Crunch Time by Diane Mott Davidson Page B

addition he’d done to his place in Denver. He’d also told her he’d just been accepted into the Furman County Sheriff’s Department. He wanted to live in Aspen Meadow, because the people were so nice. And, he said, he would be using the land only to host picnics for his fellow law enforcement officers.
    Portia, a lifelong Republican who was a great believer in law and order, had gladly sold Ernest her house. Shoveling the long driveway might have kept her in shape for the first decade of her retirement years, but the winters had begun to grind on her. She wanted to move to Arizona. The deal was made, and they were both happy.
    Portia had sent Ernest postcards from Tucson, which he’d shown us. In reply, he’d sent her pictures of her old house, with whatever project he was undertaking highlighted in “before” and “after” snapshots. Ernest had begun by adding a garage and a cantilevered second story that featured a second, new kitchen, a new living/dining room, and two more bedrooms, plus two more baths. He’d then moved on to building a deck in the middle of the second-story façade, with a greenhouse on one side and a glassed-in winter porch complete with wood-burning fireplace on the other. He’d carved a sign that said PORTIA’S PERCH and hung it outside the winter porch, then another one that read PORTIA’S PARCEL , which he’d staked next to a boulder. Portia had written back to Ernest that they were her favorite photographs; she showed them to everyone in her retirement home.
    Even after Ernest married Faye, who divorced him three years into their union for the Wyoming doctor, he’d sent snapshots to Portia, until his last letter was returned, stamped “Addressee Deceased.” He’d told us about her passing with tears in his eyes, and shortly after that, his casual drinking had turned heavy, then addictive, and he’d been forced into early retirement. Still, he’d told us at one of the department picnics he still hosted at his house, he’d found spiritual renewal through AA and a “new way to fight the bad guys,” as he put it, in his job as a private investigator.
    Tom and I had often admired the view from Ernest’s deck. Every house in Aspen Meadow had a slightly different view. It was that same puzzle posed by the Mountain Journal, which Tom had reminded me of: “Whose view is this?” For a whopping five bucks, you could drive around and try to figure it out.
    Portia, for her part, had hated the newspapers and had called the cops when the Mountain Journal had shown up, uninvited, to take a photograph of her view. Ernest said Portia called the media “a bunch of pinkos.” Remembering, I smiled as I recalled Tom putting his arm around me as he pointed out the spectacular vista of national forest, with its steep nearby mountains. Around Ernest’s house, the land was peppered with quartz and granite boulders, towering lodgepole and ponderosa pines, stands of aspen, and the occasional perfect, Christmas tree–shaped blue spruce. After some December poachers had come in with chain saws, which they’d used to cut down over two dozen of the spruce, Ernest had put up signs every twelve feet that read ABSOLUTELY NO TREE CUTTING , although he’d told us we could come get a tree any time we wanted. We demurred, saying Portia wouldn’t have wanted it.
    I sighed and stared at the house, which, with all the additions, had a hodgepodge look to it. The place already showed indications of neglect, although Ernest had been gone—I couldn’t bring myself to think dead —for only two days. It was hard to make things out through the wind, the rain, and the gathering gloom. The PORTIA’S PERCH sign hung at an angle. The long deck had the painful look of abandonment. When Ernest hadn’t returned Saturday night, Yolanda clearly hadn’t known to bring in the pots of annuals. These massive displays—petunias, geraniums, nicotiana, and a dozen other florals—had died from the frost we’d had the