The Undoing

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?”

Kate sat back, light from the computer washing over her face.

“I don’t know, Julian. I guess I just couldn’t let it go.”

He held his face impassive, but his throat was tight with grief and something akin to fear. He picked up their bags. They seemed much lighter now than they had ten minutes ago; he could barely feel them.

As they reached the foot of the winding staircase, Emma paused to look back.

“What were they like?” she said.

“Oh,” Kate said, as if this was something she’d never considered. “They were...”

Silence crept into the room. From far away, Julian could hear the echo of laughter, the bright crackle of the fire, a murmur of music and voices.

Dead. All dead, and they had taken him with them.

Kate turned her head toward the kitchen, the half-open door. Her answer came just as Emma started up the stairs, leaving only Julian to hear.

“They were really young.”

* * *

Kate stayed at her desk as Julian and his girlfriend disappeared into the upstairs hallway. She could hear the girl’s voice, still chattering, exclaiming over the old hotel, and Julian’s grumbled responses. A door opened and closed, leaving Kate alone in the silence.

For a few minutes she sat where she was, staring out the window. A blue jay hopped along the gnarled branch of a spruce tree, tipping its head to get a look at her. She imagined herself from the bird’s point of view, framed by the windowpanes, alone at her desk, how she’d still be here when the bird looked down from high above.

I’m lonely, she thought, surprised.

She opened the right-hand drawer of the desk. Under some folders and a stack of bills, she found a photograph, still in its heart-shaped frame. Eric had taken that picture. She remembered looking back at him, with the whole snowy mountain laid out at their feet and Julian’s arm snug around her shoulders. Both of them grinning so hard at some joke of Eric’s, Celia and Rory flanking the camera, doubled over with laughter. She wished she could remember what they all had found so funny, two months before the laughter died.

She had hardly recognized Julian today, he’d changed so much. Even his voice, once smooth and self-assured, now had climbed in pitch and developed a petulant whine like a child’s. And his face, though still tanned as it was in the photograph, seemed sallow and pinched, with a furrow between his brows and a strange new habit of dragging his gaze around the room as if the sight of it exhausted him.

She wondered what Julian had been doing over the past five years. The last time she saw him was the night of the murders, when he had taken her home with some vague promise to check on her the next day. But he never did that. Like the others, he was simply gone.

She had heard about him from time to time: Julian was in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia. Hot places, sunny and flat. An odd itinerary for a skier.

She had nearly forgotten him until last winter, when she’d run into Zig Campanelli at a bar in Telluride. Zig was Julian’s best friend—if Julian had one of those. They had known each other since they were teenagers. It would have seemed strange not to ask after him, and after a few minutes she did. But even Zig seemed puzzled by the changes in Julian.

“He’s not skiing anymore,” Zig said. “Hasn’t for years. I don’t know whether he busted something important or got bored or what. Last time I heard from him, he was in Bali, said he was sick of the snow. That’s all I could get out of him. He sounded...”

“What?”

But Zig only shook his head.

* * *

“This is it,” Emma said. She shut the door behind them and leaned back with an ecstatic sigh. “This is where she died. I can feel it.”

The buzz in Julian’s ears had built to a dull roar. Who was this girl to say she felt something from Celia? As if she knew anything at all about what had happened, had even a sliver of an idea what it was all about. He ground his teeth in anger.

Shut up. Stupid girl.

What had he been thinking to bring her here? Here, of all places. She was nobody special, a friend of a friend, the tail end of a long chain of acquaintances that had started, as far as he could remember, with his buddy Zig Campanelli. The two of them had worked together for a time at ESPN and maintained a sporadic friendship over the years, which was built more on a mutual need for points of contact than true affection.

Zig had a way of introducing Julian that set them both up for admirers.

“This is my good friend Julian Moss,” he’d say. “Used to make a living carving up the ski slopes, kicking my ass most of the time. Swept the championships more than once, went to the Games and came home with a bronze in downhill. Then somebody noticed he’s not all that bad-looking, under the helmet.” Here he’d give Julian a friendly little clap on the shoulder. “My boss gave him a job anchoring the championships at ESPN. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

And he’d saunter off, drink in hand, leaving Julian with another chance to parlay that biography into something truly worthwhile.

Julian hadn’t seen Zig in years, but, like the Olympic medal, he was the gift that kept on giving. When Julian had surfaced again in Colorado three weeks before, there wasn’t a scene in which he wouldn’t have known someone who knew someone else.

In fact it was Emma, her girlfriends giggling and clutching at each other in the background, who had approached him. They must have talked at some point, to some end, but if so the conversation had been so perfunctory that he couldn’t remember a word of it. She was in his bed the next morning. He had fucked her and she was willing to be fucked again and was not inclined to complain about the fact that his head was not with her for a moment. He was a status lay for her. The thrill, if there was one, was in his name.

It was a fair trade. When he asked her later that day to come up here with him, she agreed happily, possibly imagining herself as Julian Moss’s girlfriend, a further bump in status. She could write about it on Facebook, or send a Tweet, or whatever was the latest venue for the humblebrag: Driving up to Telluride with Julian. First time in an F-Type, OMG!!!

She was entitled to that. It was his end of the trade. He was aware that the ache in his jaw was not Emma’s fault. She couldn’t help the nasal drone of her voice or the fact that it bored into his ear like a hungry beetle. It was irrational to blame her when she was clearly doing her best. But every time he looked at her vapid face—features so like Celia’s but put together all wrong—he wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake until something came loose.

He set down the suitcases and walked slowly back to her. Emma gazed up with a fatuous smile as if she thought she was too goddamned irresistible for words. He unbuttoned her shirt. She was wearing some sort of push-up bra, with a hard lace-encrusted pad that scratched his palm.

Celia had never worn anything under her shirt. The shallow swell of her breast made barely a ripple in her clothing, so he supposed she didn’t need one. But he’d once caught a peek through the armhole of a loose-fitting blouse, where her ribs laddered up the side of her bare chest, and he’d sprung so fast he had to leave the room.

“Take your pants off,” he said to Emma. She wriggled out of her jeans and stood against the wall with her hip cocked, grinning as if she expected him to take her picture.

He put his hand between her legs. Right away she started to sigh and coo, wriggled into his hand with that eager camera-smile on her face, cupping her breasts in her hands so that the ridge of her implants stood out beneath her skin.

An easy girl. The kind of girl he used to enjoy. He’d tell her what to do and she’d go along, eager to please, those vacant, colorless eyes blinking up at him while she sucked him off like she’d seen the pretty girls do on cable TV. She might throw in some move of her own, some tease of her fingers across his balls or a knuckle to the perineum, something she’d read about in Cosmo and could claim for her own. Probably she’d swallow when he came, going mmmm like his semen was the best thing since mint chocolate chip. And it would be good for the moment. But in a week or a month, she would recede with the rest of them, who existed in his memory like the cities in a traveler’s diary, dreamlike and insubstantial but determinedly annotated:

—the dreadlocked woman whose breasts dripped like ripe fruit into his open mouth (Burning Man, milk lady)

—the French virgin with skin so dark she seemed to melt into the shadows, disembodied, her scent mingling with the briny perfume of the sea (Samudra Beach, Venus blunt—holy fuck what was in that?)

—that sloe-eyed whore who gave him head in Amsterdam, whose little-girl voice had sent him running, terrified, back to the rose-tinted sidewalks and right the hell out of town (blue pigtails, Daddy issues)

Et cetera, et cetera.

And now Emma. He searched her face for something to remember her by. A few freckles on her nose, glitter in her mascara and nail polish. He kept glancing away, then quickly back, as if he could startle her face into his memory by sneaking up on it.

After a moment she pulled away, frowning. “Are you okay?”

He tried to smile.

“I’ll be more okay if you get on your knees.”

She grinned, confidence restored. Everything would be okay, her expression implied, once he’d done her. And she might be right about that.

Assuming, of course, that he could get it up. At the moment he felt nothing, nothing at all. His body was curiously soft, vacant as Emma’s blond head, the blood floating down his arms and legs without the faintest inclination to gather and pool into a hard-on. Even when she unzipped his jeans and took him in her hand...

Nothing.

Maybe it was the Blackbird. Being in Celia’s room, with this girl who could be described on paper in similar terms but was as unlike Celia in personality as it was possible to be. The woman he remembered, eccentric as she was on the surface, was even more so underneath. There was a quiet force to Celia, a sense of the unknowable. She was real, warm, terrifyingly alive.

Only she wasn’t anymore. Now she was only bones, or maybe ash. He wished he’d thought to ask Kate what they’d done with Celia’s body. He could have visited the cemetery to see her name carved in stone. He could have learned her middle name, her birthday. He could finally have brought her flowers.

None of these ruminations was going to solve the immediate problem. He stepped back, zipped up his jeans and pulled Emma to her feet.

“Sorry,” he said.

“What happened? You were really into it yesterday.”

“Into it. Yeah.”

“We were doing good. I mean, that thing you did in the elevator...”

“Yeah, you liked that?”

“I liked that we might get caught.” She eased forward, one hand on the front of his jeans. “I wanted to, kind of. I like being watched. It feels like that here, doesn’t it? Like the ghosts might be watching...”

“Nobody’s watching,” he snapped.

“There could be. You were here then. You met them. Maybe they know you’re back—maybe they can see us. I’m pretty intuitive, my mom always said so. Maybe I can call them.”

He caught her hand and pushed it away. “You might be the least intuitive person I have ever met.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Her head tilted to one side. Though there was a fighting spirit in the words themselves, her eyes were big and soft, head tilted again in that befuddled way, as if she couldn’t quite believe he meant to insult her.

Julian felt a rush of words surge up his throat, unstoppable and bitter as bile.

“It means that I couldn’t be less ‘into it’ if you paid me. If you were swinging a dick. If yours were the last pair of plastic tits on planet Earth and if yours was the last ass I could ever grab and if you were the owner of the last hole between the last pair of legs, I still would not be ‘into it.’”

Her face crumpled, as suddenly and completely as a child’s. Tears welled up at the rims of her wide-open eyes and rolled in wavy gray lines down her cheeks, bearing specks of glitter in their wake.

Julian raised his eyes to the ceiling.

“Why did you even bring me here?” she said.

He dug his car keys from the pocket of his jeans and held them out to her.

“No idea,” he said. “Go home. You can take my car.”

“I—I can’t drive your c-car. Where would I leave—” She teetered around the room, pulling on her clothes, hopping into a boot.

“It doesn’t matter. Go home.”

“How can I—”

“Get out,” he roared, and she snatched the keys from his hand and darted out the door. He heard her feet pounding down the hallway, and she was gone.

Julian stood for a minute looking down at the bed. He smoothed the covers, straightened the pillows and tucked the bedspread underneath. This wasn’t Celia’s bed, he realized now. Her room had looked much different from this, filled with candles and books, and her mattress sat right on the floor without a frame and with only an old door for a headboard. She had a piece of fine silk hung on the wall, embroidered with brightly colored birds sporting long tails that curled like bouquets of flowers at the ends. He had asked where she found it.

“A friend gave it to me,” she said. “This nice old guy who used to come in for coffee every afternoon—black, no sugar, no nothing. He liked to talk. He told me stories about the Blackbird, people he remembered from when he was young.”

That was her. That was Celia all over. He imagined her nodding gently, encouraging the old man’s nostalgia, revealing nothing about herself.

His throat ached. He couldn’t lie here in Celia’s room, where she’d lived and fucked and wept and died. The walls still smelled like her, that peculiar warm scent of her, that smoky vanilla mixture of sex and incense and Celia’s own sweet skin.

He went out to the hallway, down the row of doors. Four on each side, counting the one he’d closed behind him. A tiny hotel by anyone’s standards, but Celia had dreamed of it since she was a little girl. She and Rory and Eric had played here as children during the years when the hotel stood vacant, and Celia had fallen in love. He imagined her wandering down this hallway, her tawny hair made dark by the shadows, fingers trailing along the walls. She would have skipped down the curved staircase, her little feet pattering on the floor. She would have been humming, craning her neck at the pine trees outside the leaded windows. Would have laid her hand on this very banister and felt the smooth wood warm to her touch.

Later, after Eric had bought the place, they had stripped the pine floors and waxed them to a lustrous amber glow. Celia brought in low couches lined with pillows and blankets in rich colors and contrasting patterns and arranged them around the river-stone fireplace with a copper-sheathed coffee table at the center—a contribution from Rory, a nod to the hotel’s mining days. Everywhere there were candles and old brass lamps, dropping pools of golden light that flickered and danced when anyone walked by, and from the ceiling hung a chandelier made of elk antlers. But the brightest light came from the fireplace itself, and this was where they gathered every night after dinner, cradling cups of mulled wine or cold mugs of beer. Rory always sat nearest the fire, stirring at it lazily with a long green stick. Then Kate in the chair next to him, and Julian directly across. Celia would stretch out on the divan, facing the hearth, her long legs draped across Eric’s lap, her eyes sparkling with firelight.

Sometimes, rarely, Eric would bring Celia her guitar and she’d play them a song. She had a book of old children’s poems and had composed some simple melodies around them.

My age is three hundred and seventy-two,

And I think, with the deepest regret,

How I used to pick up and voraciously chew

The dear little boys whom I met.

I’ve eaten them raw, in their holiday suits;

I’ve eaten them curried with rice;

I’ve eaten them baked, in their jackets and boots,

And found them exceedingly nice.

But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare,

I think it exceedingly rude

To do such a thing, when I’m quite well aware

Little boys do not like to be chewed.

She was not particularly musical and the chords were uncertain, but her voice carried with it a sort of enchantment that held him frozen and breathless, hardly daring to blink. She had a slow, throaty drawl, a holdover from her father’s Cajun heritage, and she’d set the melody to a gentle waltz rhythm that rocked her body in small circles as she played. He remembered thinking that she should have been somebody’s muse, an artist’s lover, but had the misfortune to be born and raised among athletes.

He would have watched her for hours. But she’d see something in his face and she’d hesitate, pressing her fingers flat over the strings to silence them.

The fireplace was dark now, and the room had been redecorated. The velvet divan had been replaced by a leather sofa, so slick and firm that he almost slid out of it when he sat down. The side tables were ye olde lodge style, made of logs and twigs; a pristine iron coffee table had been sanded around the edges to make it look worn. Celia’s collection of local art had been replaced by matted nature prints in thick frames, and next to the door, a brass plaque declaimed no smoking in neat black letters. No copper bin full of logs, no scent of pine sap in the air—and, cruelest of all, the hearth had been fitted with an electric fire and a pile of fake ceramic logs.

Julian crossed his arms to warm himself. He hadn’t realized the hotel would be so different. In a thousand years he wouldn’t have guessed that it now belonged to Kate Vaughn.

I couldn’t let it go, she’d said, and that much he did understand. This had been a magical place with Celia in it. But the hotel was dead now. Celia had gone cold inside these walls and she was gone.

Julian leaned his head back on the unforgiving sofa and closed his eyes.

* * *

In the morning, he walked to the gas station, the only one in Jawbone Ridge. He bought a red plastic gas can and filled it at the pump.

A pickup truck had stopped beside him. The driver, a young man with sleep-flattened hair, asked if Julian needed a ride.

“No, thanks,” Julian said. “I don’t have far to go.”

Back up the hill. His feet pounded a rhythm on the gravel, the weight of his body seeming to be all in his feet while his head and torso floated helium-light up the curve of the road. To his right, the mountain rose in scrubby lumps of rock and patches of grass, where a season’s worth of pine seedlings bristled in soft pale green swaths across the earth. The ground fell steeply away left of the road, then rose again in bounding ridges along the banks of Deer Creek. He could hear the water moving—not in a rush of snowmelt, but with the runoff from an overnight storm, the water flowing rapidly in humps of white and brown.

He rounded the last bend in the road and started up the long, steep drive to the vacant Blackbird Hotel.

The first time he’d come here, it was with Celia alone. He had been familiar with nearby Telluride, having trained and competed there several times over the years, but had never found a reason to go around Bald Mountain and turn up the side road for Jawbone Ridge. But when he started seeing Kate, and spending time with her circle of friends, he began to be curious about the place. He wanted to see for himself what was going on inside the Blackbird Hotel.