Last Night in Twisted River (56 page)

The birds would get it, and they made such a ruckus over the snakeskin early the next morning that Ketchum was tempted to fire off his 12-gauge again, this time to drive the seagulls and the crows off the roof of the log cabin. But he restrained himself, knowing Charlotte would hear the shot; Ketchum went outside and threw rocks at the birds instead. He watched a gull fly off with the remains of the snakeskin. (“Nothing wasted,” as the logger later described the event to Danny.)

That day, the Mounties came by in their boat to inquire about the gunshot the day before. Had anyone heard it? Someone on Barclay Island said that they thought they’d heard a shot on Turner Island. “I heard it, too,” Ketchum spoke up, getting the two young Mounties’ attention. Ketchum even recalled the time of day, with impressive accuracy, but he said that the shooting definitely came from the mainland. “Sounded like a twelve-gauge to me,” the veteran woodsman said, “but gunfire can be both magnified and distorted over water.” The two Mounties nodded at such a sage assessment; the beautiful but unsuspecting Charlotte nodded, too.

Then Joe had died, and Danny lost what little taste he had for killing things. And when Danny lost Charlotte, he and Ketchum gave up their dead-of-winter trips to Turner Island in Georgian Bay.

There was something about Pointe au Baril Station that stayed with Danny, though he didn’t go there anymore. In fact, his parting from Charlotte had been so civilized—she’d even offered to share her summer island with him, when they were no longer together. Maybe he could go there in July, and she would go in August, she said. After all, he’d put his money into those improvements, too. (Charlotte’s offer was sincere; it wasn’t only about the money.)

Yet it wasn’t Georgian Bay in the summer that Danny had adored. He’d loved being there with
her—
he would have loved being
anywhere
with Charlotte—but when she was gone, whenever he thought about Lake Huron, he thought mostly about that wind-bent pine in the wintertime. How could he ask Charlotte for permission to let him have a winter view of that little tree from his writing shack—the weather-beaten pine he saw now only in his imagination?

And how could Danny have had another child, after losing Joe? He’d known the day Joe died that he would lose Charlotte, too, because he sensed almost immediately that his heart couldn’t bear losing another child; he couldn’t stand the anxiety, or that terrible ending, ever again.

Charlotte knew it, too—even before he found the courage to tell her. “I won’t hold you to your promise,” she told him, “even if it means that I might have to move on.”

“You
should
move on, Charlotte,” he told her. “I just can’t.”

She’d married someone else soon after. A nice guy—Danny had met him, and liked him. He was someone in the movie business, a French director living in L.A. He was much closer to Charlotte’s age, too. She already had one baby, a little girl, and now Charlotte was expecting a second child—one more than Danny had promised her.

Charlotte had kept her island in Georgian Bay, but she’d moved away from Toronto and was living in Los Angeles now. She came back to Toronto every September for the film festival, and that time of year—early fall—always seemed to Danny like a good time to leave town. They still talked on the phone—Charlotte was always the one who called; Danny never called her—but it was probably easier for both of them not to run into each other.

Charlotte Turner had been very pregnant—she was about to have her first child—when she won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for
East of Bangor
, at the Academy Awards in March 2000. Danny and his dad had watched Charlotte accept the statuette. (Patrice was always closed on Sunday nights.) Somehow, seeing her on television—from Toronto, when Charlotte was in L.A.—well, that wasn’t the same as
actually
seeing her, was it? Both the cook and Danny wished her well.

It was just bad luck. “Bad timing, huh?” Ketchum had said. (If Joe had died three months later, it’s likely Danny would have already gotten Charlotte pregnant. It had been bad timing, indeed.)

JOE AND THE GIRL HAD TAKEN
some of the same courses in Boulder—she was a senior at the university, too—and their trip to Winter Park together might have been a belated birthday present that Joe decided to give himself. According to their mutual friends, Joe and the girl had been sleeping together for only a short time. It was the girl’s first trip alone with Joe to the ski house in Winter Park, though both Danny and his dad remembered her staying at the house for a couple of nights over the last Christmas holiday, when a bunch of Joe’s college friends—girls and boys, with no discernible relationship with one another (at least that the cook and his son could see)—were also camping out at that Winter Park house.

It was a big house, after all, and—as Charlotte had said, because she was closer in age to Joe and his pals than Danny and Dominic were—it was impossible to tell who was sleeping with whom. There were so many of them, and they seemed to be lifelong friends. That last Colorado Christmas, the kids had taken the mattresses from all the guest bedrooms, and they’d piled them in the living room, where both the boys and the girls had cuddled together and slept in front of the fire.

Yet, even with such a mob of them, and amid all the taking turns in the showers—it had surprised Danny and his dad that some of the girls took showers together—it was the cook and his son who’d noticed something special about that girl. Charlotte hadn’t seen it. It was for just the briefest moment, and maybe it meant nothing, but after Joe
died
with the girl, the writer and the cook couldn’t forget it.

She was pretty and petite, almost elfin, and naturally Joe had made a point of telling his father and grandfather that he’d first met Meg in a life-drawing class, where she’d been the model.

“One look at the girl doesn’t suffice—it isn’t nearly enough,” the cook would tell Ketchum, shortly after that Christmas.

It wasn’t just because she was an exhibitionist, though Meg clearly was that; as had been the case with Katie, Danny had seen for himself the first time, you simply had to look at Meg, and it was almost painful not to keep looking. (Once you saw her, it was hard to look away.)

“What a distraction that girl is,” Danny said to his dad.

“She’s trouble,” the cook replied.

The two older men were making their way along the upstairs hall of that Winter Park house. The wing where the guest bedrooms were was a curious
L-
shaped addition off that hall—so architecturally strange that you couldn’t pass the junction without at least glancing at the guest-wing hallway, and that was why Danny and Dominic noticed the slight commotion. Then again, their heads might have turned in that direction at the piercing shrieks of the young girls’ laughter—not an everyday occurrence in the lives of the cook and his son.

Meg and another girl were emerging from one of the guest bedrooms, both of them wrapped in towels. Their hair was wet—they must have come directly from a shower—and they ran awkwardly in their tightly wrapped towels to the door of a different guest bedroom, the other girl disappearing into the room before Meg, who was left alone in the guest-wing hallway, just as Joe came around the corner of the L. It all happened so suddenly that Joe never saw his father or grandfather, and neither did Meg. She saw only Joe, and he clearly saw her, and before she slipped inside the guest room and closed the door—to more shrieks of laughter, from within the room—Meg had opened her towel to Joe.

“She shook her little titties at him!” as the cook would later describe the episode to Ketchum.

“A distraction, indeed,” was all Danny had said at the time.

It was what Charlotte would have called “a throwaway line”—a reference to any extraneous dialogue in a screenplay—but after the accident that killed Joe and Meg, the
distraction
word lingered.

Why hadn’t they been wearing their seat belts, for example? Had the girl been giving him a blow job? Probably she had; Joe’s fly was open, and his penis was poking out of his pants when the body was discovered. He’d been thrown from the car and died immediately. Meg wasn’t so lucky. The girl was found alive, but with her head and neck at an unnatural angle; she was wedged between the brake and the accelerator pedal. She’d died in the ambulance, before reaching the hospital.

What had led Joe and Meg to cut two days of classes in Boulder, and make the drive to Winter Park, at first seemed pretty obvious; yet two days of new, nonstop snow
wasn’t
the prevailing reason. Besides, it had been a typical late-March snow, wet and heavy—the skiing must have been slow, the visibility on the mountain treacherous. And from the look of the ski house in Winter Park—that is, before the cleaning lady rushed in and made some attempt to restore order—Joe and the girl had spent most of their time indoors. It didn’t appear that they’d done much skiing. Perhaps it had no more significance than most youthful experiments, but the young couple seemed to have made a game out of sleeping in every bed in the house.

Naturally, there would remain some unanswerable questions. If they weren’t in Winter Park to ski, why had they waited until the evening of the second day to drive back to Boulder? Joe knew that after midnight and before dawn, the ski patrol was in the habit of closing U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass, whenever there was any avalanche danger; with such a heavy, wet snow, and because it was the avalanche time of year, possibly Joe hadn’t wanted to risk leaving before light the next morning, when they might still be blasting avalanches above Berthoud Pass. Of course the two lovers could have waited until daylight of the following morning, but maybe Joe and Meg had thought that missing two days of classes was enough.

It was snowing heavily in Winter Park when they left, but there was next to no ski traffic on U.S. 40 in the direction of I-70, and that highway was well traveled. (Well, it was a weekday night; for most schools and colleges that had a March break, the vacation was over.) Joe and Meg must have passed the snowplow at the top of Berthoud Pass; the plowman remembered Joe’s car, though he’d noticed only the driver. Apparently, the plowman hadn’t seen the passenger; perhaps the blow job was already in progress. But Joe had waved to the plowman, and the plowman recalled waving back.

Only seconds later, the plowman spotted the other car—it was coming in the other direction, from I-70, and the plowman presumed it was “a goddamn Denver driver.” This was because the driver was going much too fast for the near-blizzard conditions. In the plowman’s estimation, Joe had been driving safely—or at least slowly enough, given the storm and the slickness of the wet snow on the highway. Whereas the Denver car—if, indeed, the driver was from Denver—was fishtailing out of control as the car came over the pass. The plowman had flashed his lights, but the other car never slowed down.

“It was just a blue blur,” the plowman said in his deposition to the police. (What kind of blue? he was asked.) “With all the snow, I’m not really sure about the color,” the plowman admitted, but Danny would always imagine the other car as an unusual shade of blue—a
customized
job, as Max had called it.

Anyway, that mystery car just disappeared; the plowman never saw the driver.

The snowplow then made its way downhill, over the pass—in the direction of I-70—and that was when the plowman came upon the wreck on U.S. 40, Joe’s upside-down car. There’d been no other traffic over the pass, or the plowman would have seen it, so the plowman’s interpretation of the skid marks in the snow was probably correct. The other car—its tires spinning, its rear end drifting sideways—had skidded from the uphill lane into the downhill lane, where Joe was driving. From the tracks in the snow, the plowman could see that Joe had been forced to change lanes—to avoid the head-on collision. But the two cars had never made contact; they’d traded lanes without touching.

On a wet, snowy road, the plowman knew, a car coming uphill can recover from a skid—just take your foot off the gas, and the car slows down and stops skidding. In Joe’s case, of course, his car just kept going; he hit the huge snowbank that had buried the guardrail on the steep side of U.S. 40, where the drivers coming up Berthoud Pass don’t like to look down. It’s a long way down at that section of the road, but the soft-looking snowbank was densely packed and frozen hard; the snowbank bounced Joe’s car back into the uphill lane of U.S. 40, where the car tipped over. From
those
skid marks, the plowman could tell that Joe’s car had slid on its roof down the steepest part of the highway. Both the driver’s-side door and the door on the passenger side had sprung open.

How had one of Danny Angel’s interviewers asked the question? “Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Angel—regarding how
slowly
your son was driving, and the fact that he
didn’t
hit the other car—that, in all likelihood, it was an accident your son and the girl would have survived if they’d been wearing their seat belts?”

“In all likelihood,” Danny had repeated.

The police said it was impossible to imagine that the driver of the other car hadn’t been aware of Joe and Meg’s predicament; even with all the fishtailing, the so-called Denver driver must have seen what had happened to Joe’s car. But he didn’t stop, whoever he (or she) was. If anything, according to the plowman, the other car had sped up—as if to get away from the accident.

Danny and his dad rarely talked about the accident itself, but of course the cook knew what his writer son thought. To anyone with an imagination, to lose a child is attended by a special curse. Dominic understood that his beloved Daniel lost his beloved Joe over and over again—maybe in a different way each time. Danny would also wonder if the other car ever had a driver, for surely it was the blue Mustang. That rogue car had been looking for Joe all these years. (At the time of the accident on Berthoud Pass, it had been almost fourteen years since that
near
accident in the alleyway in back of the Court Street house in Iowa City, when Max—who’d seen the blue Mustang more than once—and the eight-year-old Joe himself had sworn there was
no
driver.)