A grim-faced sheriff and a pair of burly deputies greeted him at the door with a machine-gun barrage of questions and suspicious looks at the departing black Jeep. One of them mentioned Gibson’s name, a curl in his lip when asking if the man who’d carried Zach up the mountain had done him harm.
“Not like he’s the type of guy to bash a man over the head, then bring him home,” Ruth Mahoney, the inn’s cook and bottle washer, snapped. She and her wife, Martha, a square-faced sturdy woman who spent most of her time tending the grounds, pushed the cops away from Zach, giving him room to breathe. “The Keller boys have been coming up here since they were kids. Their family has owned that land for more years than most people have been settled in the area, so don’t the two of you come around here and start talking shit about either one of them. The oldest Keller boy is a goddamn war hero, and the one that’s up there now, he’s always been good solid folk. If Mr. Thomas here says Gibson Keller did right by him, then that’s what happened.”
With that, Ruth stuck a fork in the argument, and Zach spent the next few days being couriered to the doctor’s office, then shuttled back to the inn to spend the rest of the day sleeping and being force-fed hot soups. With his bruises fading and his limbs responding better when he tried to move, Zach grew squirrelly, chafing at every maternal effort Ruth threw his way. After a ten-minute argument about putting on thick socks over his two warm feet, Zach slipped off to find Martha.
The women were in their midfifties, legacy employees from a time when the inn was a bustling business and tourists filled every room. Now larger hotels with fancy names and marble floors lured customers from the small, quirky bed-and-breakfasts dotted around the lake’s shores, and Ruth and Martha were left behind to maintain a man’s dying dream. They’d been making plans—or rather scrambling for a plan—when Zach purchased the inn and its surrounding property, sure that they would be turned out for younger, hipper staff. When Zach informed them he had no intention of letting go of two of the inn’s greatest treasures, it was as if the heavens parted and he’d been declared a messiah.
Despite his deity status, Ruth still had no qualms in bossing him around, while Martha was a silent, stern-faced monolith of a woman Zach could hide behind.
He found Martha puttering around in the shed, her overalls greasy and worn, stained with smears from her oily hands as she worked on fixing an ancient snowblower. She looked up when he came in, a placid study in grays and denim. Her close-cropped hair was more of a rooster’s comb than any particular style, and her frustration showed in how her salt-and-pepper bristle cut stuck up around her head. She nodded her chin toward the beat-up coffee maker she kept going throughout the day and grunted an affirmative when Zach asked if she wanted a refill.
Settling on one of a pair of old Camaro car seats bolted down to a heavy block of wood, Zach took a long draw on his coffee, sighing contentedly at its sharp bitter taste. He waited until Martha laid down her tools, then picked up the mug he’d poured for her.
“Ruth driving you crazy?” Martha’s voice was a scratchy drawl, a rasp reminiscent of unfiltered cigarettes and moonshine smuggled over county lines. She was the type of woman Zach’s mother considered beneath her, a hard-working flat-plains descendent who sought peace working with her hands and the land. Martha was someone his family wouldn’t see in a crowd or even give the time of day if asked, and Zach was grateful for every second Martha could spare him. “I love that woman, but she can drive somebody right out of their mind with her fussing. Sneeze once in front of her and she’ll have you wrapped up in blankets and drinking foul potions before you can even blink.”
“Sometimes a man needs to suffer through a few things, especially if you can’t really do anything about your pains,” Zach agreed, rocking the seat back in its moorings. “I had to draw the line at her no-coffee rule. There is only so much tea a man can drink, and I reached that point two days ago.”
“So you came down here looking for coffee?” Martha eyed him suspiciously. “Or was that just an excuse? You’ve got that I’m going to poke at a beehive look on your face.”
“The coffee’s something I’m very grateful for,” he replied, saluting her with his mug. “And yeah, you’re right, I could’ve just made a pot of coffee up there, but I wanted to pick your brain a little bit.”
Martha eased her thick body down on the chair next to him, hunching a little bit over her knees. “What’s on your mind? Because if I had to take a guess, I’d say you came back down off the mountain a changed man, and it wasn’t the tumble down into the lake that did it.”
“No, you’re right,” Zach muttered, taking another sip, then making a face at the oily smear on his tongue. “You and Ruth have been around here for a long time, so you pretty much know everyone and everything in the area—”
“You’ve got a couple questions about Gibson Keller,” she remarked. “Never thought he’d be your type. But then a lot of people would say the same thing about me and Ruth. I’m not going to gossip about the boy. Not that there’s anything to tell you. He came up here about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, with that big dog of his. His older brother, Ellis, built that place, so it was kind of a surprise to see Gibson moving in, but the Kellers usually do things their own way. That cabin is the first real structure up there. Before that, they would spend their time up there in tents, even in the dead of winter. A couple of times I wondered if their father—Gregory—should be charged with child abuse, what with those boys having to survive a snowstorm with only canvas between them and the wind, but nobody else felt that way.”
“They seem—I mean, Gibson seems pretty hardy,” Zach caught himself. “The cops didn’t seem like they were too fond of Gibson.”
“It’s the dogs the Kellers breed. They’re monstrous, with jaws big enough to snap a man’s head like a watermelon in a vise. That kind of power makes a person nervous, especially if the animal is running loose on a property. But they bring one or two with them every time they go up the side of the mountain, and a couple of times, they’ve scared the shit out of hikers.” Martha shook her head. “People don’t pay attention to No Trespassing signs, and even though that’s the Keller property, the sheriff doesn’t want any tourist to get taken down like a deer during hunting season by a dog bigger than a pony.”