Peter Heller - Celine

Celine could only forage in her bag for another piece of jerky. This was too good.

“Danette bragged one afternoon that she had met a National Geographic photographer at a bar on Haight Street. She lived in the Mission but came into the Haight to hunt, I guess. When she was tired of doctors and wanted a big strong free-loving hippie.” Pete managed to look bemused. “She said Lamont was the most charismatic man she had ever met, one of the most handsome, too, and the saddest. And drunk. She bragged that she screwed him in the telephone booth in back of the bar. But she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Marie St. Juste said that she was really bothered about this man. ‘She could forget anyone!’ Marie declared. ‘Drop him like a Kleenex, you know? But this man, he really bothered her. Every day she went on about this photographer. One day she told us she was going to have to marry him! Ayee, imagine! Well, you should have seen our faces!’” Pa smiled an inward smile. He always took delight in the pure souls of the earth, wherever they shone.

“They married at city hall—”

“You found the marriage certificate,” Celine said tartly.

“Well.” Pa cleared his throat. His investigation partner really had been in a state the last few days. She always was before a trip.

“Continue, please.”

“Well, Gabriela told you about living in her own apartment when she talked to you. How Danette couldn’t stand the sight of her almost from the beginning and banished her and the photographs.”

“You talked to Gabriela!”

“I was going to tell you last night but you kept asking me where the recording wire was and dropping shoes off the loft railing.”

“Ha, wow. I guess I did. She told me about one photograph of her mother on a ferry.”

“Danette sent Gabriela off with a whole box. Almost like having her mother in an urn. The nudes, everything. These were the ones the adult Gabriela so carefully catalogued online. Many had been in shows in San Francisco and New York, but many hadn’t.”

“Okay, so how does it bear? On his disappearance.”

“I’m not sure.”

“But you have an idea. Don’t clam up on me now.”

“Hmm,” Pete said. “Give me a minute. I’m still arranging it.”

Arranging it in his mind like one of the office interiors he used to design. Celine bit off a shred of jerky and decided to give her husband a break.

The basin and range country of southern Wyoming is an acquired taste. Celine had not acquired it. She wrote to Hank in a letter a few days later, “The miles of rolling sage and rabbit brush, the surprising flecks of antelope like splashes of paint, red and white, the distant dry mountains and the incessant wind, they feel remote, untouchable somehow. They make me feel remote. They are like true mountains that have been drained of moisture and color, though I know people that go on and on about the subtle shades of that country. Almost like a compensation, an apology. Well. They make me tired. I never wanted to meet a landscape, or a person, more than halfway. If one is to dance one needs a dancing partner, don’t you think? Which made me think of Gabriela. I was getting the sense that, like these parched and far-off hills, she was withholding something.

“That’s what I puzzled about as we drove through gritty, windbeaten Rawlins and stopped on the old main street at a Chinese restaurant across from a building painted entirely in jungle camo. Not kidding, can you believe it? The whole building. Welcome to the West. What I thought about as we folded our pancakes around the moo shu pork and sipped the scalding jasmine tea…”

Celine often said it was the one drawback of working pro bono: When people put up good money for an investigation they had usually committed to their decision and rarely got cold feet. But if all they had invested was a phone call and a story, sometimes it was too easy to back out. It was true, though—money or no money, many of those who enlisted a PI weren’t fully prepared for what they would find. But Gabriela had insisted on paying and Celine never got the impression that she was in this search with anything but both feet.

When Hank had found his mother’s letter in his mailbox he had put on a windbreaker and taken it with him for a walk around the lake. It was a cool fall evening, the clouds over the mountains burning with russets and purple shadows, and there were still a couple of snowy pelicans drifting slowly on the dark water like fat schooners. Hank loved how the huge white birds took on the hues of the sunset. They came every year to breed, and happily fished for crawdads and carp, and helped the lake’s visitors pretend they were on the coast.

He carried the envelope to his favorite bench across from the little sanctuary island and opened it there. He and Celine still traded handwritten letters, a habit they began when he went away to Putney for high school. They had a bond, going to the same school, and more than once she wrote to him of secret spots none of his peers had known about, like the flat diving rock in Sawyer Brook. He remembered his joy when he went to his mailbox in the lobby of the dining-hall building and found one of her square envelopes. She did not write to him the way other parents wrote to their children—of commonplaces, weather, pets—she wrote of the problems confronting her in her current case, and he read the letters with the avidity some read detective novels. She often asked for his thoughts, and more than once his insights had led to a breakthrough. His roommate, Derek, insisted that he read those parts aloud so that they could ponder the puzzle, like young Watsons, while they lay in their bunks before sleep and a winter wind howled in the eaves of their cabin.

He was not surprised that the sere landscape of eastern Wyoming was not to his mother’s taste. She’d be happier as they moved north and west into the mountains. She was a New Englander at heart, a shaded-brook and hardwoods gal. He remembered the almost vertiginous sense of exposure he had experienced when he first encountered the vast sky of Colorado. Whenever he came to a grove of big cottonwoods that reminded him a little of the broadleaf forest of Vermont he had felt relief. The Putney hills were in their blood.

The summer after he graduated from high school, and was shocked by Baboo’s partial revelation, he returned to Putney almost every day in his mind. He closed his eyes and put himself back on the campus, back on the country lanes and paths he knew so well; back into the classrooms and barns, into the routines of chores and classes and sports, of meals and evening activities. He traveled in his imagination to the fields and art studios, the sugar house and blacksmith shop, and tried to fathom who the father of his brother or sister might have been. Might be. Two years later, while at college in New Hampshire, he drove the hour down to the school and took a tape recorder.

He interviewed two teachers who had taught both him and his mother, and the retired farmer, now an old man, who lived over in Dummerston. He had a journalist’s instincts even then, and he conducted the interviews in a way that did not arouse suspicions of the real story. He told them he was working on a family memoir about Putney for a college writing project. And he did not tell his mother.

Celine didn’t really relax until they turned up into the Sweetwater valley and the ranges on either side got close, and their flanks were dark with timber and the meadows were green. So were the irrigated fields of the ranches lying along the river, the neat white ranch houses peaking out from groves of boisterous cottonwoods. She opened her window and let the late-afternoon wind pour in and it smelled of alfalfa and wet fields and the river. They drove into Lander just as the sun was settling into the long escarpment of the Wind Rivers.