Pariah Read online

  Before the Second World War, expert skiers from the university clubs back east had stayed here, braving the untested cirques and couloirs high in the backcountry beyond. But in the winter of 1940, three shining stars from the Dartmouth Ski Club were swept away in an avalanche near Mount Daly, and the word soon reached the ski world that this spur of the range was too unstable for even the most experienced Tyroleans.

  The war closed the place, and afterward Aspen, the sleepy mining village down the road, quickly developed into the most commodious resort in Colorado. The Elk Mountain Lodge was too remote, too extreme. Within a few short years the investors had abandoned their project and sold the entire piece of land to the Bauer family of Denver. Nicole and her two brothers still owned the 150 acres.

  Kurt walked up the split-log steps to a wide porch beset with wicker rocking chairs. Pushing open the heavy Bavarian door, he found the old lobby in considerably better shape than the last time he’d seen it, when the building was deserted and stank like animal urine and these polished pinewood floors were as dirt-packed as a potato cellar. Now the room had presence: the quaintness of its original intention. Logs burned in the large stone fireplace. Deep, overstuffed reading chairs were arranged in a circle around an adobe pueblo surface rug. The sign-in desk was fully restored, with its original porter’s gate and wall of pigeonhole boxes for room keys and messages. There was no one in the chairs or at the desk counter, and with little imagination he could believe that the lodge was inhabited entirely by hospitable ghosts.

  He wandered into the cozy pine-beamed room, drawn to the sunlight glistening through the modern sliding glass doors that opened onto a rear deck. It was public knowledge that in their divorce settlement Nicole had given Jay Westbrook this lodge for his practice, along with the use of the grounds. Judging by the handsome renovation, his practice was doing well.

  Kurt heard what sounded like a woman weeping somewhere down the long corridor leading to the private rooms. The eerie strain unsettled him. He was still carrying the weight of Nicole’s sobbing phone call like a stone in his pocket. At a stairwell to the upper floor he stopped and listened with more concentration, trying to make out her pleading words.

  Soon the weeping began again. He followed the voice down the narrow corridor off the lobby until the woman’s distress grew louder and he could hear her clearly: “I can’t let go, dammit! Don’t you think I’ve tried? I’ve been working through this my entire adult life!”

  A group therapy session was taking place in a carpeted space that may have been the billiards room in the old days. Kurt paused at the open door. People were sitting cross-legged in a circle, mostly middle-aged clients listening sympathetically to the distraught woman.

  “I endorse that,” said Dr. Westbrook, a bearded, barrel-chested man with squared shoulders and impressively erect posture. Kurt recognized several other faces as well. Local people with money to burn.

  As soon as he saw Kurt, Westbrook nodded to a young woman, who rose alertly and hurried over to the door. “You’re the sheriff, aren’t you?” she said in a low voice, taking Kurt’s arm and walking him back down the corridor away from the gathering. “I recognize you from the newspapers. You’re a lot taller in person.”

  “I have to be,” he said, offering no resistance. “Are you the young lady I spoke with?” He recognized the chirp in her voice.

  “Unhunh. The session will be over in a few minutes. Jay will see you then.”

  Her name was Tanya and she seemed less officious in person than on the phone. Late twenties, a turtleneck sweater complementing her full Teutonic figure, a long blond braid down her back.

  “Is there anything I can do for you while you wait?” she asked once they’d reached the lobby. “Some herbal tea?”

  “I’m fine, thanks. Unless you want to listen to some of my problems.”

  She was slow to smile. Her responsibilities were important to her. “If you’re serious, I will be happy to arrange something.”

  “It may require electroshock.”

  She started to formulate a sincere reply, then caught herself, realizing he was joking. “Jay will see you shortly,” she said with a dismissive frown.

  Kurt watched her return down the corridor to the therapy session, then he ambled across the lobby to the glass sliding doors. Out on the deck the pine benches were dark and wet. Snow was dissolving in the morning sunlight, trickling into the roof gutters. In the distance a spruce forest belted itself around the rocky lower terrain of Elk Mountain, and Kurt could see more of those cabins nestled in the trees. Someone was sitting on the steps of a small hutch hidden within the shadows a hundred yards away, and when Kurt gave him a friendly wave the man stood up stiffly and went back inside.

  Stepping over to the deck rail, Kurt cupped his hands around his eyes and gazed up the steep southwest chute into the white glare, where an alpine wind was blowing snow smoke and the ice shimmered on fir branches. The tower poles for that old T-bar lift still ran like a tight black stitch up a thousand feet of rock face. The investors had abandoned their dream before the lift was completed.

  When they were seventeen, eighteen years old, Kurt and his brother and Jake Pfeil had been outlaw skiers restlessly searching for adventure, another boundary to cross, untrammeled slopes and virgin powder. They had skied in this valley since they were children and had mastered Aspen and Highlands and had even grown bored with the extreme outback of Maroon Bells and Hayden Peak. They knew the old stories about the Dartmouth skiers, and more than anything else it was that tragedy, and the boys’ morbid curiosity, that had brought them to this doomed range. Arrogant, fearless, fit as Sherpas, they truly believed they were the best skiers in the Roaring Fork Valley and that no mountain could lay them low.

  So one morning in the early spring of 1964 they drove the Pfeil family pickup truck to this obscure valley, where deep snow-drifts beckoned beneath the glorious sun. The county had plowed the road only up to the old ranch fence, and they had to park the truck and snowshoe a half mile to the uninhabited lodge with backpacks and skis slung over their shoulders. Those were the days before avalanche probes and Tracker DTS transceivers. They didn’t even carry a rescue shovel.

  After breaking in through a window and exploring the dark, feral-smelling rooms, scaring off a family of foxes holed up in the old kitchen area, they stowed their gear on this same deck where Kurt was now lost in memory and followed a trail thirty degrees uphill through the draw, tracking over deadfall and icy rocks for two hours until they topped the first summit. The view was magnificent. In the distance rose the peaks of two mountains, Daly and Clark, and between them one of the deepest, most perfectly rounded bowls of white powder they had ever seen, like a snow-filled crater of the moon.

  “That’s what ate them,” Bert had said that day, meaning those bold young men from Dartmouth. Kurt would always remember the basin as unblemished and blessed, like the face of a sleeping child.

  Jake looked at his two friends, their poles knifed in the snow. “The bitch spread her legs,” he said with a scoff, “and they jumped in. Fucking amateurs.”

  Kurt stared into the bowl below, his lungs laboring hard after the thousand-foot climb. “It wouldn’t happen to old pros like us,” he said, only half serious.

  The boys considered the statement in silence. They were tempted to traverse the spiny ridge and slice down into the immaculate purity of that basin as the other skiers had done nearly twenty-five years earlier.

  Minutes passed in the chill wind while they studied the unspoiled beauty. Finally Bert said, “We’d be crazy to trust her. She’ll swallow us alive.”

  They all knew he was right. That stunning bowl was an avalanche waiting to happen.

  “There’s a whole world up here.” Kurt had pointed with his pole, breaking the spell with more sober possibilities. “Let’s go check it out.”

  For the next two hours they crisscrossed the terrain near the bowl, discovering other cirques and rugged paths splitting down through the fir
forest. A cluster of small frozen lakes flashed sunlight off blue ice. The country felt so new and untouched they wondered if any human had ever left tracks in this snow. Cut by slash, they were claiming these ridgetops as their own breathless secret.

  Later, it was impossible to say for certain what had triggered the slide: thawing sunshine, seismic pressures, a ski blade or the sound of their voices.

  It was the end of their day and they were resting on a ledge overlooking the final plunge down three hundred yards of unknown chute toward the lodge somewhere below. They had breathed the thin air too long, enthralled with themselves and their discoveries, overcome by testosterone and hubris and the maniacal competition between teenage boys. They were out of water and Bert’s stomach was cramping, Jake’s lips were sticky from dehydration, Kurt was exhausted. His quads twitched uncontrollably, a raging fire from his heels to the base of his spine.

  “Come on, ladies. Up on your feet,” Jake had barked like a weary master sergeant. “Let’s go for it.”

  They were only sixty yards down the chute when they heard the roar behind them. Kurt looked over his shoulder and saw the white cloud and huge chunks of snow hurling downward, sluicing the narrow rock channel carved into the mountainside. Panic-stricken, Bert waved his pole at his younger brother, entreating Kurt to catch up. Each boy raced for survival now, the avalanche bearing down on their strapped heels.

  “Sheriff Muller,” someone said. “I’m sorry we have to meet under these circumstances.”

  A bone-chilling vapor swirled around them. They could feel the snow giving way beneath their strokes, set off by the noise echoing through the chute. They poled faster, skiing for their lives, but the avalanche kept roaring after them.

  “Sheriff Muller?”

  Kurt turned around to face a short, stocky man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a cardigan sweater, brown corduroy trousers, and Rockport dress boots. He appeared to be in his late fifties now, his trim gray beard streaked with red. Twenty years ago, when the Bauers had brought him into Nicole’s defense team, his beard was as red as a Norseman’s.

  “Jay Westbrook,” the psychiatrist said, offering his hand.

  “Sorry,” Kurt said, grinning apologetically, shaking hands. “You caught me daydreaming, Doctor.”

  With a warm smile Westbrook cupped his other hand firmly over the top of their mutual grip, the sympathetic double handshake of a minister or undertaker. “Memories,” he said. “They trap us all.”

  “Or worse,” Kurt said.

  He noticed the clients milling about the lobby on break, making their way toward the deck for fresh air. “Is there somewhere we can talk in private?” he asked.

  Westbrook led him through a deck entrance to his office, a large converted space, two lodge bedrooms with the common wall removed. Pine paneling, bookshelves filled with hefty volumes, file cabinets side by side in an orderly row, a majestic walnut desk arranged with tidy stacks of notes and pink message slips. Against the opposite wall sat the requisite couch, a glass coffee table, and a stately high-backed chair. The wall above the couch was arrayed with dozens of small amateur artworks, the kind rendered for doctors by their patients.

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” Kurt said. “I know you’re a busy man.”

  “Your phone call came as quite a shock,” Westbrook said, directing Kurt to the couch while he stepped over to a hot-plate nook and placed tea bags in two decorative mugs. “Forgive me if I seem a little dazed. I’m having a hard time processing this,” he said, pouring water from a steaming kettle. “We were married for fifteen years.”

  He brought the two mugs of steeping tea to the coffee table and sat down in the high-backed chair across from Kurt.

  “I’m aware that Miz Bauer had a history of psychiatric care,” Kurt said. “Had she ever attempted suicide before?”

  Westbrook laced his fingers and stared at the steam curling from the two mugs. Time passed while he was lost in contemplation. “Yes, she had,” he said finally. “Soon after the Rocky Rhodes trial.”

  Kurt could see that this was still delicate ground.

  “Unfortunately, over the past year she seemed to be regressing to that painful period in her life,” he said, “reopening old wounds. I was concerned for her stability.”

  “Is that why you prescribed Risperidone?”

  His eyes widened, showing surprise that Kurt would know about her medication. “Nicole had been on and off antipsychotics for many years,” he said, bending forward to dip the tea bag up and down in his mug. “She was experiencing a relatively long period of equilibrium when that disturbed young woman tried to break into her house. The incident sent her into a downward spiral.”

  “I’m familiar with the case,” Kurt said.

  “Yes, that’s how Nicole met you, isn’t it?”

  Now it was Kurt’s turn to show surprise. Until this moment he hadn’t considered the possibility that Nicole might have revealed their affair to someone else. Say, her longtime therapist and ex-husband. Suddenly he felt ill at ease. He shifted about on the couch, searching for a more comfortable position. Instead of two professionals, cop and shrink, examining the motivations of a suicide, the conversation had taken a strange, more personal turn.

  “The break-in left all her vulnerabilities exposed,” Westbrook added. “She was grateful that you gave her case so much attention. You must be a very conscientious police officer, Sheriff Muller.”

  Although the compliment appeared straightforward, Kurt felt the slightest undertow of another man’s envy.

  “She discussed it with you?” he asked, unsure himself if he meant the break-in or the affair.

  Westbrook nodded. “Even after the divorce I was always there for her. An emotional crutch,” he said. “She knew she could confide in me.”

  “So you continued to be her therapist? She came to you for counseling?”

  “That’s correct.” His round bearded face grew animated. “Why let a bad marriage ruin a good relationship?”

  A bad marriage. At the time of their divorce the Aspen gossip mill had circulated the story that Westbrook could no longer tolerate Nicole’s infidelities. But Nicole herself had once mentioned to Kurt, during their own brief affair, that the divorce was her idea. She had told Kurt that living with a psychiatrist was like living in a laboratory where every utterance was examined and dissected. Their life together had become too claustrophobic, she’d said. Too confining.

  Restless, Kurt stood up from the couch and wandered over to the wall where the doctor’s diplomas were hanging in frames. “Did she tell you about the letters?” he asked, reading the inscribed parchment. M.D., Tulane School of Medicine. Alpha Psychiatric Institute of Denver.

  “Which letters, Sheriff?”

  Kurt bent down to watch a lone fish gliding in the green-glowing aquarium below the diplomas. It was an exotic golden creature with delicate tendrils floating about like ribbons. “The ones she started receiving a couple of weeks ago,” he said.

  “Can you be more specific?” Westbrook said.

  “Death threats,” Kurt said, turning to face him. “A half dozen in all, the same sender.”

  The psychiatrist’s eyes shrank behind the wire-rimmed glasses. He issued another comprehending nod. “Nicole received hate mail for years, Sheriff. Deranged fans of the late Rocky Rhodes. Every time a new generation discovered his music and learned how the great rock star died, they turned on the person they thought was responsible. And then the letters came. Angry, obscene, threatening,” he said, his face conveying pity for the kind of people who sent them. “They blamed Nicole for killing their god.”

  The vicious words flashed through Kurt’s mind: evil fucking cunts. “She showed me the latest ones,” he said. “They were very convincing.”

  “Is there any reason to believe they were different from all the others?”

  “Nicole seemed to think so,” Kurt said. “They were from Rocky Rhodes himself.”

  The psychiatrist sipped his te
a and raised an eyebrow, as if he’d been told a joke in poor taste.

  “Someone claiming to be Rocky,” Kurt explained. “Nicole was certain it was him. She thought Rocky was alive and planning to kill her.”

  Westbrook took some time to respond, then spoke in a measured tone. “Nicole was a delusional paranoid, Sheriff Muller. She had suffered a long acquaintance with the imaginary,” he said, his voice dropping into a solemn confidentiality. “Some of the persecution was real, of course. The occasional harassment, the bad press. And she certainly had been shunned by Aspen society.”

  His face softened, as if he himself had endured the same rejections. Despite the popularity of his practice, their fifteen years together must have forced him into an awkward social isolation. “She had fantasies about Rocky all the time,” he said. “A recurring nightmare that lingered with her throughout her waking hours. She always believed he would come back someday and take revenge.”

  “The letters were for real, Dr. Westbrook. Whoever was pretending to be Rocky did a damned good job.”

  Suddenly it occurred to him that the person most familiar with Nicole’s bedtime rituals—and the intimate details of her relationship with Rocky—was the husband-psychiatrist sipping tea from his arty ceramic mug.

  “It was someone who had known Nicole extremely well,” Kurt said.

  Westbrook stifled a smile. “Yes, my friend, you’re certainly right about that,” he said, removing his glasses and fogging a lens with his breath.

  Kurt was losing his patience. “Those letters were probably what tipped the balance,” he said. “They may have been responsible for her suicide.”

  The two men stared at each other in silence.

  “Sheriff Muller, I know exactly what the letters say.” Without his glasses the psychiatrist looked older, hollow-eyed, worn. “Whatever else is in them, they eventually make their way to Nicole’s sexual proclivities—what turned her on and what made her climax. There are explicit descriptions of the pagan goddess rituals she surrounded herself with when she was aroused and ready for her mate. Am I correct?”