The Threshold Read online

  She made a tossed salad and put it in the crisper, poured herself a glass of wine, and settled on the couch with some of the material on Telluride’s history Cree had left on his night table. No mention of Callie, but Aletha tingled with the awareness that she read of Callie’s world.

  In prison the boredom had been so intense it numbed. Life was either monotonous or dangerous, each new cellmate a threat until Aletha could psych her out, each work or exercise period a potentially treacherous time even with guards in attendance. Kitchen duty was the worst because of the availability of weapons. But the periods of boredom stretched long between the moments of danger. And sometimes the only grist for her thoughts was rehearsing and planning for the scary times. Despite all her efforts to blot out those relatively few but momentous months in her life, Aletha had to admit it was possible she’d brought along an unsuspected abnormality with her into freedom—a dangerous need for excitement.

  There were hazards in Callie’s world, too, and not all in the mines or on the line. In the early years of the century Telluride had a war. The miners formed a union to protect themselves from the insensibilities of a management working for indifferent and unaccountable absentee owners in the money capitals of the East and Europe. The management formed an “Alliance” against the threat of ignorant and greedy labor to run things to suit itself, and against the very idea of organized labor—a threat not only to democracy but to the ability of the industry to make enough profit to warrant investment and provide jobs in the first place. Wringing golden glitter from the cold hard Rockies was as expensive as it was inefficient.

  It all sounded a little like Republicans and Democrats, more like liberals and conservatives, and mostly like two distinct classes of people, each determined not to understand the problems of the other.

  “Who was W. J. Barney?” Aletha asked Cree over steak and salad that evening, hoping to get him off guard.

  “Barney … ahhh … some mine foreman who disappeared mysteriously at the time of the troubles. He turned up dead after a long while. The Alliance blamed it on the union. Put his skull in a store window to prove a point. The identification hung on his red hair, I think.”

  “And who were the guys in the Bronco you didn’t want me to see, so you plastered me to the side of the post office?”

  “I didn’t want them to see you. My guess is they were the ones who strip-searched this apartment.”

  “Why not report them to the town marshal?”

  “Because I can’t prove it was them, and besides, nothing—”

  “Besides, nothing was taken.” The piece of juicy steak went dry as wool and she spit it out. “Cree, are you a dealer?”

  “Christ, first you call me a narc and now I’m a dealer.” But an unfamiliar flush stained his face.

  “And I was even beginning to like you.” She dropped her fork and stood. “It’s like I never learn.” She scooped Charles up off the couch. “Come on, kitty, we’ll go spend the night in the car. You, McCree, ought to get along special with Tracy. She likes her toots.”

  Charles did his rigor-mortis routine. He had a real thing about being carried. He also had bad breath and made an effort to wail his protest right in her face before he tried to climb her head. Aletha pulled him down, clamped him to her chest, and marched toward the door. She marched headfirst into Cree Mackelwain.

  “You belong on the stage.”

  Aletha swung at him and lost the cat. She knew better than to take on somebody his size without being sneaky, but it was too late to call her fist home. It bounced off the arm he held up in mock terror.

  “You do have a real flair for the dramatic.” He moved to block her path as she tried to step around him to the door. “If you’ll just stand still, I will tell you my big secret. I may have involved you in something by being around you.”

  “Why,” Aletha asked later when they sat over coffee, “do you suppose so many innocent lives get messed up because of cocaine? I mean … people who don’t even use it or sell it? Pretty soon it’ll be the whole world.”

  “Most people live totally unaffected by it. You and I just happen to have been unlucky in our associations. I do think you and Tracy better disassociate yourselves from me until this is over or they leave town.”

  “But the coincidence is a little much. Almost as if time had planned it all. Or once Callie and I met, this whole thing started coming together. We sort of set time’s plan in motion.”

  “You’re being a flake again. Time is not somebody who plans things. Time is an ‘it’ to or in which things happen. Life is full of coincidence.”

  But the next morning when Aletha cleaned rooms at the New Sheridan Hotel, she mulled over all the instances in which her life had touched with Callie’s, trying to discover a pattern. These thoughts helped her through several vicious chemical attacks on bathrooms and endless pushpulling with the vacuum.

  She’d stepped out onto the balcony hallway on second to deposit some dirty linens when an older couple passed her on their way to the staircase. Aletha could have been a potted plant for all the notice they took of her. The woman dripped ashes from her cigarette waving in the air as she upbraided her companion for dressing too formally for the day’s excursion, for walking too slowly, and for drinking too much the night before. He winced and dug his cane into the carpet with each step, his expression one of weary endurance.

  Aletha had just turned back into the room to retrieve the vacuum when the woman’s scratchy diatribe ended in a gasp. Aletha wondered if she’d sucked the cigarette down her throat or if he’d summoned the energy to hit her over the head with his cane. When she looked out, the couple stood on the landing, stiff, motionless. She leaned forward. He took her elbow.

  “Oh, that’s only Audrey, she—” Aletha reached them in time to see the problem was not Audrey. In fact Audrey was gone and the staircase descended to the lobby, ended in a splash of dusty sunlight worthy of a religious experience. The carpet became a narrowed runner of a different color where it met the absence of the wall. It wasn’t the same lobby. It had a double door with glass windows. And when the door opened a man in floppy trousers stood looking up at them.

  “Good Lord, madam, your skirt,” he said to the woman with the cigarette, and doused his cigar in a white vaselike thing filled with sand. The sweet-sour smell of barnyard wafted up from the open door below, and creaking sounds. It was fascinating how these history people all looked so normal, even with their funny clothes, crooked and sometimes yellowed teeth. Aletha could see this one’s stiff collar working as he tried to force a swallow with his head tilted back to stare up at them. His necktie was a short wide thing tied more like a lady’s scarf with the two ends spread side by side instead of one overlapping the other.

  The hole closed as the man below blinked and fled out the door. The nude Audrey traipsed dramatically across the forbidding backdrop of her painting. “That was a supernatural experience.” The woman flipped her cigarette into a pot of phony ferns and turned on her heel. “I’m going back to the room. I think it gave me the shits.”

  “I suspect whatever we thought we just saw is best forgotten,” the man with the cane said, eyeing Audrey and the wall and avoiding Aletha’s eyes. “Enough trouble in this life the way it is.”

  Cree helped Aletha pack her suitcase. Tracy Ledbetter was moving her belongings into the vacated crib and Cree had talked her into taking in Aletha and Charles until he was convinced those around him would be in no danger. “I think I’m going to miss you,” he said to Charles, but then smiled at Aletha. They carried everything down to the Datsun and came back for Charles.

  “It seems like there’s more and more happening, like it’s speeding up.” Aletha opened the door and entered first. Charles stood in the middle of the room, his tail puffed to twice its normal size. Part of the tiled Jacuzzi had faded into dim light. Next to it a deep bathtub sat up on molded ankles and slender human feet instead of the usual antique animal paws. Steam twirled up from it. A woman stood wr
apped in a towel, a load of hair pinned up on top of her head, one strand escaping to curl down over an ear, promising to get wet. She was slender, straight, pale. What showed around the towel was flawless. Aletha could hear the change in Cree’s breathing.

  Shadows moved across the small mirror beside the bather’s head. Wrought-iron curlicues painted white formed its frame and provided fastening to the wall. Aletha had seen its like in an entry hall filled with such mirrors. She’d seen the tub before, too. And the pale green eyes that stared at her now in startled outrage.

  “Mildred?” Aletha couldn’t believe it. “Mildred Heisinger?”

  23

  Another little something hardened up in Callie after her forbidden excursion on the street. Everyone had allowed her to believe her Aunt Lilly was dead, yet the world expected strict honesty and openness from Callie O’Connell. That excursion after three o’clock was never discovered and she was sent on a legal one early the next morning. This time with Elsie Biggs. They were to carry a valise up to the hospital and not dawdle along the way. Mr. Macintosh, whose boots Callie had collected with Olina, had succumbed to a mysterious stomach ailment during the night after a sumptuous dinner party he’d thrown for friends in the hotel dining room.

  “If it was such a grand dinner, why didn’t we have to stay up and work?” Callie asked as they trudged along Fir Street.

  “There weren’t any ladies present.” You had to lean into Elsie to even hear her soft speech. One of the ways she wasn’t like Olina was her teeth. Not wide and even, they were bad and often pained her. But Elsie Biggs rarely smiled. Her family put her out to work because they wanted her to learn responsibility and not grow into foolish ways. They lived in Pandora at the head of the canyon. Her father worked in the Smuggler-Union stamp mill there. Her mother came to see her once a week. But Pandora was only a mile or two from Telluride. John O’Connell had sent word through Mr. McCall, when Mr. McCall came from Alta on his long day, that he’d be down to see Callie over the July Fourth holiday.

  The hospital blocked the end of Fir Street. A wide covered porch spread on two sides with wooden steps at one end, and giant brick chimneys reared up on two ends of the building. Great snow patches on the mountain looming behind and above the hospital put a cold wet smell on the breeze.

  “I wonder if Mr. Macintosh is dead yet,” Elsie breathed. “My pa says people only come to the hospital to die.”

  Callie thought of her brother and had the urge to kick Elsie, but she read the sign that warned them to be quiet. They turned the valise over to a lady dressed in starched white. Callie had expected to hear screams of pain and agony but all was as quiet as the sign suggested it should be. Back outside, Callie slowed her steps gradually, dazzled by the brilliant colors of sky, young grass, and exuberant dandelions. An enclosed school wagon pulled by two white and two brown horses bumped along the rock-pitted street. It was bigger than a stagecoach and the driver sat on the very top. Children’s elbows and heads and hats hung out the side windows. Taunts, squeals, whines, hoots, and laughter replaced the birdsong. Someone yelled, “Elsie Biggs! Hey ho.”

  Elsie waved and blushed. Callie was surprised at how pretty she looked just then. “They’re from Pandora.”

  “Where’s the school? I want to see it.”

  “We’ll be late back … but well … only if you hurry.” They picked up their skirts and ran. Beautiful, monstrous houses—some with fences and their own sidewalks. And then the school, bigger than the hospital. It was made all of stone and sat in the center of a large piece of land. Callie counted ten arched windows across the front of the top story, and the building was longer yet going back. Wide concrete stairs led to the arched double doorway.

  “Aren’t you sad to not be going there every day?” Callie asked. “They must have many books in so important a school as that.” But Elsie just hurried her back to the hotel. Callie tried to imagine the inside of that school for weeks afterward, fantasized that she and Bram attended it. She even peopled every room with a beautiful Miss Heisinger.

  But Callie had to watch the summer disappearing through windowpanes. “I’m here to see you earn your way,” Mrs. Stollsteimer told her when she found the girl dreaming about the school and watching the languid dust motes in the sun at the bottom of the staircase. “Someday you’ll thank me. Now, run down and help the girls in the ballroom.”

  There was to be a special dance and late buffet dinner. The girls had to rush about to clean themselves and change into fresh uniforms after cleaning up the ballroom. They helped set up the buffet tables in the dining room and then carried platters of bite-sized meats and cheeses and cakes, and tiny sandwiches without crusts, to the people standing and sitting out in a ring around the dance floor.

  “… eight-hour day. Just give the lazy rascals more time to gamble, drink, and fritter away what means their labor has earned them.”

  “Unions only keep the honest man who’s willing to work from selling his muscle as he sees fit.”

  Threading her way through the canyons of adults reminded Callie of the snow tunnels to the privy Pa and Bram had shoveled in Alta. But the canyon sides here were dark and gave off heat, were starched and corseted, mustachioed and tuxedoed. Voices echoed over her head, useless little hand fans flapped like bird wings. Hands accepted her delicate offerings, offered on tiptoe and with outstretched arms. Eyes looked right into her eyes and out through the back of her head. Callie thought she could have made rude faces at them and they’d never have noticed.

  “Timber as you go. Ignorant rednecks have no idea the cost of such a thing. Don’t have the timber or the time anyway. Damn few cave-ins for all the mining operations around here, if you ask me.”

  On the dance floor the ladies looked like princesses in the ruffled skirts and high-piled hair. And the gentlemen looked like sissies, pointing their toes, bowing and scraping. Then the orchestra in the loft speeded up, the violins fiddled instead of squeaked, the older people left the dance floor, and the younger ones paired off to jump around, lady and gentleman together. The chandeliers shook and jingled. Cheering, stomping, and rough voices accompanied the music from the barroom through the slid-back panels in that wall. Cigar smoke wafted gray-blue from the barroom, over the heads of the musicians, and into the ballroom. And when the orchestra stopped to rest, the clicking of the gambling wheels from the same source formed a constant background.

  There was no smoking in the ballroom, but a great many unsuccessful attempts to spit at the brass cuspidors. A steady stream of gentlemen made their way through a door to the side of the orchestra loft and into the barroom and came back smelling of something stronger than punch. There weren’t enough ladies for the dancing anyway, and only the very old and crippled were allowed to sit out.

  “Aren’t having trouble hiring nonunion men up at the Smuggler, are you, Collins?”

  “Running full shifts. Out-of-work men coming in on the train every day.”

  Olina Svendt wore her pale hair in one neat braid that she could sit on if she wanted. It trailed down her back and over the bow of her apron strings. She was approaching Callie with a tray of cut-glass punch cups when a gentleman reached over to give the braid a quick, forceful tug. Then he looked back to the man speaking to him; except for the good-natured sparkle in his eyes, the man went on as if nothing had happened.

  Callie caught the smart of tears the gesture had brought to Olina’s eyes and determined she’d not aspire to become a maid no matter how fine the hotel. Perhaps she’d be a teacher like Ma’am and Miss Heisinger. She’d never known anyone but her brother to take such advantage of a teacher.

  “WFM, Western Federation of Miners, they call themselves. Wastrels, Foreigners, and Misfits is more like it.”

  “Insurrectionists is what they are. Country’s going to the dogs when these scalawags get in power. Owners ought to band together and get the Pinkertons in here. Infiltrate and investigate these socialist buffoons before we have another Coeur d’Alene on our hands.”


  An elderly lady sitting bolt upright, her old-fashioned bustle holding her at least six inches from the chair back, motioned to Callie with little eyeglasses on a gold rod. She took two wafers from Callie’s platter, never taking her eyes from the dance floor, and Callie moved down the wall to offer the platter to Mr. Macintosh, who had recovered from his hospital stay despite Elsie’s misgivings. He was also elderly and he didn’t look at her either, but took a wafer with one hand and began kneading Callie’s bottom through her skirts with the other. Mr. Macintosh made her skin creep up her bones. For a moment she worried she’d throw up her supper all over the gruesome-smelling, sludge-colored liver mixture smeared across the wafers on her platter.

  “Building their own hospital to avoid health deductions. Wait till they see the cost of that and they’ll change their song.”

  “What about that Barney chap that’s missing? Nonunion man, wasn’t he, and a shift boss to boot?”

  “Probably just the heel-itch. You know these miners—always moving about. If he’s the one I think he is, he’s got carrot-red hair.”

  “Shift bosses don’t move around so much. Union’s done away with him.”

  Callie, sick and angry, reported Mr. Macintosh to Mrs. Stollsteimer. She expected the formidably moral housekeeper to march out and confront him, but found herself hushed instead.

  “Don’t say such nasty things about poor old Mr. Macintosh,” Mrs. Stollsteimer whispered, and took Callie off to a corner of the dining room. That was the first Callie knew the woman could whisper. The words “discreet” and “ladylike” hurried from the housekeeper’s lips, and the admonition for Callie never to place her backside within reach of a gentleman. Callie came away with the feeling that she was the nasty one.