“Joanne, if Ben is reading this beside our fireplace, then Preston has shown his hand, and I am sorry I am not there to stand next to you.” Ben Okerlund read the first line of the letter of Russell in a steady voice, and the great room of Elk Ridge Lodge went silent from the rafters to the floorboards. Thirty investors in fleece vests stopped whispering. Forty of my neighbors, crowded along the walls with coffee cups in their hands, leaned forward as one body. Over the mantel, the elk head that Russell had shot in 1983 seemed to look down with a calm and rather satisfied expression.
“I did not trust the young man from the first dinner,” the letter went on. “So I did a little digging, as a firefighter does when he smells smoke. In 2019 I placed the lodge and the land in the Pike Mountain Trust. The trustee is Joanne, for the rest of her life. No sale, no loan, and no deed is valid without her signature, given in person at the county clerk office with a witness. If you are holding a paper notarized in Denver, throw it in the stove. Joanne, you have not been to Denver since the funeral of your mother. I remember. I was driving.”
Gail Ortega, the county commissioner, stood from her folding chair at the back. “I can confirm that,” she said. “The trust was recorded in our office on the ninth of May, 2019. I have the book number in my purse.” She actually took a small notebook from her purse and read it aloud, to a ripple of nervous laughter. Ben laid a certified copy on the hearth, beside the stack of kindling. Then he turned to the investors, who had gone as stiff as the pine walls. “Gentlemen, Mr. Hale has no authority to sell what he does not own. I suggest that you ask for your deposit.”
A thick envelope behind a stone hearth showed a lodge full of strangers who the real owner was.
Preston did not give up at once. I will say that for him. He smiled his polished smile and spread his hands, and said that there had been a misunderstanding about the paperwork, and that the whole thing could be cleared up over a drink. It was the sort of voice that had sold three men a share in a condominium that did not exist. But Russell had not finished. Ben turned the page and read on, more slowly. “Preston, I know about the partnership in Boulder, and the judgment against you in 2016, and the two investors who lost their savings. I am told that the third one is in this room today.”
A man in the second row slowly stood. He was in his sixties, in a gray sweater, with the sad dignity of someone who has been waiting a long time to say something. “My name is Dennis Albright,” he said. “I put my retirement into a ski lodge in Boulder six years ago. It never opened. Mr. Hale told me it was a delay. I came here today because a friend sent me a flyer, and I wanted to see whether he had done it again.” He turned to the investors. “Gentlemen, I would ask you to walk out of this room. I would ask it as a favor, from one fool to another.”
They walked. First the man in the front with the polished loafers, then the woman beside him, and then all of them, one after another, collecting their coats from the pegs by the door, with the stiff politeness of people who have just had a narrow escape. The deputy who had been standing quietly beside the fireplace stepped forward, and I saw that the cuffs were already in his hand. “Mr. Hale,” he said, “the Larimer County district attorney has been waiting to speak with you. There is a matter of a forged deed and a notary stamp in Denver.”
I looked at my daughter. Natalie was standing by the stone chimney, with her arms around her middle. She had not spoken in minutes. When she finally looked at me, her eyes were so full that I could not tell what color they were. “Mom,” she said, “I knew something was off. I told myself I was imagining it. I told myself he was only ambitious.” I crossed the floor and took her face in my hands. “You were afraid,” I said. “That is not a crime. But from now on, you will tell me when you are afraid. That is the whole bargain.”
She came to live at the lodge that very week. She slept in her old room, the one with the knotty pine walls, and in the evenings she helped in the kitchen, her hair tied back, peeling potatoes. She divorced Preston by spring. He pleaded to fraud and forgery and was given four years, and I am told that he does his time with polish and that the other men call him Professor. Dennis Albright stays with us now, three weeks every summer, as a guest at no charge. He fishes in the creek and reads in the porch rocker. He says it is the first place where he has felt safe.
I reinstated all eleven reservations that Preston had lost, with a personal note to each guest. The first week of May, the lodge was full. Natalie ran the front desk. I cooked elk stew for forty. Late in the evening, when the guests had gone upstairs and the last of the coals glowed in the great hearth, Natalie asked what Russell had meant by the line at the end of the letter, the one that Ben had not read aloud. I took her to the fireplace, and I reached up to the fourth stone from the left, and slid it out.
Inside was a small tin box. Inside the box was a photograph of Russell and me, taken the week we poured the foundation, both of us sunburned and laughing, with sawdust in our hair. On the back, in his blocky hand, he had written two lines. For my girls, when the fire burns low. Build it again if you have to. Natalie read it, and put her hand over her mouth, and we stood together in front of the fire, the warm light moving on our faces, while the mountains outside went quietly dark.
