Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“Stop, please,” said Syd. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I brought it up.”

Dar was quiet for a moment. He felt as if he were returning from somewhere far away. He looked at the chief investigator and realized with a shock that she was crying. “It’s all right,” he said, stifling the impulse to pat her hand where it lay on the white tablecloth. “It’s all right. It was a long time ago.”

“Ten years isn’t a long time,” whispered Syd. “Not for something like that.” She turned toward the window and wiped away the tears with two angry swipes of her hand.

“No,” agreed Dar.

Syd looked back at him and her blue eyes seemed infinitely deep. “May I ask one thing?”

Dar nodded.

“You didn’t resign from the NTSB and move out to California until almost two years after that crash,” she said. “How could you…stay? Continue doing that work?”

“It was my job,” said Dar. “I was good at it.”

Sydney Olson smiled very slightly. “I’ve read your whole file, Dr. Minor. You’re still the best accident reconstruction person in the business. So then why do you work primarily with Stewart Investigations? I know you’re fairly well off and don’t need a huge salary…but why Lawrence and Trudy?”

“I like them,” Dar said. “Larry makes me laugh.”

They arrived at Dar’s cabin just after sunset, twilight hanging in the soft summer evening air like a muted tapestry. The cabin sat by itself up a half mile of gravel road, south and east of the town of Julian, on the very edge of the Cleveland National Forest. Its view looked down broad meadows and across great valleys of grass to the south. Above and behind the cabin, the ponderosa pines and Douglas fir grew thicker, ending in a rocky ridgetop.

Syd stared in admiration. “Wow,” she said. “You say ‘cabin’ and I picture caulked logs and mice scurrying around.”

Dar glanced at his trim stone-and-redwood structure with its long porch looking south. “Nope,” he said. “It’s only six years old. I bought the property when I first came out here; lived in the sheep wagon before this place.”

“Sheep wagon?” said Syd.

Dar nodded. “You’ll see.”

“And I bet you built this all by yourself.”

“Hardly,” said Dar with a chuckle. “I’m incompetent with a hammer and saw. A local builder—seventy years old—named Burt McNamara did most of the work.”

“My God,” said Syd as she came around to the front of the building along the open porch, “a hot tub.”

“It has a nice view. On a cold winter’s night you can sit in the tub and see the few lights out on the Capitan Grande Indian Reservation way across the valley there.” Dar unlocked the front door and stood aside to let Syd enter first.

“I see why you don’t have…ah…guests too often,” said Syd softly.

The last of the evening light illuminated the large, single room. Dar had not partitioned the cabin except for the bathroom area, and only groupings of furniture and carpet delineated one area from another. Most of the walls were lined with bookshelves, but there were several huge French original posters—one advertising a fishing line and showing a woman catching a trout from a canoe, the art stylized in wonderful 1920s negative-space blacks and bold lines. The southeast corner held a large L-shaped desk under twelve-over-twelve paned windows. The view from that area was amazing. A huge fireplace took up much of the west wall, the windows on either side were soft with twilight, there was a scattering of comfortable leather chairs and couches near it, and the single bed, covered in a Hudson’s Bay blanket, was just behind the long couch.

“I like to watch the fire from bed,” said Dar.

“Uh-huh,” said Syd.

Dar dropped his own bags. He picked two lanterns off hooks on the wall. “Come on, I’ll get you set up in the sheep wagon.”

Dar led her back out onto the porch in the fading twilight and about a hundred feet along a well-maintained trail. Japanese snow lanterns made of stone lined the path at twenty-foot intervals. After walking through a small stand of birch, they entered a grassy clearing, and the wagon came into sight.

The old Basque sheepherder’s wagon had been completely renovated with ancient wood and glass. Now the wheeled structure had a small porch, a screen door, and a canvas awning on the south side. Near it, several Adirondack chairs had been set facing a view even more incredible than the cabin’s.

Dar gestured and Syd walked up the four steps, opened the unlocked doors, and stepped into the small space.

“This may be the coziest room I’ve ever seen in my life,” Syd said softly.

The sheep wagon was only eighteen feet long and seven feet wide, but the space was used with great ingenuity. There was a tiny bathroom to the right as one entered, a small sink under a window on the north side, a tiny eating booth on the south side, and the entire west end was comprised of a built-in bed under a hemisphere of old windowpanes. The barrel-vaulted ceiling was low, but it gleamed with slats of honey-colored old wood. Various pegs and hooks lined the walls, and Dar hung the lanterns on two of them. The high bed looked impossibly comfortable with a homemade patchwork quilt on it and several huge pillows at either end. Drawers were built into the wainscoting under the mattress area.

“There’s no electricity,” said Dar, “but the plumbing works…We ran a line down from the same cistern that serves the cabin. No shower or tub, I’m afraid…there just wasn’t room, but there’s no charge for using the big shower in the cabin.”

“Did your Mr. McNamara build this as well?” asked Syd, sliding into the wooden booth and looking through the small panes at the last of the sunset. The tiny space gave the impression of being below decks in a very tiny but cozy boat.

Dar shook his head. “We…my wife and I had this built the summer before the crash. In a magazine— Architectural Digest —we read about an interior designer and an old rancher and builder up in Montana who were buying up old Basque sheep wagons and converting them into…well, this. They built the thing according to our plans and then disassembled it, shipped it to Colorado, and put it together again. I did the same thing when I moved it out here.”

Syd looked up at him. “Did the three of you ever use it?”

Dar shook his head again. “We’d bought some property in the Rockies, not too far from Denver, but that was the winter that David was born, and then…well, we never got to spend time in it.”

“But you did,” said Syd. “Out here. Alone.”

Dar nodded. “But I had to do more and more work on the weekends,” he said. “Mostly on the computer. So I had the cabin built rather than electrify the sheep wagon.”

“Good choice,” said the chief investigator.

“Fresh sheets and pillowcases in those drawers under the bed,” said Dar. “Also clean towels. And no mice. I was up here last weekend and checked.”

“I wouldn’t care if there were mice,” said Syd.

Dar opened a drawer, removed a box of kitchen matches, and lit the lanterns. Instantly the old wood everywhere and especially in the vaulted ceiling began to glow with a honeyed warmth.

“The little two-burner stove is propane,” he said. “Like a camp stove, really. There’s no fridge, so perishable things I keep in the cabin. You can leave the lanterns on when you leave—they’re safe—but bring this to find your way back.” He opened another drawer and pulled out a flashlight.

Dar went to the door. “You’re welcome to just settle in here or to come over to the cabin for some hot tea or something.”

“We’ve still got a lot of files to go through,” said Syd.