The one exception was Mud Month, when all the staff went on vacation. Nothing could be delegated then; either Chet or Dodge had to be on call 24/7 until they all came back.
Dodge was there now. Had been for a few days. This had given Chet an opportunity to relax, catch up on his reading, go on a few motorcycle rides with the surviving members of the Septentrion Paladins. He had just returned from one such ride, up the west shore of Kootenay Lake, a few hours before sunset. After grilling a steak and killing half a bottle of cabernet, he had collapsed into bed early and slept well. But in the hour before dawn he had found himself lying awake, convinced he was hearing something from up the valley: a jangling bell.
That fucking sprinkler system had sprung another leak.
It couldn’t be an actual fire. Had there been an actual fire, the alarm system would have detected it, summoned the fire department, and sent a text message to his phone. Sirens would be screaming by his cabin already. And Dodge would be calling him.
No, something must have whacked a sprinkler head and set the thing going. Right now water was spraying in torrents around one of the Schloss’s rooms. It had happened before. It was always a huge mess. It was probably Dodge, up early in the morning, chasing a stray bat around with a badminton racket, flailing in the dark, not thinking about the delicate sprinkler heads. Now he was alone in the Schloss in the wee hours, dark and wet and furious and humiliated, too proud to call for help.
Chet dragged himself out of bed, peed, and pulled his motorcycle leathers on over his pajamas. Not very dignified, but only Dodge would see him, and he had no secrets from Dodge. He strode out into the patch of gravel between his cabin and the road. The chopper was there. It was dirty and tired, needed to have its oil changed. Riding it through the dark, he would be uncomfortable and cold. A sane man would take the SUV that was parked right next to it. But Chet on a whim had decided to ride the bike. What the hell, he was up anyway and about to spend the whole day dealing with Dodge’s mess. It couldn’t get a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than that.
He bestrode the Harley, kicked it into life, fishtailed it around in the gravel, and headed out onto the little access road that led down to the highway from his property. This was a former mining road, bladed once a year after the spring thaw had finished turning it into a rutted gully. So it would never get any worse than it was today. Feeling his way into the hyperbola of light cast by the chopper’s headlamp, he put all his attention, for the first couple of minutes, into staying out of the deepest channels that had been carved into it during the weeks since the snow had begun to thaw. His slow progress was a blessing in disguise; if he went any faster, clots of semifrozen mud would hurtle up from the tires and glue themselves onto the insides of the bike’s fenders.
As he neared the bank of the river, the trees thinned out and afforded him a clear view of the eastern sky, which had gone all pink and pearly. He was tempted to shut off the headlamp and run dark, the way he had used to, back in the old days. Back before the accident. But the accident had put sense into him, if having cornstalks shoved into your brain could be so called. And living in these parts he had learned that this was the very time of day when critters were about: it was light enough that they could see what the hell they were doing, but not so light as to make it easy for predators to spot them, and so this was the hour when a lone biker was most likely to kill himself by T-boning a moose in the middle of the road. Predators would be out too, looking for crepuscular prey with their big glowing eyes and listening with their twitching radar-horn ears. The Selkirks were oversupplied with apex predators: bears of two types, wolves, coyotes, cougars and various smaller cats, just to name the four-legged ones—to the point where their station on the food pyramid no longer seemed like an apex so much as a plateau or mesa. If striking a deer on your chopper was bad, what adjective could be applied to striking a grizzly who was stalking a deer?
So he kept his light on as he turned south onto the road and built his speed only slowly, giving the tires a quarter mile of free running on the clean blacktop so that they could shed their furry husks of cold mud. Then he opened up the throttle and began to carve the turns toward the Schloss, picking up speed when there was a long clear stretch of road ahead of him, throttling it back a little when he approached blind curves where deer might be grazing in the low rich undergrowth that came to life, at this time of year, in the sunlit ditches and verges that lined the road cut.
In a few minutes—not long enough, really, since he had begun to enjoy the ride—he swept around the broad leftward curve into the shadow of Baron’s Rock and felt the road angle downward beneath him as it made its plunge for the dam. It broadened, here, into a turnaround for vehicles too long and heavy to cross, and a sort of informal parking area for motorists who wanted to fish in the river or picnic on their tailgates while enjoying the view of the Rock, the river, and the stone turrets of the Schloss rising up above the trees on the other side.