Celine

SEVEN

The basin and range country of southern Wyoming is an acquired taste. Celine had not acquired it. She wrote to Hank in a letter a few days later, “The miles of rolling sage and rabbit brush, the surprising flecks of antelope like splashes of paint, red and white, the distant dry mountains and the incessant wind, they feel remote, untouchable somehow. They make me feel remote. They are like true mountains that have been drained of moisture and color, though I know people that go on and on about the subtle shades of that country. Almost like a compensation, an apology. Well. They make me tired. I never wanted to meet a landscape, or a person, more than halfway. If one is to dance one needs a dancing partner, don’t you think? Which made me think of Gabriela. I was getting the sense that, like these parched and far-off hills, she was withholding something.

“That’s what I puzzled about as we drove through gritty, windbeaten Rawlins and stopped on the old main street at a Chinese restaurant across from a building painted entirely in jungle camo. Not kidding, can you believe it? The whole building. Welcome to the West. What I thought about as we folded our pancakes around the moo shu pork and sipped the scalding jasmine tea…”

Celine often said it was the one drawback of working pro bono: When people put up good money for an investigation they had usually committed to their decision and rarely got cold feet. But if all they had invested was a phone call and a story, sometimes it was too easy to back out. It was true, though—money or no money, many of those who enlisted a PI weren’t fully prepared for what they would find. But Gabriela had insisted on paying and Celine never got the impression that she was in this search with anything but both feet.

When Hank had found his mother’s letter in his mailbox he had put on a windbreaker and taken it with him for a walk around the lake. It was a cool fall evening, the clouds over the mountains burning with russets and purple shadows, and there were still a couple of snowy pelicans drifting slowly on the dark water like fat schooners. Hank loved how the huge white birds took on the hues of the sunset. They came every year to breed, and happily fished for crawdads and carp, and helped the lake’s visitors pretend they were on the coast.

He carried the envelope to his favorite bench across from the little sanctuary island and opened it there. He and Celine still traded handwritten letters, a habit they began when he went away to Putney for high school. They had a bond, going to the same school, and more than once she wrote to him of secret spots none of his peers had known about, like the flat diving rock in Sawyer Brook. He remembered his joy when he went to his mailbox in the lobby of the dining-hall building and found one of her square envelopes. She did not write to him the way other parents wrote to their children—of commonplaces, weather, pets—she wrote of the problems confronting her in her current case, and he read the letters with the avidity some read detective novels. She often asked for his thoughts, and more than once his insights had led to a breakthrough. His roommate, Derek, insisted that he read those parts aloud so that they could ponder the puzzle, like young Watsons, while they lay in their bunks before sleep and a winter wind howled in the eaves of their cabin.

He was not surprised that the sere landscape of eastern Wyoming was not to his mother’s taste. She’d be happier as they moved north and west into the mountains. She was a New Englander at heart, a shaded-brook and hardwoods gal. He remembered the almost vertiginous sense of exposure he had experienced when he first encountered the vast sky of Colorado. Whenever he came to a grove of big cottonwoods that reminded him a little of the broadleaf forest of Vermont he had felt relief. The Putney hills were in their blood.

The summer after he graduated from high school, and was shocked by Baboo’s partial revelation, he returned to Putney almost every day in his mind. He closed his eyes and put himself back on the campus, back on the country lanes and paths he knew so well; back into the classrooms and barns, into the routines of chores and classes and sports, of meals and evening activities. He traveled in his imagination to the fields and art studios, the sugar house and blacksmith shop, and tried to fathom who the father of his brother or sister might have been. Might be. Two years later, while at college in New Hampshire, he drove the hour down to the school and took a tape recorder.

He interviewed two teachers who had taught both him and his mother, and the retired farmer, now an old man, who lived over in Dummerston. He had a journalist’s instincts even then, and he conducted the interviews in a way that did not arouse suspicions of the real story. He told them he was working on a family memoir about Putney for a college writing project. And he did not tell his mother.

Celine didn’t really relax until they turned up into the Sweetwater valley and the ranges on either side got close, and their flanks were dark with timber and the meadows were green. So were the irrigated fields of the ranches lying along the river, the neat white ranch houses peaking out from groves of boisterous cottonwoods. She opened her window and let the late-afternoon wind pour in and it smelled of alfalfa and wet fields and the river. They drove into Lander just as the sun was settling into the long escarpment of the Wind Rivers.

Just three more latitudes north made a difference, here, at the end of September. The air pouring through the window was chilly with fall, and she could smell woodsmoke. The aspen were already turning on the higher ridges, slashing the shoulders of the mountains with ocher and gold. Glorious. This time of year. It was good to be out of the city now, good to be rolling, traveling, letting her losses toss in her wake. The cold currents would bring them around again, surely; probably tonight as she slept. And if she woke up to the strange silences of a new town and lay in the dark listening, she would welcome them home, and taste without bitterness the oddly sweet grief of missing those one loves. But now it was wonderful to forget for a few hours, to be traveling, to hear tires hum and thwop on cracks in the pavement, to come to a T in the road above a creek whose meadow was dotted with horses, roans and appaloosas, and smell smoke from the wood of trees that didn’t even grow in the East.

Celine didn’t feel like cooking. Pa offered but she waved him off.

“Let’s have ribs,” she said. “Isn’t that what they eat in Wyoming? And then let’s go find a pullout somewhere to make our new home. I feel a little like a hermit crab.”

“Carrying his house on his back?”

“We had one as a pet, you know. Mimi brought it home from Simmons Point one day in her glasses case. Mummy had a fit.”

“You were all suckers for a stray.”

“He was not at all a stray. I’m sure she plucked him from a very fine family where he’d been quite happy. It made me mad. Kind of a lesson for me in not offering help where it isn’t needed.”

“Did you make her put him back?”

“No. She was irrationally attached. At the end of the summer I abducted him and put him right back in the little tidal pool where she’d found him. I’d been with her that day. Anyway, over the summer he’d been quite spoiled. She dropped all manner of food into the pickle jar. One Friday night she brought him to the movies. She swore to me that he crawled to the edge of the jar and came half out of his shell and watched. Ginger Rogers. She swore on the Bible that he moved all his little legs like he wanted to dance. She said he was an Almond and wasn’t allowed to dance. I finally figured out that she meant Amish. I had learned about them from our nanny and I’d been telling her about how they don’t have zippers, which she thought was hysterical. She changed Bennie’s saltwater twice a day. When it was clear that he was actually growing she found several empty snail shells and dropped them in. He inspected them and found them lacking. I told her that probably they couldn’t have holes. She thought he’d like to have windows in his new house. Finally she found a beautiful glossy symmetrical shell all covered in irregular black spots like a paint pony and with no pinholes. Bennie took one look and moved right in. Years and years later, as an adult, she told me she thought of that as one of her proudest moments. Isn’t that odd?”

Pete half smiled. It was his way of giving vigorous applause. Finally he said, “I always thought of ribs as a Texas specialty. Or Louisiana. Though, come to think of it, Uncle Norwood could barbecue a wicked batch.”

“Were you even listening? Of course you were.”

“His son, Norwood Jr., kept a pet lobster one summer. That one didn’t end so well.”

“Ha!” How could she have doubted him? Of all the things Pete Beveridge was very good at, listening was perhaps the best. “Maine ribs?” she said. “You know, Pete, I’ve been cutting you slack all afternoon.”

“I’m supremely aware.”

This was how they sparred. It was a call and response, a little like the cries red-tailed hawks screed across a valley to their mates: Are you there? Yes, I am here.

They passed the Pronghorn Lodge and came down the hill onto Main Street, a straight mile-long prospect of mostly late nineteenth-century brick buildings with tall front windows and ornate front doors. They passed the Lander Grill and the Noble Hotel and two outdoor sport shops with tents and fleeced-up mannequins in the windows. They passed a Loaf ’N Jug and the Safeway and a gas station turned burger joint and two stores featuring Native American crafts. It was that time of day, or night, that happens only a few weeks a year at a certain hour in certain parts of the American West. The sun sets behind mountains but the cloudless sky that is more than cloudless, it is lens clear—clear as the clearest water—holds the light entirely, holds it in a bowl of pale blue as if reluctant to let it go. The light refines the edges of the ridges to something honed, and the muted colors of the pines on the slopes, the sage-roughened fields, the houses in the valley—the colors pulse with the pleasure of release, as if they know that within the hour they too will rest.

Maybe Celine thought this way because she was exhausted. She was. It had been a long time since she had driven that far in a day. Main Street curved to the right and they passed the Double Ought Motel—which made them laugh as there were probably patrons doing things there they doubly ought not to do—and Celine abruptly threw the wheel over and executed a U-turn that startled Pa and squealed the tires.

“Practice,” she smiled. “Twenty-seven miles per hour. Pretty good. Didn’t even think about rolling.” She grinned. “Never know when we might need one of those. I was thinking we ought to head back to the Lander Grill. They might not have ribs but I bet they serve a mean steak.”

The summer of Bennie the hermit crab was their first full summer at Fishers Island. It was also the summer Celine discovered that fathers don’t always behave like fathers—that they might actually choose to be far away from their daughters.

When she first came to this country she was seven. It was mid-May 1940. The Nazis were steadily marching toward Paris, and the season at Fishers Island would begin in a few weeks, and Baboo’s mother, Gaga, said yes, of course they could come early. Baboo and the girls’ father, Harry, were still very much together, and the plan was that he would hold down the bank’s office in Paris until things got very bad, and then he would come over and join them. If Baboo were to have planned their middle-of-the-night flight from Marseilles she could not have picked a better time. Over the course of their seven-year sojourn in France, they had been back to Baboo’s parents’ villa on Fishers Island twice, both times when Celine was too young to remember. Maybe she did remember. She had been four the last time, and she could, when she closed her eyes, recollect the sounds of seagulls, the rising laughter. She thought she could remember a smell of drying seaweed and ocean and the cold onslaught of waves. A wood balcony with a view of treetops and blue water. Her grandmother Gaga speaking to her in an accent she would later find out was touched with Spanish. That was all. The memories were somehow delicious. Somewhere in the background of all of it was her mother’s laughter, her grandmother’s delight chiming in just after, the two overlapping like waves. Now they were refugees, sort of, and they were returning home for good.

What was perfect about the timing was that the three sisters spoke only French. Mimi was five and precocious, rattling away in a constant soft-spoken soliloquy on the world around her, Bobby was eleven and already willowy and tall for her age and terribly practical—and perhaps a better judge of adult character than even Celine would be—and Celine was Celine; at seven she was quiet and shy and kept her many impressions mostly to herself, humming as she drew figures of birds and horses, and usually only voluble when it came to the subject of animals. Silent Celine would turn into a nonstop, exuberant commentator, for instance, at the Paris Zoo. But. They only spoke French. And so having a summer with Gaga and Grandfather at Fishers would be the perfect acclimatization.

Baboo hoped that by the time they hit their various grades at Brearley they would be fluent in English. They weren’t. Probably because all that summer they stuck mostly to one another. They had their own small beach below the house, and their grandparents and their mother often invited other families over to swim and picnic and so the girls got away with learning a few necessary phrases and yammering among themselves. When they all drove over to the club beach in the Packard and trekked across the sand with their baskets and towels—“like Lawrence in Arabia,” according to Baboo—the girls hung together. Bobby and Celine did, and Mimi ran after and lagged behind and rarely cried, and was so often covered head to toe in fine white sand she looked like a powdered doughnut. Not to say that they did not understand English, they did. They just refused, or did not know how, to speak it.

During that summer Celine remembered that Baboo communicated with their father by regular mail, by telegram, and by the rare phone call, which he made, because of the disruptions caused by the war, from the American embassy in Paris. Harry had stayed behind. He was safeguarding Morgan’s interests in what was left of Europe and making preparations for his eventual flight. Celine remembered her mother bent over the rolltop desk in her room carefully writing letters to her husband. The room had a little balcony just big enough for two people to stand on, and it faced north toward the sound and the Connecticut shore, which could be seen over the trees if someone hoisted Celine. Through its screen door came the perpetual angelus of the bell buoy in the channel.

Celine has an image of Baboo bent over the small desk composing her letter—her handwriting was perfect, Victorian: It unfurled itself across the pages in rulered lines of slants and loops where there had never been a ruler. The oversize capitals at the beginnings of paragraphs had the formality of chess pieces. The signature below “Your Ever Loving Wife,” Barbara, spun crisply through the Bs and twirled away through the last a with the self-discipline of a great waltzer—which she was—and the flourish beneath it had the surprising dash and speed of passion.

Celine thought later that all love letters should look like that: that the recipient need not read the content but only glance at the hand to feel its impact. And then, in the middle of writing, her mother would stand and stretch, open and close her cramping fingers, and go out to the balcony for some air. Sometimes she seemed wrapped in fog, hazy, distant. Sometimes she pulsed like a firefly. Celine remembered.

And then one afternoon while Celine was drawing egrets and crabs on her big artist’s pad on Baboo’s floor, her mother came briskly to the desk with a letter from Harry—Celine recognized the blue airmail envelope, heard the tinkle of her mother’s bracelets—and Baboo took up a silver letter opener and sliced the top and drew out the single translucent sheet and began to read.

She was bent over the rolltop and Celine saw her shoulders begin to quiver. A movement that spread down her arms and back the way a sudden strong wind moves through trees. And then her mother stood abruptly, keeping her back to her daughter, and made her way to the little balcony, weaving almost like a passenger moving on a deck in a rough sea, and stood under the sky, her hands gripping the wooden railing, as if she were holding on for dear life.

Only for a minute. Celine saw her mother’s back stiffen. Expand with a great indrawn breath, saw her mother stand erect and breathe. Saw her hands come to her face, which was by then lifted to the blue waters of the sound, and wipe her cheeks with a gesture Celine would never forget and only saw from behind: Unhurried, decisive, Baboo moved both hands in sync from what must have been the corners of her eyes, or the bridge of her nose—moved them over her cheeks outward to her temples and then lifted them away and held them up palms outward toward the sea and spread her fingers. Held them there for a moment as if to dry. Like the wings of a seabird. And then she turned to her daughter and in a voice that was pitched a little higher than normal, said, “What are you drawing, Ciel? Birds again? How beautiful.”

The contents of the letter were never discussed, but the ramifications became apparent over the next months. Baboo, if anything, became more attentive to the girls. She took them more often to the island’s beaches. They branched out from Gaga’s little strand and the familiar white sand of the club beach. They drove a few miles up island just past the big painted footprint in the road to the long stony stretch of Chocomount, which always had rougher waves and felt wilder, and had the most gorgeous thicket of thorny wild rose. They had to walk through it on the narrow path and Celine always lingered, inhaling the fragrance of the delicate flowers whose petals folded back in the sea wind. She picked the berrylike rose hips that she chewed and spat out. She liked to pretend it was betel nut and that she was an Indian woman on the way to the shore to gather snails. For Celine, the sight of the pale pink flowers and their sweet scent would for the rest of her life remind her of this time.

If Baboo was sometimes distracted and seemed to move in a mist of sadness, she was also more tender with her daughters than she had ever been. She read to them from books more often when she put them to bed (one of the latest had been Kim from which Celine got the betel-nut thing); she often eschewed the formal dining room, with apologies to Gaga, and ate with the girls at the long table beneath the windows in the kitchen. She took them on walks to look for bird nests, and they all practiced together how to whistle like a bobwhite and a whip-poor-will, and hoot like a barn owl. Bobby could make the ugly alarmed croak of a heron, which got the biggest laughs.

Of course the girls could feel their mother’s grief but they had nothing to attach it to and so responded with a tenderness of their own. They reached for her hand when they were walking over the uneven stones at Chocomount, and they curled up in her lap to shelter from the wind and sun in the fragrant shade that smelled of coconut Coppertone and the particular salty sweetness of their mother’s freckled skin, and they breathed in her sadness with her love.

In mid-June Harry Watkins also fled Paris. Baboo knew how the girls pined for their father, and she loved them too much to ever let her own troubles get between him and his daughters; she told them that their father had left the house on rue de Lille and was coming across on a grand boat and was bringing their cat, Chat. They would see him in New York at the end of the summer. The girls were beside themselves. It would have been hard to say what caused more delight—the prospect of seeing Harry again or of squeezing Chat, who, remarkably, loved to be squeezed and seemed even to enjoy being picked up unskillfully by Mimi, under the forelegs, and run around the house, eyes huge and striped gray body dangling.

Bobby, who was hard to excite, and who had not been listening closely, asked excitedly, “Et quand va-t-il arriver ici? He promised he would jump with me off Grayson’s dock!”

And Baboo stiffened and said that Papa had urgent business in New York and would not be coming to the island but would wait for them there.

The three girls looked at one another. In many ways, despite the span of their ages, they were as close as triplets. They had sensitive social barometers—even Mimi at five—and they were sensing the import of this statement without having a clue as to its meaning, and the pressure in the room dropped as before a nor’easter.

Celine, who was even more attached to Harry than the others, said, “C’est entendu. Il peut venir pour le weekend! Il nous emmenera pêcher!”

Baboo squeezed her hand and said that they would see him in just two months in the city.

And that marked the end of the Period of Tenderness and the Weeks of Wild Roses.

Not from Baboo’s standpoint. She recognized the beginning of a transition that would be very painful for the girls and she was determined not to scar them, or, at the least, to minimize the damage. She was as attentive as ever. She insisted on forays up island to the village for ice-cream cones at Diana’s and comic books at the drugstore; she organized picnics with just the four of them to Simmons Point and to her friend Ty Whitney’s where there was a swimming pool with a diving board and slide, which were objects of endless fascination for the girls. But the sisters were keenly aware of a dark cloud of catastrophe hanging over their displaced family, and they had nothing tangible on which to pin their dread, and they began to act out.

The Lander Grill did serve ribs. So there. Celine was starving. She had a full rack and Pa had a chopped salad that, curiously, was blanketed in well-done burger. The only flora on Celine’s enamel plate was coleslaw out of a can, which is the way she preferred it, but Pete dutifully picked a leaf of iceberg lettuce out of his bowl and garnished her pork, laying it down delicately like a proffered rose. “Geen,” he said.

“I don’t like geen.”

“Well I know.” It was their ritual. She would eat the single leaf last because she loved him.

It was a Sunday night and the grill was hopping. Most of the tables were full, and the mounted speakers played a mix of Mavis Staples and the Dixie Chicks, which was lively if not a little disconcerting. The crowd was burly oil-and-gas men—she could tell because their caps said stuff like McIntyre Drilling or Hansen Well Services—a few young cowboys, anachronistic in their Wranglers and hats; a large contingent of very athletic and outdoorsy-looking young people, men and women; two Native American couples in Goth black; and a single pleasant-looking young man in the far corner, head down, concentrating hard on his double cheeseburger. Celine noticed that his Black Watch flannel shirt was very green in the greens and black in the blacks and creased down the breast—brand new. And that he sported a week’s worth of whiskers but was otherwise clean-cut. She noticed these sorts of things.

She also noticed that the folks laughing the hardest and seeming to have the best time were the drillers. Maybe because they were drinking at twice the rate of anyone else. She noticed, too, that the sporty outdoorsy folks in their very expensive and colorful soft shells and fleece mostly ordered pitchers of beer—the cheapest option—and drank them at a judicious pace. Revealing perhaps a subconscious tallying of ounces-slash-dollars per minute per level of intoxication divided by the steadily decreasing time left in the evening. A couple of the kids were clearly wild and showed some promise, but mostly these young people were very smart and very controlled. There was one woman who was older than the rest, and more beautiful, very lean, her hands dark and weathered, and Celine studied her, the facial structure, the movements. Early fifties would be the age, just right. She felt the old swelling in her heart, but she shook herself—not a chance; just a habit, an old habit, that’s all—and continued scanning the room.

The oil-and-gas men drank longnecks, some accompanied by amber shots—that would be Jack Daniel’s, wouldn’t it?—and they were supremely comfortable in their own skins. They drank what they wanted and didn’t care what it cost. The Native Americans were in one of the far corners, at the dimmest table, and seemed insular and wary. They leaned toward each other when they laughed, as if trying to cover their humor. The single man in the new shirt in the other far corner was hard to read. He was eating with a purpose but not quite relish, and he seemed at the same time to be listening, the way a hunter would listen in a windy forest.

All of this was good information, probably. For context in a new territory if nothing else. One never knew. When Celine was on a case she observed many things closely, it was reflex—gathering everything up in the baleen of her intelligence. It both kept her in practice and sometimes gleaned useful and even crucial information. As for her and Pete, nobody seemed to notice them much, though they were clearly “from away” as Pete would say, and this was also good. One of the things that happens to people as they get older, and especially to women on the other side of middle age, is that people forget to notice. If Celine wanted to be virtually invisible she could be. She was also gorgeous and striking and if she wanted to make an impression she could do that, too. Also useful.

They finished their meals and Celine ordered a scoop of ice cream smothered in chocolate sauce for a nightcap. The warmth of the pub, the rich meal, the hiatus from the long day on the road—they suffused Celine with what these days was a rare fatigue that felt a little like contentment. She came around the table and slid a chair next to her husband. She’d been very patient with him all day.

“Okay, Pete,” she said. “You’ve been ‘arranging’ all day, I can tell. Now tell me the rest.”

Pete let his brown eyes fall gently on his wife. The wonderful thing about having a close and long marriage is that certain responses are as dependable as sunrise. He pursed his lips, which only meant he was covering another inscrutable expression, like maybe the beginnings of a laugh. He’d known this reckoning was coming.

“Well,” he said.

“You need coffee.”

Pete nodded. She managed to grab a waiter who brought two cups, one black, one with milk.

Celine nodded. “I can hear you, Pete. Even in the din. Any time.”

Pete sipped and set the mug on the scarred wood table. “Gabriela’s exile.” He huffed out a breath. “Paul Lamont let his new wife banish his daughter. Just downstairs, but still.”

Pete glanced at her. She tipped her head forward: Go on. Sometimes Pete was a bit slow to rev up.

“The calculus may have been something like this: I need this woman. Without this woman I will drown. She is keeping food in the cupboard, in Gabriela’s kitchen, she makes sure she gets off to school and back, she knows that is the bottom line, the bare minimum. That is the bargain. Without her my daughter may not eat and I may succumb. To oblivion. It was oblivion he was battling. A mortal battle. For him and his beloved daughter. Beloved, yes. May not seem like it at first glance, but if you look closely. Gabriela was his cherished daughter and also the living repository of his wife’s heart. And her doppelgänger in some sense. She looked just like her, you should see the photographs.”

“Well, I would have, if—”

“I know, I know. I’m catching you up now. There’s nothing else.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m getting to that. He must have known right from the beginning that his bargain with the devil was a mistake. But he had no Plan B. Whenever he could—when Danette was working an afternoon or night shift—he would go downstairs and try to help Gabriela with her homework. He tried. But he was often too drunk. And it wasn’t often enough. When I called her the other day—you were having a fit trying to compress two suitcases into one—she told me that when he came to visit she pushed aside her homework and tried to engage him in a game of canasta. A fairly advanced game for an eight-year-old, my cousins and I played it for hours on rainy summer nights, on Aunt Debbie’s porch on North Haven—”

“Why rainy nights?”

“Because on clear summer nights we were out frogging, or fishing with lights, or playing these big games of kick the can in the Beveridge cemetery.”

“Was Norman Rockwell on-site? Or were those reenactments?”

“You’re making me lose my train of thought.”

Celine considered her husband’s upbringing and felt again the pang that those with imperfect childhoods feel when confronted with one that seems idyllic. Or even normal. She marveled once more that his youth seemed to her so exotic, when she was the one raised in Paris who fled the Nazis on an ocean liner. Salvador Dalí was on her passage. She remembered him, he had a pair of ocelots on jewel-studded leashes, imagine.

“I’m sorry. You were talking about card games.”

“Gabriela ignored the homework and tried to get her father to play canasta because even three sheets to the wind he was a competitive sonofabitch and canasta can be a very long game. She wanted him to stay with her as long as possible.”

Celine lit up. “We used to play it on Fishers! Same strategy: The longer the game, the more time Mummy would spend with us, and the later we could stay up.”

Pete nodded. “She told me that she also visited her father upstairs. She would listen for the heavy clomp of Danette’s clogs on the steps going down—Gabriela said she was sexy but not at all graceful—and she’d go up. She said she took little Jackson with her once, but only once because Danette came home and found cat hairs on the couch and freaked out. Gabriela said she was afraid her stepmother would get rid of the cat while she was at school. Ended up that Jackson took care of that all by himself.”

“Whew.” Celine could hardly bear it, the story. The predicament. Her finely tuned sense of empathy vibrated and hummed. It was the harmonic that ruled her life. The small child was visited by her father like someone in a prison, or a hospital. Or worse, a mental ward. What is wrong with me? Gabriela must have asked herself again and again. She knew that Danette was jealous of her, her and her dead mother, Amana, but the kind of isolation she experienced gets internalized. Especially by children.

“Another thing,” Pete said. “When they visited and he was warmed up, which was pretty much all the time, he would tell her this fairy tale that he’d made up: He said that way far north, up on the Canadian border, there was an Ice Mountain, and a lake the color of his true love’s eyes, and there was a castle there for princesses and their families and he would take her there. He said the lake sounded like birds and the mountain was the king of mountains.”

“I want to hate him,” she said, “but somehow I can’t.”

“That’s just it. And what I’m getting to. He must have known right away. He was not insensible, as I said. He was too sensitive. What I’m learning about the man. He was too heartbroken. He could not face life on life’s terms after his wife’s death. He tried every way: alcohol, immersion in work, travel, a plunge into an obsessive sexual affair that he allowed, unfortunately, to become a marriage. I imagine that Danette got him warmed up one afternoon and screwed his lights out and dragged him down to city hall. So there he was. Trapped first by overwhelming grief and then by marriage. And he was—really trapped.”

“How do you mean? Was there a prenup?”

Pa let out one of his soft hums, part amusement, part pathos. He loved that his wife could often be a step ahead of even him.

“Yes there was. She wrote it, not him. Gabriela sued to see it after he disappeared. Lamont had not inconsiderable income from the royalties of a handful of his iconic pictures, which are everywhere. But, as you seem to anticipate, the prenup undid and reversed the usual protections. I mean that we think of a prenup as usually entered into in order to protect the rights of the party with a disproportionate share of assets. Well. It also protects the other, the one who has much less, in that it often stipulates a schedule of payments in the case of a divorce—so much after so many years of marriage, so much more after more time. But get this. This prenup said… let me see if I can remember the wording… ‘In light of the fact that the grantee’—that’s Danette—‘has eschewed numerous lucrative marital options in favor of marriage to the grantor’—that’s Paul Lamont—‘this agreement, legally binding under the laws and statues of the State of California, lays out the following terms…’”

Celine was wide awake. Unconsciously she was stirring her coffee, which didn’t need stirring.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” she cried.

“No. Not kidding.”

“In plain English,” Celine averred, “it was saying that because she screwed so many surgeons in the broom closet and had them dead to rights in one way or another, and could have had her choice of a gaggle of rich doctor husbands—if Lamont ever divorced her she would pick his bones. Clean him out! Unbelievable.”

“Yep.”

“That’s legal? I mean some lawyer actually typed out those words. My God.”

Sometimes in the middle of the night when Pa couldn’t sleep, which wasn’t often, he liked to think about all the jobs there were in the world. He liked to take a tour of the workbenches in China or India where nimble-fingered women who would never see a free-running brook, much less a trout stream, tied fishing flies. He imagined someone cementing the gargoyles to the ledges of reconstructed churches. Someone adjusting the compasses that now come with cars. He could imagine many both wonderful and cruel jobs but he could barely imagine the conversation in some cluttered legal office—probably just like those in the warrens of the hack lawyers up on Court Street—that led to the crafting of those lines. Man.

“The terms set forth, needless to say, were draconian. Gabriela said she probably got him drunk and worked him up right to the threshold, so to speak, of sex, and then made him sign it. Most of his net worth was tied up in the upstairs apartment, the one the two lived in. If he were ever to initiate divorce she would get the place, plus half the value of the cash and stocks he had on the date of union. Lamont had bought the apartment outright after selling a coffee-table book on the wild horses of Monument Valley. You’ve seen the pictures, some of the most iconic wildlife pictures ever taken. And there is the famous one you see everywhere of the fishing boat cresting the giant wave. Gabriela is still partly living on the royalties and subsidiary rights. As I said, they are not inconsiderable.”

“Danette would have gotten those, too.”

“That’s right. But not if he died.”

They sat in silence. The Dixie Chicks were wailing out “Travelin’ Soldier.” “I need fresh air, Pete,” Celine said. “There was a bench by the door. It’s not so cold.”

They paid the check and buttoned up their coats. It was cold. They shoved open the heavy door and went back out into the chill night. Because it was night now and moonless and ranks of heavy clouds had marched over the country in just the last hour, and the stillness smelled heavy with rain. Not a single star. Still, the fresh air was clean and good.

Pete held her hand and they sat. “You were saying about what happened if Lamont died,” she said.

Pa nodded. “Danette thought she had that covered too. Gabriela said she was practically licking her lips at the unsealing of the will in the lawyer’s office on Howard Street.”

“Ha.”

“Yep. She gave Gabriela a look like, ‘You poor thing. I’ve seen the will. You’ve always lost out in the battle for his affections, and you are going to lose out now big-time.’ Gabriela told me she would not have been surprised if Danette had whispered, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll send you a card from Acapulco, sucker.’”

“And?”

“And her expression changed gradually as the lawyer unsealed and read the document and she digested the words sole heir and then Gabriela Ashton Lamont. Danette stormed out. Later she locked herself in the apartment and Gabriela heard dishes breaking. It took about a month for the co-op board to transfer ownership to Gabriela, at which point Gabriela evicted her on the spot. She was only twenty, but she knew what needed to be done. The co-op board, none of whom had much stomach for Danette Lamont, had to call in the city marshal to drag her out.” Pete lifted up his tweed cap and rubbed his forehead. The image was sad and amusing at once. It always amazed him that greedy people could throw themselves so headlong into acting against their own long-term self-interest.

“There was an insurance policy, too. That drove her wild. Wilder. One million. All to Gabriela. It seems trite, doesn’t it? Like Dr. Evil putting his pinkie in the corner of his mouth and asking for a million dollars to ransom the world.”

“Trite or not,” Celine said, “it’s a pile of cash for a college student on scholarship. But wait, how long before Lamont was declared dead? It was pretty fast, wasn’t it? I think she told me it was something like two months after his disappearance. That doesn’t seem right. Without a body.”

“Yes.” She’d done it again. Worked out in a flash what had taken him not inconsiderable pondering. “A federal agent in Yellowstone National Park, and then a county judge, signed off. A smear of Lamont’s blood was found on the bark of a nearby fir tree. The prevailing theory was killer bear. And there was this otherwise destitute young woman who stood to inherit. The intensive search lasted about ten days. It probably would never have lasted that long except that it was fueled by media coverage. The story was sexy. Lamont was a handsome and well-known National Geographic photographer who took the photo of the wild horses clashing beneath the towers in Monument Valley. An unexpected long shot from above, the two stallions rearing up and dwarfed by the rock. You’ve seen it.”

Celine nodded.

“Gabriela said there were television vans all over Cooke City. The place only has one paved street and two motels. She said loggers and bearded recluses were renting out rooms to coiffed broadcast reporters in panty hose.” Pa chummed—his trademark utterance, between a chuckle and a hum. “There’s another detail.”

Celine studied her husband, one eyebrow barely deigning to rise. He had done a lot of groundwork on his own in just a couple of days. While she was, admittedly, on her own frightful tear to get ready and out the door. This was not their usual way of doing things, however, and she felt a mixture of hurt, if not betrayal, as well as admiration for his thoroughness. “Yes? Another detail?”

“An insight is perhaps better. Lamont disappeared just outside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. Half a mile outside. Had his car been found just south, within the park’s borders, the case, and the search, would have automatically been federal.”

“Ahh.”

“You see? He avoids both the FBI and the prodigious search-and-rescue apparatus of the national park and the federal government.”

“He does?”

“Yes. I mean if this was premeditated, if this wasn’t actually a killer bear attack. Except.”

“What?”

“Gabriela flew out from Sarah Lawrence as soon as she heard from Danette that her father had disappeared. She spoke to her professors and got deferments on the first papers and work groups. It was lucky that she had no labs. She landed in Bozeman, rented a Jeep, and drove down. She said she interviewed everybody, the biologists, the tracker, the cops and the searchers, park officials, even the people who ran the bar that Lamont frequented in Cooke City. She kept meticulous notes and a journal. And she kept running into a pair of officials she knew in her gut were feds and who would not talk to her. She said they avoided her.”

“She brought the notes with her when she came to dinner,” Celine said. “But not the second time she came over. Can you please hand me my phone?”

Pa’s telltale eyebrow lifted and fell, a bit like a Maine coast groundswell. He knew that his wife was constitutionally incapable of staying out of the fray and that she would not be sidelined for another minute.

Gabriela answered on the first ring. “Hello, it’s Celine. I hope I haven’t caught you in the middle of dinner.”

“No, no, we’ve eaten.” That clear voice, like mountain water, Celine thought. A voice to love.

“Can you please FedEx a copy of your file of notes? The one I saw you with the other night?”

“I can’t find it. I… I misplaced it.”

“How? Do you remember? Can you tell me any more about that?”

“No.” Neither woman was in the mood to beat around the bush. Celine knew there was more, but she also sensed that now was not the time.

“I see. Well tell me: You spoke of certain rumors about your father. About his… his, ah, travel. All those places he went back to—Argentina, Peru, Chile. Do you think the rumors had merit?”

“I’m not sure, but—”

“But what?”

Gabriela hesitated. The girl was clearly conflicted. “I mentioned on the dock that there was one thing—”

“Yes, I remember.”

“I told you that after… that I moved back into the larger apartment upstairs.”

“Right.”

“I did it on my Christmas break from school. My junior year at Sarah Lawrence. Not the funnest Christmas—”

“Of course. Very bleak. I can imagine.”

“Well, I was cleaning out the upstairs apartment, trying to purge the residue of Danette before I moved in, and…”

“And?”

“And I lifted out the silverware tray, the one with all the compartments for knives, forks—”

Celine nodded impatiently into her phone. She knew what a silverware tray was.

“I lifted it up and underneath was a stained sheet of thin oilcloth. It was sort of etched with the outline of a rectangle. I peeled up the sheet and underneath was a current U.S. passport. It bore Pop’s picture. But the name was Paul Lemonde Bozuwa.”

Celine felt a rush, almost like the hit from a double espresso. Gabriela said she had put the passport back where she’d found it, she wasn’t sure why.

They drove west up Main Street and halfway through town they saw a sign on the left that said SINKS CANYON—US FOREST SERVICE ACCESS. They turned. Bounced up the washboards for ten minutes and pulled off at a small meadow. When she opened her door the sound of a creek in a rock bed filled the night, and the smell of cold stones and water and sage, and she felt strangely elated.