"Let me tell you more," Sophie said, beginning to pace the Zapotee rug in front of the fireplace, "about the spring at the El Rico... .
"You saw in the photograph how William Lovell looked twenty years younger than his age. A billy goat to boot-some of the young men in town wouldn't let their wives dance with him at Saturday night shindigs. He visited the brothel down in Glenwood Springs once a week regularly until just a few years before his death, well into his nineties. Rebecca Lovell died in 1901, aged sixty-four, a withered old woman. Caleb, who worked at the mine, was in every respect his father's son-a young-looking satyr. Naomi and John, the two other children, were normal. But what kind of fate had tapped this man on the shoulder and ignored the other? No one knew. Everyone speculated. People finally asked, 'What do Francis Hubbard and the McKees and William Lovell and his son Caleb have in common?' You didn't have to be a genius to come up with the answer, but it did take some boldness of logic, a willingness to be called an idiot. The common solution to the question of the age disparity was that it was a sexual freakishness, a disgusting randiness that kept a few men looking and acting younger than their years. But then why did Larissa McKee-a woman!-also look so amazingly young? Where did the vitality come from-the vitality that in her early fifties made her the physical equal of any Springhill woman of thirty? It drove those younger women crazy.
"The popular answer to that was also simpleminded. She was a slut! Danced naked under the full moon, brewed potions and drank them with Otis, a slave to her bidding. God would have his revenge! One night, lying in bed, that goatish husband panting at her side, lightning would strike straight through the roof and fry her crippled bones!
"And then Larissa McKee changed the history of Springhill.
"She heard these stories about herself. She knew they weren't true-so she wondered, what was true? She began to reason. She knew what no one else other than Otis knew-that she bathed in the spring in exactly the same way that the youthful-looking and long-lived men did.
"And she came forward. Not to defend herself against the scandalmongers, but to clear the brush away and blaze a path toward the truth-because she'd seen how enormous that truth was, how it could change everyone's lives in a way they never even dared dream.
" 'The water,' she said. 'There's something in the water at the spring.'
"At first everyone slapped their knees and howled. The goshdarned fountain of youth! What was the name of that crazy Spaniard who'd hunted all over the place for it? Ponce de Len! Where was it supposed to be? Florida, right? Hell, no! It's here in Gunnison County, Colorado!
"Larissa backed off from confrontation. She wasn't out to be canonized or make converts. But of course she kept going to the spring with Otis. And pretty soon, she and Otis weren't always alone there. The townspeople showed up on summer evenings, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone. They may not have been convinced, but plenty of them said to themselves, 'Say, what if we're wrong? What if she's not crazy and there's something to it? What have we got to lose? And look what we might gain! Let's go there once a week.' They came out to El Rico and asked, 'Is that all right with you, William?'
" 'Be my guest,' said Mr. William Lovell graciously.
"Still it took another eight or ten years before it fully dawned on anyone with half a brain that there was no other rational explanation. Larissa's reasoning was ultimately seen to be simple, elegant, and inspired. William Lovell was the major convert. His three children were the proof, he proclaimed. One of them bathed in the spring and maintained his youth and vitality-two didn't, and they aged. 'Isn't that a fact? And look what's happening to the rest of you, the ones who are going there now and bathing. By God, look at yourselves! You're barely changing.''
"So in June of 1908 a town meeting was called, chaired by the mayor, my grandfather, Scott's father. By then everyone had a barrel or jug of water from the spring in their home, but a committee was formed to investigate properly. It was called-with a touch of humor, I believe-the Water Board. 'Let's get to the bottom of this,' folks said-'but let's not tell anyone else yet. They'd laugh at us. Or worse.'
"Funds were appropriated. A bottled sample from the spring was taken by hand to Denver and analyzed there in the best hydrological laboratory. The report came back: the water was drinkable. Unremarkable. Nothing in it that shouldn't be there.
"Since then, in the past eighty-eight years, that procedure has been repeated some two dozen times. Every time the Water Board hears of a new high-tech water analysis company that's been formed, or any new microbiological instrumentation, we send off a sample of spring water for chemical analysis. In my time samples have gone to the Colorado Department of Health in Denver, to labs in Los Angeles, Los Alamos, U.T.-Austin, Washington, D.C. Of course we never tell the true reason for what we want done-we just ask for a chemical workup. Nothing ever turns up that shouldn't be there. Maybe a tiny bit more n-butylbenzene and bromochloromethane than normal. Mild contaminants. Not significant. They're found in the water supply of Carbondale and throughout the Ozark Mountains.
"I'm a chemist. You're aware of that, but you never knew why, or how I got to be one. My education was paid for by the town. In the late forties Cornell had one of the best chemistry departments in the country. We always need a chemist here, to keep up with new technology. I'll have a backup soon-Jed Loomis is getting his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Washington. One of the Pendergast girls is studying gerontology at Florida State. I told you that Oliver, whatever else he is, is a trained hydrobiologist-and Shirlene Hubbard has an M.A. in geology from the University of Colorado. We sent Oliver to seminars all over the country to study hydropathy, which is the curing of disease with water. A lot of it was crackpot stuff, but we have to know. We keep investigating. But we know no more now than we did ninety years ago. We may never know. If we did, if we could isolate the factor, everything would be different.
"That leads me to a vital decision made at the meeting in June 1908, and reconfirmed ever since. The decision of absolute secrecy.
"Back then, with the limited scientific resources available to them, the townspeople studied the spring. They brought in a big-time geologist from San Francisco. He was asked to determine the source of the water and approximately how much of it there was. Would it flow forever? The town told him they were considering starting a resort spa.
"This expert dug, and poked, and did a flow check, and consulted his charts and maybe even his crystal ball, and he said, 'The source of this flow is separate from the aquifer-it's an underground thermal spring. Might be mixed with snowmelt, or might not. It's more shallow than deep. It could gush forever, or one fine day it could dry up. Its flow is not strong.'
" 'But do you think there's enough water for a spa, a big public pool, like the one down in Glenwood Springs?'
"The geologist looked down his nose at these country bumpkins, and he said, 'This is quite a long way for people to come in order to bathe.'
" 'Never mind that. If we open a spa to the public, if the water is used lavishly, under those circumstances would it last fifty years?'
" 'Good people, I doubt it,' the geologist said.
"Then in 1909 the townspeople held another meeting. This kind of meeting has taken place every two, three, or four years since then. It's almost always the same. Someone said, or says now, 'I'm troubled. We have something that the whole world desperately wants. Do we have the right to be so selfish, to keep the secret to ourselves?'
"And someone else, probably a lot smarter and older and wise to the ways of mankind, always answers like this: "'Do you know what would happen if we told the world? First off, they'd call us crazy. But curiosity would get the better of them and they'd come and take a gander. Eventually they'd realize it's true. After exhaustive tests they'd conclude, just as we did, that the chemical content of the water doesn't yield to analysis-meaning that this is the only such finite pool known in the world. It can't be analyzed chemically and then patented and duplicated elsewhere, and bottled, and sold in supermarkets in Boston and Bakersfield, Berlin and Beijing.
" 'But word will get out. This is not a secret that can be kept by more than a handful of closely knit people. And when the knowledge of what's up here gets out into the world, whether by word of mouth, or newspaper articles, or radio, or on the Today Show, here's what will happen, sure as God made eggs. Human beings will flock to Springhill not by the thousands, not by the hundreds of thousands, but by the millions. They'll come by chartered jet, by bus, by helicopter, and on foot if they have to. They'll come by the family and by the battalion, in such numbers that even these mountains that have been here nearly forever won't be able to accommodate them. They'll be camping in the forest, drilling in the rock and dynamiting in the snow, beating each other to death over every drop of moisture that falls from an aspen leaf. Chaos will be a pale word to describe what will happen to this part of the world. Government will have to take over in order to prevent anarchy. And that will be the end of everything, as it always is when government takes over.
"'None of us here in Springhill will survive these events. Even if we're not trampled to death by the hordes who crave life everlasting, our good life here will have been destroyed. And in time, since the aquifer is limited and the source shallow, the spring will run dry. Gurgle, gurgle, splat... gone! Despite their howls of anguish, everything the invading masses dreamed of will vanish before their eyes.
"'By then the Elk Range will be a wasteland. Do we dare let that happen? Why?-so we can become rich? We don't need to be rich. We want to live quietly and happily in our little Shangri-la, in our minuscule corner of paradise, as we've lived now for more than a hundred years, harming no one. We have what no one else in the world has, and we've cherished and protected it all these years. The fountain of youth! We're unique. We're blessed. We want to give our children what we have: not the patently impossible gift of eternal life, but the realizable gift of healthful longevity. And we'll beg them to preserve and protect that gift. Pass it on as a legacy to future generations-at least, for whatever future the madness of this violent planet allows. Maybe for another century, maybe for eternity. Who knows?'
"So," Sophie said, "the townspeople decided not to tell the world. They took an oath of secrecy. Each succeeding generation as it came of age has been sworn to that same oath. Springhill began to cut itself off from the other towns. 'We'll get big enough just by normal breeding,' we said. 'We don't want new families. If the town gets too big, we'll lose control of the secret.
"Back in the late twenties some union people from Denver arrived to organize the marble quarry and the coal mines. That was an ugly chapter in the town's history. Folks told the union organizers to leave, and when they refused and tried to preach the gospel of the working class, our working class jumped on them one night over on Quarry Road-beat them up badly and sent them packing. The union gave up. 'Let 'em rot up in Springhill,' the union organizers said.
"There's never been a church here. That helped discourage people from moving in. The town developed a reputation-not undeserved-for being unfriendly to skibtails. I remember a sign on the road to Marble back in the fifties, which they said had been there since 1927. It read: SPRINGHILL.
INCORPORATED TOWNSHIP. POP: 282.
SPEED LIMIT, 5 MILES PER HOUR, STRICTLY ENFORCED.
NO SALOON OR BAR.
NO CHURCH.
NO HOTEL.
NO SOLICITING.
NO CAMP MEETINGS ALLOWED.
WATCH OUT FOR BEAR AND BOBCAT.
NEAREST AVAILABLE DOCTOR, 35 MILES.
"Those were mostly lies. Someone had a sense of humor. Later they toned it down a bit-but not much.
"Meanwhile our marble sold well. It was used for banks, courthouses, monuments, mausoleums, city halls, schools, post offices, hotels. The Great Depression came along, and then World War II. Those were successive blows that a one-industry economy just couldn't deal with. They didn't need marble for submarines or atom bombs. In 1941 the Colorado-Yule over in Marble sold their facilities for scrap. The Springhill quarry had to close too, but we didn't sell the facilities. We had our coal mines to live on-factories and homes still had to be heated in wartime. El Rico produced good-grade copper that was needed for rifle bullets. We tightened our belts a little. No one was rich, but no one was poor. We shared what we had. That became a tradition. People became one family-still are. Bound by their oath of the spring."
Sophie stopped talking. She looked at him, took his hand, squeezed it, held the grip. "And there was a second oath," she said.
He sensed the effort she was making to meet his eyes, not to waver.
"The water had to be kept a secret, that was clear, but even as far back as 1915 the people realized that it wouldn't be a secret for very long if everyone in Springhill lived nearly forever. You told me once, when you were trying to explain to me some concept of the law: 'Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.' This was the reverse of that. Our people couldn't let it be seen.
"Not that they believed that drinking the water of the spring would allow them to live to be Methuselahs. Some people wanted to believe that, but common sense soon told them it wasn't true. The spring water retarded the aging process dramatically. But it didn't do away with it. And in 1920 the coal mine blew up from methane gas. A few miners were killed. You could bathe in the spring all you liked, but you couldn't avoid sudden death.
"William Lovell grew old. Never sick, though. He died with a smile on his face. So did Otis McKee, in the accident I told you about, and Francis Hubbard. Caleb Lovell, William's son, began drinking the spring water at sixteen. He lived to be ninety-four, though he always looked thirty years younger. On a scuba-diving trip to Jamaica in 1953, Caleb's tank ran out of air at a depth of a hundred feet. He had a stroke. He was buried down there at Montego Bay.
"Larissa McKee, who started ingesting the water at a younger age than anyone else, also grew very old, but by the time she died at the age of one hundred she looked and felt like an exceptionally healthy woman of, let's say, sixty-five. An autopsy was done on her by our local doctor. It showed that her arteries were beginning to close up, and she also had some minor liver damage." Sophie smiled. "I guess I forgot to tell you, she and Otis drank a lot of beer, and they both smoked Camels and a pipe. She might have lived another ten or twenty years before a fatal coronary or something else claimed her."
Dennis interrupted: "Might have lived another ten or twenty years? What do you mean, 'might have'? How did Larissa die?"
Sophie was silent for a minute.
"Voluntarily," she said. "Larissa went voluntarily-as we all do. Or will do. Because we have to, and because we decide to. If we don't have a stroke or major heart attack or cancer, or get hit by an avalanche like my first husband, or like Otis McKee by a car whose brakes fail, we live to the age of one hundred. A century. Enough, don't you think? That was Larissa's idea, and it became the key idea to the safe existence of the secret of Springhill. She started her mature life as a devoted sensualist. When she'd had her fill, she began to change: it was her wisdom and foresight which allowed this community to survive. First, she convinced everyone that the water would allow them to live nearly forever. And then she convinced everyone that 'nearly forever' was far too long-that 'nearly forever' would lead to disaster. She was the one who said, at one of those town meetings back around 1910: 'If we live nearly forever, or even if we just live an unnaturally long time, the world will find out. We have to protect ourselves and our children from that catastrophe. We have to keep the secret, and guard against the invasion that would come if we didn't.' " Sophie paused. "Dennis, we can't be greedy."
He looked at her; at last he was beginning to understand.
"It took a while," she said, "and there was a lot of protest. Some people wept and beat their breasts ... but they finally saw that she was right, and in the end they gave in. You can't live a hundred and fifty years or more without the world finding out. Scientists and journalists demand to know the why and how of such things. They want to interview you and put you up there on the twenty-inch screen, or get you to endorse their brand of whole-grain bread and shake the hand of the president on the White House lawn and receive a plaque honoring the achievement. Centenarians aren't as rare as they used to be, and getting to one hundred is becoming more common. But imagine if they found out you were a hundred and twenty! Or a hundred and sixty! And you looked seventy-five! And you could still ski the Dumps and ride a mountain bike uphill, and hike to 12,000 feet, and you had a full sex life-my God, you'd have a hell of a lot more than fifteen minutes of being famous! They'd hound you to your grave.
"And also we realized that even if you keep quiet about it, there are birth certificates, death certificates, IRS forms, passports, driver's licenses that need to be renewed, Social Security benefits, Medicare-records galore. Everything we do has documentation. Our lives are exactly the opposite of private. Government doesn't let you be. In Springhill we've learned over decades of study how to control all that. How not to be found out. That's why the dates aren't correct in the cemetery. It's why we have home rule and deal with our own local taxes and records. That's why so many of the men have the same names as their fathers. We make sure there's always at least one doctor like Grace to write out death certificates and file them with the state, and one dentist like Edward, who, if he has to, in an emergency, will get the records mixed up. One funeral home, and one registered nurse, as well as a few others trained by her, who are capable of administering the injection that people get-if they need it-on a day of their choice within a month of their hundredth birthday. It used to be cyanide. Now it's potassium chloride.
"That's what we do and how we do it. In each case we can manage the deception, we figured out, for a hundred years. Longer than that is too chancy. You might say, 'Well, why not a hundred and five?'- and there's no overwhelmingly correct answer. We simply decided on one hundred as a round number. A good number. A degree of deception to the outside world that we could deal with, that we could carry off with reasonable certainty."
"Wait," Dennis said, and raised his hand. "Look at my Aunt Jennie. There are plenty of people who live into their nineties now. Jennie might make it to a hundred. Or more. It's not that rare in our time."
"Jennie might make it to a hundred," Sophie said, "but in what condition? In Watkins Glen that Thanksgiving your sister told me Jennie wore diapers, that she left pots of water boiling on the stove, that during the night her arthritis made her cry out from pain. Dennis, what good is living to a hundred and twenty, or even ninety-five like your Aunt Jennie, if the quality of your life fades and erodes-if you're a burden to those you love-if you suffer? Do you understand that here in Springhill the man or woman who lives to be a hundred is in the prime of life? If we extended the departure to a hundred and ten or more, we would be found out, because at a hundred and ten we'd be easily as vigorous as a normal man or woman of sixty! Don't you see? I tell you: we are blessed.
"So that's the second oath we swear in that ceremony when each of us turns twenty-one. It's an oath that we'll depart voluntarily, and without fuss, at the mellow age of one full century. There'll be a going-away party a little before that time, to wish us well. We call it the departure ceremony. Departure is the formal word we use for what's essentially a voluntary death. A lot of songs and warmth and touching. Lots of laughs and reminiscences. And then we go. With dignity, surrounded by friends and family, and without pain. Can you realize how wonderful that is? What a fitting end to a long and decent life? How perfect?
"The amazing thing is, after that ceremony and before any injection is necessary, the person who's reached the age of one hundred often goes very quickly They realize that their time has come, it's been a good life, and they depart. Did you ever hear of boning? It's something that happens in Australia among the aborigines. A witch doctor points a bone at a man-usually someone very old or with a supposedly incurable disease. The man who's been boned falls to the ground and crawls off to his hut. His spirit sinks. Within days, sometimes within hours, he dies.
"Boning is another word we use here for what happens. It started as a kind of joke. Then it became part of the lore. We often talk of the departure ceremony as the boning. But here our spirits don't sink, even though we know there's little time left. Do you remember when Jack Pendergast died?"
"Yes, I certainly do." Dennis was remembering what he had seen from the shadows by the creek on that June night: Jack Pendergast making his final bow to the world, embedded in Rose Loomis.
"He'd turned one hundred a few days before his departure. There was a little boning party for him given by my parents. Only close friends came. And three days later he lay down to take a nap and never woke up. It wasn't a heart attack at all, and he didn't need any Versed or potassium chloride. That's how it will happen for most of us. We'll go without remorse, with hardly anything undone, and without anger. With a full acceptance of death as a voluntary rounding off of a completed life. Because we know we've had more luck than any other group of people in the world. Where else on this planet is that true?
"Larissa, my great-grandmother, was the first. The rest of us-well, almost all of the rest of us-have followed in her footsteps gratefully."
"Almost all, yes." Dennis nodded slowly. "But not all."
"That's right. There have been occasions when someone said, 'No, I've got things to do, places to see-I don't want to die yet. I don't care what I swore to when I was a kid. I want to keep on living!' "
"And then what happens, Sophie?"
"Usually we talk them out of it. We make a concerted communal effort, because we believe it's vital. And they come round. They realize how their death fits into the scheme of things-most particularly, how it benefits their children and grandchildren. How it makes it possible for all of the rest of us to go on living. They're boned, so to speak, and they depart quietly.
"But not all, as you said. I know of two such instances. About twenty years ago there was a man named Julian Rice. He had no children and so he didn't feel a great sense of continuity. Two of his brothers had died in a mine disaster that he believed could have been prevented-he blamed the community. Also, he was in love. Imagine, he was coming up on a hundred years of age, and he fell in love with Betsy Prescott, a woman of eighty-two who'd been widowed in that same mining accident. Julian and Betsy were having an affair. If you're full of good cholesterol and you don't smoke and you drink the water from the spring, it can happen.
"The bottom line was that they didn't want to die. He and the widow left town one night. They took a supply of the spring water with them, although that was unnecessary. One thing we've learned is that after a certain age the water becomes redundant. If you drink regular quantities from your twenties up to about sixty, you've ingested as much into your system as you'll ever need. It sets in motion a biological cycle that appears to be irreversible. You can quit imbibing-you still age slowly and gently, and you still keep your vitality. Do you remember Lost Horizon, the James Hilton novel?-it was a movie later, with Ronald Colman. His plane crashes deep in the Himalayas, near this monk-ruled paradise of Shangri-la, where the people live forever. Ronald Colman eventually leaves with a beautiful young Tibetan girl, but by the time they go through a snowstorm and reach the outside valley she's shriveled into a hundred-year-old hag. "It's not like that here. Not so romantic, not so drastic. But Julian Rice didn't believe it and he took water with him. We had to stop them-him and Betsy Prescott. They might have lived far too long and the secret would have come out that way, or Rice might have talked about it, because he was a boastful, hot-tempered man. We couldn't risk it. We did some detective work and found out they'd gone to the Pacific coast of Mexico. We sent people after them. What happened was horrible, and violent. Julian Rice was killed. So was one of our young men, Sam Hubbard. Rice shot him. Betsy was unharmed, although she was in shock. They brought her back here. She recovered, bit by bit, and died at the age of ninety, well before her time. It was sad, and I've often wondered if we did the right thing. But I think on balance we had to."
Sophie fell silent, waiting for his response.
"And of course," Dennis said, "the second time that anyone tried to break the pact was last summer. The Lovells tried. Susan and Henry Lovell."
"Yes. And I'm going to tell you about that. I'll tell you everything. But come with me now." She stood quickly. "Come outside. Dress warmly. Come."
"Where are we going?"
Sophie took his arm. "Don't you know?"
Chapter 25.
The Murderer
SOMETIMES HER GLOVED hand touched his. Sometimes she was a step ahead. They reached the gate in the forest. A few stars gleamed between tufts of snow hung from the trees.
"It's hard to believe, Sophie."
"I understand that."
She twirled the combination lock on the gate, and it clicked open. They stepped through. She led him along the path, the same path he and the children had trod nearly a year ago when she had shown them the old mining cabin and the odd way the tennis ball rolled and the seemingly impossible tilt of her body.
They reached the spring and the little oval pool. In the darkness a light mist of steam rose off the water. Dappled moonlight gleamed off the snow. Sophie took off her clothes. Her skin seemed the color of ivory. Her nipples stiffened in the cold. She was smiling at him.
"Now you, Dennis."
He undressed, dropping his clothes in a pile on the earth. There was no wind and he was not cold at all. She took his hand and led him into the water, carefully, because there were rocks and not all were eroded smooth. He lowered himself into the pool next to her. It was deep enough for him to sit and allow the warm current to flow around his hips and splash as high as his shoulders. He smelled no sulphur, no chemicals. The water soothed and calmed him.
"This is where they came," Sophie said. "My great-grandparents-Larissa and Otis. Do you feel their spirit in the air?"
"I'm not sure."
"I do. Do you want to make love?"
He remembered she had asked him that in her house on the first night they had been alone, when he had flown back from New York to be with her because he had known already that he didn't want to live without her. Then he had said, "Of course I do." This time he had no need for words. Already aroused, he took her in his arms and drew her toward him in the water of the spring. Even as she settled on his lap and he entered her greater warmth and began to rock gently back and forth, he felt water surge up and touch his lips. It was the water of the spring on his face. The sweet, warm water of the spring. He touched his lips with his tongue and took his first sip.
An hour later they were back at the house. Sophie brought feta cheese, crackers, and red wine from the kitchen. He stirred the log fire again, added more oak. He felt wonderfully tired, cleansed. The red-orange blaze sprang up in the fireplace.
"Are you worn out?" Sophie asked. "Do you want to go to bed?"
"No. I want to know the rest." In as calm a voice as he could recruit, considering all he had been told and all that had happened, he asked, "What was the Lovells' reason for refusing to honor the pact?"
Sophie said, "Henry and Susie told us they'd been thinking about it for years. Thinking, debating, and planning. They saw no necessity to die. Modern medicine, nutrition, and biological science had made enormous strides. Except for pneumonia and AIDS, we'd virtually conquered infectious diseases. One hundred years of life was no longer so remarkable. The age of departure should be changed to a hundred and ten, the Lovells believed. Or at least a hundred and five.
"They came to me and my parents with that suggestion, and the Water Board met, with other elders invited as well, to get some more input and a quorum. We discussed it, and we decided in the negative. It could have brought discovery and further requests for more and more extensions of life.
"My father, because he was an old friend of the Lovells, brought the decision to them. They were disappointed, to put it mildly. But they had a second line of persuasion. With the town's blessing they wanted to leave Springhill. Never come back. They said they understood the risks but they had a well-thought-out plan to obviate them. They were going to travel to a city in another state and start life there as a couple in their late sixties. After about twenty years they'd move to another city in another part of the country and there they'd tell people they were in their seventies. And then, later, move again. And so on. Each time they moved they'd lie about their starting age, so no one would ever realize how old they really were. They'd go on a long time that way.
"Their idea was plausible but not acceptable. Too much could happen along the way. They could become attached to the first community they moved to, not want to leave. How would they deal with Medicare, driver's licenses? Out of the protective aura of Springhill, they'd be vulnerable. And they might have the urge to confess the secret to someone. Maybe it would feel wonderful, one evening around the barbecue pit, to say to friends, 'Do you realize Susie and I are one hundred and twenty and one hundred eighteen years old? You don't believe us? We can prove it.'