A January Chill

He was taking care of her again, the way he’d always tried to in the old days. Part of her wanted to resent it, and part of her was touched that he still cared enough to do it, even after all these long years.

A few minutes later he returned with two sheafs of papers. One was her copy, carefully restapled at the corner. The other, unstapled, was clearly his copy.

“There,” he said, returning hers. “Look, this isn’t some kind of morality attack, is it?”

Confused, she looked at him. “Morality?”

“Yeah. You’re not on some moral high horse, thinking that you’re going to teach us all to be better people, are you?”

“No. God no! I’m not that conceited.”

“No?” He put his palms on the table and leaned toward her, looking straight at her. “Then what is this, Joni? Are you saying our feelings aren’t valid? That Witt doesn’t have a right to be angry with me? That I don’t have a right to feel it’s better to avoid the man?”

She felt hurt, because she didn’t at all like the way he seemed to be seeing her. Her eyes started stinging, and her throat tightened up. Pressing her lips together, she snatched up the envelope, stuffed the papers into it and headed for the door, picking up her jacket as she went.

“Joni…”

She didn’t want to look at him, but something made her turn around anyway. “I think…I think I’m ashamed of my behavior,” she said thickly. “I think I’ve let Karen down. You and I were friends, Hardy. We were friends.”

Hardy stood at his open door, watching her dash down the street. Not until she stopped and pulled on her jacket did he close the door.

Damn her, he thought almost savagely. Damn her eyes. What was she doing, shaking all this old stuff out of the woodwork at this late date? What was she hoping to accomplish? Did she think some miracle was going to occur if he entered his bid? Did she think Witt was going to forget all his anger and bitterness just because Hardy Wingate could build a better hotel?

Not bloody likely.

“Shit!” He swore under his breath so his mother wouldn’t be disturbed. He could almost hate Joni right now. She’d dangled a plum under his nose, something he would have given his eyeteeth to do, something that would have put him in a position to take his mother to Hawaii.

And considering that Barbara wasn’t doing well at all, he desperately wanted to give her that trip. Since her pneumonia she’d been so frail, even needed a wheelchair some of the time. Her lungs had been damaged, leaving her breathless after even mild exertion. He needed to get her to a lower altitude, but she refused to go.

Swearing softly once more, he grabbed the bid packet from the table and went back to his office. A spacious two rooms he’d added to the house, it was like another world: gleaming real-wood paneling, wide picture windows looking out onto a snowy, night-darkened backyard, a freestanding fireplace. Worktables, model tables, drafting boards, two computers…

It was his eyrie. His escape. His dream-place. When he was here, he forgot everything except creating.

On the model table right now was the project he’d been working on for the last couple of months despite himself: a lodge for Witt Matlock. He had decided to fly in the face of the conventional for this one. Instead of following the Vail and Aspen trend toward Alpine looks in redwood and cedar, he’d chosen to carry the Victorian charm of Whisper Creek into the hotel. High spires, lots of gingerbread, a porch that wrapped around. Beautiful.

Lines that sang. A creation that deserved to be realized.

He stretched out his arm and prepared to knock the whole thing to the floor, to wipe out the insane dream that Joni had planted in his brain.

But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he dropped onto a stool and simply sat staring at the model. Seeing it not as it was, but as it could be when finished. Somebody else could build it, he told himself. It didn’t have to be Witt. Some other investor would come along, especially if Witt built a lodge.

That was what Witt probably wanted. A long, low building, the rustic log-cabin type. A male sort of retreat. That would be like Witt, to want something of that kind, not this Victorian froufrou.

But he knew he was lying to himself. He was lying to himself about a lot of things, and had been for many years. It was a poor excuse, realizing that deluding himself was the only way he could remain sane.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he clenched his fists and wondered why he couldn’t just keep on pretending. Wondered why Joni had suddenly decided she had to take action when this whole mess had been carefully buried years ago.

Did she suspect? he wondered. Had she always suspected at some unconscious level? And if Joni had, had Karen? And maybe Witt?

It was something he’d never really admitted to himself, and sometimes, over the past twelve years, he’d managed to convince himself he was imagining the whole thing.

But the heavy weight of guilt in his heart didn’t let him fool himself that easily. It wouldn’t let him forget for long.

The night he’d taken Karen out, the night she’d been killed…he’d begun thinking about breaking up with her.

Because he’d just started to realize that he was falling for someone else.

And that someone else had been Joni.

4

The drive to Denver took nearly four hours, even with the high speed limit on the interstate highway. Witt was impatient all the way, and glad of Hannah’s company to keep him distracted.

“I still don’t understand why you want me to come with you,” Hannah said as they were at last traveling through the suburbs, passing the Westminster exits.

“It’s simple,” he said, as he had yesterday when he’d insisted she ride shotgun. “I want a second opinion on the proposals.”

“But I don’t know anything about hotels, Witt.”

“But you know the kind of place you’d like to stay in if you were taking a vacation in the mountains.”

“I doubt that.” She looked at him with a vaguely amused smile. “It’s one woman’s opinion, Witt.”

“It’s one more than just mine.”

“Aren’t these things decided on the basis of cost?”

“Partly. That has to be taken into account, of course. But whatever it costs, I want to be sure it’s appealing.” He didn’t want some boxy-looking place that could be any one of a hundred other motels and hotels in the state. “I want something special.”

She nodded and settled back in her seat. Out of deference to her, Witt had troubled to lay a metal sheet across the floorboards so the wind of their travel wouldn’t be blowing up through the holes.

Hannah had never criticized his truck, unlike Joni, who was apt to tease him mercilessly about it. But Hannah didn’t seem to have very high expectations, which he found a little strange in a woman who’d been married to a doctor. Instead, she seemed content with whatever she had, meager though it might be. And she never criticized his truck.

“I’m still gonna get that new truck,” he told her, for some reason needing to know how she would react.

“I imagine you’ll enjoy that,” she said.

“Wouldn’t you be more comfortable?”

Her dark gaze settled on him. He could feel it, even though he wasn’t looking at her. He’d always been able to feel Hannah’s gaze. “If I was worried about that, we could have taken my Jeep.”

He kept his eyes on the road. “Seems like you could worry a little more about such things, Hannah. Look after your comfort a bit better.”

“I’m content.”

That was what she always said, that she was content. And he always wondered whether to believe her. Maybe she was just trying to convince herself. Or maybe she meant it. God knew he had no way of knowing the truth.

The lawyer’s office was on a quiet street, in a professional building full of doctors and other lawyers, and surrounded by older residences. Jim Loeb’s office was on the second floor, a spacious suite that suggested he did quite well in business and real estate law. A very ordinary man with brown hair and eyes, his wide smile saved him from being plain.

He shook Witt’s hand warmly and didn’t even blink when Witt introduced Hannah as his business partner. Hannah did, though. She opened her mouth as if she wanted to argue the point, then closed it tightly.

“How do the bids look?” Witt asked when they were all seated with cups of coffee.

“Well…” Jim sighed. “I was hoping for a larger response. Apparently a lot of firms don’t want to get tangled up in jobs in such a small, out-of-the-way town. But we did get three, and they all look pretty good to me.”

He opened a large portfolio on his desk and passed some eleven-by-seventeen color drawings to Witt. “These are from the first bidder.”

“Not too bad,” Witt muttered as he looked at the half-timbered Tudor-style structure. “But not exactly exciting.”

Jim nodded. “I know. But given the price constraints…well, I think this bid was off-the-shelf, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah. Something these folks have done before. What’s next?”

The next was a log cabin-style structure, two stories high, looking like a piece of Fort Laramie. Witt actually liked that better. At least it had rustic charm. Hannah wasn’t exactly thrilled, though. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t seem especially interested. “Okay. And the last one?”

“This one’s interesting,” Jim said. “It came from someone we didn’t approach. I guess one of the other prospectives must have turned it over to him. Anyway, I checked on him. He’s solid, even if he is relatively new to the business. And he seems downright eager. Come on, I’ll show you.”

He took them down a short hall into another room where a polished conference table held a scale model of a two-story Victorian structure that looked like a grand hotel out of the past.

“Ohh…” said Hannah.

Witt couldn’t mistake her enthusiasm, even though she said nothing more. Of course, he had nearly thirty years of learning to read that often-inscrutable face of hers. There was a smile in her dark eyes, just a subtle hint around the corners.

He looked at the model again and admitted to himself that he kind of liked the fact that the architect had gone all out, building a model rather than relying on drawings. He liked the idea that the guy apparently really wanted the job.

But he was no pushover. “Can I afford this?”

“Actually,” said Jim, “you can. The bid’s reasonable, well within what the bank’s willing to go with.”

“I don’t know.” He wasn’t quite sure why he was resisting. “I wasn’t thinking Victorian.”

Hannah broke her silence. “It would fit with the rest of the town.”

It would. It would fit perfectly. Especially with the Main Street improvement project that had resulted in Victorian streetlights and brick sidewalks.

He walked slowly around the table, looking at the model, which was painted in the candy colors so popular on Victorians. “It’s cheerful,” he said finally.

“It’s beautiful,” said Hannah, then clapped a hand to her mouth as if she were talking out of turn.

“That’s why I brought you along,” Witt said. “Talk to me, Hannah.”

“The others are ordinary, Witt. This would be a landmark.”

Surprisingly, Jim nodded. “Might even get you some coverage in the major papers and some magazines. And look at this.” Bending over the table, he swung back part of the model, opening one of the wings for inspection. Inside were the rooms, a few of them even decorated with fancy doll furniture, rugs and fixtures.

“Wow,” said Hannah, a smile curving her mouth. “Can I take this home and play with it?”

Jim laughed, and Witt had to grin. “Some dollhouse, huh? Well, if I decide to go with this guy, you get to keep the model.”

Hannah colored faintly. “I don’t have anyplace to put it, Witt. I was just being enthusiastic.”

“You’ll have a place to put it,” he said with a firmness that had her looking strangely at him.

“Okay,” Witt said, looking at the model again, trying to wrap his preconceived ideas around this unexpected model of his future. Hannah liked it, and that was a big plus as far as he was concerned. “It’s got the owner’s apartments and everything?”

“It does,” Jim confirmed.

“And you’re sure this guy is okay?”

“I checked him out. He’s only been in the business solo for five years, but he hasn’t had any problems. His clients seem to be happy. He has a reputation for keeping on schedule and on budget.”

“Sounds good. And the overall price?”

“Smack between the log cabin and the Tudor style.”

“Hmm.” He couldn’t reject it on those grounds, then.

“Witt?” Hannah spoke. “What’s wrong? Don’t you like it?”

“It’s just not what I had in mind. I’m going to have to think about it.”

“What don’t you like?”

“Nothing. Really. It’s just I wasn’t planning on Victorian.” A silly thing to be resistant about, especially when Hannah seemed to like the design.

“Well,” she said, “it has to be your decision.”

Jim spoke. “If you don’t like any of them, Witt, we can put out requests for more bids. Acceptance is contingent on you liking the designs, as well as on the financial side of it.”

“It’s not that I don’t like it,” Witt said again, feeling a little beleaguered. “Maybe it’s the colors. Wouldn’t all white with black shutters look better?”

“More traditional, certainly,” Jim agreed.

“Let’s take a look at the bids, okay?”

Jim nodded and led them back to his office. He’d pulled out the salient parts of all the bid packages and had them ready for Witt to look at without the boilerplate in the way.

Witt read through the first two slowly, making mental notes about the time lines, about the lists of materials, thinking about all the little details these guys had considered, things he might never have thought about if he’d spent a year working on something like this.

The he turned to the final bid, the one for the Victorian. And he saw the name at the top of it.

“Hardy Wingate?” he said, his voice muffled. Beside him, he could feel Hannah stiffen.

Jim looked at him, his brow furrowing. “Is something wrong?”

“Yeah,” said Witt, tossing the papers down on Jim’s desk. “I wouldn’t do business with that jerk if he was the last architect on the planet. I’ll think about the other two, Jim. I’ll call you in a day or two.”

He and Hannah were in the car climbing back into the mountains before he spoke again. “I’m sorry, I forgot I was going to buy you lunch.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He nodded once, briefly, then pounded the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “Goddamn it! How the hell did Hardy get hold of that bid package?”

Hannah spoke uncertainly. “You heard what Jim said. One of the other firms must have passed it along to him.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” But his gut was burning, and he didn’t want to think it was all as simple as that. “Imagine him having the gall to bid!”

Hannah folded her hands in her lap. “He put an awful lot of work into it.”

“And why the hell did he do that? He must’ve known I was going to turn him down.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s no maybe about it.” He glared at her, as if she were somehow at fault, then slapped his hand against the steering wheel once more.

“Witt…”

He hated it when she did that, starting to speak, then checking herself, leaving him wondering what the hell she had decided to say. But he knew from long experience that pressing her wasn’t going to get her to spit it out.

“Damn it,” he said again, and turned off the highway. “I’m getting lunch. Son of a bitch thinks I’m going to hire him to build my lodge after he killed my daughter?”

“Maybe not,” Hannah said quietly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe he doesn’t expect anything at all from you. Maybe he just has dreams, too, Witt.”

“Well, fuck him.”

Neither of them said another word until they stopped at a fast-food place and ordered chicken. Hannah had her usual thigh with coleslaw. Witt, who burned calories faster in the mine than he could sometimes eat them, ordered two breasts, mashed potatoes and gravy, biscuits and baked beans.

They took a table in a quiet corner. The place wasn’t busy, probably because it was the middle of the afternoon. Halfway through his first chicken breast, Witt looked up. “He did it just to tweak my nose.”

Hannah, who was nibbling at her coleslaw, merely looked at him.

“Well, what the hell else could he be up to?”

“Maybe,” she said carefully, “he just wants the job. Or maybe it’s an olive branch.”

“Olive branch! Hah! He should never have taken Karen out behind my back.”

“Maybe not. But you need to remember that she was your daughter, and she chose to go with him even when you forbade it.”

“She wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been urging her.”

“Mmm.” Hannah said no more. Instead, she filled her mouth with a spoonful of slaw.

God, Witt thought, he hated it when she went inscrutable on him. That “Mmm” said volumes. She didn’t agree with him but wasn’t going to say so. Ordinarily he could ignore that kind of stuff from her, but today he was itching for a fight so badly he could hardly stand it. And Hardy Wingate was nowhere around to fight with. Which left Hannah. And what did that say about him?

“Sorry,” he grumbled, and attacked his second piece of chicken. The food, which he ordinarily enjoyed, tasted like sawdust today. For a bit, he stared out the window beside him, noticing that dark clouds were gathering over the mountains to the west. Apparently the clear sunny day was about to give way to some more snow. Well, that was fine by him. The way he was feeling, getting snowed in would suit him just fine.

He tried to tell himself he shouldn’t feel so bent, but he felt bent anyway. It wasn’t as if Hardy Wingate had done anything new to him. All the guy had done was set himself up for a major disappointment. Asking to get kicked, really.

So what maggot was gnawing Hardy’s brain, anyway? For all the nasty things Witt had thought about Hardy over the years, he’d never thought the guy was stupid. And this was stupid. Had he thought he was going to slip one by, that maybe Witt wouldn’t notice who the bidder was?

He would have liked to think Hardy was that underhanded, but in his mind’s eye he could still see the pages of the bid, every one clearly marked Hardy Wingate, Architect.

No, he hadn’t been trying to pull a fast one.

“Olive branch?” he said, returning his gaze to Hannah.

She was holding her foam coffee cup in both hands, her lunch barely touched. “Yes,” she said.

He sometimes hated her calm and her monosyllabic answers. Sometimes he wished she would get all ruffled. Angry, even. He’d only seen her that way once, but afterward it had been as if all the doors had shut. Probably better that way, for both of them, but a guy could wish.

“Well,” he said, “it’s a hell of a way to do it. And I don’t give a damn, anyhow. My daughter’s dead, and I’m not likely to forget that fact.”

“Of course you’re not.”

He barely heard her agreement, because he could almost, but not quite, hear the three or four sentences she hadn’t spoken. “What are you thinking?”

Hannah shook her head and sipped her coffee. “It’s a pretty hotel.”

“Too fuckin’ bad.”

“Witt, please.”

“Sorry.” He knew Hannah didn’t like that word, but he was that mad. Mad because he had a feeling someone was trying an end run around him, and he didn’t like that feeling. Mad because he had a gut-deep suspicion that Hardy hadn’t come up with this harebrained idea on his own. Hardy was definitely not that stupid.

But then, his opinion of Hardy Wingate had never been that low. Even back when he’d objected to Karen dating him, he hadn’t thought Hardy was all that bad. A little wild, like most boys his age, but not as wild as some. It was just that at the time, given Hardy’s background, Witt had feared the boy wasn’t going anywhere, and he hadn’t wanted Karen to tie herself down to some miner. He’d wanted better things for her.

And he’d feared that Hardy’s character hadn’t been fully set yet, and that he might turn out to be a twig off his father’s tree. A useless alcoholic. Hadn’t turned out that way, obviously, but Witt didn’t have a crystal ball. He’d just wanted what was best for Karen.

But Karen was dead, and he held Wingate directly responsible, and he wasn’t going to make any excuses for that. None at all.

And he sure as hell wasn’t going to give the guy a million-dollar job. Jesus, no. Every time he saw Hardy, all he could think of was Karen.

Hannah stirred, and Witt looked at her, asking, “Aren’t you going to eat?”

“Somehow I don’t have much appetite when you get mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

She shook her head.

“Okay, so I’m mad. Except that…that’s not exactly the word I would use, Hannah.”

She sipped her coffee and nodded encouragingly, but he didn’t have any more to say. Finally she said, “Maybe you’re not as angry as you are hurt.”

He shied away from that. It sounded weak, somehow. “The hurt was a long time ago.”

“That isn’t what I meant.” But, as usual, she wouldn’t tell him what she had meant. That was Hannah. Like talking to a goddamn riddle.

He sighed in irritation and shoved his lunch aside, his appetite long since gone. Reaching for the coffee he still hadn’t touched, he popped a hole in the plastic lid, then swore when it burned his tongue. Some days he felt cursed, and this was turning into one of them.

It didn’t help when he realized Hannah was looking amused. “What’s so funny?” he demanded.

“Not a thing.”

“Quit lying to me.”

Her amusement faded, but she didn’t answer directly. “Sometimes,” she said, “folks start acting like flies caught in a spiderweb. Twisting this way and that and just getting more stuck.”

Witt didn’t like that image one bit, especially since he had the niggling suspicion she might be right about him. “What are you saying?” The question was truculent, and he expected that in her usual way she would avoid answering. She surprised him.

“Look into your heart, Witt. Do what you know is right.”

And the way she said “right” let him know that she didn’t mean he should do what he felt like doing. Funny how doing the right think was often the wrong thing in terms of how you felt about it.

“I am doing the right thing. I ain’t letting any murderer build my hotel.”

For once her face wasn’t inscrutable. It was downright disapproving. Right now he didn’t give a damn. Right now he wasn’t prepared to nitpick the fine line between murder and killing, or the one between deliberate and accidental. Because the result was always the same, regardless: Karen was still dead.

Joni beat her mother home by about twenty minutes, so she started making lasagne. As a rule, she hated cooking, but there were times, like now, when the routine and rhythm of it could soothe her. She desperately needed soothing.

All day she’d been acutely aware that Witt and Hannah had gone to Denver to review the bids. She had no idea if Hardy had bid and couldn’t even guess what Witt’s response would be if he had. Would Witt suspect her involvement? Part of her hoped not, while another part of her scolded herself for being spineless. She ought to just fess up and have it out with Witt.

But now that she’d taken the drastic action of trying to mend fences with Hardy, all she could think about was how much she loved Witt.

She browned some hamburger, then dumped store-bought spaghetti sauce into the pot with it to simmer. She put the water on to boil for the pasta and stirred the ricotta mixture in a blue bowl.

Then, for a bit, she had nothing to do but wait, and waiting gave her time to think. For a week now she’d been trying to avoid that, but life wasn’t cooperating.

She loved Witt. She loved him at least as much as she’d loved her father. He’d been a good uncle before her father’s death, and she’d adored him, but from the day she and Hannah had moved up here, after Lewis was killed, Witt had stood in for her dad.