Averil Dean - The Undoing

She was smiling up at him now, her rabbity head tilted to one side.

“Used to be part of the copper town.” Julian nodded toward the sign in black and red above the door: blackbird hotel. “Built by the mine owner so he’d have someplace to stay when he was in town, above the stink of it all. It’s changed hands many times since then, been modernized and all that.”

He faced the hotel with their bags in his hands.

An unexpected thrill of anticipation expanded in his chest. Any second now, Celia would open the door, or lean out an upstairs window, her hair lifting out like a banner, that slow smile on her face to show she’d been waiting for him. The sensation was so strong that for a moment he found himself searching the windows for movement, straining to hear her voice.

A second later, the excitement subsided. She wasn’t here. She never would be again.

Emma was waiting for him. She seemed to occupy too small a space in the scene, as if he were seeing her through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Are we going inside?” she said.

Too late now to change his mind. A cold knot of dread replaced the warmth of his original response. The Blackbird didn’t want him here any more than Celia had.

They crossed the rutted gravel lot and mounted the front steps. Julian opened the heavy wooden door and held it with his foot as Emma went inside. A bell hanging from the brass knob jingled as the door swung shut behind them.

Beyond the tiny vestibule, the room opened with surprising expansiveness to a tall, narrow space with a massive stone fireplace towering like a sentinel on the opposite end of the room. To their left was a winding staircase with a curved wooden banister, soaring up to the second floor. At its foot, a heavy door stood half-open; through the doorway, he could see a couple of hammered copper pots hanging from a rack and the edge of the long kitchen table. Celia had sanded that table to a beautiful sheen and finished it in a rich chestnut brown. She used to rub it down with an oiled rag after every meal; you’d catch the scent of it sometimes while you were eating, a faint bite of lemon where the warm plates sat.

As he watched, the kitchen door opened farther. A woman came halfway through the doorway and stopped. She was wearing a dark T-shirt and a pair of designer jeans so tight they had set into a series of horizontal creases up her thighs. On the front of her shirt was a screen-print image of the Blackbird Hotel, in white lines like a child’s drawing on a chalkboard.

Julian caught his breath.

Again he felt vaguely disoriented, thrown back in time. Yet Kate Vaughn was unmistakably part of the present. Her brown hair was lighter now, longer and fashionably streaked, but she looked much older than when he’d last seen her five years before. The babyish roundness of her face had gone, leaving a sharper line at her cheekbones and chin. It was the face of a beautiful woman now, evolved and polished. Cute little Katie, he used to call her. But it seemed that girl, like so many other things, was gone.

He thought at first that she was going to come forward and embrace him. She took one step, then hesitated as if she’d changed her mind.

“Julian,” she said.

“Hello, Kate.”

“How are you?”

“Surprised, at the moment. I didn’t realize you’d be here.”

He understood the lay of the land immediately. Kate’s family must have bought the only remaining property on the Ridge. Presumably to indulge her, to assuage any lingering grief; the Blackbird was far too small to make more than a very modest profit. Nothing like the Vaughns’ resort hotel in Telluride or the two in Vail and Crested Butte. Kate had probably finagled this tiny property out of her father like a kid with her heart set on a fancy tree house.

He’d met Justin Vaughn once or twice. A sweet, shrewd guy with three daughters and a knack for keeping them happy. Kate was the youngest by fifteen years, and she could wrap her father around her little finger simply by adding an extra syllable to his name: Dad-dy, can you lend me the car? Dad-dy, will you buy me a hotel of my own, the Blackbird Hotel, we can’t let them tear it down...

“Oh, you two know each other?” Emma said, affecting an air of cool disinterest.

“We used to,” Kate said. “In the biblical sense. Kate Vaughn.”

Emma’s face was blank as she took Kate’s outstretched hand. “You went to church together?”

Kate’s mouth twitched at the corner, a dimple winking in her cheek. The moment swelled as Julian realized he should introduce them and couldn’t, because he didn’t know Emma’s last name and wasn’t entirely sure of her first one. Emma could be Ella, or Anna, or Abby, or Eve. He had resorted to an assortment of pseudo-endearments over the past few days, waiting for her to repeat her name—which, maddeningly, she never did.

Kate turned to Julian.

“You heard about the reopening, I take it? Did you get our email? I blasted it to everyone in my contacts.”

He nodded. It had given him a shock to see the Blackbird’s photograph appear on the screen. He’d shut the window down immediately, unable to open it again for more than a week. When he finally gathered the courage, he pored over every page and all the fine print on the hotel website.

THE HISTORIC BLACKBIRD HOTEL

GRAND OPENING

JAWBONE RIDGE, COLORADO

Nowhere had the flyer mentioned the Blackbird was now one of the Vaughn family properties.

“I didn’t realize—” he said again.

“Yeah, that’s my dad’s thing. I think he doesn’t want people to realize it belongs to us. Not our finest business investment, by a long shot. He probably wants to save face if the whole thing folds or falls off the cliff or something.”

She walked over to a small desk, where a computer sat next to a stack of unopened mail. Insects buzzed from outside the half-open windows.

“So, what’s up? Do you need a room?”

“No,” said Julian.

“Yes,” said Emma at the same time.

“We just wanted to see the place,” he said. “We don’t need a room. Probably stay at the Adelaide.”

It was a foolish thing to say, with two suitcases at his feet and this fluffy blonde hotel accessory clinging to his elbow. But seeing Kate here unnerved him, gave his anger a point around which to coalesce.

“It looks good,” he said, glancing around. “Very...tasteful.”

A deep flush rose up her neck. “Yes, well, I’m not sure the whole bohemian thing would have worked out that well in the long run.”

“I think it would have worked fine.”

“Do you? Would you have me leave it as a shrine?”

“I would have had you leave it alone.”

“Ah. And is that what you’re doing? Leaving it alone?”

Julian pressed his lips together.

“They were going to tear it down,” Kate said. “I’m trying to save it. I would have thought you’d approve. They were your friends, too.”

“What friends?” Emma said.

“You didn’t tell her about the murders?” Kate said.

“She doesn’t need to hear about that,” Julian said.

“Murders!” Emma said. “Of course I need to hear about it. When was this?”

“What’s it been now, Julian?” Kate said. “Five years?”

A slow prickle crept up Julian’s back, under the collar of his cotton shirt. His ears seemed to fill with sound, a low, almost electrical hum that muffled the sound of her voice.

Five years. An anniversary, a number that meant something, that indicated something might happen again. Five. Dangerous, sharp-sounding, like a blade or the edge of a stony cliff.

“Five,” he said, carefully.

“Wait, you were here?” Emma said.

“We were both here,” Kate said. “Staying in the hotel, that is. We didn’t witness the crime or anything.”