ABOUT THE BOOK
Chicago cop Dean Wister takes a forced vacation when he is on the brink of a breakdown after the death of his wife. During his summer solstice in Jackson Hole, where he met her years before, he is called in by local police to consult when a notorious Chicago mobster is found dead in the Snake River. What has drawn the hitman west to murder a popular local citizen and pollute the pristine mountain enclave of the rich and famous is it love, sex, money, or power? Or is it somehow related to the Presidential campaign of Wyoming's favorite son? Dean's investigation threatens to uncover the secrets of a group of memorable suspects, ranging from rich tycoons to modern day cowboys, with political consequences reaching far beyond the small resort town. As Dean follows the leads in the case from Jackson Hole to Chicago to Washington D.C., he also struggles to cope with the personal loss that threatens his mental stability, as the nocturnal visits from his deceased wife suppress his will to let her go and make him question his purpose in life. The climactic scenes contain reveals the reader will never see coming. A funny, romantic, sexy, roller coaster thriller!
INTERVIEW WITH DENNIS D. WILSON
Dennis, what’s the story behind the title of your book?
The Grand is a reference to The Grand Teton, the infamous peak in the Teton Mountain range and one of the epic peaks in North America to mountaineers and skiers. It’s serves as an important symbol for the main character in the book, Dean Wister, who has recently lost his wife and returns to Teton National Park, where they first met, to get his life back in order. There are several characters in the book who are also searching, so
The Grand can symbolize many things to each of them.
Tell us about your series. Is this book a standalone, or do readers need to read the series in order?
This is the first book in a series featuring Dean Wister, a Chicago cop. The second book, the as yet untitled sequel to
The Grand, is complete and in editing. It should be published in the summer of 2018.
The Grand stands on its own, but hopefully readers will want to know if there is more to the story (there is).
What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned?
Writing has taught me patience, which is definitely not my strong point. Patience in the writing process, as the creative process cannot be forced. Patience in the publishing process in that everything takes much longer than you think it should. Forced learned patience seems to have carried over to other parts of my life as well.
What is the most daring thing you've done?
Climbing the Grand Teton.
What choices in life would you like to have a redo on?
My theory is that if you could do everything over in your life, there is no guarantee that any of it would turn out better, because (luckily) we are unable to foresee the consequences of our decisions. I would like to write a book with this as the premise, but your readers are welcome to steal the idea. I will probably never get around to it.
What brings you sheer delight?
When I am driving in my car to Teton National Park, and I turn around a bend and see the Teton Range. I get chills every time it happens, as if I’m seeing it for the first time.
What would you like God to say when you reach the pearly gates?
What took you so long.
What’s your favorite line from a book?
“We live in a universe of horror and loss surrounded by a singled lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.” -Stephen King in 11/22/63
How did you create the plot for this book?
It seems mechanical when I write it down, but I wanted it to be set in Teton National Park, and I wanted the main character to be from Chicago. I needed to devise a plot device to get him there, and another plot device to get him involved in a crime investigation while he was out there. I had a list of elements that I wanted to have in the plot and then “connected the dots” by making up a story containing those elements.
Is your book based on real events?
My wife asked me the same question when she read the book (she was concerned that maybe I was harboring secrets). None of the events are real, but the detail in the locations both in Wyoming and Chicago are very real places.
Who are your favorite authors?
James Lee Burke, Elmore Leonard, Tom Wolfe, John Irving, Paul Theroux
.
What book are you currently reading and in what format?
I’m currently reading
God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell, an autographed hardcover I picked up online, and the audio book of
Wayfaring Stranger by James Lee Burke narrated by my favorite narrator Will Patton.
How did you find your publisher, and how long did your query process take?
The Grand is published by Water Street Press, and is one of the inaugural books of the Water Street Crime imprint. My agent Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli found my publisher. I found my agent after dozens of queries and rejections. It took about four months to find my Agent and another six to get the book accepted by a publisher.
What is the best compliment you’ve received on your writing?
Someone compared a section of dialog to Elmore Leonard, and a description worthy of James Lee Burke.
Book Details
Genre: Crime Thriller
Published by: Water Street Press
Publication Date: December 2016
Number of Pages: 304
ISBN: 978-1-62134-330-1 (ASIN: B01N682LXW)
READ AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRAND
1
SENATOR
THOMAS MCGRAW sat back in the hand-distressed, buffalo-hide easy chair
and contemplated the room around him. This was his first visit to the
brand new, custom-designed mountain home of his lover. When their affair
started a little over a year ago, what a sweet and savory surprise it
had been to both of them. A business relationship grew into friendship,
and then suddenly and unexpectedly exploded into something else— a
red-hot, cross-country, obsessive romance fueled by shared erotic
tastes. The senator felt sexually liberated under the spell of his
exotic lover, and he was pretty sure those feelings were mutual. True,
they needed to be discreet for a variety of reasons— indiscretion had
nearly cost them everything— but they had worked it out. Although hectic
schedules limited their rendezvous to only a couple of weekends a
month, the deprivation and anxiety of anticipation made these weekends
that much more satisfying. He was generally in a frenzy by the time he
could get to her.
The room was the den of a typical
ten-thousand-square-foot vacation home of the rich and powerful in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Decked out in nouveau western, its reclaimed
timbers, Wyoming sandstone, and river rock were either complemented by—
or detracted from, depending on your esthetic point of view— the
original modern paintings depicting bold and most definitely
non-earth-toned western landscapes and various forms of neon-colored
wildlife. As Tom sipped his twenty-three-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, he
studied the visage of a purple and orange moose head sculpted from
California mahogany hanging dispiritedly over the fireplace. Damn, any
self-respecting Wyoming moose would be embarrassed to know that this is
some guy’s idea of what a trophy moose should look like. His personal
style was more traditional Western— big wooden beams and a glut of real
dead animal heads on the walls. But, the sex was still new and novel,
unlike anything he had felt before, and he was willing to overlook these
stylistic differences for the time being or, who knew, maybe for a long
time. As his mentor had told him a long time ago: “Pussy is a powerful
motivator.”
“I am soooo happy we were able to start our weekend a
day early,” his lover called from the other room. “I’ve been so horny
this week that I’ve been bouncing off the walls. I brought back
something special for you from Chicago. Just give me another minute,
sweetie.” Charlotte Kidwell dressed, and undressed, to accentuate her
best features: her big green eyes, her long, toned legs, and her perfect
bubble butt. Her regular head-to-toe salon appointments, personal
trainer, and strict dietary regimen were essentials to the healthy,
put-together appearance that women of her age and social status often
have, if they have the money and motivation to work at it. In her
younger days, her insecure attempts to add sex appeal fell short, and
she’d ended up with an oddly unfeminine look with her clumsy and
unsuccessful experiments with cosmetics. But middle age had actually
softened her features, and as she became more adept at the finer points
of female grooming, she began to realize how much she resembled her
sister. During what she referred to as “The Sexual Awakening,” she had
finally developed the confidence in her sexuality to consciously emulate
her sister’s makeup and dress. Her older sibling had always exuded
effortless sexuality, and throughout high school and college had gone
through more boys in most years than Charlotte had dated for her entire
youth.
The senator had certainly surprised her. Although his belly
professed his lust for food and drink and a disinclination for
exercise, his face was the opposite, exuding an irresistible cowboy
masculinity. At middle age, most people have to choose between a
wrinkle-free face and a toned and youthful body. What was it her friend
in Chicago called fat? “Nature’s botox.” He had chosen his beautiful
face at the expense of his body, but that was fine with her, because he
was a sexual artiste. Certainly no one who knew him could possibly
conceive of the hot spring of sexuality that was percolating beneath his
surface. In spite of their distinctly different personalities, she
considered him her soul mate. The first man in her forty-four years who
had ever laid claim to that title. The thought made her giggle.
“Hurry up, baby, and get your pretty little ass out here.”
Appearing
in the doorway, she framed herself with the hand-on-the-hip pose so
popular with women much younger than herself. “You like? I know this
little specialty boutique in Chicago, and it ain’t Macy’s Intimate
Apparel.”
He liked the look very much. The red lace push-up bra,
matching thong panties, silk kimono, and six-inch stilettos appealed to
the man who’d had a weakness for strippers in his younger days. Though
the untied robe looked more like a cape than boudoir attire, and the
entire outfit reminded him of a porn movie he once saw— Superslut, a
parody of Superwoman, he had to give her an “A” for effort. “Wow, you
look like a very sexy Little Red Riding Hood. And where in the world did
you find a bra that makes those pretty little A cups of yours look like
Cs? Now turn around and let me admire your world-class bootie.”
She
did a little twirl for him, grinned, and pushed together her bra cups
to emphasize her cleavage. “It’s called a miracle bra, and see, it does
work miracles. Now you just sit there and sip your whiskey. I have
another surprise for you.” She strutted over to the bookcase, flipped a
switch, and AC/ DC’s “Shook Me All Night Long” filled the room. And she
began to dance.
“Oh my.” Tom took a big swallow and relished the burn. “You are just full of surprises tonight.”
“Just sit back and enjoy, Senator. I’ve got a few more surprises coming your way.”
Watching
her rehearsed moves, the familiar hunger began to stir below his
opulent belly. And then, in a maneuver that would have been impressive
for a woman of any age, she turned away from him, spread her legs,
touched her toes, looked straight up at him from her bare inverted V,
and twerked. She had been practicing all afternoon, and when she saw the
image of her quivering butt in the mirror she couldn’t wait to see his
reaction.
“Oh, my god, where did you learn that?” The stirring
rising now to a different level. And he was also wondering... her dance
routine looked really professional.
“I have a very good friend in Chicago who does this for a living, and she’s been giving me some lessons.”
“Judging
from that pose, sweetie, your friend must be an instructor in ‘stripper
yoga’.” The senator, feeling the fire down there, leaned forward and
reached for that perfect ass. “Get over here and let me take you the way
I like, the way I know you like.” Putting his hands on her bare cheeks
and grabbing two hands full, he left his chubby fingerprints as
indentations on her flesh. Crazed now, pulling off his pants and
underwear but not bothering with his shirt and tie, he pulled her thong
aside, mounted her, grunting, sighing. Both of them grunting, sighing,
grunting some more. And now just the sounds of flesh slapping flesh. And
AC/ DC, urging them on...
Hayden Smith was running late. He was
always running late. It was common knowledge in town that you had to
book every appointment with Hayden an hour early to get him to show up
on time. Attorney, county commissioner, real estate broker and
developer, owner of a property management company— all that, plus trying
to live up to the moniker of Teton County’s most eligible bachelor as
determined by Mountain Woman magazine, well, that could take a toll on a
man, even a man as fit and athletic as Hayden. And it was taking its
toll on Hayden today. Sometimes he thought there was little point in
taking any time off because you had to work twice as hard just to clear
your schedule.
The last item of the day on his long list was to
make sure all was in order in the home of his newest property management
client before their arrival the next morning. But what he really was
thinking about, as he put the key in the door, was that he was already
an hour late for a dinner date at the home of one of Teton County’s
richest and most beautiful socialites. And so if he hadn’t been
fantasizing about the evening’s upcoming sensual activities, and if he
hadn’t assumed that it was his cleaning crew that had left that open
bourbon bottle on the counter, and if he hadn’t been formulating the
words he was going to use to chew Pablo’s ass about getting control of
his maintenance team, and if he had checked his voicemail after his last
two meetings instead of engaging in licentious banter on the phone with
the young socialite, then he might have reacted differently to the
pounding bass of one of the most iconic rock anthems of the 1980s. He
might not have followed the mesmerizing sound of Brian Johnson’s
sandpaper voice into the den, assuming that he would find some of his
employees having an unauthorized party; and he might not have witnessed
the sight in front of him that would not only drastically change his
life but would also set in motion a chain of events that had the
potential to change the course of American history.
If he had
looked directly at the man’s face, he almost certainly would have
recognized one of the most well-known faces in Wyoming, soon to be
equally famous throughout America. However, Hayden looked everywhere but
into his face. The man, still dressed for business on top but naked
from the waist down, was humping a pretty redhead doggie style, and
Hayden was fascinated that with each thrust, her red stilettos would
come off the ground about twelve inches, and then at the end of the
thrust, the tips of her heels would bang down on the pine floor. Thrust,
bang, thrust, bang, thrust, bang. Later when he played that video clip
back in his mind, he captioned it “porn star tap dancing.”
He
looked all around the room, but his eyes kept coming back to those red
shoes, maybe because he didn’t really want to look at the man’s jiggling
ass, or maybe because when his eyes followed those shoes north he was
treated to a pair of the finest legs and most delicious bootie that he
had ever seen. If he had been thinking clearly, he would have just
turned around and walked right out of the house and he would have been
able to go back to his great life as Teton County’s busiest and most
eligible bachelor. But for whatever reason— the shock of the scene, or
his own perverse voyeurism— he did not turn back around. He knocked on
the door jamb with his clipboard and stammered loudly enough to be heard
over AC/ DC. “Ah, ah, ah, I thought you weren’t coming in until
tomorrow. I just came to check on the house. Is everything OK? I mean,
just call me if anything isn’t OK. Sorry to interrupt. I’ll just let
myself out...” And then he backed out of the room and nearly sprinted
out the door.
Tom jumped up with impressive agility considering
his exertion and girth, partly hopping, definitely bobbing. “Oh shit, oh
shit, oh shit.”
Charlotte rolled over onto her side. “What the fuck, I left him a message that I was coming in today. What was he thinking?”
And
the senator just kept repeating, “Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit.” Then,
catching his breath, added to his mantra, “I’m sure he saw me, I’m sure
he saw me, I’m sure he saw me.”
His lover, handing him the rest of
his twenty-three-year-old Pappy, said, “Here, drink this,” trying not
to let the panic sound in her voice. She thought for a moment. “We’ll
call Mario. He’ll know what to do. If that asshole tells anyone it’ll
hurt Mario as much as us. Well, maybe not quite as much as us, but you
know what I mean.”
Tom sat down for a minute, his white dress
shirt soaked through, wheezing from the exertion, from the excitement,
from the fear, his heart a thumping kettle drum in his chest. Neither of
them said a word for a minute, then two. Finally realizing the heart
attack wasn’t coming, he took a huge breath and said, “OK, call him.”
Charlotte
punched the number into her mobile phone. “Mario? Sorry to bother you,
but we have a problem. Some asshole just walked in on the two of us.
Walked in on us… you know. What do you think we were doing? How could he
not recognize him? Yeah, he’s my property manager. Hold on. Honey,
would you hand me that business card on the table?”
2
THE
FIRST TIME Dean Wister had visited the Tetons was twelve years ago, the
summer before his senior year in college. Although he said it was
adventure he was looking for, it was escape that he was really seeking
when he answered an ad to guide for one of the rafting companies that
run whitewater trips down the Snake River, just south of Teton National
Park. It was a grueling twenty-four-hour drive from his home in Chicago
to Jackson Hole, the mountain town at the foot of the spectacular Teton
Range, and the route that he was taking, I-90 across Illinois,
Wisconsin, and South Dakota, was one of the most monotonous and boring
stretches of highway across America. Hour after hour he would stare at
the road between truck stops, trying to keep alert for the highway
patrol and the erratic driving of drowsy long-distance truckers. He
tried listening to music and audio books, but his mind wouldn’t let him
focus. Lately, he had a lot of trouble focusing. He’d once tried
meditation, taking a Transcendental Meditation workshop with his wife,
Sara, but meditation wasn’t for him. His mind would inevitably wander
from the rhythm of his breathing to some problem from work that he was
trying to solve. Dean had always been more of a ruminator than a
meditator. And so he ruminated for hour after hour. He ruminated about
all that had happened over the last twelve years. He ruminated about the
horror of the last year. And he ruminated about what the future might,
or more importantly, might not, hold.
That first trip had also
been a time of transition for him. His mother died after his freshman
year in high school, and his dad was killed in a work accident at the
lumber yard just before Dean started college. As an only child he had
led a solitary existence growing up, but by the time he left for college
he was officially an orphan, no parents to cheer him as the starting
safety on the University of Illinois football team, and no siblings to
share the empty and confused feelings of losing the only responsible
adults he had ever known. His hometown of Summersville, West Virginia,
was near the banks of the Gauley River, one of the most famous
whitewater-rafting rivers in the East, and the gray, small-minded, and
cruel little town resembled what Mayberry may have looked like if Andy
hadn’t been born. Until he was seventeen, Dean had never met a college
graduate outside of a classroom, and growing up with his nose stuck in a
book most of the time, his peers, and even most of the adults he knew,
looked down on his habit as a sign of either homosexuality, laziness, or
both. Maybe it was resentment for not living the fantastic and
interesting life of the characters in the books that he read, or maybe
it was the bullying that he experienced from his literature-averse
peers, or maybe it was his sense of insecurity and inferiority from his
hillbilly background, or maybe it was just his nature— for whatever
reason, there was a well of anger deep inside of Dean.
The
bullying stopped the first time he stepped on a football field. He loved
to play defense, and putting the hammer to the ball carrier or receiver
was equally pleasurable to him, whether in practice or during an actual
game. He loved the rush of power he felt when a body crushed beneath
him as he delivered the blow. As he would take aim at his target coming
across the field, he imagined his body as a sledge hammer and he would
launch himself, helmet first, at his opponents, relishing the pain he
received nearly as much as the pain he delivered. As his scrawny
adolescent body matured into a six-foot, one-hundred-ninety-pound
defensive back, his football hits became ever more fearsome, and
attracted the attention of a recruiter for the University of Illinois.
Football would end for him upon college graduation for, as a pro scout
told him, “Son, you sure have the meanness for pro football, but not the
speed.” But that was all right; football had served its purpose.
The
first time his dad had taken him along to run the rapids of the Gauley
he was only nine years old, but after that he was addicted to the river.
Working as a gofer for one of the rafting companies, imagining himself
as one of the cocky swaggering guides, he would do anything to be near
the river. The owner of the company took a liking to him, and broke the
rules to put him on as a guide at sixteen. He worked on the Gauley
through high school and college. But, with the death of his father, West
Virginia held too many painful memories; he needed to get away. He
heard from some fellow guides that the Snake River in Wyoming, south of
Jackson, could be fun. Sure, its mostly Class 2 and 3 rapids were
nothing compared to the Gauley, but he had always wanted to see the
Rockies, and it was about as far away from West Virginia as he could
imagine. That summer on the Snake, in the Tetons, revealed another side
that he didn’t know he had. He learned how to cap that well of anger, to
regulate the flow, to use it instead of letting it use him, and for the
next decade was able to let it out only when his job demanded it. He
discovered that there was another well, an untapped well, within him. A
well of love and sweetness, of kindness and generosity. And the auger
that tapped that well was Sara.
He’d just sent some food back at the Pioneer Grill, the coffee
shop in Jackson Lake Lodge in Teton National Park. His order of sautéed
Rocky Mountain rainbow trout appeared on his plate as buffalo meatloaf.
His anger rising at this inexcusable display of disrespect and
incompetence, he called over the pretty blonde server and pointed at the
food in front of him. “Miss, do you think you would recognize a Rocky
Mountain rainbow trout if you saw one?” She’d looked first at the
gravy-smothered brown glob, and then directly into his twisted angry
face, and behind her best smile said, “Apparently not, but I can
recognize an asshole when I see one.”
Dean was overmatched by the
spunky girl with eyes of a deeper blue than the summer skies over the
Grand Tetons, and he fell in love on the spot. They laughed at the story
forever, and she still called him “meatloaf asshole” on occasion,
either when she was feeling especially fond or, more often, particularly
annoyed with him. She loved to tease him and ridicule his quirks,
calling him “schizo” for the many paradoxical elements in his
personality: jock/ intellectual, hot head/ sentimentalist, loner/
showoff. But when she would call him “schizo” and flash him her
irresistible smile, it would always soften his mood, and he was able to
laugh at himself.
As a trust-fund baby of a power couple in
Chicago’s legal community, Sara’s suburban childhood was exactly the
opposite of Dean’s. Her bookworm ways were admired by her parents,
friends, and her community. The vivacious blond with the sharp wit and
the ability to fit in with every social group was a psych major at the
University of Chicago, less than a two-hour drive up the interstate from
Champaign if you are a hormone-crazed college boy, more like three
hours for everyone else. Her well of anger was only a fraction of Dean’s
and reserved exclusively for bullies and people who abused children,
animals, and the less fortunate. But if you happened to occupy that
territory, her fierceness could make even Dean flinch.
When he
thought of their first summer, it played back in his head like some film
made from a Nicolas Sparks novel. As he watched the movie, alone in the
theater seat of his Jeep Cherokee, he smiled at the “meet cute” first
scene in the coffee shop, marveled at the on-location, awe-inspiring
backdrops of the Snake and the Tetons, was moved to tears by the scene
where he makes love to Sara for the first time. And he couldn’t
criticize the filmmaker’s decision to leave every sex scene of the
summer in the movie. There they are making love on the window seat in
the tiny apartment shared by Dean and his four other river rat
roommates. There they are making love after a picnic at Schwabacher’s
landing, the Tetons reflected like a painting in the beaver pond. And
there they are on their last day of the summer, on a picnic in the
alpine meadow they had discovered on their long hike into the mountains.
The meadow they had named “Sara’s Meadow.” The meadow where Dean
proposed. The meadow they pledged to return to each year on their
anniversary. They talked of it often, and relived the moment every year
on that special day. But they never came back. Life, and careers, and
bullshit got in the way.
Careers included the single-minded
ambition they shared. Dean’s resulted in a meteoric rise to detective in
the Chicago Police Department and, after being handpicked to join the
Midwest Organized Crime Task Force as the only local police detective
among FBI and ATF agents, his days and weeks became an unending blur of
clues, criminals, and cases. Sara’s graduate degree at Northwestern led
to a tenure track appointment at Loyola University. But tenure track
meant running never-ending, back-to-back-to-back marathons of teaching,
research, and publishing. Their career ambitions allowed no room for
children, or travel, or a return to Sara’s Meadow.
And then, over
the last year, came the bullshit. Dean was working eighty-hour weeks on a
high-profile case involving government and police corruption, and many
of the Chicago cops whom he considered friends turned away from him. And
then, just when they thought they were getting close to breaking the
case, the investigation was shut down and he was reassigned. He was
exhausted, disappointed, stressed, and his friends treated him like a
traitor.
And then there was Sara. She had been diagnosed with
cancer just as Dean began the investigation from hell. After her initial
treatment, she received a clean report, and he was too preoccupied to
notice when she continued to lose weight. A check-up a few months later
showed that the cancer had returned. The rebound was aggressive,
additional treatment failed to stop the spread, and she continued to get
weaker and weaker in spite of what she would call “frequent invitations
for happy hour cancer cocktails with my oncologist.” She even made up
names for the cocktails based on the side effects she would experience
afterward. There was the Diarrhea Daiquiri, the Migraine Martini, and
the Vomit-rita. No subject was out of bounds for her wicked and
irreverent sense of humor. Once, when she was bedridden near the end,
Dean asked her how she was feeling, and in her best Sally Field Mama
Gump imitation, she said “Well, Forrest, I’ve got the cancer.”
Dean
wanted to take a leave to stay at Sara’s bedside, but she made up her
mind that that was not an option. And when Sara made up her mind about
something, he had learned to let her have her way. So Dean was relegated
to spending every hour that he wasn’t working by her side, holding her
close, imagining how they would live their lives differently when she
was well.
The night she died, she asked him to describe that day in Sara’s Meadow.
And when he finished, she said, “Promise we can go there when I get
well. Will you take me there next summer?” He nodded, unable to speak.
She slept peacefully that night for the first time in quite a while, and
in the morning she was gone.
Strangely, although she was the
center of his universe, the only person that he could say he ever truly
loved, he showed little emotion when she died. He didn’t cry. He felt
almost as if he were an outside observer of these terrible events. He
experienced only numbness. An unrelenting, withering numbness. A
numbness interrupted only by random bursts of anger that disturbed even
the hardened cops he worked with. Dean was not unaware of his problem,
and tried to channel the anger by hooking up with Manny Cohen, a mixed
martial arts coach and self-proclaimed king of “Jew-Jitsu”. He loved the
physicality of the MMA bouts, and that the jiu-jitsu moves he learned
permitted him to disable much bigger and stronger fighters, even if he
was on the ground being pummeled. He justified the training as part of
his law-enforcement skills, but he knew what it was really about— the
ability to inflict some of the horrible hurt he was feeling on others.
The
changes in Dean since Sara’s death were most troubling to his boss,
Carlos Alvarez. Carlos had been crushed when, on the verge of busting a
Chicago mob guy who had both political and police connections, which
evidently reached all the way to Washington, the whole operation had
been shut down. In his heart, he knew it was those same connections he
was investigating that had defeated him. He looked at Dean and watched
one of the most competitive spirits he had ever known flicker out,
starved for the oxygen that Sara could no longer supply. The case they
had put their hearts and souls into for the last year was ripped out of
their hands and Dean, who normally would be just as pissed off as he
was, seemed to be only going through the motions.
But the most
disturbing problem, as far as he was concerned, was Dean’s refusal to
mourn Sara. Carlos watched as Dean’s isolation became extreme, and he
refused all offers to talk or socialize. Dean’s robotic demeanor and
increasingly unpredictable violent outbursts were scaring him. When
Carlos sent him to meet with the psychologist assigned to their
department, he refused to cooperate. He insisted that he was fine. But
Carlos knew he wasn’t fine. He saw a man on the brink of a breakdown and
finally decided that drastic action was needed to rescue the man from
himself. One morning he walked into Dean’s office and handed him a
letter worded as an authorization, which was actually an order, to take a
three-month leave of absence.
“But where will I go? What will I
do?” Dean said, seemingly incapable of entertaining any change to his
barely functional routine. Carlos looked toward the picture on his desk,
the one taken twelve years earlier. It showed Dean standing on a
whitewater raft. Sara was sitting in the boat looking up at him with a
combination of love and lust in her eyes. In the background, the
grandeur of the Tetons loomed. “You have to get out of town. You have to
get away from here, from all this. And I know where I would go if I had
no obligations and three months off. I’ve been envying that picture
since the day you moved in here.”
What his boss didn’t know, and
what Dean couldn’t tell him, or anyone else for that matter, was the
real reason that he wouldn’t see the psychologist— something that would
make him seem crazy to outsiders. Hell, he often had that thought about
himself. Not every evening, but maybe two or three nights a week, he
would spend the night with Sara. He would wake up a couple of hours
after he went to sleep, and she would be there, sitting in the chair
next to his bed. He would get up, and they would talk just like they
used to, about everything, what was happening in his life and in his
job, or what was going on in the news. They would make love, and it was
every bit as passionate and real as before she was sick. When he would
wake up in the morning, she would be gone. At first, he tried to
convince himself that it was all a dream, until one night he washed the
sheets before he went to bed, and the next morning her perfume lingered
on the bedding. She was really there, and she was as real as anything he
had ever experienced.
He had nothing against psychologists. He
had seen a therapist in college after a particularly hard break-up and
had found it very helpful. In fact, he visited that same therapist when
Carlos was pushing him to see the department shrink— he wasn’t about to
have his craziness officially certified to his employer. And his own
therapist confirmed what he instinctively knew himself. “Your
hallucinations of your dead wife will go away when you allow yourself to
fully mourn her.” But that was exactly the problem. Her very real
apparition was the only tangible thing he had left of her. Her visits
were the only thing that let him get through the day, that kept him from
becoming totally out of control, and he wasn’t going to let anyone take
that away from him. He was determined to hold on to whatever was left
of her, for as long as he could.
Sara was the one that convinced
him to take the trip. She told him during one of their nocturnal visits
that he could use the time off; that she knew he was stressed out. He
agreed on one condition. That she would come with him. She gave him her
mischievous smile, the one that had captured him that first day in the
coffee shop, and said, “That’s not a problem. I’m not going without sex
for three months. And the ghosts here are too creepy to sleep with.”
That
first summer twelve years ago, he had come into town from the south,
getting off I-80 west of Rock Springs, approaching Jackson via Alpine
and driving up through the Snake River canyon so that he could view the
whitewater section he would be working. Wyoming is mostly high plains
except for the northwestern part, which is an endless vista of scrub
grass, prickly pear, sage brush, with occasional red-rock battleships
and gargoyles. On that first trip he was able to view the Wind River
Range in the distance outside his window, but he didn’t really get a
good view of the Teton Range until he reached the outskirts of the town
of Jackson. This time he had decided to take the Northern route via
I-90, because he wanted to see the Black Hills, one of the few
topographic areas of interest that is easily accessible from the
interstate. So he was not really prepared for what happened when his
Jeep rounded the bend on Route 26, east of Teton National Park, and he
looked west. The fragrance hit him first. He had the windows in his Jeep
rolled down and, as the road increased in elevation, the air turned
cooler and became infused with snow runoff blended into mountain streams
and the bouquet of lodgepole pine forests to form the unique perfume
that his unconscious associated with his first summer there. He was
looking down for a station on the radio when he felt the jolt, as if a
switch was flipped in his brain, and when he turned his face back to the
road, the windshield was suddenly and magically filled with the
panorama of the majestic purple, snow-tipped peaks of the mountain range
that symbolized all that had been true and pure in his life. All that
was lost and would never ever return. The image struck him like a bullet
in his chest, sucking all the air from his body. The next thing he
knew, he was out of his car, on the side of the road, on his knees,
gasping for air, heaving, sobbing. “Oh, Sara. My sweet, sweet, Sara.”
***
Excerpt
from The Grand by Dennis D. Wilson. Copyright © 2017 by Dennis D.
Wilson. Reproduced with permission from Dennis D. Wilson. All rights
reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
After a career working in an international
consulting firm and as a financial executive with two public companies,
Dennis D. Wilson returns to the roots he established as a high school
literature and writing teacher. For his debut novel, he draws upon his
experiences from his hometown of Chicago, his years of living, working,
hiking, and climbing in Jackson Hole, and secrets gleaned from time
spent in corporate boardrooms, to craft a political crime thriller
straight from today’s headlines. Dennis lives in suburban Chicago with
his wife Paula and Black Lab Jenny, but spends as much time as he can
looking for adventure in the mountains and on his motorcycle.
Connect with Dennis:
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