The Gorge

by Ronald M. Berger

  “Anybody else on your list?”

  “The fly-fishing crowd have spent big bucks trying to keep rafters off the river. I don’t think they’re desperate enough to try rough stuff, though.”

  “What about the paper mills? I heard Marshall’s father took them to court, angling for exclusive rights to the water coming off the Indian Lake dam.”

  “If you’re asking me if these people would play hardball to protect their operations, the answer’s yes. They stand to lose millions.”

  Every time someone entered or left the diner, a blast of frigid air poured into the room. “So we’ve got nothing to go on so far,” Wells said.

  “Until that thing yesterday in Harris, everyone assumed that we had this guy confined to the Indian.” Carlyle moved their coffee cups to one side, pulled a map from his pack, and placed it in front of Wells. “Our mistake was thinking that the gorge was outside his reach.”

  Carlyle pointed to the Hudson, a pale blue streak in the center of the page. It plunged due south and then east before flowing into the gorge, the vital link connecting the central Adirondack watershed to the ocean. “We neglected the surrounding territory.”

  “What did we miss?”

  “The first trail that would give him access to the gorge itself.”

  Wells moved his hand slowly across the map. Carlyle shook his head. “Not south of the river. Look at the other side.”

  Wells pointed to a tiny dotted line running east and south through the backcountry. “Holy Christ.”

  “That’s right. The Huntley Pond trail. It dead-ends at Blue Ledges, two hundred yards from the Narrows.”

  “How the hell did you find it?” Wells said.

  “Are you kidding me? I’ve been staring at that map every day for the past two weeks.”

  Wells pulled the ADK guide to the Central Adirondacks from his jacket pocket. “It’s no more than three miles each way. That means he can get to the river and back to the road in four hours.”

  “And once Marshall’s rafts reach Blue Ledges, he’s a sitting duck in the canyon.”

  “Why didn’t I see it before?”

  “Because you’ve been too busy trying to save people who think they’re scaling Everest,” Carlyle said.

  “What happens now?”

  The waitress put scrambled eggs and toast in front of Carlyle, pancakes and sausage before Wells. “You read the paper this morning, Leo?” she said.

  “It’s still in my car, but I have a hunch you’re going to tell me what I missed.”

  “Marshall’s father is evicting the families living on his land. He wants them gone by Christmas.”

  Wells put his knife and fork down. “What’s that got to do with these murders?”

  “Do I need to spell it out for you? It’s why everyone around here hates his kid.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Wells said.

  “I don’t? Just ask anyone in here what they think about the little prick.”

  As they drove away from Riparius in Wells’s truck, Carlyle stared at the derelict houses lining the road. The local manufacturing economy had been dying off for a century. When the lumber and paper mills finally collapsed fifty years ago, it tore the guts out of a half-dozen communities. Men who’d followed their fathers into the mills for generations, giving up decent pay in exchange for meager benefits, now spent their days running ski lifts or managing convenience stores. Their wives, the primary breadwinners, were employed as waitresses, daycare attendants, babysitters, and teachers’ assistants. But two measly salaries still didn’t cover the cost of rent, food, diapers, and cigarettes.

  Wells shifted into low gear to climb a hill. “Marshall’s father is creating second homes for millionaires, not jobs for ordinary people. He cares about protecting the damn trees, not the men and women who need work.”

  Twenty minutes later, their truck left the paved road and followed a gravel track through a forest of beech and red maple. Sunlight now washed over the windshield. Losing control for a moment as the back end fishtailed, Wells eased his vehicle through a sharp hairpin. They crossed the Boreas River and followed the valley road west and north. Six miles from the turnoff, nearly a half-hour from Riparius, Wells pulled over and stopped.

  “You really want to go in here without backup?”

  Carlyle opened his door and stepped from the truck. “We could call Pierce, but then we’d have to listen to him laugh at us all day.”

  The two men gathered up their gear and moved down the trail. A thick stand of jack pine marched across the hillside above them. Two crows, wings folded, dropped out of the sky. Clouds and light rain returned to conceal the sun. A sign nailed to a tree read Blue Ledges, 2.3 Miles. Somewhere just below them, a stream coursed through dense vegetation.

  Carlyle stopped for a second and looked around. “Jesus, it’s so beautiful.”

  Wells gave him a gentle nudge. “You ought to quit that desk job of yours and spend more time out here.”

  “And hang off a cliff like you? No, thanks.”

  They stepped across a narrow footbridge spanning the creek and were engulfed by thick vines bearing greedy, adolescent leaves. A carpet of pine needles and white mushrooms muffled their footsteps. “Watch yourself,” Wells said. “You don’t want to turn an ankle on these rocks.”

  Carlyle pushed his way through the undergrowth lining the trail that angled downhill toward Huntley Pond. They crossed a series of small streams seeping into the lake and made their way over slick rocks toward higher ground. An escarpment to their left kept the trail in semidarkness.

  Just as they were about to reach the end of the pond, Wells tumbled to the ground. Carlyle rushed over to him and knelt down. “What happened?”

  Wells rolled over on his side and pushed himself to his knees. “My boot got caught on something.”

  “You okay?”

  “I smacked my right elbow on a rock.”

  Wells stood up. “It’s nothing. Let’s get going.”

  After a quarter-mile, the trail turned its back on the pond, headed southwest, and entered a grove of beech trees. When the wind picked up, their pale brown leaves filled the air and covered the ground. “It looks like a snowstorm,” Carlyle said as he walked through the bright foliage.

  “Old growth stays on during the winter until new shoots appear. I’ve been in white-out conditions in April.”

  Twenty minutes later, the two men found a dry patch of ground and stopped to rest. Wells said, “You have any idea why this guy’s after Marshall?”

  “This may surprise you, but I don’t think he’s out to murder anyone.”

  Wells nearly dropped his water bottle. “Two guides from the same outfit have died. How can you say that?”

  “He’s single-minded, obsessed maybe, but we really don’t know yet what he wants.”

  “He’s a monster, for Christ’s sake.”

  Carlyle chose his words carefully. “He’s got a grudge against Marshall, that’s all we can be sure of.”

  “What more proof do you need that the guy’s nuts?”

  “We don’t know that he’s insane,” Carlyle said. “He’s trying to send us a message, but, like most angry people, he’s not sure how to do it.”

  “Okay, so how in hell do you get inside the mind of a killer?”

  “You don’t. You can only try to predict where he’ll strike next.”

  Wells fiddled with his bootlaces. “How’s Marshall holding up?”

  “He’s getting hit from all sides. A local paper sent a reporter out to dig up some dirt on his father. They found that he owns a thousand-acre property in Connecticut with a fifteen-room house and a barn filled with thoroughbreds. You should see the hate mail Ryan got when that story came out.”

  “So why’s Marshall living in an unheated bungalow when he’s got a millionaire father?”

  Carlyle looked at his watch. “We’d better get moving or we’ll get stuck out here after dark.”

  The trail wound through a field o
f granite boulders, skirted the bottom of a cliff, and entered a wide, well-watered valley. Moss covered every rock, and tiny white mushrooms carpeted the ground. Carlyle pointed to a stream rushing off the mountain and checked his map. “That must be headed to Virgin Falls.”

  “So we’re near Entrance.”

  “Less than a half-mile now.”

  An ovenbird, shrieking wildly, plunged through the canopy over their heads. Thick clouds moved across the sun as they walked toward a gap in the cliffs that would take them to the gorge. The creek to their right, filled with blue-gray snowmelt, had carved a wide trench through the valley floor.

  It was almost noon. In two weeks, black flies would begin swarming from the undergrowth. Anyone out here without a head net would be covered in bleeding wounds.

  After another thirty minutes, Carlyle and Wells broke through underbrush and found themselves staring down on Entrance Rapid. Upstream, the Hudson emerged from a narrow space between two cliffs, veered right, and plunged downhill. Whitewater, backwashing waves, and bone-shattering drop-offs filled the quarter-mile boulder garden.

  The sun, directly overhead now, had burned through the cloud cover. Every collision between water and rock became a light show. The river was turgid green below the surface and incandescent white in the waves. Jack pine and red spruce covered the hillsides.

  Wells, holding onto a thick limb, peered down on Entrance. “If I were him, this would be my next target.”

  Carlyle pulled binoculars from his pack and swept the valley floor with his lenses. “We’re vulnerable here, that’s for sure. The river’s got to be two hundred yards wide. There’s no way to set up a z-drag if we had a boat wrapped on those rocks.”

  “He could lay a trap here and be back in these trees in minutes.”

  “Once we started down Entrance, we’d never see it coming and there’s no place to pull over.”

  “Is there any way you could protect yourselves?”

  “This guy always tries something new,” Carlyle said. “How could we prepare for that?”

  They turned their backs on Entrance, climbed steadily for another fifteen minutes, and then hiked carefully down a narrow switchback to the river. Breaking through undergrowth, they found themselves on a sand beach. White cedar, their bright green leaves glowing in the sunlight, lined both banks of the river.

  Carlyle shrugged off his pack and stared at Blue Ledges, a three-hundred-foot wall of granite, on the far shore. The cliff dropped straight to the floor of the gorge. A sheet of ice sixty feet high and several inches thick hung from the rock. He remembered that one April morning as his raft slid silently past this spot, a ten-foot chunk of ice separated from the bluff and, shattering as it fell, crashed into the river not fifty feet from his boat.

  Carlyle watched the Hudson cascade down through Entrance and into the basin at the foot of Blue Ledges. In the other direction, downstream, he could see the river gather momentum, rise into one massive standing wave, veer right, and then plunge into the Narrows.

  “If some clients knew this trail was here, they’d probably walk out rather than face the gorge.”

  Wells was sitting on a boulder with his back to the cliff across from them.

  “Not interested in the scenery?” Carlyle said.

  “I don’t need to see it.” Wells was silent for a minute. “My sister died in a place just like this.”

  Carlyle said nothing.

  “I was sixteen. She didn’t make it home one night. The police organized a search party. I spent two days walking through the woods behind our house. My parents, afraid of what we would find, stayed inside the whole time. They found her a week later. Someone raped and murdered her, then threw her body into an abandoned quarry.”

  Carlyle stared at the ground. “What happened to your parents?”

  “It took my mother six months to leave her bedroom. My dad had a heart attack two years later.” Wells picked at his lunch. “The guy got twenty years, plus five on probation. We got a life sentence.”

  Wells turned to look at Carlyle. “That’s the problem with professors. You actually think you can explain why someone like my sister was murdered.”

  Carlyle watched a hawk circle overhead. “Don’t you want at least some sort of answer?”

  “I don’t believe all those clever explanations for why people become compassionate or cruel. Shit happens no matter what you or I do to prevent it.” Wells threw his lunch in his pack and stood up. “What are we doing out here, anyway?”

  “There’s got to be some evidence that will help us locate this guy.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “DEC brought a dog to Cedar Ledges several days ago,” Carlyle said. “The animal found the tool that he used to drag the tree to the river. It’s called a peavey, a four-foot pole with a spike and a sharp curved hook.”

  “Why bring something like that to the river?” Wells said.

  Carlyle stood up and brushed the sand off his rain jacket. “That’s the way it was done seventy-five years ago, when nearly everyone was logging by hand.”

  “What exactly are you saying?”

  “I think Blake was murdered by a person who feels compelled to act out rituals that are important to him in some way.”

  “You want to explain that?”

  “Your father shave with a blade razor?”

  “So what?”

  “You use one?

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Wells said. “Our suspect is still a nut case.”

  “At least we can work on the assumption that this guy has some connection, however weird, to the logging industry.”

  Wells looked at his watch. “Time to get going.”

  “As long as we’re here, might as well take a look around.”

  “For what?”

  “If this guy’s out for revenge, he probably can’t stop himself from planning another attack.” Carlyle paced the beach. “Blue Ledges is perfect. Steps from the gorge, a place he could watch boats drift by on their way toward his trap.”

  “As long as we get out by dark,” Wells said.

  Clambering over a series of boulders, Carlyle wandered downstream, deeper into the gorge. With only three feet between the cliff and the rocks lining the river, he soon ran out of space to walk.

  The sun was high over his left shoulder. Scanning the hillside, he saw a dull blue object hanging from a limb near the ground. He slowly pushed his way uphill into the woods and found a carabineer suspended from a Scotch pine. Several large branches and a thin layer of earth had been thrown over a hastily buried object.

  He bent down and carefully shifted the underbrush and dirt to one side. When he’d finished, he realized why the job of finding the person who’d been targeting Marshall had been so difficult.

  He hiked back up the beach to Wells. “Grab your gear and follow me.”

  They walked back to the hanging carabineer. Carlyle pointed to a snub-nosed whitewater kayak painted camouflage green, brown, and gray.

  “Holy shit.” Wells bent down to get a better look.

  “He must have paddled this thing down from Indian Lake. Give me a hand.” The two men, one on either side of the boat, rocked it back and forth to remove the remaining leaves.

  “Why put it here?”

  “So he could hike in early some morning, do whatever he needed to do, and be off the river before anyone found him.” Carlyle bent down to examine the kayak. “If he can run a boat through the gorge when the river’s this high, nowhere is safe.”

  “There could be other boats like this one.”

  “Probably.” Carlyle turned over the kayak and reached inside. “Jesus Christ.” He held up a tool topped by a ten-inch spike on one side and a six-inch curved barb on the other.

  “What in hell’s that?”

  “It’s a peavey. Just like the one they found near Blake’s body.”

  Wells took the device from Carlyle’s hand. “Why did he bring it all the way in here?”

 
Carlyle stared at the waves filling the Narrows. “Some people get fixated on weapons, old knives, bayonets, or antique rifles. Often it’s something they’ve inherited from a favorite relative. When the pressure on them becomes too great, these objects make them feel invulnerable.”

  “What’s the connection with the peavey?”

  “It may remind him of a disturbing event he can’t get out of his mind.”

  Wells handed the tool back to Carlyle. “Some family thing?”

  “Maybe. Whatever it is, this peavey is one way we can figure out what’s going on in his mind.”

  “But why carry around something so awkward?”

  “It could make him feel he’s got some special power. Who knows, he may even believe he’s defending a way of life he shares with that relative. I’ve been sifting through the records of online antique shops. It’s a collector’s item. Sooner or later, I may come across a paper trail that will lead us to anyone who’s purchased one.”

  “What about the carabineer? Why hang it where someone is sure to see it?”

  “He may believe no one would ever walk all the way down here. Or maybe he’s just taunting us.”

  “You have any idea yet what the peavey and the attacks on Marshall tell you about what’s going on?”

  “It suggests, and I’m just guessing at this point, that our guy has deep roots in this community. If so, he may see the outside world as hostile and frightening.”

  “But these attacks on Marshall, what’s that about really?”

  “This guy probably thinks he’s on some sort of crusade. That’s how he may justify the deaths of Sanders and Blake.”

  Wells grabbed the front loop of the kayak and began dragging it toward the water.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Carlyle said.

  “I’m depriving our enemy of a vital asset.”

  “Leave it,” Carlyle said. “I’ve got a better idea.” He pulled a three-inch Spyderco knife from his pocket and punched four holes in the top of the kayak.

  “Are you crazy?”

  Carlyle stood up. “This should get his attention. He’s a tightly wound guy. If he goes ballistic over this, he’s more likely to make a mistake.”