplete without them. Loved sex but was happy to give an unrequited blow job. She laughed at his jokes; she sang his praises.
Really, thinking about it, she was perfect for Julian Moss. Why, then, did she get the feeling he was slipping away?
As she got to the back of the drawer and the last handful of clothing, she stopped, staring at what she’d found.
She stood that way for several seconds, her pulse pounding in her throat. Then stiffly, methodically, she began to put his clothes back into the drawer, exactly as she’d found them. She let herself out of the room and closed the door behind her.
* * *
The lights kept flickering on and off.
Celia lifted her face and let the hot water stream down her neck, rinsing away the soap and shampoo. She screwed her eyes tight shut. She didn’t want to think about what new problem might have arisen with the wiring in the past thirty minutes, what new task she’d have to lay on Rory and Eric. She laid her hands against the walls as if the Blackbird might be soothed and stop its twitching.
The lights flickered again, and the room fell into darkness.
“Really?” she said.
She’d been looking forward to a few extra minutes to work out the strain in her shoulders and legs, the knotted bruise-like ache in her thumb that flared at the end of any long day spent with a paintbrush in her hand. But the old claw-foot tub was oddly shaped, treacherous even with the lights on, and the steam felt dense and pressurized in a darkness as complete as this.
She turned the faucets and pushed back the shower curtain. Water streamed with a metallic patter around her feet as she reached blindly for a towel.
The lights came back. Celia flinched in surprise and nearly fell, grabbing at the towel rack to steady herself.
Eric had come into the bathroom. He was leaning against the chipped tile counter, one hand in his pocket and the other on the light switch.
“Jesus,” she said. “You scared me.”
“Sorry.”
She stepped over the edge of the tub, wrapped the towel around her body and tucked it under her arm. Eric took a second towel from the rack and started to dry her hair, gathering it in one hand to squeeze the water to the tip. His face in the mirror was thin and haggard, a specter moving through patches of fog. Over his fingers, the four tattooed letters he’d gotten years before:
, now sideways and reversed by the mirror.
.
A moment later his reflection was swallowed completely by the steam.
She turned to face him.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” she said.
His eyes shifted to meet hers—wide, beautiful black eyes, the whites as pure and smooth as milk. He opened his mouth and closed it again, deciding what to say. There were harsh lines like cuts running down between his eyebrows.
“Eric—”
“Tell me something. I want you to tell me something and be honest.”
She nodded. The steam burned at the back of her throat.
“I want to know if you’re happy here,” he said. “With...with all of this.”
“Of course I am. This is what I always wanted.”
“What you always wanted. I thought you promised me an honest answer.”
“Maybe it’s a little more—”
“A lot more. What I’m asking is whether you’re happy.”
“I am.”
The steam had gathered along his eyebrows and beaded at the tips of his lashes. He tilted his head.
“I can’t tell,” he said. “I just never can tell whether you’re telling me the truth.”
“Do you want that to be a lie?”
“Maybe.”
“It isn’t.”
“Whatever you say.” He plucked a strand of wet hair from her face. “I notice you don’t wonder why I’m asking. Don’t you want to know whether I’m happy?”
A suffocating weight pushed at her chest. She wished they could go outside, where the air was thin and light.
“I...I thought...”
Eric ducked his head to get closer to hers.
“You thought what? That if you’re happy, everyone else is, too?”
“No, no—”
“Yes, yes. I think it hurts your tender little heart to imagine anything else. Easier not to look too close. That’s what I think.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No. Maybe not.” He laid the towel aside and reached for her hand. His thumb traced a small nervous pattern on the inside of her wrist. “But you have to see that this place is no good for us. I think we should leave. Just leave, right now. Tonight.”
A lump of panic rose in her chest.
“What are you talking about?”
“I just think, all of this, it’s too much.”
“You’re tired,” she said. “We’re all tired. We knew it would be this way at first. Probably jet-lagged, too...”
She drew her hand away, fussed over an open drawer and found a bottle of sleeping pills. She shook out two tablets. But Eric curled her fingers with his palm and held them closed.
“I don’t need another pill,” he said. His words, which had started uncertainly, tumbled out. “I need you. I need it to be just you and me. We can go someplace warm, someplace with palm trees and sand, where we can listen to the ocean every day, lay under the stars every night. We can get one of those big hammocks, baby, we can live someplace new, and you wouldn’t have to work so hard, and there wouldn’t be so much goddamn snow...”
His voice raced on, a current of words sweeping him far away from her. She looked at him, light-headed, as if some crucial underpinning had come loose; they could be sliding right now, down the Ridge as so many others had done before. She gripped the edge of the sink.
“I like the snow,” she said.
He drew back as if she’d struck him.
A slow anger bloomed in her chest. How like Eric to throw down something this impulsive and expect everyone else to follow.
“You want us to leave here after all this work?” she said. “Leave the hotel half-finished. Just walk away, with no reason and no explanation—”
“Oh, I’ve got my reasons.”
“No,” she said.
He dropped her hand. The sleeping pills clattered to the floor. He backed away a step.
“You won’t come,” he said.
“How can you even ask? This is our home. This is what we’ve always talked about. You and me and Rory. How can you think of leaving him behind?”
“Easily.”
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you two—”
“Because you don’t want to know.”
“Because I don’t need to know. It’s not my business. If you and Rory had a fight, go to him and work it out, because I sure as hell am not going to leave in the middle of the night and go off to sip mai tais on the beach with you.”
“I see,” he said. “You choose him over me.”
Celia sighed. She reached up to stroke the hard line of his jaw, as though it might soften if she were patient enough to smooth it away.
“I choose us,” she said. “The Blackbird. Like it always has been.”
He shook her off, his mouth set in an unhappy line. His gaze traveled down her body, and he reached for the towel she had tucked closed against her chest.
She caught it first. Her fist curled across the knot of terrycloth.
“Let’s rest tonight,” she said.
He laughed bitterly, peeling off his shirt as he turned to start the shower.
“And so it begins,” he said.
* * *
Celia changed her clothes, pulled her damp hair over her shoulder and opened the door. Julian was standing just outside the bedroom door, in the dim hallway. His shoulders blocked the light from the staircase and cast his face in shadow, but even so she could see the smile creep across his lips as he bent toward her.
“Trouble in paradise?” he said.
His voice was low and rich with amusement, as though they were sharing an inside joke at the back of a crowded room. He propped his hand on the wall behind her head. She couldn’t look him in the eye without stepping aside or craning her neck; either choice felt like a concession, so she willed herself not to move, not to lift her face to him. She stared past the shadowy bump of his collarbone at the wall sconce near the end of the hallway.
“Let me by, Julian.”
He leaned in closer, lowered his head to speak from just above her ear. His breath was warm on her temple.
“What are you going to do when they leave you—tell me that. Do you even know?”
A shiver crawled up her neck. Don’t speak. He doesn’t know us; he doesn’t know what we’re about. But the question in her mind bubbled through the tarry silence and burst from her lips before she could stop it.
“Why do you hate me, Julian?”
For a moment she imagined a flash of surprise in his expression.
“I’ve been nice to you,” she said.
The surprise, if it had been there, was gone. His face hardened. He pushed back from the wall and turned away.
“You haven’t been,” he said. “You haven’t been nice at all.”
Two Days Earlier (#ulink_462134b5-47c0-5d35-965d-a1dc7e417103)
“CLOSE YOUR EYES.”
“I’m a grown man, Katie.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Only that years of experience have made me wary of surprises.”
“You shouldn’t be wary of this one, because it’s excellent.”
“Hmm. What are you up to now?”
“Five foot three.”
“Seriously. What.”
Kate sighed as Julian leaned back in his chair. His friends had turned back to their drinks and conversation, lost under a low din of chatter and the chink of plates and cutlery from the open kitchen behind them. She had tracked them down to Paco’s, finally, where they sat amid a detritus of ski clothes and half-eaten lunch.
“Come with me—I’ll show you.”
“I’m eating,” he said. “And we haven’t paid the bill yet.”
“You can come right back.”
He took an enormous bite of pulled-pork sandwich and pointed at the plate of fries.
“This is meant to be a hot meal,” he said.
“Okay, okay. But hurry up.”
He raised his eyes to the ceiling. Not quite an eye roll, but almost.
He didn’t know what she’d gotten him, though. Once he saw it, he’d understand why she was so excited to show it to him. She helped herself to his Coke, tapping her foot while he finished the last bites of his lunch. He wasn’t in any hurry at all. With every bite he looked up as if to point out the fact that she was watching him eat.
“You’re driving me crazy,” she said around a mouthful of fries.
“That makes two of us.”
“Don’t you even want to know what it is?”
“What what is?”
“The surprise, for fuck’s sake, Julian. Try to follow the plot.”
He wiped his hands on a paper napkin, which tore as he used it, leaving shreds of paper all over his fingers. He summoned the waiter by holding up his sticky hands. “Cheap-ass paper napkin. Bring me a real one, will you, please? Like, out of cloth?” And to Kate, “Okay, honey, lay it on me.”
“You have to close your eyes first.”
“I’m not doing that.” When the napkin came, he wiped his hands, tossed some bills on the table and zipped his wallet back into the breast pocket of his jacket.
“Jesus. Fine. Come on then.”
She took his hand and led him outside, leaving everyone else behind with their coffees. Through both sets of double doors, down the icy steps and into the snow. At high noon the sky was so flatly blue that it looked like plastic. All the shadows stood narrow and hard under the glare of the sun, the pine trees spiked and dripping.
When they reached the corner of the lodge, Kate stopped.
“Ta-da!”
Parked beside the building was a brand-new snowmobile. Glossy red, sleek as an apple, with a fine spray of snow over its bonnet. Kate held out the keys.
“Happy birthday,” she said, an unstoppable grin spreading into her cheeks.
Julian’s face didn’t change at all. He didn’t take the keys.
“You are unsurpriseable,” she said.
“Ye-ah.”
“You don’t like it?”
“Oh, I like it. It’s just...a lot of present, Katie.”
“Well, it’s your birthday—”
“How did you know about that? Nobody else does.”
“Well, somebody does, obviously.” She tried to smile.
“Nobody.”
She felt her face redden. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.
“Have you been snooping around my stuff?” he said. “My wallet, maybe?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then how did you know.”
“Your mother told me, last month.”
“My mother told you.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t even know my mother.”
“Well, I do now, a little.”
“How did you even get her number?”
“From my phone, of course. When you borrowed it to call her a couple of months ago.” No need to explain how she had dialed and hung up twice before she found the voice to introduce herself and strike up a conversation. And how awkward it had been, as if Kate was the first person the woman had talked to in years. She kept asking whether Julian knew Kate was calling, in a hopeful voice like the phone call would have meant more if he had instigated it.
Which it would have, of course, but why point it out? Why treat Kate as though she were being dishonest when she was only trying to do something nice for Julian?
“Let me get this straight,” Julian said. “You called my mother, weaseled my birthday out of her—”
“Saw it was coming up and scored you a prezzy! I know—clever me, right? It’s really sweet, too. I rode it up here to meet you. I thought we could play on it this afternoon.”
He stood back, eyeing the snowmobile as if it were still on the lot and he couldn’t decide whether to take it home.
“Come on—let’s go for a spin,” she said.
“I’d love to, but I have plans for the day.”
“Just with Zig.”
“I have plans, Kate.”
“Why are you being such a dick right now? This is a present that I bought you for your birthday. It’s supposed to be fun.”
He looked at her as if bewildered by the concept.
“But, I mean, what am I supposed to do with it? I don’t live here. I don’t have any place to store it.”
“You can leave it in our garage. There’s plenty of room.”
“Then really it’s yours, isn’t it?”
“No, of course not.”
“But I’d have to ask to take it out, right? Someone would have to let me in to get it?”
“Sure, but—”
“So then it’s yours.”
“Well, you don’t have to keep it at our place, obviously. Stash it wherever you want. I’ll ship it for you, if there’s somewhere else you need to be.”
She was offended now, and Julian sighed.
“That’s not the point. And I do appreciate the thought, truly. But let’s just call it a loan. We can go out on it tomorrow, okay? I promise. Not today.”
“You have plans.”
He stepped closer and chucked her under the chin with his forefinger, smiling indulgently as if he’d just granted her a huge favor.
“I’m not trying to be a dick. It’s just too much right now.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”
But her throat was tight and the back of her mouth stung with bitterness.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back inside. I’ll get you a hot chocolate and schnapps.”
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Averil Dean
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Триллеры
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: On a bitter January evening, three people are found murdered in the isolated Blackbird hotel.Best friends since childhood, Eric, Rory and Celia have always been inseparable. Together they’ve coped with broken homes and damaged families, clinging to each other as they’ve navigated their tenuous lives. Their bond is potent and passionate—and its intensity can be volatile.When the trio decides to follow Celia′s dream of buying and renovating the Blackbird, a dilapidated hotel that sits on the perilous cliffs of Jawbone Ridge, new jealousies arise and long-held suspicions start to unravel their relationship. Soon they find themselves pushed to the breaking point, where trust becomes doubt, longing becomes obsession, and someone will commit the ultimate betrayal.An unflinching story of ambition, desire and envy, The Undoing moves backward through time to tracethe events leading to that fateful night, revealing the intimate connections, dark secrets and terrible lies that wove them together—and tore them apart.“Smart, gripping and thoroughly absorbing. Dean’s The Undoing had my brain twisted for hours.” —New York Times bestselling author Chelsea Cain