Tor, Drake, and Raine exchanged amused glances.
“You think?” Drake said.
Ms. Adams made a half-choked laughing sound. “Of course,” she said. “You’ve kept this secret quite well so far, haven’t you? Can you take the CBI officer, if I can get one up here, to the blood?”
“Yes,” Drake said.
“Fingerprints would help, on the fridge,” Ms. Adams continued. “Not yours.”
“We wore gloves,” Raine said.
“That’s good. I don’t know if it’ll be enough, but it’s a start. Just keep your heads down for a day or so and let me do my grown-up thing, all right?”
“Deal,” Tor said, and felt relief wash over him like warm water.
“Okay,” Drake said, and frowned. He didn’t look very relieved.
“Yes,” Raine said. She looked hopeful.
“Now go on,” Ms. Adams said. “I’ll clear up a few last things and I’ll head home to work on this. Best if we’re not seen leaving the building together, not right now.”
That was something Tor hadn’t thought about. Were they being watched? He looked around as the three of them walked down the empty corridors and out of the school, but there wasn’t anyone around. No Mayor Malone in his expensive tan coat, no blue coats, no stick-figure vampires in the glare of the snowy afternoon.
“Let’s go snowboarding,” Drake suggested, as they crunched across the street. “Why not? We have to stay out of sight, right? We’ll hang with you on the easy slopes, Tor, so Jeff and Max’ll leave you alone. Want to, Raine?”
“I’d love to,” Raine sighed. “I can’t believe it about—”
“Shhh,” Tor said. “No talking about it. Drake’s right. Let’s ride.”
A few minutes later Tor was stripping out of his school clothes. Raine’s flashlight from their trip to the mayor’s office was sitting on his dresser. He reminded himself to give it back to her and zipped it into a deep pocket of his snowboarding pants. He shoved some granola bars in various other pockets and then headed down to the clinic to see his mom. He didn’t really have a reason to see her, except he wanted to see her. He wasn’t going to tell her anything, of course. He wasn’t going to tell her that they’d solved the mystery of Brian Slader’s death and were going to stop the mayor and break the curse.
He kept telling himself that as he walked up the clinic steps, nearly bouncing in his excitement. Everything was going to be solved. Some CBI guy would drive into town like an action hero and arrest the bad guys, and Mayor Malone would go to jail, and Raine’s mountain would stay untouched for the otters, and he and his mom would stay here in Snow Park.
Tor set his snowboard on the porch and opened the door to the clinic, happiness bubbling inside him. Even the sight of Mrs. Colm couldn’t destroy his good feeling. He grinned at Mrs. Colm too widely and she glared at him suspiciously.
“Is my mom in?” he asked.
“She’s with a patient,” Mrs. Colm said coldly.
“I’ll just leave her a note,” Tor said, and walked down the hall to his mother’s office. He passed the first patient room, empty and quiet, and realized the room didn’t have a refrigerator in it like the other rooms did. There was an empty space where a fridge could fit, but there was nothing there.
He stopped, electrified by a sudden thought. The clinic had been shut down before his mom came to town. Could the mayor have used the empty clinic to do his blood doping? Tor ducked into the room and stood, thinking. It made sense. The clinic had examining tables and a fridge to store the blood. This was the logical place for Mayor Malone to take blood from the snowboarding team. Then when his mom came to town, they realized they had to move. Mayor Malone had taken the entire refrigerator and hidden it in his office.
Tor imagined Brian Slader lying on the patient table in front of him. He imagined Mayor Malone leaning against the sink as he drained Brian’s blood into a bag. There really are vampires in the world, after all, Tor thought grimly.
Would there be evidence here? Fingerprints, blood, anything?
He quietly shut the door and started looking on the floor, on the patient table, and on the windowsill. He opened the doors over the sink and saw an array of bandages and swabs and tongue depressors. Each of the drawers opened to his touch but was empty or held nothing but more medical supplies. Tor took a pair of examining gloves from a drawer and, feeling kind of silly, put them on. He continued to the last drawer, which held nothing but dust, and then turned to the garbage can. He pulled it out to examine the contents just like he’d seen in television shows, and that was when he saw something underneath the cabinet, behind where the garbage can usually rested.
He squatted down and peered in. There was a piece of paper there, folded in half. It didn’t look very large. He picked it up and opened it carefully.
It was a receipt, he saw with disappointment. Just a receipt for a purchase of a box of Safe-Paks, whatever they were, from some company back East somewhere. The logo of the company was a picture of something, and then Tor realized what it was: Safe-Paks were blood bags. He was holding a receipt for blood bags. His pulse started to pound.
Mayor Malone’s fingerprints had to be on this receipt. Tor knew that the lab people could get fingerprints off of anything—he’d seen a TV show once where they found fingerprints on someone’s eyeballs.
Tor held his breath. He imagined how it had been tossed in the wastebasket and had slipped out, falling down behind. He knew the clinic didn’t do blood donations, at least not since his mom had come to town. Tor held the paper up to the light, trying to see the whorls of a fingerprint.
“What are you doing?”
Tor leaped to his feet. Mrs. Colm was in the doorway, her beady eyes looking from Tor to the paper in his hand. She’d never believe him—and if she touched the paper, he’d lose the fingerprints. He grabbed the end of the glove where he held the slip of paper, reversed it over the paper, and pulled it off his hand. The receipt was now safely inside the latex glove, with the fingerprints protected. Hopefully. He shoved it into his jacket pocket.
“Give me that,” Mrs. Colm said, her voice angry and shaking at the same time. Tor looked wildly around the room. There was no way out. He didn’t think. He launched himself at Mrs. Colm. She squawked and leaped backward as Tor pushed by her. She tried to grab onto him, to hold him. Her fingernails scrabbled on the smooth sleeve of his coat and then he tore free and he was running down the hallway toward the clinic door.
His mother was in the back with a patient, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to find her before Mrs. Colm had the paper from him. He banged out the clinic doors, picked up his snowboard, and set off at a run toward the lodge and the chairlift. The receipt in its twist of glove felt like a burning coal against his chest.
Evidence, he thought, as he dodged his way through slow-moving people in the lodge and headed for the chairlift, his eyes searching the crowd for the familiar yellow-green of Raine’s coat. Drake’s dull brown colors were so neutral he’d never be able to find him. Raine would be the one to spot.
He found coats. They were blue. Jeff Malone and Max Nye stood holding their snowboards, chatting with a couple of cute girls. They weren’t in the lift line, but were off to one side. Maybe Mrs. Colm had warned them, and they were waiting for him. Maybe they were just there to have fun. Either way, if they saw Tor, he’d be in for it.
Tor held his breath and joined the lift line, keeping his head turned away and using other riders to block him from the two older boys as he scrambled into his bindings. Drake and Raine had already taken the chairlift up. They must have, or he would have seen them by now.
Tor was almost at the front of the lift line when Jeff finally spotted him.
“Hey!” Jeff said, turning away from the girls and pointing at Tor. “Hey, waster! Hey! I wanna talk to you!”
Tor hopped up and let the chairlift scoop him up, sighing as he was lifted into the air and away from Jeff and Max, who were now struggling to cut in line. A huge s
nowboarder with a black coat and a black helmet put a burly arm out and stopped them. As Tor was lifted up the mountain, he watched, grinning, as Jeff and Max had to take a place at the back of the line.
His friends weren’t at the top of the lift, though. Tor stood with one foot out of his board, trying to decide what to do. Were they at the top of the second lift, at the terrain park? Where were they? His heart pounded and his mouth was dry. Skiers and snowboarders came off the chairlift like cakes off the end of an assembly line, some crashing and some gliding smoothly, and Tor knew it was only a matter of minutes before Jeff and Max were going to come off that line, too.
He made up his mind. He’d been down the upper slope once, and he hadn’t been killed. Well, just barely not killed. He’d been working hard every day with Gloria, and if Drake and Raine were up at the top level at the terrain park, they’d let him follow them down the hill. He’d be with his friends, and if the worst happened, he’d pass the glove and the receipt to Drake and let Drake get it to Ms. Adams.
Tor skated over to the other lift line and got on the chair, panting. He was scared, that was the flat-out truth. He felt like he was going to throw up. He had the one piece of evidence that would clear his mom’s name, and there was no way he was going to give it up even if he was afraid. He’d die before he’d hand it over like some tame little rabbit. Gloria had told him he had courage, he reminded himself as the lift line took him up to the top of the clouds. The silent woods of Raine’s mountain stretched to his left. Time to show courage, if he had it.
He slid off the chairlift line and remained upright. He barely thought about it. He strapped in and rode over to the group at the terrain park. The board was such a part of him now he was only vaguely aware of what he was doing. Everyone at the terrain park was watching a kid dressed in screaming plaid make a leap and slide over some exposed railings. The rider scraped over the rail, hopped off the end, gave a whoop, and then fell in a spectacular flurry of snow and plaid. A single glove came off and spun circles in the sky before falling down and landing with a tiny puff of snow.
“Yard sale!” someone called out. The plaid rider got up, caked with snow, and laughed. He gave a bow and went sliding downhill to find his lost glove.
Raine wasn’t there. Neither was Drake. Tor felt his stomach sink as he looked over the group again. And again. His friends weren’t there. He fumbled his park map out of his jacket pocket and opened it with shaky fingers. He found the terrain park, the bowl they called Lucky Charms, and the two blocked avalanche chutes called the White Gates. The gate that he’d nearly gone into a few weeks ago was the Right Gate, which curved into Borsh Mountain land and began and ended in a crossed-poles symbol that meant danger—rocks, or something. The other gate was to the left of the terrain park. It was marked with the crossed poles as well. They looked like a crossbones symbol without the skull.
The terrain under the chairlift looked like it was okay. Tor thought he could make it down. He was a better snowboarder now, and he wasn’t going to let Jeff and Max scare him. He could always try to follow their old trail and find the otters and their valley, if it came to that. He put the map back in his pocket, took a last look for Drake and Raine, and gave a hop so he could start gliding toward the enormous pylons that supported the chairlift.
The slope was still the same—like trying to snowboard off the side of a building. But his board seemed to grip better this time, and the slope didn’t seem so terrible. He’d ridden through a pine forest, after all, he reminded himself, and the solution to any problem was to take it slowly and carefully.
He glided across the narrow slope and flipped the back end of his snowboard to come around and slide down around one of the big concrete pylons that supported the chairlift. Just as he came around the pylon, his board floating in the deep snow like a dream, he caught a glimpse of brilliant blue and clenched his jaw tight. Jeff. Max. No way he was going to panic now. He flipped again and headed back toward the trees, keeping his board cutting deep into the powdery snow. That was when Jeff Malone shot by him and smacked him hard in the back with an outstretched arm.
“Waster!” snarled Jeff, as Tor felt his board shoot across the slope, instantly going too fast to control. Jeff knew just what to do to make another snowboarder crash. He was going to give Tor another Snow Park Swirlie if he could, one that would probably put him in his mother’s clinic with a broken leg or worse. But Tor knew about trees now. They were killers, all right, but he knew you could thread through them. He let his board go between the trees. He’d find a place to turn and then he could come out onto the slope and he’d be in control.
The trees were dense, but he avoided them the way Drake and Raine had showed him. Suddenly he thumped over plastic orange fencing buried in the deep snow and nearly lost his balance. Pinwheeling his arms, gasping, he abruptly shot out into an area completely free of trees.
Tor felt a burst of triumph as he turned downslope. He was suddenly in the clear and there were no trees. The snow was deep and fresh and there were no ski tracks or snowboard tracks at all. He should have realized this meant something. He didn’t.
There was an open path in front of him and no Jeff and no Max—that was what mattered to Tor—and his snowboard floated across the unmarked snow like a dream.
He turned at the edge of the trees and continued down the slope, and that was when he heard the shouts of Jeff and Max. He could see their blue coats against the dark green of the pine trees. They were stopped at the edge of the open area and they were shouting and waving at him.
They don’t sound angry, Tor thought distantly as he turned again in the deep narrow chute. The slope was so steep he was using everything he had to keep upright. Tor heard their shouts grow more frantic as he went downslope, and it was only at the last moment that he realized what they were shouting. They were shouting stop. They were shouting please. They were screaming no.
Tor was in one of the White Gates. He knew what the crossed poles on the map meant as he saw the cliff edge approaching. He threw his board into a heel-side position, but there was no stopping him. He flew out into space and had a final thought as he started to fall. He was kind of pleased about it.
No one else had done what he’d just done. He had just ridden the White Gate.
THE FALL TOOK only seconds, but it seemed like a lot longer. Tor windmilled his arms, trying to keep upright. His heart climbed right up into his throat and stayed there, beating frantically, and he kept breathing in but couldn’t seem to breathe out. The trees flashed by; first the tops, then the increasing width of the branches, then the trunks. He couldn’t see anything beneath him, because he didn’t look.
His board disappeared into snow and Tor followed. Then the snow gripped his body and he stopped with a jar that shook him from his head to his toes. Tor saw sparks and stars in front of his eyes and a darkness like curtains flapping in front of him.
He breathed out, and then breathed in again with a wheeze, and the stars and curtains started to fade. Tor panted and looked around, his board buried and his body upright. He was stuck like a toothpick into the snow all the way up to his armpits. Trees crowded close on each side, covered in white and showing only flashes of green needles and brown trunks. Tor looked over his head and saw a sheer cliff face above him that was so high he nearly started seeing stars again.
He’d stopped before he hit the rocks that were probably inches underneath his board. All the heavy snow that they’d had lately had piled up so deeply it made his landing a big soft pillow. Tor started working himself up out of the snow, hearing himself making a chuckling sound under his panting breath. He didn’t like the sound; he sounded like a little kid getting ready to cry.
His snowboard came free and Tor laid back, arms spread-eagled like he was going to make a snow angel, feeling sweaty and hot. His heart still pounded hard but it was back down in his chest now, and his breathing was better. That odd noise he’d been making seemed to be done with for now, too.
Sudde
nly there was a piercing siren in the distance. Tor sat bolt upright. He’d never heard anything like it before. It was high and shrieking and said Danger! as clearly as someone screaming out loud. He looked wildly left and right, scooping some stray snow from the front of his goggles, but he didn’t see anything.
Then he realized he was feeling something. The snow was trembling under his legs and backside. Earthquake! Tor gathered his legs close to himself, wondering what to do and where to go. The trembling increased, and Tor realized he was hearing a sound over the shrieking of the siren from the town. The sound was distant and rumbling, coming closer by the second, a sound like an ocean wave crashing toward shore.
This wasn’t an earthquake. This was an avalanche. The siren was to warn the town that an avalanche was coming. And Tor realized with a sick feeling that he was sitting at the bottom of one of the avalanche chutes. The White Gates were avalanche chutes.
“Stop, stop, please!” Jeff and Max had yelled, their screams echoing off the snow-filled avalanche chute. Tor saw in his mind the echoing sound of their yells, bouncing off the walls of heavy snow that had been building for weeks. Their shouts had started the avalanche. The snow was coming right at him.
Tor started scooting backward toward the cliff face, his snowboard digging into the snow. Perhaps if he got right up at the edge of the cliff, the avalanche would fall over like a waterfall and he would be safe behind it. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was all he had. He’d seen avalanche footage on a snowboarding video that Drake had brought over to show him. Drake’s dad and his cameraman had boarded safely away from an avalanche as the other camera had caught the gigantic cliff of snow breaking away and sliding downhill, gathering up pine trees like they were miniature toys and smashing down toward the valley floor below.
The rumbling was getting louder, and the shaking stronger. In just a few seconds a wave of snow was going to break over the cliff and bury everything underneath it in snow. Tor bumped up against the rocks at the cliff edge and felt a stinging as a sharp rock smashed into his back. He looked wildly around, trying to find a deeper spot where he could wedge himself, and saw an opening between two rocks. He shoved his way between the rocks and lifted his snowboard straight up and down so he could unclip the bindings and kick it away. If he got rid of his snowboard, he might be able to squeeze between the rocks and hide.
The White Gates Page 13