And even if he absolves himself from his sins a
thousand times, he has lost all capacity of faith in the
true forgiveness, just because he has never really known it.
   —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

IT PULLED him forward that Saturday morning. Sall hadn’t woken up yet from her night shift, and the house was nearly silent. Matt turned away from the calendar, shielding his eyes as if ignorance of the date alone would protect him. Even as he swallowed the coffee, it was acid in his throat. Something recoiled inside him, knowing what he had to do.

Outside in the yard, a few crickets didn’t seem to realize that daylight had come. They shrieked up at him. He could leave now, lie to Sall about where he was going. Ignore the date. The truck was outside. He could be gone in a moment.

But he knew where he’d be going. It was the anniversary of her death.

The date was like gravity for him. Drawn as inexorably as any body in motion, he would end up at her graveside. He had stopped even trying to figure it out. Was it some penance that would fade with the years? Or did part of him meet her there—did he honestly think that she returned, just for his visit? He took a bitter swallow of coffee and grimaced. Some hope for atonement? He did not know any longer why he did it.

He had missed the anniversary of her death one year, and for months afterward, it was all he could think of. Her face was in his dreams, and no matter how many times he visited the grave in subsequent months, it was never the same. He suspected he did this to himself, that it was some mental game he tortured himself with. But he didn’t miss the date anymore. Drunk or sober, sick or well, certain or uncertain, he was always there, no matter how much he wished he could be elsewhere.

Matt looked up at the craggy mountain ahead of him. Vast sheets of ice had pushed them into that formation, long ago, the rock itself twisted and tortured in that glacial grip. He’d read a book about this country once. The power and weight of the glaciers deformed the earth’s crust, dug new ocean beds, crinkled the land with a vast wrinkle—the Rocky Mountains. Their work still cut the continent in half, their residue remained in every mountain lake, in every bit of mountain snow.

The ice had trapped him too, it drew him forward, over the mountains, back to her grave. No matter how far he moved away, he still had that stone in him, dragged back to her grave every year, the same cycle as any glacier, a vast arc of ice that encircled the world. No one could break out of it.

Matt’s thoughts seemed to keep him deep under water, under ice. And as he came close to the lake, he drove around the construction trucks without thinking. He hardly noticed the bulldozers anymore—the Herrick Industries construction project had been going on for nearly eighteen months now—but the new overpass near the lake’s southern edge, freshly cleared of equipment, caught his eye. Something seemed odd about it, although he gave it only a passing glance. Something was askew in his car tires as he passed over the verge of the new roadway. Something unnaturally curved.

It was only when he could see it in the rearview mirror that it was obvious the highway had actually broken in two pieces, the new overpass only halfway there.

At five o’clock on Saturday morning, when the night’s frost broke, the wide expanse of the new overpass had begun to melt into the lake. It was a slow ballet of sixty-ton rolling equipment and massive wedges of uncured concrete, all of it slowly sliding off a base of loose sand and broken granite, bending the surface of the road until the asphalt surface was hanging unsupported above the water. Then the roadbed broke in half and the rest of the embankment sank down, describing a slow parabola as it settled toward the water.

The yellow bulldozer moved like something prehistoric. It rolled faintly, pulled by gravity and its own kinetic force, directly to the bottom of the lake. Gradually the bulldozer disappeared, a submerged machine under the surface, sinking slowly deeper.

The second piece of equipment to fall into the lake was the roadbed roller. A half-empty dump truck followed. There was only one bulldozer left, but the embankment was mostly gone by this point, the pylons that had kept the cars off construction now kept them away from nothing except air. The old highway was edged only by a ragged, seven-foot-wide piece of asphalt, on which a wheelbarrow and a bulldozer slumped.

Except for a Montana-bound semi that hugged the inside lane like a highballing freight train, the highway was empty on this morning. So Matt kept going around the lake. Broken highway or no broken highway, some other officer could handle it. He had an appointment to keep in the Silver Valley.

Yet on his way up the mountain, Matt kept his eyes open. Nothing else seemed out of place. The oversized backhoes and graders had all been backed up to the service roads, as they should be on the weekend. Cones were all still in place. Caution signs hung in plain sight on every curve that had construction.

Except for that one curve near the top of Fourth of July Pass. He’d asked them for months to pull some concrete barriers across the edge, place something other than flimsy water-filled pylons. Independence Loop was a thou sand-foot drop, and they still hadn’t fixed it, despite all the near misses the department had documented for nearly a year. Matt slowed the car, wondering if there was something he could do. Then he sped up again. If he didn’t make it there today, things wouldn’t feel right for months to come.

It wasn’t until weeks later that he thought of Independence Loop again.

When he pulled onto the cracking ice on the gravel road near Osburn, and stopped the car at the rusted iron fence, he felt the same rush of disappointment. He stepped out of the car and headed toward the center, but no matter how often he’d been here, it was always as if he’d invaded from outside, as if he had no right to be there at all.

The first gravestones, from the 1800s, had moldered under the elements, filling the old town cemetery with unrecognizable stumps of stone and mountain brush. Because the words on her narrow marble slab were sharp-edged and clear, it always seemed as if her death had happened only a few months ago. “Irene Closner,” the stone letters read. “Beloved Daughter, Friend to All God’s Creatures. b. March 31, 1961—d. November 11, 1984.”

He stood there a moment in the sunshine and then bent down in the light dusting of snow that covered the graves, brushing away the gathered dirt and dusting of snow. He tried not to look at the dates again, but as always, he couldn’t help it. It was compulsive for him to add them up. Four months shy of her twenty-fourth birthday.

He tried to shake the feeling of being unwanted in that place. Yet when he closed his eyes, images came to him, memory developing like film rising in the emulsion: strobing lights, wailing sirens, twisted metal. The weight of responsibility bore in.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the tombstone. “Dammit, I’m sorry, Irene. I know you and I weren’t anything, but still it was my fault I was drunk that day. You were too young to have a drunk kill you like that. I’m sorry, so sorry.”

“Hey.” Someone was walking across the icy ground, their footsteps solid as they crunched through the frozen clumps of grass. Matt turned and brushed a quick hand across his face, smearing the tears away. “Hey, Matty, I’m here for you, buddy.”

It was Russ.

The last bulldozer at the edge of the broken overpass was on the verge of collapsing into the lake, but no one was working to stop it. Three pieces of equipment were already fifteen feet down in the lake, and the entire underlayment of the embankment had collapsed.

Tim Morgan, the construction supervisor, should have been trying to halt the carnage. He was responsible for the work site on both workdays and holidays. Typically he checked in for fifteen minutes around nine in the morning on weekends, but by the time that hour came, he’d already been there for an hour in the supervisor trailer, frantically making phone calls, trying to dig his way out of this mess.

He knew that underneath the new overpass, in the spots where there was supposed to be heavy gravel, rebar, and concrete, there were in places only sand and partial reinforcement. The state specs had been seriously compromised.

By the time the news crews showed up, Tim was rapidly reviewing all the paperwork that had been submitted over the weekend, hurriedly scratching in the words “Supported by natural granite” or “Full rebar reinforcement” in any questionable field.

A few hours after the general public had begun to gather, gawking at the slowly submerging hunks of highway and construction equipment settling into the muddy bottom of the lake, Tim Morgan finally got around to calling the sheriff’s department.

“Every year,” Russ said to Matt. “Every year, I hear from you about how you visited Irene’s grave, and how you hate doing it, ’cause you’re all alone up here with the dead girl, but you gotta do it. So I figured I’d get here on the anniversary too.”

Russ held out his large hands, suede work gloves encasing them in black. “Did you hear I’m ahead in the polls? Looks like I might even win.” He glanced at his watch. “I got another campaign event this afternoon. But for now, I’m here for you, my friend.”

Matt turned back, blinking at the shapeless stones, the sharp-edged lines of Irene’s marker standing in the middle of the moldering ice and dead brush. The whole graveyard suddenly seemed so much smaller, more manageable.

“Well,” said Matt slowly. “You want to help me clean up this place?”

“Sure. Glad to be of help,” said Russ quietly. “You do more than just her stone?”

“Graveyard was abandoned by the city two years ago when the last of the big mines closed. Osburn city budget went to pot,” said Matt. “And Irene’s mother died two years ago. So there’s no one else now. Only me.”

Carefully, Matt rubbed a hand over the inscription on the stone, an icy residue wetting his palm. It was as if he were groping his way through the dark, memories emerging like old fingerprints. The tone of her voice came back, the look on her face when she first accepted a ride from him back to her place in Osburn. He’d never slept with her, but now it seemed almost more intimate to know her. No one else seemed to remember her now, and being here, it was as if he were reclaiming a lost possession.

Russ looked around at the sparse housing on the hillside. “Hey, didn’t she used to live around here too? You said once that’s why she wanted to be buried here, right?”

Matt continued scraping dirt off a tombstone. Without looking, he pointed a block up the street. “Yeah. Before the city condemned the place, I used to go up there too, look around. Sit there and talk to the dead girl. Can’t do that anymore.”

Russ squinted at a blackened foundation a few houses away. “Got burned down?”

“Squatters smoked it out,” said Matt. “It used to be a little yellow house. She wouldn’t have wanted that to happen.”

“That’s a shame.” Russ looked down. He used a foot to clear brush off a grave. “Hey, Matty,” he interrupted, and Matt realized he’d been muttering something again. Probably that useless sorry, sorry, sorry.

“Look . . . you need to stop worrying about all this,” said Russ. “I know that you never got to see her in the hospital, but—”

“It was my fault though,” said Matt. His hand trembled for a moment. He stilled it before he looked over at Russ. “And then I was too cowardly to go see her. Went out, drove around the parking lot a couple times, couldn’t work up the nerve to go up there and face her. Figured she’d recover, but she never did. Then it was too damn late.”

“Yeah, I know, but I told you about when I visited her. I heard her, what she said.” Russ threw a rotting branch over the fence into the woods. “What she wanted—”

“You aren’t going to feed me some line about her forgiving me after all this time, are you? You’re the one who told me the truth about how much she hated my guts.”

Russ’s face blanched. “Matt, I’ve kept your secrets. And I’ve never lied to you.”

“Well, dammit, Russ, don’t start snowing me now. I already know the truth.”

“You think you do, huh?”

Matt snapped out the words bitterly. “Sure, I do. I’ve heard them enough to know them by heart. Irene wanted to press charges against me until her dying breath. It was only you and Valerie who talked her out of it. Sure, I know at the end, you said she was willing to let go, to forgive, but dammit, that’s only because you talked her into it. I owe you . . . I owe . . . Without you, I’d be . . .” Matt wiped an arm over his face. His eyes were streaming, his cheeks wet with tears.

Russ put a hand on his arm, a solid grip. “Look, you need a place to be alone for awhile. You just drive up to our boat cabin, you hear me? You know where the key is . . . you just drive up there, spend an evening or a weekend with our friend Jack Daniel’s, okay?”

Matt shook his head and continued between the silent sobs. “That won’t work, nothing works. I tried to confess, I really did, but look what happened.” Matt felt his shoulders shaking, his body convulsing beyond his control, as if he carried a deep and fatal wound. “I finally worked up the nerve to tell God what I did, and Jesus Christ, look what happened after that to Arlen. You and I are the only ones who know. I tried to—”

“Matt, I know,” said Russ firmly. “I know all about what happened to the chaplain. And don’t worry, I won’t be telling anyone. It’s between us, you understand?”

Matt looked up at Russ, his vision blurred and uncertain. “I know she couldn’t forgive me, but can you? Can you forgive me for that one damned mistake I made? Someone has to—Jesus Christ.”

Russ closed his eyes and shook his head slowly from side to side. “Matty,” he said. “I forgave you years ago. I already forgave you. Who cares if Arlen never forgave you? And she’s dead, what does it matter if she forgives you? I mean, hell,” Russ gave a short forced laugh, “Valerie’s never forgiven me—for anything.”

Matt snorted despite himself, a chuckle choked by grief.

“Look,” said Russ. “You’re a good man, my friend, and don’t let anyone tell you any different, even yourself.” Even as Russ spoke, the radio in Matt’s truck began to crackle. “Calling five-oh-seven. We need a lieutenant to supervise all available units on a serious situation. We’ve got a road hazard—more like no road—on the south end of the lake. Potential to shut down the entire interstate. Calling all units in, to meet at new overpass.”

At the sound, Russ’s eyes snapped open. He looked at the truck and then back at Matt. “Mind if I come along? I know I don’t work there anymore . . . but hey,” he put a hand back on Matt’s shoulder. “You look like you could use someone beside you today.”

Two deputies were already out on the open road when Russ and Matt arrived, shepherding traffic away from the gap, moving pylons by hand. Russ pulled on a sheriff’s department jacket and began to move pylons as well. Matt went back to the truck and radioed the Bitterroot Fire Department. He also attempted to raise the general manager for Herrick Industries. Matt was in the midst of his seventh attempt when he noticed that the door to the construction trailer seemed to be propped open.

Matt found Tim Morgan inside. Morgan was disheveled and uncertain, but he was certainly present. Matt knew Morgan as a long-time union man, constantly at odds with Valerie Herrick, the ostensible owner of the company he worked for.

“Well, good to see you, Matty,” Morgan chuckled nervously. “I expected maybe some overtime . . . but shit. This is a real fuckarow, ain’t it?” That was all he said for the first fifteen minutes, as he shuffled papers on his desk. Then Matt noticed that he’d begun to smile. He couldn’t wipe the smile off his face as they walked outside and looked over the damage. Outside, in the lake, the top of a cab could be seen just under the surface, looking for all the world like a yellow boat cabin without a keel.

Once the fire engine arrived, Matt took Morgan back inside. “I’m not taking a statement,” said Matt. “So this is off the record. But you gotta let me know a couple of things—just to protect the public safety. Is this whole road going to collapse? Is the rest of the highway safe to drive on? How the hell could something like this happen?”

Morgan sat down heavily in his chair and pulled a stack of papers toward him. “Off the record, I don’t mind telling you the whole damn story here, Matty. You’ve been on the inside for a few of these, a few years ago, so I figure you’ll understand. This is a private deal I made—but it appears to have gone a little sideways from what we wanted.”

“What kind of deal?” said Matt heavily.

“Well, you know Will Herrick wants to buy the company off his sister, see? So although there’s supposed to be heavy gravel, I figured out a way to just put sand in there. A hell of a lot cheaper, save the company some money. And rebar is damned expensive too, so we cut a little here and there. State specs say we gotta foot it in natural granite, but I just had them truck in some mine tailings from Herrick’s mines over in the Silver Valley, chuck that in there, and I signed off on the granite footings.”

“Why? Why would you do such a thing?”

“It’ll cost Valerie too much to sustain the company. She’ll have to sell the damned construction business. Look at this spreadsheet”—Morgan pointed to a printout—“see that column of numbers? That was the profit for Valerie Herrick. And here’s—”

A voice from outside the door spoke loudly. “What was that about Valerie?” Matt sat back and sighed. He felt fatigue settle into him, a heavy weight.

“C’mon inside with us, Russ. How long have you been listening to this?”

Russ came into the room, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the low light. “Just got here. Tell me what you were saying about Val.”

Morgan put down the file folders he was holding. “Well, hell, Russ, I didn’t know you were still in the mix with the day shift—I thought you were running for sheriff!”

“I am,” said Russ shortly. “What happened, Tim? Something got left out of the overpass footings, and I bet on purpose. You’re screwing Valerie over again, aren’t you?”

Morgan gave him a heavy look, and then as Russ stared back, he seemed to waver. Matt looked back and forth between them. “Look,” he said finally. “Isn’t there insurance for this kind of thing? Doesn’t a construction company carry a lot of insurance?”

Russell did not take his eyes off Morgan. “He knows damn well there’s not enough insurance on this deal to cover a catastrophe like this. Val had to take cost-cutting measures somewhere.” Russ’s voice grew louder. “He knows damn well that—”

“Hell, Russ, I checked it all out four times to Sunday.” Morgan shot Matt a sideways glance and held up a sheaf of papers as he shook his head mournfully. “I don’t know—”

Russ grabbed the papers from Morgan and threw them across the room. “It’s William, isn’t it? He’s bought you out, hasn’t he? He’s screwing Valerie with this and—”

Matt pulled Russ back from the desk. “Look, Russ, a judge will sort this one out. There has to be sufficient coverage—it’s a state contract, right? Dammit, what a mess.”

Morgan began to chuckle. “Russ, Russ, Russ. You couldn’t do anything to me if you wanted to. I signed the forms, in triplicate. It’s all duly authorized—who am I to know if the company provides material that is substandard? We did our job.”

Matt gave him a hard look, it seemed to take hold. “Tim, I don’t care about your wheeling and dealing right now,” said Matt. “Is the road dangerous? Unstable?”

“No, no, of course not. Just the road that fell in—the new part.” Mor gan stood and walked out onto the porch, squinting in the sunlight. “Who knows—if the temperature had dropped in time, froze it up, the road mighta been fine. Guess I was wrong.”

Russ came out onto the porch right behind them. Violently, he shoved Morgan off the porch. “Goddammit to fuckin’ hell! Sure as hell you were wrong!”

Matt whirled around and caught Russ as he was about to jump off the porch down on top of Morgan, who was struggling in the mud. He pulled Russ in front of him, yanking his jacket to hold him still. “What the hell, Russ? I mean, it’ll all work out.”

But Russell’s arms were windmilling furiously, pushing him away. “Fuckin’ Will Herrick—he’s screwing us over with little Timmy Morgan, just like he screwed us over with you! He just uses all of you—never gets his own hands dirty! Using you!”

Matt held on to him as Russ swung back and forth. “Herrick never used me,” he said.

But Russ didn’t seem to have heard him. His hands clenched over and over, as if he were squeezing an invisible neck. “Just like he screwed us with Arlen at the resort.”

Matt let go of Russ’s jacket in sudden consternation. “What are you talking about?”

Russ seemed to see him then. He flushed a violent red, his face going dark. Rapidly, he turned his head from side to side, checking if anyone was near. “Matty,” he muttered, “don’t worry—I’ll keep your secrets. Even about the resort that night—”

“I don’t have any secrets about the resort. What about that night—what?”

Russ frowned suddenly, his brow lowering as if at an insult. He ran a hand down his jacket, smoothing the fabric. When he spoke, his voice seemed unnaturally calm, as if he were trying to convince more than just Matt. “Jesus, Matty, c’mon, give it up, would you? You know I didn’t have anything at all to do with the resort. Anything at all. I mean, you were there with me, together we—”

“What do you mean? Russ, you better tell me what you mean.”

Russ shook his head, pulled away from Matt, as if the glimmer of doubt in Matt’s face was something he never expected to see. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered weakly, staggering backward. “I can’t talk about this now. I gotta go . . . Jesus, I gotta go see her.”

“Who? Valerie? I can get the dispatcher to call her office. Who do you have to go see? Who?”

But Russ just looked at him and backed away, moving rapidly until he got to his car. He swung in a wide circle across the unfinished highway, spinning the tires as he swung toward the Bitterroot Mountains.