The Last Lie Page 4

  Mattin’s face was familiar to me the way that local media personalities’ faces become familiar from repeated exposure on advertisements on billboards and on the sides of buses. I couldn’t have pointed to a particular way that I’d come to know what Mattin Snow looked like, but I definitely knew what he looked like before I met him that first day. He had fine silver hair—not old and gray, but silver and distinguished—that was just long enough to be interesting, eyes that hinted at a gene pool worthy of a long story or two, and skin that was solidly in the range of Mediterranean tones that looked good on the beach after a few hours. I thought he appeared more ruddy and real without powder on his face and without the earnest, toothy half smile that I’d come to associate with his public persona.

  I proceeded to welcome him and his wife and their family to our shared remote dead-end lane in the already remote corner of Boulder County called Spanish Hills, and I offered any kind of help they might need getting settled.

  He didn’t acknowledge my offer. He merely repeated his inquiry about Emily running free. “My wife? She’s frightened of dogs,” he said. “Especially big dogs.”

  The Bouvier qualifies as a big dog. Or a small bear, depending on one’s level of trepidation about big, husky black, four-legged mammals.

  I could have used that moment to clue Mattin in about the multiple red fox dens nearby, or about the wandering pack of coyotes that lingered menacingly in the vicinity of our homes. Certainly, he must have already known about Boulder’s troubled history with quick brown bears and even quicker predatory cats.

  I was prepared to mount an argument that my dog was the least of his wildlife problems. That, in fact, she was an integral part of the solution. But I decided that such an argument wasn’t a good place to start on day one of our relationship as neighbors. Mattin and his wife must, I thought, be exhausted from the stress of the move, and I silently allowed him the benefit of the doubt.

  I also reached a hasty conclusion that it was preferable to begin our relationship as neighbors with an unpleasant truth rather than with a lie. So I told him that it was, indeed, my practice to allow the big dog to roam at will, at least late in the evening when most everyone was inside. I could have added my certain confidence that Mattin and his family would come to appreciate Emily’s services. Or I could have told him tales of how she had come to earn her off-leash privileges the hard way. But the tenor of our interaction did not leave me feeling that stories of Emily’s exceptional canine bravery in service of the homeowners in Spanish Hills would have been welcome, or even tolerated.

  “Really?” he said in response to my admission that I allowed Emily off leash. “Is that legal out here? I didn’t know that it was acceptable to allow dogs to run free in the county.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Boulder has a complex history of dogs and leash laws in open space. The history involves the Internet, GPS mapping of canine feces, and other indications that the people involved haven’t always been either considerate or mature.

  He took advantage of my temporary apoplexy. “Legal, I mean. That kind of acceptable. I could look into that. Maybe I will.” I was going to say something in reply. But before I had a chance to come up with something witty, he continued. “Just to clarify. Alan? It’s Alan? Are you talking on our land, as well as . . . your land?”

  From California to the New York islands . . .

  Suddenly I couldn’t get Woody Guthrie out of my head. I like Woody fine, but, I mean, damn. “This Land Is Your Land” was one of those songs that could stick to my dendrites like a wad of gum adheres to the sole of my shoe.

  Mattin Snow, our new neighbor, and my apparent new adversary, at least in matters canine, was a highly regarded attorney. A hugely popular attorney with a fan base that extended from Woody’s redwood forests all the way to his Gulf Stream waters. When Lauren and I initially learned that Mattin and his wife had bought Adrienne’s house, my wife, also a lawyer, had told me that in her opinion he was in the process of doing for her ever-misunderstood profession what Mehmet Oz had done for medicine.

  At the time of that conversation with Lauren, I didn’t know who Mehmet Oz was or what the hell he had done for medicine. But, fortunately, Google did. I learned that Mehmet Oz, M.D., was America’s favorite daytime doctor, a surgeon with magic hands, endless wisdom, an extra dose of charisma, a nonjudgmental ear, and apparently, always sound advice for the masses.

  Mattin Snow was a J.D., though, not an M.D. Google links made clear to me that he was teaching his ever-expanding television and Internet audience—primarily women—how to use the law to their advantage. His first book, This Law Is Your Law, was due out just before Christmas. One of the Googled links I’d followed informed me that it was already a national bestseller in preorders on Amazon. I was impressed.

  I was also very aware that it was that Mattin Snow, the attorney Mattin Snow, who was asking me if my big dog, Emily, on her nightly prowls, might have been crossing invisible boundaries between his land and mine. Which meant that my new neighbor was a lawyer hinting at instigating a quarrel with me about leash laws.

  I thought, Oh damn. The truth? I couldn’t have identified the property line between Mattin’s land and my land—hello again, Mr. Guthrie—even had there been a knife at my throat and a psychotic threat spelled out in neon spittle on the knife-wielding surveyor’s lips. I did know that of the twelve acres of ranch land that remained of the expansive homestead that was anchored by Mattin Snow’s newly acquired house, my ranch hand’s shack sat on a cropper’s share that was a skosh more than a solitary acre.

  In Boulder proper, if Boulder has a proper, an acre-plus-sized piece of land would be a rare treasure for a homeowner. But out in rural Boulder County, where we lived in the country on the side of the valley that looks at the Rocky Mountains but isn’t in them, ownership of an acre or so would not peg me as an astute real estate operator, but rather as an interloper. An acre was barely a homesite out in this part of the valley, certainly a parcel not significant enough to qualify as a ranchette.

  Many years before, early in our relationship, Peter—the first of my Spanish Hills neighbors and friends to die a tragic death—had educated me about how little of our shared hillside I actually owned. As was Peter’s proclivity in such matters, he had gone to great lengths to determine that my legal domain was, in fact, just shy of half a hectare. A hectare, he explained to me, is itself just shy of two and a half acres. We were in his wood shop at the time. Like a professor schooling a recalcitrant pupil, he used white chalk on the not-money side of a full sheet of walnut veneer to show me the arithmetic that proved that the plot to which I held title—one that had been carved out of the larger ranch when the lovely woman who had been my landlord of many years agreed to sell me the caretaker’s home I’d been renting—was scant a true half hectare by a couple of dozen square meters.

  I wasn’t as fascinated by the lesson as Peter had wanted me to be.

  To memorialize my minority landowning status—and to taunt me with the reality of my comparatively diminutive holdings—Peter had carved a sign on a big hunk of scrap mahogany from his shop’s stash. Peter was a woodworker extraordinaire; the woodcarving that commemorated the limits of my stewardship was a fine piece of art. He had proceeded to anchor the sign proudly, with dowels and marine glue, to the mailbox post at the end of the lane.

  The placard read: ALAN’S AHAH.

  It stood, of course, for “Alan’s almost half a hectare.”

  Until the day he was murdered on the stage of a downtown theater, Peter loved the fact that no one had ever guessed the meaning of the acronym.

  4

  My brief meeting with Mattin Snow during the week before the big housewarming they were planning to show off their new digs—or at least the “before” version of their new digs—proved an inauspicious start between new neighbors.

  I think Emily was aware that I shared her sense of impotence about the state of affairs that was developing across the lane. Pe
ter and Adrienne had been almost perfect neighbors. Whoever followed them into that house had a high bar to vault. I was determined to offer Mattin and his wife, Mimi, whom I had not yet met, as much latitude as I could muster while they settled into our remote Spanish Hills neighborhood and assimilated into our odd part-of-Boulder-but-not-part-of-Boulder culture.

  I reminded myself that I didn’t really know Mattin. But Boulder is, despite its geographical size, a small town. Our good friends Diane and Raoul knew Mimi and Mattin well and considered them friends.

  Diane, in fact, was the one who told me who had purchased Adrienne’s house. She’d explained that she’d only known Mattin for a few years, but that she’d known Mimi, Mattin’s wife, and her ex-husband since Raoul’s heady NBI days in the eighties. Diane, who knew more about other people’s family histories than the average ancestry website, also informed me that Mimi had a couple of kids who wouldn’t be around much—a daughter, currently studying in Prague, who was a cheerleader at the University of Iowa, and a son who was at a boarding school in the mountains perfecting his skiing, or something.

  Diane thought we’d all become fine friends. Lauren seemed to agree. It was increasingly clear to me that my wife was a fan of Mattin’s work, and perchance even a fan of Mattin himself. Lauren, I knew, had good radar. So, except for the part about maybe being a jerk about Emily running off leash for ten minutes each evening, I was working to keep an open mind about my new neighbor.

  EMILY’S LATE ROUNDS the night of the big housewarming began only after she completed a careful reconnaissance of the few vehicles that remained parked across the lane. Her quick appraisal—she’s a nimble beast—ended with a head-shake and a loud huff. I could relate. She then dashed through the narrow gap between Peter’s old barn and our house in the direction of the distant dark vertical gash in the Front Range that was the entrance to the wonders of Eldorado Canyon. When she reemerged in my sight she was halfway down the hill, hopping at an angle in the Bouvier-as-jackrabbit motion of hers that I have never tired of observing. In seconds she bounded over the nearest miniridge—okay, it was more like a berm—and disappeared from view.

  Our other dog was by my side.

  When Adrienne died the previous year, she left behind her wish that Lauren and I raise her son, Jonas. Our second dog was her posthumous gift to Jonas. Fiji was a Havanese, a breed I hadn’t known existed. It took Jonas a while to settle on a name for the puppy—she’d come to us as Callie, a moniker that he announced wasn’t going to last. Befitting her heritage, Jonas had eventually named his new dog after a tropical island. Jonas being Jonas, he’d chosen an island about as far from the puppy’s ancestral homeland, Cuba, as was possible.

  Fiji had no choice but to stay with me while Emily took off down the hill. Because she hadn’t yet proven herself qualified to act as Emily’s deputy, Fiji was haltered and leashed. Truth be told, Fiji wasn’t even yet Girl Scout material. The Havanese was still a puppy, if not in size—the vet assured us that she was approaching her full weight of a dozen pounds—certainly in temperament.

  She was a bit of a nut. Intellectually, we hoped she still had some maturing to do. Though we were no longer holding out hope for a canine Einstein, we were praying for something more cognitively complex than what we’d seen so far. Jonas kept telling us that the dog had hidden smarts. I kept hoping he was right.

  For almost a month, Fiji had spent every determined moment of our daily late evening walks sniffing for prairie dogs. After a solitary surprise encounter in the open with one of the critters—the two mammals, Cuban puppy and Great Plains prairie dog, had a precious moment nose-to-nose before the prairie dog went all subterranean on her—Fiji reached a couple of impetuous conclusions about life in the Boulder Valley. She decided that prairie dogs were as ubiquitous as dirt and that they were as dangerous as the devil.

  The first conclusion had some truth to it. There were plenty of prairie dog colonies in our neck of the nonwoods of Boulder County. But dangerous? Not so much, at least not to humans. Well over a century of Western history had proven that livestock legs and prairie dog tunnels were most definitely not a match made in heaven. Occasional plague was another small risk from the colonies, sure. But from my perspective of many years in the valley, prairie dogs were more of a nuisance than they were a danger.

  Our little Havanese, bred to protect Cuban chickens from Cuban foxes, begged to differ. That evening’s search-and-destroy mission had Fiji checking at the roots of some dry grasses at the base of the accumulated loose dirt that multiple passes by graders and snowplows had left piled on each side of the lane. Since I was significantly more copacetic about burrowing rodents than was the dog—but please don’t get me started on wasps and yellow jackets—I was content to meander along the edge of the eastern rim of the dirt and gravel path while catching up on my e-mails.

  Fiji’s retractable leash dangled from one of my hands. The dog’s lead was at maximum extension, stretching across the lane between the amusingly paranoid Havanese and me. My other hand held my cell phone.

  I was walking north. An hour or so before, a solid wind had begun blowing out of Wyoming. One of the perks of living in the vicinity of Colorado’s Front Range is that compass directions are easy to discern. If the Rocky Mountains are on your left—as a landmark, they are nigh on impossible to miss from a distance of seventy blocks—north is the direction you’re walking. Since north is also where Wyoming is, the insistent gusts from the Wind River Range were blowing into my face. I was forcing my chin down near my chest in a futile effort to keep dust from my eyes.

  I was already thinking that night’s walk with the dogs would be abbreviated. Although the sky was clear above the Rockies, the harsh chill in the wind and the unpleasant tang in my nose—northern gusts carried the unmistakable scent of the big stockyards near Greeley—suggested we might have a dusting of snow by morning.

  Because the northern wind was so boisterous, my ears didn’t even register the advent of the siren crackle of tires rolling on gravel behind me, from the south. The first thing I heard that announced any impending danger was the scream of a woman’s voice: “Eric! Oh my God, there’s—Your lights! Lights! Lights!” Then, as the van passed, “Oh my—Did you—”

  The driver of the van—Eric, I presumed—didn’t flick on the lights until his vehicle was almost fifty yards farther down the road, a fraction of a second after he was into the kind of not-so-subtle bend that drivers typically don’t like to be surprised by in the dark on unfamiliar, unlit, unpaved roads in rural neighborhoods on hillsides. The sudden illumination of brake lights, followed by the even more sudden shift of those bright red squares to the right, confirmed what my ears were telling me—the van’s rear tires had lost purchase on the first sharp curve that lay dead ahead.

  I knew from ample personal experience that there was not much margin for driver error in that particular location. If the back of that big van slid even a few feet off the center line of the narrow lane, the van’s right rear tire would cross the laughably small shoulder and then it would immediately succumb to gravity’s will.

  Gravity’s will was, of course, reliably down. Down in that location meant an immediate slide of eighteen inches at about forty-five degrees, followed by a quick dozen feet at about thirty degrees. Once the van’s tire scooted down the first foot and a half, those next dozen feet were almost guaranteed to follow. The odds of a vehicle with the van’s center of gravity staying upright during that kind of sudden detour? Let’s just say they were much worse than the odds of Fiji finding her prairie dog. The immutable truth was that if the right rear tire crossed the shoulder and completed the first little slide, the van was going to start to roll. And once it started to roll, it wasn’t going to stop for a while.

  If the van does go off the lane, I thought, anticipating the aftermath of the almost certain disaster that was coming, maybe I’ll consider going over to help after I corral my dogs.

  I had all those thoughts from the sitting position tha
t I’d ended up in as I avoided the fender of the van. As I tried to regain an upright posture, my balance, and my bearings, the wind carried a cocktail of obnoxious fumes to my nose. Three components dominated the aroma: cow shit from Weld County, overheated motor oil, and burning tobacco leaves.

  Two conclusions were instantaneous for me. The van needed a ring job, or worse, and someone in the van—Eric or the woman in the passenger seat—needed a nicotine patch. The stockyards? No conclusion was necessary.

  The woman hadn’t lowered her voice at all. The passenger-side window, open, I assumed, to release the cigarette smoke, permitted me to hear her continuing play-by-play: “The dog! Eric, stop! Stop! Go . . . back. Stop! Eric! Did you even see the little—”

  The dog?

  From my vantage, it appeared that Eric wasn’t stopping. Eric didn’t even seem to slow. He had instead decided to chance the application of brute horsepower to try to keep his vehicle on the lane. The van’s engine roared and whined as the RPM climbed. The back wheels continued to spin faster and slide sideways in mockery of Eric’s strategy.

  I suspected that Eric wasn’t aware that he had yet another unwelcome surprise just ahead of him. The curve he was currently navigating, not very successfully, was only the first C-bend of an S-curve.

  S, like in shithead. I muttered, “Asshole,” as I scrambled toward the other side of the lane on my hands and knees after Fiji.

  I had already tugged on the lead. I had tried to call out to the puppy but failed both times to get past the F. My vocal cords were coated by dust and smothered by pressure from my suddenly swollen heart. The rest was beyond my capability.

  I’d felt dead weight when I yanked on my end of the leash.

  Jonas doesn’t need this, is what I was thinking. Jonas can’t take this.

  Please. Please. Please.

  5

  Lauren and I were worried about Jonas’s reaction to the sale of what had been his family home.