The Threshold (6 page)

Cree stood on the road in front of Lone Tree Cemetery at the edge of town, puffing from a run to the end of the canyon and back. He still wasn’t used to the altitude. Across the San Miguel River sprinklers whirled water drops across a huge drift of mill tailings. An attempt had been made to plant something green over this refuse from inside the planet. The sun finally struggled to the top of notched mountain crests. It sparked the droplets from the sprinklers and caught up pieces of light in the river, casting a pink glow on steeply pitched roofs in town. A speck in the sky circled in a thermal, an eagle or a hang glider, and set off an excitement and a sense of recognition in him.

Telluride, at an elevation of 8,745 feet above sea level, still sits at the bottom of a great chasm. On three sides monstrous peaks of the San Juan range rear into the sky, as stunning as they are threatening. The wall of rock that boxes in the end of the canyon is scarred by snowslide and torture cracks and a silver water ribbon that plummets from a saddle some eight hundred feet to the valley floor. Cree tried to imagine what all this must look like from above.

Lone Tree Cemetery had more than a lone tree. He poked around among old tombstones and plaques, markers weathered bare of inscription, a mass grave for miners caught in a fire. Many marked the violent demise of young men, caught in their prime by accident, fate, and highly treacherous work. Telluride’s union troubles had placed more men here. Pneumonia, silicosis, and gun fights over a slight or a whore had claimed many others, he knew.

Cree began looking for the name of “Callie” on a whim, and because it helped him forget a more recent tombstone, that of his partner and friend Dutch Massey. Dutch had led a dangerous life too. Cree found young women who’d died with their babies in childbirth, and many babies and children. He found names—Italian, Scandinavian, eastern European with their “ak” and “eck” endings. No Callie.

Cree had an amateur’s interest in history that caused bits of fact and pieces of trivia to stick in his head. It made the odd events occurring around Aletha indelible and Telluride’s history in general of more interest than it should be. He had work to do here that had nothing to do with history.

He, his father, and his brother had once stood in a graveyard such as this in Oregon. The boys just listened politely at first as the elder Mackelwain expounded upon the possible lives and deaths planted forever at their feet. But they soon began to see real people in strange clothing going about varied tasks unaware of the fate awaiting them here. Gregory Mackelwain had sold everything from cars to swimming pools and he’d sold the tingle of enchantment about the past to his sons as well. Cree’s brother had gone on to become a professor of history but Cree found the dryness of its study like sand after the excitement of his father’s reality. Something inside had already committed him to the sky.

“My, you’re out early.” A woman with wavy gray hair and pleasant features knelt beside a grave and set down a trowel and a basket of flowers. There weren’t many people over forty in the town and this one lacked the driven look of the younger citizens. “Are you searching for someone special or just browsing?”

She probably sells real estate, he thought. “Just curious about a possible burial, someone named Callie. I don’t know her last name.”

“Callie, oh yes. Over there and up by the fence. There’re many unmarked graves in that area. She’s a small headstone set flat to the ground. Come, I’ll show you.” She led the way to an area Cree had thought vacant. “This is a section some friends and I have been trying to figure out. Hers is one of the few markers left. Most have grown over until they’re buried. Callie, C-a-l-l-i-e, is that the right spelling? Most of the records have been lost, I’m afraid.”

“I haven’t seen it written.” Cree looked down on a rectangle of stone. Callie, just Callie. No more information. “Have you lived in Telluride long?”

“About fifty years or so. Which makes me a true old-timer. I came as a bride. All but one son and three grandchildren are over there.” Her trowel pointed back the way they’d come. “There are a few of us left who haven’t sold out to the new wave yet.” She smiled wrinkle lines deep into her face and started back toward her family. “Perhaps we’ve stayed to finish the history we all started and because it’s so deathly beautiful here.” The trowel waved at the looming peaks and she paused to stare up at them. “And then … it all seems to have gone so fast.” She shook her head and the smile vanished. “Why were you looking for this Callie?”

“I have a friend who’s been dreaming of her … no, not dreaming. More like haunted by her.”

“That’s interesting. I have a friend who has spoken of a Callie, but my friend is very old and much of what she says is impossible to understand.” She laughed, short and melodic. “Tell your friend that my friend has not enjoyed being haunted by this Callie.” The sun glinted on the bifocal curve in her glasses and hid any meaning her eyes might have held.

“I hope you didn’t spend another night in your car.” Renata wore tight designer jeans and a blue work shirt unbuttoned halfway down the front.

“Cree lent me a spare bed.”

“Wonder what that man is up to,” Renata said slowly and more to herself than to Aletha. “Always asking questions.” She sat on the corner of her desk, chewed on the end of a ball-point without touching her lipstick to it. She giggled. “You don’t suppose he’s a narc, do you?” She stared through Aletha and then straightened. “Oh, I have a job for you today.”

Aletha sank onto the long bench beside the door and tried to sound casual. “What makes you think Cree’s a narcotics agent?”

“I was just making silly guesses. Some of our citizens and visitors have been busted over the last few years for dealing cocaine, and it’s become a half-scandal, half-joke around town. I really doubt that Cree’s a narc. He’s too obvious. The Sheridan needs a maid today.”

“How long have you known Cree?”

“Just the week or so he’s been in town. He introduced himself right away. We had a mutual friend. Our friend is dead.”

Renata’s office was upstairs in an old store building that seemed to have kept its original dust. Traffic patterns had worn hollows in the wooden flooring and stairs. Wainscoting reached shoulder-high on the walls and the ceilings were lined with embossed tin. Footsteps echoed up the stairs from the street now, passed the doors of several other offices on this floor. A woman with a trowel and gardening gloves came to stand in Renata’s doorway.

“Hi, Mrs. Lowell, been out to the cemetery?”

“Yes, and a fine morning for it too.”

“Mrs. Lowell, this is one of my new helpers, Aletha Kingman. Mrs. Lowell was assistant to the county clerk at the courthouse before retiring, and before that she taught English at the school here. Now she’s president of the San Miguel Historical Society.”

“I’ll bet you’re really here for the skiing.” Mrs. Lowell poked Aletha’s arm playfully and turned back to Renata. “I think it’s time Mildred had a good cleaning up again.”

“I can get somebody over there tomorrow. Clean … Miss … Heisinger’s,” she repeated slowly as she wrote on a scratch pad. “How’s she like the Meals on Wheels?”

“She won’t say, but she’s eating again anyway. I swear she’ll outlive us all. Incredible woman.”

Aletha hurried up the street to the New Sheridan Hotel, wondering why the name “Heisinger” should sound so familiar. It kept nagging at her as she stripped sheets off beds, scrubbed down sinks and toilet bowls. She was sitting on the staircase waiting for some late risers to pack up and check out and staring at the life-size portrait on the wall where the stairs ended when it came to her. She’d seen the portrait before, but now the woman in it looked familiar.

The portrait was done in oil on a dark background that suggested either a dim red sunset all but overpowered by swiftly encroaching night or the faint fires of hell abroil behind the powers of darkness. The nude in the center foreground was about twenty pounds overweight, pearshaped, with long kinky hair flying out behind her. Her pose in midair suggested she might be running, one arm thrown up as if in panic, the other crooked so she could place the back of her hand on her brow to show deep distress. Amidst this drama her expression was surprisingly composed, if not a trifle bored. She’d shaved her underarms and pubic hair but there was a suspicious suggestion of darkness on her lower legs. A swath of gauze with tiny stars peppered all over it swirled about her loins, concealing much of nothing. And all this was enclosed in an ornate gold frame.

Aletha had dismissed it as a cornball tourist-grabber until now. Now she recognized the face as that of the woman who had been eating with Callie at the Senate when the oval had replaced the freezer and the cabinet. The woman who’d dropped her spoon and spattered her soup and … that’s when Aletha had heard the name “Heisinger.” That’s when Callie had said a Miss Heisinger had taken Aletha’s sketchbook. She left the pillowcase stuffed with dirty sheets on the stairs and raced down to the pay phone in the odd little room under the staircase that connected the lobby and the bar. She called Renata Winslow. “Is this Miss Heisinger you’re going to have cleaned tomorrow a native of Telluride?”

“Well, I don’t know if she was born here, but nobody around can remember when she didn’t live here. Doris Lowell thinks she’s over a hundred. And still staying through the winters. Can you imagine? Why are you so interested in old Mildred Heisinger?”

“Renata, I want that job tomorrow, the Heisinger job.”

Renata laughed. “You make it sound like a bank holdup. Listen, Aletha, I got a call from Norwood, little town about thirty miles from here, for a job you’ll like better—fry cook. It pays much more.”

“Please give me the Heisinger job. It’s important. Please?”

“Oh … all right. I’ll scare up somebody else for Norwood. I honestly do not understand you. Hers is the little Victorian across Pine Street from the Pick and Gad and down a lot length.”

Aletha was hoping to get back to the dirty sheets before they were discovered, when the girl in the registration cage in the lobby called to her. “Hey, if you’re still looking for a bed, there’s one in the women’s dormer tonight. Cheap by Telluride standards.”

“I’ll take it. Do you know anything about the naked lady on second?”

“There’s a naked lady on second?”

“In the painting at the end of the staircase.”

“Oh yeah. She’s supposed to be some kind of legend. I take all legends with a grain of salt and a bourbon-and-Seven myself. You can probably find out about her up at the museum.”

But Aletha didn’t make it to the museum because Renata sent her to baby-sit three children in a pseudo-Victorian condominium for the rest of the day and into the night. When she did crawl into the dorm bed at the Sheridan, she had ambivalent feelings. She wished she could tell Cree Mackelwain about the nude in the painting. But she was relieved not to be sleeping in with a possible narc. Mostly she was excited about meeting Miss Heisinger in the morning.

7

Mildred Heisinger wore her black gathered skirt with a satin cummerbund, snowy blouse, and a black ribbon around her throat. This was her second post. Mildred was eighteen. Things had not gone well in her first position for reasons she still did not understand. She’d not been asked to return and came here without recommendation. Knowing she must succeed in Alta set a feathery, cold sensation to crawling in her stomach. It also caused her to withdraw, giving her the appearance of an icy composure far from her true state.

Her students ranged from four to fourteen, the usual mix of bright, willing, obstreperous, and disinterested. Mildred believed she’d pretty well won them over. Except for one. Brambaugh O’Connell, the oldest, who stood much taller than she, who had to sit sideways with his legs in the aisle, who never spoke unless spoken to and never missed a word while reading aloud or in composition.

She’d taken to seating him in her own chair when working with him, and standing herself so he’d be more comfortable and she’d feel more in control. He had a dignity she knew to be part resentment at being forced to attend her school and part attraction to her. Sometimes he was a little boy in an oversized body, sometimes his eyes held a maturity that made her drop her own.

Mildred found herself engaged in small fantasies concerning her oldest pupil: She would surprise him with some sudden bit of knowledge that would light up the sullen expression. Or she would see him as a grown man returned to find his teacher whom he’d never been able to forget. She stood behind him now and watched his large hand make small, perfect ciphers on his tablet. She could almost feel the power growing in the restless shoulders, was tempted to touch him carelessly as she did the other children. But of course she did not.

Johann Peterson reached around Callie O’Connell and stuffed something down the back of Mable Fisherdicks’ dress. Mable wiggled and screamed. Miss Heisinger tapped Johann on the head and pointed to his destination in the corner. She asked Callie to accompany Mable to the cloakroom and help remove whatever forced her to squirm so. No one ever teased Callie with her brother in the room.

Sudden thunder from the sky displaced the thunder of the mill, shook the earth beneath the school, rolled in on gusts of wind that rattled in the rafters. Raindrops splayed across window glass and lightning dazzled the room. This was the third day in a row a thunderstorm had flared shortly before the school day was to end. Yesterday she’d kept her students late to let it pass.

“That was a wise decision, Miss Heisinger,” Timothy Traub, the Alta mine manager and her host, had said at dinner. “The ground was fairly crackling with electricity this afternoon. It’s a wonder nothing was struck here on the hill. Or, God forbid, the current from the plant below should arc and shut down the mill.”

The entire area had been electrified even before many large cities by mining interests who’d denuded mountain slopes of timber to fuel steam boilers and who needed cheaper power than coal to continue operations. This was the first time Mildred had actually lived with electric power and she’d been amazed to find a light bulb on a long movable cord available in every room of the manager’s house. There were two stationary bulbs in the schoolhouse. She switched these on now to brighten the storm gloom and calm the children.