But then, I’d thought the Internet was a pipe dream, too.
And I had to give it to Tucker Peak on aesthetics. Like Stratton, although smaller, it lay encased in a bowl of mountains. A single road led into it, up and over a humpbacked cleft, and the initial view of the resort, as the car turned the last curve at a low-flying, bird’s-eye level, was straight from a fairy tale. The base lodge, surrounded by buildings, stores, sheds, and the nightclub, looked like an alpine village, the slopes and lifts fanning out like anchor lines from the heart of a spider’s web. The sprinkling of slopeside condos resembled outlying rural homes.
The most striking feature, however, towered far overhead, above the buildings, the access road, and even the broad, carved mountain bowl cradling the ski trails. Lining the horizon, with the blank white sky as a backdrop, looking spectrally indistinct in the barely falling snow, was a row of modern windmills—stark, pale, streamlined, and huge—eight of them with rotors so wide, it seemed unlikely they could move. And yet move they did, with the same ghostly, silent, otherworldly grace that elephants have drifting through the night in a herd.
In another effort to pay the bills, Tucker Peak had leased its ridge-line to a local power company for this experiment in alternative energy, granting itself in the process the single most unusual feature of any ski resort in the country.
All of it—the village, the fan of trails, the beautiful mountains, the surreal windmill farm, and the colorful sprinkling of brightly clad skiers across the white snow—made me think that in a world so given to appearance over substance, I might have been too harsh in giving Tucker Peak an early requiem. Faced with such an ethereal picture, this isolated, small, vertically challenged ski bowl just might find a way to compete with its brawnier rivals.
“Where do we go?” Willy asked, as impressed as if we’d just come to a crossroads in Kansas.
“Western slope. Something called Laurel Lane. Number 318.”
I drove down into the pseudo village, noticing how its alpine image fell apart under closer scrutiny. The buildings, of ersatz Swiss design, began losing their picturesque appeal. Dark, supposedly shingle roofs emerged as painted metal; the pattern of wooden beams on fake stucco walls turned out to be only brown paint. The whole vision became threadbare, cheap, and perilously impermanent. I was abruptly forced to wonder if fifteen million would make much of a dent, a thought driven home by the addition of a quiet group of placard-wielding protesters camped out by the base lodge’s front entrance.
I passed between the lodge and the nightclub opposite, paused where the road split into a Y, and headed uphill to the left, skirting one side of the crazy quilt of interlocking ski trails. I noticed that the skiers I’d seen earlier, traversing the slopes like ants crisscrossing a sugar spill, weren’t present in the kind of numbers to give a resort owner much joy, especially during a weekend. I also saw there were as many empty building lots as condo sites.
Willy was checking off road signs. “Summit Road, Powder Lane, Snowflake Circle… Christ almighty, Joe, why don’t they give it a rest? Here we go, the tree section: Maple, Fir, Hemlock… Laurel’s on the right.”
The scattered houses we’d passed had varied in opulence from the functional, tucked away with no view apart from a few trees, to the marginally upscale, with a glimpse of a meadow or a nearby ski trail. Laurel Lane brought us up a significant notch.
“What d’ya think?” Willy asked. “A half-million each? Three-quarters?”
I watched the procession slide by as the road emerged from the trees and stretched taut behind one perched palace after another, like a ribbon with gaudy baubles glued to one edge. Most of the houses were cantilevered out over a steep incline, allowing them the panorama their less affluent neighbors merely aspired to. For the first time since our arrival, here were signs of real wealth—and of potential salvation for the whole.
“I have no idea,” I said quietly, suspecting the economies of such places had little to do with true value.
Number 318 looked vaguely western to me, low and spread out with an expansive, oversize roof that was more flat than peaked, unlike most New England buildings. It was built of logs and had huge windows and a wraparound deck that looked deep enough to hold a tennis court.
We parked next to a sports utility vehicle deserving of a rope ladder and stepped out into the cold air. The snowfall had completely petered out.
As we set foot on the porch, the front door opened abruptly, revealing a short, round, balding man wearing a bulky, expensive white knit sweater and a permanently angry crease between his eyes.
“Who are you?” he asked abruptly, his tone of voice matching his expression.
I couldn’t stop Willy in time.
“Be nice, asshole,” he said without hesitation, “we’re cops.”
The owner’s mouth dropped open. Feeling like the straight man in a comedy act, I pulled out my shield and announced as nonchalantly as possible, “Vermont Bureau of Investigation—Special Agents Gunther and Kunkle. I gather you asked to see us?”
To my surprise, our presumably type-A host merely gave Willy a grudging look of admiration and stepped back into the open doorway. “’Bout time. Come in.”
We walked past him as he continued, “I’m glad that idiot sheriff got the message. I thought I might have to call the governor.”
“We’re only here because the sheriff invited us,” I explained. “It’s still his case.”
The short man waved his hand dismissively. “Whatever. I just wanted someone who could read and write. Guess you’ll have to do.”
“Wild guess,” Willy interjected, “you must be William Manning, from New York.”
The crease deepened between Manning’s eyebrows. “You got by the first time, sonny. Don’t push it.”
“Could we cut this out?” I asked them both.
They looked at me as if I’d just spoiled a good windup. Manning was the first to recover. “Right. This has really pissed me off. I didn’t come to the boonies to get robbed like it was the city.”
He preceded us toward a glass-walled living room beyond the entryway. I held up a hand to stop Willy from responding.
“Why don’t you take it from the top, Mr. Manning?” I suggested.
He motioned us toward one of three large sofas, all positioned to enjoy the scenery outside. Everything was there, from the sweep of ski slopes, to the base lodge far below, to the windmills looming high in the distance like gigantic praying mantises. I noticed there was a long, graceful ramp connecting the deck to the nearest trail, allowing Manning and his guests to ski directly from home.
Despite the overcast day, the living room was saturated with light.
“You’re not going to want coffee, are you?” Manning suddenly asked.
We both shook our heads.
He sat back and crossed his legs. “There’s not much to tell. My wife and I come up weekends this time of year. Last weekend everything was fine. This one they ripped us off.”
I pulled a sheet of paper from my pocket, rose, and crossed the thick wool rug to hand it to him. “That’s the list of missing items Sheriff Dawson prepared from your statement. Any changes you’d like to make?”
Manning pulled a pair of half-glasses out of his breast pocket and scrutinized the list, eventually saying, “That’s it. The watch was the only thing I couldn’t replace.”
“What was so special about it?” Willy asked. “Besides the cost?”
Manning responded to the implication. “Yeah, that would stick out for you guys. The cost is irrelevant. It was a custom job, from my son on my sixtieth birthday. It’s a sentimental thing, one of a kind.”
“You have a picture of it?”
He gave us a sour smile. “Yeah, I do. The insurance company made a big deal out of it, bastards.” He reached over to a long table behind the sofa, opened a wooden box, and pulled out a wad of photographs. “I had these delivered to me this morning. It’s everything that’s missing, including the watch.”
Instead, I returned to my roost and handed the photos to Willy to study. He pointedly tucked them into his pocket without a glance.
The sooner I was out of this gladiator pit, the better, I thought.
“Did you sense anything unusual when you drove up this last time?” I asked.
Manning shook his head but then answered in contradiction, “Yeah. Some snow had drifted onto the deck, in front of the front door, but it had been swept clean. I thought it was the caretaker, at first, why, I don’t know. Dumb yokel wouldn’t know a broom if he fell over it. It was obviously to get rid of footprints, but I didn’t figure that out till later, when I found the broken window they used to get in, around the far side of the porch.”
“You asked him anyway?” I inquired.
“’Course I did—he was clueless.”
“Mr. Manning,” I asked, “when did you notice you’d been robbed?”
“As soon as we got inside. For one thing, it was cold, from the broken window. But the small TV was missing from the kitchen. Peggy noticed that right off, no surprise.”
We both caught the sardonic tone of voice again.
“Where’s your wife now?” Willy asked.
“She went back to the city. Anyhow, after that, I started looking around. Whoever did it was obviously low rent—missed the paintings and ceramics and grabbed whatever he could sell fast.”
“And the watch was on your bedroom dresser?” I asked, recalling Snuffy’s report.
“Yeah, out in plain view. You want to see where everything was?”
I shook my head. “The sheriff’s people took photographs and made diagrams. Just out of curiosity, though, pretending this isn’t the smash-and-grab we’re all assuming it is, can you think of anyone who might’ve done this to get back at you for some reason?”
The other man was genuinely nonplussed. “Get back at me? For what?”
Willy rose abruptly and studied Manning, cradled by his overpriced sofa like a silver spoon on velvet. “Can’t think of a thing,” he said in an angry, flat voice and headed toward the front door. “I’ll be in the car.”
Manning and I watched him leave.
“Touchy guy,” he commented.
I stood up also. “Yeah… Well, I don’t think so. You told the sheriff you thought one of his deputies might’ve been involved in this and that you also suspected the mountain’s security force.”
Manning shook his head disdainfully. “I said that to get his attention—like hitting a mule with a two-by-four.”
“So there’s no truth to it?”
“I don’t know,” he said with disgust. “That’s your job.”
· · ·
I found Willy sitting quietly in the car, staring out the window at the view.
I didn’t start the engine immediately. “Am I going to have problems with you on this?”
He remained looking straight ahead. “I was just asking myself the same thing.”
“And?”
“Not if I don’t have to spend any more time with him.”
I turned the ignition key. “Deal.”
Chapter 3
IT HAD BEEN WHOLLY APPROPRIATE TO DRIVE OUT TO Tucker Peak on a Saturday on Snuffy Dawson’s request, but given the low profile of the crime and our own budgetary constraints, I was now happy to drop Willy off outside the office and just quickly double-check by phone that the sheriff’s deputies had filed the initial paperwork, processed the evidence, and set all the appropriate electronic inquiries into motion. After that, I headed back home to my woodworking shop.
Not that my project there was anything monumental. In fact, I was replacing an elaborately shaped but cracked wooden seat from a chair belonging to Gail Zigman, the woman with whom I’d eccentrically shared my life for just under twenty years.
We weren’t married, and we didn’t live together, although we had briefly not long before. But through thick and thin, some of it quite traumatic, we’d proven to ourselves and to each other that we were as closely intertwined as any couple we knew.
Gail was younger than I, born to privilege in New York City. Well traveled and highly educated, she had come to Brattleboro at the height of the commune movement to try living a life far different from that of her parents. Living the countercultural life in Vermont hadn’t been a waste of time. It had opened her eyes to values she still held dear. But it had also been relatively short-lived. Within a few years, she’d yielded to an ingrained and natural ambition and had joined the town’s business and political world, growing and evolving over a couple of decades from successful Realtor to selectman to deputy state’s attorney, to where she’d recently become legal counsel to VermontGreen, the state’s preeminent environmental group, based in the capital city of Montpelier.
Now, Gail was one of that growing class of professionals who’d taken advantage of computers, faxes, and cell phones to stretch the lines connecting her to the office. When the state’s citizen-legislature was in session, roughly from January to April or May, she lived in a condo in Montpelier so she could watch the political pot. The rest of the time, she worked out of the house we’d once shared in West Brattleboro, from which the chair I was repairing had come.
As foolish as it sounded for a man of my years, I was intent on returning to my repair job less for the daunting task of making a new piece match an old chair, and more because handling it brought me at least tangentially closer to Gail.
We didn’t live apart because of any friction. We didn’t argue, or dislike each other’s politics or eating habits or taste in late-night movies. It was more that since we’d met later in life—I a widower and a settled, lifelong cop; she a professional woman increasingly eager for a new challenge—we’d already come to terms with the bachelor lives we’d adopted. We instinctively needed more breathing space than a younger couple and were less willing to compromise for the sake of steady companionship.
In the end, it had been neither easier nor harder than an old-fashioned marriage. It had merely evolved into something rich and rewarding enough to keep us coming back for more.
So, I kept at my project for the rest of the weekend, until by Sunday night I fitted a reasonably antiqued seat between the old and slightly battered legs, arms, and back of a hundred-year-old wooden chair, knowing that the effort I’d put into it would count for more with Gail than just good craftsmanship.
· · ·
It was with similar anticipation that I returned to the office on Monday morning to see what the computers had coughed up concerning William Manning’s missing items. For me, an investigation, no matter how apparently trivial, shared many of the elements of a woodworking project. They both demanded thoughtfulness, patience, and attention to detail, and both promised to disappoint if handled carelessly. But neither one was entirely successful if only followed by the numbers. Strong elements of intuition and creativity always featured in the end result.
It was also true, however, that encouraging momentum was sometimes slow to build. When I checked for reports from our queries of two days ago, I found nothing.
Or, as Willy put it more succinctly, “We got shit. No hits on the fingerprints, the MO, the sheriff’s neighborhood canvass, nothing from the caretaker, who I interviewed yesterday, and no news on any of our rich boy’s toys. I still think he did it himself for the insurance.”
Sammie Martens was standing by a small counter that held a coffeemaker and a few cups. Small, slight, and as tough as sinew, Sammie was ex-military like Willy and me, but—perhaps because she was barely in her thirties—she still maintained the spit and polish both of us had long since dropped. She was also intense, ambitious, and extremely loyal, a combination that occasionally got uncomfortably tangled up in itself and dropped her into dark moods of self-doubt and frustration. She and Willy
were the only erstwhile Brattleboro police officers to accompany me in the shift to VBI, a move that had effectively robbed the town’s detective bureau of three-fifths of its manpower. We’d been working as a team for over ten years, as a result, and had become more like family members than mere colleagues.
“You know most of that stuff won’t be coming in for days,” she told him. “You’re just pissed off because you don’t like the guy and you think the case is beneath you, but you still can’t resist being interested in it.”
Willy looked at her balefully. “Oh, right. Like I’m staying up late at night sweating this out.”
“You drove me all the way back to Tucker Peak to talk to the caretaker on a Sunday,” she said, smiling and taking her first sip of coffee. “The sheriff’d already done that.”
Willy scowled.
“Did you learn anything new?” I asked, surprised and curious.
But feeling cornered by now, he didn’t take it well. “Right—you, too. Don’t be bashful. Pile it on. You saying we shouldn’t double-check the other guy’s work?”
Sammie was walking slowly across to her desk so she wouldn’t spill her drink. “Willy, give us a break. It’s too early for opera.”
He didn’t respond, but I noticed him hiding a smile as he pretended to dig around in a lower drawer. Willy and Sammie, after years of bickering while working for me downstairs, had recently and suddenly become a romantic item, just prior to joining VBI. It was very low-key. I was one of the few who even knew of it, and it had seemed at the time as likely as a bullfrog courting a bird. But it appeared to be working. Sammie’s nearly obsessive, jagged, driven style had been softened, and the angry fire that raged perpetually inside Willy was running just a few degrees cooler.
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