Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page B

Greenwich, Dennis began raising the children while Alma shuttled in and out of expensive drug programs and the beds of cocaine dealers. She’s the mother of my kids, Dennis kept telling himself. I care for her, I have to help her. For two years he tried and failed. Later he wondered how he could have been so quixotic and so stupid.
    After the divorce, Alma moved back to Virginia and married a man seven years younger than she. She wrote to Dennis: “Nobody here knows I had children and I want to keep it that way. I was never interested in being a mother, and they’re better off with you anyway.” It took Dennis a while to get over that, and telling the children was the hardest task of his life. A year later Alma’s heart failed; the autopsy showed it to be almost double its normal size.
    In his private life Dennis had brief affairs, but he balked at involvement. He had been brought up to believe that you persevered at commitments and didn’t quit until they lowered you into the grave. You could forgive yourself for making a mistake once. In his moral scheme of things a second failure would be unacceptable.
    The incorporated township of Springhill nestled at 9,000 feet amid dense forests of blue spruce. Creeks seemed to flow everywhere. Dennis visited there with Sophie on the last evening of his vacation, two days after their first dinner at a restaurant in Carbondale. During those two intervening days he fretted; he wandered about Aspen, wondering what change he was undergoing.
    Years ago a wise person said to him, “Before you get involved with the daughter, know the mother. The daughter may grow to be like her.” Alma’s mother had been an alcoholic and a chain-smoker. Dennis in love had ignored the wise person’s advice. Older, and bearing the scars of that failed marriage, at Sophie’s parents’ dinner table he paid close attention to her mother. Bibsy Henderson’s calmness and slightly wry turn of speech were comparable to Sophie’s. When the discussion veered to politics and Scott Henderson thumped the dinner table to punctuate his views on Bill Clinton and gun control, Bibsy said to Dennis, “My husband sometimes believes he can make a fact out of an opinion by raising his voice.”
    But even as she spoke, she was lightly stroking the back of Scott’s hand, and Scott smiled apologetically in response.
    Bibsy reminded Dennis of his own mother back in Watkins Glen. He couldn’t think of a higher compliment. “Why ‘Bibsy’?”
    “It’s Beatrice. When I was a kid I couldn’t pronounce that.”
    Dennis liked Scott too. To a friend in New York he described Sophie’s father as “a talky Gary Cooper. Arms like an oak tree. He can outhike you and outchop you and probably out-arm-wrestle you. For a man of sixty-five, which is what I guess he is, he’s in amazing shape.”
    After that first February meeting on the bumps of Aspen Mountain, Dennis could not push Sophie from his thoughts, day or night. He had not made love to her but already he felt possessed. His fears were not realized; she had told him there was no other man in her life. He flew back to Colorado two weeks later, leaving his children with his sister in Greenwich. Sophie picked him up at Aspen airport. Dennis tossed his ski bag and suitcase in the back of her Blazer and she bore him up and away to the village of Springhill.
    The drive wound through the icebound valley of the Crystal River, past herds of unmoving horses who looked to Dennis like black cutouts pasted on white cardboard. The evening was cold and the river glistened in the setting sun. Layers of snowy mountains fell away in all directions. Where avalanches had poured from the crests and smashed paths to the valley floor, rows of mature aspen trees were broken like matchsticks.
    “I love the aspens,” Sophie said. “See the black spots against that pure gray of the bark? When I was a girl I thought those spots were eyes, looking at me. Protecting me.”
    “From