Tough Cookie

An image of church school with Rorry floated into my mind. Our teaching: the fall of Jericho. Joshua. I looked up: The moon skidded drunkenly between the branches. Had I been hit? Jack’s shot echoed and reechoed in my head. After the Hebrews blew their horns. The earth was moving, the moon was wobbling in the sky. The walls came tumbling down. I gripped the tree and turned my head to the groaning, trembling slope. A mammoth slab of ice and snow had dislodged from the mountain.

Joshua’s troops made the noise. The monumental size of the slide, like a skyscraper imploding, was beyond belief. The avalanche’s deafening rumble pained my ears. A mist of snow burned my eyes. The walls came tumbling down. My knees gave out beneath me as I held onto the tree. A fifty-foot vertical wave of snow was roaring downward, toward us.

A vast cloud of mist exploded upward. Darkness flashed inside it. Jack Gilkey screamed and fell. Then he was sucked into the killer white tide of the avalanche that rushed past me and swept him away.

CHAPTER 23

A helo carried me out. At the roar of the avalanche, the guard in the cabin, who’d been listening to a football game on the radio and was therefore deaf to my cries and the sound of gunfire, came bursting outside. He phoned for help.

On the way to Denver, I told two Sheriff’s deputies all I knew about Jack Gilkey and his deadly, double-dealing relationships with Fiona Wakefield, Doug Portman, and Barton Reed. The paramedics insisted I go to the hospital to be checked for frostbite, injuries, and shock. I kept assuring them that I was fine. But they did not believe a wildly shivering woman whose face and clothes were covered with blood and garbage.

“Lady,” one of them said, “at this point you couldn’t buy a ticket straight home. That ankle looks badly bruised. Did you fall on it when you were holding on to the tree?”

I nodded numbly and looked down at the snow-covered Continental Divide far below, the sparkling rows of tiny cars going east and west, ruby lights one way, diamonds the other.

You can’t buy a ticket home

. That was really the problem, wasn’t it? Trying to buy your way into anything. Jack had tried to buy his way out of a prison term by bribing Doug Portman; like Fiona Wakefield, Eileen Druckman had thought her money could bring her a handsome young husband who would really love and cherish her. Nate Bullock had tried to provide a better lifestyle for his beloved pregnant wife by making a video that had killed him. Even I was not immune, with my misbegotten attempts to use earrings and treats to purchase a girlfriend for my dear Arch. And hadn’t the lure of money made me ignore my scruples and try to sell Tom’s skis to Doug Portman?

All that night and the next day, Friday, I was cossetted, bandaged, medicated, questioned, and scolded. With Arch and Todd Druckman in tow, Tom raced to the emergency room to meet me. Todd hurried off to see his mother; Arch brought me soft drinks from the soda machine and (bless him!) some of Julian’s life-restoring fudge. Tom gave me updates and called Rorry to tell her I was all right. I learned that Jack Gilkey’s body had been dug out by Killdeer Ski Patrol’s Avalanche Rescue Team. Arthur Wakefield was being charged with breaking and entering and mail theft. The latter was a federal offense. Arthur, Tom said, had hired a lawyer who was a teetotaler.

During a break between X-rays, I visited my old friend Eileen. I had told the authorities that I wanted to be the one to give her the bad news about Jack. Gently, I did so.

Todd comforted her. She patted his head and kept sobbing that she was sorry, just so sorry. Todd said he was fine! And besides, the nurses had announced he could spend Christmas with her, on a guest sofa in her hospital suite. And then Eileen cried some more, but this time with happiness.

Christmas Eve, bandaged, weak, and awkward on my crutches, I slid into a pew next to a surprised Julian and Marla. Tom and Arch joined us. In the pew behind us, three of my former Sunday school pupils were giggling in their home-fashioned shepherd costumes. They tapped my shoulder and twirled for my approval. I gave them the thumbs-up. Tom kissed my cheek, Marla handed the kids sticky chunks of ribbon candy, Julian winked at everyone. Even Arch smiled. You can’t buy what you want, I reflected. It all comes as a gift.