Very few villages in the Rocky Mountains have managed to check the natural progression that leads from Old West town to Old West ghost town. Some of the ones that have managed to freeze themselves in time have become polished tourist magnets like Telluride and Georgetown, but only a precious few of the surviving nineteenth-century burgs have managed to remain invisible to the hordes of annual visitors who show up clutching tour books. Gold Hill was one of those few. Gold Hill was hard to get to, its fewer than two hundred full-time residents didn’t exactly lay out a welcome mat for guests, and any attempt to find a location for a Golden Arches or Starbucks within the range of a.30-06 from town would likely be met by a crowd of passionate locals prone to carelessness with torches.
The Gold Hill Inn, the town’s enduring fine dining destination, was open only during the summer months because too few Front Range residents could be counted on to make the drive up to nearly nine thousand feet in the inevitable springtime slush or the usually predictable autumn ice. Winter? For most people, casual travel to Gold Hill was too risky during an average snow year. I’ve always had the impression that four or five months of regular visits by curious flatlanders were about the maximum the residents of Gold Hill could tolerate anyway.
I hadn’t asked Sam about his business in Gold Hill. The mountain enclave was in Boulder County, and Sam was a city cop, not a sheriff’s deputy, so I suspected that his business was personal, not professional. But I also knew Sam well enough to know that if during the course of an investigation he wanted to talk with somebody who happened to reside a few steps outside the city limits, he would usually find a way to do so. The solution might be by-the-book legal, or it might be less-than-by-the-book creative. But the job would get done.
The fact that he was on medical leave from the police department? That would be no more of an impediment to him than the countless potholes we dodged in the dirt lane up to Gold Hill. Or the fact that I was certain he was under orders not to drive for a while after his heart attack.
Did I mention that to him? The driving restrictions? I didn’t. When I arrived at his house, I had offered to drive. He had declined. That’s as far as it went. I knew from experience that I could strongly encourage Sam’s sense of self-preservation. But insisting on it only put my own at risk.
We parked on Gold Hill’s main street across from the Gold Hill Inn. The street may actually have been called Main Street, but I didn’t look for a sign. I was enjoying the gorgeous day and was reveling at being up in the mountains in a town that was so charmingly frontier yet didn’t look as though it had been imagined by Disney set designers. As soon as I stepped out of the car onto the dusty dirt lane, I knew that, despite the fine autumn day, the air in Gold Hill-three thousand-plus feet above Boulder in altitude-held a chill that warned of imminent winter.
It should have felt ominous to me, but it didn’t.
Sam led me across the road toward the ancient building I’ll probably always think of as the home of the original Lick Skillet Café. My first wife and I had made frequent treks up the hill to the Lick Skillet for memorable meals in the late eighties before Dave Query packed up and trucked his culinary imagination down the mountain to Boulder and Denver.
The destination Sam had in mind was packed with locals. About half of the patrons seemed to make Sam for a cop before the cleft of his substantial butt cleared the jamb of the doorway. He pointed me toward an open deuce in a far corner. On the way we passed tables covered with platters that were plastered rim-to-rim with eggs and bacon and potatoes and flapjacks as big as hubcaps.
“Breakfast is hard for me,” Sam said. “I miss meat that’s been treated with nitrates. Outside of cheese, that’s what I miss most. Brats, bacon, salami…”
I thought the waitress was just the slightest bit tentative as she approached our table. Sam waved off the menus and ordered an egg-white omelet, sans cheese, sliced tomatoes, and dry wheat toast. He asked her to be sure that the omelet was made with very little butter. Almost speechless, but eager to endorse his choices, I told her I’d have the same.
Although we both knew that we had just done the equivalent of going into a fine steak house and ordering steamed broccoli and brown rice, the waitress took the order with casual aplomb, as though the entire town of Gold Hill were already on the Ornish diet and our order was par for the course that morning.
“Wait here,” Sam told me. “I have to go to the head. I won’t be long.” He stood and walked toward the bathrooms. Although I hadn’t been back that way for most of a decade, I was guessing that the odds were about fifty-fifty that the plumbing Sam would find was still the kind that didn’t involve copper pipes, or flushing.
I watched the choreography of turned heads that followed Sam’s departure from the dining room. Just as the faces returned to their plates and their stained stoneware mugs of coffee, the waitress who had taken our order-a pleasant-faced young woman with close-set eyes and stringy brown hair-took the short walk toward the back of the house, too. She glanced over her shoulder before she turned the final corner.
Sam returned to the dining room first. He had been gone no more than ninety seconds total. The waitress followed him about ten seconds later and resumed her tasks behind the counter.
“Had to pee,” he said as he sat down across from me. “Like to wash my hands before I eat.”
“Yeah. You met with our waitress, too.”
He nodded. “Wanted to remind her that the toast had to be dry. I’m off butter, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. You want to tell me-”
“Maybe later.”
Breakfast was bland, but then, we’d ordered it that way. Sam dug into his without complaint. I used the hot sauce on the table to add some zip to mine.
“Remember when we took the kids to Rocky Mountain National Park in September?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. Elk mate in the early autumn, and the beautiful dance concerts they produce at dusk prior to copulating draw hordes of human observers. Rocky Mountain National Park, northwest of Boulder, is prime territory for Front Range elk voyeurs. Sam, Sherry, Lauren, and I had taken the two kids, Simon and Grace, up the previous September for a cold picnic dinner and a visit to the annual elk show.
The elk had done their courting thing that night with philharmonic aplomb. Although the dance steps of the majestic bulls and their harems of cows were difficult to discern during the prime dusk time period, the acoustics that night were perfect. The bugling bulls sent their baritone calls bouncing off the granite faces in the park, and the eerie echoes quieted even the most restlessHomo sapiensin the audience.
“That’s when it hit me that Sherry was kind of unhappy. That night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He had wiped his plate clean and held up his mug for a refill of decaf before I realized he’d said all he planned to say about that night in the park. Me? I had a feeling there was more to discuss.
The waitress hustled over and topped off Sam’s coffee mug. “There are a lot of rules after a heart attack. No caffeine for a while-that’s one of them,” he said. “As far as things I miss, it would be hard to choose between caffeine and nitrates.”
“Sex?”
“I hope that’s not an offer. If it is, you’re a dead man.”
I offered a grudging smile. Were I with a patient, clinical protocol would have had me waiting silently, feigning patience, for Sam to return to the topic of his troubled marriage. But with Sam I didn’t have to follow any protocol. I said, “So that’s it? That’s all you’re going to say about Sherry? That you knew she was unhappy?”