It was Monday. Two days and nights had passed since Dean's siren-serenaded ride to the Montrose Hospital and subsequent forty-eight hour stay in its friendly confines. The leg wound from Shipton's flailing ice ax had been an eight-stitcher of no permanent consequence but the clump of frozen mountain Dean caught on the head kept him fuzzy and blurred his vision for a day and a half, necessitating the stay. An hour earlier a nurse wheeled Dean to Cynthia, Fred and their waiting Jeep. Now, thanks to an early February thaw, it was warm enough to haul out the front porch rockers and pretend it was summer in the warmth of the mid-afternoon sun.
Cynthia, Fred, and Dean with a cane nearby, rocked in unison, albeit bundled and mittened, but content to have Bird Song to themselves, at least until the weekend.
"Are you going to fill us in or just keep rocking until you wear a hole in the porch?" Fred asked, his patience hitting the wall. The trip from hospital to Ouray excluded any mention of the earlier happenings as Dean's health took precedence but now that wellness was established, it was open season.
Dean chuckled. He'd been waiting for just such an outburst. During his in-and-out-of-it hospital stay both his wife and stepfather had refrained from questioning him. This noble restraint wasn't entirely out of respect for Dean's condition. A police guard blocked Dean's door for the first twenty-four hours, precluding visitors. Once it was established the law wasn't there to jail Dean as soon as he'd recuperated, Cynthia relaxed. Shipton was dead-he had tried to kill Dean. Beyond possessing those meager details, wife and stepfather were clueless.
Shipton's traveling companion, Penelope Something, hysterically filled in what little she knew to Jake Weller and Emile Corday, both of whom visited the patient at the hospital. Dean's spoon-fed explanation to the two, served between naps and medical visits, satisfied officialdom enough to free Dean from any hint of culpability. If Corday had apologized, Dean was napping at the time.
Dean continued to pump his rocker a few moments longer, trying to set up his response in some sequence of understandable order.
"It's a bit confusing and a lot of it's speculation on my part, but bear with me and I think I have enough of the answers to make some sense of what happened. The bottom line is Shipton killed his wife." Dean turned to his stepfather. "It wasn't the amount of the check Shipton gave you that caught my attention, it was the ink. The check was written with an old fashioned fountain pen. If the pen were Edith's, how, or why would Shipton have it?"