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Next to him, a woman’s voice filtered back into his mind.
“...two years ago. And it was beautiful weather. We didn’t even want to stop. We were the last ones on the gondola, and by the time we got to the top I had to pee so bad I didn’t think I’d make it to the bathroom.”
Emma giggled, a soft purring sound. She stretched widely, seeming to notice for the first time that they had arrived. She pressed her hand to the window, fingers spread like a spindly starfish.
“What is this place?” she said.
After the blocky cabins and rugged lines of Jawbone Ridge, the hotel next to them was strangely proportioned, crouching on the edge of the ravine as if driven there by the cluster of buildings below. A tall, crooked little place, with two steep arches flanking the portico and a roof like a hat smashed down over the top. The age-blackened walls imposed a sort of gravitas, and the leaded windows a sense of romance, but the hotel gave Julian the impression of a child at the edge of the playground who has not been asked to play.
Dark, neglected, unloved and unremembered.
No. Not true. Celia had loved the Blackbird. And Julian sure as hell remembered.
He popped the trunk and pulled out their bags: his, in sleek charcoal gray, hers a candy-apple red, studded around the handle with rhinestones that bit into his palm. A damned silly color for a suitcase and exactly the sort of thing Emma would choose. She had a passion for bling and kept herself well glazed: lip gloss, diamond earrings, a satin headband to hold back her wheat-blond hair. The effect was so convincing that he had only noticed her weak chin yesterday morning when she got out of the shower, her hair slicked back and face bare of makeup. This girl hadn’t even been given orthodontics, and here he’d taken her for money, for one of his own. Now he noticed the overbite all the time and held it as a sullen resentment against her, as though somehow she’d deceived him.
She was smiling up at him now, her rabbity head tilted to one side.
“Used to be part of the copper town.” Julian nodded toward the sign in black and red above the door: blackbird hotel. “Built by the mine owner so he’d have someplace to stay when he was in town, above the stink of it all. It’s changed hands many times since then, been modernized and all that.”
He faced the hotel with their bags in his hands.
An unexpected thrill of anticipation expanded in his chest. Any second now, Celia would open the door, or lean out an upstairs window, her hair lifting out like a banner, that slow smile on her face to show she’d been waiting for him. The sensation was so strong that for a moment he found himself searching the windows for movement, straining to hear her voice.
A second later, the excitement subsided. She wasn’t here. She never would be again.
Emma was waiting for him. She seemed to occupy too small a space in the scene, as if he were seeing her through the wrong end of a telescope.
“Are we going inside?” she said.
Too late now to change his mind. A cold knot of dread replaced the warmth of his original response. The Blackbird didn’t want him here any more than Celia had.
They crossed the rutted gravel lot and mounted the front steps. Julian opened the heavy wooden door and held it with his foot as Emma went inside. A bell hanging from the brass knob jingled as the door swung shut behind them.
Beyond the tiny vestibule, the room opened with surprising expansiveness to a tall, narrow space with a massive stone fireplace towering like a sentinel on the opposite end of the room. To their left was a winding staircase with a curved wooden banister, soaring up to the second floor. At its foot, a heavy door stood half-open; through the doorway, he could see a couple of hammered copper pots hanging from a rack and the edge of the long kitchen table. Celia had sanded that table to a beautiful sheen and finished it in a rich chestnut brown. She used to rub it down with an oiled rag after every meal; you’d catch the scent of it sometimes while you were eating, a faint bite of lemon where the warm plates sat.
As he watched, the kitchen door opened farther. A woman came halfway through the doorway and stopped. She was wearing a dark T-shirt and a pair of designer jeans so tight they had set into a series of horizontal creases up her thighs. On the front of her shirt was a screen-print image of the Blackbird Hotel, in white lines like a child’s drawing on a chalkboard.
Julian caught his breath.
Again he felt vaguely disoriented, thrown back in time. Yet Kate Vaughn was unmistakably part of the present. Her brown hair was lighter now, longer and fashionably streaked, but she looked much older than when he’d last seen her five years before. The babyish roundness of her face had gone, leaving a sharper line at her cheekbones and chin. It was the face of a beautiful woman now, evolved and polished. Cute little Katie, he used to call her. But it seemed that girl, like so many other things, was gone.
He thought at first that she was going to come forward and embrace him. She took one step, then hesitated as if she’d changed her mind.
“Julian,” she said.
“Hello, Kate.”
“How are you?”
“Surprised, at the moment. I didn’t realize you’d be here.”
He understood the lay of the land immediately. Kate’s family must have bought the only remaining property on the Ridge. Presumably to indulge her, to assuage any lingering grief; the Blackbird was far too small to make more than a very modest profit. Nothing like the Vaughns’ resort hotel in Telluride or the two in Vail and Crested Butte. Kate had probably finagled this tiny property out of her father like a kid with her heart set on a fancy tree house.
He’d met Justin Vaughn once or twice. A sweet, shrewd guy with three daughters and a knack for keeping them happy. Kate was the youngest by fifteen years, and she could wrap her father around her little finger simply by adding an extra syllable to his name: Dad-dy, can you lend me the car? Dad-dy, will you buy me a hotel of my own, the Blackbird Hotel, we can’t let them tear it down...
“Oh, you two know each other?” Emma said, affecting an air of cool disinterest.
“We used to,” Kate said. “In the biblical sense. Kate Vaughn.”
Emma’s face was blank as she took Kate’s outstretched hand. “You went to church together?”
Kate’s mouth twitched at the corner, a dimple winking in her cheek. The moment swelled as Julian realized he should introduce them and couldn’t, because he didn’t know Emma’s last name and wasn’t entirely sure of her first one. Emma could be Ella, or Anna, or Abby, or Eve. He had resorted to an assortment of pseudo-endearments over the past few days, waiting for her to repeat her name—which, maddeningly, she never did.
Kate turned to Julian.
“You heard about the reopening, I take it? Did you get our email? I blasted it to everyone in my contacts.”
He nodded. It had given him a shock to see the Blackbird’s photograph appear on the screen. He’d shut the window down immediately, unable to open it again for more than a week. When he finally gathered the courage, he pored over every page and all the fine print on the hotel website.
THE HISTORIC BLACKBIRD HOTEL
GRAND OPENING
JAWBONE RIDGE, COLORADO
Nowhere had the flyer mentioned the Blackbird was now one of the Vaughn family properties.
“I didn’t realize—” he said again.
“Yeah, that’s my dad’s thing. I think he doesn’t want people to realize it belongs to us. Not our finest business investment, by a long shot. He probably wants to save face if the whole thing folds or falls off the cliff or something.”
She walked over to a small desk, where a computer sat next to a stack of unopened mail. Insects buzzed from outside the half-open windows.
“So, what’s up? Do you need a room?”
“No,” said Julian.
“Yes,” said Emma at the same time.
“We just wanted to see the place,” he said. “We don’t need a room. Probably stay at the Adelaide.”
It was a foolish thing to say, with two suitcases at his feet and this fluffy blonde hotel accessory clinging to his elbow. But seeing Kate here unnerved him, gave his anger a point around which to coalesce.
“It looks good,” he said, glancing around. “Very...tasteful.”
A deep flush rose up her neck. “Yes, well, I’m not sure the whole bohemian thing would have worked out that well in the long run.”
“I think it would have worked fine.”
“Do you? Would you have me leave it as a shrine?”
“I would have had you leave it alone.”
“Ah. And is that what you’re doing? Leaving it alone?”
Julian pressed his lips together.
“They were going to tear it down,” Kate said. “I’m trying to save it. I would have thought you’d approve. They were your friends, too.”
“What friends?” Emma said.
“You didn’t tell her about the murders?” Kate said.
“She doesn’t need to hear about that,” Julian said.
“Murders!” Emma said. “Of course I need to hear about it. When was this?”
“What’s it been now, Julian?” Kate said. “Five years?”
A slow prickle crept up Julian’s back, under the collar of his cotton shirt. His ears seemed to fill with sound, a low, almost electrical hum that muffled the sound of her voice.
Five years. An anniversary, a number that meant something, that indicated something might happen again. Five. Dangerous, sharp-sounding, like a blade or the edge of a stony cliff.
“Five,” he said, carefully.
“Wait, you were here?” Emma said.
“We were both here,” Kate said. “Staying in the hotel, that is. We didn’t witness the crime or anything.”
A sour taste convulsed Julian’s mouth. No, he wanted to say, I didn’t see a thing; it’s nothing to do with me. But the words were swimming in water and he couldn’t get them out.
“Oh,” Emma said. “So who was murdered?”
Kate slid behind the desk and switched on the computer. “My friends. My three best friends.”
Emma was taken aback. “Oh. I’m sorry, I thought...if you don’t want to talk about it...”
“Celia Dark. Celia’s stepbrother, Rory McFarland, and her boyfriend, Eric Dillon.”
The computer chattered to life, an alien presence in the gothic gloom.
“We don’t need to go into it.” Julian’s temple ached from gritting his teeth.
“I don’t mind.” Kate smiled and gave Emma a little half shrug. “It was a long time ago. And anyway, there’s no escaping the topic here on the Ridge. It was all anybody talked about for months. You couldn’t get away from it, not if you lived here.”
Julian walked to the other end of the room, where the boxy new furniture was arranged around the fireplace. It looked nothing like it had five years before, nothing like the way he remembered it.
After the murders, Kate had sent snapshots of the common room and kitchen, along with a bundle of newspaper clippings she’d carefully packed and mailed to his mother’s address in New York. Block headlines at first with thick chunks of text, then smaller, sketchier pieces, featuring standard-issue high school pictures of the three victims and a bigger photo of the Blackbird Hotel. The news petered out at last to a single column of newsprint from the obituaries page: Eric Dillon, Rory McFarland. Their faces grinned out at him, blurred as if by smoke, the ink like soot on his hands.
There was no obituary for Celia. Julian never knew whether the paper hadn’t run one or whether Kate had simply forgotten to include it with the others.
“So did they catch the murderer?”
“There was no one to catch.”
“You mean, one of them killed the others?”
“Maybe. It’s hard to tell for sure. We know that Celia’s stepbrother, Rory, was killed first. He was in the kitchen, shot once in the chest. The room was in a shambles—broken dishes everywhere, chairs overturned. Apparently he and Eric had been fighting. There was a broken bone in Rory’s hand and two in Eric’s face, blood everywhere. Which was exactly what you’d expect from any fight Rory was involved in. The police assumed at first that Eric had left the fight and came back with a gun to finish it. But that didn’t seem to make sense when they looked at everything else.”
“Why’s that?” Emma asked.
“Because Celia was the one left holding the gun.”
It occurred to Julian that Kate must have told this story a hundred times. It had the rhythm of a recitation, a prayer-like cadence. He wondered what it was like here on the Ridge, afterward, what the locals made of it. He had almost no memory of the town itself. Its residents were part of the peripheral setting in his mind rather than personalities in their own right. Reddened, snow-scrubbed faces, thick hands, everyone booted and stomping in doorways, swallowed up by their winter clothes. No one outside the Blackbird had penetrated his consciousness far enough to leave more than a faint impression.
He went to the window. From the sun-dried slopes, crossed with lift lines and dotted with dusty snowplows, the mountains stretched north for hundreds of miles. Though the hills and valleys were covered with trees, they felt barren to Julian, motionless and devoid of life. He wished he’d come back in the wintertime, to see the mountains caked with snow and everyone outside enjoying it.
Kate went on.
“So they thought maybe she was trying to stop the fight and shot Rory by accident, then blamed Eric for what happened and killed him, too.”
“And where was she?” Emma said. “Your friend?”
“Upstairs, in her bed. Shot through the heart. The gun was still in her hand.” Kate’s gaze fixed on him. “Julian’s gun, actually.”
Emma looked at Julian doubtfully, and Kate laughed.
“He was with me at the time,” she said. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
“So it was all an accident, in a way,” Emma said. “Why do people always fight when they go on vacation?”
“Oh, they weren’t on vacation.” The computer had booted up, and Kate sat down in front of it. “They owned this place, the three of them together. They were in the process of renovating to turn it into a B&B. There was a little tray of spackling paste in the kitchen, still wet. Celia had been prepping the walls for a coat of paint when the trouble started.”
“What were they fighting about? Money?” Emma looked disappointed, as if the ghost story had let her down.
“That’s a good question. The only question that matters, really. But it wasn’t money. They weren’t like that. No one could understand what had changed, why they suddenly imploded that way. It didn’t make sense.”
A memory crept into Julian’s mind: a dead sparrow in the grass, its legs curled like dried twigs, and the revulsion on Celia’s face as she looked at it. Celia hated death. She was terrified by it. Yet she’d taken her own life and the lives of her two best friends. She loved them and she killed them and she killed herself. What they were fighting about didn’t explain a thing.
Across the room, a jingle. Kate was trying to give them a room key.
“No,” he said. “I told you—we’re going to the Adelaide.”
“Oh, but I want to stay here,” Emma said. “Maybe we’ll see a ghost.”
Kate handed her the key. Emma turned to him, grinning, dangling the key chain over her thumb.
“Why did you buy this place?” he said. “What was the point?”
