“He climbed down,” I said. “He climbed down and stood above me and asked his wife whether I was breathing.”
Ray looked at me.
“I believe you,” he said quietly.
“Then arrest him.”
He set down his pen.
“Mrs. Hartwell,” he said, “I want to. Believe me. But I need to tell you honestly what will happen if I do that today.”
He laid it out for me, at June’s kitchen table, while the dogs snored by the woodstove.
It would be my word against Michael’s and Emily’s. I’d had a severe head injury. I’d been unconscious for an unknown amount of time. Any defense attorney would say I was confused. That I’d heard voices that weren’t there. That my grief over my husband had made me paranoid about my son.
“The rock,” I said. “The boulder. They rolled it down.”
“Maybe,” said Ray. “Or maybe the slide loosened it. There were rocks coming down all afternoon. My people saw it.”
“And the money? The hundred and eighty-one thousand?”
“That’s real,” he said. “And that’s something. But he had your power of attorney. He’ll say you asked him to pay your bills. Or that it was a loan. A good lawyer can make that look like a family misunderstanding.”
I put my face in my good hand.
“So he gets away with it.”
“No,” said Ray Salas. “I didn’t say that.”
That evening, a deputy district attorney named Maria Esparza drove up to June’s cabin.
She was in her late thirties, small and sharp, with dark hair pulled back tight and a laptop under her arm. She listened to my whole story again. Then she looked at Ray.
“What’s in the trust?” she asked me.
I told her. The two million four. The life insurance. The terms. Everything goes to Aiden when I die, unless Aiden is dead too. Then to Michael.
Maria Esparza sat very still.
“So right now,” she said slowly, “Michael believes that his mother and his son are both dead. And he’s the only one who gets everything.”
“Yes.”
“And he still has your power of attorney.”
“Yes.”
“And there are no bodies.”
I looked at her.
“No,” I said. “There are no bodies.”
She looked at Ray. Ray looked back at her.
“Mrs. Hartwell,” Maria said carefully, “I’m going to ask you to consider something very hard. You don’t have to say yes. If you say no, we’ll put you in an ambulance tonight and take you to the hospital, and we’ll arrest your son and his wife on what we have, and we’ll do our best with it.”
“And if I say yes?”
“If you say yes,” she said, “we let your son and his wife go on believing you’re dead. For a while. And we watch what they do with that belief.”
I didn’t answer right away.
I looked at Aiden, asleep on June’s couch with a dog against his back and a bandage on his forehead.
“What about him?” I said. “He’s four. His father is—” I couldn’t finish.
“He’d stay with you,” Maria said. “Somewhere safe. We’d go to a judge, privately, tonight, and ask for a protective order and temporary custody to you. Under seal. Nobody outside this room and that judge would know.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “As long as it takes for him to show us who he is. With money, it usually doesn’t take long.”
I thought about Michael at four. Curly hair. Dandelions. These are for you because you’re my favorite.
I thought about Michael yesterday, standing above me in the ravine.
If she’s breathing, we can’t risk it.
Okay.
“Yes,” I said.
They took Aiden and me to a hospital that night. Not in Boulder. In Fort Collins, an hour north. Under different names. Ray drove us himself. June came too, in the back seat, holding Aiden’s good hand.
The X-ray showed Aiden’s collarbone was broken in one place and would heal clean. He had a concussion, mild. Cuts and bruises.
My left arm was broken in two places. I needed surgery. A plate and six screws. Three cracked ribs. Eleven stitches in my scalp.
At two in the morning, while I was waiting for surgery, Ray Salas came into my hospital room and handed me a piece of paper. An order from a district court judge in Larimer County, signed an hour earlier, at the judge’s kitchen table.
Temporary emergency custody of the minor child A.M.H. to the paternal grandmother. Record sealed.
I held it in my good hand and read it four times.
“The judge has grandchildren,” Ray said quietly. “She didn’t need much convincing.”
The search for us lasted nine days.
I watched it on the little television in my hospital room in Fort Collins, with the volume low.
Helicopters. Dogs. Volunteers in orange vests combing the banks of Fourmile Creek. A spokesman for the sheriff’s office saying that the creek was running high with snowmelt, and that it was possible the bodies had been carried downstream.
On the fourth day, Michael stood in front of the cameras at the trailhead and gave a statement.
He looked terrible. Pale. Unshaven. Emily stood beside him in her red jacket, holding his arm.
“My mother was the strongest person I’ve ever known,” Michael said, his voice breaking. “And my son—” He stopped. He put his hand over his eyes. “My son was my whole world. I’d give anything. Anything. To have them back.”
Emily rubbed his back.
The reporter thanked them. The news moved on to the weather.
I turned off the television.
June Coulter was sitting in the chair beside my bed. She’d driven up every day.
“Well,” she said quietly. “He’s good at it. I’ll give him that.”
“He was always good at telling people what they wanted to hear,” I said. “Even when he was little.”
On the ninth day, the sheriff’s office called off the search.
On the twelfth day, Michael and Emily held a memorial service at a church in Boulder. Two photographs on easels at the front. Me, in a blue sweater, at Richard’s retirement party. Aiden, at his fourth birthday party, with frosting on his nose.
Two hundred people came.
I watched it on Emily’s Instagram. She’d posted a photo of the easels with a long caption about grief and loss and how “the mountains took them home.”
Four hundred and twelve people liked it.
I want to tell you about the two years. But I can’t tell you all of it. Some of it still belongs only to me and Aiden.
After the surgery, we moved into June’s guest cabin, behind her house. A little one-room log building with a woodstove, a bunk bed, and a window that looked out at the creek. June wouldn’t take rent. I paid her anyway, in groceries and gardening and cash from a part-time job I found at the library in Nederland, shelving books three days a week, under my maiden name.
Carol Beck.
Ray Salas had arranged it. A temporary identity, a new phone, a post office box. The sheriff’s office had a fund for witnesses who needed protecting. I hadn’t known such a thing existed. It covered our basic needs. Not much. Enough.
My own accounts, I couldn’t touch. Officially, I was missing. Presumed drowned.
“Leave them,” Ray said. “We want to see who does.”
Aiden had nightmares for a long time.
He’d wake up screaming in the bunk bed. “Gramma, the ground! The ground is falling!” I’d climb up the little ladder, which hurt like fire with my healing arm, and hold him until he stopped shaking.
For the first few months, he asked about his father every day.
“When is Daddy coming?”
“Not for a while, sweetheart.”
“Is Daddy sad?”
I never knew how to answer that one.
June found him a child therapist in Boulder. A gentle older man named Dr. Hammond, who’d worked with kids who’d survived terrible things. Ray made sure everything was under seal. Dr. Hammond came up the mountain to see Aiden once a week, on Thursdays, and they played with trucks on the cabin floor and talked about feelings.
Around six months in, Aiden stopped asking.
One night, while I was tucking him in, he said, “Gramma. Daddy didn’t come help us. When we fell.”
I sat very still on the edge of the bunk.
“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”
“And Emmy didn’t either.”
“No.”
He thought about that for a long time, looking at the ceiling.
“I heard them,” he said. “When I was lying there. I heard Daddy. He said ‘okay.’”
I couldn’t speak.
“I thought maybe I dreamed it,” Aiden said. “Dr. Hammond says sometimes when you hit your head, you dream weird stuff.”
“Do you think you dreamed it?”
He shook his head slowly on the pillow.
“No,” he said. “I think it was real. I think Daddy said okay.”
I lay down next to him in the narrow bunk and held him until he fell asleep.
I told Ray Salas the next morning. Then Dr. Hammond. Then Maria Esparza.
Maria was quiet on the phone for a long time.
“I’m so sorry, Carol,” she said. “I’m so sorry he had to carry that.”
Meanwhile, my son was busy.
Thomas Reinholt, our family attorney in Omaha, had been told everything within a week. Ray and Maria flew to Nebraska to meet with him in person. Thomas had known Richard for thirty years. He sat in his office on Dodge Street and listened to the whole story and then took off his glasses and pressed his fingers into his eyes for a long time.
“Richard was afraid of something like this,” he said finally. “Not this. Not this, God. But he was afraid of Michael and money. That’s why he wrote the trust the way he did.”
Thomas agreed to cooperate. So did Gene Albright at First National Bank.
And every few weeks, Ray drove up the mountain to June’s cabin and sat at my kitchen table and told me what Michael had done.
Three weeks after the memorial, Michael used his power of attorney to withdraw $62,000 from my personal savings account at First National. The memo line said Funeral and memorial expenses — C. Hartwell estate.
The memorial had cost $8,400. Ray checked.
A month after that, he sold my car. My blue Buick, sitting in my garage in Omaha. He signed the title as my agent under power of attorney. A used car dealer in Council Bluffs paid him $14,300.
Then the house.
My house. The little brick house on Hickory Street in Omaha where Richard and I had lived for thirty-six years. Where Michael grew up. Where Richard died in his recliner.
In August, three months after the hike, a quitclaim deed was recorded with the Douglas County Register of Deeds.
Thomas Reinholt drove to the courthouse himself and got a certified copy. He mailed it to Ray. Ray brought it up the mountain and laid it on my kitchen table.
QUITCLAIM DEED. Grantor: Carol A. Hartwell. Grantee: Michael R. Hartwell. Property: 2214 Hickory Street, Omaha, Nebraska. Consideration: One Dollar ($1.00).
At the bottom, there was a signature.
Carol A. Hartwell.
It didn’t look anything like mine. I make my C with a little loop at the top. Richard used to tease me about it. This C was flat and plain.
Below it, a notary’s stamp. Tara J. Lindgren, Notary Public, State of Colorado. Commission expires 11/2027. Dated May 12th.
Two days before the hike.
“I was in Omaha on May twelfth,” I said slowly. “I flew to Denver on May thirteenth. In the afternoon. I have the boarding pass.”
“I know,” said Ray. “We found the notary. She works at a shipping store in Boulder, near Pearl Street. She remembers Michael. He came in with a woman he said was his mother, who was ‘too sick to come inside.’ He brought the document already signed. Asked her to stamp it. She did it as a favor because he seemed so upset. She didn’t check any ID except his.”
