Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (7 page)

“I know, but …” She loosened her hair, letting it cascade around her face. “Lucy and Brian are enough to satisfy my maternal instinct. I love them, Dennis.”

He was disappointed but it was not an issue he could press. Let it be, he instructed himself. You love her. Don’t try to change her.

Almost right away Brian and Lucy cleaved to her and seemed to benefit from the harmony that was at the heart of her nature. She read to them from Dr. Seuss books, hauled them with her when she went shopping in Carbondale, and sent them on errands to the little general store in Springhill. She thanked them for helping, and hugged them. One day after school she had a snowball fight with Brian, and they banged into the house through the kitchen door, red-faced and laughing. She began teaching Lucy to play the violin.

Scott and Bibsy Henderson fell immediately into the role of grandparents and spoilers. Dennis was delighted, realizing that the children had lacked all that in Westport. He had been both father and mother to them for too long. Bibsy said to him, “We never thought it would happen. Sophie was so standoffish with men. Thank you, dear Dennis.”

In February of 1994, a month after Dennis moved to Springhill and a year after he had met her on Aspen Mountain, he and Sophie were married at the Interfaith Chapel in Pitkin County. No honeymoon until spring, they agreed—let’s give the kids time to settle in. Then they would board an Air France jet in Los Angeles and spend two weeks on the island of Mooréa in the South Pacific. “I fell in love with the name when I was a child,” Sophie said.

“I’m glad you weren’t taken by the cadence of Timbuktu,” Dennis said, though he would have gone there or anywhere with her.

He drove to Aspen four or five days a week to his wood-paneled office at Karp & Ballard. On the wall he hung his law degree from Yale and his framed certification of membership in the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. All that winter in the early mornings he heard the distant boom of explosions as ski patrols set off avalanches to clear the mountain slopes. By early March he was in court defending the seventeen-year-old son of a visiting film star on a drug-sale charge, and then a local bar owner on a DUI. He plea-bargained both cases before Judge Florian, the local district judge. Both his clients received suspended sentences. Dennis was pleased, and so were the clients.

New clients began to call. He began to feel he could make a living here—not a fortune, but enough to live on. That was enough. His ambitions and his vision of the future had changed.

In Springhill Dennis spent so much time with Sophie—talking, making love, listening to Mozart and Verdi in front of the log fire on winter and spring evenings—that he had little time for anyone else besides the children. Occasionally some friends came to dinner: Hank and Jane Lovell or Edward Brophy. The mountain hamlet was small. Life was simple. He had never seen a Springhill man wearing a jacket or tie, and the women, including Sophie, wore jeans not only to work but at home and in the evening. Yet there was nothing tawdry or common about them. In New York and Connecticut he had been accustomed to a physical cross-section of Americans, from the slim, beautiful, and fashionable to the weird, plain, and frighteningly obese. The inhabitants of his new hometown, however, were almost uniformly attractive and well formed. There seemed to be a simplicity about them and their lives that he grew more and more to admire. Within a few weeks Dennis had met all of Sophie’s friends, neighbors, and family. She told him she had at least a dozen first and second cousins who lived in the town. “In fact, Oliver Cone is one of them.”

“What does the town do about inbreeding?”

“As much as it can. Oliver is the result of inbreeding—the positive side of it. He’s got a master’s in hydraulic engineering. He’s smart as a whip, although you wouldn’t know it unless he trusts you, and the only people he trusts are Edward and those pals of his he goes hunting with. He’s a first-rate bow hunter, did you know that? He supplies me with most of the venison every fall. He only works at the quarry because … well, because the quarry is a town-owned enterprise, and everyone pitches in.”

Sophie paused. “But of course you’re right. When I was younger I remember a girl who had an epileptic fit and died, and then there was a twelve-year-old boy who we couldn’t control, and he had to be sent away. That was all unfortunate. Since then, as far as I know, we don’t have any feebleminded Snopeses locked away in padlocked barns. We keep a good check on the family trees. We try to keep the bloodlines separate.”

“Who was ever able to deal with teenagers in rut?”

“In a community like this, if there’s a genetic risk, we have no misgivings about encouraging abortion. Obviously the kids can say no, and then there’s nothing we can do. But they usually listen to reason.” Something about the concept, and the way Sophie expressed it, troubled Dennis. At first he didn’t grasp it. Then it came to him.

“Who is the
we
you talk about? The
we
who keeps a check on family trees? The
we
who can ‘do nothing about it.’ Don’t tell me it’s part of the mayor’s job.”

“Believe it or not,” Sophie said, “the town Water Board does it.”

“The Water Board? Are you serious?”

“It’s a small town. Just three hundred and fifty of us—anywhere else, we’d be a wide spot in the road. We don’t have committees or agencies for every little thing. The Town Council handles the finances, the legislation, and the school and the quarry. The Volunteer Fire Department deals with emergencies, organizes holidays, and does avalanche control in the town and even on the road down to Redstone. So everything else, like pollution control, and even genetics, got dumped on the Water Board. It just fell out that way. Kind of elegant, I think.”

Dennis nodded, silent. What did it matter? What did it have to do with the new heart of his life?

Some evenings Sophie read poetry aloud. She read Wordsworth and Mallarmé to him. She had taught herself French with videos from the Pitkin County Library. He loved the sound of her voice; its clarity was like that of a lightly struck gong. And at least three or four times a week she played the lovely dark violin kept in the battered leather case. She caressed its gleaming wood and its taut strings. Her playing captivated Dennis. Whatever cares the world still inflicted on him vanished. He was borne away to a womblike place where he seemed to drift in warm, slow-moving water.

“Sometimes,” he admitted, “when I shut my eyes, I could go to sleep while you play.”

“Do,” Sophie said, her eyes bright with pleasure. “I wouldn’t mind. Music can take you to another world. And it can reach you while you sleep.”

Dennis had sometimes watched television at night when he lived alone, and before, when he had been married to Alma, but he realized one day that here in the mountains he rarely turned on the TV except for a movie on PBS or a sporting event that he couldn’t resist. His real world was sunny and celebratory—entertainment enough.

Before meeting Sophie he had considered himself a sexually sophisticated man. He had been a bachelor for many years before his marriage to Alma, had made love to many women. One of his longterm partners in New York had been a French art magazine editor, another a dark-skinned psychiatrist from Brazil. He had always been willing to experiment, and on several occasions had made love with two women together. But he was never arrogant about his sexuality. Like most men, he believed he was a good lover. Women had told him so—why doubt it? Even more, he had been fortunate in having experiences with women who were skilled in the arts of love. It
was
a skill, he’d begun to see. It was not always enough to follow your instincts. You could learn. You could experiment. You could go beyond the ordinary.

And now there was Sophie. Whatever he thought he knew before about womanliness and sex, with Sophie he was reeducated. There seemed to be nothing that she wouldn’t do or didn’t know how to do. The bedroom was her dominion. By candlelight, they romped. In the dark, she whispered in his ear and conjured images of all his fantasies. And yet despite her skills, everything was achieved with the delight of carnal freshness. He wondered where such knowledge came from.

After making love, if it was not too cold they would walk out on the deck together. “To let the starlight wash our eyes,” Sophie said. At 9,000 feet the darkness was absolute. The stars were diamond hard in their brilliance and seemed to give off a faint hum. From the mountain fastness came the howl of coyotes, which occasionally woke the children. On starry nights a nesting owl hooted, and on warmer nights as spring moved toward summer they heard deer or elk moving through the brush.

“Are there grizzly bears around here?” Brian asked.

“Black bear,” Sophie said. “In the winter, they hibernate. Now that it’s spring you can see tracks and fresh droppings. And in summer you might spot one or two young ones on the other side of the creek. They won’t come near the house unless they’re really hungry.”

One night in April Dennis was awakened by a series of thuds behind the kitchen. The heavy-duty green plastic garbage cans stood unprotected in the snow next to Sophie’s Blazer and his Cherokee. A quarter moon hung clear and brilliant above the mountains. Dennis peered out from the upstairs window and saw a large animal nuzzling at one of the garbage cans. A neighbor kept cows and often forgot to close the barn.

He looked at his watch: not yet midnight. The remains of a log fire glowed in the living room fireplace, and the room was still warm. He put on his toweled bathrobe and padded downstairs. Shadows danced on the walls as he took a flashlight off the kitchen counter. Hearing a soft footfall above him, he turned. Brian stood on the staircase, wearing his red flannel pajamas with pictures of Mickey Mouse and Pluto.

“I heard something, Daddy.”

“I think a cow’s poking around in the garbage. We threw out all those delicious chicken teriyaki bones from supper, remember? Let’s go look.”

With Brian at his side, Dennis opened the kitchen door—the bitter cold night air struck them a solid blow. He stepped outside, flicked on the beam of the flashlight, and said, “Shoo!”

A black bear turned its great head toward him. It crouched on all fours by the laden garbage cans. Its eyes, crimson buttons in the yellow cone of the flashlight beam, suddenly and unaccountably blazed with what struck Dennis as malevolence. Dennis smelled the animal’s meaty breath. It took a shuffling step toward them. Dennis shoved Brian behind him. The boy screamed and wet himself.

Dennis could never afterward recall where he had read or heard what to do, but some clear memory lay rooted in his mind. The white toweling bathrobe was only loosely knotted. Rising on tiptoes, he thrust his arms up and to the sides.
Look larger,
he remembered. At the same time he lowered his eyes to avoid challenging the animal.

The bear turned and shuffled off quickly into the darkness of the forest.

For a month, whenever Dennis spoke to friends and family in the East, he related the story, although he left out the part about Brian’s wetting his Disney World pajama pants. He began to feel like some kind of modern-day mountain man—nearly naked under the moon and sharing the turf with Neighbor Bear. An adventurer, a former city boy happily out of his element: this image pleased him.

Chapter 7
Trust Me

BRIAN REMEMBERED HIS stepmother had told him the town of Springhill was named after a nearby warm-water spring.

“You said it was a special place, and you promised to show it to us. Why is it special?”

“When we go there, I’ll show you.”

Brian kept nagging, and early on a Sunday morning in May Sophie announced that she would escort him and his sister and his father through the woods to the spring.

“Grab your snowshoes, gang.”

During the night it had snowed four inches of corn snow. The snowshoes had been Sophie’s Christmas present to everybody. The family tramped through the property and across the creek and onto a path that led into the forest. There they halted and strapped on the snowshoes. A hundred yards deeper into the forest they came to a sturdy wire gate set into a four-foot-high barbed-wire fence that snaked between the trees as far as they could see. The gate was padlocked with a combination lock.

Sophie twirled the dials. With a snap, the lock sprang free.

“This isn’t your land, is it?” Dennis asked.

“No, this is village land.”

“How come you know the combination? Is that one of the mayor’s privileges?”

“Every adult in Springhill knows it.”

“If every adult knows it, why bother locking the gate? To keep out the children?”

“The path leads to the spring, and then beyond to Indian Lake. We don’t want strangers poking around here.”

“Sophie, in case you haven’t noticed, strangers don’t come to Springhill.”

“Valley people go hiking in summer. Do you think they know which creeks contribute to a drinking water supply and which don’t? They can contaminate without realizing it.”

She plunged ahead in the snow, where drifting powder had piled up in some places as high as her head. The pines were hung with tufts of snow and the blue sky shone through branches like a winter postcard on a drugstore rack.

“There,” Sophie said, pointing to a small hill, a thin waterfall that dropped perhaps a dozen feet from a rocky ledge, and a stream below. Only three feet wide, the stream coursed turbulently along its bed for fifty feet, widened briefly into a pool of five feet in diameter, and then disappeared in an abrupt dogleg into the hillside. Its surface carried moss and ferns, some rotting branches, and dark vegetation.

“That’s the spring?” Dennis asked. “That skinny waterfall and rivulet? And the hill? That’s what the town is named for?”

“The spring is hidden. The water you see is about eighty degrees Fahrenheit. In summer it goes up to eighty-five. That pool you see used to be quite a bit bigger, and people sometimes bathed there. Come. I’ll show you something else.”

There was no path, but she knew exactly where she was heading. Dennis and the children followed. A tumbledown cabin showed itself suddenly against a small mound of dirt.