Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller by Clifford Irving

you see him walking through the village in the middle of the night?
    As he settled in, his title changed to “Sophie’s man.” You heard?— Sophie’s man helped June Loomis in an argument with a garage owner in Glenwood Springs. Didn’t charge her a penny. Those kids of Sophie’s man had been hunting for a lost cat.
    Dennis smiled at the quaintness, but it faintly annoyed him that he lacked a name. He understood there was no malice intended. People held aloof from him in some ways, but he felt they liked him. He sensed he was being tested: the villagers were waiting to get to know him better before accepting him. He had to serve his apprenticeship.
    Mountain life was wholly unlike the electric and frenetic world he had known in New York. People were calm, unhurried. He was fascinated by the village, had never dreamed he would—or could—live in such a quiet, remote place, no matter how beautiful. Sometimes he wondered if after a time he would grow tired of it and yearn for the dynamism of the city he had thrived on for so many years. He realized he had cast his lot with Sophie; had accepted, at least for a while, a dependency. But it had not been out of weakness. Love had not blinded him: he’d made a clear-cut choice to change his world. To change, to grow. To learn.
    But there were peculiarities about his new mountain home, and he needed to come to grips with them.
    He went to Sophie with his questions and soon grasped that Sophie was not quite as forthcoming as he might have liked—indeed, as he felt he deserved—when it came to talking about her past life in Springhill and the people of the village. When he probed too deeply in either of those areas, her common answer was, “One day soon, my sweet, I’ll tell you. Not now.”
    Dennis thought his questions were innocent enough. “You know,” he said one Sunday morning while he squeezed fresh orange juice, “I’ve noticed something about the people here. They seem to be in unusually good physical condition. Robust—active—cheerful.”
    Sophie smiled at him from the stove, where she was cooking pancakes. “Clean mountain air does it.”
    “And maybe clean living. I don’t know a soul up here who smokes except Harry Parrot. And no one really carouses or whoops it up on the weekends, not even the teenagers. Remarkable. Reassuring, and delightful. But…”
    Sophie looked up the stairs, where there were sounds of activity. “Dennis, you promised to take the kids biking today.”
    “And I will, I will… let me finish this first. Just about everyone in town is healthy and vigorous. No invalids. No one seems gloomy or depressed. Isn’t that so?”
    “I suppose it is,” Sophie said.
    “Are they all on Prozac?”
    Sophie laughed and set out the maple syrup and applesauce. “You’d have to ask Grace Pendergast. But I don’t think she’d breach medical ethics and tell you.”
    “Jack Pendergast told me that Grace complains all the time—says she’s got hardly anything to do except give kids polio shots and treat broken bones at the quarry. And yet here’s what’s peculiar.” He had thought about this often, but shunted it aside. “There are no very old people here. Everyone seems to die off more or less in their seventies. If everyone is so healthy, which seems to be the case, then that doesn’t make sense.”
    “The investigative legal mind strikes again.”
    “Don’t you see what I mean?”
    “I never truly noticed it,” Sophie said.
    “Come on, darling. Every town always has a few ancient geezers. But here, where everyone is physically vigorous, there isn’t one old fogy sitting on a porch in a creaky rocking chair. They get to be seventy or thereabouts, and bang “—Dennis snapped his fingers—”they just go. As if by appointment.”
    Sophie said nothing.
    “When did your grandparents die?” he asked.
    She considered for a while. “My maternal grandparents died in their mid-seventies, I guess. My paternal grandmother died