Michael looked at the photos spread on the table: young men with scruffy beards, shorts, hiking boots, and big rucksacks on frames. He remembered the smell of dust and unwashed socks and hemp. “That was David,” she remarked.
“Was?”
“It only took me three years to find David. An unattractive person,” she added reflectively, “Not the sort of friend Mark had been used to having. He had a motorcycle accident. I read later that they believed he’d been forced off the road by another vehicle.”
“How did you find him?” Michael asked.
“Judy’s snapshots. She knew his name. I found his address by contacting every motor vehicle department in the country. It took a lot of time. David told me about the party. There had been a fight, he thought, but he had been too drunk to remember. In the morning, he said, Mark was gone. I did not believe him.”
“Perhaps you should have believed him,” Michael said.
“But that would have raised other questions. Brian, now, took nearly eight years. He’d gone into camping equipment, working at a mail-order company for serious backpackers and hikers. There are a surprising number of mail-order companies. I paid to have a computer age the image from Judy’s snapshot. And, of course, travel is my business. I found him in San Diego.”
“How did he die?” Michael asked. His voice, sounded hollow, unfamiliar.
She looked at him quizzically. “He died in a fall,” she said. “Ironic for a climber, but he fell down his office stair.”
“Four years ago?” Michael asked.
“Just about. I’d figured maybe another six or seven for you, but there is always serendipity. I saw you sitting here when I least expected to, but of course you’d always been in my mind.”
“Of course,” Michael said.
“And now we must swap,” she said. She laid her handbag on the table. It was the size of a small duffel bag and looked heavy.
“Perhaps you do not really want to,” he said.
“Perhaps you are afraid,” she said. “Afraid to know.”
“None of this has anything to do with me,” Michael said. “Now Mark...”
“Yes?”
“Mark was afraid.”
She waited.
“When it happened — and before — he was afraid...”
“Ah,” she said, “when what happened?”
“The fight, the accident. It really was an accident; it was no one’s fault.”
“Up in the aspens,” she said. “The night of the party.”
“That’s right.”
“He was afraid...” She stopped and, for the first time, hesitated.
“He was afraid of violence, of unforeseen craziness and confusion.”
“Why?” she asked and bit her lip.
“I think that is what you have to swap,” Michael said. The lights were coming on. Their golden pinpoints swam in her dark lenses.
“There was no way he could have known,” she said softly.
“There are always rumors, hints.”
“In a small town, yes, rumors, hints, whispers.”
“And when it happened — we were all drunk, you know — when it happened—”
“It? It?” she demanded.
“You’ve been there,” Michael said. “The loneliness of it, the mountains, the sheet of water with the trees quivering and dancing.”
“The campsite was sordid.”
“In the mountains, you feel small,” Michael said. “The wind comes down and blows your soul away.”
“But if he was afraid,” she said, “he was afraid of himself.”
“He had a temper,” Michael agreed.
“But nothing like...”
“You were going to say?”
“I was going to say, ‘Nothing like his father.’ Nothing like.”
“Yet he worried,” Michael said and gripped the edge of the cafe table.
“There was no sign,” she said carefully. “There was no sign whatsoever. Schizophrenia develops typically in adolescence. His father — his father was ill from the time he was eleven or twelve.”
“A fine father you picked for your son,” Michael said.
“ ‘Picked’ is not the right word. But that’s another story. We were talking about Mark. He was seventeen when he disappeared. True, the danger years, but there was no sign ever.”
“But you must understand,” Michael said. “The night awash in beer, rivalry, anger, a sudden violence—”
“And my son was killed,” she said in a cold voice.
“There was blood,” Michael admitted; he sounded surprised. Yes, there had been blood. “Even in midsummer, it is very cold there in the morning. The light is bluish and the mountains are the color of lead. You can wake up there and see the very shape of your fears lying in a pool of blood.”
“You had killed...”
“Let me give you the situation, all right? This guy was in the camp. A stranger passing through. He joined the party that night. He made a pass at Judy, picked a fight. In the morning, he was lying dead in the tent, and the others were gone.”
“They would have had ordinary fears,” she observed, not unsympathetically.
“They bugged out. Mark had no head for alcohol. By the time he came to, everyone else was gone. He was left to... clean up.”
“The lake,” she suggested.
“The lake is very deep,” Michael agreed.
“But not as deep as deception.”
“Nor as madness. There was the proof, wasn’t there? Proof of what he’d always wanted not to know. Proof of the rumors about crazy Uncle Ben, who’d done something terrible, who was locked up far away, who could never, ever be released.”
“You knew all this and yet you left him,” she said, her voice dangerous again.
“I’m trying to give you the situation.” ‘
“The situation in which he died or in which he ‘disappeared’?” She began fumbling in her purse and Michael stood up.
“It was Uncle Ben, wasn’t it?” he demanded. “Mark’s father was loony Uncle Ben?”
“You see,” she said softly, “why it was better not to tell him. You see how much I had to protect him from. You do see that, don’t you?”
“Maybe you can see why he had to protect you, too.” Michael’s whole body pounded with his heart like a great resonating chamber, and a gray morning light suffused the Cafe Visconti, bringing with it the inescapable awkwardness of death. “Why life was impossible for him. How could he have told you, for God’s sake!”
“He would have told me in the end,” she said calmly. “We were very close. I can’t expect you to understand that, but he would never have left me wondering and grieving for twenty years. Never. You had an ordinary life, a conventional home. You have no idea.” A little black snub-nosed pistol peeked out over the top of her purse. “You are the very last,” she said. “After twenty years.” She raised the pistol, and, full of anger and regret and fear, Michael leaped back from the table and broke for the street. His bad leg slowed him, and she saw that the instant before she saw the car. She jumped up and shouted his name, and he glanced back — she would remember that he did glance back — but he had hidden too well, the past was too terrible, and all alternative futures too full of regrets and recriminations. He was still running when he hit the street.
The squeal of brakes and the thump transfixed her heart and turned her nerves to thorns. After a few seconds, she sat back down and laid the child’s pistol on the table. When the caribinière arrived, the pistol would be lying there, a harmless toy, and she would be staring toward the dark street behind her tinted glasses. She knew what she would say, something about a present for a friend’s child, a misunderstanding, a curiously unstable stranger. She knew she would say those things, though she was not sure why she should bother, for now she was not convinced that she had not, after all, made a terrible mistake.