breezing in and out with the stiff-legged gait of the mildly shit-faced, walking down slopes only they could see.
Black Ridge was, as it had always been, kind of a dump. Carol and I hardly ever came down here – getting our groceries from Roslyn or Sheffer (the closest communities to our house) or Cle Elum (bigger than Black Ridge, but still hardly the excitement capital of the world). Once in a while we'd saddle up and drive over the Snoqualmie Pass and thence to Seattle, about three hours away. There were a couple of other small towns en route – Snoqualmie Falls, Snohomish, Birch Crossing – which were just about worth the trip if you are open-minded about what constitutes a good time.
Black Ridge wasn't one of our places, which is among the reasons why, two and a half years ago, I'd wound up in a motel here for a while. I'd spent almost all of that time holed up in my room, not sober, or else out the back in a chair, overlooking the disused swimming pool – also not-sober. It was a condition that I'd specialized in at the time. This lay in the past, however, and so I had little patience with the people I saw drifting in and out of the Mountain View. I didn't know whether Ellen Robertson was the kind of woman who might find herself in bars of an afternoon, however, and so I vaguely kept an eye out anyhow.
Or so I told myself. The truth was I had no clue what to do, or where to go, and no idea of what she looked like. Until Ellen called me, I was just an idiot sitting on a bench. I stretched the Americano as long as I could but as the light began to change it started to get cold and finally I stood up.
As I did so I noticed a young woman walking down the other side of the street, tall with dark hair and bundled into a black coat, the effect overall being somewhat like a lanky crow. She walked straight into the Tavern without hesitating, revealing a flash of pale cheek and forehead as she reached out for the door.
Was that Ellen? No, probably not.
Just after she'd disappeared, I heard a shout from behind and turned to see a large man bearing down on me. I froze for a moment, wondering what was about to happen next.
‘For the love of God!’ the guy said. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Well, that's a sort of a greeting, I guess.’
‘Jesus H, John. It's been … You lost weight.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, as I braced myself to submit to one of Bill Raines's trademark hugs. Bill sure as hell hadn't lost any pounds. When I'd first met him he was big but rangy. There'd been an even larger guy waiting to get out, however, and Bill had usually done his best to help him. He'd always been this huge, affable guy, who used his surname to make dumb but disarming jokes about the weather in the Pacific Northwest.
We disengaged. ‘Well, shit on a brick,’ he said. ‘How the hell have you been?’
I shrugged.
‘Yeah. Carol with you?’
‘No. I'm really just passing through.’
We talked for a couple of minutes, establishing that Bill still lived out the north end of town, still worked at the family law firm down in Yakima, and was on his way to visit a client whose case he was affably confident of losing. I said I was living and working down in Oregon, without being more specific. I didn't proffer a reason for being here in town. I asked about his wife, because you do.
‘She's great,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘Well, you know Jenny. Always got something on the boil. Look, shoot, I'm sorry, John – but I gotta run. Stupid fucking late as it is. You free this evening?’
‘Probably not,’ I said.
‘Shoot. That changes, give me a call. Jen's out of town. We'll get wasted like old times, man. It's been too long. It needs to happen.’
‘You got it,’ I said.
‘Well, okay then,’ he said. He seemed becalmed for a moment, then clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Shit, I really have to go. Later, yeah, maybe?’
‘Right.’
I watched him hustle across the street to his car, wave, and drive away. Then I walked back to the motel, climbed in my own vehicle, and got on with doing what had been in the back of my mind all afternoon, had perhaps even been the real reason I'd being willing to fly up here in the first place.
Maybe I'd never make contact with Ms Robertson, and probably it didn't matter anyhow. But there was one thing I could do, and it was about time.
When I was a hundred yards short of the gate I started to slow down, and eventually let the car roll to a halt. For the last ten minutes of the drive it had felt as if I was shaking, gently and invisibly at first – but growing in intensity until I had to grip the wheel hard to stay in control. As soon as the noise of the engine died away, I was still. When I was sure the shaking wasn't going to start again, I opened the door and got out.
I was now fifteen minutes northeast of Black Ridge. I'd taken the Sheffer road, climbing gradually higher, then turned off onto the country road which doubled back up into the mountains. A few miles from here it all but ran out, narrowing to a perennially muddy track under the aegis of the forestry management service. I walked up to the padlocked gate and stood looking over it, up the driveway.
Was this enough?
Over the last two years I had many times imagined being where I now stood, but in those morbid daydreams the gate had always been open and I had been there by prior arrangement. I had been possessed, too, of a keen sense of rightness, of a meaningful deed being undertaken. As is so often the case, life had failed to mirror fantasy.
I took out my phone. I knew the house number, assuming it had not been changed. Perhaps …
I turned at the sound of a car coming down the road, slowing as it approached. It was a spruce-looking SUV of the light and elegant type owned by people who have no genuine need for a rugged vehicle, but know their lifestyle requires accessorizing.
It stopped a few yards past me and the driver's side window whirred down to reveal a cheerful-looking man in his fifties.
‘Bob let you down?’
‘Excuse me?’
The man smiled. ‘He's a super realtor, don't get me wrong. Sold us our place – we're up the road a mile? Moved over from Black Ridge a year ago and Bob was great with, you know, the process. But timekeeping really isn't his core field of excellence.’
‘No big deal,’ I said. ‘I'm only here on a whim.’
The man nodded as though he understood all about that kind of thing, though he looked like someone who last acted on a whim around five or six years ago, most likely a statistically sound whim concerning moving non-critical cash reserves from one low-risk portfolio to another.
‘Had a look at that property ourselves, in fact,’ he said. ‘Not quite big enough for us, but beautiful. Has direct access to Murdo Pond. But I'm sure Bob told you that already.’
‘It's been on the market that long?’
‘You don't know?’
