Two modified Suburbans are waiting for them right outside the terminal. They’ve got tinted bulletproof windows, tires capable of plowing through a blizzard. Cole’s barely taken a seat when Scott slides in next to him. Ed would have taken the empty passenger seat in front.
A right turn on I-70 would take them east toward Vail. Instead, they turn left. Then they make a quick right onto a twisty mountain road. They’re surrounded by slopes of pine blended with a few dry, exposed limestone faces and some determined patches of snow. A few miles west, the Rockies tumble down into a vast, arid stretch that extends into Utah. This land is where that eventual transition has its subtle origins.
The gate to the ranch used to be the traditional kind you had to get out and pull open. Now it’s a sliding electrified panel with an attached guardhouse, connected to miles of new fencing that run the property’s entire border.
When Cole was young, the only livestock here were a few horses, and they were mostly ridden and groomed by the staff. His father didn’t build the place because he loved animals. He didn’t even build it to commune with nature. He built it to give his privileged, delicate son some connection to something greater than himself, and because he didn’t believe in God, he was convinced that connection could only be found on the edge of a vast wilderness.
The driver slows down some as they descend the dirt road to the main house.
Cole feels a chest-constricting performance anxiety that could be memory, or it could be assaulting him from the present. He’s not sure. In the end, it doesn’t matter. He just wants his palms to sweat less, and he doesn’t want Scott to notice he’s having trouble breathing.
If he had a better place to keep Noah Turlington prisoner, he’d use it. But this is the only property his father left entirely to him in his will. Stonecut Ranch was built for Cole, and it still feels like his despite his loathing of it, maybe because the exterior looks exactly the way it did when he was a boy. The limestone cliffs that cup the far side of the glassy lake still look like the palms of a goddess; the gurgling brook still parallels the side of the dirt road as if it were dug by landscapers.
And there, in front of the house’s main entrance, amid precisely placed beds of flowers that are currently just green shoots and buds, is the same slab of obsidian his father put in place right after the ranch was completed. It looks like a tombstone, but there are no dates carved into it. Just a long quote. His father’s favorite.
Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Jacob Riis
The stone’s evenly split at the top to make it look like it just suffered a strike from a giant’s ax.
His father used to make Cole lay his hand briefly against it whenever they arrived.
Cole hasn’t repeated the ritual since the man died.
Giant logs along the house’s facade soar three stories to support the wings of the expansive A-frame roof. All in all, the place has always looked like a Greek temple Paul Bunyan tried to build out of local materials.
Even after the security team opens the front door for him and Cole walks into the great room with Scott on his heels, Noah Turlington doesn’t turn away from the room’s windows. They’re giant walls of plate glass, really, built to make the most of the stunning views of the twinkling lake and its border of limestone cliffs. But given how long Noah’s been held prisoner here, Cole has a hard time believing the man’s still enamored by the landscape.
When his father was alive there were enough bronze statues of animals stationed around the great room to make the place feel like a petrified zoo. Cole’s had them all removed. But he left the dark wood and leather furniture exactly where his dad placed it. Thank God there were never any antlers on the walls, or skulls, or moose heads to deal with. His father wasn’t a hunter. The man’s relationship to the wild was subtler, more personal.
Cole remembers lots of long walks and hikes. Whenever there was a flash of frightening movement in the nearby brush that would make Cole want to turn tail and run, his dad would take him by the shoulders and make him wait until whatever had caused the disturbance emerged. It didn’t matter if it was a deer or a bear. He was intent on turning his only child’s moments of fear into patient wonder, intent on connecting him to a world beyond housekeepers and chauffeured cars and his privileged classmates at his elite private school. Perhaps those things might have been easier to accomplish if the property hadn’t sported a multimillion-dollar palace for them to retire to each night, but Cole would never have suggested such a thing. The house and its library were the only things that made his visits here bearable.
Now the house is, appropriately, a prison.
For someone else.
Cole drops a thick spiral-bound file onto the coffee table with a loud thud.
Noah turns and, without so much as a nod, moves to the file and starts leafing through it.
Two members of the house’s security team stand sentry by the front door, waiting for Cole to give them their cue. Scott’s closer, studying Cole with an intensity that makes gooseflesh break out on the back of his neck.
Standing, Noah flips pages with increasing frustration. “This is . . .” The words leave him as he flips more. “This is just a rehash of the footage. There’s nothing . . .” Noah looks into Cole’s eyes for the first time. Whatever he sees there causes him to raise the entire file in one hand and hurl it to the floor.