Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (28 page)

Oliver Cone’s face flushed. “We were just leaving,” he muttered.

“Oh?” Dennis felt that his teeth were slightly numb. “Got to get up there above the road before I do? Got some dynamite handy?”

Cone glared at him. “Not funny, Conway.”

“Let’s go,” Hapgood said quietly to his companion, taking his arm.

Cone shook him off. “You want what we’ve got,” he said to Dennis, “but you’ll never get it. Not if I have any say.”

“I want what you’ve got? And what is that?” Dennis asked.

“Come on, Oliver,” Hapgood said, with greater urgency this time, pulling Cone away.

Dennis did not object or interfere. An entirely new purpose had taken hold of him. He turned his back on Oliver Cone and Mark Hapgood and walked with the same slow, deliberate strides to the bar stool he had previously occupied. “You have a cordless phone?” he asked the barman.

When the instrument had been placed before him, Dennis punched out the number of his home.

“Yes?” Sophie said.

“It’s me. I’m still in Aspen, but I’m coming home. And when I get there, I want you to tell me everything. I think I know part of it now, but I want to know it all.”

“You don’t know,” Sophie said, “but I’ll tell you now, Dennis. I swear to you. I’ll tell you everything.”

Chapter 23
Sophie’s Tale

SOPHIE THREW HER arms around him as she had not done in months. “Thank you,” she said. He felt that all her heart went into those two simple words. But he was a little drunk, unable to stop his tongue from voicing what was on his mind.

“You’re welcome. All in a day’s work. I may have lost a friend or two and I had to pillory a deputy district attorney, but the son of a bitch probably deserved it. Never mind that he was in the right and I was in the wrong. I just keep wondering why I have this sour taste in my mouth. Is it the bourbon? Must be.”

“Don’t act like this, Dennis, please. Whatever you had to do, you did the right thing.”

“Did I?” Dennis said. “Convince me. Tell me all.”

The telephone rang. Sophie answered, and Dennis bounded up the stairs two at a time to hug his children. “Ouch, Daddy,” Lucy said. “Too
hard.”

He flung off his suit, shirt, and tie, all his clothes, then plunged into the shower. In the frosted glass stall he shut his eyes and stood under the drumming beat of the hot water for ten minutes, as if soap and steam could wipe off the grime of the trial. When he finally came out to towel down, Sophie was waiting for him.

“That was my father who called. They wanted us to come over for dinner, to celebrate.” It sounded so domestic, as if he had won a promotion or it was someone’s birthday. “But I said no.” Sophie wasn’t smiling; she looked oddly flushed. “I need to talk to you, Dennis. I’m sorry about how you feel but I think after I’ve talked to you, you may feel differently. I want to explain Springhill. It can’t wait. It has to be tonight. I have so much to tell you—all that I couldn’t tell you before.”

He was bewildered by her urgency, but not unhappy at the thought that he wouldn’t have to spend the evening feasting with Scott and Bibsy. He had seen more than enough of them in the last week. He’d done what had to be done, but he wondered if he would ever feel the same warmth toward his in-laws as he had before he came to the conclusion they were guilty as charged. He had defended them with full vigor: that was his obligation as a lawyer, and he had won. It wasn’t his obligation to forgive and forget.

The buzz of the alcohol began to wear off. “I want to spend some time now with the kids,” he said.

“I understand. Do it, of course. I meant after dinner.”

Sophie had barbecued two chickens and baked a peach pie. Later, at the computer, Dennis worked with Brian and Lucy on a new astronomy program. He showed them the planetal orbits. The moon whizzed around the earth; the earth flew around the sun. It was all orderly and yet it made no sense. Just like life, he thought. By the time the children were bored and ready for bed Dennis felt that life was beginning to move back to normalcy. The old fundamental truth struck home: whatever happens, life goes on. The planets move on their tracks and so do we.

Dennis kissed the children good night. Downstairs, Sophie ran toward him. “Oh, God, I’m happy,” she cried. “Come out on the porch with me. Put on a coat.” She couldn’t sit still. She needed space, she said, to tell her tale. He wrapped himself in his ski parka. They stepped outside. “I need to tell you some of the history of this place,” she said.

“History? Now? Sophie, what are you talking about?”

“We’ll get where you want to go. You’ll know what happened at Pearl Pass, and you’ll know why it happened, and you’ll see how good a thing you did.”

That put a new spin on things. Dennis frowned.

A chill wind began to blow. He had to strain to catch her words. It was only because her face gleamed against the black background of the forest that he knew where she was, who she was.

“Will you listen? Will you believe what I tell you? Will you make an effort to understand? Do you promise?”

“Yes, I promise.” A promise as to a child. But he sensed she was not about to speak of childish things.

Sophie said: “The first settlers came here after the Civil War. They were only three families and a few single men. When the people arrived they found abandoned miners’ equipment over by the shores of Indian Lake. They also found a couple of mountain men who claimed they’d been trapping beaver here since 1860. The mountain men didn’t like the settlers moving into what they considered their private territory, even though they’d never bothered to file any claims. I think there was some arguing … a man was killed, so the story goes … but it’s an old story, gotten fuzzy over the years. The point is, the mountain men packed up and left Springhill.

“One of those first families was the Hendersons. Charles Henderson was my great-grandfather, from near Pittsburgh. James Brophy, our friend Edward’s great-grandfather, was a muleskinner from Worcester, Massachusetts. And there was a William Lovell, a miner, and later a Frazee, who was a hunter, and a Cone, another hunter who opened a saloon some years later. Cone was supposed to have been the one who’d shot the trapper—bushwhacked him, they said, from behind a pine tree—and driven the mountain men off. A few Ute Indians lived here too, on the other side of the lake. But they were forced out of western Colorado after the Meeker massacre in 1881.

“Marble was the biggest of the settlements up here and later it became a good-sized town. Springhill was never more than a mining camp and no one paid much attention to it. The settlers were looking for gold. They found it in small quantities—small enough, fortunately, not to start a stampede. They also found silver and lead and zinc and copper, but again the holdings were barely worth working at. It wasn’t called Springhill then. Charles Henderson and the first settlers called it Fortune City—you might call that the triumph of hope over reality. Naturally the name didn’t stick, and then people remembered that the Ute name for the place was Wacha-na-hanka, which they’d been told meant ‘the hill where the warm spring is.’ That was a mouthful for white men, so it became Springhill. Prosaic, but appropriate. More than anyone knew.

“People hung on, scratched a living from the mines. Winters were hard but no one froze—there was plenty of wood to burn. No one went hungry—there was plenty of game. No one was ever thirsty— the drinking water was pure and virtually unlimited, depending on the accumulation of snow and the summer runoffs. People either took their water from the nearest stream or from Indian Lake.

“Up near the El Rico mine—a little copper deposit on a north-facing slope—there was a warm spring and a tiny waterfall. You remember the place I took you and the children to that day? Where the water gushes out of the hillside? That was the El Rico claim. They say that in the 1860s the creek ran more forcefully, and the bed was a foot or two wider. William Lovell owned the claim. That was his old mining cabin we went into, where the gravity seemed out of whack and where I told you no birds fly over.

“Bathing was not an everyday event in the nineteenth century, but miners get pretty dirty. William Lovell used to bathe in the warm spring the whole year round, just to get clean after a day’s work. So did a couple of men who worked the mine with him.

“When you bathe in water, your body absorbs some of it. You may try not to take it in, like when you’re swimming in a chlorinated pool, or in the ocean and you haven’t got a particular taste for salt water, but the water gets on your lips and goes up your nose. So you imbibe minuscule amounts of it whether you realize it or not.

“It was around 1868 that the miners first started washing in the spring near the copper mine. There were three men. William Lovell was thirty-three years old. Francis Hubbard, who worked for him, was a widower of about forty, a laborer. Otis McKee, the third, was close to fifty—he was Mr. Lovell’s junior partner. All three imbibed the water from the spring.

“William Lovell’s wife, Rebecca, didn’t bathe in the spring. She bathed at home two or three evenings a week in a big iron tub with creek water she heated on the wood stove. That was also true at the time for the Lovells’ three children—Caleb, Naomi, and John.

“Pay attention. Otis McKee’s first wife died from influenza back in Ohio. He had recently remarried, to a young Ohio girl named Larissa Orlov, born in this country but Russian in origin. They say that Otis McKee was crazy about her. She was over thirty years younger than he was—a clever, bold, imaginative girl. Larissa was a cripple. She’d been thrown from a buggy as a child and smashed her foot on a boulder, so that one leg was shorter than the other. She limped badly, but otherwise she was very well formed in her body, with dark eyes and long reddish brown hair. Not a beauty, but pretty. She’d learned to play the violin—taught by her Russian grandfather. Her father was a railroad switchman but he’d bought her a quality Italian-made violin, probably as some sort of compensation for the fact that he couldn’t repair her broken body.

“Larissa loved Otis too, first for saving her from the fate of a spinster, and then because he was kind to her. By all reports he was a fun- loving, warmhearted man.”

Dennis nodded. The snow had stopped falling and the sky began to clear. Starlight glowed on Sophie’s face.

“That brings me back to El Rico,” she said, “and the miners who washed off the copper dust every evening in the warm water of the creek that flowed out of the hillside. In 1900, William Lovell celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday. I want to show you something.”

She drew Dennis back into the warmth of the house and then upstairs to the bedroom, where she removed Harry Parrot’s big oil painting from the wall and twirled the dials on the safe. Dennis saw that her fingers were trembling. The safe didn’t spring open.

Sophie murmured, “Damn.” She worked through the numbers more slowly a second time, trying to calm herself. The safe clicked open.

“Look.” She plucked out and held in her hand a worn sepia-tinted photograph. It showed a gathering of people. They stood and sat erect, straightspined, facing the camera. The picture had the solemnity and stiffness of all old photographs; no one dared smile. A date had been written in ink on the bottom white border: April 16,1900.

“This is a photograph taken at William Lovell’s birthday party,” Sophie said. “Look at that man”—her fingernail tapped the face of a handsome man just to the left of center in the middle row. “How old does he look to you?”

“Hard to say exactly.” Dennis bent closer. “In his forties?”

“That’s William Lovell. He was sixty-five. He still worked the El Rico mine nine or ten hours a day. You’ve seen pictures of miners from Appalachia—how hollow-eyed and worn they are. I’m sure you can imagine what their lungs are like. Look at Lovell. .

Dennis looked again. There was not a strand of gray in William Lovell’s hair. He was not smiling but there was a glint of humor in his eyes.

“He looks vital, doesn’t he?” Sophie said. “A remarkable specimen. His wife, Rebecca Lovell, was a year younger—sixty-four years old. That’s her, next to him.” Sophie tapped; Dennis saw an old woman—wrinkled, white-haired, starting to stoop. She looked more like William’s mother than his wife.

“The Lovell children are in that photograph too,” Sophie said. “Caleb was forty-two—at sixteen he’d gone off to work with his father as a miner at El Rico. Naomi was a married woman of forty. John, the youngest, was thirty-seven—he’d become a wagon driver on the route to Carbondale. See? That’s John. He looks his age. That’s thin-lipped Naomi. Ground down by life, a typical middle-aged working housewife of her era.”

True, Dennis thought. If you didn’t know who everyone was, you’d believe that Naomi and John, William’s children, were actually his sickly brother and sister.

“And there’s Caleb,” Sophie said. “The forty-two-year-old oldest son, the one who went to work in the copper mine at the age of sixteen.” She pointed to a good-looking young man who looked to be about twenty-five.

“I don’t understand this,” Dennis said.

“You’re not alone. Few people did. Let’s go down.” Sophie took the photograph and a brown manila envelope from the safe, twirled the dial, and slammed shut the gray metal door. Eagerly she led Dennis downstairs into the living room.

He stirred the fire, added two logs, and blew on the coals until they crackled, glowing cherry red.

“No doubt,” Sophie said, “if all this stuff had happened a thousand years ago in Europe, or in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, William and Caleb would have been burned at the stake. But this was a more scientific era. You could twist a few suppositions around, work out a thesis to account for the phenomenon—in the end no one would be able to challenge the logic of it. Except for one thing. Francis Hubbard and Otis McKee and Larissa McKee had to be factored into the equation. Francis Hubbard was about forty when he went to work at El Rico for William Lovell. He quit working in the mine when he was eighty.”

Dennis raised an eyebrow.
“Eighty?”

“Eighty, still swinging a pickax. They say he had the physical strength of a forty-year-old lumberjack.”