Born of gilded mountains, p.2
Born of Gilded Mountains, page 2
Your new pen pal,
Rusty Bright
p.s. You ever need a place to be, you just come find Rusty Bright in Mercy Peak. Sure as your name’s Marybeth Spatts, you got a place here. And don’t forget it.
CAMERA ZOOMS OUT. CAPTION READS
20 YEARS LATER
FINAL NEWSPAPER SPINS TO A STOP AS CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON HEADLINE.
WINDSOR IN EXILE: WHERE IS THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS FACE HIDING?
Folio of Field Notes, Volume I: Mercy Windsor Disappears
[Property of Sudsy McGee, Hollywood Biographer]
OWN A PIECE OF THE STARS
Los Angeles Times
Advertisements: Real Estate
March 3, 1948
For the very first time . . . Hollywood mansion of legendary actress Mercy Windsor* offered for sale! Celestial Climes, the 23-room mansion, sits on a pristine promontory off Sunset Boulevard. Stylish splashes of color throughout the home’s plush, carpeted interior; terra-cotta tile imported direct from Tuscany; bright white walls and vaulted ceilings make for an unparalleled hosting venue. A modern fireplace creates a sleek statement piece, while two entire acres of citrus orchards, with a plum tree at the orchard’s heart, provide privacy from faraway neighbors. Bask in your own tropical conservatory paradise with vibrant parrots, an indoor waterfall, and blooming birds of paradise. Never bother again with those pesky Santa Ana winds! On nice days, enjoy the balmy Southern California weather at your sequence of three linked pools. You’ll feel as if you’ve escaped to a mountain haven, with yet another waterfall descending into a pool through a built-in slide. Gable, Stewart, Garland, and more have walked these halls at Windsor’s famous social gatherings. Join their ranks today as the new owner of Celestial Climes.
For further particulars, contact
Burdock & Holmes, Inc.
Real Estate
*No publicity inquiries. Burdock & Holmes strictly represents the property and its owner, Pinnacle Studios, and does not have information regarding Mercy Windsor’s whereabouts, motives, or plans.
Wildwood Estate For Sale Notice
From Mercy Peak Mercantile Bulletin Board Mercy Peak, Colorado
March 1948
For Sale: Old Gilman Place
Seven or eight bedrooms, maybe nine, hard to say. Indoor plumbing if you get the water running plus TWO outhouses. Elevator (hand cranked). Tunnel to town so you’ll never have to be cold(er than you have to). Boathouse on Gold Leaf Lake, if you can repair. Maybe boat or two. Bring hammer and nails. Remote. Lots of acres, maybe 50, going on up the mountain. Owner keen to sell. See Kurt.
HAVE MERCY: THE RISE AND FALL OF MERCY WINDSOR
By Sudsy McGee, for the Hollywood Herald
March 1, 1948—She arrived on a train and was on her first Hollywood set three hours later. In a world where aspiring actresses give up by the dozens each day, and even the contracted ones wait for months or years to be cast in a bit role, Mercy Windsor’s rags-to-riches and obscurity-to-fame is the stuff of legends.
After all, who in their right mind would take on a black-and-white ten-minute scene in the last silent film Pinnacle Studios would ever produce? Who, in the age of talkies, mob films, and sensational musicals, with rumors of color films on the horizon, would mark their career obsolete before it had even begun?
Here’s who: the girl fresh off the train, spotted in a stage play in Denver and brought to Hollywood by Pinnacle Studios president Wilson P. Wilson himself.
No one knew her name.
No one knew her face.
It was the lowest-budget film on their docket for 1938. Slated to open at only a few old theatres across the country. One of which included the vaudeville hall–turned–movie house in a tiny Vermont town where revered reviewer Owen Haskell, of the review duo Haskell and Kline, happened to be visiting his daughter.
The famously severe critic for the New York Review was moved until words evaded him. “Go and see it,” he said simply. From the man best known for scathing syndicated reviews, those four words were as good as gold, and her fate was sealed.
“The single tear that flooded the world,” they called it. This unknown actress, with the face of a waif and hair dark as night, took to the screen with something real. In a medium characterized by caricature, where exaggerated expressions and wild gestures compensated for the lack of sound . . . she made silence her voice.
She embraced it. Dared to be understated—to let the minuscule crease of her brow speak more than the overwrought twisting hands she was urged to employ. To let a single tear splash upon her hand, so empty of her child’s grip, and eschew the swoon written into the script.
The director saw something in this quiet rebellion and kept the scene in what he’d called “the throwaway film.”
But the scene touched something in audiences, who spent their rare pennies to see someone on the screen who, like them, would’ve given anything to offer a table full of food to their children.
Soon, the film was everywhere. Every theatre, for lengthy runs. The people’s message back to Hollywood was clear: Give us more of her!
Hollywood delivered . . . and a star was born.
They loved her loveliness.
Were won over by her winsomeness.
Touted her timidity.
And the spotlight grew. Roles followed as Cinderella, Guinevere, a Fifth Avenue socialite, a backcountry bumpkin, and a catacombs-traversing heroine in a role invented just to include her in The Cask of Amontillado, a role she declined initially due to an aversion to tunnels. Typically agreeable to any filming challenge, her quiet resolve surprised the studio, who in response proposed that a roofless tunnel set be constructed, with lighting and strategic shadows providing the needed illusion of confined space.
She gave that same sincerity in each role until she didn’t just live on their screens—she lived in their hearts.
One question, always lingering: Where did the girl come from? Wilson P. Wilson, owner of Pinnacle Studios, has been uncharacteristically reserved with his answers to the press. “Mercy Windsor was a gem in her time on the silver screen,” he said. “But after an unpleasant set of circumstances, Pinnacle has found it unavoidable to prematurely end its relationship with Miss Windsor, who is, in fact, in breach of contract.”
Rumors include everything from moral scandal to embezzlement. All that’s known for certain is that it stems from the filming of Joan of Arc, with Windsor in the title role. Pinnacle had already poured untold thousands of dollars into it when it was forced to the brink of cancellation.
The Mighty Mercy has fallen . . . and there does not seem to be anyone to catch her. One question echoes in her absence:
Where is Mercy Windsor?
The zigzag stitch is nearly impossible to undo, Mercy. But that’s the beauty of it. It’s strong. It mends tears, finishes the frayed edges of fabric cut from its place that would otherwise unravel.
—Mabel Greer, wardrobe mistress of Pinnacle Studios
Mercy Peak, Colorado
March 1948
To get to Mercy Peak, Colorado, a plucky little locomotive known as a “Galloping Goose”—half train, half automobile—carried the rare visitor up the colorful foothills and into the emerald timberline.
The Galloping Geese—motors numbered 1 through 8—had tin-toothed grins in the form of a fender-like feature known as a cowcatcher, a term the locals pretended not to notice, out of fondness for their bovine friends. The rail cars galloped daily past landmarks with assuring names such as Lost Canyon, Sawpit, and Lizard Head Pass.
And tucked into the folds of those mountains, they stopped at Mercy Peak Gulch, as the town once was called, till someone decided Gulch sounded like something a rude dinner guest would do and it was off-putting to visitors. Nothing was said about how maybe it was the zig-zag railroad putting people off, how by the time you arrived, your soul was stitched to the mountain for the way you’d white-knuckled your seat and held your breath around hairpin turns and too-high trestle bridges.
And then you’d open your eyes to scenery too good to be true and breathe again, hand to heart. A mercy, indeed.
It was a place as much legend as land. High up there and near unto heaven as a body could get while still alive and kicking . . . yet still more peaks rose impossibly above. And maybe that’s why men came in search of streets of gold there, the sort that runs down deep.
It took a heap of courage to live there. A world of men thrummed in the lantern light, deep down below. The mechanical heartbeat of the mountain, veins running in petrified ore, hoisted by man and machine. The people there had each other and not much else. They gathered for Sundays, gathered for rice-throwing and candle-blowing, gathered to celebrate and grieve. Made feasts of dried beans and whatever bounty the mountain offered, not much blinking to notice when the Great Depression hit the outside world, for they’d always lived this way. And if hard times hit, you could bet the folks down the road would mention they happened to have a spare slab of bacon or an extra bag of beans, and would you mind taking it off their hands? It’d do them a big favor.
Winters were brutal and summers a dream, all blue skies and thunder in concert, canyons spilling wildflowers into lakes so turquoise-bright they seemed shot from stars themselves. Stars in canopy over spark-spinning campfires, making the good folks below ache in the chest to see how vast it all was, how small they were, how right that somehow felt.
Summers cast a spell, entrancing you just long enough to forget the hard edge of winter and how you’d sworn, come March, to pack up and hightail it out of there to somewhere you didn’t have to slice through ice to open your door or knock icicles off your beard. But then came May, and the snow sighed into waterfalls beneath that high-country sun, tumbling over cliffs, running in rivulets, washing souls with wonder and hypnotizing them to stay a little longer, live a little deeper.
It was into this land of not-quite-spring that Motor No. 7 brought a single passenger. Dark-haired, dark sunglasses, and a dark shadow that seemed to hover over her.
A clattering sounded, followed by the slow screech of wheels upon tracks. The driver hopped out, poking his head into the cargo wagon, where Mercy Windsor perched on the edge of a passenger bench, holding tight to her suitcase.
“Everything alright?” she asked.
“Aw sure, we’ll have her back up in no time. Just a little overheating, is all. The Geese hardly ever have any serious trouble.” He grinned, proud.
She nodded. They’d had their share of overheating on the jungle roads when they filmed Embargo. No need to fear. “If you need a hand with the coolant, I’m happy to help,” she said, sliding her suitcase from her lap and standing. He took one look at the way the wind rippled the silk of her dress and scratched his head.
“It’s an . . .” What was the term the driver had taught her? “Internal combustion engine, yes?”
The man’s eyebrows shot up.
“I could pour, or hold the cap, or . . .” Anything to take her mind off what awaited in Mercy Peak. Or rather, what didn’t await. She held her hands out, forgetting about the bandages.
He saw them. She saw him see them. She pulled them back, clasping her hands behind her back.
Soon. Soon, she’d be healed enough to remove them.
“I wouldn’t want you to, uh, get your perty dress soiled,” he said with a blush.
She looked down. “It’s all I have.” And it was the truth. It was this or one of the other costumes, and this one was as plainclothes as her costume wardrobe got. “For now.” She’d been locked out of her own home, a legal entanglement with Pinnacle Studios resulting in frozen accounts, immediate eviction from Celestial Climes, dayslong deliberations between attorneys over what “breach of contract” did and did not mean . . . and her one possession clear: her entire movie wardrobe, per the infamous costume-keeping clause.
It was fine . . . except for one item she desperately needed, squirreled away on a shelf at Celestial Climes. But she’d find a way to get it back. She had to.
They were soon back up and running, chugging their way up the mountain to Mercy Peak and the end of the line for Mercy Windsor.
The jaunty engine slowed, approaching the depot. Mercy stood in the doorway of the dented tin Goose, taking in the Victorian village with its brick buildings. A hotel so fine it looked like it had been plucked from Paris and planted here in the clutch of these peaks. A clock tower on the town hall, a mercantile. In the distance, snow blew off the peak like a phantom flag, frozen in a ripple. Her courage rippled, too.
It was different, coming to Mercy Peak this time around. A little over ten years ago, she’d been here and gone before twenty-four hours had passed. Before anyone had even known she’d made the trek across the country, left everything she’d ever known, to get to a place she’d dreamed of coming all her life—only to turn right back around and leave.
A woman thin as a rail and with the posture of one, too, laid a measuring tape between lampposts and scribbled down notes. Across the cobbled street, two white-haired men sat on a bench, engrossed in conversation as if they’d worked all their lives to do just this. The measuring tape snaked loose in a twist, and one of the men hopped up, holding it down with his foot, doffing his cap at the woman. All without missing a beat in his soliloquy about how the trout weren’t biting in the river, and had the other man tried Jake’s Cove yet?
A sign at the end of the depot in fresh white paint with crisp black letters caught her eye.
Welcome to
MERCY PEAK
Your Alpine Hamlet Home
Pop. 198
The engineer with bushy white brows offered his hand, pulled it back when he realized it was streaked in engine grease, wiped it on a handkerchief that he stuffed back into his overalls pocket, and helped her down. She pulled her wool sweater tight against a shiver, planted her scarlet silk heels on the weathered platform, and breathed deep.
“Is that a new sign?”
“Priscilla Murdock’s doing.” He tipped his head toward the woman, who had neatly coiled her tape and was now examining an empty flowerpot outside a shop, tsking at a crack and jotting something down. “The town’s trying to get people to come out here. Not much in the way of mining anymore, and things have been . . . slow. So, they put up a new sign, and Miss Murdock said alpine hamlet sounded nicer than gulch. But to me, hamlet just sounds like breakfast food that’s a heap too small, and I can’t see how that’s much better. Whatever you call it, Miss Murdock was born and raised here, just like most of us. The gulch is in her veins, whether she likes it or not.” The woman, dressed in a long wool coat and a fine hat with a feather, walked at a clipping pace with a hint of a limp. “Maybe even more than most, good Lord bless her.” He tilted his head to study the sign with Mercy. “Nice sign, though.”
When she asked whether she could reach Wildwood Estate by foot or if she needed a taxi, he guffawed. “Ralph’ll take you,” he said. He saw her into the mercantile—“heart of the town, where anything that’s got to get done, gets done,” according to her guide. Here she saw a man named Kurt about the keys and was introduced to Ralph, a kind-faced older gentleman who looked wary when she named Wildwood as her destination but was happy enough to lend his Model T to the task.
She arrived at the gate of a stone-and-timber estate with pinnacles and points aplenty . . . with broken windows and boarded-up doors, too. The earth squished and punctured beneath her stiletto heels. That’s right, mud, she thought. Cover up the old life. Here, we start anew.
Gripping the rusted bars of the ornate iron gate, she sent up a silent prayer that this place—though she knew nary a living soul here—would do for her what the mud did to her shoes.
“Ma’am?” Ralph spoke over the throaty idling engine of the Model T that wore its mud splatters like badges of honor. “You sure you’ll be alright in there?” He scratched his head as the hem of blue chiffon trailed in the mud, forming its own question mark.
“I—” She cleared her throat, put on a smile, told herself the old lie. I’m ready. “I’ll be fine.”
He didn’t look convinced. “Ain’t a soul stepped inside that place in years. Mr. Gilman was a strange one toward the end. And the house shows it.”
Mercy gulped. “How so?”
“Ever hear of the Winchester House?”
“The place with stairs and doors that lead nowhere?” California lore whose fame could rival the silver screen.
He nodded. “This here’s a bit like that. Mostly it’s just a big house, but Gilman got a little paranoid. He brought in a blacksmith from nobody-knows-where, in a private car, even though we got the best blacksmith right here in Mercy Peak. Made this place into something of a puzzle. The man had ghosts in his past, no doubt about it, and people think they finally caught up to him. He had his share of secrets, sure, but most just think he went a little crazy, in the end. Guilt, probably.”
“Guilt?”
Ralph waved. “You don’t want to know all that your first night here. You’ll get an earful from the town soon enough. And this place’ll clean up right nice.” His smile was unconvincing. “But if you need a place to stay till it’s fit for living, might be Miss Ellen in town has a room open. She poaches a mighty fine egg.”
Mercy faced the man and reached for his name in the place she filed them, carefully, in invisible rows. How many words had she memorized over the years? How many lines, in how many scripts? Too many to count. She’d decided early on that the least she could do was make names the first thing she remembered. People mattered, even if she was verifiably the most alone soul in the universe this evening.
“Thank you for your kindness, Mr. Mosely.” She pinched open her red clutch, pulling out a crisp bill and offering it.
The bearded man scuffed a foot awkwardly in the mud and waved off the gesture. “Aw,” he said, swatting his hand through the air, “no need, ma’am.”
“But you drove me all the way from the depot.”
