Tough Cookie

carpet. This space featured a miniature sagging green-and-gold brocade couch, two stained gold chairs, and a fruitwood-veneer coffee table with a small pile of cardboard coasters featuring beer logos. The furnishings were all from that Seventies-era style known as “Mediterranean.” It must have been in that decade, I reflected as I sat on the couch, that this trailer had been built and sold as a furnished home. If Killdeer could spend millions expanding onto adjacent slopes, why couldn’t they subsidize low-income housing for their workers?

“Here you go.” Rorry set a large mug of steaming coffee on one of the cardboard coasters. She winced. “Don’t look at the rug. My boss back at Aspen Meadow Carpets would have had a fit.”

“I won’t tell,” I vowed, “if you promise not to squeal to my food-snob clients that I brought you meatballs.” She laughed and sipped her tea. I drank some of the coffee and pronounced it delicious.

Rorry smoothed the blue dress over her huge belly, then said, “Thank you for being so nice, Goldy. I don’t deserve it, after how bitchy I was to you.” Her light brown eyes held mine. Flecked with gold, puffy from lack of sleep, they were weary and apologetic. And sad.

“Don’t worry about it, I can handle bitchy. Remember when the president of the Episcopal Church Women objected to our class doing Ezekiel-in-the-Valley-of-Dry-Bones in the narthex? Now that was bitchy.”

She smiled thinly and shifted with obvious discomfort in her chair. “We had fun with that class, didn’t we?” When I nodded, she pulled a miniature bottle of lotion from a pocket, squirted some onto her right palm, and rubbed her hands with a nervous wringing motion. “We did Ezekiel after we did Joshua and the walls of Jericho,” she mused. “We were a pretty rambunctious group.” She took a deep breath. “I still stay in touch with St. Luke’s through the prayer chain. That was a great community. In Killdeer, there’s nothing like it. You’ve got the very rich and then you’ve got their servants, who live in trailers at the edge of town. Guess what category I fall into?” She laughed humorlessly.

“If you don’t like it,” I blurted out, “why do you stay?”

“We used to love to ski.” Rorry’s voice was unexpectedly defiant. What had she said at the fund-raiser? She was just puzzled. Her mood swings were bewildering. Or maybe not. After all, she was nine months pregnant and, as far as I could tell, alone. “I suppose you’ve heard the rumors,” she went on bleakly. “That’s one way that Killdeer doesn’t differ from Aspen Meadow. The gossip mill runs around the clock.”

“Nope, haven’t heard any rumors. And I’m a servant, too, you know.”

“But you’re dying of curiosity, and so is everyone at Front Range PBS. They sent you.”

“Nobody sent me, Rorry,” I told her. “I saw you Friday … and suddenly missed our friendship. So I called.”

She stared at the low, stained ceiling and went on as if I had not spoken. “The TV people won’t tell me anything. Oh, sure, they have their annual do in memory of Nate. They’re not raising funds for me, because the FCC says they can only raise money for themselves. For equipment! What a joke!”

“Rorry, I don’t know what—”

She banged her mug down on the battered coffee table and glared at me. “Nate’s the father of this baby I’m carrying.”

“Ah.” Either she’d been artificially inseminated, or she was losing her mind.

She read my expression accurately. “The first time we conceived, we had to freeze his sperm and go through artificial insemination. I was seven months pregnant when I had the miscarriage. Then last year I read an article, about women laying claim to the frozen sperm of their deceased lovers. So I decided to use what I had left of Nate.” When she scowled, her eyes crinkled in anger. “Use it before his girlfriend did, that is—”

I gagged on my coffee and remembered what Arthur had told me about Rorry’s suspicious nature, about her claims Nate was having an affair with Boots Faraday. “You think another woman would actually—”

Rorry held up a hand. “Nate said he and Boots Faraday—the collage artist, do you know her?” When I nodded, she raised a thin blond eyebrow. “Nate said Boots was giving him business advice. Then he went out-of- bounds to film something, and she said he was tracking lynx. Unfortunately, the wildcat population doesn’t buy a lot of videotapes, so I doubt a film of tracks was his so-called moneymaking idea.” She tsked and asked, “Do you know anything about tracking wild animals?”

“Not a thing, I’m happy to say.”

“You hear of a sighting,” Rorry continued in the same aggressive tone, as if determined to prove something to me. “You go where the trail might be and you look for scat. You find it, you start filming.”

“Rorry, I’m not following you—”

She heaved herself up, crossed to the kitchenette, and pulled something out of a drawer. Wordlessly, she thrust an envelope at me. I pulled out a much-crumpled note. Meet me at the Ridge trail at 2:00. Make sure nobody sees you. And remember your equipment, pal. The handwriting was slanted and feminine.

Rorry, bitterly triumphant, announced: “Lynx don’t buy videos, and they don’t write notes, no matter how endangered they are. Arthur Wakefield and the TV people claim Nate was not doing a tracking project for them. But they didn’t know what he was doing, so the spin, the story, the myth came out of the Killdeer Artists’ Association and Boots Faraday.” She raised her voice to a mocking falsetto. “ ‘Brave Outdoorsman Loses Life Tracking Vanishing Colorado Wildlife.’ What crap! The only prints on that trail were from a man and a woman. Nate and his girlfriend, Boots. Bring your equipment, puhleeze. They sneaked into the out-of-bounds area to make love. Where no one would see.”

“There’s no hay to roll in in Killdeer Valley, Rorry.” She shook her head dismissively. I persisted. “But the footprints diverged. One set went up, one went down.”

“So you have heard some rumors.” Her eyes blazed.

“Not rumors, but information. From the ski patrol. After the fund-raiser, I was worried about you. So I asked a patrolwoman to tell me about the avalanche. I thought it might help me understand what was going on with you. That’s it.” I took a deep breath. “But if their paths parted, maybe he was just keeping her company—”

“Maybe he was planning on getting undressed at the bottom of the hill and waiting for her,” she said hotly.

I bit the inside of my cheek. My old friend had clearly spent three years of sleepless nights worrying over details, trying to piece disparate data bits into a coherent theory of her husband’s death. She hadn’t grieved properly because she didn’t know what had happened. Worse, too many unknowns had left her with a sense of betrayal deeper and more devastating than grief.

“Rorry, the Killdeer Artists’ Association said that Nate was trying to diversify, to provide a better living —”

“Oh, don’t give me any of Boots Faraday’s bullcrap. I’ve heard her line about Nate wanting to raise money for us, blah, blah, blah. Boots is a great skier and snowboarder and a successful artist. She called here and called here and called here before Nate died. Each time, she tried to hide her identity. Why? She’s sexy as can be, as I saw when I went to one of the association’s meetings with Nate. She was flirting all around, trying to get everyone to sign a petition, to get rid of Doug Portman. You saw her at the fund-raiser on Friday, didn’t you? You see, she just can’t get Nate out of her mind. She’s obsessed. I think she’s the one who wrecked my car, then returned it just to torment me.”

“Rorry, you’re an old friend.” I asked gently, “Why did you decide to have Nate’s baby, now? After all these years?”

She pressed her lips together, struggling to keep the emotion in. Then she answered, “I lost one baby when he died. And … I miss Nate terribly, even with all the … unanswered questions. The baby is for me—for us. I decided to have the baby now for what Nate and I could have been.” Before I could reply, she pulled back her sleeve to check her watch. “I need to go. Can you still take me to work at the warehouse? I’m doing a double shift today. A coworker can bring me home later.” Before I could ask whether doing a double shift was a good idea, she excused herself to freshen up.

I sighed quietly, picked up our mugs, and fit them into the trailer’s small, packed dishwasher. When Rorry returned wearing snow boots, a jacket, and a hat, we took off for the Killdeer warehouse.