A Little Learning (2 page)

Elizabeth’s words pounded at him again.

He just didn’t know Belle.

Seamus had memorized directions to the historic hotel that was the home base for the Sultan Mountain School. He would meet his old friend Kurt there and pick up the keys to the house.

The hotel was three storeys high, with its historic name, the Hotel Ambassador, painted on the brick facade. A shingle hanging over the street, a block from Main Street, read, SULTAN MOUNTAIN SCHOOL. Seamus parked.

Beau shoved open his door. “I’m going to get Seuss out, okay?”

“Put his leash on him,” Seamus ordered. German shepherds were supposed to be smart, but he hadn’t seen many signs of intelligence in Seuss so far. He did have a startling baritone bark—strange coming from a puppy.

As Lauren climbed out and stalked to the rear of the vehicle, no doubt intending to criticize her brother’s behavior with the dog, Seamus headed for a wood-and-glass door beneath the shingle. It opened as he reached it and a young woman came out, almost colliding with him. She had long, thick hair, curly and tied back in a loose ponytail. Her eyes were brown, her nose straight and lightly sprinkled with freckles. The eyes widened slightly at the sight of him and his vehicle. “You’re... You’re Mr. Lee,” she exclaimed, and shifted a manila envelope, book and a huge, lumpy package, then held out her hand. “You are, aren’t you? I’m Rory Gorenzi.”

“Any relation to Kurt?”

“Ah, yes. Yes. I’m his daughter, actually.” As if the fact surprised even her. “And you
are
Seamus Lee?” She sought confirmation again.

“Yes.” Kurt’s daughter was beautiful. He’d heard about her from Kurt: she’d been raised by her grandmother, Seamus was fairly certain, and she wasn’t as successful as Kurt wished, though Seamus didn’t know the details. Seamus hadn’t paid much attention to Kurt’s conversation on the matter—he’d been too worried that his own children might not turn out all right because they, like Rory Gorenzi, had no mother.

And if Elizabeth was right, an inaccessible father.

It was over three years since Janine’s death. There had seemed to be no time for his own mourning, not to mention his accompanying feelings, with his youngest child just one and not even weaned when everything changed. With the whole story unfolding around him.

How his wife had come to die that way. And his inner conviction that her death had been her own fault. Her most aggravating traits had led to her dying, and he still couldn’t forgive her—and couldn’t speak to his children because he was afraid he’d tell them how angry he was at their mother for being so fatally single-minded.

Immediately after Janine’s death, the succession of
au pairs
had begun.

He dragged himself away from his grim thoughts.

Rory Gorenzi wore a black snowboarding jacket, black snow pants, Sorel-style boots and mittens. Both jacket and pants were patched with duct tape, and the boots had seen more than a few seasons. “Look,” she said, “I’ve got the key to your place, and I’ll take you over there. I just need to quickly run down there...” She indicated an area across the street and half a block up, “and drop off this stuff.”

“Can I help you?” He reached out, offering to relieve her of her package, which seemed not only oddly shaped but heavy.

She sidestepped him. “Oh, I’ll get it. It’s, um, pet food. Just let me... Just—I’ll be right back.” She turned away and tripped over a crack on the sidewalk, and the parcel, envelope and book all flew out of her arms and landed in front of her, the brown paper ripping to reveal what were unmistakably dead rabbits—frozen.

Seamus ran his tongue around the inside of his cheek and bent to pick up the book and envelope while she reached for the rabbits.

“My roommate bought these in Montrose,” she explained. “Usually we have them shipped, but we ran out and had to get some while we’re waiting for our next order to arrive. I realize it looks odd. They’re for a snake. It’s not mine.”

The snake must be large, Seamus thought, to eat full-grown rabbits.

He glanced back toward a sound behind him, to find his two oldest children and Seuss, the puppy, all breathing steam in the frigid air and gazing at the scene before them with a mixture of disbelief and puzzlement.

Seuss had one ear up and one ear down, and Rory Gorenzi suddenly swallowed hard and looked away. Seamus had the strangest feeling that she was about to cry.

She said, shakily, “My dog was just put down yesterday.”

“I’m sorry,” Seamus responded politely. Though he couldn’t really imagine crying over a dog. He’d never had one until now, and he’d only agreed to the puppy in order to demonstrate, at least to himself, that he
did
have a relationship with his kids.

Rory seemed to make up her mind about something. She crouched down and looked at the puppy, who immediately came toward her and sat down, leaning against her legs as if finally he’d found security. “You’re a handsome guy,” she said.

Eyeing the frozen rabbits with disgust, Lauren looked as though all her suspicions about the residents of Sultan had been confirmed. “What are those for?”

“My roommate has a...well, a Burmese python. She’s sort of all of ours, but...”

“Can we see it?” asked Beau, unusually engaged. “Can we watch it eat?”

“Eating’s maybe not the best time to see her,” Rory said apologetically. “She’s a bit unpredictable then.”

“How big
is
this creature?” asked Seamus, inexplicably fascinated by Kurt Gorenzi’s daughter.

“Well, almost thirteen feet. And she has a nice disposition. It’s just that, well, the disposition doesn’t exactly matter with a snake that size. If you see what I mean. Because she weighs about sixty pounds, we follow a protocol when we clean the vivarium or feed her. There always have to be two of us, and preferably three on hand. Actually, we’re trying to find a zoo or reptile rescue place to accept her, because she’s really gotten too big for us to care for. That’s probably much more than you wanted to know about Lola.”

Lauren picked up Seuss and gazed at Rory as if
she
were a python who might suddenly decide to eat the puppy.

Seamus wondered just what Rory’s “roommate” was like. A boyfriend with a Harley and a love of gigantic pythons?

She wrested the book and envelope away from him and said, “I’ll just go to my house, and then I’ll be right back. After that, I’ll take you to the place where you’ll be staying—it’s right around the corner from where I live. Across the alley, so it’s on the next street, but...I’ll be back.”

Rory hurried away, stepping carefully over the ice on Solomon Street and imagining Seamus Lee and his two children watching her.

He was handsome. She supposed she should have expected he would be one of those Telluride types, probably a regular speaker at the film festival and probably with his own private jet tucked into a hangar at the airport. If he wasn’t rich, he looked like he should be. Those new hybrid SUVs weren’t cheap, in any case.

His hair was a bit long and so dark brown it was almost black; his features angular. He was six feet, definitely, and dressed in Gore-Tex and Carhartts. Very Telluride. Very Colorado. Very ski resort. His eyes were green, a true green and not remotely hazel. Probably around forty, she thought. Probably divorced, she also thought. She should know, but she hadn’t even had a chance to look at the packet her father had given her. She’d just had time to get the rabbits out of the school freezer, where Desert had left them in a rush the previous afternoon on her way to an appointment. Desert, the founder of Caldera, their dance troupe—was a massage therapist at the local hot springs; her current boyfriend worked at the mountain school. Lola belonged to Desert, and Rory could not believe that Desert had just casually left the rabbits in the freezer here.
Is she trying to ruin my working relationship with my father before it even begins?

That wasn’t Desert’s style, though. Desert simply felt that, well, people should be able to cope with just about anything. She thought rabbits in the freezer were not a big deal, and they were no problem for Rory; but other people might not feel that way. Desert also thought it shouldn’t have been a problem for the State of Colorado, if Rory was less than polite when speaking to a U.S. senator.

Her roommates were home.

In fact, they were treating the frigid day as good weather, and spinning poi—firelit balls attached to cables—out in their backyard. Rory wished she could practice with them, as she’d planned to do, but Seamus Lee and his family had arrived sooner than expected. She hadn’t even had time to figure out their course work. Samantha, whose white-blond hair was pulled into a knot at the back of her head and covered with a tight-fitting ski hat, was the spotter, standing by with a fire blanket, just in case. Without taking her eyes from Desert, Samantha edged to the fence to greet Rory.

Desert, whose head was entirely shaven beneath
her
ski hat, ignored the approach of her roommate and continued spinning the burning balls. Total concentration was required, and still poi spinners got burned. Samantha asked, “Did you bring the rabbits?”

“Yes,” Rory said, with resignation, letting herself in the back gate. She and Samantha were of one mind about Lola—the python had to go. Samantha now refused to have anything to do with the snake beyond assisting—from a safe distance—at feeding time. She’d been bitten the previous summer and she was convinced the snake would have killed her—by constriction—if both Desert and Rory hadn’t been there to pull it off. As it was, she’d needed sixteen stitches to close the bite.

Rory agreed that the snake might have killed Samantha. In fact, Lola had frightened Rory more thoroughly than anything else ever had in her entire life. And Rory was
not
afraid of snakes.

She wanted to plead with Desert not to do anything that might jeopardize her job. But Desert wouldn’t welcome an interruption to her practice. And on second thought, Rory didn’t think she was up to coping with Desert at the moment.

Desert, christened Naomi Katz, had come to Colorado at the age of eighteen. She’d immediately rechristened herself and had begun living off a trust fund provided by her grandfather, a diamond broker, and also by her mother’s family. Rich and beautiful, she’d trained in Boulder as a massage therapist and as a fire dancer, had moved to Sultan and bought the two-storey Victorian where she, Rory and Samantha now lived. Its exterior was painted pink.

Sometimes, Rory and Samantha asked themselves why they put up with Desert.

But they loved her. And pitied her. And wanted to help her somehow; help her to not make life hard for herself. Desert’s boyfriend was a recent acquisition—they’d been together nine weeks. Rory and Samantha were holding their breaths, dreading the ending. Dreading it for themselves as well as for Desert, who was sensitive and, well, troubled.

Rory said to Samantha, “Can you take these? I’ve got to go show some clients to the Empire Street house.”

“Sure.” Samantha took the rabbits, clutching the bundle against her with one arm. “Go.”

* * *

R
ORY
G
ORENZI
WAS
ATTRACTIVE
, but Seamus had come from Telluride, where beautiful was the norm. He didn’t want another girlfriend; he only wanted to sort through the things his ex-girlfriend had said. He wanted to attend to the flaws she’d pointed out. And they were flaws. He didn’t want to marry again—his experiences with other women reminded him not that Janine had been the perfect wife and mother, but that she hadn’t been. No, that wasn’t fair. She’d been the mother of their kids and, so, the perfect mother for them.

But she’d always needed to prove something.
He’d
known she was sensitive beneath her sometimes-abrasive exterior. One of his male employees had once said to Janine, “You have more testosterone than I do.”

She’d said, “Thank you!” and had clearly been pleased by the compliment.

She’d been an athlete, but that wasn’t the only thing that had made her challenging. It was the way she’d presented herself. Her certainty that
her
way was right. She’d been insecure and determined to hide the fact, and in their twelve years of marriage she’d never revealed the source of that insecurity or the reason for it.

She’d been smart—a legal-aid lawyer employed by the Women’s Resource Center, defending the battered and the terrified. And she’d never struck him as particularly maternal, although she’d nursed each child for at least nine months.

Janine had been difficult, and since her death Seamus had vacillated between the notion that no relationship could be as trying as his marriage had been and the idea that no woman would be as good for his children as Janine had been. And how good was that, really?

Better than you, Seamus.

But that hadn’t been so true, back when his wife was alive. He’d spent time with his kids, talked with them and listened to them.

Janine had listened, too—long enough to get the gist of situations. Then, she’d pronounced judgment.
You’re not going to take that from anyone,
she would order the seven-year-old who’d just had his lunch money stolen.

Lauren seemed determined to remember her as a sort of warrior mother, an Amazon who had demanded warrior-like behavior from her children, as well. Even these days, Seamus occasionally heard his oldest say, “Mom wouldn’t have stood for that,” or “Mom wouldn’t have put up with that.”

But actually, she might have. To be as much bite as bark required a certain resolve that she’d lacked. Janine had been a great skier, a hard-riding cyclist, a distance runner, a strong ice-climber and, above all, a fantastic talker. She had talked big. It was the one quality that had come to define her and that Seamus had eventually found most annoying.

Seamus went inside the Sultan Mountain School to see if Kurt was around. Lauren accompanied him, leaving Beau, Caleb and Belle outside with Seuss.

As they stepped into the lobby of the Victorian building, Seamus spotted Kurt, talking to two men in mountaineering clothes and showing them something on a topographical map on one wall. Seamus saw that the map was composed of many geological survey maps joined together.