Chapter 4
CALLUM
The Aldrich Hotel does grief the way it does everything else: beautifully, expensively, and on schedule.
I stand at the back of the lobby and watch my family's building perform its sympathy.
The front desk staff wear black today instead of charcoal, a distinction no guest will notice and every employee was briefed on.
Fresh white lilies bank the reception table in arrangements so precise they look engineered.
The girl behind the desk, Meredith, hired out of a hospitality program in Boulder, greets each arrival with a murmur pitched low enough to suggest solemnity without committing to actual sorrow. She's good. Ward hired her himself.
The building is good too. Over a century of Aldrich money soaked into the dark-stained beams, the hammered-brass fixtures, the oil portrait of Elias above the front desk.
The founder's face is rendered with the benevolent confidence of a man who collapsed a mineshaft on six men and then built a hotel over the view.
The lobby is paneled in walnut so old it's gone nearly black.
Sound behaves strangely in it, absorbed by the wood, swallowed into the walls, so that conversations carry as texture rather than content.
The building was designed by men who understood that privacy is a construction material.
You can stand close enough to touch someone in this lobby and hear nothing but the shape of what they're saying.
Through the west-facing windows, the mountains are doing something obscene with the October light.
Gold aspens against dark spruce, the peaks sugared white, the whole valley arranged like a postcard designed to make you forget what's underneath the scenery.
My family built this town to look like this from every window.
The beauty is load-bearing. Remove it and the structure underneath is just a mine full of dead men and generations of paperwork explaining why that's fine.
The memorial for June begins in less than an hour. The lobby is filling with people who spent decades ignoring a woman and have now, in the span of her dying, discovered a civic obligation to mourn her.
I straighten my cuff and count the room.
The grocer, Frank, who stopped carrying the brand of flour June preferred after one of Ward's people suggested it.
Quietly, casually, the way you'd suggest a man reconsider his inventory if he wanted to keep his lease.
June drove to Durango for her baking after that.
The postmaster, Linda, who once held a certified letter addressed to June for nearly a week before delivering it, enough time for Ward to learn what was in it.
Dr. Reeves, who attended to June's pneumonia last winter and sent his notes to Ward's office with the bill.
Every cruelty here is institutional, the kind that leaves no fingerprints.
They stand in clusters now, sipping coffee from the hotel's white china. Their faces carry the particular gravity of people who understand they're being watched and have arranged their expressions accordingly.
I came in through the lot and counted plates out of habit. A black BMW with Denver tags sat parked in the space nearest the kitchen entrance. Guests park at the front and let the valet take it. Whoever used the kitchen door came early and didn't want the lobby to log the visit.
I went upstairs before coming down. My office is on the second floor. Ward's is on the top floor, above it, because Ward has always preferred the highest ground in any building he owns.
I took the stairs, turned the corner, and found the door closed.
Through it I could hear the low cadence of Ward's voice, unhurried, the rhythm I can hear in my sleep.
Underneath it ran a second voice, a woman's, clipped and professional and unfamiliar.
I stood in the hall long enough to confirm that the cadence was negotiation, not greeting, and came back down.
My uncle is meeting with someone from Denver behind a closed door on a morning when the whole town is gathering to mourn the woman whose daughter I left in a bed with ironed sheets before dawn. I file the fact. I come down to the bar.
Keaton sets a bourbon on the counter before I reach it.
"You look like you're attending a funeral," he says.
"Memorial."
"My mistake. You look like you're attending a memorial and hoping it ends before the appetizers." He polishes a glass with unhurried competence, a man who made himself indispensable by becoming invisible over a decade ago and has never seen a reason to change the arrangement.
I take the bourbon and don't drink it.
"Has Ward come down?" I ask.
"Not today." He lays the words on the bar the way he lays the drink, flat and without emphasis. "Whoever's up there was already in the building when I opened."
He picks up another glass and begins polishing.
I drink the bourbon. The woman's voice I heard through Ward's door was not one I recognize, and I know every voice that matters in this building.
The details line up one by one: Denver plates, kitchen entrance for discretion, closed door, the clipped cadence of someone who bills by the hour.
Ward is bringing in outside counsel on a morning when outside counsel means the family's attorney is no longer sufficient. Which means me.
I set the empty glass on the bar and Keaton replaces it without being asked.
"Don't," I tell him.
"You're going to need it."
"Why?"
"Because you're about to walk into a room full of people performing grief for a woman your family wanted dead, and you're going to have to perform it, too." He doesn't look up from the glass in his hand. "And you're not as good at it as you used to be."
He's right. I take the second bourbon.
The reception room carries the same studied elegance.
Folding chairs in rows, upholstered, not metal, because metal folding chairs signal gymnasium and the Aldrich Hotel signals permanence.
A lectern stands at the front in dark-stained oak that matches the lobby paneling, because the Aldriches don't do anything once when they can make it echo.
Beside it, a photograph of June rests on a small easel.
The photograph is wrong, and it takes me a moment to place why: it's too young.
The June in the frame is early fifties, strong-jawed, clear-eyed, her hair still dark.
The June I knew in her last years was thinner, grayer, her gaze sharper, as though age had burned away everything but the essential apparatus of paying attention.
Someone on Ward's staff chose the younger photograph because it's more flattering. The woman who actually died would have loathed this entire event. June's voice is clear enough in my head: 'If any Aldrich sets foot at my memorial, I want you to promise me you'll make a scene.'
I promised. I lied.
Greer arrives just after nine, and the room adjusts.
The small movements give it away. Heads turn. Conversations suspend mid-sentence and resume a beat late, half a tone quieter.
She walks in wearing the dark green dress from dinner, the one she packed for the funeral and repurposed for a chess game over scotch and bourbon.
Its intended occasion has finally arrived.
Her hair is pulled back from her face this time, exposing the line of her jaw and the tendons in her neck.
My body responds to the sight of her before my brain has any say in it.
The hollow at the base of her throat where I put my mouth hours ago.
The collarbones I traced with my thumb while she came apart underneath me.
The line of her shoulders, her back held straight, the same spine that arched against the kitchen counter in her mother's house while I held her wrists and watched her try to keep her composure and fail.
She walks into a room full of people, and I can still feel the weight of her thigh against my hip.
The sound she made when I pressed inside her.
The way her fingers closed on the back of my neck hard enough to leave marks I can feel under my collar right now.
Every person in this room is looking at Greer in her funeral dress, and none of them are seeing what I see—a woman I have memorized with my hands—and that knowledge is doing something territorial and absolute to the pit of my stomach.
She doesn't look at me. She crosses the room toward the first row of chairs, where a seat has been reserved with a small card that says FAMILY. She reads the card, sits without removing it, and folds her hands in her lap.
The room fills. The town council occupies the third row, all seated together with the synchronized solemnity of men who have been told where to sit and what to feel.
Rick Halston, county assessor, is in the next row with his wife.
He keeps adjusting his collar. His eyes find me and drop to the floor.
The hold on the mining permits won't last without reinforcement.
Thayer comes through the side door. My cousin moves the way he always moves, with the loose-limbed ease of a man who has never had to calculate the effect of his own body on a room.
He's a few years older than me, built broader, his face open and handsome in the way a jury consultant would describe as ideal.
His sandy hair is pushed back from his forehead, and his expression defaults to warmth the way mine defaults to neutrality.
He spots me at the bar and comes over first, because Thayer always comes over first. The hand lands on my shoulder, warm and fraternal, a grip that says family the way a handshake says business.
"You should be up front, not skulking back here with the bourbon.
" He leans against the bar beside me and signals to Keaton, who pours without being told.
Thayer drinks whiskey at funerals. I know this because I've been to funerals with Thayer, and the man's rituals are as consistent as his smile. "How are you holding up?"
"I'm not the one who lost a parent."