Summitt

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The Selbys’ hotel in Switzerland was near Lake Geneva in the foothills of the Jungfrau. At dusk, banks of clouds gathered around the peaks but in the morning the sunlight broke through like splendid yellow lances.

The village had no name; it was a suburb, a cluster of buildings on the narrow road between the towns of Zweisimmen and St. Stephan.

Their lodge was settled in a valley circled by stands of fir trees and smooth white hills. The main street — there was just the one thoroughfare actually, the others were only lanes or footpaths — that single street was packed deep with snow and lined with a few shops and a pair of open air cafes. The architecture was pleasantly uniform; all the buildings were faced with cream-colored stucco crisscrossed with stained brown timbers. A steepled church stood at the top of the street, where the road forked to St. Stephan. In this season the shop windows were trimmed with holly wreaths and silver bells and brilliant, glittering lights.

Shadows deepened in the cafes as the last sunlight slanted over the tallest ridges of the Jungfrau. The hazy light made a dull shine on the steeply pitched red-tile roofs of the village. A few bundled-up tourists were window shopping, but most of the skiers were down from the slopes by now, either resting up in their rooms or sitting about the fireplaces in the lounges. Dogs with thick heavy coats trotted along the sidewalks, stopping as if on schedule for a snack from the few people sitting outside at the open air cafes.

A large horse-drawn sled came down the street, harness bells jingling, bringing in a last group of skiers. The youngsters perched on the high seats laughed and waved like celebrities to the people in the cafes in front of the hotels. Most of the ski lift traffic was routed back and forth in long diesel station wagons, but the huge sled with its hand-painted panels was brought out during the holidays as a reminder of the country’s festive old traditions.

The horses’ hooves thudded rhythmically on the packed snow. Their snorting breath puffed like streams of white smoke from their frosted nostrils. The decorative brass “irons” on their harness straps were relics of a lost craft, delicately worked with tiny figures of knights and hounds and castles.

Shana sat on one of the highest seats of the sled, between two tall teenagers who carried her skis and poles slung over their shoulders. Their laughing voices mingled with the sound of the creaking harness, the pounding hooves and the Angelus bells on the gusting winds.

Selby looked up and smiled at his daughter. He sat in a sidewalk cafe with a pot of chocolate and the British newspapers. Shana laughed and pointed to the young men beside her; they smiled broadly at Selby and pantomimed bowing from the waist and shaking hands.

When the sled stopped, the young men handed Shana’s skis and poles down to her and shouted cheerful goodbyes as she joined her father.

“They’re brothers, Jules and Guy Brizzard,” Shana said, waving back at them as the horses pulled the sled off. Stacking her skis in the hotel’s outdoor rack, she joined her father and took a long swallow from his pewter mug of chocolate. “I had an adventure with them,” she said, turning and smiling after the jingling sled and horses. “I lost a binding on that slope they call Bonne Chance, accurately enough, and took a derriere-over-teakettle spill. I wasn’t hurt but my knee felt funny, so I stuck my skis in the snow, made a cross of them, the international May Day distress signal, you know, and within seconds, really, the Brizzard brothers came swooping down to rescue me.”

She was a pleasure for Selby to look at in a red parka with her blond hair tumbling around her shoulders, glinting now with sun and snowflakes. Her face was pink and tanned with the mountain sun, except where her snow goggles had made a slim white mask across her eyes and cheeks. It gave her an animated and whimsical look, a winter harlequin.

She ate a sugar bun, licked her fingers and drank the rest of his chocolate. Guy and Jules Brizzard were nineteen, she told Selby. They had tucked her skis under their arms, picked her up between them and carried her down the Olympic trail to the lift area, where the doctor said a hot bath was all she’d need, and maybe a day or two off the slopes to rest her knee.

“They’re both studying medicine in Lyon,” she told him. “They’re fantastic skiers. They’d like to come over some time to meet you and have tea with us.” She gave him back his empty cup. “When’s Miss Brett’s train getting in?”

“In about an hour,” Selby said. “I just checked, it’s on time.” Brett had flown to Bern from Paris that afternoon. She was coming over to St. Stephan on the Bern-Montreux Exchange. Selby planned to drive over shortly to meet her.

“I’ve talked to the hotel manager,” he said. “He’s put Brett in the room next to yours, on the floor above Davey and me.”

“Wonderful. We’ll probably talk all night, then we can have a graceful invalid’s breakfast on the terrace. I am an invalid, you know. I can’t ski for two whole days. But we have lots to talk about. She wrote that her sister’s poodle had puppies, six of them, imagine. She’s bringing pictures. They named them after wines and grapes. Pinot, Margaux, Chablis, Merlot — I forget the others. She says they’re absolutely adorable but rascals, into everything. She wondered by the way” — Shana glanced at him — “how Blazer would manage in his dotage with a puppy.”

“Blazer’s only six, what does she mean?”

Shana picked up another sugar bun but put it down again with a resolute gesture. “No, it would spoil dinner,” she said, “and my shrewd intuition tells me dinner might be a celebration of sorts.”

“It will be a pleasure, for sure,” Selby said. “But there’s nothing definite to raise glasses to.”

Davey came out of the hotel then and joined them with the afternoon mail. He had filled out in the last year; he was as tall as Shana now, and had the promise of Selby’s size in his wide hands and knobby shoulders. Shana told him excitedly of her fall on the Bonne Chance — it was now a “desperate, dizzy slide” — and the rescue efforts by the Brizzard brothers.

Selby sorted through the letters. There were household bills, a note from Miss Culpepper for Shana, a statement from the league’s pension plan and a card from Mrs. Cranston.

Everything was fine at home, young Gideen had shoveled out the drive, and some of Shana’s friends had made a Christmas wreath of plastic bones for Blazer’s doghouse. “It sounds all wrong, but it’s really very pretty. The bones are painted red and green,” Mrs. Cranston explained.

Miss Culpepper wrote that she had found some new books on Swiss history that Shana might find of interest but would hold them at the library until the Selbys returned. She concluded with a smattering of local news, which Shana read aloud for Davey’s benefit:

“Muhlenburg beat Bull Run for the regional finals. Normie Bride scored eighteen points. Weather is cold and blowy, with lots of snow. The new management at Brandywine Lakes is making all sorts of changes. They’re mostly young men — by my measure, very young — in their thirties, that is, a team of specialists in community planning from Belgium and South Africa. A good deal of construction is going on...”

Shana dropped the letter and said, “Davey, can you imagine living with Normie Bride if we make the state finals? You know how intense he gets.”

Selby picked up Miss Culpepper’s letter and glanced through it. He put it in the pocket of his duffel coat. It was dark by then, and time to drive down to St. Stephan to meet Brett’s train.

Shana was saying, “Davey, we’re having a party tonight. Miss Brett will be here for dinner. Would you go up to my room, please, and—”

“I know she’ll be here.” Davey’s voice was good-humoredly resigned. “I also know she’s won about three or four hundred medals skiing, and I’m still floundering around on the bunny slopes.”

“You’re doing fine,” Selby assured him. “Remember, she hasn’t been on skis since she was in college. You’ll probably have to help her along until she gets the feel of it again.”

“Davey, listen, please. Will you get my shoulder bag for me? I’ve saved some money from my allowance, lots of francs, and we should buy some fresh flowers for the table tonight. You can order the wine, that will amuse everyone.”

“Very funny, mam’selle.” Davey wasn’t indifferent to his sister’s opinion and occasional sarcasm, but he had lost most of his young sensitivity to it.

“My bag’s on the dressing table,” she told him, “or hanging on the hook in the closet. Or in the drawer with my sweaters, maybe.”

“I’ll get a metal detector and sweep the place,” Davey said, standing and walking into the hotel.

Selby paid the check and they stood and watched the snow drifting heavily into the street, the flakes spinning through the colored lights from the shop windows.

“Daddy, may I ask you something?”

“Why, sure.”

She hesitated. “Is everything okay with you and Brett?”

“I think so, Shana, I think it will be. But there are some things to talk over. Nothing serious from my point of view.” He paused. “Brett finds it hard to put in full perspective any problem or issue. I mean that as a compliment. She doesn’t blame other people if things go wrong, she takes the responsibility herself. Most people, as you probably know, lean a little the other way. But Brett tends to feel any failure is probably her fault. It’s made her, well, cautious.”

“Can I tell you something?” Shana smiled and suddenly hugged him tightly and put her forehead against his chest. “I’m not going to be the only girl in your life now. So I won’t ever say this quite this way again, not ever exactly this way. I love you, daddy, I love you very much. And I respect you more than anybody. Even during the worst of what we went through and when we were angry and said things because of it, I knew you were never really mad at me or disappointed. I always had that to hold on to, I knew we were trying to get through it together. That made the difference, because I knew you were on my side and nothing could ever change that. I wanted to tell you this, I wanted to say it, and now I have.”

Selby held her close for an instant, her slim body firm and warm in his arm, and then he let out his breath and smiled and put his hands on her shoulders. “I’m glad you told me,” he said. “It makes me feel very good, Shana, and very proud.”

It was an important and precious moment because it was so fleeting and impermanent; they were closer than they might ever be again, and they both realized that, with a poignancy matched by the lights of Christmas and the transient beauty of drifting snowflakes.

When Davey came from the hotel with Shana’s shoulder bag, she kissed her father on the cheek, and that moment between them was over, the child was gone, and it was a young woman who slipped from his arms and hurried away with her tall brother.

Selby stood and watched them, hearing their light voices mingling with the sound of church bells. A curtain of snow fell across the street, stirred by winds, and Davey and Shana disappeared behind it. He had an impulse to call after them and wish them well. They were growing up, no question of that, they had started their journey, and he hoped people would be kind to them... God bless.

The station at St. Stephan was on a spur between the main line from Montreux to Interlaken. A weathered sign gave the town’s name. A chalked notice below it listed the arrival of the next Bern connection: 6:35 P.M. A lath and timber building with a narrow clock tower above it, the station adjoined a platform which had a phone booth and several wooden benches.

The stationmaster was tail and thin, with black moustaches waxed to tapering points. He assured Selby the Bern Exchange was on time. The interior of the station was warmed by an iron stove. A group of people stood around it, but Selby decided to wait outside. A glowing red wreath hung above the ticket window, the light falling across the tracks. A wind from the valley sent snow gusting along the platform. But the rails were clear and Selby knew he would see the light from the train when it came around the foothills into the St. Stephan spur.

He sat and reread Miss Culpepper’s letter. “... the management at Brandywine Lakes is making all sorts of changes... community estate experts from Belgium and South Africa... a good deal of construction is going on along the river. They’re putting in a landing strip for their own airfield, buying up most of the land on the other side of the Rakestraw Bridge. I’ve never been opposed to progress, anyone who lives with books as much as I have knows that change is just another way of defining growth, but all growth isn’t necessarily an improvement on present conditions, or a congenial addition to the general community. We are losing so much of our natural beauty here, things that seemed to belong to us without question...”

Selby heard the sound of the Bern local, a muted, staccato rumble, and saw the headlights turning around the hill into St. Stephan.

He looked at Miss Culpepper’s letter again and then — with the feeling he was ridding himself of a worrisome burden from his past — he crumpled the pages lightly in his big hands and dropped them with a sense of relief and finality into the immaculate blue-and-white trash container beside the phone booth.

The train stopped and a conductor swung down and looked at his watch. Several passengers were met by friends and relatives with flurries of holiday greetings and hugs.

Selby went aboard and walked through both cars, and then spoke to the conductor in his stilted French. He described Brett as well as he was able to, holding up a hand to indicate her height, but the conductor shook his head and snapped the cover shut on his watch. In careful English he replied that no person of such a description had boarded his train in Bern or Montreux. Excusing himself, he climbed aboard and the cars started up with a lurch, gathering speed as they began the climb toward Zweisimmen.

Selby called the hotel. Shana’s room didn’t answer, she would be in the bathtub, he surmised. Davey answered his phone on the first ring. No, they hadn’t heard from her, there’d been no message. They’d been to the shop and bought snowdrops and pink roses. The waiter already had them in a vase on the table. Was something wrong?

“Brett missed the train, I guess,” Selby explained. “I’ll check with the stationmaster and see when the next one is due. Then I’ll call her in Bern. Just wait dinner till you hear from me, okay?”

“Sure, dad.”

The stationmaster came onto the platform as Selby left the public phone booth. “Mr. Selby? Mr. Harry Selby?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I have a call for you in my office. You can take it there if you like. Come with me, please. This way, sir. It’s a Bern call, the Hotel Regina.”

The stationmaster’s office was small and warm. His desk held a rack of well-cured meerschaum pipes. On the wall a white sign with a gold cross listed church services in various nearby villages. Selby noted these details automatically as he heard Brett’s voice, unnaturally high, saying, “Harry, I was leaving for the station, I was waiting for a cab, when the concierge stopped me. I’m still at the hotel. Burt Wilger was killed last night. I’m sorry to tell you like this—” He heard her swallow tightly, heard the tears in her voice. “Like some stupid weather report. He was killed last night in an automobile accident, Jonathan Lamb called me at the hotel here, and the concierge stopped me. I’d paid my bill, I’d left the lobby to get a cab. I was leaving for the train... I said that, didn’t I?”

“Brett, are you all right?”

“Yes, Harry. It’s hit me so hard. I was standing there waiting for a cab. I had presents for Shana and Davey and pictures of Chablis, that’s the puppy Kay gave me. Oh, Harry...”

“Brett, listen. Would you like me to call you back in a little while? You could sit somewhere and have coffee or a drink.”

“No, please. I want to be with you, Harry. There’s another train in an hour. Will you wait for me?”

“Yes, I’ll be here at St. Stephan, standing right on the platform. I’m just an hour away. We’re only an hour apart. But, Brett, don’t keep it all locked up inside you until then.”

“I’m sorry, Harry. I wasn’t thinking of you. But saying it was so hard. Hearing myself say the words made them true. Here’s all Mr. Lamb could tell me...”

Selby sat on the platform with his coat collar turned up. The station was empty, except for the stationmaster, who was inside at his desk posting accounts in a ledger and smoking one of his curved golden pipes.

Burt Wilger, Jonathan Lamb had told Brett, got a call at the Division toward the end of his shift. Something he had to check out, Wilger advised the sergeant who relieved him. He didn’t say who phoned or where he was going. But he’d given the impression it was a continuing case and that he was meeting someone that night.

There was a reminder on his desk pad to pick up some dry cleaning in the morning, and at the Mobil station in East Chester Wilger had stopped for gas around ten-thirty P.M. That was all they had at that end.

Approximately an hour later a man who wouldn’t give his name called the sheriff’s substation in Muhlenburg and reported that he’d seen a wrecked car on the riverbank at the foot of the Rakestraw bridge. There was somebody inside, but he wasn’t moving, the man told the sheriffs people. But he didn’t want to get mixed up in anything, he added, and hung up.

The sheriff dispatched a squad and they found Sergeant Burt Wilger dead at the wheel of his car, crushed against it when he went off Dade Road and smashed into the wooden timbers of the old covered bridge. Skid marks were inconclusive, and so were the dents and scratches on Wilger’s car. He could have been sideswiped and forced off the road. Or he could have fallen asleep at the wheel. There was no way to say for sure. But there was no trace of drugs or alcohol in his blood.

Selby stood and paced the platform, watching and listening for Brett’s train. He thought of her and he thought of the red-haired detective, crushed to death on Dade Road, a mile or so from Brandywine Lakes and Vinegar Hill, lands the Taggarts had owned for generations...

“... let me give you some free insight into cops,” he remembered Wilger telling him. It seemed strange to think of the detective on a snowy night in the hills of the Jungfrau while a stationmaster with waxed moustaches and a meerschaum pipe sat adding up his ticket sales. “We’re thieving bastards or knights on chargers keeping the jungle back from civilization. Take your pick. Some cases have mile-high no-trespassing signs around them. It hurts, so some cops take a drink and forget it.”

Selby thought he heard the far rumble of the Bern Exchange in the hills.

Then Wilger had said, “A case like Shana’s, that’s different. They shouldn’t stop us. Maybe you think you ought to thank me.” He looked at Selby with his mild, near-sighted eyes and said, “Don’t.”

Selby saw the lights of the Bern train flashing around the white flanks of the hills. He walked to the phone booth and picked Miss Culpepper’s letter from the blue-and-white trash can beside it. Typical of this immaculate country, it was the only waste paper in the receptacle.

Smoothing out the note, he held it up to the glowing light of the Christmas wreath, then folded it into a neat square and tucked it next to Senator Lester’s card in his wallet, a card with nothing on it but a priority number in Washington, D.C.

He put the wallet in his pocket and buttoned the flap over it. The snow was coming down harder, big, star-shaped flakes that had covered the tracks and the platform completely by the time the last Bern Exchange for that evening pulled into St. Stephan.

The windows of the coaches were warm yellow squares against the driving white darkness. Selby saw passengers rubbing mittened hands against the steamed glass and looking out. A wind rushed from the valley and made a metallic whine along the frozen rails.

He watched anxiously as the conductor studied his watch. He didn’t see anyone get off the train; the storm had become a blinding whiten-wall, like the snow in the village that had closed around Shana and Davey, sealing them off from him.

He called Brett’s name but heard only the conductor shouting orders and calling out the next stop: Zweisimmen.

As the train began to move, the snow seemed to part suddenly like an immense curtain and Brett came hurrying toward him, one hand raised high and waving, and her red scarf and dark hair tumbled and blowing about her in the bitter winds.

Her face and lips were numbed from the cold. He kept an arm around her shoulders as they collected her luggage, a leather overnighter, cheerily wrapped presents, a heavy coat and lined boots.

He stowed her things in the rented station wagon and got in beside her. She asked him how long they were from home, and they both smiled at that choice of word, because they knew it wasn’t a mistake, but the simple truth between them now. They would talk about that tomorrow. And then the rest of it. But not tonight.

On the narrow road through the white hills to St. Stephan, he watched the rear-view mirror and saw their tire tracks filling swiftly with snow and the road stretching out white and empty behind them.

When he saw the lights of the little town beyond the steepled church glowing like beacons through the darkness, he touched her shoulder and said, “We’re home, Brett.”