Sleeping Beauty (65 page)

“And what about you?” Josh asked.

“I wasn't hurt. I can't believe it, really; I'm the only one out of ten people who doesn't even have a scratch.”

“That isn't what I meant.”

“I know.” There was a pause. “No one else has asked me that.”

Her voice had changed; suddenly she was not guarding it. And in that instant their voices seemed to touch as if there were no telephone, no distance between them, no Egyptian hotel or Colorado hospital, just their voices, touching without constraint. They had never been so close.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I've hardly thought about it. I don't really know how I feel. Relieved, of course, but still scared, in an odd way; I keep feeling us swaying up there, not knowing if we'd fall. I didn't know how badly Leo was hurt, and I didn't know if anyone in the other car was dead, and I knew I couldn't protect Ned and Robin if we broke loose. . . . I guess I stored up a fair bit of anxiety, and it doesn't all go away at once.”

“No,” Josh said. “Terrors always linger, don't they?” Anne was silent. “But it's easier if you have friends. I hope to be there by Wednesday, Anne.”

“I'll be—we'll all be glad to see you,” she said. She wanted to tell him how welcome his voice was, how grateful she was for his call, how her breath had caught when he said he would be there in three days. She wanted to tell him she had thought of him while waiting for help in the gondola. But all that came out were those formal words. “Very glad,” she added, trying to make up for it. “Tell me about your dig. Did you get to the tomb? Is it all there?”

“Yes, and yes.” Anne heard the smile in his voice. “You don't want to hear about it now, though—”

“Oh, I do. All of it. How wonderful for you, Josh. You've waited for this for so long. Was it Tenkaure's?”

“Yes, his seal was just inside the door.”

“So it was the first thing you saw. What an incredible feeling that must have been. Were you the first?”

“We were. Nothing's been touched. Tumbled around by earthquakes, but it's amazing how little is broken; even most of the alabaster seems intact. Anne, you've got to see it. You can't believe the beauty, and the incredible mass; everything from soup ladles to gold thrones.”

“And Tenkaure?”

“He's there. We won't get to him for a while; we have to clear the other rooms and the corridor first. But he's waited a long time; he can wait a little longer.”

She gave a low laugh. “It's like a fairy tale. How many people in a lifetime ever have anything like this? I'm so glad for you. How can you be so calm?”

“I'm not, really. I feel like a kid. It's been the most incredible day, from the minute we got to the door.” His words came faster, pouring out, as if, Anne thought, he had been storing them up until he could talk to her. “You remember the steps, the way they looked at the top, if you can picture them going all the way in . . .”

She listened, seeing the rooms through his vivid descriptions, feeling the cool alabaster and warm gold; breathing the hot, still air. He had been walking through those rooms, in the midst of discovery, while she sat in the hospital, waiting for Robin and Ned to have their legs set, waiting for Gail to call with news from Albuquerque, waiting to hear what the Tramway Board had found.

She thought of those two places: a pharaoh's tomb and Tamarack. And she recalled one of the doctors saying, that morning, that the town was as quiet as a tomb. We weren't so far apart after all, Josh and I, she thought wryly.

“I'll have slides a few days after I get back,” Josh said. “If you'd like, we'll have another show; it's not as good as being here, but it's the best we can do for now.”

“I'd like that,” Anne said simply. There was a pause, and she knew he had been prepared for her to refuse, as she had refused just a few days before, on Christmas. “And I'd like to talk to you about the accident,” she went on. “There were so many things happening, and then too much to do when we got down. . . . I haven't sorted it out in my mind, yet.”

“We'll have plenty of time to talk,” Josh said, and there was a note of buoyancy in his voice. “I'll call you from New York, as soon as I get through customs; by then I ought to know when I'll get to Tamarack. You
will
be there, won't you? When are you going back to LA?”

“Not until Gail gets back; I can't leave Robin and Ned. I'll be working here, in Leo's office; my secretary can send me most of what I need.”

“And you don't think Gail will be back in the next three days?”

“I doubt it. But even if she is, I'll wait for you.”

The words sang on the wires that spanned the miles
between them. Anne listened to their resonance and waited for Josh to reply, afraid he would try to push her further. “I'll see you Wednesday,” he said at last, very quietly, “as early as I can make it.”

When they hung up, Anne sat still, curled up on the sofa bed in Robin's hospital room where she had slept the night before. Robin was in bed, watching a movie, her headphones tight to her ears. Anne gazed out the window. A dense cloud filled the valley, blotting out the mountains on each side; snowflakes skittered in the gray air, the beginning of what was predicted to be a blizzard. A cloud lay on Tamarack, too, Anne thought; the exhilaration of a good beginning to the season had vanished with the fall of the gondola. She had felt it ever since they were brought down from the mountain the day before, and the clouds had closed in. There were whispered conversations in the corridors of the hospital, and in town; everyone speculating on what had happened—and what would happen next.

But for now Anne sat in Robin's room, the telephone beside her, and realized she was feeling warm and relaxed.

I'll see you Wednesday, as early as I can make it.

“Aunt Anne!” Ned called from across the hall.

“Coming.” Anne stood up to go to him. She did not know what would happen next, she did not even know precisely what she wanted to happen next, but her step was light as she crossed the hospital corridor.

We'll have plenty of time to talk.

I'll wait for you.

*   *   *

Vince heard about the gondola accident on the evening news as he was dressing for dinner. He stood in the center of the room, his shirt open, his tie dangling from his fingers, and watched the pictures, from that morning, of the fallen car on the slope, the car above still dangling from the cable, and the empty mountain. “Fear walks the streets of Tamarack tonight,” the reporter proclaimed. “Fear that the people who run this posh, glamorous resort may have gotten careless with success; fear that the problems of the past few
months may be more than they can handle.” He was standing in front of Timothy's, frowning solemnly and gesturing toward the people walking on the mall. “Visitors are leaving; cancellations are coming in. As one skier said to me today, ‘I can control my skiing; I can't control the guys who're supposed to keep the gondola running.' He left this afternoon. For Aspen.”

Vince used the remote control to flip to another channel.

“—no deaths, which officials say is a miracle. The people in the fallen car suffered major injuries, but all are expected to recover. Leo Calder, president of The Tamarack Company, was in the car above; he was flown to a hospital in Albuquerque with a fractured skull. His two children, who were with him, suffered broken legs. The fourth person in the car, Anne Garnett, the noted Los Angeles divorce lawyer, escaped injury. The ski patrol says she saved the lives of the two children by holding them when the cars collided and the back of their car was torn—”

Savagely, Vince switched channels.

“—tried to interview Miss Garnett, but she has stayed out of sight. As for the injured, in both cars, they're in hospitals in Tamarack and Durango, and we haven't been able to talk to them, either. I did talk today to Keith Jax, the assistant manager of Tamarack Mountain.” Keith appeared on the screen, smiling self-consciously into the camera. “We never had any problems with the gondola; it's got safety built in, like, all over the place. I mean, we take, like, thousands of people up the mountain every day, and nobody's ever been, you know, hurt. Somebody coulda got to it I guess, but I don't know who or why they'd want to; this is an awful thing to do to this town, scaring people, you know, and then they talk about the water, how it was, you know, poisoned last fall, but that's all over, and I don't think it's fair to, you know, like, blame the town because we've had some problems. I mean they could like happen anywhere.”

Vince turned off the set. A little too clever, he thought. But not clever enough to get rid of her. He clenched the
remote control. Still here, still here, still here. What the hell was he going to do about her?

She hung over him like a sword. She had not spilled her story to the press, showed no sign of spilling it, but it was still coiled inside her, ready to spring when she unleashed it . . . when he was close to the top, almost touching it. . . .

She'd been teasing him with it for months by moving in on the family and manipulating them, showing him she could attack him piecemeal and from a distance, before she used the weapon that would finally destroy him. And he'd been so busy he'd relied on a small-time, incompetent henchman. He should have taken care of her himself. That's what it came down to. And he had to do it right away. He could be in Tamarack in a few days, as soon as he could cut short his visit to Florida; he'd spend a day or so there, and then Denver, checking in with his people there, and be back in his office before Congress reconvened at the end of January. He was known for his record of attendance; he didn't want to spoil that.

But as he thought about it, it began to seem less urgent. She was out of sight for now; she'd probably be kept busy, with Leo and the kids in the hospital. And the truth was, Keith hadn't done such a bad job with the gondola. The more Vince thought about it over the next two days, the more pleased he became. He could do a lot with it; he'd know better when he was in Tamarack, and could talk to Keith.

“How did you do it?” he asked when the two of them were sitting in his suite at the Tamarack Hotel. He poured Scotch into two glasses, added ice, and sat back, looking past Keith at the ski mountain. A few skiers were coming down, stopping short at the road above the closed gondola building to ski to the other side of the mountain where the chair lift was operating. The empty gondola cable stretched up and out of sight; the cars had been taken off and stored in a shed at the top of the mountain until the investigation was completed, and repairs were made.

Looking at the cable, Vince thought of the town as it had
looked from his taxi window on the ride from the airport that afternoon. Wide, silent streets, houses and lawns hushed beneath a foot of new snow, sidewalks plowed and swept, waiting for the crowds that did not come. The town was eerily quiet. It was New Year's Day and in a normal year the streets and malls would have been crowded with visitors shopping or coming down from skiing for drinks and snacks and the last hot tub of their holiday. But not this year. This year, most of them had left early; the few who had stayed were doggedly trying to look cheerful, so they could get their money's worth. A ghost town, Vince thought, and grinned. It's a goddam ghost town.

“Well?” he asked. “How did you do it?”

“Maybe it's better if you, like, don't know,” Keith said. “I mean, if they ask you anything, you could say . . . you know.”

It occurred to Vince that Keith strongly resembled a weasel. Sandy-haired, his face a thin triangle above his sparse beard, his eyes narrowing when he spoke, he looked sly and shifty, and Vince remembered that he had only trusted him because there was no one else. “I asked you a question.”

Keith shrugged. “It's a little hard to, like, explain if you don't know how the gondola works, but basically what I did was like block the J-grip so it wouldn't hold—”

“What did you use?”

“To block it? A piece of wood; you know, a two-by-four.”

“What happened to it?”

“It fell out somewhere. What difference does it make? I mean, it wasn't there when the investigators, you know, checked, so the grip looked fine to them. You want me to go on?” Vince nodded. “Well there's this safety backup; it's like a switch that stops the gondola if the J-grip isn't grabbing right. So I fixed that, too; there's a bolt that holds part of the switch in place, and I just, like, took it out.”

“The bolt?”

“Right. So the J-grip was jammed but the switch wasn't getting signals from it, so it couldn't shut the gondola down.
So the whole thing kept going instead of, you know, stopping, and when they got moving up the steep part, the J-grip couldn't hold against, you know, gravity, so the car stopped. I mean, the cable kept going and the next car like rammed into them. You shoulda heard it. The whole thing was like pretty simple, you know?”

“Where's the bolt?” Vince asked.

Keith grinned. “I hid it.”

Vince waited.

Keith drained his glass and poured from the bottle of Scotch. He refilled Vince's without asking. “See, Vince, this is the thing. I've gotta get out of this place. I mean, I've had it up to here with Leo and the company and the whole resort bit; I'm like bored up to my kazoo. There's lots of things I can do; I mean, I've got lots of talents, only there's no way I can do anything creative in this hole. And I promised a little lady I'd take her with me when I go.”

“Nobody's stopping you,” Vince said. “You want Denver? Chicago? New York? I can call a few people if that's what you want. You were telling me where you hid the bolt.”

“No, I wasn't. Not yet. See, those are all nice cities and it's nice of you to say you'll, you know, help me and all, but this little lady wants to go to Washington, and I think that's a great idea. I mean, I said something about this before, you remember? I asked if you'd take me with you.”