she opened to me like a flower in the spring of our senior year, I accepted her attentions like a divine gift. For girls that age, having sex is usually so tied up in the desire to be accepted by peers that true motives are impossible to fathom. But for Livy Marston acceptance was not an issue. When she gave herself, it was because she wanted to, and that knowledge immeasurably dilated the experience. That her skills did not seem virginal I wrote off to her being as gifted sexually as she was in so many other ways. I submerged my self into hers, basked in the glow of being seen with her, of being known to be loved by her. I cared as little for what lay ahead of me as for what lay behind, and so set myself up for the fall of my life.
“Penn? Are you awake?”
I blink and look over at Caitlin. She’s watching me from her chair, her face flickering in the television light.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing. Everything.”
An enigmatic smile. “Livy Marston?”
“God, no,” I lie, thinking that Caitlin was absolutely right when she told me she had lethal instincts.
“I’m going to bed,” she says, rising from her chair. “Tomorrow’s a big day.”
I get up to walk her to her room, amazed by how tired I feel. Witnessing death up close saps you like a day under the sun. It also stokes the sexual fires, urging toward procreation. As we stand outside her door, Caitlin looks up at me, her face tilted perfectly for a kiss, and I realize again how beautiful she is. But I no longer see her as I did last night in the restaurant. I’m looking through the distorting memory of Livy Marston. Caitlin lowers her chin, and the moment passes.
“What do you think Dwight Stone knows?” she asks.
“More than we do. Maybe he knows everything.”
She opens the door and slips through without looking back, leaving me alone with my ghosts.
Crested Butte, Colorado, is a tiny village nestled nine thousand feet in the Rocky Mountains, twenty-five miles from Aspen as the crow flies, three hours by car. The easiest way to get there is to fly into Gunnison and drive north up the valley for half an hour. But to get to former special agent Dwight Stone’s cabin, you must leave the pastel storefronts of Crested Butte’s old town behind and drive northwest into the mountains on a forest service road, past the summer homes of the rich, until the road turns into a jeep trail that follows the Slate River upstream between Anthracite Mesa and Schuylkill Mountain. A few hundred yards north of an eight-foot vertical drop in the river, situated in the thick fir and spruce between the jeep track and the narrow blue-black span of the Slate, stands a small but well-built cabin, facing southwest to catch the sun.
Dwight Stone likes his solitude.
When I called Stone from the Gunnison airport and asked if I could speak to him about the Payton case, he politely declined. I did not tell him where I was calling from.
That was an hour ago.
Now Caitlin and Annie and I approach his front porch like a lost family asking for directions. I’m glad we brought coats. When we left Natchez it was ninety degrees. Here it’s less than fifty, and there are dark clouds glowering over the summit of Gothic Mountain to the east.
Before I can knock, a tall, fit-looking man in his late sixties clumps around the side of the cabin wearing hip waders, a Black Watch flannel shirt, and carrying a fly rod.
“You folks lost?” he asks in a deep, resonant voice.
“That depends on where we are.” I’ve already recognized the voice, but I say, “Are you former special agent Dwight Stone?”
Stone has the eyes of a combat veteran, and they narrow instantly, assessing threat. A man with a woman and a little girl can’t seem like much danger, but I don’t know what his anxieties are.
“You’re on my property,” he points out, quite reasonably. “Why don’t you introduce yourself first?”
“Fair enough. I’m Penn Cage.”
His eyes relax, but he sighs wearily. “You’ve wasted your time, son. Flying up here to get told no to your face instead of over the phone.”
“I hoped you might soften up a little when you saw us.”
He shakes his head, climbs onto the porch, and leans the fly rod against the cabin wall.
“I’m not a journalist. I have no interest in sensationalizing this story.”
“You’re a writer, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but that’s not why I’m looking into this case.”
“Why are you?”
My gut feeling about Dwight Stone is that if you want to get anywhere with him, honesty is the best policy. “I could say it was to help the victim’s family. Althea Payton and her mother-in-law. And I do want to help them. But I also have a selfish reason. I’m trying to nail a man who hurt my father a long time ago.”
Stone studies me for several seconds. “Who would that be?”
“Leo Marston. Judge Leo Marston. He was the district attorney back—”
“I know who he was.” Stone eyes Caitlin. “This your wife?”
“No, a friend. Caitlin Masters. But this is my daughter. Say hello, Annie.”
Annie waves her right hand while clinging to Caitlin’s leg with her left.
“You bring her along for the sympathy factor?”
“I brought her to keep her out of harm’s way. I’ve already been shot at. Not many people want the Payton case reopened.”
A flicker of something in Stone’s eyes. “You convicted Arthur Lee Hanratty, didn’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“I saw you on CNN last night, at the Walls.”
I nod but say nothing.
“That’ll buy you a half hour of my time, Mr. Penn Cage. How about some coffee?”
“Coffee would be wonderful,” Caitlin says, lifting Annie into her arms.
Stone takes a trout bag from his shoulder, then wipes his hands on his shirt and reaches for the cabin door. “I don’t get much company up here, but I think maybe we could rustle up some hot chocolate too.”
Annie breaks into a wide grin.
Stone settles Caitlin and me on a sand-colored leather sofa with Annie between us. Before us is a huge fieldstone fireplace, and Stone quickly builds a roaring blaze in it. The cabin is full of hunting and fishing gear, snowshoes hanging on the walls, rifles over the mantel, a fly-tying bench
