“Mom, the lift is moving,” Leah whispered again, and we both stood frozen at the dusty window as the first empty chair swung slowly up the mountain toward the shack. It rose on the long steel cable like a bead on a string, rocking gently, and behind it came another, and another, a dozen red chairs crawling up out of the morning haze. Far below, on the third tower, one chair carried a passenger. I saw him clearly, a tall man in a green resort parka, sitting very straight, with a radio in his lap. He lifted a hand. It was Curt. He had never been in Denver at all.
I understood in a single cold breath that I had about nine minutes. That was how long the old triple chair took to climb to the top, ten years of Tuesdays I had spent in the resort office counting the numbers, and Curt knew it as well as I did. He had ridden up in the empty chair so that no one at the base would see him go. At the top he would step off at the unloading ramp and walk the thirty feet to the shack, and he would find a widow and her daughter, and he would explain very kindly that it was a bad idea to disturb old equipment. Leah gripped my sleeve. “Mom, run.”
“No,” I said. I looked around the little lift shack, with its metal desk, its dusty thermos, and the big control panel on the wall that Tom had once shown me, laughing, when I visited him at work. I had never paid attention to the buttons. But one of them, set apart under a plastic flap in the middle of the board, was bright red and the size of a dinner plate. Beside it, in the hand of Tom, on a faded strip of masking tape, were three words: Stop. Everything. Now. I put my hand on the flap and lifted it.
A hickory cane hid the one sentence a groomer needed his wife to hear above the hum of a mountain.
The mountain stopped. It happened with a long shuddering groan of steel and a deep thump from the bull wheel, and the whole line of chairs jerked to a halt in the air. I walked to the window. Far down the hill, six hundred feet above the rocks, a man in a green parka dangled in a swinging chair, alone, with the wind pulling at his sleeves. I picked up the wall microphone of the shack, a heavy old black thing, and I pressed its button. My voice rolled down the slope on every speaker of the ski area, enormous and calm. “Curt,” I said. “This is Gail. Tell me about the cable.”
He did not answer for a minute. I could see him far off, clutching the bar, his hat blown back. The radio in his hand was dead. Then, thin and tinny through the loudspeaker on the tower, I heard him shout. “Gail, get me down. For God sake. I am forty feet over the boulders.” I said I would be glad to. As soon as he told the truth. Leah, beside me, had taken out her phone, and I saw the little red dot of the recording. I said it again. “The cable, Curt. Tell me why my husband died.”
It came out of him in a rush, over the wind and the echo and the barking of the speakers. The lift had been due for a new haul rope for three years. The resort board had approved four hundred and eighty thousand dollars for it. Curt had signed the work order and pocketed the money, and put an old rope back in service with new paint on the splice. Tom, who inspected the cable each shift, wrote it in his notebook and told Curt he would report the matter to the state. Curt went up the mountain at ten fifteen that night with a pair of bolt cutters.
“I only cut it halfway,” he sobbed, and the voice rang off the whole mountain. “I thought it would fail on the morning run, with no one aboard. I never knew Tom would take the cat up the grade at midnight.” I closed my eyes. Leah made a small, strangled sound. Below us, a siren was winding up the access road, and then another, and a line of trucks marked with the star of the Gunnison County sheriff pulled into the lot, followed by the white van of the ski patrol. Leah had called them from the shack, silently, ten minutes before the lift began to move.
They got Curt down with a rescue rope and a harness, in a fifteen minute operation that I watched through the window. A pair of patrollers rode a gondola out to the stalled chair, clipped him in, and lowered him slowly to the snow field below, where the sheriff waited with a pair of handcuffs and a thermos. He walked between the deputies with his head down, his parka unzipped. As they passed the shack, he looked up at the window where I stood. I did not look away. It was the longest, quietest glance I have ever shared with another human being.
The state recovered every dollar it could, and the resort board resigned in disgrace. Curt pleaded guilty to second degree murder and fraud against the board, and received forty years. I had the marriage annulled, and moved out of his house on the hill, back to the small rambler where Tom and I had raised our daughter. The first winter alone, I took a season job with the ski patrol, cooking in the lodge kitchen, and I stood at the window every morning to watch the lift start, with a new rope, a new inspector, and a green notebook on the shelf.
Leah teaches snowboarding on the weekends now. She still has the cane, with the brass handle screwed back on, and she keeps it in the shack at the top of Chair 3, leaning in the corner by the red button, as a talisman. Last January, on the third anniversary of the accident, we rode up together at dusk and watched the lights of the town come on. She leaned against my shoulder. “Mom,” she said, “Dad would have hated all this fuss.” I laughed. Then I said, quite softly, “He checked it at ten. It was fine.”