Sea to Sky (16 page)

“Depends …”

Just then the microphone came alive with a burst of feedback as they regulated the volume, and then one of the conference organizers began to speak.

Meredith leaned over and spoke softly into Todd Milton’s ear, brushing his cheek with her cupped hand. “I hope you’ll tell me more later,” she said.

“Absolutely,” he said, then reached over and tentatively patted her knee. “Stella.”

Meredith looked away briefly, clenching her jaw, then turned back toward him with a flirty grin. “Great,” she mouthed.

But to herself she said,
You’re hooked now, buddy. I’m going to play you like a trout.

Back at the top of the Harmony Chair, Hunter and detective Shane Blackwell were about to start a second run down Whistler Mountain. They had pored over the map and discussed the options with the two most experienced lift attendants. Hunter thought it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but you never knew, they might get lucky, or it might turn out to be easier than he expected.

“Could be dangerous,” the lift attendant named Parsons had warned. “You’d better stay together because skiers have accidentally fallen into those tree wells and not been able to get back out. You fall in head first, and you’ll suffocate pretty quick. Like drowning in snow.”

Whoever had killed Mike Irwin and planned to escape on skis — or a snowboard; not likely but there was no way of knowing — had probably discarded the murder weapon on their way off the mountain. It was also possible that they had thrown the weapon from the chairlift, but that would have involved a greater risk of being noticed, or of missing the intended target. Yes, it could have sunk into deep powder, but reaching a tree well across the wide vertical gap in the mountain vegetation beneath the chairlift would be more difficult. Parsons had suggested the route which would afford the greatest opportunity to ditch the weapon out of sight of the chairlift, and away from the busiest ski runs. Hunter took the left side and Shane took the right side, each of them looking for indentations in the snow that would indicate a single skier had veered close to a tree well, then back closer to the fall line for a quick run down the mountain.

“Harmony Ridge,” Parsons had said. “There are several routes through the trees to choose from, especially if he was a good skier. Or better yet, Harmony to Burnt Stew Trail. Lots of trees down that route. Easy to ski out of sight for a few minutes. Then somebody could ski on down to the Village, or confuse things by taking the Harmony or Emerald Express back up the hill, or … hell, if somebody was trying to be tricky, it’s a total maze of lifts and trails, you know.” The lift attendant shook his head and said, “Good luck” as if he didn’t hold out much hope for their success.

Now that they were back on the slope, Hunter didn’t hold out much hope either. They skied down slowly, skis tracing parallel lines through the surface of the slope, one on each side of the run. Every now and then one of them would holler, “Whoa!” as they peeled in closer to a tree well, or followed a ski track off the main slope behind some snow covered firs. Hunter found a promising recent track behind a tree, peered into the tree well from as close as he dared, and was rewarded with the sight of a small pocket of yellow snow.

A few hundred yards further on he heard Shane yell, and followed the sound behind a large tree on the other side of the slope to see Shane’s skis and poles stuck upright in the snow. Shane was nowhere to be seen, but tracks showed that he had waded through deep snow toward the tree well of a big fir. A few of the closest branches were bare of snow.

“Hunter. Here!”

“Oh, shit.” Hunter inched his way over the snow, keeping his ski tips snowplowed in, until peering between branches, he could see Shane in the deep hole that surrounded the trunk of the tree. He took a firm hold of his right ski pole and extended it into the hole. The detective managed to grab it, and Hunter sidestepped away, a few inches at a time, until Shane was able to climb out of the hole on his hands and knees. He stood and took a step, sinking up to his thigh in the soft snow.

“Find anything?”

“Zilch. Pass me my skis, would you? This is a fuckin’ useless exercise.”

“We should’ve brought a rope,” said Hunter.

“How many trees on this slope, anyway?”

Hunter laughed. “Who said he was even headed down this slope? There are a dozen ways he could have gone. There must be a million trees.” He couldn’t help thinking of how Alora had been the first one to mention throwing the weapon into the tree well. “Or she,” he added. “Plus they could’ve just spiked the gun into the soft snow anywhere off the groomed runs and we’d never see a trace of it.”

Shane nodded. “We can’t even be sure the killer ditched the gun on the mountain. Maybe he threw it in a restaurant dumpster in Whistler. Maybe he threw it into the Cheakamus River on his way back to Vancouver, or off a cliff along the Sea to Sky highway into the ocean.” Shane lost his balance trying to fasten his boot onto the second ski, and fell on his butt. “Fuck!” he said, reaching for help from Hunter’s ski pole again. He pulled too hard and Hunter’s skis slid out behind him, pitching him forward into the snow.

For a moment they looked at each other in silence, then both burst out laughing. Two homicide detectives — one current and one former — floundering in soft snow, barely able to stay upright. They both managed to struggle to their feet, their skis perpendicular to the slope, and considered the situation.

“You know,” Shane said, turning to point at the tree well behind him with a ski pole, “the gun could very well be under the snow in there. I would have absolutely no way of finding it without a metal detector and a shovel and too much time.”

“The tree well I checked out was the site of a piss stop. How many more of those will we find? You can’t get too close to them, because the snow under the branches is full of air pockets. It just collapses and sucks you right in.” He rubbed his cheek with his glove. His face was starting to get numb from the cold. “You’re the boss, chief. Do we carry on?”

Shane looked up toward where they had been, and down to where they were heading. His nose was red, but his forehead glistened with sweat in spite of the temperature. The lifts had started running, and it wouldn’t be long before the slope was alive with skiers and snowboarders. He took a deep breath, sighed, and said, “We’re here. Might as well keep an eye out for promising signs until we reach the bottom.” He started turning his skis, preparing to push off. “But let’s stick closer together.”

As his skis started sliding down the slope, he threw back over his shoulder, “I don’t want to end up in one of those hell holes face first.”

The little farm on Greenhorn Road looked much the same as it had last time Sorry had pulled into the driveway, except the trees had grown. He’d been on his Harley that time, as he had several times before that. This time, he was on foot. He had managed to back The Blue Knight into the neighbor’s driveway and park it in a wide gravel space in front of the farm’s machine shed, as his father had suggested. He could see his mom’s white and yellow Chevy pickup parked beside the same old horse trailer. The paint was dull and pocked here and there with rust. Both of them had seen better days.

Sorry climbed the front steps and banged hard on the front door. No answer, so he turned away from the door and yelled, “Mom!” at the top of his lungs, then “Mor!” Neither he nor his mother spoke Norwegian, except for a few common words they’d picked up from Hank’s parents. Mor was one of them.

“Danny?” he heard her call from behind the barn. Of course she was with one of her ‘pets’, as her husband referred to all of the farm animals, from a two pound chicken to a twelve hundred pound horse. As he walked toward the sound, he heard the clink of a chain on a metal gate, and a few seconds later she emerged from the other side of the barn, lugging a bucket. She looked a lot younger than her sixty-three years in spite of her gumboots and a bleach-stained hip-length jacket that must have been one of Hank’s. She was still fit and strong and hardly overweight. She placed the bucket on the ground and reached up to give him a hug. She was only five foot three to his six foot two. He hugged her back until she pushed against his chest so she could look him in the eye.

“You should’ve called.”

Close up, he noticed that the skin above her eyes seemed to sag, and there were pouches under her eyes and lines around her mouth he didn’t remember seeing before. “Last minute thing, Mom. I’m doing a delivery to Redding, got a ten hour layover.”

Her expression said, “Huh?”

“Trucking regulations. There’s my truck.” He pointed over at the eighteen wheeler, visible through the naked aspens that lined the neighbor’s field. “I drove for eleven hours, I’ve got to stop for ten.” He gave her another quick hug. Her jacket smelled a little bit like horse manure. “Got anything to eat?”

“Don’t be an ass. We don’t hear boo from you for a couple of years, then you show up without calling and expect me to drop everything to feed you?”

She made him help her finish up the chores, pushing a wheelbarrow full of manure from the barn to a pile out back and filling up water buckets for the horses and cows. Since his last visit, she’d added a couple of yearling Herefords.  “What are their names?” he asked. “Sirloin and Brisket?”

She rolled her eyes at him as she said an emphatic, “No.”

Twenty minutes later he was sitting in the familiar kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil. For some reason his mother’s kitchen always smelled slightly of dill. His mother was heating up a pot of homemade soup, and putting together a cheese and salami sandwich. She had changed from jeans and boots to sweats and slippers, and she made him leave his own boots in the mudroom. He rubbed his stocking feet together under the table.

“Place looks good,” he said. It hadn’t changed much since his last visit. The floor was some kind of linoleum that looked like red sandstone tiles, and they had installed oak cabinets and ordered a solid oak table from a local woodworker somewhere around 1986. He remembered the year, because his mom told him she was thinking about coming for the ’86 Expo in Vancouver but that they couldn’t afford it because they’d renovated the kitchen.

“Only if you don’t look too close,” his mother said. She held up her right hand for him to see, and he realized that her finger joints were swollen. “Arthritis,” she said matter-of-factly. “Scrubbing and polishing was never my favorite thing, and now it even hurts.”

“Dad said he was trying to sell the store.”

She turned from stirring the soup, obviously surprised. “You’ve seen him?”

He nodded.

“And… ?”

Sorry shrugged. “He seemed kind of bummed about selling the store. Otherwise, it went okay. He didn’t spit in my eye or nothin’. I think he was even happy to see me.”

“Of course he was. I don’t know why you always put the blame on him for you two not getting along. You’re the one who stays away for years at a time.” She put the lid on the soup pot, walked to the table, and sat down. “I’m worried about him, Danny.”

Sorry’s gut dropped. Even if he and his old man had behaved as if they hated each other for years, somehow at the back of his mind he figured his old man would be around long enough for that to change. “Why? Is he sick?”

“No,” she said, absently drawing little circles on the table top with a finger. “Not physically sick. Not yet, anyway.”

“What do you mean, not yet?”

“You know your father. That hardware store has been his whole life. I’m just worried that when he sells it, he’ll be one of those men who retires and then dies a couple of months later.”

“That’s crazy talk, Mom.” Sorry didn’t want to say it, but he thought maybe she was right. “Doesn’t he want to retire?”

She worked her mouth a bit, as if she was thinking hard. “He says he’s too old to work that hard. He says he wants to take it easy, but it doesn’t feel like a good thing when he says it. It feels to me more like he’s giving in to his age.” She sighed and shook her head. “More like he’s just giving up. I can’t see him doing volunteer work or taking a part time job working for somebody else. Hank’s Hardware has been part of who he is since before you were born, Danny.”

The kettle whistled and she got up to make coffee in the same old Bodum Sorry remembered from years ago.

Sorry sat without speaking, playing shuffleboard from one hand to the other with the empty coffee mug in front of him, then stroking his moustache as he thought about what his mother had said. What the hell
would
his father do with his time?

“Besides, it’ll drive me crazy to have him around here every day. There’s only so much he can do here. It’s not a big farm, and he’s never been interested in the animals.” She poured him a coffee. It looked weaker than the Tim Horton’s he’d grown used to.

“He needs a hobby. You got cream and sugar?”

“He doesn’t really have one. You can’t call yard work and home maintenance a hobby. More like a chore.” She brought a carton of cream from the fridge and a sugar bowl from the counter. “A real hobby’s something that makes you feel more alive.”

“Like my bike,” said Sorry, reflecting on how great it felt to have the machine power up to full throttle underneath him, how free and happy he felt ripping up the open road with the wind whistling past his ears. He even got pleasure from polishing every inch of it now and then on a winter evening when the weather was too shitty to ride.