Gabi Frischmann, the receptionist at the Apparthotel, introduced Mr. and Mrs. Falchero to the MacPhersons, who were shocked to learn that Fabrizio had vanished at the same time they were conducting their initial search for Duncan. He must have passed within a hundred meters of them. When they heard that he enjoyed cycling, they remembered seeing a young man riding his bike on the road between Neustift and the Mutterbergalm—a memorable sight because it had just started snowing.
A video found in his camper showed footage of the mountains around the Mutterbergalm during a snowstorm, apparently taken just before Fabrizio disappeared.
“Watching that video was such a strange experience,” Bob recounted. “I remembered the storm perfectly as the one that had forced us to call off our search.”
The next day everyone rode the gondola up to the Eisgrat and gazed at the glacier.
“Nothing could have happened to Fabrizio here!” Gino exclaimed. “He was a mountaineer and professional skier. Maybe on Mont Blanc, but not on this little thing.” Lynda remembered Bob saying more or less same thing when he first saw the glacier.
“I turned to Anna to see if she had any opinion,” Lynda recalled. “She had this look of agony on her face, as though she was about to cry, but she didn’t say a word.”
“Fabrizio must have gone somewhere else after he visited this place,” Gino concluded with a wave of his hand. Nevertheless, several Italian volunteers, some with dowsing rods, searched the Schaufelferner. Lynda was amazed to see some of them fixing raw meat on the y-shaped twigs, apparently to make them more sensitive.
The MacPhersons and Falcheros shared the cost of another search for their sons in the mountains around the Stubai Valley. One morning Bob tried to join a search party that assembled near the gondola station. Standing there in the cool morning air, wearing his hiking boots, he greeted the mountaineers and tried to indicate that he wished to join them. Some returned his “hello,” but otherwise didn’t take much notice of him. They then set off from the parking lot at a brisk pace, without gesturing at him to join. It was as though he, the father of the missing person, weren’t even present.
“That was sort of a low moment,” Bob said. “I knew I couldn’t really talk with those guys, but it still sort of stung me the way they acted like I wasn’t even there. I trailed along behind them, looking at the terrain they covered, and not once did I see any kind of hazard that could kill a man and conceal his body.”
Lynda saw Gino every morning in the breakfast room, and she liked to listen to his theories.
“He was always making wild hand gestures, and he had the funniest habit of tearing bread rolls in half and pulling out the spongy centers. We’d get to the end of breakfast and his plate would be covered with little bread balls. One morning he told me he figured that Fabrizio had met a beautiful and rich Austrian girl and was living with her at her villa in Kitzbuehel. I have no idea if he was kidding because he said it with a straight face.”
Coincidentally, an Innsbruck cop had proposed a similar explanation for Duncan’s disappearance, though in his version, Duncan had met an enchanting Italian girl. A psychic in Vienna who’d followed the case in the papers called Angelika Ladner at the hotel and said she’d had a vision of Duncan in the sauna with an Italian woman whose jealous husband murdered him and then dumped his body in the mountains.
A group of Italians had, in fact, stayed at the hotel on August 9, 1989, so in spite of being fed up with psychics, Lynda asked Angelika to find their contact information. Angelika never produced it, perhaps afraid of violating her former guests’ privacy. It was really a task for the police, but Lynda had given up on them.
The Falcheros stayed in the Stubai Valley for ten days and then returned home, though Lynda remained in contact with them. For a while they figured their son might have forgotten who he was from his head injury in the motorcycle accident. One day, while watching an Austrian skiing competition on television, Gino thought he saw Fabrizio among the spectators, and he tried pursuing the lead without success. Ultimately he concluded that his son had been the victim of foul play near the Stubai Glacier—that he’d encountered an assailant on a hiking path or in the parking lot after dark.
Chapter 11: Revelation
The MacPhersons spent the entire summer of 1990 in the Stubai Valley. Most days Bob walked the trails with Derrick and Duncan’s dog Jake, searching the woods, rock formations and moraine fields for traces of his son’s corpse or clothing. Despite the grim purpose of these long hikes, Bob found them therapeutic. He understood why the mountains were associated with purity and peace. Sometimes, for brief moments, he even forgot about the disaster that had brought him there.
He found the local people sort of exotic, and he admired their mountaineering skills. While Lynda regarded their clannishness and strong Catholicism with suspicion, Bob understood that living in a valley where everyone knew each other came with different social pressures from those he’d known in Canada.
Only once did he feel something like enmity for the local people. Out for a hike one day, he passed a missing person poster that he’d tacked to a tree a few weeks earlier, and saw that someone had driven a walking pole spike into the image of Duncan’s face.
“Right through his eye,” Bob said. “I figured it was probably just a bored teenager, but it was still sort of chilling. I wondered if it said something about the way people in the valley felt—like they just wanted us to go home and forget about Duncan.”
“On the other hand,” Lynda said, “some of the locals made us feel very welcome. For a month we camped above the Mutterbergalm, and sometimes when we returned from our daily searches, we found a basket of food and beer from an anonymous donor. Later I learned it had been the sister of a town councilman in Neustift.”
“A few times we returned to our camp to find it trampled by cows,” Bob said. “At first I didn’t understand why, and then I realized they were attracted to the salt in our sweaty clothes that we hung out to dry. Derrick and I drove them away with pebbles and a larch branch, and the next morning, while I was having breakfast at the Hofer family hotel on the Mutterbergalm, I noticed Old Man Hofer glaring at me from under the brim of his fancy Tyrolean hat. He seemed angry for some reason, so I asked Angelika if I’d offended him. ‘He’s protective of his cows,’ she said. I couldn’t believe it! I had no idea that those were his cows until Angelika told me that all of the grazing land up there belonged to him. Why didn’t he just say something to me about it?”
“Because he couldn’t speak English,” I replied.
“Of course, you are right,” Bob said. “We tried to learn German, but it was just too damned hard.”
“I guess Mr. Hofer was watching us at our camp site,” Lynda said. “He was a strange man. I’ve never seen anyone get so dressed up for breakfast. Every day it was like he was going to a parade.”
“He must have been a member of the Tyrolean militia,” I said.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Back in the old days, Tyrol was a semi-independent province, and its free farmers formed militia units to defend themselves from foreigners like the French and Bavarians. Their hero was a guy named Andreas Hofer who beat Napoleon’s army at Bergisel—that place just south of Innsbruck with a big ski jump. Nowadays the militia is a fraternal organization that gives guys like your Herr Hofer at the hotel an excuse for dressing up in traditional garb and being as Tyrolean as possible.”