The Threshold (12 page)

“Not tonight, Callie. I’m feeling too tired and sad for Aunt Lilly.”

“Aren’t you afraid of the cave-in the lady’s husband warned you about?”

“If it was going to happen, it would have happened before now.”

“You know what the Bible says, ‘As ye sow so shall ye reap’?” Charles was gone and baby Henry and now Aunt Lilly. Bram must not leave her too. “Bram, you don’t suppose you’ll reap a cave-in because of what you did to Miss Heisinger?”

13

“I think that big kid was Bram, don’t you? I mean, the way he looked at me when I said his name …” Cree lay spread out on the ground on his stomach, pitching rocks under Callie’s house in an attempt to dislodge Charles.

“We’re terrifying him. But he can’t stay here. There’s no town left. No one to feed him.” Aletha had found a long stick to poke and prod with. Charles spat and hissed and backed himself into a corner where some of the flooring had caved in.

“He’s an animal. He might make out all right.”

“He’s a domestic animal and he’s Callie’s cat. We’re not leaving without him. Your mission can wait, McCree.” Aletha slid on her belly over the rocky, disturbed earth beneath the shack and tried not to think of what kind of creatures might have been digging here, perhaps have homes under her. She had to pull her souvenir pendant out of her sweatshirt to keep it from cutting into her. Just as she reached for a handful of cat tail, Charles broke and scooted past her face, made a wrong turn, and Cree had him by a hind leg an instant before he would have been free.

“Poor kitty, he’s out of time and out of place,” Aletha said when she drove them down the mountain. Charles lay across Cree’s lap, hiding his face in the darkness of the crook of Cree’s elbow. When Aletha stopped before pulling out onto the highway, he raised his head and panted with terror as a dog would with the heat.

“He’s caught in time. What if we’d been caught last night?” Cree stroked a dirty spot on Charles’s white coat. “Last night when it happened, the old times were all around us. And when it stopped we sort of fell back into our own time. This morning we merely glimpsed Callie’s world through a hole. And when it closed, old Charlie here stayed with us instead of falling back into his own time.” It sounded like he was peeling a carrot when he scratched his unshaven chin. “It must be the place. Or you and the place.”

“And Callie.”

“Callie wasn’t at that roadblock. We didn’t hear her when we heard the tram and those voices. It’s you. And if I hadn’t met you I’d be worrying over my own life. Not wondering if that Bram kid went into the mine.”

“What if we changed history by warning them? Maybe Callie didn’t go to the Senate. You know, if her teacher’s still alive, she could be too.”

She held Charles while Cree went into Rose’s Market in Telluride for cat food and kitty litter. They discovered their new Victorian friend was not housebroken shortly after they turned him loose to sniff around the condo. Cree put him in a bathroom with food, water, and the kitty box and closed the door. “Could be why Ma’am threatened to poison him.”

“Shouldn’t we talk to him, soothe him down? This is all so strange to him.”

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with Charlie.” He turned her away from the bathroom door. “But there is something we can do for you.”

Cree walked Aletha out to Lone Tree Cemetery. The toe of her tennis shoe nudged the flat stone in the grass. “It might not be our Callie.” Her voice was husky with tears that weren’t in her eyes. “Could have been a very popular name years ago.”

Cree wished he hadn’t been so abrupt, had warned her on the walk out. He turned away feeling like an ass because he didn’t know how to comfort her. Instead he poked around in the grass nearby for other buried markers and found one almost completely grown over. He pulled away grass and weeds, dug out dirt with bare fingers, wiped repeatedly at the inscription, hoped it wasn’t somebody named “Bram.” This marker was larger than Callie’s and looked as if it could once have sat upright. Some of the inscription was indecipherable but he did make out the words “Beloved Husband and Father” and “Haskell Gibson” and the birth and death years—1880 and 1900.

He brushed off his hands and quelled an urge to look for more stones. That boy, even with his funny haircut and big ears, had struck a chord in Cree. Perhaps it was just that the kid was the healthy type, that if a man ever wanted a son … well, this Bram was the kind you’d want to show off to other men. Cree snorted self-derision and found Aletha watching him.

“Do you know you talk to yourself? I think that’s kind of nice.”

He knew he talked to himself, but he never realized he’d been doing it until the conversation was over. It had embarrassed him more than once. “So what did I say?”

“I don’t know. You just move your lips. Hey, there’s nothing the matter with being human.”

Cree kissed her to make her shut up and took her to the Floradora for lunch. A barn had been stripped of its weathered wood to line an old building on the main street. The Floradora boasted the requisite bar, stained glass, hanging plants, and prints of Telluride’s mining days, but it also had a soup-and-salad bar worth the price.

Aletha’s honey-colored hair usually hung smooth to her shoulders and turned under at the ends, but now it was mussed by wind and tucked behind an ear on one side. Her cheeks were flushed with the outdoor activity and with sadness over Callie. Cree could well imagine her in a Caribbean tan and a nifty bikini surrounded by palm fronds and sand. He could not imagine her in a federal prison. She was too trusting.

“Are you married?” she asked him suddenly.

“Eat your salad.”

“Least you could do is talk some about yourself. Especially after taking advantage of me that way last night.”

“Advantage? I was practically attacked!”

“Are you married?” She lifted amber-colored eyebrows that matched her eyes.

“Was. Didn’t work out.” That wasn’t all that hadn’t worked out.

“‘It didn’t work out’—that’s become a cliché for a sick society.” She waved her fork as if directing the sixties music playing from the speakers in the corners and originating at the local radio station.

“You’re not only old-fashioned, you’re a prude.”

Aletha laughed, then whispered, “I wish I’d never gotten involved with Callie. All I can think about is her. I walk around jumpy-like, not knowing where or when a hole into another world will open up.”

“And possibly swallow you like it did Charlie. You might get stuck in Callie’s world sometime. Ever think of that?”

“I don’t ask for these things to happen. What can I do?”

“Get out of Telluride, maybe even out of Colorado. I’ve got a Cessna at the Montrose airport. Take you anywhere you want to go.”

“You’re a pilot. I knew you must have done something before you were unemployed. You certainly don’t seem to lack for funds.” She contemplated a cucumber slice on the end of her fork and then pointed it at him instead of putting it in her mouth. “I’ve got to know what happened to Callie. And there’s only one person who can tell me. Mildred Heisinger.”

“What about Mildred Heisinger?” Renata Winslow slid in beside Cree. “And where have you been? You missed a shift at the San Juan Bordello but Barry wants you at the Senate by four.” Cree chose to ignore the raised eyebrow and questioning glance she turned on Aletha and then on him.

They stayed to have coffee while Renata picked at a lunch and regaled them with stories of the incompetents she’d been known to hire, and then softened it all with a coating of wry sophistication that passed for charm. She was one very smooth lady but she didn’t seem like Dutch Massey’s type. Renata had moved to Aspen from the West Coast, she’d told Cree, looking for reality. She’d owned a boutique there for a few years and moved on to Telluride, he supposed because she hadn’t found reality in Aspen. He couldn’t believe she’d found it here either.

“Cree and I have been seeing people and things happening in the past,” Aletha said. “They even gave us a cat this morning.”

“Oh, are you into the occult?” Renata’s pause was minuscule. “They’re talking about having a workshop on that next year between the hang-gliding conference and the film festival. There’re already a few loons in town trying to drum up business.”

“She didn’t turn a hair,” Aletha complained when they walked back to the Pick and Gad. “I don’t understand this world even when I’m not in prison.”

Cree had been assured that locks were unnecessary in Telluride but he’d always locked up the condo. That’s why he noticed his key locked the door instead of unlocked it. He drew Aletha back and entered carefully, pushing aside the contents of the coat closet to gain entrance. Everything in the place had been tipped over, pulled apart, or dumped on the floor. He headed for the bedroom. The dresser in the corner angled out into the room, the carpet pulled back to expose the pad and the tack strip and the absence of the folder. How had they found that one section of loose carpeting in the whole place? And why today in daylight when the condo had been empty all night?

“Charles is gone.” The fear and suspicion in Aletha’s voice had nothing to do with the cat. “I don’t know if whoever did this took him or just let him out.”

“Probably let him out. He had no value to anyone. Listen, I have to borrow your car.”

“The car’ll just scare him. Shouldn’t we look for him on foot?”

“I have something more important to do than look for a cat.” Cree held her gently, spoke slowly. He clamped down on a surging impatience that wanted him to shake the car keys out of her and the sense of what he had to do into her. “You may have the keys to the condominium for what good they seem to be. I think they found what they were after and won’t be back. But I need your car, now. Please?”

She didn’t look convinced but she did pull the keys from her pocket. “That car is one of the few things left in this world that belongs to me.”

“I’ll take good care of it. May not be back till tonight or even tomorrow. Do not, I repeat, do not report this to the marshal.”

Aletha was late to work at the Senate because she’d roamed Telluride asking after a dirty white cat with the palest of green eyes. She had no luck. Tonight she had a room but no car and she’d lost Callie’s cat.

“Well, if it isn’t the Witch of the West,” Tracy greeted her. “What have you been up to lately? On second thought, I don’t want to know. No tricks or whatever it is you do tonight, okay?”

“What’s this Tracy tells me about you being haunted?” Barry took her aside later in the evening. “Haven’t been hittin’ the ‘shrooms,’ have ya?”

“I’ve been having strange experiences since I came to Telluride, and without any hallucinogenic help. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything to the guests.” Aletha had learned there were two kinds of people here—locals and guests. And since tourism was the only industry left, the locals—mostly refugees from either coast looking for a mythical small-town way of life—could not survive in their mountain paradise without a continual stream of guests to bring in money.

“Oh, I don’t know. Might help the trade.” He stared through her a moment, jutted out his chin to scratch at the neck under it, and grinned. “Don’t think even Aspen’s got ghosts.”

The Senate sided on an alley across which were the back ends of the businesses that fronted on Colorado Avenue, Telluride’s main street. Many of brick, all built in the heyday of the mining boom, their behinds were an interesting hodgepodge of architecture. While some abutted directly on the alley, others were inset as much as half a lot space, the whole effect reminiscent of a mouth packed tightly with uneven teeth. Though there was a streetlight, the alley was, as alleys should be, heavy with shadow and mystery. It was also well populated by cats, Aletha learned when she stepped out the door of the Senate’s kitchen with a plastic garbage bag.

She hadn’t seen many this afternoon when searching for Charles, but now one jumped out of the dumpster as she pitched in the bag. Another sat on the edge of the dumpster across the alley, swiping its whiskers under the streetlight. And there was an all-out hissing fight taking place somewhere in the shadows. Aletha stood still, listening for the congested wail of her Victorian friend. She heard a “mew,” several “meows,” and some threatening moans that could have come from any cat.

“Charles?” she called tentatively, and that was a mistake, because all the cats shut up and listened back. The one on the edge of the dumpster eyed her as if she were an alien. Behind her, dishes clanked, the human dishwasher swore, the mechanical one sloshed and rattled. Someone on Colorado Avenue shouted. An engine that needed a muffler rumbled on a side street. A mountain night, chilly, dark—and somehow the human sounds did not seem a part of it. If Charles was in town, this would be the time to look for him.

The alley didn’t feel friendly. Aletha opened the screen door. Heat and the stink of cooked cauliflower and chemical detergent hung like an invisible barrier at the doorsill. “Herm, do we have a flashlight?”

The tattooed dishwasher scratched grease from the splatter panels.
“We
do not have shit.
They
have a flashlight.” He reached into a cupboard, handed her a slender cylinder but didn’t release it as their fingers met. “You got a smoke? A joint? Forget it.” He let her have the flashlight. “Just where is it at that you come from, dear? Do you even know?”

“Yeah. Prison.” Aletha stepped back into the alley to the tune of his laughter.

“You are lost, lady,” Herm called after her. “You am lo-ost.”

14

Uncle Henry gave up his cabin and moved into the boardinghouse. If there was a funeral in Telluride for Aunt Lilly, no one spoke of it to Callie and Bram. They couldn’t have gotten down for it anyway. Luella was so strained and white that no one spoke of her sister to save her the pain. Her tonic ran out and she caught a lingering cold.

Callie’s cheerful home had grown gloomy, and to add to it, the school session ended. One afternoon she climbed to the top of the drift in front of her house and felt like she was standing on a mountain on top of a mountain. She could even see the Lizard Head in the distance over the sloping mill roof. The sky snapped blue and the snow snapped tiny brilliants back at it. The cold and dry pricked the inside of her nose as if it wanted her to sneeze. Moisture from her breath caused the knitted strands of the scarf tied around the lower half of her face to freeze scratchy in front of her mouth. Her toes hurt already in last year’s fleece-lined arctic boots. Callie had planned to visit Bertha Traub on the hill but a crowd had gathered around the tram house below the mill and she changed directions.