AHMM, December 2009 (15 page)

Once there, she debated with herself over whether to call Sedam, hesitating because of the hour, one o'clock, and because she hated to ruin her record of independence. As she debated, she happened to look out the window. A light was burning in the upper story of Millikan House, over the garage, she thought. Chaz Gitry's room, she was willing to bet.

She went back to the ranch house long enough to grab her down jacket and the keys to the ATV. She could have walked the distance easily, but she'd remembered Gitry's hurt leg. And the four-wheeler's barely muffled engine would announce her better than any doorbell.

Nevertheless, she rang the doorbell when she arrived at Millikan House. The porch light snapped on immediately, and Anne stepped back so Gitry could look her over though the front door's peephole. When the door opened a crack, Anne was surprised to see that the room beyond it was dark.

"What do you want?” a man's voice asked.

"Mr. Gitry, I'm the new caretaker at—"

"I've seen you.” The curt response was a restatement of the original question.

"Something's gone wrong with the heat over there,” Anne said. “I'm afraid the pipes might freeze."

"Not that cold tonight,” the other said. “You should make it through to morning. Call the manager then."

"He said I should ask you if I needed help. Said it was part of the caretaker's code."

She'd hoped for a laugh from Gitry but got a grunt instead. And an excuse: “I hurt my leg."

"I know. I'll drive you over and bring you back."

This time Gitry sighed. “Wait a minute."

V

Anne was seated on the idling ATV when he came out, pulling on a coat that seemed too big for him. Koval had called him a boy, and Anne wondered now whether a boyish quality was part of Gitry's mysterious appeal.

He climbed on behind Anne, grasping her shoulder with one hand. “Okay."

At the house, Gitry headed for the mechanical room without waiting to be shown the way.

Anne said, “You know the place."

She got her first good look at him then, in the light of the front hall. As Koval had said, he was shaggy, his ginger hair unkempt and his razor stubble approaching a beard. But the river guide had also called Gitry homely, and Anne considered that a slight if not a slur. She thought Gitry's narrow face and sharp features would have been handsome but for his eyes. They were so dark-rimmed they almost looked bruised. And they were haunted. By thoughts of the lost Laura, Anne told herself. The unworthy Laura, who had turned her back on love.

"I should know my way around,” Gitry was saying. “Your predecessor could never figure out the boilers, either. What happened to him?"

"Joined a band,” Anne said.

Gitry grunted again. “I noticed the guitar playing had stopped. Thought the coyotes had complained."

Once inside the mechanical room, he glanced briefly at the control panel of the dormant unit and then began pressing buttons. “Happen to know the date?” he asked over his shoulder.

"It's the last day of May."

"Before midnight it was. Now it's the first day of June. That's why the thing went to standby mode. The genius who set it back in January told it to expect new instructions in June. Guess he didn't know anything about the weather up here. Thought it'd be balmy by now. Serves them right for putting in a system that has more brains than it needs to do a simple job."

By then, the furnace was humming. Gitry showed Anne what he had done, had her repeat the instructions, and led her back into the hallway. There he noticed the paperback she'd left on the Chinese table.

"Love's Forbidden Memory,"
he read. “All memories of that poison should be forbidden. Yours?"

Anne plucked the book from his hand.

Gitry considered her curiously. “This mausoleum have a coffeepot?"

"There's one in my place,” Anne said. Before Gitry could jump to the wrong conclusion, she added, “We shouldn't use the Zollmans’ stuff."

"Why not? They won't be using it again. And I'm pretty sure that caretaker's code of yours has a clause about grabbing whatever you can. Kitchen this way?"

He went off without waiting for an answer, limping more than ever. Following along, Anne asked, “How did you hurt your leg? Snow-boarding?"

"Chopping wood. Hell of a thing for a caretaker to admit."

"Your mind must have been somewhere else,” Anne almost said, biting it off at the last second. Instead she asked how he knew the Zollmans. “I heard they were only here once."

Gitry had located the coffeemaker. He concentrated for a moment on filling the pot at the island sink. Then he said, “She was only here once. He came out regularly while this place was being built. It was his baby. Presented it to the missus like a proud cat presenting a dead mouse. Went over like a dead mouse too. There's a moral there somewhere."

"Let your wife pick the house?” Anne asked.

"More like, if you've got to make payments on a wife, make damn sure your checks don't bounce."

He wasn't really speaking of the Zollmans now, Anne decided. He was speaking of Laura, the woman who had tired of Gitry's hand-to-mouth life.

Anne realized with a start that the caretaker was addressing her. “You awake? I asked where the coffee was. Never mind. I found it."

While it brewed, Gitry limped to the windows that faced the lights he'd left burning. He stared out for a long time without speaking.

Forget her, Anne thought, She's no good. Aloud, she said, “She won't come tonight. It's too late."

Gitry turned on her, his bruised eyes flashing. Then his gaze widened to take in the dark timbers around them, the steaming coffeemaker, the neon-bordered clock that glowed above the sinks.

"It is late,” he said. “Sorry. I haven't talked to anyone in a while. Didn't realize you could miss it so much. I'll drive myself back. You can pick up the ATV in the morning when you finish your run."

VI

Anne spent the next morning replacing a fence post on one corner of the Zollman property. It was the corner closest to Millikan House, but that was only a coincidence, as Anne told herself repeatedly. The fence post was certainly rotten or at least showing a tendency that way. The project took hours of what turned out to be her first warm day in Jackson, but Gitry never appeared.

She regretted the soreness in her shoulders later when she reported to the headquarters of Snake River Explorers for a training session. Leaving her cats to mind the ramshackle building, Mattie Koval loaded her entire staff—two experienced guides, two trainee guides, and a grizzled driver—into one of her two white vans and headed north out of Jackson on 191.

The route took them past the National Elk Refuge, a huge expanse of bottom land drained by the Snake's tributaries, where, according to Koval's running commentary, thousands of elk gathered to shelter and feed in the winter. On the other side of the highway was the Jackson airport. Anne watched an airliner on final approach, its wings rocking in the winds off the Tetons, and thought of Rachel, the stout waitress. The connection escaped Anne for a moment. Then she remembered Rachel's curt dismissal of the idea that Gitry's Laura might be flying in from distant parts because she would never have chosen Idaho Falls's airport over Jackson's. Something about that reasoning had bothered Anne at the time and bothered her again now.

She was still thinking about it when they arrived at Moose Junction and unloaded one of the big red rafts from the trailer behind the van. Anne then watched as Koval prepared herself, donning first a compact life vest, then fingerless gloves, then a broad-brimmed hat with a chin strap. Finally, the guide put on mirrored sunglasses that completely hid her eyes. They reminded Anne of Koval's description of Laura in dark glasses with a scarf over her hair. Anne felt she had the key to the airport mystery, but before she could work it out, Koval was calling them into the raft.

Jubal, the driver, pushed them down the slick ramp and into the swift brown current, then turned and walked away without a backward glance. Koval was at the sweeps, standing in the center of the raft between metal uprights that held the oarlocks at waist height. As she worked the long oars, she lectured on the best way to negotiate the Moose Junction Bridge, already looming above them. Once past it, she handed over the sweeps to Anne and the other trainee, Daniel, in alternating ten-minute shifts. Koval taught them to spin the raft and to move it left and right in the current, while the two experienced guides kept watch for “strainers,” Koval's term for debris in the river.

Anne ended every session at the sweeps with aching shoulders and the conviction that the Snake was really the one in charge. During the last of her shifts, she was chased down the river by a monster strainer, a thirty-foot pine tree, stripped of its branches and bark but with a huge root ball that rose out of the water like a galleon's high stern. Or so it seemed to Anne as she struggled to stay clear of the skeleton ship that paced them without masts or sails.

By the time the strainer finally grounded on a bar, the Teton Village Bridge, which marked the end of the run, was in sight. Even at a distance, Anne could see the water roiling at the base of the bridge's midstream support like a continually crashing wave. Just short of the span was the landing area. Jubal stood there, hands in his pockets.

Anne extended the handles of the sweeps in Koval's direction. The guide shook her head.

"You're doing fine. You can take us in. Just don't miss. The next chance is fourteen miles downstream. Start moving us over. Bow to the bank so you can see what you're doing. Push on those oars, girl. Push!"

Jubal's only sign of interest was the removal of his hands from his pockets when Koval tossed him a line. The raft was still moving downstream so fast that Anne was sure the little man would be pulled in after them. But he stood like a bollard, pivoting the raft shoreward when the line went taut.

"Ship your oars,” Koval ordered. “Fred, Bob, give Jubal a hand."

The guides splashed into the shallows. By the time Anne had the sweeps secured, the raft was aground on the rocky bank.

"Good work, Anne. Good work, everybody. Jubal, show these newbies how to back the van down."

VII

Back at their base, Anne volunteered to hose off the raft for the chance of a private word with Koval. It came when the guide emerged from the office carrying two sodas, her cats trotting behind her.

Anne thought she might be in for a performance evaluation. She wanted to discuss something else, the insight that had been inspired back at Moose Junction by Koval's sunglasses, so she spoke first.

"I think I know why Laura doesn't use the Jackson Airport."

"Gitry's Laura?” Koval handed her one of the sodas. “Have you seen her?"

"No,” Anne said, “but I met him last night. Early this morning, I mean.” She watched Koval's mouth draw down in the same lopsided grimace she'd used whenever Anne had dragged an oar. “Nothing happened."

"Sure of that?” Koval asked. “What's this about airports?"

"It's something that's been bothering me. Rachel thinks Laura must live in Idaho because she drives instead of flying into Jackson. It doesn't make sense to Rachel that someone would fly into Idaho Falls and drive over the mountains."

"To me either,” Koval said.

"But you said Laura wears dark glasses and a scarf over her hair. In other words, she's wearing a disguise. A disguise wouldn't work if she flew in. To fly back out, she'd have to show a photo ID. I think she's remarried. That's how she found her better life. She doesn't want her new husband to know she can't give up her old one. Gitry is wasting himself on a woman who's cheating on two men at once."

"When he could be doing what?” Koval asked.

Anne didn't answer, and the two women stood side by side, Anne scattering the cats with the jerky movements of her hose, Koval waving occasionally to cars passing on the highway.

Finally, the guide said, “I hope I didn't make a mistake by telling you about Chaz Gitry. He's an interesting man, maybe even an exciting one, but he isn't a man I'd wish on a friend of mine.

"I probably should keep my mouth shut now, but if you're right about this airport thing, it opens up an even more sordid possibility. You should be ready for it. It's easier to deal with things you see coming."

"What is it?” Anne asked.

"That disguise business has always bothered me. I mean, why would Laura go to the trouble? It's not like anyone around here knows what Gitry's ex looks like. But you've got me thinking that maybe we'd know her after all."

"How could you? You didn't even know Chaz had been married until he told you."

"Exactly. We only know because he told us. Suppose that was a cover story. Suppose there is no Laura. This valley is the two-months-a-year address of a lot of wealthy wives. Maybe one of them got a taste of Chaz Gitry and ended up hooked.

"Like I said, if you see a rock ahead you can pull away from it. Any reasonable person would."

VIII

Koval's last words haunted Anne as the long day slipped into evening, both because she knew the warning was well meant and because she knew she wouldn't heed it. Again and again she thought of the tree trunk that had chased her down the Snake that afternoon, sometimes grinding away at the bank, sometimes disappearing behind an island, but always coming back. The fascination of Chaz Gitry was exactly the same: nagging, powerful, and—Anne couldn't quite say how—dangerous.

She was less bothered by Koval's suggestion that Laura wasn't Gitry's ex at all, but only a trophy wife who wouldn't stay in her case. She had to admit it was the logical conclusion of the chain of reasoning she'd started herself. But that only made her more certain that Gitry was wasting his time with the wrong woman. What was more, Anne was sure that Gitry knew it too. That was the only possible explanation for the desperation she'd seen in his eyes.

Or maybe not the only explanation. While she cooked a dinner she didn't want, Anne wondered if Koval hadn't been wrong in one particular at least. Maybe it was Gitry and not the straying wife who'd had a taste and gotten hooked. Maybe the local lothario had made the mistake of falling for a woman who only wanted a risky fling.