A Winter Haunting

THIRTEEN

BOY, I hate movies like that.”

“Movies like what?” said Dale. It was late on Thanksgiving Day. Duane’s farmhouse smelled of turkey and stuffing and a dozen other cooking smells. Dale had ended up doing the shopping for the turkey and the wine, but Michelle Staffney had done most of the cooking that day. By early evening, Dale and Michelle had eaten a good portion of the twelve-pound turkey, had drunk a couple of beers before dinner, and were on their second bottle of white wine. They had washed the dishes and returned to the dining room. Dale had lugged all of the ancient learning machines out to a shed, but there had been no dining room table, only the benches on which the machines had sat. Dale had done his best, dragging the benches to the basement, moving the kitchen table into the dining room for the big day, and covering it with an ancient linen tablecloth he had found in the hall closet. Now the sunlight had faded away, but only a couple of lights were on in the house. Music from the console radio wafted up the stairway from the basement.

“You know,” said Michelle, holding her wine glass in both hands. “I hate those formula scary movies. Horror movies. Slasher movies. Whatever.”

Dale frowned. He had been telling her about the events of the past week—the blood in the chicken coop, finding his truck with flattened tires, the other truck driving off in the fog—something he probably wouldn’t have talked about unless he’d had too much wine. “You comparing my life to a slasher movie?” he asked, pretending to be indignant—and actually feeling a bit indignant beneath the friendly buzz of the wine and beer.

Michelle smiled. “No, no. But you know—I always hate that part in the movies where the people know that something scary’s going on but they stay anyway. And then the monster comes out and gets them. You know, like in the old Poltergeist or that mess of a remake of The Haunting or those slasher movies with the guy in the hockey mask or whatever.”

Dale shook his head. “I intended to leave. But I thought that those idiots had slashed my tires again.”

“But they hadn’t.”

“No,” said Dale. “After I hiked all the way to Elm Haven in the fog, called the Oak Hill garage, and waited more than two hours for the guys in the tow truck to show up and drive me back to the farm, we discovered that someone had just let the air out of all the tires.”

“But you thought they’d been slashed again.”

“Yeah.” Dale smiled ruefully and drank some wine. “I was stupid. The garage guys helped me get the tires inflated. At least I didn’t have to deal with Sheriff Congden again.”

Michelle poured more wine for both of them. Now she was also shaking her head. “C.J. Congden a sheriff. I remember him from high school here. What an asshole.” The redhead held up one manicured finger. “But you stayed. They fixed your truck. . . but you stayed here.”

Dale shrugged. “Well. . . it seemed silly to leave after all that anger at slashed tires that weren’t really slashed. . . just a stupid practical joke. And I was still working on the novel and this seemed like the right place to write it.” The only place to write it, Dale thought. He looked at her. “And besides, we had this date for Thanksgiving.”

Michelle smiled. Her smile in sixth grade had been dazzling. Now, forty years and thousands of dollars of Beverly Hills dentist bills later, it was flawless. “So did they catch them? The skinheads? I assume that they were the ones who let the air out of your tires.”

“Nope,” said Dale. “It turns out that the one kid I knew by name—Derek—had an alibi. He was in Peoria with his aunt, Sandy Whittaker.”

“Sandy Whittaker!” said Michelle. “My God. Do people just stay within five miles of home here until they die? Sandy Whittaker. I bet she got fat and married a Realtor.”

Dale slowly shook his head. “Not quite. She got fat and became a Realtor. Anyway, the sheriff’s deputy I talked to on the cell phone the next day wasn’t too interested in trying to track down some kids who just let the air out of some stranger’s tires. So I dropped the whole thing.”

“And what about the blood?” said Michelle. When she leaned forward as she was doing now, Dale could see her full breasts press together down the low neck of her green silk blouse. Her California tan had begun to fade, and the freckles on her chest blended into the softest-looking white skin imaginable.

“What?” said Dale.

“You said that there was all this blood in your chicken coop. Do you think that the skinheads who let the air out of your tires threw this blood around your chicken coop?”

Dale held his empty hands out. “Who knows? The deputy I talked to said that it just wasn’t in the Sheriff’s Department’s charter to be chasing down foxes and stray dogs who kill chickens.”

“Do you think it was foxes and stray dogs?”

“No,” said Dale. “And it wasn’t chicken blood, either. There haven’t been any chickens in that coop for forty years or so.”

“It would have been cool if someone had done a DNA test on that blood,” said Michelle. “You know, find out if it was animal blood or. . . whatever.”

There was a silence after this comment.

Finally Dale said, “So you don’t like the logic holes in these movies. Slasher movies. Horror movies. Whatever.”

Michelle studied her glass of wine while thinking about this. The lamp behind her made her short-cropped red hair glow like a soft flame. “I don’t like it when the writers and directors have the characters act like idiots just so they can get killed.”

“Do you think I acted like an idiot by staying here?”

“No,” said Michelle. “I’m glad you stayed here. I’m glad we got to cook a turkey together. It was a nice surprise not to spend Thanksgiving alone.” She leaned forward again, and for a moment Dale was sure that she was going to put her hand over his where it lay on the white tablecloth. Instead, she pointed upward. “Speaking of surprises. . . weren’t we going to go upstairs, take down the plastic, and see what’s up there?”

Dale swallowed the last of his wine and looked toward the ceiling. “You mean you don’t mind the parts in those dumb slasher movies where the characters go somewhere they’ve been warned to stay away from?”

“Actually,” said Michelle Staffney, “I love those parts. That’s the point in the movie where I quit rooting for the humans and start cheering for the monster or psychopath or whatever. But I think we have to find out what’s up there.”

“Why?” said Dale. “It’s been closed off for decades. Why do we have to find out now?”

She showed that wonderful smile again. Dale found himself wondering why she hadn’t succeeded as an actress. “Wehaven’t been here for decades,” she said lightly. “I, for one, can’t leave Elm Haven without knowing what’s up there behind that plastic.”

“Oh,” Dale said casually, “I already know what’s up there.”

Clare Two Hearts’s first words when Dale picked her up for their long weekend of traveling to Glacier National Park and the Blackfeet Reservation were, “Does your wife know we’re going away together?”

Dale had prepared himself for the content of that question but not the clarity of it. He actually blushed before saying, “Anne’s used to my off-season camping trips up there. I often take students if students want to go. She doesn’t mind. We have a pretty solid marriage.” This last part was true, but the overall statement was a lie. He had never gone north with just one student, and usually it was a couple of male graduate students who loved to climb and camp who hitched a ride to the park with him. Anne, distracted by a swarm of life’s demands, simply hadn’t asked who he was going with this autumn.

Clare had looked at Dale as if reading all of this information from his blush and expression. Then she had thrown her gear in the back of the Land Cruiser and climbed into the leather passenger seat.

They both had a Friday free of classes—not too surprising, since, for reasons unknown to the instructor, Ms. Clare Hart seemed to be taking just the graduate courses that Dr. Stewart taught—so they had decided to leave on Thursday afternoon and camp near Flathead Lake that night before continuing on through the national park and then east to the reservation. It was early October, and while Dale had learned to mistrust the weather in Glacier and points north any time of the year, this autumn—and the winter to come—would be amazingly warm, with few blizzards. The cottonwoods and aspen were at the height of their color.

Dale drove west from Missoula on I-90 for a few miles and then exited to follow Highway 93 north about sixty miles to Polson and the south end of Flathead Lake. Past the little town of Ravalli, they jogged east a bit and then turned due north. Dale mentioned the National Bison Range that ran west of the highway, but Clare only nodded and said nothing. They passed through St. Ignatius, a sad little town on the Flathead Reservation, and Dale glanced at his passenger, but Clare only watched the passing examples of depressed reservation living without comment.

The ride to and past Flathead Lake was always beautiful—the sharp-toothed Mission Mountains spiking skyward to the east—and it was all especially striking in the afternoon autumnal light, the aspen stirring gold in the breeze, but Clare Two Hearts rode in silence and Dale would be damned if he’d be the first to mention the astounding beauty all around them.

It was almost dinner time when they came close to Polson, but Dale knew of a nice place to eat in the old timber town of Somers twenty-some miles further on and he had planned to drive straight through Polson, following 93 around the west shore of Flathead Lake. But about two miles south of Polson, Clare suddenly said, “Wait! Could we stop there?”

“There” was the Miracle of America Museum, billing itself on faded signs as “Western Montana’s Largest Museum.” Dale had stopped there years ago with Anne and the girls, but had not paid attention to it since. He pulled into the lot.

“This is a dusty old place,” he told Clare. “Tanks, tractors, collections of tractor seats. . . it’s more a hodgepodge of an attic than a museum.”

“Perfect,” said Clare.

They spent more than an hour in the ramshackle museum, almost half of that time listening to recorded music in the place’s “Fiddler’s Hall of Fame.” Clare smiled at everything—the tractor seat collection, the armored tanks from three wars, the motorized toboggan, the yellowed old newspapers behind glass, the old toys with flaking paint. Dale had to admit that it was sort of interesting, in a nondiscriminating, kitschy way.

It was almost dark when they got going again, passing through Polson and heading north along the lake. Here the view east toward the high peaks was especially beautiful—Dale’s ranch was across the lake here, near the U. of M. biological research station—but he was determined to mention it only if Clare said something about the view or the hills. She didn’t, so neither did he.

They had dinner in Tiebecker’s Pub in Somers, on the north end of the lake. Clare ate only salad and paid for her own meal, despite Dale’s offers. After dinner, they drove a few miles east to a good campground that Dale knew right on the water at Wayfarer State Park. They were almost two hours behind the schedule he’d planned, so they set up their camp in the dark, using flashlights and the Cruiser’s headlights. Clare did not seem to mind.

Outdoors people can tell a lot about other outdoors people by the gear they use. Dale was wearing quality old boots, but he had brought an expensive North Face backpacking tent in his Gregory expedition backpack, a top-of-the-line L. L. Bean goose-down sleeping bag, and a high-tech gas backpacking stove for cooking, with lots of freeze-dried packets of food. Clare had brought only an old Swiss canvas military rucksack. Her camping gear consisted of only a tarp—which she pitched in little more than a minute, using a hiking stick for a center pole and rocks bunched in the nylon for grommets—and an old military-spec down bag that literally looked as if it had been left behind in Italy after World War II by the 10th Mountain Division. Her food supplies consisted of a water bottle, some fruit, and crackers.

Dale suggested that they build a campfire—the evening wind had turned cold—but Clare said that she was tired and disappeared under her tarp. Dale had stayed outside to watch the stars for a while, but soon he crawled into his seven-hundred-dollar tent and tried to get some sleep.

The next morning—cold and clear—they made coffee at the campsite, had a real breakfast at a cafe near the summer playhouse in Bigfork, and drove north to West Glacier.

Their plan had been to cut through Glacier Park to the Blackfeet Reservation and then head south along the Bob and the Front Range to the little reservation town of Heart Butte where Clare’s mother had been born. On Saturday they planned to head straight back to Missoula on Highway 2, turning south again along Flathead Lake. Dale had argued for the side trip through Glacier—it was part of his annual late-autumn outing—but mostly he wanted to show off Montana to this young visitor.

The fifty-two-mile-long Going-to-the-Sun Road was famous, but one had to see the incredible scenery to understand how spectacular it really was. Heading east, they drove along the narrow but very deep Lake McDonald for eight miles or so, then started curving and climbing toward Logan Pass. Dale kept glancing at Clare. The young woman was attentive but did not appear to be enraptured by the incredible view.

About four miles beyond the lake, Dale pulled into the Avalanche Campground turnoff. “Want to walk for a few minutes?” he asked. “I know a nice little loop trail up the road here.”

“Sure.”

The Trail of Cedars was a tourist walk—partially built on a boardwalk to protect the delicate undergrowth of ferns and moss—and it wound through a forest of 200-foot-high hemlock and red cedar. There were no other visitors on this beautiful October morning. A soft wind stirred the branches high above them, creating a regular sighing that Dale found as calming as the susurration of ocean surf. Patches of light filtering down through greenery above filled the air with the scent of sun-warmed pine needles and decaying humus. Where the boardwalk crossed Avalanche Creek, water tumbled over moss-covered rocks into the steep and narrow gorge.

“Don’t you wish we’d brought a camera?” said Dale.

“No,” said Clare Hart.

“No?”

She shook her head. “I never travel with a camera. Occasionally a sketch book, but never a camera. It always makes me sad to see tourists snapping away with their cameras and staring through video viewfinders—waiting to get home to see what they didn’t really see when they were there.”

Dale nodded, pretending to understand. “But you have to admit that this is some of the most beautiful country in the world.”

Clare shrugged. “It’s spectacular.”

Dale smiled. “Isn’t that the same as beautiful?”

“Not really,” said Clare. “Spectacle is just more accessible to the dulled sensibility. At least that’s the way I think of it. This kind of country is hard to ignore. Rather like a Wagnerian aria.”

Dale frowned at that. “So you don’t find Glacier Park beautiful?”

“I don’t find it subtle.”

“Is subtlety that important?”

“Sometimes,” said Clare, “it’s necessary for something to be subtle to be truly beautiful.”

“Name a subtly beautiful place,” challenged Dale.

“Tuscany,” said Clare without hesitation.

Dale had never been to Tuscany, so he had no response. After a moment, moving onto the trail beyond the boardwalk, he said, “Your people considered these mountains to be sacred.”

Clare smiled at the “your people” but said nothing. As they came back toward the campground, she said, “Can you think of any mountains anywhere in the world that some primitive people did not consider sacred?”

Dale was silent, thinking.

“Mountains have all the attributes of the gods, of the Jehovah God, don’t they?” continued Clare. “Distant, unapproachable, dangerous. . . the place whence cometh the cold winds and violent storms of rebuke. . . always present and visible, looming over everything, but never really friendly. Tribal peoples worship them but have the sense to stay away from them. Western types climb them and die of hypothermia and asphyxia.”

“Whoa,” said Dale, rolling his eyes a bit. “Theology. Social commentary.”

“Sorry,” said Clare.

They continued the drive across the incredible Logan Pass. Dale told Clare that the pass was usually closed even this early in the autumn, but that the snows were coming late this year. She had nodded, her eyes on a mountain goat hundreds of yards above them on the rock.

Going west to east, Dale had saved the most spectacular scenery for last— St. Mary Lake with the high peaks to the west, little Wild Goose Island in the foreground. He realized, looking at the scene, that if he had a dime for every photograph taken from precisely this spot, he’d never have to teach or write again. Clare said nothing as the view receded behind them. They reached the east portal to the park before lunchtime.

Passing out of the park and through the little reservation town of St. Mary, they headed south into the flatter, sadder belly of the reservation, driving toward Heart Butte. Dale found himself irritated at his passenger—at her arrogance, at her refusal to be amazed by the amazing scenery, at her dismissal of her own heritage. He was sorry that they had another night of camping and day of driving ahead of them before he could get back to Anne and the girls and his work. He was sorry that he’d invited this spoiled little diva’s daughter on a trip that usually made him calm and happy to be living in Montana. He was sorry that he’d ever spoken to Clare Two Hearts about her real name.

He was only hours away from becoming Clare Hart’s lover and, much worse, from falling in love with her.

Dale?”

He looked over the top of his wine glass at Michelle Staffney.

“You still here, Dale?”

“Sure,” he said. “Just gathering wool.”

“You were going to tell me what’s upstairs behind the plastic and how you know.”

He nodded and set his wine glass down on the wine-stained tablecloth. “The Jolly Corner,” he said.

Michelle’s expression showed no recognition.

“When we were kids, I remember Duane calling this house ‘The Jolly Corner,’ “continued Dale. “It’s a story by Henry James. A sort of ghost story.”

“Like The Turn of the Screw?” asked Michelle. She had lit a cigarette and now exhaled smoke from her narrow nostrils. When she’d asked earlier if she could smoke after dinner, he’d said “No problem,” but he was surprised that she still smoked. Now he was surprised that she knew about The Turn of the Screw. Quit making assumptions about people, he warned himself. He heard Anne’s voice saying that, since she had suggested that to him hundreds of times during their marriage.

“Not quite like The Turn of the Screw,” he said, “but subtle in the same way.” Subtle. “Sometimes it’s necessary for something to be subtle to be truly beautiful.”

Michelle batted ashes into the small bowl she’d brought out to use as an ashtray. She waited.

“In ‘The Jolly Corner,’ “continued Dale, “James has one of his typically Jamesian protagonists—a fifty-six-year-old guy named Spencer Brydon—return to New York and the States after decades spent in Europe. Brydon’s coming back to check on some property of his, including a tall old home in Manhattan where he grew up. . .”

“A place his family called The Jolly Corner,” guessed Michelle.

“Right. Anyway, the house is empty—no furniture—but in the story, Brydon becomes obsessed with it, returning night after night to climb the stairways and wander through the empty rooms in the dark, carrying only a small lantern or a candle. . . searching for something. . . for someone. . .”

“A ghost,” said Michelle.

“A Jamesian ghost,” agreed Dale. “Actually, Spencer Brydon is convinced that The Jolly Corner is haunted by the ghost of his alternate self.”

“Alternate self?” Michelle’s eyes were very green in the dying candlelight.

Dale shrugged. The cigarette smoke made him want a cigarette, although he had not smoked in more than twenty-five years. “The person he could and would have been if he had stayed in the United States,” he said. “If he had pursued money rather than the finer things of life he found in Europe.”

“Whoo,” Michelle said sarcastically. “Sounds scary. Real Stephen King territory.”

“Actually, it is sort of scary,” said Dale, trying to remember whether Clare had been in any of his graduate classes where he discussed “The Jolly Corner.” He thought not. “When he finally confronts the ghost of his alternate self,” he went on, “the apparition is pretty awful—brutal, missing fingers, a sort of Mr. Hyde to Spencer Brydon’s sophisticated Dr. Jekyll.” Dale closed his eyes for a second, trying to remember James’s phrasing. “‘Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay.’ “

“Cool,” said Michelle. “You have a good memory.”

Dale shook his head. “I just emphasize the same phrase over the years of teaching the story. . . over the decades of teaching the story.” He frowned. “Anyway—not much more to the tale. Spencer Brydon confronts the ghost of himself in the middle of the night and. . .”

“Dies?”

“Faints,” said Dale. He smiled. “This is a Jamesian hero, after all.”

“That’s how the story ends?” said Michelle, stubbing out her cigarette and looking dubious, a producer who had not especially liked a screenwriter’s pitch. “He faints? That’s it?”

Dale rubbed his chin. “Not quite. You get the idea that Spencer Brydon might have died—he’s unconscious for hours—except for the fact that his older lady friend, Alice Staverton, I think her name is, had come to the house with premonitions of danger for him. She gets the housekeeper—Mrs. Maloney or Mrs. Muldoon or some such—to let her in, and Brydon comes to with his head on Alice’s lap. His head pillowed, I think James puts it, ‘in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing fragrance.’ “

“Sexy,” said Michelle.

Dale actually blushed. “I don’t think he. . . I mean, not deliberately. . . anyway, you get the idea in the end that he’s been saved from his alternate self by the love of a good woman. . .”

Michelle snorted politely. “The love of a good woman,” she said softly. “That’s a phrase I haven’t heard for a while.”

Dale nodded, still blushing like an idiot. “So it ends with Alice Staverton saying to Brydon, ‘And he isn’t—no he isn’t—you,’ or something like that, and hugging Brydon to her breast.” Dale quit, feeling sorry that he had brought the whole thing up.

Michelle smiled again and looked toward the ceiling. “So that’s what we’re going to find up there? Our alternate selves? Who we would have been if we’d both stayed in Elm Haven?”

“Scary thought, isn’t it?” said Dale, returning her smile.

“Terrifying,” agreed Michelle. She stood, reached into the purse she’d hung from the back of her chair, and removed a box opener. She thumbed a catch that slid a razor blade out of the end of the thing. “I came prepared.”

“Is that to fight off the ghosts?” said Dale, rising with her.

“No, stupid. It’s to cut through the plastic.”