The Empire of Shadows

by Richard E. Crabbe

  “Isn’t this gorgeous?” she said, waving a hand at the view of the mountains. “The river looks like a ribbon of silver from up here.” She brushed some loose strands of raven hair that had come loose about her flushed face. Tom gave her a secret grin, blessing her for trying to lighten the mood. He put his arm around her waist as he stood by her side, not caring if it wasn’t proper.

  “Sure is pretty,” he said. He thought to say more, something about how wonderful she looked with her face flushed and her hair flying loose, or maybe about how he was glad he hadn’t let Chowder shanghai him into not coming, but the moment passed. They turned to follow the coach.

  It wasn’t all that far to the top of the slope, a mile or so. Still, it took over an hour to make it. When the road leveled out, the women, and finally the men climbed back aboard. The driver passed a couple of canteens of cool water. Tom and Mike were rocked into a fitful doze, jolted now and again by boulders in their path.

  Hours went by. After a time, they started to see signs of lumbering, with ugly tangles of cuttings scattered about and rutted tracks back into the woods. Some were old and weed-choked, others fairly new. “Comin’ to Indian Lake soon,” the driver threw over his shoulder. “Stop at the Arctic for a little refreshment. Old Jackson sets a pretty good table. Get you set up proper for the ride on ta Blue.”

  “Sounds good,” one of the men behind said. “This seat’s got a lot harder the last hour.”

  “How much more after that?” Tom asked.

  “More? Ya mean miles or time? One’s pretty sure, t’other ain’t. Been wet up here. Rained up ta Blue last night. Roads get iffy.”

  For a moment Tom considered this. He finally settled for “Uh-huh,” as if all was crystal clear.

  “It would appear that time is a decidedly relative thing in this part of the world,” a dapper gentleman in a black top hat mumbled from the back seat. Tom folded his arms, letting his chin fall back on his chest. If this was a vacation, then by god he was determined to treat it like one.

  The Arctic Hotel, or the Cedar River House as the place was called, depending on who was doing the talking, was about a mile on the other side of town, though “town” was a generous word for the scattering of houses and the couple of stores that comprised Indian lake. A dog, and two locals whose feet were propped on a porch railing, seemed to be the only inhabitants. The three of them watched the coach full of fancy-dress flatlanders pass as if it were a parade. Mike said something under his breath that Tom didn’t catch.

  The coach was barged across the narrow Cedar River about a mile outside of town. “Just another coupla three hours ta Blue, folks. Got a bit o’ rough road here ‘n’ there but h’ain’t lost a fare yet.” A yell from the driver set the coach off again. Soon the rattle of the wheels and the jingle of harness lulled Tom back into a doze. Mike slumped in his seat, and in a few miles was leaning on Tom’s shoulder. Tom stole a look at him through a half-open eye. He let the boy get comfortable.

  Tom woke with a start, disoriented by the sudden jolt to wakefulness. The forest clung close to the road. The trees overhung it in spots. They were passing under a towering white pine that stood sentinel by the road, a grand and powerful presence, its head in the clouds, roots gripping the earth in a gnarled embrace. Feathery-needled branches reached far out over the narrow dirt track. Tom could have reached up and touched them. But it wasn’t the tree that drew his attention.

  His eyes were drawn to the forest. It was thick with fallen trees under a lush blanket of moss and fern. Spruce, too young for cutting, grew close under the overhanging shade of tall hemlocks. Silver birch struggled. It was cool, green, and fragrant. Tom saw the eyes first, but once he did the rest of the fox seemed to materialize as if pulled from a magician’s hat. It stared, unblinking, muzzle slightly open. Tom could see white points of teeth. The eyes held him, man and animal locked in recognition.

  “Mike!” Tom said, elbowing the boy out of his doze.

  “Wha?” Mike grunted.

  “Look, a fox!”

  “Huh?”

  “There.” Tom pointed, but it was gone. Vanished. A single fern swayed. Mike craned but saw nothing, nor did anyone else on the coach. They were all set to looking and pointing. Mike grumbled, annoyed at the interruption but even more so at his father making a fool of himself.

  “Probably a stump,” Mike mumbled.

  “Fox ain’t easy ta spot,” the driver said over his shoulder. “That was a pretty one.”

  “Might get a touch wet,” the coachman observed a while later with a nod toward the west. They’d cleared the forest near a large marsh that the driver had called “Thirty-four Flow.” With an unobstructed view they could see a mountain of cloud was rolling down on them. “Off a ways ta Raquette. Mayhaps ten mile or so,” he added with an appraising squint. “Comin’ on fast. Might jest make it dry-shod.” He flicked the reins hard, calling, “Get-up now!” to the team, setting them into a rolling canter. Everyone held on as the coach stuttered from gully to rock as they raced the storm. The horses sensed the coming weather. With widened eyes and flared nostrils they pulled together. Distant thunder rumbled.

  The first drops were falling as the coach stopped before the Prospect House. Guests on the veranda watched with curiosity and amusement as the coach emptied, the passengers dashing for cover. Coachmen and porters unloaded bags and steamer trunks, hurrying them up the stairs to the porch. In minutes the coach was emptied, leaving only the steaming horses, heads held low and muscles twitching in the growing downpour.

  The Prospect House was nothing short of magnificent. It stood poised at the edge of the lake, tall and commanding. The forest around the hotel had been cut back into broad, undulating lawns that surrounded it like a great moat keeping the wilderness at bay. The thunderheads had piled up behind, casting the world in a weird half-light, as if seen from under water. The lake was choppy. Whitecaps danced to the gusting breath of the storm.

  The Prospect House glowed in the odd light, its tiered verandas standing out in delicate relief. It was as though it had been transplanted here intact, uprooted whole from Saratoga or Newport and levitated to this spot fifty miles within the forest. Like some marvelous confection, a wedding cake or a marzipan castle, it seemed to exist in sparkling suspension, awaiting the time when the patient forest would reclaim its own.

  “That was fun!” Rebecca cried, dancing from one foot to the other in the shelter of the wide veranda.

  “Yup. Just made it, ’Becca,” Tom agreed, stomping a bit of mud off his boot. “So, what do you think?” he asked her, waving a hand at the hotel.

  “Oh, it’s a very big house, Daddy. Is it all mine? Can I play in it?” she asked, hopping more than ever.

  “Sure it’s yours, but just for a couple of weeks, okay?” he said as they marched into the lobby.

  They were registered quickly by a polite, liveried clerk behind the long, polished walnut front desk. Tom signed in and the clerk fetched his keys, handing him a folded telegram as well.

  “This came for you earlier this morning, Mister Braddock,” he said. Tom looked at it as if it might bite. Though he had known that there was telegraph service to the hotel, he had hoped never to actually get a telegram. A telegram on vacation was like a rabid dog, best avoided till you were out of the neighborhood. Tom opened it and read quickly.

  “What is it?” Mary asked. She was familiar with inconvenient telegrams. Tom heaved a sigh and frowned. “Note from the chief,” Tom said with a downcast look. He let Mary wait while he read it all. “Oh no! Says I should…” Tom hesitated, “…forget about the job and concentrate on my family, especially you, my beautiful wife,” he said with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Mary grabbed his arm and pinched it for all she was worth.

  “Ow!”

  “Serves you right for fooling me,” Mary said as she straightened her skirts. “I hate when you do that. For once I agree with the old walrus, though.” Tom put his arm around Mary’s waist as they started to follow a be
llman to their rooms.

  He hadn’t told her everything that was in the telegram. What would be the point? Byrnes’s rumblings about important cases and new police investigations were nothing for Mary to be concerned with. Tom knew how huge a rationalization that was. He also knew where his priorities lay, or should lie at least. There had been no orders in the chief’s words, nothing more than concern, and Tom wasn’t about to alter his plans for that.

  “Now, is that any way to speak about the chief of the New York Detective Bureau, one of the most respected men of law enforcement in the nation?” Tom asked with mock seriousness.

  He knew very well how hard Byrnes had been leaning on him and the pressure it had put on the entire family. Though, as a precinct captain Tom no longer reported directly to Byrnes, he still worked closely with the legendary chief detective.

  They had developed a strong bond working on the East River Bridge conspiracy a few years before. The deft way Braddock had managed to handle his troubles with the corrupt Captain Coffin had earned Byrnes’s respect. But with that respect came expectation. Tom knew he was ignoring Byrnes’s concerns at his peril. He put it out of his mind as best he could though, determined to be on vacation, no matter the cost.

  “Byrnes will tell you what he wants when it suits him,” Mary said. Tom nodded. It was almost as if she’d read the telegram herself.

  In short order they were settled into their rooms, with Mike and Rebecca sharing one and Tom and Mary the other. They had a door between them and shared a spacious porch one floor above the main veranda. The rain was hammering the glass of their windows like nails falling from a molten steel sky. The far side of the lake was a gray-green mass of forested mountain, all detail sponged away by the slanting rain.

  “We want to go exploring,” Rebecca said before the bellman had even closed the door behind him. It was clear that Mike was a reluctant part of that “we,” but he seemed willing enough, if it got him away from his parents. They left with Mary’s warning to Mike to look out for his sister.

  “Hmm,” Tom muttered after Rebecca slammed the door. “How long you figure they’ll take?”

  Mary picked up on his tone. “Oh, an hour at least, I’d imagine. It’s a very big hotel,” she said with a raised eyebrow. A tug at her hair, letting it cascade over her shoulders was all the invitation Tom needed.

  “And I thought you might be too tired,” he said playfully as he took her in his arms, feeling the answering press from thigh and breast and hips.

  “I’m exhausted,” she sighed, nuzzling his neck. “Hardly a wink on the train and seven hours on that horrible stage. If I don’t lie down I’m going to fall down.” Tom bent, sweeping her up in his arms, though he was every bit as tired. “Let me help you, Missus Braddock.”

  The bed was a cloud, the sheets crisp, cool, and billowing. In a few languid minutes their naked flesh was streaked with liquid light from the rain-running windows. The storm, unnoticed, grumbled and flashed and drove at the glass. In a short time, though, it was spent and passed on rumbling gray feet off into the east. Slashes of blue slowly rent the reluctant clouds, sending brush strokes of light to color lake and forest. The world outside their windows emerged sparkling and renewed. Tom and Mary drifted off to sleep.

  It was more than an hour later when a slamming door jolted Tom out of his nap. Mary didn’t stir, not even when a rhythmic thumping announced that Rebecca was jumping on her bed in the next room. She giggled and laughed and Tom could hear Mike’s deeper voice laughing with her. It was good to hear him laugh. Tom couldn’t remember when he’d heard it last. He lay there listening, soaking up the sounds of play while Mary snored lightly beside him.

  Pleasant images of laughter past started to flicker against Tom’s closed eyelids, Rebecca in her bath, Mike and him flying kites in Prospect Park four or five years ago, the surf at Coney Island and the face Rebecca had made when she got her first mouthful of salt water. The images blended and flowed, merging into a dream when ’Becca bounded into the room.

  “They have magic lamps, Daddy! Magic! They go on when you turn the secret switch!” she cried as she took a running leap onto the bed. Then, in a conspiratorial whisper she said, “I know how.”

  The Prospect House was unique in a lot of ways, but first among those was that it had electric lights in every room. It was the first hotel in the world to boast of it. Thomas Edison designed the system and the generator, a contraption that was dubbed “Long-waisted Maryann,” because of its unusual design featuring two long poles a bit more than four feet high, tightly wrapped with wire.

  Its boiler, which produced the steam to power the generator, would burn about a quarter of a cord of wood each evening to produce light for the hotel. It cost only six or seven cents a night to light the place. In New York or Boston it would have been a marvel, here in the wilderness it was magic.

  “That’s amazing!” Tom said to Rebecca with hug. “Can you show me how?” Tom knew about the lights. It was one of the things that had attracted him to the place. Rebecca was on the move before the words were out of his mouth.

  “This is how, Daddy,” she said, running to the ceramic, insulated switch on the wall. “You turn it like this.” Her small hand grasped the black switch, twisting it with a loud click. Tom and Mary looked at the ceiling fixture, expecting the little glass bulb to glow, but nothing happened. Rebecca and Mike started laughing and ’Becca finally managed to say “Fooled ya! It’s not turned on yet, not till supper time.”

  “Okay, you win,” Tom said, throwing his hands up. “Now, out of here while your mother and me get dressed. I want a full tour before supper. I expect you two to know the place up, down, and sideways by now.”

  “Oh, we do, Daddy. Do you know they have a two-story outhouse and a bowling alley and a pharmacy and steam heat and—”

  “And a billiard room,” Mike broke in, “a shooting gallery and a boathouse, all sorts of things.”

  “All right. All right. Get going you two. We’ll be ready in a couple of minutes.” Mike and Rebecca closed the adjoining door behind them while Mary said, “This might just be worth the trip after all.”

  Four

  He added whole townships to his inherited holdings; he built the first artistic camps the woods had ever seen, and opened the Raquette Lake region by facilities of transportation unknown before. From 1885 to 1900 he enjoyed an unrivaled regency of prominence and popularity.

  —ALFRED DONALDSON

  The sky above Raquette Lake was menacing and gray. Angry thunderheads, black-bottomed, crowned in dirty white, were rolling in like the devil’s own blanket. The waters of the lake shifted and slapped at the shore. The lake was empty, save for the steamboat Killoquah, alone and still glistening white and brassy in a last shaft of sun far out on the roiled water.

  Durant watched it, a small smoking chip of white, as it steamed for the carry to Forked Lake. He watched as the gray sky overtook it, shrinking the last of the blue water until it disappeared and the lake was conquered by cloud. The Killoquah, too, turned from white to a ghostly gray, as if somehow it no longer plied the choppy waters but had slipped into the past, a memory steaming only in dreams of what might have been. William West Durant shivered, shaking off the sudden gloom. Such thoughts were not for him. He was an optimist.

  Durant turned from the window as the first drops began to fall. They plopped in a sporadic tattoo, as the storm tested the ground with a tentative toe. A few seconds more and the rain jumped in with both feet, streaking the world outside Durant’s window in little rivers of silver. The surface of the lake seemed to leap up and the choppy outlines of the waves were lost in the froth of droplets beyond count.

  Durant dropped the letter he had been holding onto the top of his desk. Ella just didn’t understand, he thought, shaking his head with a troubled frown. She had no idea, no notion at all of how business was conducted. He was the master of the estate now, he and he alone. Father had wanted it that way, knowing that Ella was in no way capable of ru
nning their vast holdings. She was a writer and an artist, a dilettante more accurately, dabbling in the arts for lack of anything else to do.

  She had no head for numbers. He doubted she could even balance her own accounts. All she knew was that their father had left them money and she wanted more of it. And that lawyer of hers; a blood-sucker of the first order, by the sound of it.

  He’d have to find out about Van Duzer, have his lawyers give him a report or something. The man was demanding far too much, even for a lawyer. William considered his letter, which came in the same post as Ella’s. There was something about it, something beyond the usual lawyer’s language. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was, what combination of threatened legal and financial ruin had made that impression, only that when he’d put it down it was with an overwhelming feeling of dread.

  Thunder boomed across the lake and Durant looked out at the broad, empty sheet of water. It must be the storm, he thought, the sudden gloom and the downpour. It was enough to bring any man down a bit.

  He looked at the old photograph on his desk. Father, Ella, Mother, and he were lounging on the porch of the original main lodge at Pine Knot. He was standing by one of the wide windows Father had insisted on, talking to Ella who sat inside. Father, his beard white by then, was sitting on the porch, Mother on the stairs. Ray Stoddard had taken it back in ’77. It had been Ella’s idea, an effort to pull the family together in an illusion of close domestic life. She supposed that having the photograph done would make it so.

  They had rarely seen their father during the years he’d worked on the Union Pacific. He’d sent them off to Europe, to school and tour and hobnob, and it was only through his letters that they knew him at all. So Ella had tried to build bridges in any way she could. The photo was one of her attempts. It was a good thought, a worthy attempt, but it was an artist’s effort after all, a dreamer’s conjuring of a loving family.