The Threshold by Marlys Millhiser Read Free Book Online Page B

a basket of flowers. There weren’t many people over forty in the town and this one lacked the driven look of the younger citizens. “Are you searching for someone special or just browsing?”
    She probably sells real estate, he thought. “Just curious about a possible burial, someone named Callie. I don’t know her last name.”
    “Callie, oh yes. Over there and up by the fence. There’re many unmarked graves in that area. She’s a small headstone set flat to the ground. Come, I’ll show you.” She led the way to an area Cree had thought vacant. “This is a section some friends and I have been trying to figure out. Hers is one of the few markers left. Most have grown over until they’re buried. Callie, C-a-l-l-i-e, is that the right spelling? Most of the records have been lost, I’m afraid.”
    “I haven’t seen it written.” Cree looked down on a rectangle of stone. Callie, just Callie. No more information. “Have you lived in Telluride long?”
    “About fifty years or so. Which makes me a true old-timer. I came as a bride. All but one son and three grandchildren are over there.” Her trowel pointed back the way they’d come. “There are a few of us left who haven’t sold out to the new wave yet.” She smiled wrinkle lines deep into her face and started back toward her family. “Perhaps we’ve stayed to finish the history we all started and because it’s so deathly beautiful here.” The trowel waved at the looming peaks and she paused to stare up at them. “And then … it all seems to have gone so fast.” She shook her head and the smile vanished. “Why were you looking for this Callie?”
    “I have a friend who’s been dreaming of her … no, not dreaming. More like haunted by her.”
    “That’s interesting. I have a friend who has spoken of a Callie, but my friend is very old and much of what she says is impossible to understand.” She laughed, short and melodic. “Tell your friend that my friend has not enjoyed being haunted by this Callie.” The sun glinted on the bifocal curve in her glasses and hid any meaning her eyes might have held.
    “I hope you didn’t spend another night in your car.” Renata wore tight designer jeans and a blue work shirt unbuttoned halfway down the front.
    “Cree lent me a spare bed.”
    “Wonder what that man is up to,” Renata said slowly and more to herself than to Aletha. “Always asking questions.” She sat on the corner of her desk, chewed on the end of a ball-point without touching her lipstick to it. She giggled. “You don’t suppose he’s a narc, do you?” She stared through Aletha and then straightened. “Oh, I have a job for you today.”
    Aletha sank onto the long bench beside the door and tried to sound casual. “What makes you think Cree’s a narcotics agent?”
    “I was just making silly guesses. Some of our citizens and visitors have been busted over the last few years for dealing cocaine, and it’s become a half-scandal, half-joke around town. I really doubt that Cree’s a narc. He’s too obvious. The Sheridan needs a maid today.”
    “How long have you known Cree?”
    “Just the week or so he’s been in town. He introduced himself right away. We had a mutual friend. Our friend is dead.”
    Renata’s office was upstairs in an old store building that seemed to have kept its original dust. Traffic patterns had worn hollows in the wooden flooring and stairs. Wainscoting reached shoulder-high on the walls and the ceilings were lined with embossed tin. Footsteps echoed up the stairs from the street now, passed the doors of several other offices on this floor. A woman with a trowel and gardening gloves came to stand in Renata’s doorway.
    “Hi, Mrs. Lowell, been out to the cemetery?”
    “Yes, and a fine morning for it too.”
    “Mrs. Lowell, this is one of my new helpers, Aletha Kingman. Mrs. Lowell was assistant to the county clerk at the courthouse before retiring, and before that she taught English at the school