THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  No use wanting what wasn’t to be. The status of elder was one that Calvin took for granted would be his, but now never would be. Moses had fixed that. Moses had wasted both their lives.

  His fingers curled over the top of the fence, as he looked at what he couldn’t have, and remembered why he was here.

  Roddy Milligan was squeezing some oranges for breakfast when he realized his briefcase was in the den. A piece of toast between his teeth, he wandered through to get it.

  The snow was worse. Its wind-driven descent filled the huge window, creating an illusion that the whole house was a vehicle traveling sideways at speed through some weird white sea. This weather was making commuting a nightmare, and his temper short. He picked up his leather case and wandered past the huge den window, looking down the virgin white paddock to the gray snow on the road. There was somebody looking up at the house from the fence. Roddy narrowed his eyes and chewed his toast. A tramp. Shit. So much for the neighborhood’s strong police presence that the real estate agent had bragged about. Roddy felt apprehension stir. Maybe he wasn’t a bum. Maybe something worse. Were there more of them? Were they casing the joint to break in as soon as he’d gone to work?

  Roddy swallowed the last of his toast and went to the phone. The police had better get here fast enough to let him get to work. If those bastards made him late, he’d fax their superiors in town first thing he did. Someone would get it. There was a cordless sitting on the coffee table in the foyer. He picked it up, pulled out the aerial and walked back into the den to keep an eye on his latent intruder. The figure hadn’t moved.

  Should he dial 911? It wasn’t exactly an emergency, a tramp looking over your fence. But it was a potential emergency if he was going to rob your house, and Roddy was in a hurry. He thought for a moment and decided to go for it anyway, punching in the numbers and watching the dark, hunched figure in the snow as he put the phone to his ear. Even though the man was too far away for Roddy to see the details of his face, he felt the man’s eyes sweeping his face like a searchlight. He felt a little light-headed. The phone was making a buzzing noise now that made him feel strange. It calmed him, made him think of sweet summer smells, the scent of chokecherry blossom dancing in white clusters on the end of thin green branches, even though he stood in a terry-cloth robe only a glass pane away from a blizzard.

  “Roddy?”

  A woman’s voice on the phone. Roddy was only mildly surprised. Must have misdialed. This certainly wasn’t the police but he felt pretty good about it.

  “Roddy? Is that you?”

  “Mom?”

  Why hadn’t he phoned his mom lately? he wondered dreamily. He remembered she’d been dead twelve years, that was why. But it sure was nice to talk to her again.

  “Roddy. Ask the man in. He needs clothes and some sleep.”

  “I thought he was a thief, Mom.”

  “Don’t be silly, Roddy. He needs to come in right now.”

  He was sure he could hear larks in the background. There was certainly a feeling of summer, like his mom was calling to him from the house to come in and get his lunch. He could feel the sun on his face, and smell honeysuckle in the air.

  “OK, Mom.”

  He took the phone from his ear and went to the window. The man seemed to be waiting for a sign. Roddy banged on the glass and beckoned him forward with a smile. Calvin Bitterhand opened the white wooden gate and slowly shuffled up to the house.

  21

  Sometimes you just have an instinct as a patroller. Mike wished his instinct had been wrong. But it wasn’t. The guy in the clown suit said that his buddy was right behind him on the mogul field and that he waited for him at the bottom. Couldn’t have missed him if he’d come down, he’d said. He got a rocket up his Californian ass from patrol, of course, for skiing a closed run, but the poor kid seemed upset enough. They let it go and didn’t take away his lift pass.

  “There’s no way I could have missed him, man,” he’d whined. “I stood right here at the base and he just didn’t show. Ain’t no other way down.”

  Patrollers knew different. The boy could have skied past without being seen if the clown was looking the other way for even a second, or could have cut through the trees onto the green run. But they had to check anyway. His gang was getting concerned. Mike had skied the trail a couple of times, but there were no signs of a wipeout and no stray poles, gloves or goggles, which usually told a tale of woe.

  The thing to do was to leave it until the end of the day, just in case he was chilling out in a mountain restaurant, and if the kid still didn’t show they’d start getting serious about a search.

  He hadn’t appeared by three and they got serious, all right. The trail was at least a mile long. A lot of trees to search, but that’s where Mike’s instinct told him to look. The kid could have crashed into the pines and, God forbid, be lying there with a broken back. The snow had started again just as the fun run ended, and that would have covered any signs of a major wipeout, but if he was in there, Mike was going to find him.

  Betty and Lachlan took the east side of the run and Mike took the west. He side-slipped down the first hundred yards, where you could at least see right through the pines to the other side. Then it got thick. Nothing to do but to get in there and poke about. Mike unhitched his pack and swung it around in front of him. He unbuckled a pair of snowshoes he took from the patrollers’ hut and stepped out of his ski bindings while there was still hard pack to support his weight. One step off the trail and you were up to your waist in snow that held you like a mantrap. He strapped his long skis on his backpack where the snowshoes had been, and legged it into the forest.

  There was a strange kind of silence in among the trees. When his radio crackled it was like swearing in church. Almost like life became muffled for the time you were in there, softer around the edges, like it didn’t matter what went on out there in the other world you could glimpse through the branches. This primeval place sat secretly like a sanctuary beside the highway of snow that carried tourists up and down the mountain every day. A green-and-brown secret full of twittering birds, scuffling animals and that thick, syrupy silence.

  Mike loved the trees, but he loved to ski in them. He didn’t much like walking through them. It was tough going in there, with branches whipping him on the legs and face as he plodded through their constantly changing corridors. He kept a line about twenty feet in, parallel to the trail, from where he would at least see a point of entry if the kid had crashed. He knew Betty and Lachlan would just poke a head into the trees on the other side of the trail looking for signs of disturbed snow and leave it at that. It was Mike’s instinct that told him he might find the boy there. The fall line made it more likely he would have slid or tumbled this way. It was that instinct that made him walk rather than ski, as unnatural a choice of locomotion to a patroller as swimming might be to a buzzard.

  It was that instinct that also made him hesitate when he saw the ski sticking up in the snow between a gap in the trees. Mike stopped and looked for a second. It had to be the kid. He saw the pink flash of the Rossignol ski he remembered from this morning. This year’s model. A hundred and ninety centimeters, if he knew his stuff. Too long for the kid. They always thought long skis made them look like experts. Yes, he remembered that ski. It was going to be bad. If the kid had been lying here for that length of time he would most probably be dead or dying from the cold, whatever his injuries. But somehow, Mike Watts didn’t want to rush forward, pull out his first-aid kit and get to it. His instinct told him something was even more wrong than a skier lying injured deep in the trees. He pressed “talk” and spoke to anyone who would listen.

  “Mike here. I’m in the trees about half a mile down Beaver black diamond. Looks like I found him. Not quite there yet, but it looks bad. Over.”

  A crackle of static, and Mike was still standing, not moving.

  “Read you, Mike. Do what you can. Blood wagon’s on its way.”

  Mike thought about marking the t
rail outside the trees with his skis first. Just so the wagon could find them. But even as he thought about it he wondered why. Every patroller worth the white cross on the suit would run instantly to the injured skier and assess the situation, not pussy about with skis when someone was lying there needing help. He was nervous. No explanation. Just nervous.

  Grabbing the picture back into his head of how the boy might be alive and in pain, Mike moved forward. He heard Betty and Lachlan shouting, somewhere, in another time.

  He shouted back. “Here! Through here! Below you.”

  That pink Rossignol. It had SEAN painted on it in big fat clumsy letters with a windsurfing sticker of a cartoon piranha partially obscuring the n. He remembered everything about that ski. The scratches, the stickers, the angle it jutted out of the snow. He remembered it very well indeed. When he got to what was left of Sean Bradford, and saw the mess of flesh, guts and bone that was loosely attached to that ski, Mike could barely remember his own name.

  “Jesus fucking Christ! Jesus Jesus Jesus!”

  Good in a crisis, thought Eric sarcastically as he watched Pasqual Weaver shrieking and clutching at her breast. The police incident tape made a whirring sound as it fluttered in the wind where it was attached to the trees, and more than twenty people tried to stand upright on the treacherous edge of the darkening trail.

  Pasqual leaned against her snowmobile, a female officer’s arm around her shoulder. She’d made the mistake of marching across the trail, ducking under the tape and making straight for McGee. She needed through there. This was her patch and they would damn well let her past.

  She got through and saw what the policemen were seeing as they crouched around it, trained lights on it, took photographs of it and wrote about it in notebooks. Now she was a tearful, hysterical wreck who was going to heave at any minute. Eric didn’t want through. He knew what was in there. The head patroller had told him. Well, more or less. Enough to know he wanted to stay on the trail, well away from the action. Eric was just here watching, taking stock, grateful that the porridge that was an eighteen-year-old kid hadn’t been found until the end of the day when the resort was closed and all those curious, happy skiers had gone home to soak in a hot tub. Eric knew his skiers. They were attracted to incident tape like flies around shit. Keeping them from tragedy was pointless. They loved it. But luckily they were gone. At least, those who got off their mark sharp were gone. The rest were being held by the roadblock McGee had set up at the exit road from the resort. Even now, the Trans-Canada was scaled off in both directions by the highway patrol. That, if nothing else, would guarantee the media would be here in a matter of hours. Eric took a few careful steps on the precipitous trail toward the huddle in the trees. He didn’t want to go ass over elbow in front of all these Mounties. It was bad enough for the company that their managing director was coming on like Fay Wray. They didn’t need any more childish displays of weakness.

  It was practically dark now, and the ski patrol were setting up halogens on the trail and in the pines for the RCs to continue their grim work. McGee looked up, saw Sindon pick his way over the bumps to the edge of the wood and went out to greet him.

  “Don’t come in, Mr. Sindon,” he said from the tree side of the tape. “It’ll live with you a long time.”

  Eric looked past Craig into the forest, lit now like a Spielberg movie, the beams from the halogen lamps making fans and girders of solid blue light between the trunks.

  “I wasn’t thinking of it. Believe me.”

  Craig nodded toward Pasqual. “Is she OK?”

  Eric smiled. “Sure. How’s it going in there? Anything?”

  Craig ignored the question, since it was asked the way you’d ask a gardener how the hedge trimming was coming along. “Was it snowing up here this afternoon?”

  Eric shifted his weight, felt himself slip and shifted it back again. “I couldn’t say. It was certainly snowing at the base lodge, but as you know, it can be coming down up here and sunny down there, so that doesn’t mean much. Why do you ask?”

  Craig looked away, nodding. “Routine. We’re going to need a lot of cooperation from you, Mr. Sindon. I’m sure you’re aware of what’s going to happen when the press get a sniff of it.”

  “I’m aware of it.”

  Craig didn’t like Sindon’s tone. He pushed the tape up and ducked beneath it, joining Eric on a little platform of snow behind a rock-hard mogul.

  “We need a full list of everybody that was working at the resort. We need names, locations, times, and we’re going to need to speak to every last one until they’re hoarse with telling us the details of their day.”

  “We still have a resort to run, Staff Sergeant.”

  “Then we can close it if it gets in the way of our investigation.”

  “I don’t think you can do that.”

  “Watch me.”

  Sindon suddenly wondered why he was being so protective about what was, after all, Pasqual’s company. Force of habit. He changed tack. “We’ll cooperate fully. I’ll make sure they’re all available first thing tomorrow.”

  Craig shook his head. “Too late. We’re knocking on doors tonight, Mr. Sindon. Can you let my officers have the names and addresses right now?”

  Sindon sighed. “I’ll take them down to the lodge now if they want to come.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Craig said without much feeling. He looked back over his shoulder to the lights in the wood. “Hawk! Bell! Here, please.” He turned back to Eric. “That includes you and Miss Weaver, and all these guys here.”

  “Of course.”

  Craig looked beyond Sindon to where their bodies threw gigantic and grotesque shadows over the blanket of trees on the other side of the trail. He spoke softly as though Eric had already gone.

  “We need to get this animal.”

  22

  The lodge cafeteria was bad enough as a place to eat. It was even more horrible as an interview room. The long concrete room had windows along one wall looking over the nursery area and a serving counter along the other. In the poorly conceived space between were 20 ten-seater wipe-clean tables with permanently attached plastic seats.

  Constables Daniel Hawk and Jeff Bell had set up their posts at the table nearest the cash register, their notebooks and a photocopied list of names open in front of them as they worked their way through the employees of Silver Ski Company. Those waiting their turn to be questioned had arranged themselves into groups declaring the rigid class system that exists in ski resorts. The patrollers sat near the darkened window, apart from the horde, their unclipped boots on the floor as they sat with their steaming, socked feet on the table. They tried to look like they knew exactly what was going on. Patrollers always did that. Tell a patroller something he didn’t know and he’d move his gum around his cheek a little and say, “Yeah. We heard.”

  Anything at all.

  “Hey, Baz! Giant soldier ants from Africa have taken over the world.”

  “Yeah. We heard.”

  Patrollers figured it was part of their image to be the center of things. They sat and tried to look like they were in control again, but for once the uniforms on the two Mounties’ backs were trumping their white crosses.

  Standing around the closed serving hatch were a cluster of manual groomers, the ones who drove the trail bashers, shoveled the snow, fixed the fences and drove the lifts. They didn’t care about image. They wanted home. So did the catering staff, the office staff, the bus drivers and the shop people. But it was going to be a while.

  “So, Karen Howe.”

  Daniel ran a finger down a list of names in the staff rota.

  “Your job is…?”

  Karen looked nervously at Hawk, who was flicking open a new page in his book with his free hand, not looking at her.

  “Manual groomer.”

  Her voice was higher than it should have been.

  He looked up. “Hey. Don’t worry. This is just routine.”

  He smiled a big white smile. She smile
d back.

  “Sorry. I get nervous speaking to policemen. Always think I’ve done something. You know? When you haven’t? Like when you’re stopped for a ticket and think they’ll shoot you?”

  “Sure. Get that way myself when I go through customs at airports.”

  “You do? Wow. A cop feeling guilty.” She giggled. Not unpleasantly. Hawk turned his eyes back to his notebook.

  “Where were you between the hours of eleven-thirty A.M. and three-thirty P.M. today, Karen?”

  She swallowed, moving forward in the plastic seat that didn’t move with her. “Uh, I was here mostly, on the quad. Then I went over to Beaver to relieve the groomer on the chair.”

  Hawk looked up. “Uh-huh. How so?”

  “Oh, he got ill or somethin’. I did the chair till it closed at three forty-five.”

  “And who was it that you relieved?”

  “Sam Hunt.”

  Hawk raised an eyebrow. So Sam was a groomer, then. He’d known Sam briefly when he drove buses at Fox. Met him every time there was a violent passenger or a theft. Would have been hard not to, since Sam and a handful of others were the only Kinchuinicks living in Silver. But he hadn’t seen Sam in years. Not socially at least. Nice guy, Sam. Married white, same as Joe. Hung up about his roots, though, that was for sure.

  Anyway, it made him pleased to see Sam making something of his life, even if it was only shoveling snow. At least it wasn’t stealing for drugs and booze like most of the guys he’d dealt with when he policed Redhorn. And it looked like he was going to make Sam’s acquaintance again tonight. If this girl’s calculations were correct, Sam had been the man on the spot when the boy was being sliced.