Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (8 page)

Lucy said, “The wicked witch lives here!”

“No,” Brian cried. “She lives in a castle! This is a poor woodcutter’s cabin.”

“No one lives here now,” Sophie explained, smiling. “But many years ago, a miner did. William Lovell, an ancestor of Hank Lovell, our friend who manages the quarry. That man, Hank’s ancestor, was one of the first settlers in this part of the range.”

Brian’s eyes grew wide. “Is there still some gold here?”

“Mr. Lovell mined copper, not gold, and his little mine, which used to be on the side of that hill, was called El Rico—Spanish for ‘the rich one.’ The copper gave out about twenty years ago. No one works the mine anymore. Now I’ll show you some of the reasons it’s special. Sometimes, odd things happen around here.”

“Scary things?” Brian asked quickly.

“No.” Sophie put one gloved hand on each of the children’s shoulders. “Take off your snowshoes. Come into the cabin with me.”

The children followed her. Dennis, lingering a few feet behind them, watched. The old cabin was dark. Its sod roof had been replenished several times during its more than century-old lifetime. The floorboards creaked.

“Which one of you is taller?” Sophie asked.

“You know I am,” Brian said. “By two inches.”

“One,” Lucy said.

Sophie nodded. “Stand back-to-back.”

The children stood inside the cabin in winter morning shadow on the old plank floor, which seemed perfectly level. Sophie pressed the backs of their heads together.

“Dennis, you be the judge. Which of them is taller?”

“Whatever they’re standing on,” he said, “makes them seem the same height.”

“I’m two inches taller,” Brian insisted. “Well, maybe one and a half.”

“The floor must slope,” Dennis said, puzzled.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Sophie asked. From the deepest pocket of her parka she took out an old tennis ball. Bending, she placed it on the floor just a few inches past Brian’s feet. The ball rolled slowly toward Lucy and bounced against her heel.

“If the ground slopes the way that ball rolls,” Sophie said, “then Brian should look a lot taller than Lucy. Even more than two inches.”

“The whole cabin must be on a slant,” Dennis said. But even as he said it, he knew that the words and the concept made no sense. He was baffled.

Sophie picked up the tennis ball. “Look at me.”

Clasping her hands high in the air, she leaned far to the left. Her body canted at an angle that seemed impossible; it seemed that she should fall to the floor.

“Cool,” Brian said.

“Wait a minute,” Dennis said. “That’s
weird.
How are you able to do that?”

Sophie straightened up again, offering no explanation of the impossible angle she had assumed. “Come outside.”

There in the woods she said, “Strange things happen here. And strange things
don’t
happen here. In summer, for example, there are no birds. They don’t fly over these trees and they don’t land in the branches. They make a detour around the whole area. And look at the trees. What do you see?”

Some of the aspens were twisted like gray corkscrews.

“In the summer,” Sophie continued, “squirrels jump from one of those trees to another, and often they miss the branch they’re jumping for.”

“You’ve
seen
this?” Dennis asked.

“Yes, I have.”

“Give me a rational explanation. What’s the nature of this place?”

Sophie led them back through the snow toward the distant gate. “Some say the deep veins of copper cause all these odd things to happen. Others say that thousands of years ago a dense meteorite struck here. It’s supposed to be embedded not too far below the surface. There’s a magnetism we can’t explain. The gravity is out of whack.”

“Who told you that?” Dennis asked.

“A geologist from the University of Colorado came here. That was before my time, but I heard all about his conclusions. I imagine he’s right, but who knows?”

“You’re a teacher,” Brian said. “You should know why this place is funny.”

“You’re right. I should know, but I don’t.” She touched Brian’s cheek. “There are some things in life you can’t explain. You can theorize, you can speculate, but you can’t reach a scientific conclusion. Maybe it’s all an optical illusion.”

Brian turned to the supreme authority. “Dad, what do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Dennis said. “I’ve lived in New York and I thought I’d seen it all. Obviously I haven’t.” He laughed, and so did Sophie, and it was infectious: the children began to jump around in the snow and fall down and say, “I’m a squirrel and I can’t find my branch!”

But Dennis’s laughter hid his puzzlement. It was more than puzzlement: he couldn’t yet find a name for what he felt. Something about the place disturbed him deeply, and he was glad to go.

The huge snowpack on the back range melted so slowly that even in late May it was still piled to a height of four or five feet in the forest surrounding the Conways’ home. Lucy came to Dennis at the breakfast table in the kitchen, where he was having a Saturday midmorning cup of coffee and doing the crossword puzzle in the national edition of the
New York Times.

Lucy said mournfully, “Donahue is gone.”

“Are you sure?” Dennis put his pen down and looked up. “He could be in one of the sweater drawers, like the last time you thought he was missing.”

“No, Daddy, he’s gone. He didn’t sleep with me last night. I’ve looked everywhere.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Last night after supper. I fed him and Sleepy.”

“And where is Sleepy now?”

“On your big chair that you like to watch football in.”

“If Donahue was really gone, do you suppose Sleepy would just go to sleep like that? Wouldn’t she be out looking for him?”

Lucy began to cry. “Daddy, you’re making fun of me, and I’m trying to tell you that Donahue is gone.”

Dennis hugged his daughter, then got up and tested the cat door to make sure it hadn’t jammed. It swung freely.

“Let’s go look for him, sweetheart,” he said.

Sophie was in town at a Town Council meeting. Dennis and Lucy, soon joined by Brian, searched the house. They looked everywhere, including a chest of drawers that contained T-shirts and long johns, and the tops of Sophie’s closets where soft woolen sweaters were piled.

In the nearby meadow and forest Dennis showed the children how to conduct a logical search in ever-widening ovals. They tramped through snow and mud, searching for paw prints, calling Donahue’s name and making hissing noises. They peered up trees and poked under bushes. They found nothing.

“He’ll turn up by nightfall,” Dennis said, “as soon as he gets hungry.” In the evening when Sophie returned home they all went round to their various neighbors to ask if anyone had seen a gray-and-white medium-sized cat without a collar. Sophie’s parents, Scott and Bibsy, lived just to the north along the creek. They had seen nothing.

The neighbor with the cows was an older woman named Mary Crenshaw. Her husband had run the town’s tiny funeral parlor and been part-time police chief. He had died several months ago and his son had inherited both jobs. Mary Crenshaw rarely came out except to shop for food and quantities of port wine that the general store carried on its back shelves. Dennis had noticed that few Springhillers drank to excess; this sobriety had impressed him.

“Better let me talk to her,” Sophie said. “She’s odd.”

Dennis and the children waited outside on Mary Crenshaw’s porch. They heard Sophie inside asking about the missing cat. Dennis thought he heard her say, a little louder, “The tweeds’ yank tomker, Mary. Zacky and grease…” He could make even less sense out of Mrs. Crenshaw’s reply.

Sophie came out of the house. “She hasn’t seen Donahue, but she’ll keep her eye peeled.”

“What was it that you asked her?” Dennis asked. “I couldn’t make head or tail out of it.”

“She’s an old woman,” Sophie said. “She slurs her words.”

“It was you I heard, Sophie. It was like gobbledygook.”

The children had gone off to make hissing and clicking noises among the pines behind Mary Crenshaw’s house, hoping the cat would respond.

“Dennis, darling, please. I’ve had a long day and I’m upset. I don’t think we’re going to find Donahue.”

In the next few days Dennis scoured the woods in the search for a body, or remains, or even for a bit of fur. He found nothing.

Lucy came to him a week later, with Sleepy cradled in her arms. “Maybe,” she said, “Donahue fell in love with another girl kitty and she lived somewhere else, like you did with Sophie. So he went there to be with her. Do you think so, Daddy?”

“That’s a definite possibility.”

“And he might come back one day to visit.”

“Yes, he might.”

“Or for good, if he stops liking the other girl kitty.”

“Yes, darling, that could happen,” Dennis said, “but don’t count on it.”

He had planned to take Sophie to the South Seas in June for their belated honeymoon. They would do nothing except swim off the reef of Mooréa and sail outrigger canoes and eat tropical fruit and make love.

The plan included leaving the children with Sophie’s parents. Taking his cue from Sophie, Dennis said, “I don’t think the kids will miss us. By June they’ll have friends.”

But by May it hadn’t happened. The children clung to him more and more. They came home from school with or without Sophie and did their homework, and played with each other and the cats, and watched television when it was allowed. After Donahue’s disappearance, they played only with Sleepy.

“Why aren’t they making friends?” Dennis asked Sophie.

“It takes time. The village kids are clubby.”

“What can we do?”

“Let it work itself out.”

“I don’t like to just do
nothing.
It’s not my nature.”

“Dennis, you can’t change your children’s social lives. They’ll do it themselves, when they’re ready, in their own way. Parents only stand and wait, like civilians on the home front in a protracted war. It’s difficult, it’s frustrating, but that’s the only way that makes sense in the long run.”

Sometimes he felt that Sophie had wisdom and knowledge beyond her years.

“You love them,” she said, “and they know that. Be supportive and instructive, not interfering. Let them work out their own destiny.”

“I hate to fly off to Tahiti if things are like this.”

“Air France is a friendly airline—they’ll let you change the reservations. Let’s wait until winter.”

“Life is short,” he said. “Usually when you postpone things you want to do, it’s a mistake.”

Sophie was silent for a long moment, as if she were struggling with a concept or wanted to say something but wasn’t sure it was the right time to say it. Then she sighed and said, “When you genuinely believe that good things will happen, it works out to be that way. I know. Trust me.”

All right, he decided. I can do that. And I will.

Chapter 8
Under the Full Moon

WHEN DENNIS FIRST unpacked his luggage in Springhill the locals referred to him as the new lawyer. The new lawyer had skied crosscountry to Owl Creek with Edward Brophy. Restless fellow, the new lawyer: did you see him walking through the village in the middle of the night?

As he settled in, his title changed to “Sophie’s man.” You heard?— Sophie’s man helped June Loomis in an argument with a garage owner in Glenwood Springs. Didn’t charge her a penny. Those kids of Sophie’s man had been hunting for a lost cat.

Dennis smiled at the quaintness, but it faintly annoyed him that he lacked a name. He understood there was no malice intended. People held aloof from him in some ways, but he felt they liked him. He sensed he was being tested: the villagers were waiting to get to know him better before accepting him. He had to serve his apprenticeship.

Mountain life was wholly unlike the electric and frenetic world he had known in New York. People were calm, unhurried. He was fascinated by the village, had never dreamed he would—or could—live in such a quiet, remote place, no matter how beautiful. Sometimes he wondered if after a time he would grow tired of it and yearn for the dynamism of the city he had thrived on for so many years. He realized he had cast his lot with Sophie; had accepted, at least for a while, a dependency. But it had not been out of weakness. Love had not blinded him: he’d made a clear-cut choice to change his world. To change, to grow. To learn.

But there were peculiarities about his new mountain home, and he needed to come to grips with them.

He went to Sophie with his questions and soon grasped that Sophie was not quite as forthcoming as he might have liked—indeed, as he felt he deserved—when it came to talking about her past life in Springhill and the people of the village. When he probed too deeply in either of those areas, her common answer was, “One day soon, my sweet, I’ll tell you. Not now.”

Dennis thought his questions were innocent enough. “You know,” he said one Sunday morning while he squeezed fresh orange juice, “I’ve noticed something about the people here. They seem to be in unusually good physical condition. Robust—active—cheerful.”

Sophie smiled at him from the stove, where she was cooking pancakes. “Clean mountain air does it.”

“And maybe clean living. I don’t know a soul up here who smokes except Harry Parrot. And no one really carouses or whoops it up on the weekends, not even the teenagers. Remarkable. Reassuring, and delightful. But…”

Sophie looked up the stairs, where there were sounds of activity. “Dennis, you promised to take the kids biking today.”

“And I will, I will… let me finish this first. Just about everyone in town is healthy and vigorous. No invalids. No one seems gloomy or depressed. Isn’t that so?”

“I suppose it is,” Sophie said.

“Are they all on Prozac?”

Sophie laughed and set out the maple syrup and applesauce. “You’d have to ask Grace Pendergast. But I don’t think she’d breach medical ethics and tell you.”

“Jack Pendergast told me that Grace complains all the time—says she’s got hardly anything to do except give kids polio shots and treat broken bones at the quarry. And yet here’s what’s peculiar.” He had thought about this often, but shunted it aside. “There are no very old people here. Everyone seems to die off more or less in their seventies. If everyone is so healthy, which seems to be the case, then that doesn’t make sense.”