felt his heart surge. She slid on top of the table at the furthest corner of the room, and her knees were apart. She was smiling at him. His whole body was pounding, not just his head anymore. She opened her mouth to speak, but as he pressed himself against her, he could feel that her whole body was exactly the same way, and he knew that no-one should talk.
It was his first time. He had no idea sex could make you so angry. So, so fucking angry. This is insane. He laughed. This is insane.
He lay there when it was over, staring at the ceiling. They had wound up on the floor. Her hair had come off. It must have been a wig. It was in his hand.
He got up and started to fix his clothes. ‘I gotta go,’ he said.
When he put his hands in his pockets, he could feel the paper. He didn’t need the drawing any more. This had made up for it. She could have it. He crouched down beside her and placed it by her head.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That was awesome.’
As his mouth pressed against her cheek, a small bloody bubble of saliva grew between her lips, and burst.
1
Taber Grace had a slim file on the passenger seat of his car and a cigarette burning down in the ash tray. He was sitting back against the head rest, his bloodshot eyes staring into the dark. He had often thought about sitting in the same position, in his garage, breathing in exhaust fumes through a hose pipe.
Taber Grace was forty-two years old, short and slight. He liked to dress in straight-leg jeans and plain, washed-out shirts, always buttoned to the neck. His hair, thick and brown, fell across one eye. Someone in a bar once joked that it was his private eye. The Private Eye with the private eye. Taber Grace mostly had the sense not to go into bars to listen to drunk talk. He was not a competent drunk. He would recognize the early signs of his drunkenness – the softness around the edge of his vision, the longer search for words – and it was too hard these days to resist being drawn to the dissolution.
After an hour waiting in the dark, watching the snow fall over Denver, Taber Grace knew that his client was not going to show. November 14, evening: it was to have been their second meeting – to see how the client wanted to proceed, based on Taber Grace’s preliminary findings. These meetings were always the same. The client would sit like a prisoner in the electric chair. But the current came from within – the spark of dueling fears as their suspicions were about to be confirmed or dismissed. There was no comfort in either. And there was no comfort for Taber Grace. He had intimate knowledge of his clients, their lives, the lives of those close to them. He was the stranger-witness to their darkest betrayals. They needed this knowledge, they paid him for it, yet they didn’t want him to have it. Each time he delivered it, he could see in their eyes how quickly he became repellent.
Taber Grace had been the bearer of bad news before. It had been part of his first job. Then, like now, it never touched him. It was a practical delivery of information, uncomplicated by emotion. In that job, he had been bound by propriety. He was on time, he spoke politely, he never swore. When he was fired, it became easy to believe that he was what he had always feared he was – just a small-town boy, shoulder to shoulder with his blue-collar buddies, no taller. The problem was that he had never fit into that small-town world and he had run from it as soon as he could.
Taber Grace had liked the mannerly man he became when he left his home town. He liked his new life in Denver. But what he had loved at the start became what he hated at the end, like a failed relationship. The life that came with his job was like a smart overcoat he had carefully put on, that fit perfectly, but gradually began to slip from his shoulders. And he only realized it was gone when the world got very, very cold. And later, when his home did.
Melissa Grace, his sweetheart wife, had also liked the mannerly man, and couldn’t understand why, despite the early end to one career, her husband appeared to have thrown it all away. But Taber Grace, fired and depressed, slowly convinced himself that his job had been the first thing his wife had seen, the part that impressed her, and promised her so much. It turned out that Taber Grace never believed that his wife loved him for who he was. For his heart … or for how it used to be.
The Graces had one son. He had blond hair to his shoulders and an exceptionally pretty face: his mother’s face, with his father’s long eyelashes. He was christened Taber Grace Jr, but his father, as his own life unraveled, began to call him TJ. He had given him the nickname he swore he never would, because maybe being called Taber Grace would just be bad luck.
Taber Grace knew that he had neglected his marriage to death. Even now, at times, he felt that the life he thought he would have ran parallel to this new, empty one. At times, he felt that back at his house, Taber Grace 1.0, proud, loving husband and father, was having pancakes with his wife and son.
Yet, here he was. He had walked from his marriage not into bars and strip clubs, but down into the sewage pipes that ran under other lives. A client might heft the manhole cover aside; Taber Grace made the descent.
And Taber Grace was the one who came back up covered in shit.
2
Summer was hiker and biker season in Breckenridge, Colorado, but winter was when the pretty little town really came to life. It was then that its true beauty shone – in the glow of the white peaks, in the sparkle of the fairy lights down Main Street, in the headlights of the groomers, in the bright, after-ski faces.
In winter, the population of Breck could go from three-and-a-half thousand to more than ten times that, yet its magic was how it held its ground and its charm. There were plenty of hotels, inns and condos to accommodate Breck’s visitors, and the newest was The Merlin Lodge & Spa. It was a small hotel in a small town with a big heart, and it had a mid-sized problem: it had opened too early.
‘That’s my opinion, anyway,’ said the desk clerk. His name, Jared Labati, was printed on a gold badge on his white shirt. The shirt was a size too small, his black pants a size too big. He was only in his late teens, yet strikingly at odds with the healthy image of the country’s skinniest state. His shaggy brown hair curled out at the ends and was combed forward and sideways across most of his wide face. It was a style for a slimmer kid. A tiny diamond ring shone in a right ear that was prominent enough to poke through his mass of hair.
Erica Whaley was standing at the check-in desk with her husband, Mark. ‘It didn’t say anywhere on the website that the hotel was brand new,’ she said. ‘Lucky us.’ She smiled.
Mark Whaley was holding his credit card paused in mid-air. He glanced at his wife. They laughed. ‘OK – go ahead,’ said Mark.
‘Did you have far to come?’ said Jared.
‘No – Denver,’ said Mark.
‘The rooms are completely finished – don’t get me wrong,’ said Jared, ‘and any extra work that needs to be done won’t happen on weekends, so it will be quiet during your stay. The major work is done … except for the Spa. Sorry.’ He directed this at Erica. But she had turned to see her three-year-old son, Leo, hanging upside down from the back of a brown leather sofa, his face red with the rush of blood.
Mark spoke to Jared. ‘Our son tests all surfaces and objects for suitability to climb or swing from.’ He paused. ‘Then climbs or swings from them, regardless of his findings.’
Erica sprinted for Leo, grabbing him under his arm and swinging him into the air.
Mark raised his eyebrows at Jared. ‘That was close. His Spidey sense is weak.’
Jared smiled.
‘OK, be honest,’ said Mark, leaning in to him, speaking quietly. ‘Will this be a comfortable stay? My little girl isn’t feeling too good.’ Mark’s eleven-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Laurie, was on the sofa reading a book, oblivious to her Spiderbrother.
‘You bet,’ said Jared. ‘They’re just doing some things like wiring,