The Threshold (48 page)

“Do you think it’s going to happen again?” Cree asked when they were alone. “Maybe we could get the sheriff home. Then we wouldn’t have to stay here. We could get out of town.”

“I don’t have the pendant.”

“You didn’t have it last time either, remember?”

“Callie did.”

“She still does.”

Cree moved into a bed-and-breakfast place, the Oak Street Inn, and applied for a job Renata suggested, helping to create delicacies at MoNika’s, the gourmet carry-out place. Before he could start work he was accosted by a well-dressed, well-spoken gentleman with the eyes of a Bob Meldrum but with sharper hearing.

“My guess is Duffer and the boys took the stash and split,” Cree told him. “They had Dutch Massey’s letter and instructions and found what I couldn’t.” They stood in front of what had once been Van Atta’s and was now a sporting-goods store. Another gentleman sat in a car at the curb watching them. “I know I didn’t find it or I’d have been gone too. Hey, honestly now, can you see me taking care of those three?”

The guy looked him over and stood thinking. “You could have had help. I’ll keep in touch,” he said finally and got into the car with his friend. He rolled down the window. “Mr. Mackelwain, you do realize that should their bodies be found you will be our first visit?”

Times like this, Cree wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off if he’d stayed in 1901.

“You can’t be the sheriff of San Miguel County, boy, because I am,” Cal Rutan said in high good humor. He traced the official shield on Tom Rickard’s jacket with the tip of his finger. “But it says here
you
are.”

Sheriff Cal Rutan looked over Sheriff Tom Rickard’s sunglasses on the table in his office at the courthouse and then the holster and sidearm. “Fancy, fancy, fancy,” he pronounced them, and puffed up his cigar to glowing. “And will you look at them boots? You one of them jennymen cowboys from the Wild West Show?”

The crinkles at the edges of Tom Rickard’s eyes smoothed out under his pallor. “Listen, I don’t understand what’s happened but I demand—”

“I do the demanding here. This is my county, friend, no matter what your fancy shields say. Deputy Meldrum, you want to lock this dude up for me?”

“On what charges?” Sheriff Rickard asked, but took another look at the short man standing next to him. Meldrum?

“On the charges that I want you under my thumb, sir,” Sheriff Rutan said. “Until such time as I can determine what has become of a certain Mr. Simon P. Doud.”

“I’m a Pinkerton man,” Simon P. Doud told the couple in front of the tepee several hundred feet above Telluride. He’d never known white men to live in tepees, but these people were more reassuring than what he’d seen of the changed world below.

“No shit? Hey, that’s cool, man,” said the Man. He was dressed something like a prospector and had a good deal of gray in his beard with not much hair of any color on his pate.

“What’s a Pinkerton?” the Woman asked. (That’s how they’d introduced themselves. Just, “I’m the Man and this is the Woman.”) She handed Doud a metal plate of beans with ground steak and tomatoes mixed in, filled a plate for the Man and one for herself, and settled before the campfire.

“Used to be a detective agency,” the Man answered. “You know, like in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
.”

Aletha read the inscription on the imposing tombstone next to her.
Here rests the body of a dead husband
.
THORVALD TORKELSON.
33 years old, who lost his life in Smuggler-Union Mine, Nov. 20, 1901
,
in trying to save the lives of others. Missed by a loving wife
.

Lone Tree Cemetery held quite a crowd this afternoon. Telluride had turned out to bury its oldest resident.

“Mildred Heisinger must have done something in all those years,” the reporter for the Telluride
Times
insisted to Doris Lowell. “The only mention I can find of her in the existing files is a paragraph in the old
Examiner
about her house being broken into by four vagrants in 1904. And it’s the same house she died in. That part of town was the red-light district in those days. Could she have been a prostitute? Or a madam?”

“Whatever she was, she wouldn’t say when she was alive,” Doris said. “Now that she’s dead, let her rest, can’t you?”

“Hey, Earl, you’re about the next oldest native.” The reporter cornered a short square man in a baseball cap. “What do you know about the deceased’s past?”

“All I can remember is during the Depression us kids used to think she was a witch. Our folks just thought she was batty. Had a black woman living with her.” Earl kneaded arthritic hands and looked into the hole awaiting Mildred. “She has to have been one hell of a lot old, I can tell you that.”

When the graveside service was over and most everyone but the eternal crows had gone home, Aletha and Cree walked up the hill toward Callie’s grave. Aletha knelt to brush dead leaves off the flat stone, wondering again why they’d inscribed only Callie’s first name on it.

Up by the fence and to their right, two people sat on the ground, their shoulders hunched in a sorrow no one had exhibited for Mildred Heisinger. They sat before the mounded and raw earth of a double grave. Aletha was about to turn back and leave them to their privacy when she registered that the couple sat on snow and that the woman wore a hat.

“Oh, Callie, you didn’t die … then.” Aletha could detect no hole with a sizzling edge around the newly filled graves and the mourners, but the sun shining on her was not shining on them. The man with blond-white hair had a hat too, but held it on his lap. Tears trickled over prominent cheekbones.

“Our folks are dead, Aletha,” Callie said dully. Her eyes were dry.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry. But I’m so glad you’re all right.” Aletha started forward onto the snow but Cree pulled her back onto the grass. “Callie, do you know what’s become of the sheriff? He didn’t come home with us.” Callie just gave her a blank look and turned back to her buried parents. “Our sheriff, not yours. I know you have more important things to think about but … the pendant, Callie, do you have that piece of quartz still?”

Callie reached into her coat pocket and brought out the pendant and chain. The last sound Aletha heard from Callie’s world was the girl saying, “It’s got Pa’s blood on it.”

“Bram,” Cree said as the snow and the O’Connells faded. “Tap ’er light, son.” And the double graves settled into an unmarked depression of fall-dried grass.

EPILOGUE

The union wars were over in Telluride although old hatreds persisted. In 1908 Bulkeley Wells narrowly missed death when a bomb was planted under his bed in the manager’s house in Pandora where Arthur Collins had died. For all his charm, his popularity waned when Telluride’s own Troop A mobilized to march off to Europe and World War I and Captain Bulkeley Wells refused to lead them. In 1918 Grace Livermore Wells divorced him and took with her their four children and the backing of her wealthy father. He remarried, sired another family, left Colorado, and lost most of the fortunes lent him to invest in the West’s mineral wealth. On May 24, 1931, Bulkeley Wells shot off the top of his head in his office in San Francisco.

Audrey Cranston married her painter and moved to the sunny side of Telluride. The nude painting her husband had done of her was to cause her future embarrassment. It found its way to various barrooms, private gambling clubs, sat hidden in the storeroom of a drugstore for years, and eventually became exposed, long after its subject’s demise, in a renovated New Sheridan Hotel.

Clyde Duffer and Maynard Bellamy were found with their hands full of the possessions of other men’s pockets at a crucial point in Telluride’s history. Sheriff Cal Rutan and the powers that were then did not seem to notice their bodies hanging from a tram tower that came down from the Black Bear Mine into Pandora. To this day no one knows the site of their burial.

Bob Meldrum’s line of work, extremely specialized, became less necessary as events settled down. He took a job guarding the Smuggler-Union mill at Pandora from feared sniper attacks of rebellious unionists and later did the same up in Savage Basin at the Tomboy Mine. Millie Heisinger would come up to visit his shack and ride in the fantastic scenery in the summer months. But eventually his peacekeeping skills were not properly utilized in San Miguel County and he left for Wyoming, where he and others of his breed protected the cattle interests from the changes brought to the West by the farmer and the sheepman. Although there are many stories, no one knows for sure how or where Bob Meldrum met his end.

Brambaugh O’Connell and his Callie girl moved to the Tomboy Mine in Savage Basin, where Bram was forced to face his nightmare and to prove his mettle in the bowels of the earth with a hammer and drill. And Callie finally achieved her dream of having her brother to herself in a little cabin in the mountains that didn’t take long to clean. If only it’d had an indoor toilet.

The
Examiner
made no reference to the vehicle on Lawyer Barada’s lawn in its report of the battle because there were no witnesses willing to make fools of themselves who were old enough to be listened to. And it was gone before outside journalists reached the area. Thus it did not make its way into the written history of Telluride.

The highgrade ore was not recognized as such because of its sanguinary coating. A militiaman kicked it to the side of the street during the cleanup on Colorado Avenue. Lawyer Barada’s daughter, Lydia, picked up the gruesome reminder of the savagery waged before the eyes of her children and buried it in the snow of the alley behind her house. The spring thaw cleansed it of its coating and it sat with other rocks at the edge of the alley undisturbed because no one looked for gold in an alley. Vegetation grew over it, masked it even as its twin in time sat in as yet uncut rock up at the Alta Mine waiting for John O’Connell to steal it and bury it under his cabin. So that Aletha, wearing the pendant, could switch it in time with Dutch Massey’s stash. So the sheriff’s deputies could dig it up and the sheriff could bring it back to Colorado Avenue in 1904. So Callie could carry it to her father and complete the circle with his blood in that moment when time stood still.

The pendant, born in that timeless moment, continued to act as the agent of time’s misadventures whenever it was not sufficiently covered and either Aletha or Callie came near it. For they too had been bonded in the blood of that moment. Callie would have the chain repaired but it would not age any more than its pendant would lose its bloody stain. The pendant eventually passed down in time to become lost in Callie’s effects and surfaced in 1980 when a descendant shipped it along with the rest to the San Miguel Historical Society and the museum. Not considered worthy of display, it was tossed out in the trash, where a little girl found it and took it home. Her mother’s boyfriend, a starving-artist-who-liked-to-ski, knew of other artists prostituting themselves making tacky tourist trinkets to survive, and when he came across the pendant one day decided to make more like it to earn needed cash.

He kept the original as a model and inspiration and sold its clones. Eventually he expanded into other worthless gadgets until he had himself a small business which he hated and sold out to a hungry friend some years later. The friend placed the original pendant on the souvenir rack with its fellows in the lobby of the New Sheridan Hotel.

One wonders what might have happened if Aletha or Callie had never come to Telluride. Or if Cree Mackelwain had not messed with history by pushing Callie over in that moment time stood still.

As of this writing, Sheriff Tom Rickard has not been found and the blood on Aletha’s clothing has been determined to be too old to be his. Older in fact than he is … was. And more mysteriously, older than the clothes it stained. The practical Renata Winslow has stopped talking of her time trip because she has an image to uphold in her small community. Tracy Ledbetter is learning to live with her terrible secret and to trust Aletha to keep it. Charles is the least content of them all because when Aletha took him in for his shots, the local veterinarian insisted she put the Victorian cat on a strict diet.

Aletha and Cree still take a perverse delight in each other’s company, but miss the privacy and seven-foot Jacuzzi of the condominium on the second floor of the infamous Pick and Gad. And as the days pass without a recurrence of the frightening incidents, their relationship has had a chance to take a more normal course. In fact, just the other night Cree awoke with the startling idea of feeling her out about making that relationship more permanent. Something he’d sworn never to do again. And that same night, Aletha lay in her lonely bed in the crib and thought about the same thing. The upheaval in her life may have ended at last. Perhaps she could afford to trust this particular man. And perhaps she could dare to look forward to the future and not fear the past.

But of course, on the other side of the threshold, Callie O’Connell still has the pendant.…

I am particularly indebted to the published works and careful research of Roger Neville Williams of Telluride, Dr. Duane A. Smith of Fort Lewis College, and David Lavender, whose reminiscences and thoughtful studies of the mining life in the Rockies are gold mines in themselves. I am indebted to Dr. Gene M. Gressley of the University of Wyoming, his
Bostonians and Bullion
and the marvelous archival material he safeguards in Laramie. To Frank A. Crampton’s
Deep Enough; A Working Stiff in the Western Mine Camps
. To Suzanne and Dick Fetter for their
Telluride; From Pick to Powder
and for allowing me use of their extensive notes. To Karl Horn, hard-rock miner, and his daughter Wanda Apodaca, who spent her first school year in the little schoolhouse in Alta. To Elvira Wunderlich, a native of Telluride, for helping to check up on some stray and little-known facts. To Arlene Reid and her San Miguel County Museum. To David Millhiser, consummate photographer. To the reference librarians at the Boulder Public Library, who stand ready to find answers to any and all crazy questions. And especially to my agent, Roberta Kent, who would not let this tale rest until it had gone “deep enough.”