White Fire (8 page)

9

F
ive long days later, Corrie remained locked up in the Roaring Fork County Jail. Bail had been set at fifty thousand dollars, which she didn’t have—not even the five-thousand-dollar surety—and the local bail bondsman declined to take her as a client because she was from out of state, with no assets to pledge and no relatives to vouch for her. She had been too ashamed to call her father, and anyway he sure didn’t have the money. There was no one else in her life—except Pendergast. And even if she could reach him, she’d die before she took any more money from him—especially bond money.

Nevertheless, she’d had to write him a letter. She had no idea where he was or what he was doing. She hadn’t heard from him in nearly a year. But he, or someone acting for him, had continued paying her tuition. And the day after her arrest, with the story plastered all over the front page of the
Roaring Fork Times
, she realized she had to write. Because if she didn’t, and he heard about her arrest from someone else, saw those headlines…She owed it to him to tell him first.

So she had written a letter to his Dakota address, care of Proctor. In it she told the whole story, unvarnished. The only thing she left out was the bail situation. Writing everything down had really impressed on her what a brainless, overconfident, and self-destructive thing she had done. She concluded by telling him his obligation to her was over and that no reply was expected or wanted. He was no longer to concern himself with her. She would take care of herself from now on. Except that someday, as soon as she was able, she would pay him back for all the tuition he had wasted sending her to John Jay.

Writing that letter had been the hardest thing she had ever done. Pendergast had saved her life; plucked her out of Medicine Creek, Kansas; freed her from a drunken, abusive mother; paid for her to go to boarding school—and then financed her education at John Jay. And…for what?

But that was all over now.

The fact that the jail was relatively posh only made her feel worse. The cells had big, sunny windows looking out over the mountains, carpeted floors, and nice furniture. She was allowed out of her cell from eight in the morning until lockdown at 10:30
PM
. During free time, the prisoners were allowed to hang around the dayroom and read, watch TV, and chat with the other inmates. There was even an adjacent workout room with an elliptical trainer, weights, and treadmills.

At that moment, Corrie was sitting in the dayroom, staring at the black-and-white checkered carpet. Doing nothing. For the past five days she had been so depressed that she couldn’t seem to do anything—read, eat, or even sleep. She just sat there, all day, every day, staring into space, and then spent each night in her cell, lying on her back in her cot, staring into darkness.

“Corrine Swanson?”

She roused herself and looked up. A detention guard was standing in the door of the room, holding a clipboard.

“Here,” she said.

“Your attorney has arrived for your appointment.”

She’d forgotten. She hauled herself to her feet and followed the guard to a separate room. She felt as if the air around her were thick, granular. Her eyes wouldn’t stop leaking water. But she wasn’t crying, exactly; it seemed like a physiological reaction.

She went into a small conference room to find the public defender waiting at the table, briefcase open, manila folders spread out in a neat fan. His name was George Smith and she had already met with him a few times. He was a middle-aged, slight, sandy-haired, balding man with a perpetually apologetic look on his face. He was nice enough, and he meant well, but he wasn’t exactly Perry Mason.

“Hello, Corrie,” he said.

She eased down in a chair, saying nothing.

“I’ve had several meetings with the DA,” Smith began, “and, well, I’ve made some progress on the plea deal.”

Corrie nodded apathetically.

“Here’s where we stand. You plead to breaking and entering, trespassing, and desecration of a human corpse, and they’ll drop the petty larceny charge. You’ll be looking at ten years, max.”

“Ten years?”

“I know. It’s not what I’d hoped. There’s a lot of pressure being brought to bear to throw the book at you. I don’t quite understand it, but it may have something to do with all the publicity this case has generated and the ongoing controversy about the cemetery. They’re making an example of you.”

“Ten
years
?” Corrie repeated.

“With good behavior, you could be out in eight.”

“And if we go to trial?”

The lawyer’s face clouded. “Out of the question. The evidence against you is overwhelming. There’s a string of felonies here, starting with the B and E and going all the way to the desecration of a human corpse. That latter crime alone carries a sentence of up to thirty years in prison.”

“You’re kidding—thirty years?”

“It’s a particularly nasty statute here in Colorado because of a long history of grave robbing.” He paused. “Look, if you don’t plead, the DA will be pissed and he could very well ask for that maximum sentence. He’s threatened as much to me already.”

Corrie stared at the scarred table.

“You’ve
got
to plead out, Corrie. It’s your only choice.”

“But…I can’t believe it. Ten years, just for what I did? That’s more than some murderers get.”

A long silence. “I can always go back to the DA. The problem is, they’ve got you cold. You don’t have anything to trade.”

“But I
didn’t
desecrate a human corpse.”

“Well, according to the way those statutes are written, you did. You opened the coffin, you handled the bones, you photographed them, and you took two of them. That’s what they’ll argue, and I’d be hard-pressed to counter. It’s not worth the risk. The jury pool here is drawn from the entire county, not just Roaring Fork, and there are a lot of conservative ranchers and farmers out there, religious folk, who would not look kindly on what you did.”

“But I was just trying to prove that the marks on the bones…” She couldn’t finish.

The attorney spread his thin hands, a pained look pinching his narrow face. “It’s the best I can do.”

“How long do I have to think about it?”

“Not long. They can withdraw the offer at any moment. If you could decide right now, that would be best.”

“I’ve
got
to think about it.”

“You have my number.”

Corrie rose and shook his limp, sweaty hand, walked out. The guard, who had been waiting outside the door, led her back to the dayroom. She sat down and stared at the black-and-white carpet and thought about what her life would look like in ten years, after she got back out. Her eyes began leaking again, and she wiped at them furiously, to no avail.

10

J
enny Baker arrived at the Roaring Fork City Hall lugging Chief Stanley Morris’s second briefcase in both hands. The chief carried two bulging briefcases to every meeting he attended, it seemed, so as to be prepared to answer any question that might come up. Jenny had tried to persuade him to get a tablet computer, but he was a confirmed Luddite and refused even to use the desktop computer in his office.

Jenny rather liked that, despite the inconvenience of having to lug around two briefcases. So far, the chief had proven a pleasant man to work for, rarely made demands, and was always agreeable. In the two weeks she had interned in the police station, she’d seen him flustered and worried but never angry. Now he walked alongside her, chatting about town business, as they entered the meeting room. Big town meetings were sometimes held in the Opera House, but this one—on December thirteenth, less than two weeks from Christmas—was not expected to be well attended.

She took a seat just behind the chief in the town-official seating area. They were early—the chief was always early—and she watched as the mayor came in, followed by the Planning Board, the town attorney, and other officials whose names she did not know. Hard on their heels came a contingent from The Heights, led by Mrs. Kermode, her coiffed, layered helmet of blond hair utterly perfect. She was followed by her brother-in-law, Henry Montebello, and several anonymous-looking men in suits.

The main item of the meeting—the agenda was routinely published in the paper—involved a proposal from The Heights regarding where the Boot Hill remains were to be reinterred. As the meeting opened, with the usual pledge of allegiance and the reading of minutes, Jenny’s thoughts drifted to the woman she had met—Corrie—and what had happened to her. It sort of freaked her out. She had seemed so nice, so professional—and then to be caught breaking into a warehouse, desecrating a coffin, and stealing bones. You never could tell what some people were capable of doing. And a student at John Jay, too. Nothing like that had ever happened in The Heights, and the neighborhood was still up in arms about it. It was all her parents talked about at breakfast every morning, even now, ten days after the event.

As the preliminaries went on, Jenny was surprised to see just how many people were filing into the public seating area. It was already packed, and now the standing-room area in the back was filling up. Maybe the cemetery thing was going to erupt into controversy again. She hoped this wasn’t going to make the meeting run late—she had a dinner date later that evening.

The meeting moved to the first item on the agenda. The attorney for The Heights rose and gave his presentation in a nasal drone. The Heights, he said, proposed to rebury the disinterred remains in a field they had purchased for just such a purpose on a hillside about five miles down Route 82. This surprised Jenny; she had always assumed the remains would be reburied within the town limits. Now she understood why so many people were there.

The attorney went through some legal gobbledygook about how this was all perfectly legal, reasonable, proper, preferable, and indeed, unavoidable for various reasons she didn’t understand. As he continued, Jenny heard a slow rising of disapproving sounds, murmurings—even a few hisses—from the public area. She glanced in the direction of the noise. The proposal was, it seemed, not being greeted with favor.

Just as she was about to turn her attention back to the stage, she noted a striking figure in a black suit appear in the very rear of the public area. There was something about the man that gave her pause. Was it his sculpted, alabaster face? Or his hair, so blond it was almost white? Or his eyes of such pale gray-blue that, even across the room, he looked almost like an alien. Was he a celebrity? If not, Jenny decided, he should be.

Now a landscape designer was on his feet and giving his spiel, complete with slide show, images on the portable screen displaying a plat of the proposed burial area, followed by three-dimensional views of the future cemetery, with stone walls, a quaint wrought-iron archway leading in, cobbled paths among the graves. Next came slides of the actual site: a lovely green meadow partway up a mountain. It was pretty—but it wasn’t in Roaring Fork.

As he spoke, the murmurings of disapproval, the restlessness, of the gathered public grew in suppressed intensity. Jenny recognized a reporter from the
Roaring Fork Times
sitting in the front row of the public area, and the look of anticipatory delight on his face signaled that he expected fireworks.

And now, at last, Mrs. Betty Brown Kermode rose to speak. At this, a hush fell. She was a commanding presence in town—even Jenny’s father seemed intimidated by her—and those who had gathered to express their opinions were temporarily muted.

She began by mentioning the exceedingly unfortunate break-in of ten days earlier, the shocking violation of a corpse, and how this demonstrated the need to get those human remains back in the ground as soon as possible. She mentioned in passing the seriousness of the crime—so serious that the perpetrator had accepted a plea bargain that would result in ten years’ incarceration.

The Heights, she went on, had been taking care of these remains with the utmost attention, deeply aware of their sacred duty to see that these rough miners, these pioneers of Roaring Fork, were given a burial site suitable to their sacrifice, their spirit, and their contribution to the opening of the American West. They had, she said, found the perfect resting place: on the slopes of the Catamount, with heartbreaking views of the Continental Divide. Surrounding the graveyard, they had purchased over a hundred acres of open space, which would remain forever wild. This is what these Colorado pioneers deserved—not being jammed into some town lot, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of commerce, traffic, shopping, and sport.

It was an effective presentation. Even Jenny found herself agreeing with Mrs. Kermode. The grumbling was no longer audible when she returned to her seat.

Next to stand was Henry Montebello, who had married into Kermode’s family and, as a result, gained instant power and respectability in the town. He was an older man, gaunt, reserved, and weathered looking. Jenny did not like him and was, in fact, afraid of him. He had a laconic mid-Atlantic accent that somehow caused every observation he made to sound cynical. Although he had been the master architect for The Heights way back when, unlike Kermode he did not live within the development, but rather had his home and office in a large mansion on the other side of town.

He cleared his throat. No expense had been spared, he told the gathered crowd, in developing The Heights—and not that alone, but also in ensuring that it conformed, not only with the spirit and aesthetic of Roaring Fork, but to the local ecology and environment, as well. He could say this, Montebello continued, because he had personally supervised the preparation of the site, the design of the mansions and clubhouse, and the construction of the development. He would, he said, oversee the creation of the new cemetery with the same close, hands-on attention he had given to The Heights. The implication seemed to be that the long-dead occupants of Boot Hill should be grateful to Montebello for his personal ministrations on their behalf. Montebello spoke with quiet dignity, and with aristocratic gravitas—and yet there was a steely undertone to his words, subtle but unmistakable, that seemed to dare anyone to challenge a single syllable of what he’d uttered. No one did, and he once again took his seat.