SILVER SUMMIT, Utah — He sat in his chambers, unprepared for this. "Just giving you a heads up," his court administrator was saying. "Paul Wayment hasn't reported in yet. They can't find him."
Judge Robert Hilder felt uneasy. Wayment was supposed to start his jail sentence this morning.
The 52-year-old judge walked slowly to his Summit County district courtroom. The trial underway passed as a blur. More than once, clerks pulled him off the bench to give him updates on Wayment. Each time, in his chambers, he stared out windows at the jail, hoping to see Paul drive up. At the lunch break, he went into Park City to eat, alone with his thoughts.
He'd sentenced Wayment to jail even though the prosecutor didn't want this distraught father to serve time. Hilder felt he had to. Wayment's negligence caused his young son's death. There must be consequences, the judge ruled.
Now there were--more than he had intended.
On his way back from lunch, Hilder punched off the car radio, wanting to avoid the news. As always, his 6-year-old son's drawings and broken Lego toys covered the floor of his Ford Taurus. At the courthouse, he walked down a hallway that took him past the administrator's glass-walled office. She rose and waved him in. Concern, he saw, strained her face. He approached her door, bracing himself.
Had he driven Wayment to suicide? Hilder believed it possible. Just as he believed it possible that he'd caused his own father's suicide, 20 years before.
Although it includes the Park City ski resorts, Summit County is less the province of people than of rolling pastures and mountain forests. Only about 25,000 live in 1,849 square miles. Only one judge--Hilder--hears criminal cases. Three lawyers comprise the county attorney's criminal division. Two private lawyers on a part-time retainer fill the public defender's role. When they heard of Gage Wayment's death, all of them knew it would come to them. They knew they'd soon have to make their own choices.
The first choice, though, had been Paul Wayment's.
There he stood last year on a radiant October morning, high in a remote forest. Before him spread the wild green abundance of Chalk Creek Basin, a rugged 8,000-foot-high hunting ground where deer and elk and moose wander through dense stands of golden quaking aspens. Behind him, strapped in a car seat in his red Dodge pickup, sat his son Gage, his inseparable buddy, his most precious gift, his future hunting partner.
