Read Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller for Free Online Page A

quick rush of her breath when she dug her edges hard on the turns, the dry swish of both their pairs of skis schussing the last long steep glide to the bottom; and he heard the beating of his heart when he simply looked at her.
    He flew back to New York on a Sunday and the next morning went straight to court. His caseload piled up. Briefs were unwritten, telephone calls unanswered. Court dates had to be adjusted. He began to work fourteen hours a day. But until July, with his sister and his devoted German housekeeper caring for his children and assuaging his guilt, he managed to jet to Colorado twice every month for a three- day weekend.
    In April he and Sophie skied on cross-country trails that wound through the forests between Springhill and Aspen. Another time she borrowed a snowmobile from a friend. On the back of an eagle, as she had told him on the day they’d met, it was only fifteen miles between Aspen and their isolated hamlet. But the high peaks of the Elk Range—the Maroon Bells—interdicted the passage. The Bells were recipes for disaster, Sophie said. Not extreme technical climbs, but deceptive ones, for the rock was down-sloping, loose, and unstable. The snowpacks were treacherous. The gullies through which a crosscountry skier had to trek were in the path of avalanches that began as early as October and ended as late as July. Expert climbers who did not know the proper routes had died on the Maroon Bells.
    A network of a dozen good-sized cabins existed deep in the mountains between Aspen and Vail, for emergencies and rental by summer hikers or adventurous cross-country skiers. Run by the not-for-profit Tenth Mountain Division Hut Association, they were often stocked with food, cots, firewood, medical supplies, a two-way radio, and avalanche rescue equipment. Sophie knew these huts well. In June, between tourist seasons, she took Dennis to the hut at a place called Lead King Basin and they made love there in the wilderness. By July he believed that life without Sophie made no sense for him. He asked her to marry him.
    But it was not quite that simple.
    They were hiking along the bank of a high creek near Springhill. Mountain bluebirds streaked across the meadows, as if flecks of summer sky had been torn away. Dennis’s eyes narrowed like a sea captain’s peering into a haze of battle smoke.
    “Sophie, listen. Criminal law is what I do. You should see me in trial. I shine. I take my work and the law seriously. It would be hard for me to leave New York. It has nothing to do with the city itself—I could give that up. But it’s where my practice is.”
    “And it would be hard for me to leave Springhill,” she replied calmly. “That’s where my life is.”
    He had no ready answer. Could he compare his law practice to her life itself?
    “Dennis, it may not be simple for you to grasp this—not yet, not now—but if I weren’t here, if I couldn’t remain here, I wouldn’t be the person you think you love.”
    “I don’t believe that,” he said.
    “You must.”
    “I would love you anywhere.”
    “I’m sure you would. You’re not hearing me. If I were elsewhere, I would be different.”
    “How?”
    Sophie didn’t respond. He had already learned that she was capable of breaking off a conversation when she had said all she needed to say. In that she was stubborn to the point of intractable. He understood that she was begging him to reflect on her words, pursue no farther. He was puzzled, but he cherished her and he would not try to command her to fit into his scheme of understanding.
    The cold creek flowed over rocks and broken branches. They sat on a boulder by the edge of the water. In the Ice Age, such boulders had been carried southward by the glacier on its route from the polar cap. When the glacier retreated northward again, the boulders remained—”for us to sit on,” Sophie said, “and occasionally, if we don’t plan well, to tumble down on us.”
    A choice and a kind of sacrifice