On the sound system, the Wailers were wailing. The summit was lost in fog.
“The thing that burns me,” said Elderoy, “is that I didn’t have the guts to quit. Because I was afraid, I watched a good friend lose his job and get crucified in the press. Scott would have gotten sued, too—if the poor man hadn’t shot himself. And here I am, ten years later. Only it’s me who’s in charge of the lifts now. And it’s no secret who’ll be blamed if there’s another fatal accident.”
The machine tilted as we started up a steep slope, and I found myself staring up at the white sky like an astronaut about to be blown into space. The coffee sloshed unpleasantly in my stomach.
“It doesn’t sound like you’re going to help me find Adam,” I said.
“No, I am not,” Elderoy replied. “I get that Amber wants to know where her boy is—because she’s his mom and she’s worried about him—but that kid has suffered more than enough, if you ask me. I hope he’s a thousand miles away from here. I hope he’s someplace where no one’s ever heard of Widowmaker Mountain.”
12
As we gained elevation, Elderoy paused a few times to push around some newly created snowdrifts that were blocking the road. It seemed that the groomers and snowmakers were engaged in an unending battle with the weather. Some days, my job felt that way, too.
Near the summit, looking out at the horizonless landscape, I began to get a sense of vertigo. The snow didn’t seem to be falling so much as rising, borne aloft on intermittent squalls. We passed a boarded-up building with gaping holes in the walls where windows had been kicked in by vandals or broken by storms.
Elderoy turned off “Three Little Birds” in mid-chorus. The wind seemed to raise its voice outside the snowcat.
“That’s where it happened,” he said, gesturing toward the old wreck. “That’s the Ghost Lift.”
“Why haven’t they torn it down?” I asked.
“No money to do it. Not until now, that is. The new owners have scheduled demolition of the towers and the lift building for this summer.” He dropped his voice even lower. “Maybe then people will stop remembering. I never will.”
I stared down the mountainside and saw, through the rippling curtains of windblown snow, a descending row of T-shaped towers. They were spaced evenly apart, like steel telephone poles that had been stripped of their wires. But in my imagination I could see the missing chairs, and I could picture what it must have been like on that fateful day when the cables snapped and everything came crashing down.
The road flattened out as we traversed a shelf seemingly cut from the mountain rock. Peering ahead, I saw the colorful helmets and jackets of skiers coming off a modern, functioning lift. Some of them shouted and raised their ski poles over their helmets when they recognized Elderoy. Someday they’d probably name a trail after the old mountain goat.
Beyond was a wooden shack perched on stilts above the hidden valley. It had a first-aid emblem painted on the side. The most remote outpost of the Widowmaker ski patrol.
Elderoy piloted the PistenBully up to the building. When he popped open the door of the groomer, the temperature dropped fifty degrees.
“Nippy!” he shouted above the wind.
And then he’d slammed the door and was struggling, bent over, toward the stairs up to the shack. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be joining me inside.
I had never worked a district where one of my primary duties was finding lost skiers and snowboarders, but I had participated in a couple of alpine searches, and I knew the drill. Generally speaking, the ski patrol handled whatever calls came in, but any time the situation began looking desperate—night was beginning to fall, or the snow was turning to sleet—the local wardens would get an emergency summons.
I tried to follow the compacted path the ski patrollers had made in the snow—just as Elderoy had done—but I took a wrong step and found myself thigh-deep in powder. With some effort, I managed to climb free of the drift. I fought the wind all the way up the stairs.
Elderoy was waiting. “We were just about to send out a Saint Bernard!”
“As long as it’s carrying one of those little casks of brandy.”
A gust of wind slammed the door shut for me. I found myself blinking through fogged glasses at three people. Elderoy, of course. The other two were a young man and a middle-aged woman, both dressed in red ski jackets and black synthetic pants.
“Hello?” the woman said.
I unhooked the sunglasses from behind my ears and made an exaggerated series of expressions, trying to loosen the numb muscles around my mouth. “Hello.”
“This is Warden Bowditch.” Elderoy had removed his fur-lined hat and held it in front of him like a vassal who has come to beseech his feudal lord. “This is Kat, and that’s Josh. They didn’t know we were coming.”