Mortal Fall by Christine Carbo Page A

his sandwich when his phone buzzed. He looked at it and bit his lower lip. “I’m sorry,” he said, then excused himself—said that he needed to take it because it was the office.
    When he hung up, he apologized but had to get going—his partner was elbow high in some other emergency and the dog he’d operated on in the morning that was doing fine when he’d left was now exhibiting labored breathing. He then asked Will to bring him a to-go box and tried to leave a twenty on the bar. I handed it back, insisting I wanted to pay for lunch. I handed him my card and told him to call me if anything else that might be pertinent to wrapping up the investigation came to mind.
    Before he walked off, he tilted his head and squinted at me. “You really believe this was an accident?”
    “I can’t say just yet.”
    “Hmm,” he said. “Know how many really dangerous slopes we’ve attempted trying to track those animals? Crampons, ice axes, ropes . . . You name it, just praying the slope would hold. We weren’t idiots, but we did tempt fate more than a time or two. It just doesn’t make sense.”
    “I know,” I said. “It’s like a trucker who’s covered millions of miles getting in an accident a block from his own home.”
    “I guess that’s one way to see it.” He shook my hand, thanked me for lunch, and left.
    • • •
    When my pastrami came, I ate it while writing a few more notes until my phone buzzed. I saw it was Lara and hit Decline to ignore the call and shoved it back in my pocket. I didn’t want to talk to her at the moment, and I had a pretty good idea why she was calling anyway. We had already had words about it the day before. All her relatives were coming into town for a few days for a reunion at our house on the Flathead River. It was complicated, but she hadn’t yet told anyone in her family about our breakup. She said she was embarrassed—that she wasn’t ready for her parents to know until we were sure we were going through with the divorce.
    Lara and I began thinking about the reunion a year before we even split. We had wanted to have it that summer, but several of her brothers couldn’t make it because of other trips they’d planned, so we put it off for the following one, having no idea we’d be separated. Not long after Lara put the emails out about the reunion, she began talking about getting pregnant, and we began to argue all the time.
    “I thought you were sure,” I had told her the morning before when she began to say she was having second thoughts about going through with a divorce.
    “Yes, but, I don’t know,” she had said. “Maybe I should, I don’t know, reconsider.”
    “Reconsider? Lara, it’s been ten months since we split up, and every time we get close to giving it another go, you freak out and say you’re not ready and not sure you can. Well, in the meantime, while you’ve not been ready, have you ever thought that maybe I’d be moving on?”
    She had started to cry, at first softly and quietly until she spoke and her voice sounded choked and strained. I’ve never dealt with weeping females very well.
    Early on, I felt that my connection to her and her family was a lifeline to normality. I liked being a part of a network of relatively sane people always smiling and happy, always talking about church and family outings, always seeming to be there for one another and knowing the consistent domestic and religious rituals. When around them, I sensed there was a system that worked, unlike the fragmented home I came from. One knew their place, knew they belonged and were safe.
    It seemed like a second chance to have the happy household I’d missed out on. But I was wrong. Very little alters what you’ve been born into. Her family, which seemed fascinating and comforting at first, eventually began to bug me, began to seem naïve and judgmental, and even righteous. They’d act as if they had no problems and that their religion not only guarded them from