Page 74 of Dead Mountain

Luckie pushed some TV remotes off the sofa and motioned for them to sit down. Without offering any refreshment, she took the comfy office chair near the computer, swiveled it around, and looked at them expectantly.

“So,” she said. “Have you found out anything more about Rod?”

“No, we haven’t,” said Corrie. “A new search is underway.”

“So why do you want to talk to me again? I must have talked to you feds at least a dozen times back when it happened.”

Actually, she had submitted to five rather rushed and perfunctory interviews, which Corrie had glanced over after Watts gave her the woman’s name. Although she had been cooperative, she hadn’t been able to provide any useful information.

“We’ll take up as little of your time as possible,” Corrie said. “In light of the recent discoveries we’re reaching out to everyone involved, in case anything was missed.”

The woman shrugged. “Okay.”

“Thanks, Winifred—may I call you Winifred?”

“No. And please don’t call me Winnie, either. Call me Helen—that’s my middle name.”

“Helen, then. Do you remember where you first met Mr. O’Connell?”

“Sure. At the grotto.”

“The what?”

“It’s what they call local chapters of the NSS.”

“The National Speleological Society.” Watts spoke for the first time. “You were cavers?”

“That’s right. We’d go out with other members of our grotto to some of the caves around Dutchess County. New York. Rod was big into caving then, and I was a noob. He helped me through some pretty gnarly caves. Like Carson’s Mistake.”

“Carson’s Mistake?” Corrie echoed.

“It’s got this hundred-yard horizontal tube called the meat grinder. Once you enter it, there’s no turning back. You have to keep going. I freaked out halfway, and he talked me through the rest of it.” She nodded toward a table at one end of the sofa, on which sat a couple of framed Ektachrome prints, much faded.

Corrie looked—and was shocked. One was of a skinny girl in a formfitting caving suit, rope slung over her right shoulder like an aiguillette. Despite the muddy outfit, and the helmet with light and chinstrap that partially obscured the face, Corrie could tell the girl was pretty. It was hard to reconcile that twenty-four-year-old image with the tired-looking woman who sat before them now. Every day, Corrie realized, was another fork in life, based on what you did or didn’t do . . . and it might be years before you realized that some action, now regretted, had sent you down the wrong path. It sure as hell could have happened to herself. She pushed this aside and returned to her mental list of questions.

“So you started dating,” she said.

The woman nodded.

“But you went to different schools.”

“No, we didn’t. I started at Rensselaer. Transferred to Hudson Valley after my first year.”

Corrie tried to align the dates in her head. She’d transferred from a four-year to a two-year college, just before Rodney O’Connell graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and went on to graduate studies at NMIT. He must have been an upperclassman when she was a freshman.

“So you followed Rodney out here?” Watts said. Corrie had been wondering the same thing, but this phrasing sounded aggressive.

“I didn’t ‘follow’ him. We were going to be married.”

“Married,” Watts repeated, sounding unconvinced.

“I was pregnant!” Helen snapped.

What the hell is Homer doing? Corrie wanted to keep this interview friendly, productive. “So, Helen: Did you get to know his student friends out here? Like some of the hikers who perished?”

“A few.” Helen shifted in her chair, unhappy now and growing impatient.

“Was he particularly close to any of them?”

---