The following day began sunny and crisp, but by afternoon clouds had gathered and a fine mist was falling. After lunch, Logan bundled his laptop and notepad into his duffel, slung it over his shoulder, and made his way out of his cabin, along the network of paths, across the lawn, and into the great lodge. The receptionist nodded as he passed. All was quiet; he could almost imagine a great creative hive around him, busily working as—in countless private rooms—theses were being proposed, novels narrated, abstruse geometric theorems proven.
As was his nature, he had already explored the lodge and even some of its extensive grounds: he always felt more comfortable having a working knowledge of his surroundings. Now he made his way to the third floor and down its plushly carpeted hall to the heart of the building, where a half-open door revealed a narrow wooden stairway leading upward. He climbed it to a tiny room, nestled beneath the very eaves. This room, he’d learned, was known as “Forsythe’s aerie.” Back in the late nineteenth century, when Cloudwater had still been known as Rainshadow Lodge, the “Great Camp” had been the summer home of Willis J. Forsythe, a shipping magnate. He had, the story went, fancied himself something of an essayist and writer of belles lettres, and it had been his wont to come up to this tiny, uppermost room, where he could be certain of no distractions, in order to concentrate on writing. If the tactic had worked, Logan found no evidence of it: there were no books by Forsythe in Cloudwater’s library.
The room was plain to the point of monasticism, containing only a single table and straight-backed wooden chair. It was empty, as he’d expected it would be. A single double-sashed window looked over the lawn and down to the mist-shrouded lake, and it was precisely this expansive view that he had come for: sitting in the Thomas Cole cabin that morning, he’d begun to feel hemmed in by trees, and he wanted a larger view in which to make the decision he realized now had to be made.
He took his laptop and notebook from the duffel and placed them on the table, though he doubted he’d need to refer to either one. Then he walked past the table and, hands behind his back, gazed out the window at the view below.
“Okay, Kit,” he murmured to his dead wife. “Let’s run it all up the flagpole, shall we?”
It was time to make a final effort to reevaluate everything he’d heard, read, and observed—if for no other reason than to fulfill his promise to his friend Randall Jessup.
First and foremost, there were the three murders. Each had occurred during a full moon; each had been perpetrated with extreme violence; and in each case it was uncertain who or what had done the killing. The third body, that of Artowsky, had been found some distance from the other two, but that in itself meant nothing except an extension of the kill zone. It was reasonable to assume the same being was responsible for all three deaths. A rogue bear had been the first opinion; most recently, the official theory was a wolf, although Captain Krenshaw leaned more toward a human killer, despite the remarkable strength required to tear bodies apart so violently.
The inhabitants of Pike Hollow, the closest hamlet to the murder sites, held the Blakeney clan responsible. The local belief—a belief of long standing—was that the Blakeneys were lycanthropes. Werewolves. He hadn’t heard this from their own lips; he’d heard it from Jessup.
In the Saranac Lake library, he’d combed through the local newspapers going back fifty years. True, he’d come across a number of intriguing articles, sometimes splashed across the front pages, other times buried deep within: stories of strange sightings, maulings by animals, even the rare disappearance of a hunter or fisherman—not to mention the four young children who had vanished over the last two decades. None of these disappearances had been successfully accounted for, and no mention of the Blakeneys was made in the articles.
It was understandable that Jessup might suspect something unusual at work here, and Logan would be remiss not to keep in mind that his friend knew the locale far better than he did. On the other hand, he’d undertaken a dozen similar investigations, all over the world, and on every occasion he’d heard strange rumors, often sinister, always dark. Very rarely, they turned out to be true. And then, there was the other thing—despite his job as an enigmalogist, where keeping an open mind was essential to the game, something about the very notion of lycanthropy stuck in his craw. Not only that, but the Blakeneys—although he’d been personally threatened by them—seemed too much of an obvious scapegoat.
The readings of the air ion counter, EM detector, and other equipment he’d tested at a variety of sites were all inconclusive. That left only one item to consider: the unsettling feelings that, as a sensitive, he’d been aware of every time he drove down the forest-haunted 3A into deeper and deeper wilderness…wilderness he’d never experienced, or even known to exist, on his weekend trips to the High Peaks as a younger man. He could come to only one conclusion: the Adirondacks itself was full of an unplumbed, untamable force of nature that was—while not malignant, exactly—at best indifferent to man and, at worst, inimical. It was an irresistibly strong force that overwhelmed his ability as an empath to make specific observations or to absorb particular feelings, beyond the general sense that something was amiss; alien.
And that, he realized, made him useless to his friend the ranger.
Still looking out the window, he pulled out his cell phone, checked to make sure it had reception—a habit he’d developed since arriving—and made a call.
“Jessup here,” the voice on the other end answered.
“It’s Jeremy.”
“Jeremy, hi. Anything new to report?”
“Nothing. Except that I’ve done a lot of thinking, and…well, I’ve decided to throw in the towel.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Look, Randall. I’ve done all I can to help. I’ve talked to the locals, investigated the deaths, even viewed the third one with my own eyes. I’ve tried for your sake to keep an open mind. I’ve spent ten times as many hours on this as I’d originally agreed to. But I’ve run up against a brick wall.”
“What about the Blakeneys?”
“Krenshaw is already keeping a close eye on them, as you know. The plain fact is, I’m not finding any leads. I simply haven’t come across a shred of evidence, hard or soft, to justify my looking into things further. I hate to say it, but the time has come to let law enforcement—you included—do its job. And the fact is I’m losing precious ground on the project I came here to complete. I also think that Hartshorn, the resident director, is getting suspicious of my comings and goings. He gave me a look as I went into dinner last night that I didn’t care for. I don’t want to be summarily given the heave-ho from Cloudwater.” He paused. “I’m sorry. I know you feel strongly about this, and I wish I had something more positive to say. But without any measurable progress, I just can’t afford to give it any more time.”
It took Jessup a moment to answer. “I understand. And I appreciate it—I really do. You’ve gone out of your way to help, which was more than I had reason to expect, appearing on your doorstep like I did after being out of touch for so long.”
“Don’t think twice about that.”