The same thing probably happened to the driver who saw Duncan tangled in the tiller. Losing his head, he did not call emergency medical services. Either he ran down the hill and told one of his co-workers or supervisor what had happened, or he went into a state of paralysis and did nothing. Within a few minutes, Duncan died of arterial bleeding from his severed leg and arms.
For reasons known only to the driver and perhaps his co-workers or supervisor, the decision was made not to report the accident. Perhaps he feared prosecution for one or more acts of negligence, such as commencing grooming operations in the fog without first sweeping the slope with ski patrol, and without first checking to make sure that all rental gear had been returned. Perhaps he drank a couple of beers at lunch, which would have automatically made him criminally liable and lengthened his sentence for negligent homicide.
His fear of incurring the wrath of senior management was probably even greater than his fear of the police. The prospect of losing his job and being ostracized in the valley, where the Stubai Glacier was the most important concern, was terrifying to contemplate. He also dreaded hurting Herr Doktor Klier, who had always been so good to him.
Then there was the grim task of dislodging Duncan’s left leg from the grooming tiller. Numerous signs indicate that the leg went into the machine all the way to the lower thigh, and got stuck between the rotating shaft and casing. Getting it out must have been a hell of a job that required doing further violence to the leg.
Once the man (or men) freed Duncan from the tiller, they probably looked into his wallet and saw his Massachusetts Driver’s License. As everyone in Austria knows, American citizens love lawsuits as much as the American media loves to bash Austria for its involvement in the Third Reich. Just two years earlier, President Kurt Waldheim had been pilloried by the Americans, even though during the war he’d been no more than a conscripted regular army lieutenant. To the Snowcat driver, it must have seemed like the end of the world.
At some point, the driver or one of his co-workers started thinking about the glacier’s crevasses. If one hadn’t already opened on the slope, it was easy enough to remove a snow bridge covering one of the many situated in the glacier’s active crevassing zone—the area in which the Asian tourist had come to grief the year before—using the Snowcat’s blade. This presented a very tempting means with which to conceal Duncan’s body. Everyone could simply pretend they hadn’t noticed anything, and if the police got onto the dead boy’s trail, they would assume that he’d fallen into a deep crevasse (just like the Asian tourist the year before) and couldn’t be found.
After discussing the above hypothesis with Dick and Bob for three days, I told it to Lynda on the last night of our visit. As I finished the narrative, she stared at me and said nothing for what seemed like a long time. For twenty-one years she had sought the truth, and now she was presented with the full enormity of it. Within the space of an hour on the afternoon of August 9, 1989, the sensitive, funny, brave, honest, and magnanimous young man who Lynda loved more than anything had become a carcass that was concealed in order to keep a Snowcat driver out of trouble and to avoid bad publicity for the Stubai Glacier.
Finally she spoke.
“Was he still alive when his limbs went into that machine?”
I should have seen this coming. I badly wanted to tell her “no,” but I had no evidence to back it up. Helplessly I turned to Dick Penniman.
“I don’t know. Dick, what do you think?”
“Well, he was only wearing a cotton sweatshirt beneath his rain jacket, and we had a saying in ski patroclass="underline" cotton kills. It wicks away warmth instead of holding it in, especially if it’s damp. With the air temperature just above freezing and the drizzling rain, and possibly shock from a broken leg, he would have gone down quickly.
“How quickly?” Lynda asked.
“Within an hour,” Dick replied.
“Many times we saw them start grooming at three,” she said.
“I see,” he replied. “At any rate, if he wasn’t already dead from shock and hypothermia, it’s likely he’d lost consciousness before the tiller struck him.”
Lynda knew that this was pure conjecture. We weren’t even sure that Duncan’s initial, incapacitating injury had been a life-threating femur break, and not torn knee ligaments. His femur could have been broken when his leg went into the tiller.
I tried to think of something—some sort of comfort—but was at a loss for words. The wounds on Duncan’s hands and forearms suggested that he’d reacted to the tiller by reflexively extending his arms forward to defend himself. On the other hand, if he’d fallen unconscious with his hands in a position of supporting his leg injury, they could have also gotten pulled into the tiller as it grabbed the sleeves of his rain jacket.
Running through Lynda’s mind, I knew, was the terrible image of Duncan’s limbs being pulled into the machine while he was still alive and conscious. She could hear his screams and see his face contorted in agony. I looked at Bob, sitting on the couch next to her, and saw that he didn’t know what to say either. Finally I thought of something that suggested Duncan was already dead. I wasn’t altogether convinced myself, but I still felt compelled to protect Lynda from the awful truth, even though she’d sought it for so long.
“The fact that he didn’t pull himself out of the way suggests that he was already dead or passed out,” I said. “He wasn’t connected to the board, so even with an injured leg, he could have moved quickly if he was still conscious.”
“Yeah,” Bob said faintly. Lynda said nothing.
The next morning at breakfast I tried to change the subject by asking Lynda to tell us more about Duncan before the disaster had so darkened their lives. Again she just stared at me, and then started to speak, and then began to cry.
“I cannot talk about that now, John. After hearing about all of this ugliness and pain, I can’t just switch to talking about Duncan as he was in life.” For the rest of the morning she was cold, and when I walked her and Bob out to their car, I could tell she didn’t want to embrace me.
“We’ll be in touch,” she said as she climbed into the passenger seat. Bob tried his best to be friendly, and I could tell he was looking for some positive words to sum up the progress we’d made in figuring out what happened to Duncan.
“I think it was a very constructive meeting, and I—
“Bob, I think it’s time to get on the road,” Lynda interrupted.
“Okay,” he replied. “Well, Bye, John.”
“Good Bye, Bob.”
Chapter 40: Conclusions
Did Walter Hinterhoelzl, Daniela Widi, Seppi Repetschnig, and Franz Brecher know about the Snowcat accident, or did they think they were pretending to be unaware that Duncan had fallen into a crevasse while snowboarding? The notion that he must have had a crevasse fall was, in fact, a red herring, as the Snowcat driver (or his supervisor) had understood when he made the decision to hide Duncan’s body. Knowing that crevasse falls at the Stubai Glacier were not properly investigated, he used the crevasse to conceal the fatal grooming machine accident.
Duncan disappeared on the one-year anniversary of Chiu’s death from a crevasse fall, so the previous fatal accident must have come to mind when he failed to return his equipment and pick up his clothing. The people who worked on the glacier probably received no more than the simple directive, “you didn’t see anything.”