The day warmed and whatever mist clung to the ridges faded and vanished. They stopped in the road and stripped off their jackets. The road hugged the shoreline loosely, straying around wooded hills and what looked like large holdings at water’s edge. Hard to tell, because where there might have been mansions there were now only blackened ruins and docks. And, again, the boats. Whatever boats, cleated to the docks or rocking on their moorings, had been left untouched. So they walked the edge of the road and skirted the lake, sometimes close, sometimes as much as a half-mile above. They tried twice to shortcut across fields and lost time crossing fences and ditches and scratched their arms in the brambles. Lost time. Did they have time to lose, or gain? Jess wondered. Since they had started walking it almost seemed time was suspended. Or the normal accounting of it. Because time worked best when there was a movement toward or away. Toward desire, away from death. Away from the Big Bang, toward an infinite expansion that might or might not be God. Toward quitting time, beer-thirty, a quinceañera, a vacation, a wedding, a funeral. Toward the sense of a poem, or love, or away from the chaos of a dream. But now they did not know, truly, what they were headed into or out of. Or what flashed on the horizon.

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

And so Storey, who still believed he had a bearing, which was his family, was more eager to try the shortcuts, and Jess had to remind him that they had cost.

And then what once were houses along the shoreline became more frequent, houses with docks and ski boats tied, and little Friendship sloops on moorings—probably a race class up here. There were flagpoles on the lawns that sloped to the water where American flags still hung and lifted in the pulsing breeze. And Jess knew they were getting close to the town and he wondered if whatever militia had blazed through was unionist and punishing a secessionist county. Could you use that term in the third millennium? Unionist? Was any of this really happening? Or was he now in some long, involved anxious dream, in which his grief at the loss of his wife bubbled to the surface and frothed? And from which he would wake, pillow damp, into a hunting trip with Storey . . . wake into a darkness before daybreak that held the same scents of spruce and fir and lakewater that he smelled now? How many dreams within dreams could a person wake from? In grade school everyone said that if you sneezed more than eight times you would die; was it like that?

And if this grim procession or juggernaut of harvest that they were following now—if it was anti-secessionist, why would they burn the places that flew the Stars and Stripes? Wouldn’t they leapfrog around them? And why would a rabidly secessionist town—rabid enough to become a target—let anyone fly an American flag? It made no sense.

Maybe they, whoever they were, knew that flying the flag was a shallow attempt to save one’s skin. Maybe they knew that the town knew they were coming—maybe they knew that, as they attacked, they could not shut down cell service fast enough, not before a few desperate calls got out, warning other folks along the lake, or farther afield. And those people, the townspeople here, armed with the knowledge that the storm was bearing down, maybe in one last act of apostasy, or its inverse, they ran the flags up the poles and prayed.

It was too confusing. They had no idea who was on whose side, or what, really, the sides were about. Jess stopped in the road and shook his head as if trying to clear it.

“What?” Storey said.

“The flags.” Jess pointed.

“So?”

“Didn’t we say that this might be some eruption over secession?”

“So?” Storey blinked down to the landscaped shoreline.

“So what do the flags mean?”

“Hell if I know.”

“I mean, whose side is who on? I’m thinking destruction on
this scale has gotta be full-on military. U.S. of A. So these towns
must be rebel or whatever. Right?”

Storey stood looking east and blinked in the autumn sun, a pale, early-morning sun that was barely an hour clear of the ridges. He stood as if smelling the still-cool breeze that stirred in the long grass at the edge of the road.

“I wonder if it matters,” he said.

“What?”

“I wonder if it matters whose side anyone is on.”

Jess winced at his friend. “What does that mean?”

Storey turned. He tucked his thumbs under the pack straps and shrugged the weight up off his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “All this . . .” He trailed off. Jess waited. “It seems vicious and random.”

“Random?”

“Not random, I guess. Indiscriminate. They’re burning everything. Except the boats.”

“So . . . what, then?”

Storey looked back down to the lake. To the boats there, the flagpoles. “I dunno, Jess. It’s like the heat of the destruction, the savagery . . . It’s like it’s about something deeper than any issue like secession.”

“Burn”

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Jess watched his oldest friend. Whose week-old beard had flecks of gray. He knew, watching him, that Storey was thinking about the fierce and pervasive violence and that he was praying that it not spill over into New Hampshire and Vermont and touch his children and his wife. In suggesting that the violence felt deeper than secession he was voicing his own dread that it might not have boundaries.

Jess spat in the road, hitched up his own pack. “It’s probably just some crazy central-Maine shit. Right? Something like this was bound to happen somewhere.”

Storey was more than worried; he was grieving. Already. Jess could see it on his face. But Storey smiled, sad. He appreciated Jess’s effort.

Storey said, “The town would have sent out distress signals. One kind or another.”

“Right.”

“They would have warned everyone else. You know that the attacks, news of them, are zinging all over the news and the internet right now.”

“Right.”

“Why doesn’t it feel that way?”

In half a mile they came to a sign, green, that said “Randall, Population 2,732.” So they had let the sign stand. That did seem random, or at least scattershot, since Green Hill’s, on both sides of town, were gone.

But, as in Green Hill, not much else had been spared. The county road dropped down a gentle hill and into what must have been a pretty Main Street not high above the water. And so the town center was mostly flat, with streets branching down to the shore and a lovely wharf, still intact. On the far side of the wharf, with its walkway and benches and shade trees of oak and pine and maple, was another marina, this one at least twice the size of the one in Green Hill. The trees still stood; the benches invited respite. The boats swung gently on their moorings, as before. The black reek of burned houses watered their eyes.

Again, as they walked the sooted aisles of the narrow streets, they passed only the silent blackened monuments of chimney, hearth, foundation wall. Some still smoked, and when they stirred a heap of cinders with a length of rebar they pushed up glowing embers. They passed what must have been the stone arch entryway to a modest church; nothing else of it stood. Again they called out. Again they knew, without knowing why, that the typhoon of the reapers had passed and gone. Again they found few bodies. There was what must have been a child curled behind a stack of chimney stones, sheltered in what once must have been a hidden cubby or closet. The body was small and blackened and lipless with bared teeth, and Storey lurched from the sight and Jess heard him heave. There was what must have been a couple embraced beneath what must have been a
pickup in what must have been a garage. There was a badly burned body sprawled inside a grove of seven poplars whose unsinged leaves spun and clattered in the easy wind. How did that happen? On the north end of the wharf and behind it, at what once had been an intersection, a street sign still stood—bronzed letters embossed on dark steel: “Water Street.”

It seemed to Jess almost like a taunt; he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t want to look anymore. He walked to the edge of the wharf, which was decked with heavy, weather-grayed planks. They soothed him somehow. As did the prospect of open water, far shore, moored sailboats.

On the closest dock was a classic blue Boston Whaler skiff with a 150 Merc, clean and cleated, ready to travel. Why couldn’t they climb in and cast off? Gun the motor and aim for the distant shoreline? Land at some unburned camp and warn the family, make the calls, get a lift?

Because, Jess suspected, there were no families now. No cedar-shingled cottages with Adirondack chairs on a wide porch, with nursery-bought geraniums hanging from baskets under the eaves, and some yellow Lab barking good-naturedly as he and Storey coasted in. Some barefoot child running after the dog and yelling, “Opey, no! Opey! Bad dog!” Jess throwing a single hitch over the piling and clambering out, the dog now bumping legs and whining, Jess pounding the top of his mallet head with an open palm, the child yelling “Opey, no!” though there was nothing anymore to redress, the child scrambling out to the end of the dock and grabbing his dog by the collar, dragging him back, explaining seriously, “He’s nice, he doesn’t bite!” The mother stepping off the porch, the father from the garden beside the cottage, wiping hands on thighs of blue jeans as in a choreography, as in a movie, as in a Norman Rockwell painting titled The Greeting in which the Sunday-morning boaters are not traumatized strangers but old friends from across the lake who bring jars of honey from their own bees and a Superman comic for Willum, and everyone sticks to their lines. Jess felt a lurch in his chest. Why couldn’t anyone stick to their lines, ever? Life might accede to being idealized for a single freeze-frame picture but the characters always cracked. Or went away. And he knew that if that family ever did in fact exist, and did in fact share moments of joy and days of peace, they existed on this day no longer. He and Storey could get in the boat and power across the lake and run up along the shore and he knew what they’d find. And then what? Somehow they intuited that they were safer in the wake of the holocaust, the way veteran wildland firefighters will “run back into the black,” run for safety into the zone that has just been burned. But you could not follow the devastation forever. Because by the time you were discovered and killed your spirit would be already dead.

Excerpted from “Burn”  by Peter Heller, published by Knopf, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.  Copyright © 2024 by Bear One Holdings, LLC.

Peter Heller’s previous novels include “The Dog Stars,” his celebrated debut and breakout bestseller in 2012, as well as the Colorado Book Award-winning “The Painter” in 2014. “The River” from 2019 also became a national bestseller and led to “The Guide” in 2021. “The Last Ranger,” about an enforcement ranger in Yellowstone National Park, was published last year and his latest novel, “Burn,” was published in August, 2024. Heller is also an award winning adventure writer and the author of four books of literary nonfiction. He lives in Denver.

CLARA

Clara Carver never much liked the Black Place. Even at age nine, a big girl now, she’d never grown used to its rancid smell and the things that would brush across her skin like fallen eyelashes in the dark. She would leap to her feet and smack at her neck or her leg, and sometimes her hand would come away wet with an insect’s insides. Sometimes, and more often than not, she would leave the Black Place covered in welts from the ants and blister beetles that lived there, anxious for Mother’s calamine lotion to calm her sores.

Father told her the length of time she spent in the Black Place was up to her. If she were to mind her manners and do what he said, she could leave as quickly as a few short hours. If she were to cry and bang and cause a ruckus, time would pass much slower. Father said the things he did to her — the things that made her insides churn and left her whimpering with her arms wrapped around her knees — were a sign of his love for her.

“Clara, never forget how much I love you.”

It seemed that his love changed with his moods. When the corn came in thick and sweet, and money was flush, Father would take Clara for ice cream at the malt shop in Meeker, along with Mother. He would laugh and tell stories of the harvest, and how hard the men worked to bring it in. Mother would lace her fingers together and smile at him, and to anyone who passed, they seemed a normal enough family.

There were other times, though, when Father came home smelling of liquor and dragged Clara from whatever she was doing, out through the backyard and into the fields toward the Black Place. Sometimes, Father would force Mother to join him. She never resisted, but she didn’t seem to enjoy it much, and Clara guessed she did what he wanted because she preferred those things to a belt or his fists in her stomach.

Clara only resisted once at age six. She’d been playing in her room with her favorite doll, Mabel, who had a head full of lemon yarn hair, when Father told her to come. She said no. It was late, and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Mabel all alone for the night. When Father grabbed her, Clara clawed and scratched and kicked and bit. As a result, Father left her in the Black Place for two days. When Clara returned to her room, it was to Mabel lying torn in half with her cotton insides strewn over the pink comforter. Clara cried for a week, and, after that, she decided she would cry no more.

She learned to endure the Black Place. She forced herself to find comfort in the small places Father couldn’t touch. She imagined a park with bright green grass and other children who would chase her up and down slides and push her on blue bucket swings. She pictured places other than the dust-caked farm with its rusted buildings and abandoned tractor equipment, places she’d seen in magazines and read about in books. Places like France with its gleaming metal cities and sun-speckled beaches, the sand as white as snow. She told herself, someday, she would escape the farm and go there.

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

But not today. Today was worse than most. Her stomach hurt, and sharp cramps tore through her abdomen like shards of glass. She craved light and air. She needed to escape the sweltering dark and reeking stench of the Black Place. It was as if something were swelling within her, a creature inside she could no longer control. It burst up her throat, and she climbed the steps to the hatch door and clawed and scraped and screamed for someone — for anyone — to free her. She smashed her fists against the iron hatch until her knuckles bled. Clara didn’t care if her shouts brought the wrath of Father. She only wanted out.

But no one came, and she was about to return to her cot when she heard something click. She cupped a hand against a seam of light as the hatch squealed open, half-expecting to see the familiar outline of Mother’s cruel scowl or Father’s hard, brown eyes. Instead, she saw a girl not much older than herself with soft, white skin and a waterfall of raven-black hair. She wore a warm smile and a dress the color of the summer sky.

“Hello,” the girl said. “I heard you knocking. Would you like to come out?”

Clara nodded and knew she had finally found a friend.

Chapter Two

KAYLA

DAY ONE

I climb a jutting slab of rock and hold Dad’s phone skyward, tap it and hope for a signal or a text, anything to prove the outside world still exists. After three days of backpacking through nowhere, Colorado, I’m not sure it does.

“The Girls in the Cabin”

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I’m so pissed at Dad for dragging us out here. Camping somewhere new every night sucks, Dad snoring away in the tent like a broken tractor engine on one side and Emma kicking me on the other. If I had my phone, maybe I could distract myself. But no, Dad made me leave it in the car, even when I begged and begged. “Sorry, kiddo, but we need to spend some time together as a family.” What a load of crap. We stopped being a family the minute Mom died. Now we’re just three strangers who live together.

Besides, camping was Mom’s thing. Not his. He’s only doing it because he thinks he has to — because Mom always talked about backpacking in Colorado someday. He’s driving me crazy, asking me all these questions about boys and school and volleyball like he cares, which he doesn’t. Not really. All he’s ever cared about is his work because it gets him away from me and Emma and all of our drama. Or it used to, anyway. Now, with Mom gone, he’s stuck with us.

But whatever; it’s not like I can do anything about it. And, I have to admit, Colorado is pretty. There are lakes everywhere, stamped in perfect blue circles in between all the fir and pine. And the aspen trees, wow, are the leaves amazing — all these oranges and reds sparkling for as far as you can see. When we hike above the tree line, I can almost lose myself in the scenery. I say “almost” because the moment I do, I can practically feel Mom standing next to me, whispering in my ear.

Isn’t it so beautiful, Kit Kat?

Everything has been so shitty since she died. I can’t remember the last time I felt happy. About anything, really. It would help if I could talk to someone, but Dad is oblivious, and Mimi is never around anymore. Even if she were, she doesn’t get me the way Mom did. I can’t tell her about the stuff with Ethan and what a dick he was to ditch me right after we hooked up. It was my first time, and it couldn’t have been worse. He won’t even look at me now. Mom always told me to wait, that my first time should be special, but that if I did go through with it, I should tell her. And I would have. I totally would have. She wanted to be there to support me. Now there’s no one to do that except Dad.

Dad. Ugh, he thinks everything is just fine because I hang out with Bree and Abby from time to time and get decent grades. He has no idea how much I hate my pasty white legs and skeleton arms, or that my chest belongs to someone in middle school, not that anyone notices. I’m pretty much invisible at Brookline High School. Or I was before Mom died, anyway. Now everyone looks at me like I’m damaged goods:

She’s the one whose mom died, right?

God, she looks so sad all the time . . .

Oh, poor thing, that must be so hard on her. Cancer, I hear.

At first, I thought Mom would beat it. She’d sit there and tell me so — “I’m going to beat this, Kayla. I promise.” — and I was dumb enough to believe her because she seemed so strong. What a joke. She never stood a chance.

I settle onto the rock and stare at Dad’s phone, the dumb thing, then click on the photo icon. A picture appears, one of Bernie mid-bark, chasing Emma around the backyard with her sundress flared behind her like a cape. It’s easy to tell the picture is B.C. (Before Cancer) because she’s got this big smile splashed on her face. A real one, with the corners of her eyes crinkled. In the A.C. pictures, Emma’s smiles are gone, or if they’re there, they’re totally fake.

My finger hovers over the screen, and I tell myself not to do it, not to swipe because I know what comes next. I do it anyway. It’s a selfie of me and Mom at Canobie Lake, Mom in her swimsuit right after her diagnosis, looking happy, normal even, with her face still full and round. (I can beat this!) I swipe again, fall now, the leaves changing, Public Park alive with color. Mom’s hair is gone in this one, her head wrapped in a cherry silk scarf. I hated it when she lost her hair. It felt so mean. Like, how could God take something so beautiful after all he’d put her through, the very thing she loved the most?

I keep scrolling, and my throat swells when I reach the hospital pictures. The first is of Emma nestled next to Mom on the bed, Mom giving the camera a cheery, fake thumbs-up. (Maybe I’ll beat this?) Then one of me plopped in a chair beside her, crying. She has her hand to my chin, both of us staring at each other and being honest for once: there is no beating this, not this time. I remember looking at her and thinking, Don’t you do it. Don’t you dare leave me. I can’t handle it. But I knew she would, and there was nothing — absolutely nothing — I could do about it.

“That’s one of my favorites.”

I nearly drop the phone. Dad stands behind me with his arms crossed and his face flushed red from the climb. For a second, I think he’s about to blow up on me for leaving Emma by herself back at camp, but instead, he settles onto the rock and pats my leg.

“She’s so beautiful in that picture, don’t you think?”

I glance at it, annoyed. Mom wasn’t the only one he thought was beautiful.

“You look just like her, you know.”

“That’s what you always say.” And he does. All the time. It drives me nuts. It’s why I avoid mirrors. Every time I pass one, I see Mom staring back. Her auburn hair. Her lake-green eyes. The lips that are, in my opinion, a little too thin, set above a neck that’s definitely a little too long.

“You know I said no phones on this trip, Kit Kat.”

“Yeah, and I left mine in the car.” Kit Kat. Mom’s nickname for me since I was five. I used to love it. Now I can’t stand it, especially when he says it.

“Hand it over,” he says.

I toss it into his lap. “Fine. It’s not like it works up here, anyway.”

“Look, just hang in there one more day. You can call all your friends tomorrow when we’re back in the car, okay?”

“Whatever,” I mumble.

He falls silent, and we sit there for an awkward moment, watching the clouds blow off the mountains. I know what he’s thinking, because I’m thinking it, too: I wish we could go back. Back to when cancer wasn’t a thing and Mom was still alive. We all wish it. Especially Emma. She thinks if she just doesn’t talk, doesn’t say anything, it will somehow change things and bring Mom back. But it won’t. Nothing will. She’s gone, and no matter how quiet Emma is, or how badly Dad wants to fix everything, or how angry I get, things will never be the same.

He squeezes my knee. “We’d better get back before Emma jumps in the lake.”

She won’t. She doesn’t do anything these days but sit around, looking sad while she colors.

“Besides,” he says, pointing at the clouds, “rain’s on the way. We need to set up the tent.”

I move to stand, but he keeps his hand on my knee a moment longer, his eyes serious like he’s about to have one of his “Dad” talks.

“What?” I ask, hoping to get it over with. I can’t handle his lies, how he says he cares and how sorry he is for everything. Blah, blah, blah.

I groan, and he shuts his mouth, suddenly looking angry. My eyes heat up again, but I won’t cry. Not here. Not anywhere. Especially in front of him. After the last year, I’m all cried out.

With a sigh, I stand and head for the trail before he can stop me.

Caleb Stephens is an award-winning author writing from Denver, Colorado. His novels include “The Girls in the Cabin,” a psychological thriller, and “Feeders,” a speculative horror thriller. His dark fiction collection “If Only a Heart and Other Tales of Terror” includes the short story “The Wallpaper Man,” which was adapted to film by Falconer Film & Media in 2022. Join his mailing list and learn more at www.calebstephensauthor.com. Follow him on Instagram @calebstephensauthor.

Author’s note: In Chapter 13, Mary is a 37-year-old woman who made a choice that affected the rest of her life. The excerpt is pivotal in adding depth and intrigue to Mary’s character and introduces her “hidden years” — specifically the 1887-1888 academic year at the beginning of her love affair with her student, Will Housel. 

Will Housel, a handsome young man with brown hair and intense brown eyes, enrolled in Mary’s German class in the fall of 1887. Several years earlier, Will had taken a few classes in the university’s preparatory department, but he stayed only a short time. He then worked for a year or two and attended a school in the Midwest. When he returned to Boulder, he entered the university as a four-year bachelor’s degree candidate in the Department of Philosophy and the Arts. The degree requirements at the time included four courses of Latin and Greek and two each of mathematics, rhetoric, oratory, and German. Will came from a prominent Boulder family. His father, Peter Housel, had operated a grist mill, was an elder in the Boulder Valley Presbyterian Church, and served as Boulder County’s first judge. According to Mary’s student Ernest Pease, who had grown up in Will’s neighborhood, the Housel family was “well-educated and had more books in their home than anyone else.”

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

Like the others in Mary’s class, Will’s introduction to German was in grammar and pronunciation. Then he could begin the study of literature. Germany was still considered the educational and cultural center of the world, so a study of German literature was regarded as a necessary part of one’s education. In the spring of 1888, after Will had signed up again, Mary led his German literature class through the usual study of Goethe’s classic drama Faust. According to newspaper editor Amos Bixby, who still visited the campus and reported on the goings-on from time to time, German literature students longed for the time when “Mephistopheles no longer [was] a painted Devil but a sentient presence whom you are perfectly conscious is ready at any moment to drive a sharp bargain for your soul.”

Translation practice included the Song of the Spirits in which Mephistopheles conjured up a vision to lull the character Faust to sleep. It began with the lines “Melt, ye confining vaults up yonder!” and led into Faust’s revelation of nature, the cosmos, and spiritual beauty. The spirits hypnotized Faust by praising sensuality and relaxed his inhibitions by singing:

Yield to the shining
Ether’s fonder
Cerulean gaze!
Cloudbanks darkling
Dwindle for sparkling
Starlets winking,
Milder sun-rays
Drinking the haze!
Heavenly offspring’s
Graces uplifting,
Swaying and turning,
Drifting they wander,
Lovelorn yearning
Follows them yonder
And their garments’
Fluttering garlands
Cover the far lands,
Cover the arbor
Where thought-rapt lover
Lifelong trusting
Pledges to lover
Arbor to Arbor.

With Mary’s dedication to teaching, it is likely that she gave Will individual attention. They probably discussed the themes in Faust as the story unfolded. Dr. Faust, Goethe’s main character, determined to plumb the depths of how it felt to be human. At twenty-five, Will was a few years older than his classmates. He lived with his parents on their farm at Seventy-Fifth Street and Arapahoe Avenue, a few miles east of Boulder. Each day he rode his horse to the university, stabling him in the wagon shed behind Old Main. 

“Separate Lives”

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Where to find it:

• Prospector: Search the combined catalogs of 23 Colorado libraries
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SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.

By this time, Mary had purchased a sidesaddle and a horse named Fanny. Often Mary rode her horse and looked for wildflowers, just as she had done earlier with horses rented from the livery. Even when riding, Mary dressed like a lady in custom-made clothing. Society’s restrictions in the Victorian era dictated a tight-fitting bodice over a corset with voluminous skirts and even a bustle extending the yards of material on the back of the skirt.

It is possible that Mary and Will rode together as she and Winthrop Scarritt had done. At any rate, their teacher–student relationship evolved into a friendship, and at some point, even with all the clothing, the friendship escalated into a romance. 

No one will ever know the details of Mary and Will’s relationship during this time. In the spring of 1888, Mary boarded at the home of a rancher who informed her that he and his wife would be gone from Boulder for a few weeks in order to drive their cattle down from higher pastures in North Park. Perhaps Mary and Will took that opportunity to become lovers.

Mary kept meticulous diaries year after year, yet none from this time period have survived. However, an undated poem, possibly the only written evidence of their intimacy, was stuck into a later diary. It read:

We smiled and stood together for awhile,
swift impulse made us do it.
Your hand reached out toward mine,
your kindly hand.
Or was my hand the first?
What did it matter?
We knew and shared the solitude of crowds,
Lofting above the clatter.

Like Faust, Mary had stepped outside the bounds of morality. Considering the prominence she had achieved in her profession and the idealized role model she had become, her actions were extraordinarily risky.

Silvia Pettem is a Colorado-based historical researcher, writer, and author of more than 20 books on history, biography, missing and unidentified persons, and true crime. She also has a knack for pulling intriguing women out of the past. “Separate Lives” is set in the late 19th century. “In Search of the Blonde Tigress” exposes and expands upon a true crime story from the 1930s, while “Someone’s Daughter” follows a murder investigation from the 1950s. Pettem lives with her husband and two cats in the mountains west of Boulder. She can be reached through her website, silviapettem.com.

Author’s note: This excerpt contains the first few sections of the title story. It introduces Clayton Royster, the protagonist who appears in every story that follows.

“The Waterman”

Sand Point, June 1955

Clayton Royster eased his boat along the brackish channel that led from the bay to the dock behind the seafood market. The market was located along the one road into Sand Point, Virginia, a small town at the head of a peninsula jutting between the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the broad saltmarsh bay to the west. Clayton tied off to the dock cleats, unloaded two baskets brimming with blue crabs and carried them around front. Walter’s Market was a moss-stained, whitewashed cinderblock building with a broad-planked entrance porch and a raw sheet metal roof. The building housed the store in front and living quarters in back. The day was early yet, the ‘Closed’ sign still posted on the door, so he wet down the crabs from the outside spigot and slipped a nickel into the red vending machine on the porch and sat on the step drinking his soda and picking under his fingernails with his pocketknife. The hands, the split nails, cracked knuckles, and calluses fanning across his palms, were the hands of a man older than Clayton’s twenty-three years. But he was proud of them, of what they represented, the seasons crabbing in the bay and fishing in the open sea, more seasons in his few years than most spend in a lifetime. If his hands did not give him away, his deeply tanned face, his brown hair tinted auburn by the elements, the beginning of crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, and his slight but perpetual squint from the sun’s glare surely would—he was a waterman.

 Soon came a ruckus from inside and Walter’s bulk filled the doorway, white T-shirt straining across his gut, dungarees held up by suspenders. He glanced at Clayton and then turned and hollered toward the back room, “Wish I could get them eggs done right just once.”

Clayton stood. “Got your crabs here.” Walter turned his scowl back on Clayton and then noticed the baskets.

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Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

“Let’s take a look.” He stepped from the door and lifted the burlap bag covering the crabs. As he assessed the catch, Clayton looked past him to Loretta, who had come barefoot onto the porch in a sleeveless shift, her strawberry hair pulled into a ponytail. She crossed her arms at her chest and stared openly at him, her pale eyes full of trials.

Walter straightened and scratched at a patch of belly exposed at his beltline. “I’ll be honest with you, son. That is a right scrawny lot. I can go maybe seven-fifty a bushel.”

They both knew within a narrow range what price they would settle on, but the haggle was an expected part of doing business.

“You’re probably right,” Clayton said. “I should dump them back into the bay to grow up.”

“I might see my way to eight,” Walter said. “Not a penny more.” Clayton nodded.

When Walter walked inside to retrieve payment, Clayton stepped toward Loretta. “Can you get free for a bit?”

“Maybe. He’s talking about going to Pungo to see about getting sweet corn for the weekend.”

Clayton bent to retie his boot and allowed the back of his hand to brush her calf just to feel the electricity rush through him. He rose and backed away at the sound of Walter returning.

Mid-day, Clayton watched from a stand of pin oaks as Walter climbed into his truck and pulled away, raising a plume of white dust from the crushed shell roadbed. Inside the market, he idled beside a shelf displaying an assortment of carvings from local craftsmen—decoys, sand pipers, gulls—and scanned the dry good isles to ensure the store was free of customers. Satisfied, he walked toward the back and found Loretta behind the checkout counter, sipping from a glass of lemonade, a small rotating fan stirring her hair. He embraced her, tasted the tartness on her lips, her tongue, and he ran his hand down the smooth curve of her back, and bent to kiss the welt showing on her arm. “He do this to you?”

She took his hand and pulled him toward the ice room. “Hurry. He won’t be gone long.”

At First Sight, May 1950

Clayton first laid eyes on Loretta five years earlier, in May of 1950. He was walking the beach with his fishing gear when from the south wended the black dot of a pickup on the hard pack. The truck eventually pulled close and a man who looked to be Clayton’s father’s age, but with loose jowls, raised a finger to the bill of his cap as they passed, but did not stop. A black-and-tan hound occupied the passenger seat, its long face hanging from the window. In the bed of the pickup, an aged lady sat in a rocking chair and beside her a girl shared space with two mattresses and a few wooden crates. Clayton noticed the girl immediately, fifteen or sixteen he guessed, and slender as a surf rod. He willed her to glance his way, but she ignored him, looking out to sea instead. Clayton watched the truck until it disappeared between two dunes toward the blacktop that led into town.

People talked about the newcomers. The man, Walter Pine, had purchased the old Henley market, and quickly gained notice for being fawning with customers, contentious with suppliers, and disengaged with most everyone else.

 “A bit standoffish,” some said of the Pine family, who by and large kept to themselves. “The elderly lady is sickly, I hear.”

“The Waterman”

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“His mother?”

“So I’m told. The girl tends to her.”

“His daughter?”

“Wife.”

“The girl?”

“Loretta Pine. His wife.”

“There has to be a tale behind that match.”

Indeed, there was. The most repeated version had her daddy involved in some construction accident that left him alive, but feeble-minded. The family needed help getting by, children by the score, and it seemed Walter came up with the solution.

Clayton began selling crabs to Walter during that first summer. He found reasons to hang around the store just to catch sight of Loretta. They began visiting whenever Walter was away, innocently at first, just two young people passing the time. He’d talk of his dream—a commercial boat: a thirty-footer, mahogany hull, Cummings diesel, something that would allow him to earn a living on the water full-time. Loretta told of her family, the pride she took in being able to help provide for them through Walter and the market. Clayton admired her sense of obligation. He’d left his family at sixteen when his father decided to take an insurance job in Richmond. Clayton declined to move and instead went to work at Sonny Ferrell’s ESSO station after school and lived in a spare room that Sonny and his wife were never able to fill with a child of their own.

When Walter’s mother died at the beginning of their second summer season in Sand Point, Walter reluctantly left Loretta in charge of the store while he carted his mother back south for burial. During his absence, one thing led to another between Loretta and Clayton.

Even during an interminable two-year stint drafted into the Army, Clayton ferried back to Sand Point on every furlough from Fort Eustis, and he and Loretta continued to sneak into the ice room for quick, urgent couplings, and snatches of conversation. But that was the whole of it. Once returned and back on the water, Clayton worried about his life spinning in circles, impatient to get on with things but unable to let go of Loretta, and she unwilling to let go of Walter’s money. They’d nearly been caught a half-dozen times but always their luck held.

Sand Point, ice room, June 1955

Until it didn’t.

From the ice room, a sound out front startled them. Clayton tucked to a corner as Loretta ladled a bucket of ice chips and carried it to the display counter. Clayton caught sight of Walter leaning against the counter, red-faced, heaving like a bellows.

“Mr. Pine,” Loretta said. “I thought you were headed to Pungo.”

“Goddamned truck quit on me a mile out. Had to walk back in this goddamned heat.”

“Let me get you some water.”

“Goddamned Zed Phelps passed me right by and didn’t slow a tick. I’ll remember that son-of-a-bitch.”

“Maybe some lemonade?”

“Bring me a beer.”

“I don’t think there is any beer.”

“There’s beer. Find it.”

“I can’t find what’s not there.”

“Watch that mouth.” Walter jabbed a finger towards Loretta’s face. The bucket she held slipped from her grasp, sending ice chips skating across the floor.

“There you go,” Walter said, and clapped her on the ear with the flat of his hand. Loretta staggered but Walter grabbed her by the arm and raised his hand again, but before he could bring it down, Clayton came up from behind and swung a wooden duck decoy to the back of Walter’s head with such force the bird’s head snapped from its body. Walter toppled in slow motion. On the way down, his forehead struck the corner of the countertop and blood began pooling from both wounds as soon as he settled to the floor. Clayton stood over him, still holding the duck head.

“Lord Jesus, what have you done?” Loretta said.

“Is he dead?”

“Go. Hurry.”

“Come with me.”

“Just go.”

Gary Schanbacher was born in the Midwest, raised in the southeast, came west for graduate school, and never left. He is the author of “Crossing Purgatory” (2013), winner of a SPUR Award from the Western Writers of America, and the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction, and “Migration Patterns: Stories” (2007), a PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award Runner-up, and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the High Plains First Book Award. He and his wife live in Littleton, Colorado. 

This is an excerpt from “Blood Betrayal,” the 2024 Colorado Book Award winner for Mystery.

1

Harry loved his hometown, except on nights like these. The streets of Blackwater Falls were deep indigo, the darkness blotting out the foothills and cloaking the houses at the bottom of the hills. He couldn’t see much; he could only hear the footsteps he was chasing, young voices calling out to each other. He took a terrible moment to decide whether to call for backup or continue on by himself. Budgets were tight; he wasn’t supposed to waste resources. And he was only on the trail of a couple of kids, young hoodlums who’d been marking up the town with graffiti. Street art, some said. What the young did for entertainment these days.

He turned a corner, feeling a twinge in his chest. He raised a hand to massage the twinge, and at the same time switched on his body cam. Best not to make mistakes, like getting out of his car when he should have radioed in. But the suspects he was chasing had disappeared down a lane where the car couldn’t follow. He was a middle-of-the-road cop, never amounting to much, but he was good at keeping the streets safe at night, and was liked by the people he met.

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Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

Not by these hoodlums, though. They were shouting insults at him like “pig” and “fuck the police.” It gave him a sense of who he was dealing with. There weren’t many Black kids in town, except for the kids of workers at the local meatpacking plant. The ones he was chasing might not be local; graffiti artscapes had popped up all over the greater Denver area. Blackwater’s gazebo had been hit, as well as the concrete wall behind the falls. Both had been cleaned up, but now a quiet residential neighborhood was at risk of being defaced.

Harry didn’t like it.

“Stop! Police!” he shouted, hearing the strain in his voice that echoed the pumping of his lungs. He was definitely getting past this. It was time to talk to Sheriff Grant about retirement. The sheriff took good care of his boys—he’d often told Harry he was a credit to the department. Be nice to go out on a high note. One final collar, all violence avoided.

Harry stopped for half a second, fumbling for his flashlight. Where was it? There. His thumb switched it on, flooding the dark crosswalk. One of the runners had sprinted away, vaulting a fence, something Harry couldn’t hope to do. The other was straight ahead, heading into a cul-de-sac. The vandals had already been here, garbage bins lined up in a row, the lurid sprawl of graffiti on the cans.

“Stop!” Harry shouted again. “There’s nowhere to run, son.”

He gave chase, the flashlight veering wildly. He was closing in on his suspect, who was trapped between the fenced-in dead end of a cul-de-sac and the bins Harry had just passed.

The runner stumbled. Harry didn’t get a good look at his face, but the runner had something solid in his hand, he saw it in the beam of his flashlight.

Gun!

“Don’t do it, son,” he cried. “I don’t want to shoot you.”

His hand sweating, and his heart thumping wildly in his chest, he slicked his own gun free, dropping the flashlight to the road. He was supposed to hold them both, he thought, but somehow he couldn’t manage it. If he fired—God, if he fired, he didn’t want to cause any harm.

The runner darted at Harry, his raised arm menacing. He loomed above Harry, his build disguised by the baggy hoodie he wore.

Harry fired a warning shot, a sharp crack through the silence.

“Stop now, kid! Please!” His voice shook.

The runner charged as Harry fell back, his hand raised squarely in front of his face.

Harry couldn’t see a thing. He gave the runner one more warning, saw him raise his hand.

“Blood Betrayal”

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SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.

Harry’s gun went off.

The runner’s hand opened and the object in his hand rolled away down the street.

Then he dropped like a stone.

Harry’s sweat-slicked hand gripped his radio. He fumbled through a call for backup.

A sharp voice on the other end snapped him out of his daze. An ambulance was en route.

He fell to his knees. Blood flowed over his hand, and Harry’s whole body trembled.

He found the wound below the neck and applied pressure. The pulpy mass of blood beneath his fingers made him want to pass out, as doors opened, flooding the street with light. He saw the runner’s face. He was far too young to die, and Harry began to sob.

People gathered around him, some with their cell phones out.

He had just enough presence of mind to order them back into their houses. They couldn’t be allowed to touch anything. Not the flashlight he’d lost track of, not his gun, and not the object that had rolled away when the runner had let it fall.

Not a gun, no, not a gun.

It was a can of spray paint.

2

Inaya studied the photograph that had pride of place in their family home, the blue and gold mystique of Afghanistan, the lonely gate in the desert with its spiraled columns and interwoven hazarbaf decoration, patterns laid in brick. A pair of turquoise doors between twin minarets and beneath a high sandstone arch was the photograph’s one note of light; the rest suggested abandonment either by God or man, and the bone-deep weariness of war. The print hung in the hallway that opened onto the Rahmans’ elegantly furnished living room, where Inaya and her father were lingering over elaichi chai.

Inaya’s father, Haseeb Rahman, had told his family that the photograph had been taken by a friend from his youth. One of many friends her father had left behind on his journey as a refugee from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Chicago, to settle ultimately in Denver, Colorado, each migration adding a new flavor to his life yet subtracting something also. Her father carried within him a profound sense of loss. Inaya considered the print with fresh eyes and asked her father, as she often did, to tell her about its history, to name the place it was taken.

Like the detective she was, Inaya surmised that if he spoke the name of the place with the derelict gate, she would be able to search out its history—a war story, most likely, the vestiges of a past her father rarely spoke of, secrets he kept to himself.

There had been a history before Peshawar, she knew. A life lived under Taliban rule in a land that her father loved. She wanted him to speak of it so the wounds could heal. She knew there was something he wasn’t telling her, something that had made a profound impact on how he viewed the successive invaders of his country. He denied that it was about the Soviet occupation that had lasted a decade, but if it was about the more recent American presence, she wondered why he didn’t speak. Her partner in policing, Catalina Hernandez, often shared her thoughts on harm done by traumas left untreated, a veil of shadows cast over minds in deep distress. Let the light in, and the mind could heal. Yet her father continued to deflect her questions. Some memories were better left buried, he believed. To resurrect them would be to invite a form of nazar, the evil eye creeping into the light with its foreshadowing of harm.

“Tell me about the picture, Baba. One day I might be able to visit the ruins of the house with the gate, and you could come with me.”

“I will never set foot in Afghanistan again. I have seen too much.”

His quiet certainty unnerved her.

“You can’t know that, Baba.”

“A flame when it starts to blaze can burn down a whole town. Don’t ask me to dig up old graves, to wash my wounds with blood.”

She wondered if the poetic phrase was a quotation. Her father was fond of the poetry of Maulana, or Rumi as he was known in the West, but even more so of the great Pashto-language

poet Khushal Khan Khattak, whom her irreverent younger sisters had nicknamed Triple K. The verse could be one of Khattak’s. She didn’t have the chance to ask.

Freshening his voice, her father said, “If the Taliban should fall, then I will tell you about the country on the other side of this gate. The gate that stood between two worlds.”

“Let it be soon, Baba.” She pressed his hand.

He poured her another cup of tea. “You are more persistent than your mother and sisters, I suppose this is what comes of having a police detective for a daughter.”

The doorbell rang, piercing the quiet moment. Inaya made a wry face.

“You jinxed us,” she teased. “That’s probably for me.”

Inaya’s younger sister Noor came down the stairs as Inaya went into the hall. Dressed all in pinks, Noor looked as fresh and lovely as a tulip.

“Wow.” Inaya made big eyes at her sister. “Has someone come to pick you up?”

Noor bumped Inaya with her hip.

“I was doing a clip for my social media channels—how to judge the right shade of pink for your skin tone.”

Inaya flicked on the outside lights and peered through the peephole. No one was standing on the porch. Kubo, the family cat, twined through her legs with an affectionate murmur, nearly causing her to trip. Kubo believed it was his sworn duty to be the first one to greet visitors.

“Catch the little rebel, Noor.”

“Come here, darling,” Noor coaxed. Inaya opened the door, stationing herself between the open door and her sister out of habit.

The heady scent of gardenias drifted in from the porch. She cast a glance around, not seeing anyone. A frisson trickled down her spine.

As she made to close the door, she heard Noor gasp. Kubo had slipped from her hold and streaked through the open door.

Someone moved in the shadows at the foot of the drive. Noor made a move to chase Kubo down. With a face like stone, Inaya shoved her back with one arm. She pulled the door closed behind her, keeping it shut with one hand.

A man emerged from the shadows, freezing Inaya in place. 

Kubo was caught in his grip, huge hands clasped around his neck.

The man advanced on Inaya, who stood frozen, her hand gripping the doorknob.

“Detective Rahman?”

The man’s name was John Broda. His voice rose up from her nightmares.

Ausma Zehanat Khan holds a Ph.D. in international human rights law with a specialization in military intervention and war crimes in the Balkans. She is also a contributor to the anthologies “Private Investigations,” “Sword Stone Table” and “The Perfect Crime,” and the former editor-in-chief of Muslim Girl magazine. A British-born Canadian and former adjunct law professor, Khan lived and worked in the Denver area before relocating to Washington, D.C. with her husband.

How quickly she’d become animal. How fast feral had descended. The upkeep of the body seemed beyond her—hair tangled, teeth filmy, a real need to shower. It was absurd how fast a foggy lonely had descended too. How, exactly, was she to occupy herself for the next three months, not to mention the rest of her empty, empty life?

Ammalie ate a pear with one hand, her driving hand, and combed her hair with the fingers of the other as she drove past the dried grass outside Cheyenne. Empty, empty, empty. She jerked her fingers through graying tangles—dry as the grass outside—which she’d done for most of the entire circuitous drive from Chicago. Finger-combing was simply not the same as with a brush, which she had forgotten to pack, and then subsequently forgot to buy on each of her stops. She’d had the seemingly brilliant idea to grab an extra plastic fork from the cafe in Chadron, Nebraska, but it broke nearly immediately after trying to use it in her unruly hair somewhere right on the Wyoming-Nebraska border in a town called Ditch Creek, which was as absurd as the fork. Was it a ditch or was it a creek? How could its status be so poorly defined? She was acting kind of crazy and she knew it. Self-awareness was not reserved for the highly educated white-collars of the world, though she suspected they thought otherwise. Anyone with half a plastic fork tangled in her hair should get some help. Anyone who’d left her humble-but-comfortable home in a rush in order not to lose momentum or let reason seep in, and anyone who likely hadn’t brushed her hair fully in a week or a month before that, well, that person was. not. well.

She didn’t care. She could care less. She could care less than caring because she’d hit rock bottom, end of a rope, the place where maxims or axioms—or whatever one called phrases about phrases—no longer applied because the world no longer made sense. Bits of sweetly-worded wisdoms simply did not apply to chaos. Last night, prone in her sleeping bag in her car, she’d listened to a podcast about people who’d experienced a recent breakup or death of a partner, and how they had reduced executive functioning. She snort-laughed at the truth of that. Yes, her neural and behavioral changes were wildly evident. No MRI images needed here. Husband dead, son launched, job she liked gone, a world running amok, a planet lurching through space and being mistreated all the way.

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

Without a doubt, her brain was not working right. But the real mystery was: How did others continue to pierce the fog with clear and focused thoughts? And why couldn’t she be one of them?

She spit the half-chewed pear pieces into a plastic cup containing the remains of sunflower seed shells. The pear was underripe, it was going to give her a stomachache, she should listen to nature. Then she reached for her water bottle, and, in doing so, spilled the pear bits and sunflower seed shells all over her cupholder and floorboard and her mail, which is when she acknowledged once again how very wide was the gap between the goal of “Be Interesting!” and the “Being Interesting Is F***ing Difficult!” truth.

It was a chasm, really.

She blamed it on the people who made videos on van-living and strong-women-solo-traveling. She blamed it on Frances McDormand. How delightful it would be to put them in jail for misleading the public. Living on the road was not as easy as it looked, and she ticked off the missing essentials in her mind:

The frequent need for a pair of scissors, tape, fingernail clippers.

The frequent need to pee.

Ice to keep food cold.

Heat source to keep feet warm.

Something to do during long dark hours.

Room to move around, to stretch legs, to bend at the waist. She was not born a hunchback, after all, and she felt a pang of sorrow for those who were, and then felt a zing of shame, since she should be grateful for a straight spine that required bending when living in the back of a car.

Oh, and yes. And someone beside you. So that when you saw sunlit sandstone cliffs and mammoth bones and heard wind whistling through caves, as she’d done in South Dakota, there would be someone to ooh and aah with, which made the oohing and aahing comfortable and fulfilling instead of stab-your-heart-out depressing.

These were essential things.

“Three Keys”

>> READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Where to find it:

• Prospector: Search the combined catalogs of 23 Colorado libraries
• Libby: E-books and audio books
• NewPages Guide: List of Colorado independent bookstores
• Bookshop.org: Searchable database of bookstores nationwide

SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.

She scratched at her scalp and dandruff swirled in the air, caught by the sun. Disgusting. This air was dry, no joke. Perhaps her scalp was emitting the particles of fog in her consciousness, an indication of her unclear thinking and the reduced activation of network areas of her brain. Her whole head, inside and out, was a dry-hot mess. What she needed was a brush, soap, and water, which is when it would get better. She would get better. Life would clarify. Make sense.

Soon. Maybe tonight. Tonight, she’d be turning a key to the rest of her life.

Denver was an unsurprising hell—no one, not even a nutcase such as herself, delighted in the trauma of speeding, merging, honking traffic. She felt like she was in a flock of berserk geese, all of them nearly flying into one another in a moment of panic. But soon after, she was on the exit that took her into the mountains, and then, yes, it was like freaking angels singing. Early October, the aspens bright yellow, lit up by a fall-tilted sun that was playing hide-and-seek with storm clouds.

She pulled up to a rest stop with a sign that read KENOSHA PASS, parked in the gravel pullout, and sat, dazed. Beautiful, truly beautiful; now we’re talking. This is where calendar photos were born. Golden leaves, green pines, blue peaks, buttery sunlight slants. She closed her eyes and rested, heard herself make a gurgling sound as she fell into a brief moment of sleep. This was a new skill set of middle age that kept surprising her—a lifelong insomniac who could now zonk out in a car. It was a brief moment, though, and when she opened her eyes, she was surprised to discover that the sky and weather had undergone some kind of seasonal surgery. Now it was blustery, the sun hidden, and there was a hint of spitting snow.

She let out a dramatic sigh—she had noticed her new penchant for those too—and gave up on her daydream of a sandwich in a sunny splotch on a fallen tree. Instead, she stayed in the car and ate and read the Colorado sign’s details, something about South Park Ranching and Kake’s Charcoal Kilns, which she knew nothing about, did not care about, and never wanted to care about, though she had the vague notion she should. If she had been with Vincent, he would have found a way of cajoling her into caring, if only because he cared, which she would have found annoying but maybe simultaneously endearing.

The parking area was crowded—mostly with people in their twenties or thirties and unaware they were in the best years of their lives, brazenly heading into the mountains despite the dandruff-like snow—the planet having the same dry-scalp problem she did, apparently. Something about these hikers’ tenacity both annoyed and endeared them to her, and she took inspiration from their bravado and sighed and got out to pee, which was her version of living it up bravely, she supposed. There was no Porta Potti or outhouse, so she crouched between the two car doors, even though someone might see her bare ass briefly as they whizzed by on the road. Arrest her, already.

She had become an animal. This lunacy could put her in jail. Jail! She should think this trip through a little better. Mari kept telling her so with an increased pitch and vigor in her voice, and Mari was right, and Mari didn’t even know the whole truth. The trip was dangerous on several levels. Dangerous because she couldn’t think too far in advance—Just one key at a time, she kept saying. Dangerous because Powell or Apricot might come looking for her and see what a mess she was. Dangerous because she was about to break into a house, dangerous because she knew she was flipping out—and that worst of all, she was flipping out for the first time in her life, which meant she had no experience in how to handle it.

She considered the tangle of keys dangling and clanking on their key ring, turned the one that started her car, then turned it back off and did the drama-sigh. “Learn to live a little, push yourself a little, eh?” she said, and forced herself out, bundling up with hat and mittens and scarf, muttering a scattering of cusswords about the cold, the curses somehow feeling deeply satisfying and absolutely necessary.

She was asked immediately to take a young couple’s photo with a JUST MARRIED sign soaped on their window—first some shots with the mountains behind, and then some that included the parking lot, because the two women were trying to fit in the sign that said 9,999 FEET, which they clearly found amusing, giggling and falling into one another with laughter, something about one foot shy of five digits, and she had to relent and smile at how in-love people found nearly anything amusing. Plus, she suspected they were high, the pot shops being plentiful in this state, maybe the 9,999 kind of high. Very high. She might be a bland-white-bread-middle-age-invisible woman, but she wasn’t stupid. She started humming a Billy Joel lyric, “She’s been living in her white-bread world,” as she tried for several angles in an effort to cut out the cars, including her own dirty beast, since they made the photo ugly, although youngsters these days could probably just fuzz out the ugly of any photo, a skill set she had not yet cared to embrace and would die without embracing.

Excerpted from “Three Keys” by Laura Pritchett. Copyright © 2024 by Laura Pritchett. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Laura Pritchett is the author of seven novels and two books of nonfiction. Her work is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by her upbringing in Colorado. Both her fiction and nonfiction often focus on issues of ecology, conservation, climate change, and social justice. She has been awarded the PEN USA Award for Fiction, the High Plains Literary Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the Colorado Book Award, the WILLA Fiction Award, and shortlisted for many others. She is the editor of three anthologies, all on environmental topics, and writes regularly for magazines. 

Author’s note: Even before Jeff German was murdered – allegedly by a politician who was upset at stories he wrote – he faced violence from people who were the focus of his stories. In 1980, German was at a retirement party at the Sands Hotel when he confronted a man he was writing about and who he believed was threatening him and vandalizing his vehicle. The man responded with a sucker punch.

Early in his Vegas career, German got on a story about court officer Seymour Freedman collecting debts for loan shark Jasper Speciale at the same time as he collected campaign contributions for the sheriff. Freedman was also collecting a paycheck from taxpayers for his court job. The storyline was, not surprisingly, unpopular with Freedman. After the columns, German’s car window was smashed and air let out of the tires. He also received threatening anonymous phone calls, warning him to be careful about who he was writing about. 

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

One evening in the fall of 1985, German was drinking at a retirement party at the Sands Hotel for Justice Court Chief Clerk Eileen Carson. German noticed Freedman, a former New York cop and boxer, at the event and confronted him about the threats and damage to his vehicle. German always prized the cars he drove, favoring upscale Volkswagen sedans and owning a black Mustang in the late 1980s. An attack on his always well-maintained vehicle was like an assault on his person. 

“Sy, when are you going to call off the dogs?” German demanded. 

Freedman didn’t blink. He threw the drink he was holding in his right hand right in German’s face. With his left hand, Freedman sucker punched German. A ring Freedman was wearing slashed German’s lip. German had to have four stitches, but the encounter didn’t stop him from writing about corruption and organized crime. 

After the assault, Metro Police Sergeant David Groover came to take a report at the hospital from German. Groover had been a target of German’s reporting for a high-profile incident that dominated the local news and was even portrayed in Casino with some artistic license. On the evening of June 9, 1980, Groover, an intelligence detective at the time, and Sergeant Gene Smith were staking out the Upper Crust Mob-run pizza joint. Spilotro and Cullotta were sitting outside the pizza joint shooting the shit when a Lincoln driven by Frank Bluestein pulled up. Bluestein went in, ordered food, and joined the mobsters outside while his dinner baked. Bluestein was a maître d’ at the then-Mob-controlled Hacienda Hotel & Casino. His father was a member of the culinary union and was a subject of a search warrant related to the Spilotro investigation. The maître d’ chatted with the mobsters until it was time to grab his food. 

Groover and Smith watched the exchange. Bluestein then took off at high speed, and Groover and Smith pursued him to determine who was associating with Spilotro. The undercover car pulled over Bluestein for traffic infractions, and he exited the Lincoln gun in hand. The undercover officers shot him. In Casino, the portrayal of the incident shows Bluestein only had a hoagie wrapped in foil instead of a gun. Then the movie officers planted a gun to justify the shooting. 

In real life, Oscar Goodman called the shooting a police execution, and German reported those allegations regularly. But at the coroner’s inquest, Groover presented evidence that showed the gun was bought in Chicago by Bluestein’s brother so it couldn’t have been a plant. It was ruled a clean shoot. Despite that evidence, Bluestein’s family sued, but the officers prevailed. The controversy only ended when the U.S. Supreme Court denied hearing an appeal in the civil lawsuit. 

Groover and Smith had bigger things to fear than civil lawsuits. Authorities in Chicago notified Metro that the Mob had put out a contract on them over the Bluestein shooting. Police wanted a wiretap on Bluestein’s father, but Clark County District Attorney Bob Miller didn’t like wiretaps. Metro Intelligence Commander Kent Clifford, as he told a Las Vegas author before his death, got into an argument with Miller about associating with a person connected to the casino skim for the Mob so there was bad blood when Miller’s office went to a judge for the wiretap. On the second day of the tap, the judge told police someone in the DA’s office tried to get the wiretap closed down, but the judge refused. When that failed, German received a tip about the wiretap, writing a front-page story in the Sun on August 21, 1981, titled “Purported Kill Plot led to Bluestein Wiretap.” 

The phones went quiet. Metro was pissed.

Miller, who would later be elected Nevada governor, contends he doesn’t remember giving German a story on the wiretap, though he had “an off-again, on-again” relationship with German. Miller contends his only association with the Mob was his father’s business partner who went to prison for skimming from casinos. As DA, Miller thought wiretaps should be used sparingly since they were an invasion of privacy. He concedes he did not have a good relationship with the sheriff at the time and supported his opponent in the next election.

Breaking the story of the wiretap put German into the hotseat. Clifford called German into his office on August 25, 1981, read German his Miranda rights against self-incrimination, and then grilled German on his sources for the wiretap story. Clifford told German he wasn’t a target of the investigation but his cooperation was necessary to determine if someone broke the wiretap disclosure law, which was a felony punishable by up to six years in prison. German and his bosses refused to reveal the source of the story, citing the state’s reporter shield law. Protecting sources was one of the bedrocks of journalism and one that German took very seriously. 

“The Last Story”

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SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.

German had previously been subpoenaed by lawyers for Spilotro. U.S. District Judge Harry E. Claiborne quashed those subpoenas citing the Nevada Shield Law and the First Amendment. The issue was so important to Nevada journalists that there would be a fight about German’s sources that went to the state Supreme Court even after his 2022 death. 

The Chicago hitmen targeting Groover and Smith came to Vegas and were closely tracked by Metro officers. They left without carrying out the contract. Nevertheless, Clifford didn’t like something like that hanging over his officers. He flew to Chicago and threatened Spilotro’s bosses to get the contract cancelled. German wrote dozens of stories about the Bluestein shooting, often taking the side of the family as it was being represented by Goodman, who was then friendly with the young reporter. 

When Groover arrived at the hospital to take a report from German over the Freedman assault, German was crestfallen. 

“Shit, I can’t catch a break,” German told Groover. 

The reporter complained that not only was he punched in the face but now the officer investigating the incident had it out for him. German decided not to press charges in the case, and Groover thought it was because he was getting a lot of favorable publicity over the sucker punch. 

German, who later called the punch a “badge of honor,” didn’t let a little violence stop him from writing about Freedman or the incident. On September 30, 1985, German’s column on the front page of the Metro section laid out the incident, harping again on Freedman collecting money for the Mob while also collecting campaign funds for the sheriff. 

“Mom never told me journalism would be like this,” the tongue-in-cheek column says. It’s “going to take more than a sucker punch to scare me off.” 

John L. Smith, then a colleague at the Sun, congratulated German on his column about the incident, saying: “Great story. Somebody should punch you in the mouth every day.” The incident became somewhat of a joke around the newsroom as German would detail in an October 2, 1985, column. German quotes city editor Bill Guthrie asking him to contribute to the Sun’s blood drive and then reversing course to say: “Oh, I forgot. You’ve already done that.” 

Freedman’s violence did not stop his name from appearing in Jeff German’s columns. On October 9, 1985, German updated readers that he received an FBI report, apparently leaked to him, while recovering from his encounter with Freedman. He details Freedman’s loansharking work for Speciale day by day as it is listed in the document. That was the typical fearless German. 

Nevada remained a tough place throughout the 1980s. It wasn’t just gangsters and their henchmen who practiced media criticism with personal attacks and even physical altercations. 

In 1988, Nevada Attorney General Brian McKay called German a “venomous little man” during a television interview on KTVN-TV’s Face the State program. He charged German had no credibility, failed to pay attention to the truth, and didn’t “know fact from fiction.” 

McKay had been traveling to national and western attorney general conferences. German started keeping a “McKay Mileage Meter,” urging readers to contact him if they saw McKay or his wife outside the state. That really got under McKay’s skin. 

A Republican, McKay charged that German was doing the bidding of and working as a “hit man” for Bob Miller’s supporters. Miller, a Democrat, had moved on from district attorney to lieutenant governor and would be elected governor for his first term in 1989. The Sun leaned Democratic, and the Review-Journal supported Republicans. McKay felt the Sun, and German, were attacking him based on partisan politics and not for substantial journalistic reasons. 

German responded to McKay’s attacks in the United Press International article by saying he was pleased that the attorney general was an “avid reader” of his column. 

“I’m not little,” he also told UPI. 

Of course, when Miller was elected governor, German started writing about his travel, which also irritated Miller. Miller was traveling to Washington, D.C., to confer with national leaders. He thought if the president of the United States and Congress would come to Nevada, he wouldn’t have to travel, but they weren’t going to do that.

Arthur Kane has been an award-winning investigative reporter, editor, producer and executive producer for three decades. At The Denver Post, he exposed problems with the state medical board’s discipline of doctors that sparked a change in state law, and at KMGH-TV he produced or oversaw investigations that won the Peabody and two duPont-Columbia awards. He is currently investigations editor at the Las Vegas Review-Journal and was named Nevada’s outstanding journalist of the year in 2020 and 2022 by the Nevada Press Association.

“Brynn and Sebastian Hate Each Other” is the 2024 Colorado Book Award winner for Romance.

In less than two seconds of awkward dead-air time, Colton whisper-yelled at Carl and Carl shoved New Guy out of the way, leaving camera two unmanned so he could take over at the teleprompter, while I heard an urgent “Brynn! Get us to break!” in my earpiece. 

And yet, no one seemed to have any concerns about the fact that our cagey veteran, the senior man on the morning news-entertainment team at the highest-rated network in the country, was sitting there speechless and shuffling next to me, completely undone by the lack of a script and a hiccup in production. 

Before we’d hit the three-second mark on any of those clocks, I smiled at the red light on camera four. “Dynamic duos besides us, you mean?” Camera four was awkward at the angle we were sitting, but Orly at camera one was geared up and ready to go to Maria at the news desk, and everyone else was caught up in the complete meltdown of broadcasting professionals in the middle of the room. Seriously, how many people did it take to make sure Mark Irvine knew how to say goodbye? The world’s oldest-living triplets were probably still in the building after our interview with them. Maybe we could call them in too. 

“That other dynamic duo, Elena and Hayley, are making their way to their couch, so it’s almost time for us to hop back in the Sunupmobile and head back to the Sunupcave.” I patted Mark on the shoulder and nudged him to turn to our right and focus on camera four with me. “But we’ll see everyone again soon, right, Mark? Same Sunup time . . .” 

Mark nodded at the camera and grinned. “Too right. We’ll be back to wrap up right after this from your local station.” 

Same Sunup channel. Same Sunup channel! How much more perfectly could I have possibly lobbed that pitch to him? 

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

The light on camera four went off, and I exhaled and relaxed against the back of the couch. “Yikes,” I muttered to Mark. “Who needs coffee with adrenaline bursts like that?” 

He stood up in a huff and shouted to the ever-growing huddle. “Colton!” 

I glanced at Colton, who responded to Mark’s bellowing with a forced smile for his star. “I know, Mark. Sorry about that. We’re working on it.” 

Greta hurried over to me with powder for my nose. I felt the trickles of sweat running down my back, undoubtedly ruining a perfectly-gorgeous-five-minutes-ago Jason Wu silk blouse, and I had no doubt my face was showing the perspiration just as much. 

“Eddie had the bad luck of antiquated equipment taking its last breath in one of the first moments he had actual responsibility,” Greta informed me quietly with a pained expression on her face. 

“Who’s Eddie?” Mark asked as Deb touched up his face. Without makeup, the man had the complexion of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. 

“Eddie,” I stated calmly. “The new production assistant.” 

No, I hadn’t known New Guy’s name either, but if you weren’t even capable of using context clues, you deserved to be shown up in front of the crew, at least a little bit. 

Not that Mark was only shown up a little bit today. 

Greta fluffed my hair and winked at me before backing away. I smiled back at her, as humbly as I could, straightened my skirt, and prepared for one final sign-off segment. 

“So I bet you’re actually from Philadelphia or somewhere, aren’t you?” 

I did a double take toward Mark. “I’m sorry?” 

He looked down at the lapel of his suit jacket and picked off a minuscule piece of lint. “You’re always talking about your small town, rural roots—” 

“I do seem to do that a lot, don’t I?” I grimaced. 

“I get it. It works. I just think you could stand to tone it down a bit. It was cute when you were third hour, but we cover serious news here.” He looked over at me and grinned, and I resisted the temptation to remind him we’d built a snowman with the Biebers on Tuesday. 

“You know as well as I do, Mark, that Colton decides what the audience should know about me. If the down-home thing is what viewers respond to, that’s what they’re going to have me talk about.” 

He tsked and tightened the knot of his tie. “Rookie mistake. Yes, you read the lines they give you, but when the camera stops rolling, you must lay down the law. If they want you to be ‘down- home’ and you refuse, they’ll change tack.” 

He made it sound so simple, but I knew it wasn’t. If they wanted me to be “down-home” and I refused, what was to stop them from hiring one of the million other women who wanted my job and didn’t mind saying “Aww, shucks” on occasion? 

“Brynn and Sebastian Hate Each Other”

>> READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Where to find it:

• Prospector: Search the combined catalogs of 23 Colorado libraries
• Libby: E-books and audio books
• NewPages Guide: List of Colorado independent bookstores
• Bookshop.org: Searchable database of bookstores nationwide

SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.

More than anything I wanted to ask Mark what he had refused to be that had caused them to change tack toward Snoozeville. Hip? Cool? Had Mark Irvine stood up in front of the network honchos and blatantly refused to let them exploit him as interesting? 

But he wasn’t trying to be unkind, so I didn’t need to be either. He was patronizing, sure, but I perfectly understood the expression on his face and the sentiment behind it. I’d experienced it countless times throughout my career. He was helping me. Imparting wisdom. Taking me under his wing. I would never receive any kudos or straight-out gratitude for saving his butt on-air—today or in any of the inevitable days to come—but in his chauvinistic, out-of-date, out-of-touch way, this was him saying “Thank you.” 

And I was expected to say “Thank you” in return. 

Colton came running over to us, huffing and puffing like a man wearing Ferragamo loafers and sporting a pocket square was never supposed to. “Great work, you two.” 

Two? 

“I was just telling Brynn she’s been going a little over the top with the country-girl routine, but for her first week . . . not too bad. I’ll work with her to—” 

I accidentally scoffed, interrupting him. I attempted to turn it into a clearing of my throat, but their eyes were already on me. 

I patted my chest and coughed as believably as I could without producing phlegm. “Pardon me.” I looked over my shoulder and called out, “Greta, could you please get me a lozenge?” 

Colton eyed me with concern. “We’re back from affiliates in ninety, and then you hand it over to Elena. Can you tough it out for a little longer?” 

Oh, forget that. Greta reached into our midst with a tin of lozenges, but I ignored her hand. “I’m fine.” My lips tightened into an expression that I hoped could be described as easygoing—but really, I would have settled for anything this side of homicidal. “Do we have a prompter or—” 

“Just wing it,” the dummy next to me answered before I could offer to break out my amateur ventriloquism skills. “Which camera?” A voice from the control room boomed over the speakers. “Colton, we’ve almost got the feed back to the eastern affiliates. Should we key up the other—”

“No!” Colton threw his hands up in the air and spun on his heel. “When did we lose the feed?!” He turned back to us but began backing away toward the increasingly urgent chorus of his name being cried out from every corner of the room. He put the index finger of one hand to his ear and gave us a thumbs-up with the other hand. “Stick with four.” 

I readjusted my position toward camera four. At least this time I had a little bit of warning and I wouldn’t have to twist around into a television broadcasting pose best described as the Linda Blair Exorcist Maneuver. 

“That was a perfect example. You should have stood up for yourself.” Mark was bestowing wisdom upon me once more. “I took your credit. You should have taken it back.” 

I tilted my head and studied him. What do you know? Maybe Mark Irvine wasn’t as clueless as he seemed. 

“Yeah, well . . .” I tucked my ankles and knees together and folded my legs into the ladylike position Kate Middleton had taught me when I first met her at Wimbledon. (In return, I had taught her how to use apple cider vinegar as deodorant in a pinch.) “You catch more flies with honey . . . That sort of thing.” 

He snickered. “Not anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“Honey works—sometimes—when you’re climbing. I’ll give you that. But you’ve reached the top. You’re not climbing anymore. Now it’s your job to fight off everyone else who’s climbing and clawing for your spot.” He adjusted the knot of his tie and then lowered his hands back into their precise position of staged nonchalance. “Viewers might love the farm girl, but people in the business will walk all over her.” 

He was right, of course. Mostly. Except that I wasn’t done climbing. I hadn’t even reached the top of the Sunup couch yet . . . although it wasn’t surprising that in his eyes I had gone as high as I possibly could. But nothing in me would ever be content peaking as Mark Irvine’s happy little sidekick. 

I wasn’t Robin in our dynamic duo. Someday that would click for him. But not yet. Not today. 

“Why are they so obsessed with making sure I’m beloved in the heartland?” I asked, meeting him halfway in the mentor/mentee partnership he needed to believe in. “Seriously, they act like I’m from a two-cow town in Oklahoma where Pa tilled the soil and Ma baked apple pie, all day every day.” 

Everything from the dusty-rose eyeshadow that had tested well with mid-America viewers to the baby animal videos they made me pretend to be obsessed with to the way they made me talk in the early years of Sunup3 (because seventeen years in the Rocky Mountains followed by four years at the University of Southern California will totally lend themselves to developing a southern lilt) had been about making me into who they—they, they, they— wanted me to be. 

Mark laughed. “Was I right? Philadelphia?” 

“Thirty seconds!” a voice called out, and Mark and I focused on camera four. 

I shook my head gently, careful not to mess up the cascading waves Greta had perfectly sculpted over my shoulders. “I’m from a little mountain town in Colorado called Adelaide Springs.” 

“I’ve never heard of it.” 

“No one has. It’s a tiny, insignificant blip on the map, made up of a few hundred people with about twelve brain cells and forty-two bucks among them.” 

“Ouch!” 

“I’m sorry, but it’s true!” I giggled but didn’t move my face out of the camera-ready smile. “They’re obsessed with colonial times—” I felt his eyes snap to me for just a second before looking back to camera four, and the corner of my mouth twitched in satisfaction. Mark Irvine was interested in me, even if just for the length of a story about my crazy hometown. It was only week one, but I was pretty sure he already found me more interesting than he’d ever found Shauna Magwell-Moray. “Yes. American colonial times. In Colorado. It’s so stupid.” I rolled my eyes. “My hometown’s the worst. I got out the very first chance I had, and I’ve never looked back. So let the viewers believe I’m from Iowa or Philadelphia or whatever. Anywhere except that pathetic little town with its pathetic little people. As long as it’s all being sold by America’s freaking Ray of Sunshine, I’m sure they’ll keep buying it.” 

“Cut the feed! Cut the feed!” Colton yelled from the back of the room, but his voice got closer quickly. “Go straight to the Sunup3 buffer and tell Elena she’ll need to cover the seven extra seconds.” 

I didn’t want to pull my eyes away from camera four, but I also instinctively knew the red light wasn’t going to come on. 

“Colton, what’s—” 

He pointed at me to silence me. It worked like a charm. “Don’t talk,” he muttered, and then he yelled, “No one talk!” We all stared at him, not breathing, I’m pretty sure, as he raised his finger to his ear and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath, and then another, and then said softly, “Nicely done, Elena. I owe you one.” His eyes rose slowly until they met mine. “Some people owe you more than that.” 

“Um . . . Colton?” the previously booming voice from the control room whimpered. “Bob wants to see you in his office.” 

Colton sighed in response to his summons from the network president. “Yeah. On my way.” 

Everything was moving in slow motion as the pieces finally began clicking into place. Cut the feed? There had been a feed? We had been . . . live? 

The breath I had been holding released in a gust of words and angst and trembling. “But the light never came on. You told us to stick with four, and we were looking at four the whole time. You . . . someone . . . said thirty seconds, and there’s no way that was—” 

Colton’s head was hanging, and then it began shaking from side to side in that horrible “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” way that is so much worse than being yelled at. “The whole day was a wreck. I told the control room to stick with four. As in the New York affiliate link—NY4. And thirty seconds was for Elena and Hayley. That’s when we went live. It wasn’t . . .” He sighed again. “That part wasn’t your fault. The day was a wreck.” 

He turned away from us and faced the crew. “That’s on me, everyone. We’ll, um . . .” He cleared his throat. “We’ll sort it out. The wreck’s on me.” He began walking toward the door but stopped just short of it. He spun on the heels of those Ferragamos one more time, but his entire demeanor had changed. Now he just looked like a dejected teenaged boy trying to fit into his dad’s fancy suit for prom. “Brynn?” 

“Yeah?”

“I need you to wait for me in my office.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

My eyes followed Colton until the studio doors closed behind him, and then I turned to seek a little bit of consolation from the other half of the dynamic duo, but he was already off the stage and heading toward his dressing room. And there wasn’t a single set of eyes in the room that would meet mine. 

Wham, bam, thanks for nothing, fam. 

Bethany Turner is a bestselling author of romantic comedies. She has received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, been repeatedly named to Family Fiction Magazine’s annual list of 40 Essential Romance Authors and POPSUGAR’s Best Romance Novels of the year, and has been an Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Romance, “Brynn and Sebastian Hate Each Other.” She lives in southwest Colorado with her husband and two sons. 

This is an excerpt from “The Last Animal,” a Colorado Book Awards finalist in the Novel category.

In the Age of Extinction, two tagalong daughters traveled to the edge of Siberia with their mother to search the frozen earth for the bones of woolly mammoths. 

Eve was fifteen, reshaping herself more each day; Vera at thirteen was a stubborn straight line. Jane, their mother, was a graduate student in paleo-biology. Their father had died exactly one year before, plunged into a shock-green mountain in a tiny car on a tiny road in Italy where he was conducting his own research. Now they were three. Girls, sad and angry and growing and trying. Mom, sad and angry and trying. Now they hauled their bodies and hearts across the entire scoop of the sky to get to a bare place where ancient beasts had once roamed. 

Jane’s professor had grown a beard for the trip, and Todd, a post-doc, wore all tan safari clothing. Everything had several pockets and zipped into different configurations. In New York, Vera watched Todd zip off the legs to his pants and jog laps around the terminal in shorts and hiking boots, his stained white athletic socks like burned down candles. The professor plugged in a full power strip to charge his computer, tablet and two phones and then ate three kale salads out of plastic to-go containers. He said, “We’re unlikely to get fresh veggies. I want to vitamin-load.”

Vera wondered if the professor was someone’s father.

During their five-hour layover in Moscow Jane brought blini with caviar on a real plate to the seats where her daughters were draped, sleepy and prickling. 

“Airport fish eggs, Mom, I don’t know,” Vera said. She wanted a burrito. 

“They’re actually so good,” Jane said, sour cream on her lips.

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

“This is embarrassing,” Eve said.

Todd, in the next row of chairs, zipped his pantlegs off and slung them over his carryon, then jogged the halls again. Eve made a hand flourish and said, “Exhibit A.” Vera watched the Russians watch Todd and it seemed possible that he alone might inspire a war between the two countries. Americans, if this was any indication, needed to be put out of their misery. It would have been a service. 

As the sun was going down, they boarded a plane that would take them from Moscow to Yakutsk. The stewardesses in stilettos served chicken cutlet and sweet wine. The plane crossed six time zones and they had only traveled two-thirds of the way across Russia.

Eve and Vera played a favorite game, Fortunatley/Unfortunately, a game that had traveled with them on buses, planes, ships, trains all over the globe. 

“Once there were two sisters who wanted to run away,” Eve started.

Vera said, “Fortunately, they had large bags full of precious gems.”

“Unfortunately,” Eve continued, “the gems were heavy and the girls couldn’t carry them.”

“Fortunately, they came upon a cave where they could hide the bags until they had a way to transport them.” 

“Unfortunately, there was a wild and ferocious bear living in the cave.”

Vera smiled at her older sister. “You always put a ferocious bear.”

“It’s a classic.”

The story was, by design, endless. Meant to carry the girls across land and sea, every piece of bad news immediately followed by the upswing of salvation.

It was morning again when they landed, dawn, a fine pink stripe on the horizon. Vera felt broken by tiredness. She was not a person anymore but a hunger for sleep. The tarmac smelled like fire and melt. 

“The Last Animal”

>> READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Where to find it:

• Prospector: Search the combined catalogs of 23 Colorado libraries
• Libby: E-books and audio books
• NewPages Guide: List of Colorado independent bookstores
• Bookshop.org: Searchable database of bookstores nationwide

SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.

This was the coldest city on earth in winter and all the photos in the hotel lobby were of people with iced eyelashes, men in fur suits with fur hoods selling fish in the outside market and everything shimmered with frost and the fish were frozen but not because they had been in a freezer. 

While the travelers checked in, the professor and Todd had a loud conversation about three-pointers in relationship to wingspan in the NBA. The professor said, “Who wants a drink?” Jane looked at her daughters, said, “It’s morning and I have children.” 

“Go, go,” Vera said. “We want sleep.” 

“If you sleep now you’ll never get onto the right time. You’ll ruin the entire trip.”

The desk clerk handed Jane her key. It was old fashioned and had a giant wooden block for a key chain. 

Todd said, “You sure? We’re headed to the bar.” These were the moments when careers took shape. Trust was earned over jet lag vodka. 

Jane said, “Go walk, girls” and motioned her sleepy daughters outside. 

“Alone? In a foreign land?” Eve said. 

“It’s safe. It’s good for you.”

“I’ve never hated anyone so much in my life,” Eve said to Vera, the day cracking at them with its light. 

“Men are terrible,” Vera said. 

“Moms are terrible. It was a mom who abandoned us just now.”

Vera said, “It wasn’t her fault.” She looked at her watch as if it could set her right, as if knowing the time would clarify the moment. The watch had belonged to her father, not fancy, a drug store purchase, but precious because it had been on his wrist and had been a tool for mapping his life. Vera could not get the numbers to make sense. 

Everyone on the street was dressed well, especially the women, all looking as if they were about to be photographed. The buildings, meanwhile, were bloc and bland, storage for families, for lives, and the people looked especially dazzling in comparison. 

“Americans are such slobs,” Vera said. “I am basically wearing jammies and I felt proud that I brushed my teeth and hair before we left the room. What are we doing here again?” 

Eve said, “That’s easy. Mom is pretending to be a necessary part of an important project and not a token woman with both literal and emotional baggage. I can see the headline, Woman, supposed to be invisible, brings obnoxious children on science trip, ruins everything.”

Vera said, “We won’t ruin anything. Look at us being invisible and out of the way so that the adults can tour the future home for de-extincted woolly mammoths while also looking for ancient mammoth bits in order to better understand the genetic code and use that information to edit Asian elephant cells until they act like woolly cells. That’s a summer well spent.” 

Eve was clearly impressed. “Listen to you, little lady. You sound better than Mom.” 

“I have heard her say that ten thousand times. It’s embedded in my brain, like a phone number.”

“To making a mammoth,” Eve said, holding an invisible glass aloft, toward street lights strung up like a temporary display. 

They cheersed with their fists. “Except I think we’re supposed to say ‘cold-adapted elephant.’”

Eve said, “How completely lame.” 

“They don’t want to be criticized for playing God.” 

“Which is what they are doing. You know the professor dreams of snuggling up to a woolly of his own making.” 

Couples sat on benches and the girls walked across a bridge over a wide, shallow river. The bridge was covered in padlocks. Names were written on the locks. Hearts and arrows and the word LOVE in English. 

At the other end of the bridge a worker in a green zip-up jumpsuit cut locks, one by one. He kneeled, brought the bolt cutter into place and squeezed. The locks that did not fall into the river were kicked in by the worker, each one sounded a different note as it fell into the water.

Love and declarations of love lasted however long, and then they sank.  

“Do you think the grown-ups are drunk yet?” Vera asked. “Drunk enough that we can sneak past the bar and go to sleep?”

Eve said, “All I care about is a bed. I am willing to risk my life for it.” 

Vera did not know what she was willing to risk her life for but it seemed to be a question she would have to answer sooner or later. Science, progress, comfort, love, sleep. 

Ramona Ausubel is the bestselling author of “The Last Animal,” which was named a best book of 2023 by many outlets. Her previous books are “Awayland: Stories,” “Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born” and “No One is Here Except All of Us.” She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder, Colorado, with her family. 

This book is a finalist in Romance for the Colorado Book Awards. The excerpt is from Chapter 8.

The next morning, just as the sun appeared boldly on the eastern slope of the foothills, I called Eulla. My old friend would worry if she heard the pipeline job had ended and she didn’t hear from me for several days.

“Eulla, I’m off work,” I said.

“I heard that yesterday. That the job had ended, honey. You OK?”

“I’m going to take Willie and the dogs and go to the hills for a while.”

“Well,” she said, “I’ve learned not to worry about you when you’re up there.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

After a long silence, she asked, “You takin’ the ashes, honey?”

“No.” 

“Well, OK,” she said. “Will you be back for the Broncos game on Sunday?”

“I doubt it.”

“Well then. Peaceful journey. When you get back, call me so we can take care of that business I told you about.”

“I will.”

“Bye now.”

As I began to saddle Willie, I again thought about August dedicating the song to me the evening before, about his tender, whispered words and then the brazen way he’d pulled me to him with Charlie standing right there. I remembered the strength in his arms and the raging passion in his eyes. “If I became involved with him now, I wouldn’t be breaking my rule,” I said out loud, and Willie grunted when I placed the saddle on his back. “I’m a bad girl,” I told my jackass, then smiled. “But I can’t quite get the big Texan out of my thoughts. Chances are August Atkins is on his way east right now. And like all of the other guys I’ve worked with over the years, once he’s home, he won’t look back.”

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I knew that if August did try to come by to say goodbye, he would know I’d gone to the mountains. He would see that Willie and the dogs were gone, and he would know. After being around me for months, he’d also know I might be gone for days. I wondered if he’d wait. I didn’t expect him to. It was probably best for both of us if he didn’t.

Willie knew that the saddle panniers meant a pack trip. He seemed anxious to go. He kept turning his head around and nudging me with his nose as I packed the deep pockets of the panniers with lantern, skillet, sleeping bag, sweet feed, and miscellaneous gear. The dogs lingered nearby, playing with a frayed tetherball that was nearly flat. They, too, were in high spirits. 

Dolly stood near my feet, her small eyes watching intently. It would be her first trip to the mountains. I had little doubt she’d do fine. She loved me with a love beyond love. I’d rescued her from hell, and I suspected, by the loyalty in her eyes, she would forever be grateful. 

I thought briefly of Charlie tossing the hay hook and the vicious attack from Dolly that could have been much worse. “Maybe he’ll think twice before he throws something at a dog next time,” I said, looking down at Dolly. Her tail twitched.

I wondered, as I tied the flap on the panniers, would her abusive master look for her? Would he hear that I had acquired a Pit Bull and come looking? I doubted that, but even if he did, he couldn’t prove Dolly was his. And I had no intention of giving her back.

I walked Willie to the house and tied him to the handrail by the porch. In the kitchen, I put jerky, dried fruit, and water bottles in my backpack and took a new can of coffee. Hesitating, I talked to myself for a moment. Packing unnecessary food created a lot of extra weight and work for Willie. On this trip, food wasn’t a priority. I didn’t plan to be gone more than a few nights. I would fast part of that time, and my appetite hadn’t been good anyway.

But since I didn’t know how long I’d be gone…I pulled out a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon, a can of ranch-style beans, and a loaf of bread. Bacon, eggs, hot beans, and skillet toast would taste wonderful on a frosty morning after a long fast. Besides, any food I didn’t eat, the dogs would be happy to clean up.

  Once I had everything packed, I stood for a moment, going over a mental list. I usually forgot something, but after a few trips up the mountain in early fall, I didn’t forget matches, shovel, fuel for the lantern, a blanket, sleeping bag, or water. The rest was luxury, but in a storm, the essentials could mean the difference between life and death. 

The temperature was only forty degrees, but the cloudless sky promised a beautiful day that would warm into the seventies. Indian summer. There were no better months than September and October to go hiking and camping in the mountains. Waking up on cold mornings to the promise of a campfire and coffee made me smile. I envisioned bright sunlight kissed by brief shadows from floating clouds. My anticipation churned at the thought of crystal springs trickling beneath giant pine trees deep in the belly of the distant canyons. 

But autumn camping wasn’t for the weak of heart. October could bring stubborn rainstorms that moved in like evil ghosts and embraced the mountains with black clouds and gray fog as thick as mushroom soup. Or worse, early winter storms that dropped the daytime temperature thirty degrees in one day and blanketed the mountains with heavy snow that bit at your toes, played tricks on your eyes, and made all familiar landmarks look alike. 

“Autumn of the Big Snow”

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I’d been lost more than once in my mountains. Getting lost always allowed me to see things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Getting lost also taught me many things. Any time the clouds began to cast gray shadows down over the hills, I knew to look up to read the sky, then look every direction in the distance to get landmarks. That was the first and most important lesson getting lost had taught me.

I knew that the big storms usually came up from the south, moved west, then back in over Elk Creek. When I saw clouds gathering in the south, I would become ever vigilant about exactly where I was on the mountain. Once the rain or snow started, it became easy to get confused about direction. I would quickly look for an overhang or some kind of protection for my animals and myself. A warm camp in a winter storm meant survival in the mountains of Colorado.

I was tightening Willie’s cinch when I saw the strange car pull up outside my gate. Many people pulled off of Highway 40 up toward my gravel drive, for a variety of reasons. It was my pet peeve. People had eighty miles of open sagebrush with many places to pull off, but for some mysterious reason, they seemed to favor my driveway. Some would just sit and talk on their cell phones. Others would let their dogs out to pee in the road ditch. I’d even had guys pull up and walk to the side of their truck and take a leak. I’d thought about having a sign made, with a dog with his leg lifted and a guy peeing: NO PISSING ZONE.

This appeared to be a lady in a late-model black and silver Lincoln Town Car. I glanced back down, double-checking the ties on the sleeping bag, my slicker, and the blankets I had packed above the panniers but behind my saddle. I checked my .243 deer rifle, made sure there were no shells in the chamber, then slid it easily into the saddle scabbard. On this trip, I would pack Willie and walk, knowing I had him to ride back if I got into trouble.

I heard my steel gate squeak open and looked up, surprised to see the lady in the Lincoln get back in her car and drive through my gate. She pulled her shining new car very slowly on up toward the cabin. 

“Who’s this city girl?” I said to Willie and the dogs. The dogs stared, curious. “Lie down,” I said, watching as Dolly lowered her head and took another step. “Hey,” I said, in a firm tone, “that means you, too.” She dropped quickly, a look of apology in her eyes.

I was more curious than my dogs as I led Willie toward this woman who’d been brazen enough to open my gate, drive in, and shut the gate. This had to be a first for someone lost or wanting directions. Maybe she was low on gas and afraid of running out. Most would sit just outside the gate, contemplate their situation, then drive on, afraid to actually enter through a gate that said NO TRESPASSING. A few desperate souls would honk, hoping I’d come to them.

“Are you Katie Jo McVay?” the lady asked from the car as I stood ten feet away, holding Willie’s reins.

“Who wants to know?” I asked.

To my complete astonishment, the woman, who appeared to be about my age, then stepped out of the car wielding what appeared to be a .38, pointing the pistol directly toward me. “I’m Mrs. Charlie Hawkins,” she said, saying the word Mrs. like she was the Princess of Monaco.

We stood facing each other, and all I could think of was Charlie’s words from the night before, when I’d told him I wanted him to come to my cabin. “I don’t know, baby, that could be kind of risky.” Had he known his wife was having him watched, or that she was following him? The wife he’d said many times “didn’t care.”

“I’m going to shoot you,” Mrs. Charlie Hawkins said, without pause. “I can’t deal with it anymore.”

Oddly, her words didn’t alarm me at all. I thought, Well, it’s a good day to die. And then I thought, Maybe I’ll see James soon. And then, strangely, instead of fear, I felt a kind of euphoric happiness like I hadn’t known in months. 

“Well, if you need to shoot me, that’s fine,” I said, “but I’d prefer to die up there.” I pointed north toward the mountains. “That’s where I’m headed anyway, so why don’t you just follow me up and you can kill me there.” Then I calmly turned and started walking Willie north toward the ridge, wondering what it would feel like to be shot. To hear the noise blast through the calm morning, have the lead burn into my flesh, and feel myself drop into unconsciousness.

 “Come,” I commanded the dogs, walking with my back turned to the Mrs., wanting my dogs near if it was my time to die. They dashed out around me through the sagebrush, immediately on the hunt for rabbits. 

The slam of the car door sounded like a gun in my ears, and I jumped. My reaction caused me to grin. Maybe I was a little nervous.

“I’ll bet you think I can’t climb that mountain,” I heard the Mrs. scream. “Well, I’ll just show your Indian ass.”

“Hmm,” I said to Willie. “The Mrs. needs anger management class.” I walked faster, without turning to look back. I could picture her behind me, in her tight designer jeans, trying to walk in her snakeskin boots with high heels through the rocks, the long, manicured nails pushing thick sagebrush aside. She was at least fifteen pounds overweight and had probably been pampered and spoiled from the day she was born.

 “This is going to be a changing day in her life,” I said to Willie, chuckling and beginning to walk faster. The humor of the situation was almost too much to hold. I could be headed for the afterlife, and although it wasn’t at all the way I’d envisioned getting there, I knew James would be highly amused from the other side if he were watching.

I stepped up my pace, wondering if she was seriously going to try to follow me up over the rugged mountain range. I had grave doubts that she could make it across the sagebrush flats to the foot of the first ridge, which was less than a half mile. But when I reached that point, I turned and chuckled out loud. “Mad wife walking,” I told Willie. She was more than halfway across the flats, head down, marching forward, pistol in hand.

I knew from long experience that walking across the rocky flats was one thing, but climbing up the side of a mountain and going straight down the other side was another. I glanced over at the midmorning sun, now blasting forth with full glory. I led Willie up the side of the ridge, keeping up a steady pace. “In thirty minutes,” I said to Willie, “she’ll be slumped in the shade of a pinyon tree, crying for water.”

Stopping at the top of the first ridge to let Willie catch his breath, I turned and looked down. I was astonished to see that the Mrs. had effectively covered half of the distance between the cabin and the foot of the ridge below me. She was red-faced, and her once perfect blond hair stuck straight up and out. But after pausing and laboring for breath, she began her climb upward, swatting at small cedar trees and stepping over rocks.

“Anger is a great motivator,” I told Emmy and Dolly, who joined me at that point, panting and looking for attention. “Look at this white girl. Hell, she could whip four cops with her arm in a cast.”

The Mrs. hadn’t really stopped long enough to consider the fact that I probably wasn’t going to lie down and let her shoot me. That meant she’d have to catch me, which she couldn’t possibly do. Even if she continued to stay a hundred yards behind, in another three hours, she’d be totally exhausted. She hadn’t done a lot of planning in her murder scheme and had no water, no food, no blanket—just a gun. When the sun went down beneath the western hills, she’d be at my mercy. 

Lou Dean is the author of countless articles in major magazines, five books of memoirs and two young adult novels. She has received four Colorado Authors’ League Awards and a prestigious Wrangler Award for her work. She grew up on a farm in Osage County, Oklahoma, and attended Oklahoma State University. She now resides in an isolated area of northwest Colorado.