The Threshold (43 page)

“She’d just close her eyes and pretend I was Bulkeley Wells.”

“You underestimate yourself, McCree. Anybody who’s remembered at a busy whorehouse two years later can’t be all that resistible.”

He grinned and grabbed a towel. “There’s no way you’re going into town tomorrow for that dental appointment, crazy lady, pendant or no.”

Aletha’s skin felt scoured of lice and dead skin scales and accumulated dirt, that probably hadn’t even been there, when she climbed past her father’s picture on the stairway. The guestrooms flanked a center hall at the top of the house. She and Cree stood close but indecisive between the two doorways. “What will you do if you find Dutch’s stash?”

“Probably get arrested.” He slid an arm around her waist under the towel.

“But if you didn’t get arrested, would you sell the cocaine to people?”

“I’d take it up in the Cessna and fly over Telluride and heave it out by the handful and everybody’d think it was snowing and they’d be right.”

“In that case, I have the damnedest urge to get snuggled.” She stretched up to take a nip at his neck.

“’Course, I’d keep the money.”

“Cree!”

“Hell, they took everything but my shirt. What do you expect?”

“Come to think of it, I don’t really know you very well, do I?” Aletha pushed away and walked off into the bedroom on the left. But Cree followed her and she got well snuggled anyway.

The sheriff of San Miguel County, Tom Rickard, and his shields and sunglasses showed up the next morning with two federal agents. Renata had left for her office and Cree and Aletha were having breakfast. “I’ve been telling these gentlemen how you … uh left Mr. Duffer, Mr. Bellamy, and Mr. Pheeney way back in history there. And would you believe they do not believe me?”

The agents wanted to ask Cree a few questions. Aletha took her coffee down to the greenhouse area but it was impossible not to overhear most of the discussion up on the kitchen mezzanine, given the openness of Renata’s house. “We’d like to know the whereabouts of Mrs. Norman Theil.”

“Never heard of her.”

“She’s the owner of that expensive condominium you’ve been living in.”

“Oh, that Mrs. Theil. I think she’s out of the country.”

“Mrs. Norman Theil was the mother of your late partner, Dutch Massey. Before her remarriage she was Mrs. Richard Massey. She died in 1941.”

“Then you know where she is.”

“That condo was the property of Dutch Massey. Tried to hide the fact by putting the name of his mother on the deed. That property is eligible for confiscation and sale by the Internal Revenue Service to pay the estimated back taxes on income derived from the illegal sale of a controlled substance. We also have reason to believe Massey could have hidden drugs and cash in this area when he visited shortly before his death. And that might explain your presence in Telluride, Mackelwain, and that of the three missing men. You’ve got some talking to do, mister.”

Aletha pleaded silently for Cree to hold his temper. He’d been hassled by the law in two different time periods and neither could be blamed for their inability to believe the truth. The voices droned on, with Cree contributing little. Finally the drone turned exasperated and someone suggested Cree be transported into town for further questioning.

“We’ll take the girl too,” Sheriff Rickard insisted over Cree’s objections. “She’s involved in this somehow and it’s not her first time.”

“You’ll be sorry,” Cree repeated as they filed down the stairs.

“No more stories about holes into history. I’ve had it with you guys. And don’t think I didn’t notice you’ve been in a fight, Mackelwain.”

“You don’t suppose I could make my eleven-o’clock appointment with the dentist?” Aletha showed her gray incisor to the law and met stares of disbelief.

“Oh yeah, I almost forgot,” the sheriff said as they approached the car. He opened the trunk and took out a brown bag. “Got this back from a police lab and another special lab in Gunnison. Guy I know who’s into rock and assaying and historical records.” He pulled the piece of highgrade ore that his men had found under Callie’s cabin out of the bag. “That fellow claims this was mined probably around the turn of the century and probably either out of the tunnels at Alta or the nearby Gold King. But he says it hasn’t lain buried in dirt all that time since then. Nor the rag it was wrapped in. Says he never saw anything like this outside of a museum.” Tom Rickard watched Aletha and Cree, seemed disappointed in their vacant looks.

Aletha rode in front with the sheriff and Cree in back with the two federal agents.

“I think I should warn you,” Sheriff Rickard said, “that I have read a lot about the history of this place. If you’re dreaming up another fantastic story, I’m liable to catch you up on your facts.” The light from the windshield penetrated his sunglasses to highlight the crinkles at the corner of one eye in sickly green before he turned to face Aletha. “It might pay you to drop this time business and cooperate.”

“Then you know all about Willy Selby and the Cosmopolitan,” Cree said, “and Eugenio Pangrazia and Cal Rutan and Bob Meldrum.”

“Meldrum … he was a hired gunman in the old days.” Sheriff Rickard sounded pleased with himself. “You mean to tell me you didn’t chat with old Bulkeley Wells?”

“Young Bulkeley Wells,” Aletha said. “And Callie and Bram O’Connell. But they didn’t go down in the history books. They were just people trying to survive in this nutty place. Like me.”

“I think you might be interested to know we got the owner of the property up at Alta to blast the mine entrance. Nobody’s going in or out of there.” He checked the rearview mirror for Cree’s reaction and glanced over at Aletha. “If you know what’s happened to Duffer, Pheeney, and Bellamy—”

“Pheeney’s under a headstone in Lone Tree Cemetery,” Aletha told him.

“We haven’t had a burial out there in two years.” They had entered Telluride and passed the condominium complex at the edge of town when the car began to bounce and then swerve as the sheriff fought the wheel. “What the hell? Where’s the road?”

Aletha had her hands over her face for protection by the time they’d jolted to a stop. She kept them there as the sheriff opened his door and got out and the two back doors opened and slammed shut. “You two stay put,” Sheriff Rickard shouted in at them and then let loose a string of obscenities.

Aletha lowered her hands. The sheriffs car was up to its axles in snow sitting in somebody’s front yard. The eternal mountain peaks were the same but the lower slopes were barren of trees. An old-fashioned train whistle sounded remote, as if it came from a television off in another room. And if she listened carefully, Aletha could hear the mills stamping their rhythms even more remotely.

“Well, there goes the pendant theory,” she said, and bit her lip.

“Jesus, this is the first time you’ve brought along a whole car,” Cree said behind her, and strung together some four-letter words in configurations that made the sheriff sound bland.

Sheriff Rickard wore a leather uniform jacket but the two investigators wore only suit jackets. They soon grew cold and slid back into the car. The sheriff kicked snow away from the tires, turned to stare at the house, turned back to stare suspiciously at Aletha through the windshield.

“I can’t figure this one,” an agent said from the backseat.

“Some kind of stunt,” the other answered. They could all hear the sounds of a steam engine pulling rattling railroad cars into town, beginning to brake. “I didn’t know there was track over there.”

“There isn’t.”

Mildred Heisinger wafted between past and present as though passing back and forth through Aletha’s oval. Doris Lowell had taken up residence. Dr. Barbara visited frequently and was ready to dash the few blocks over at Doris’s telephone call. A few of the ladies belonging to the San Miguel Historical Society brought in food and stayed to chat with Doris and watch the still form in the high four-poster. And word went out that Telluride’s oldest living resident was about to leave it.

Renata Winslow had rushed through her office chores, sent out those helpers she’d found jobs for, and hurried over to Mildred’s. “I tell you it really happened. I should have looked for information for the historical society but I actually met Bulkeley Wells, Bob Meldrum, and Cal Rutan.”

Doris puttered around Mildred’s bed. Finally she said, “Every generation has its own way of killing itself. And I realize even salt and sugar are supposed to be dangerous now. I do try to be tolerant. But, Renata, these drugs you young people take nowadays are affecting your minds.”

“No drugs, Mrs. Lowell, I swear. Nothing but a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. We just walked out of this house and … Nobody’s going to believe us, are they? No matter what.”

“No, dear, they’re not. If I were you I wouldn’t be so eager to go around talking this way, either.”

Mildred stood at the door of her house and looked at the girl in the black dress that marked her as one of Mrs. Stollsteimer’s girls and wondered how her own life might have been different had she never met this child or her brother.

“Please, ma’am, I have to work and am getting far behind in my lessons. I wondered if you’d have a book I could study since you’re a teacher. And I’ve brought you a book as a deposit to keep until I return the one you lend me. There are wonderful drawings in it you can look at whenever you want.”

Mildred took the book of drawings and gave the child nothing in return. “It seems such a petty thing to have done now,” she tried to tell Doris Lowell, “but I remember taking great pleasure in it at the time.”

Doris just stared across the bed at Renata Winslow and didn’t see Mildred watching. Doris and Renata moved their lips but Mildred could hear them no more than they could hear her. Why was she thinking again of that girl and her brother?

Bram had been alternately tender and rough that night at the Pick and Gad. He didn’t have Mr. Bulkeley Wells’s smooth compelling ways and practiced methods. He told her how he’d thought of her when trapped in a caved-in drift and planning to die. How the peacock greens of the copper had reminded him of the colors she wore and how they paled her eyes even more. How his little sister had warned him he’d pay for carrying Mildred through the mining camp for all to see. How Mildred had figured in his nightmares while he was in the hospital as a vengeful ghost who beckoned him seductively one moment and punished him the next. Mildred was both frightened and excited and quite overwhelmed. This brash young man gorged with anger, youth, lust, and righteousness had been well-nigh irresistible.

50

Bram couldn’t be sure when the roaring in his ears ceased to be his own fury and began to be the wind racing by the cattle car. He didn’t feel himself pushed from the train but was suddenly tumbling through space. The jolt of landing forced the air from his lungs. Snow clogged his mouth and filled his eyes. Nothing moved, but his body still churned with the remembered vibration of the cattle car and the jarring of impact. His bones, even his jaw, ached from the jolt, his chest screamed for air. Bram fought snow until he realized he was facedown and that a push upward brought the glare of sun.

He spit out the clog and breathed in raw cold. He brought his knees up under him and backed onto his heels, squinted in the glare. The smoke trail of the engine’s stack flowed and rippled away behind it as the train left him on the Dallas Divide. An engine, two cattle cars, and a caboose.

“Pa?” His hat was gone. And now the train. An awful silence. The sun burned on the white around him.

Dark things on the blazing white. An outcrop of rock. The top of a telephone pole, its wires not four feet from the snow. A man wallowing, trying to stand, his movements those of a man drunk. “The government in Washington will hear about this.” He crawled on toward Bram, blinked. “You seen my hat?”

Bram walked beside his father along the tracks.

“We got ’em now, son. They can’t get away with this.” John had hurt a leg when the guards pushed him from the train. It supported his weight but he limped, and the jags in his speaking and breathing proved the pain he was in.

Vincent St. John had told them to start on ahead while he and others searched for the lost. “There’ll be more injured. You get him down to the trees, Bram. It’s a long way yet to Ridgway.”

Bram worried about meeting a train. Without snowshoes they had to keep to the tracks. In some places the slushy snow was no more than waist-high on either side of the rails. In others the plow trains had tunneled massive drifts and the rails ran along the bottom of narrow canyons. The blinding white took on a rosy hue and when Bram closed his eyes for a second’s rest from it, the color he was seeing became red. Every now and then he’d take both of Pa’s arms over his shoulders and hoist him onto his back.

“Can’t wait for the country to be hearing of this,” John said between gritted teeth. Sweat beaded his face.

“It won’t make any difference, Pa. The Owners’ Association and the Alliance have all the power.”

“They got the power in Telluride and have us outnumbered too, but we have the numbers on the outside of Telluride. There’s more stiffs than bosses and when we’re organized we’ll be having the power.”

Bram thought that if the bosses organized they’d still have the power because they had the money. They’d be easier to organize because they were fewer. But he kept his doubts to himself. He couldn’t hurt the man who’d raised him, worked until he’d had to be carried home to clear that drift in Alta.

“I can take no more for a bit. Stop and let me rest,” John said finally, and they both sat on the tracks. Stopping now with the warm sun on them was fine, but once it grew dark they’d be asking to freeze to death. “If you was to leave me here to wait for the others and go on by yourself, you’d be in Ridgway before night got too deep, big strong lad like you.”

“No.”

“You could be sending help back for the rest of us.”

“No.”

“Always was a stubborn kid.” They started off again, the sun slipping lower and the world taking on a winter chill. They made it to the trees but couldn’t stop for long because of the cold shade they provided. Then Bram was climbing the vertical slush next to the tracks and reaching a hand down to help John. “Train’s coming, Pa.”