The Threshold by Marlys Millhiser Read Free Book Online Page A

sketchbook?”
    “I think if your eyelids get any lower you’re going to fall asleep at the table. You can have the extra bedroom and your own bath.”
    “Why are you doing this? Being so kind?”
    “Why did you give me a ride from Alta?” He clasped his hands behind his head, stretched backward until she could hear the cracking in his shoulders. “Maybe I’m just kind.”
    He didn’t look kind, she thought as she was about to fall asleep in the luxury of a real bed. Cree Mackelwain looked grim. Cree Mackelwain looked like someone she shouldn’t trust. Of course, most of the people she’d found she really shouldn’t have trusted had looked completely trustworthy. Aletha slipped into vulnerable sleep anyway and awoke in the morning to find Cree’s door open, the rumpled bed empty. Aletha repacked her suitcase and left.
    Cree stood on the road in front of Lone Tree Cemetery at the edge of town, puffing from a run to the end of the canyon and back. He still wasn’t used to the altitude. Across the San Miguel River sprinklers whirled water drops across a huge drift of mill tailings. An attempt had been made to plant something green over this refuse from inside the planet. The sun finally struggled to the top of notched mountain crests. It sparked the droplets from the sprinklers and caught up pieces of light in the river, casting a pink glow on steeply pitched roofs in town. A speck in the sky circled in a thermal, an eagle or a hang glider, and set off an excitement and a sense of recognition in him.
    Telluride, at an elevation of 8,745 feet above sea level, still sits at the bottom of a great chasm. On three sides monstrous peaks of the San Juan range rear into the sky, as stunning as they are threatening. The wall of rock that boxes in the end of the canyon is scarred by snowslide and torture cracks and a silver water ribbon that plummets from a saddle some eight hundred feet to the valley floor. Cree tried to imagine what all this must look like from above.
    Lone Tree Cemetery had more than a lone tree. He poked around among old tombstones and plaques, markers weathered bare of inscription, a mass grave for miners caught in a fire. Many marked the violent demise of young men, caught in their prime by accident, fate, and highly treacherous work. Telluride’s union troubles had placed more men here. Pneumonia, silicosis, and gun fights over a slight or a whore had claimed many others, he knew.
    Cree began looking for the name of “Callie” on a whim, and because it helped him forget a more recent tombstone, that of his partner and friend Dutch Massey. Dutch had led a dangerous life too. Cree found young women who’d died with their babies in childbirth, and many babies and children. He found names—Italian, Scandinavian, eastern European with their “ak” and “eck” endings. No Callie.
    Cree had an amateur’s interest in history that caused bits of fact and pieces of trivia to stick in his head. It made the odd events occurring around Aletha indelible and Telluride’s history in general of more interest than it should be. He had work to do here that had nothing to do with history.
    He, his father, and his brother had once stood in a graveyard such as this in Oregon. The boys just listened politely at first as the elder Mackelwain expounded upon the possible lives and deaths planted forever at their feet. But they soon began to see real people in strange clothing going about varied tasks unaware of the fate awaiting them here. Gregory Mackelwain had sold everything from cars to swimming pools and he’d sold the tingle of enchantment about the past to his sons as well. Cree’s brother had gone on to become a professor of history but Cree found the dryness of its study like sand after the excitement of his father’s reality. Something inside had already committed him to the sky.
    “My, you’re out early.” A woman with wavy gray hair and pleasant features knelt beside a grave and set down a trowel and