brightest light came from the fireplace itself, and this was where they gathered every night after dinner, cradling cups of mulled wine or cold mugs of beer. Rory always sat nearest the fire, stirring at it lazily with a long green stick. Then Kate in the chair next to him, and Julian directly across. Celia would stretch out on the divan, facing the hearth, her long legs draped across Eric’s lap, her eyes sparkling with firelight.
Sometimes, rarely, Eric would bring Celia her guitar and she’d play them a song. She had a book of old children’s poems and had composed some simple melodies around them.
My age is three hundred and seventy-two,
And I think, with the deepest regret,
How I used to pick up and voraciously chew
The dear little boys whom I met.
I’ve eaten them raw, in their holiday suits;
I’ve eaten them curried with rice;
I’ve eaten them baked, in their jackets and boots,
And found them exceedingly nice.
But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare,
I think it exceedingly rude
To do such a thing, when I’m quite well aware
Little boys do not like to be chewed.
She was not particularly musical and the chords were uncertain, but her voice carried with it a sort of enchantment that held him frozen and breathless, hardly daring to blink. She had a slow, throaty drawl, a holdover from her father’s Cajun heritage, and she’d set the melody to a gentle waltz rhythm that rocked her body in small circles as she played. He remembered thinking that she should have been somebody’s muse, an artist’s lover, but had the misfortune to be born and raised among athletes.
He would have watched her for hours. But she’d see something in his face and she’d hesitate, pressing her fingers flat over the strings to silence them.
The fireplace was dark now, and the room had been redecorated. The velvet divan had been replaced by a leather sofa, so slick and firm that he almost slid out of it when he sat down. The side tables were ye olde lodge style, made of logs and twigs; a pristine iron coffee table had been sanded around the edges to make it look worn. Celia’s collection of local art had been replaced by matted nature prints in thick frames, and next to the door, a brass plaque declaimed no smoking in neat black letters. No copper bin full of logs, no scent of pine sap in the air—and, cruelest of all, the hearth had been fitted with an electric fire and a pile of fake ceramic logs.
Julian crossed his arms to warm himself. He hadn’t realized the hotel would be so different. In a thousand years he wouldn’t have guessed that it now belonged to Kate Vaughn.
I couldn’t let it go, she’d said, and that much he did understand. This had been a magical place with Celia in it. But the hotel was dead now. Celia had gone cold inside these walls and she was gone.
Julian leaned his head back on the unforgiving sofa and closed his eyes.
* * *
In the morning, he walked to the gas station, the only one in Jawbone Ridge. He bought a red plastic gas can and filled it at the pump.
A pickup truck had stopped beside him. The driver, a young man with sleep-flattened hair, asked if Julian needed a ride.
“No, thanks,” Julian said. “I don’t have far to go.”
Back up the hill. His feet pounded a rhythm on the gravel, the weight of his body seeming to be all in his feet while his head and torso floated helium-light up the curve of the road. To his right, the mountain rose in scrubby lumps of rock and patches of grass, where a season’s worth of pine seedlings bristled in soft pale green swaths across the earth. The ground fell steeply away left of the road, then rose again in bounding ridges along the banks of Deer Creek. He could hear the water moving—not in a rush of snowmelt, but with the runoff from an overnight storm, the water flowing rapidly in humps of white and brown.
He rounded the last bend in the road and started up the long, steep drive to the vacant Blackbird Hotel.
The first time he’d come here, it was with Celia alone. He had been familiar with nearby Telluride, having trained and competed there several times over the years, but had never found a reason to go around Bald Mountain and turn up the side road for Jawbone Ridge. But when he started seeing Kate, and spending time with her circle of friends, he began to be curious about the place. He wanted to see for himself what was going on inside the Blackbird Hotel.
Celia was sweet that day, eager as a child. She showed him through the rooms, each one littered with sawhorses, hand tools and buckets of paint. An unwieldy industrial sander was sitting in front of the fireplace. Wrappers from someone’s lunch lay crumpled on an overturned pail by the window. But as she described their plans in detail, Julian began to see it come alive.
“I like this place,” he said, looking around. “Good bones.”
Her face lit up.
“It’ll be beautiful when we’re finished,” she said. Then laughed, ducking her head. “Or, not beautiful exactly, but handsome. Proud of itself, you know? The poor thing’s been sitting up here alone for as long as I can remember. I want to fill it up.”
“You talk about the hotel like it’s a person,” he said.
She ran her hand down the sanded banister.
“Not a person, exactly. But personal.”
Afterward they went outside to sit on a slatted pine bench overlooking the river. A breeze moved through the aspen, rustling their coin-bright leaves, and from overhead they could hear the wind sighing through the pines and the occasional caw of a hidden crow. For a while, Celia was silent. Then she said she liked the sun.
“You’re not very tan, though,” he said.
“No. I only get freckles.”
Her skin was lovely in the clear light—a smooth, velvety white like the petals of a speckled flower.
“You bought this place together?” he said. “You and Eric and Rory?”
“On paper, yes. But it’s Eric’s money. His dad died a couple of years back and left him what he had.”
“You all went to the same school, I think Rory said.”
“He and Eric were in the year ahead of me.”
“Did you enjoy school?”
She considered a moment before replying.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Again she paused, thinking it over. “It’s too hard to know what the teachers want you to say.”
“They want you to say what you think.”
“Do they?”
She was quick with that, her eyes wide-open. For the first time, he began to see the guile of this girl.
“Sometimes,” he said.
They sat for a while in companionable silence. Celia didn’t rush to fill it. She was quick to catch a mood, poured herself into it like water.
“Have you always lived here?” he said.
“Since I was four, when my dad and Rory’s mom got married. He came out here on a contract to do some construction work on a new hotel—actually it was the Adelaide, one of the Vaughn properties. Didn’t you say you were staying there?”
Julian nodded.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? One of the best views around, I’ve always thought.”
“You like it up here?” Julian said. “You’re happy?”
“Yes.”
It