John Leake - Cold a Long Time

A strange-acting foreigner vanishing in the fog, an unknown individual returning the rental gear, the car reappearing in the parking lot after September 1—it was all so mysterious.

“With no solid lead, and with all of the ambiguity, you felt you had to pursue every lead, no matter how improbable it seemed,” I suggested to Lynda one morning at breakfast on about the fourth day of my visit to Saskatoon. Derrick MacPherson had just arrived from Vancouver for a weekend visit. Like his father, he tended to listen and observe more than he spoke, and I could tell he was watching me closely to see how I interacted with his parents.

“That’s right,” Lynda said. “You have to understand how weird everything was. I mean, how did Duncan’s disappearance after a little excursion to a ski resort become such a ridiculously complicated and confusing fiasco? It was like some crazy B-movie that’s not intended to be even remotely plausible.”

“Like an episode of The Twilight Zone ,” I said.

“Exactly!” she replied. “The following summer was almost as weird. I guess the ski resort and the police were pretty unhappy about our return,” she chuckled. “They probably thought they’d seen the last of us when we left in October of eighty nine.”

As we discussed their adventures in the summer of 1990, I started thinking about how hard it must have been for them to understand what was going on around them in the tightly-knit community of the Stubai Valley, so vastly different from their home on the Saskatchewan prairie.

“We figured that at least someone in the valley knew something about Duncan, and that we’d eventually find him if we just kept looking. In the end, we met some really nice people, but no one was able to tell us much. Given what we know now, I wonder if people did know something but were afraid to tell us.”

“I’m surprised that no one tried to help you indirectly, like sliding an anonymous note under your hotel room door,” I remarked.

Not long after I said this, we began studying Lynda’s journal from the summer of 1990, which she’d dug out of her basement in preparation for my arrival. Her second entry noted a meeting with Inspector Brecher, during which she asked him about the assertion in the Security Directorate report that the snowboard and boots had been returned.

June 28, Thursday

He explained the snowboard again—Duncan paid 500 schilling (50 dollars) for snowboard lesson & use of snowboard. Brecher made it sound as if Duncan returned this snowboard & that possibly he had another one in the afternoon. Must get clarification on this—need to have someone speak in German to Brecher & to be certain of what Brecher is saying.

A few entries later, on Monday, July 2, Lynda wrote:

Angelika, Gaby, & I also went to see Brecher to get clarification on the snowboarding procedures. He says he believes the snowboard was returned, but he does not know by whom. No records are kept. He does not know if there were 2 snowboards involved or if Walter just let Duncan keep the snowboard he took the lesson on. He says one must ask Walter.

“He’s telling you here he believes that Walter knows whether the snowboard was returned, and he’s insinuating that Duncan used a second board in the afternoon—perhaps one that belonged to Walter.”

“But why is he telling me to ask Walter?” Lynda asked. “Wasn’t that his job?”

“Officially, yes, but he feels he needs to keep his distance from this case, so he’s trying to nudge you in the right direction without explicitly telling you.”

“That was your note under the door, mom,” Derrick remarked.

As Lynda wrote in her journal, she met Walter a few days after her second meeting with Brecher. Walter reiterated that Duncan had rented a board and boots from the Sport Shop 3000 for the entire day. After their morning lesson and lunch together, Walter last saw him walking with the board towards the lift to practice. Walter still reckoned that Duncan might have had an accident while hiking on August 10. Perhaps he’d visited the waterfalls below the glacier and fallen into the pool at their base, where his body could have been buried in sediment.

Though Lynda didn’t find Walter’s waterfall theory compelling, she trusted that he was frank and sincere, so she didn’t ask him expressly about Brecher’s statement that Duncan may have used a different board in the afternoon.

On July 1, an Italian couple named Gino and Anna Falchero arrived in Stubai to resume their search for their son. Thirty-three year old Fabrizio Falchero had been a competitive downhill skier in his youth, and in his twenties he became an instructor. Like Duncan, he also loved cycling. At twenty-eight he’d suffered a head injury in a motorcycle accident from which it had taken him a long time to recover. His mother had worried when he drove up to the Stubai Valley in early October of 1989, as it was the first time since his accident that he’d travelled on his own.

“Please call every day to let me know you are okay,” she asked him, and he promised he would. On October 10 he parked his camper close to where Duncan had parked on August 9, and was never seen again. The two young athletes had led similar lives, and both of them had gone missing after arriving at the Stubai Glacier. Had they met the same fate?

Gabi Frischmann, the receptionist at the Apparthotel, introduced Mr. and Mrs. Falchero to the MacPhersons, who were shocked to learn that Fabrizio had vanished at the same time they were conducting their initial search for Duncan. He must have passed within a hundred meters of them. When they heard that he enjoyed cycling, they remembered seeing a young man riding his bike on the road between Neustift and the Mutterbergalm—a memorable sight because it had just started snowing.

A video found in his camper showed footage of the mountains around the Mutterbergalm during a snowstorm, apparently taken just before Fabrizio disappeared.

“Watching that video was such a strange experience,” Bob recounted. “I remembered the storm perfectly as the one that had forced us to call off our search.”

The next day everyone rode the gondola up to the Eisgrat and gazed at the glacier.

“Nothing could have happened to Fabrizio here!” Gino exclaimed. “He was a mountaineer and professional skier. Maybe on Mont Blanc, but not on this little thing.” Lynda remembered Bob saying more or less same thing when he first saw the glacier.

“I turned to Anna to see if she had any opinion,” Lynda recalled. “She had this look of agony on her face, as though she was about to cry, but she didn’t say a word.”

“Fabrizio must have gone somewhere else after he visited this place,” Gino concluded with a wave of his hand. Nevertheless, several Italian volunteers, some with dowsing rods, searched the Schaufelferner. Lynda was amazed to see some of them fixing raw meat on the y-shaped twigs, apparently to make them more sensitive.

The MacPhersons and Falcheros shared the cost of another search for their sons in the mountains around the Stubai Valley. One morning Bob tried to join a search party that assembled near the gondola station. Standing there in the cool morning air, wearing his hiking boots, he greeted the mountaineers and tried to indicate that he wished to join them. Some returned his “hello,” but otherwise didn’t take much notice of him. They then set off from the parking lot at a brisk pace, without gesturing at him to join. It was as though he, the father of the missing person, weren’t even present.

“That was sort of a low moment,” Bob said. “I knew I couldn’t really talk with those guys, but it still sort of stung me the way they acted like I wasn’t even there. I trailed along behind them, looking at the terrain they covered, and not once did I see any kind of hazard that could kill a man and conceal his body.”