Widowmaker (10 page)

Had Amber known this would happen? That curiosity would get the better of me once I'd started asking questions? At the very least, she must have understood that any conversation I had with stonewalling Shaylene Hawken was bound to leave me feeling angry and frustrated.

I glanced again out the window at the alabaster sky above the ragged treetops. I hadn't been back up to my father's old stomping grounds in ages, not since the manhunt. I could drive up to Widowmaker and be back home before the snow started to fall. As long as I understood where the lines were drawn and made certain not to cross them, I was at no risk of getting myself into trouble. No risk at all.

*   *   *

I kept my personal vehicle, an International Harvester Scout II, in the garage, out of the elements. I had always had an affinity for vintage four-wheel-drive vehicles. Maybe it was because I spent so much of my working life driving a state-of-the-art GMC Sierra that was loaded with more technology than I knew what to do with. My first antique had been a Jeep Willys that ran like a dream until rust ate it down to the bones. Then I had owned a cherry Ford Bronco, which I had watched being blown apart by shotgun rounds. Looking for a replacement, I had been torn between a Dodge Power Wagon and the International Harvester. I had gone with the hardtop Scout and had never had cause to regret my decision. The gas mileage was abysmal, but my trusted four-by-four took me everywhere I wanted to go.

In the winter, I packed the back with tire chains, a come-along, and a pull rope—as much to help motorists who might have slid off the road as to help myself. (I have always been an incorrigible Good Samaritan. My life would have been easier if I had been even remotely corrigible.) I kept a pair of snowshoes in there, too, as well as a wool blanket, a five-gallon jug of gasoline, and a first-aid kit.

As I backed out of the driveway, I reached into my glove compartment for a pair of sunglasses. I also carried one of my off-duty pieces in there: a Walther PPK/S that jammed on hollow-point bullets, no matter how well I cleaned the barrel. I kept it for softheaded, sentimental reasons. It was the first handgun I had ever owned.

I debated whether to call the shelter to check up on Shadow. Joanie Swette had mentioned doing a blood test. I supposed that it was probably more reliable in terms of determining genetics, especially when the stakes were so high for an animal. But they wouldn't have the results for a while.

The GPS on my phone said it would take more than two hours to get to Widowmaker.

The resort was located north of Rangeley, a lake town not far from the New Hampshire border. I decided to take the cross-country route, following the frozen Androscoggin River through Lewiston, Maine's second-largest city, and past the mill towns of Livermore Falls and Jay, where the air smelled like rotten eggs and every snowbank seemed to have a crust of asphalt grit.

I had lived briefly along the Androscoggin as a small boy when my dad had a job at the old Atlantic Pulp and Paper mill, and I could still remember my mother's warnings. Below the dams, the plunging river was coffee-brown and frothy, but then it would slip beneath a sheet of seemingly solid ice for miles.

“You can't trust it,” she'd said. “Not ever, Michael. Do you understand me?”

Her warnings had given me the idea that the river was an evil serpentine thing, a winding white dragon, slithering through the snow. The impression would be strongest at night, when I heard the ice forming and shifting. The grumbling sound made me think of sleepless monsters, and then in the morning I would see jagged new patterns in the surface, cracks and ridges that hadn't been there the night before. The term my mother used for those nocturnal noises was
river talk,
but to me it sounded much more like the growls of something that would swallow me whole if I didn't take care.

Then I would watch my father trudge out to the middle of the frozen river with a six-pack and his ice-fishing gear and sit there safely for hours pulling brown trout through holes, one after the other, while he got a buzz started for the coming night at the bars. When he returned with a bucket of trout, I knew for certain he must be the bravest man in the world. Who else could ride the back of that white dragon all day and return home alive?

*   *   *

The road to Rangeley took me through the college town of Farmington, where Shaylene Hawken had her office, and then northwest through the impoverished Sandy River Valley. Bleak little towns with names like Strong, Avon, and Madrid were strung like tarnished beads along the highway. Hunchbacked mountains blotted out the light for long stretches, and moose warning signs flashed amber at every curve in the road.

Surrounded on both sides by hills, the isolated shacks and trailers down in the river bottom must have seen the sun for only a few hours each day. I found myself imagining the domestic dramas that might be playing out inside those benighted homesteads—the drugs being injected, the alcohol being consumed, the blows and the screaming, the guns being placed speculatively against temples.

I pressed the gas harder to outrace my grim thoughts.

The crossing for the Appalachian Trail came into view. Few people attempted to hike this stretch of glacial terrain in the winter. There was a short ascent to Piazza Rock that got some foot traffic, but almost no one dared venture out onto the exposed ridges beyond. The foolish ones who did—the backcountry skiers and alpine snowshoers—often needed to be rescued by game wardens risking their own lives.

And then, suddenly, the mountains let me go, and I was back in the bright white world.

Down in the Sandy River Valley, almost all of the variety stores and motels had been closed for the winter—if not boarded up for good—but now I began seeing motor inns with glowing
VACANCY
signs, and restaurants with snowmobiles parked out front. SUVs with out-of-state plates and ski racks began to zip past. Finally, a great white bowl opened before me, and I saw the hard, shining expanse of Rangeley Lake. Bright-colored dots raced back and forth on the distant ice; the sledders were out en masse for Snodeo.

I'd never attended the winter carnival, but I understood it to be an extended weekend of snowmobile races, bonfires, and hard partying. While our fellow officers in the state police and the sheriff's department patrolled the roads, Maine game wardens were given the trails and frozen lakes to watch over. Most of what we dealt with on the sledding routes were speedsters and drunks. I assumed the wardens assigned to Rangeley for the carnival must have gotten cramped hands from writing tickets.

As I drove through the village itself, I had to stop several times to let pedestrians cross the road. They piled in and out of the clothing boutiques and sipped lattes behind the steamed windows of the restaurants along Main Street. After the poverty and desolation I'd witnessed in the Sandy River Valley, I found it disorienting to see so much money on display in what seemed, on the map, to be the middle of nowhere.

The GPS told me to make a right onto Route 16, locally nicknamed “Moose Alley” for the number of collisions that occurred along it. Just past the village, the road took another hard turn, and then I was leaving the town and the traffic behind again. The houses began to be spaced farther and farther apart, and the woods began to edge closer to the snowbanks, until the trees on either side became unbroken walls of green. I drove fifteen more minutes along Moose Alley before seeing the sign for Widowmaker.

 

10

Widowmaker was situated on the steep southeast-facing slopes of East Kennebago Mountain. The last time I could remember the resort having been in the news was a decade earlier, when a chairlift had malfunctioned, sending dozens of skiers plummeting to the ground. A man from Connecticut, a father of two, had died. There had been a number of gruesome headlines in the tabloids playing on the Widowmaker name. After the accident and the subsequent multimillion-dollar civil suit, the mountain resort had struggled to stay open.

Then, last year, a big ski company from out west had bought the place for pennies on the dollar. Pulsifer had said the new owners were looking to renovate the outdated lodge buildings and lifts. I wondered if they were considering bigger changes as well. I didn't know the first thing about marketing, but it seemed like they might want to rebrand their new investment with a less macabre name.

The access road to the resort crossed the frozen Dead River on a bridge that looked like it should have been replaced a decade earlier. Almost immediately, I came upon a cluster of businesses that had been built since the days when my father had driven a snowcat on the mountain. There was a grocery store plastered with signs that seemed to make a big deal out of its liquor selection; something called Kennebago Estates, which I guessed to be condominiums, offering many discounted units for sale; and a family restaurant, the Landing, which had an overly large and empty parking lot, as if its owners had opened the place with unreal expectations of how busy they would be.

One of the few landmarks I recognized from my childhood was the campus of the Alpine Sports Academy. The dormitories and halls had been built in the style of Swiss lodges—a timber-frame design that now seemed dated—but they looked better maintained than the other buildings I'd seen so far. Somehow ASA had managed to thrive even while the adjacent resort had fallen into disrepair—a tribute to the fund-raising prowess of its head of school, or at least proof that having half a dozen alumni with Olympic medals was enough to make the pickiest of parents overlook a lot of the mountain's flaws.

Soon the ski slopes came into view. Dozens of white trails flowed in all sorts of crazy directions from the snowcapped summit; they followed the grooves between the dark forested ridges the way meltwater streams will find their own zigzagging paths downhill after a storm. There seemed to be a lot of empty seats on the chairlifts.

The big hotel in the middle of the village loomed into view: the hub of activity for everything going on at Widowmaker. I hadn't expected to find a parking spot this near the top at the height of the season, but, to my surprise, a Volvo wagon was pulling out as I pulled in.

It was colder here than it had been at home. The air had a sharpness to it that promised imminent snowfall. As I crossed the lot, I noticed that I was one of the only people not dressed for skiing. Just about everyone else was clomping around in ski jackets, pants, and boots, as heavy-footed as Frankenstein's monster. Unencumbered, I sprang lightly up the stairs that led to the center of the resort's little village.

A recently shoveled sidewalk led between two big buildings: the Widowmaker Hotel and a plazalike strip of stores and restaurants. I saw signs for a market, a Laundromat, a coffee shop, and a few restaurants. You had to pass through an alley to reach the base lodge. It was a big post-and-beam building with wide doors. I followed a family of skiers inside.

I paused to remove my sunglasses at the entrance. At first glance, the great room seemed like a cozy-enough space; it was lighted by elaborate chandeliers and warmed by an enormous river-stone fireplace. But a closer inspection revealed that the carpet had been scuffed down to the backing in spots, and on the ceiling there were water stains shaped like prehistoric continents. Drafts blew about the room, carrying clattering echoes from the cafeteria and voices from the changing areas, where people were putting on and taking off their boots and helmets.

A sign for the Sluiceway pointed me up the stairs to the second floor.

Inside an arch, a teenage hostess stood behind a podium. She had a skier's tan, which made her gray eyes look grayer, and she was wearing a tight sweater, which accentuated the muscles in her firm little arms. She showed me the braces on her teeth when she smiled.

“One for lunch?” She lifted a menu from the stand.

“Is Amber working today?”

“Amber? She should be here somewhere.” She glanced around the room. Only the bar itself seemed to be illuminated by artificial lights. The rest of the place was awash with natural light from a wall of windows. The air smelled of french fries.

A shout went up from a table of guys in plaid snowboarding jackets. “No, she fucking didn't, dude! That's not what she fucking said!”

It wasn't even noon yet, but those shredders were already buzzed.

The hostess blushed. “If you want to sit at the bar, I'll send her over.”

“Thanks.”

She smiled brightly again, and I wondered how many drunken men mistook her innocent friendliness for flirtation. If I had been her brother, I wouldn't have wanted her working at a place where guys got wasted before noon. I took a seat at the bar, positioned so I could keep an eye on the rowdy snowboarders.

I had never skied Widowmaker during my Colby years. East Kennebago was the runt of the local ski mountains, with no interesting geological features—no horns or windswept snow plains—to amp up its sexiness. Because its trails had been built on the southeast-facing slopes, the sun had more time to melt whatever snow fell, turning powder into water, and water into ice. The ski term for the mountain's characteristic surface was
frozen granular,
but my classmates who had skied Widowmaker called it “death cookies” and warned me away.

I hadn't needed the excuse. The real reason I had avoided Widowmaker was that I hadn't wanted to run into my father unexpectedly. I knew that he frequented the roadhouses and saloons between Rangeley and Solon: a drinking territory that he roamed the way a predator will mark as its own a certain chain of mountains, or expanse of forest. The prospect of my wandering into a barroom and seeing my dad on a stool, unshaven, with a shot and a beer in front of him, had scared me off. It was easier to stick to Sugarloaf, where I knew he had already been banned for life, and where I didn't have to worry about being humiliated.

The bartender came over. She was an athletic-looking woman with short hair the color of squid ink. She was dressed in jeans and a black fleece sweater with a
W
on the breast. “Beer?”