Fully Loaded (12 page)

“Thank you, Roger.”

“For what?”

“Saying her name.”

Roger fired six times into the tent.

His ears ringing, gunshots still reverberating off the mountains, he said, “Donald?”

There was no answer, only wet breathing.
 

He went to the tent door and unzipped it and took out his flashlight and shined it inside.
 

Donald lay on his back, the only visible wound a hole under his left eye, and the blood looked like oil running out of it.

Roger moved the flashlight around, searching for a gun in Donald’s hand, something to mitigate what he’d done, but the only thing Donald clutched was a framed photograph of an auburn-haired teenager with a braces smile.

Three days later, seated at the same table they’d occupied a week before at the Grove Park Inn’s Sunset Terrace, they watched the waiter place their entrees before them and top off their wineglasses from a bottle of pinot noir.

The August night was cool, even here in the city, like maybe summer would end after all.

Near the bar, a tuxedoed man was at a Steinway playing Mozart, one of his beautiful concertos.
 

“How’s your filet?” Sue asked.

“It’s perfect.
 
Yours?”

“I could eat this every day.”

Roger forced a smile and took a big sip of wine.

They ate in silence.

After a while, Sue said, “Roger?”

“Yes, honey?”

“We did it right, yeah?”

It annoyed him that she would bring it up over dinner, but he was well on his way toward inebriation, a nice buffer swelling between himself and all that had come before.

“I don’t know how we could’ve been more thorough,” he said.

“I keep thinking we should’ve moved his car.”

“That would’ve been just another opportunity for us to leave evidence.
 
Skin cells, sweat, hair, fibers of our clothing, prints.
 
I thought it through, Sue.”

She reached across the table and took his hand, the karat diamond he’d given her twenty-four years ago sending out a thousand slivered facets of candlelight.

“Above all, it was for the girls.
 
Their safety,” she said.

“Yeah.
 
For the girls.”

The scent of a good cigar swept past.

“You’ll be able to go on all right?” Sue asked.
 
“With what…what you had to do?”

Roger was cutting into his steak, and he kept cutting, didn’t meet her eyes as he answered, “I’ve had practice, right?”

It was early October when it occurred to one of the forest rangers of the Pisgah district that the black Buick Regal with a Minnesota license plate, parked near the restrooms of the Big East Fork trailhead, had been there for a long damn time, which was particularly strange considering no one had been reported missing in the area.
 

Over several days, the sheriff of Haywood County spoke briefly with two estranged, living relatives and an ex-wife in Duluth, none of whom had been in contact with Donald
Kennington
in over a year, all of whom said he’d been on the downward spiral since his daughter’s death, that it had ruined him in every way imaginable, that he’d probably gone up into the mountains to die.

A deputy found it in the glove box—a handwritten note folded between the vehicle’s owner’s manual and a laminated map of
Minnesota
.

He read it aloud to the sheriff, the two of them sitting in the front seat as raindrops splattered on a windshield nearly pasted over with the violent red leaves of an oak tree that overhung the parking lot.
  

My name is Donald
Kennington
.
 
Please forward this message to Arthur Holland, detective with the St. Paul Police Department.
 

The death of my daughter, Tabitha
Kennington
, brings me to these mountains.
 
I am writing this in my car on August 5th, having followed Roger and Susan Cockrell, of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to Beech Spring Gap.
 
I have taken their photographs with a digital camera, along with pictures of their green Range Rover and license plate.
 
You will find my camera containing these pictures in the trunk of my car.
 

At this moment, I do not know if Mr. Cockrell was responsible for killing my daughter in a hit-and-run six years ago.
 
I plan to meet the
Cockrells
tonight and find out.
 
To be clear, I intend no physical harm to Mr. Cockrell or his wife.
 
If Mr. Cockrell is responsible, however, we will see if I’m so lucky.
 
Does a man who runs down a young woman and leaves the scene contain it within him to murder in cold blood in order to hide his crime and his shame?

I suspect he does.
  

The
Cockrells
will be thorough in disposing of my body, tent, backpack, etc., which makes this last bit of business a little tricky.
 

My camp is in a small glade in the rhododendron thicket on the east slope of Shining Rock Mountain, approximately a hundred vertical feet above the meadows of Beech Spring Gap.
 
The glade is twenty yards across, with a large boulder in the middle.
 
Look for a flat, shiny rock in the grass.
 
My tent now stands over it, and I’ve made a tiny rip in the tent floor and dug a small, shallow hole in the ground under the rock.

Late tonight, if Mr. Cockrell admits his guilt, into this hole, sealed and safe in plastic, I will drop a tape recorder, and hopefully rebury it before
he
murders me.

An introduction to “Perfect Little Town”

I live in Colorado and frequently travel in the high country. It’s beautiful, which is why I live here, but I occasionally get
creeped
out. There are a handful of small, scenic towns in the Rockies which sit in high valleys, where the only way out of town is to drive over 12,000-foot mountain passes. These towns can actually become snowed-in during major winter storms. I was in one such town a couple years ago on a snowy night. Walking in the cold through the quaint, empty streets, I was overcome not only by the beauty, but the haunted isolation of the place. My mind starting racing—what if the passes were closed and I couldn’t leave? What if no one would rent me a hotel room? What if I’d had the misfortune of getting stranded here on the worst night possible, when this perfect little town unleashed its very dark secret?

perfect little town

-1-

They arrive midmorning, the Benz G-Class rolling down Main Street with its California tags and rear end sagging under the weight of luggage, and though the windows are tinted, we bet the occupants are smiling.
 
Everyone smiles when they come to our town, population 317.
 
It’s the mountains and fir trees, the waterfall we light up at night and the clear western sky and the perfect houses painted in brilliant colors and the picket-fenced lawns and the
shoppes
we spell the
olde
English way and the sweet smell of the river running through.

Parking spaces are plentiful in the off-season.
 
They choose a spot in front of the coffeehouse, climb out with their smiles intact, squinting against the high-altitude sun—a handsome couple just shy of forty, their fashionably-cut clothes and hair in league with their Mercedes SUV to make announcements of wealth that we all read loud and clear.

We serve them lattes, handmade Danishes from the pastry case, and they drop dollar bills into our tip vase, amused at the cleverness of the accompanying sign: “Don’t be
chai
to espresso your gratitude.”
 
They lounge for a half hour in oversize chairs, sipping their hot drinks and admiring the local art hanging on the walls.
 
As they finally rise to leave, the woman shakes her head and comments to her husband that they don’t make towns like this anymore.

-2-

They wander through the downtown, browsing our shops as the sky sheets over with leaden clouds.

From us they buy:

a half-pound of fudge
 

five postcards

energy bars from the hiking store

a pressed gold aspen leaf in a small frame

They tell us what a perfect little town we have and we say we know. Everywhere they go, they ask exuberant questions, and we answer with enthusiasm to match, and in turn solicit personal information under the guise of chitchat—Ron’s a plastic surgeon, Jessica a patent attorney.
 
They drove from
Los Angeles
, this being their first vacation in four years.

We ask if they’re enjoying themselves.

Oh yes, they say.
 
Oh yes.

-3-

They each have a camera.
 
They shoot everything:

The soaring, jagged mountains in the backdrop

Deer grazing the yard of a residence

The quaint old theatre

The snow that has just begun to fall and frost the pavement

They ask us to take pictures of them together and, of course, we happily oblige.

-4-

The day wears on.
 

The light fades.

It snows harder with each passing hour.

Up and down
Main
, Christmas lights wink on.

It is winter solstice, the darkest evening of the year, and when the
Stahls
attempt to leave town, they find the highway closed going both directions, the gates lowered across the road and padlocked, since what has become a full-blown blizzard is sure to have made high-mountain travel exceedingly dangerous.

Or so we tell them.

-5-

They approach the front desk.

“Welcome to the Lone Cone Inn.”
 
And we smile like we mean it from the bottom of our hearts.

Ron says, “It appears we’re stuck for the night in Lone Cone.
 
Could we have a—”

“Oh, I’m sorry, we’re booked solid.
 
I just sold our last room not two minutes before you walked in.”

We watch with subtle glee as they glance around the lobby, empty and quiet as a morgue, no sound but the fire burning in the hearth.

The wife chimes in with, “But we haven’t seen another tourist, and we’ve been here all day.”

“I apologize, but—”

“Is there another hotel in town?”

“There’s a motel, but it’s closed for the season.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“I’m not sure I under—”
  

“It’s a blizzard out there, the roads are closed, and now you’re telling us you’re the only game in town, and you’re booked?”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Where are we supposed to sleep?
 
Our car?”

Jessica appears on the verge of tears.

We hand Ron a notepad and tell him to write down his cell phone number, promising to call if something opens up.

-6-

Ron and Jessica sit in their Mercedes, watching the snow accumulate on the windshield, piling up in the city park, a deep bluish tint settling over Lone Cone.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Ron?”

“I know.”

“Do you?
 
Because I thought you were the one who was supposed to call and get us room reservations.”

“We weren’t
gonna
stay here, Jess.
 
Remember?
 
Spend the day and drive to
Aspen
.”

“Well it didn’t work out that way, did it?”

“No.”

“So maybe having reservations as a backup plan might’ve been a bright idea.
 
Right, Ron?”
 
He’s been staring through the glass, his hands gripping the steering wheel, and now he glances over at his wife, into that wild-eyed, exacting glare he figures she terrorizes her firm’s paralegals and secretaries with.