“So you’re from out west,” I said. “Seattle, right?”
“Vail, too.”
“How did you and your sister end up at the Alpine Sports Academy?”
“My dad went to school here. He raced in the 1988 Olympics in Calgary. Then he blew out his knee.” He tried humoring me to hurry things along. “Elderoy said you’re a game warden. You must know Gary Pulsifer.”
“I know Gary all right.”
“I worked some searches with him—seems like a class act.”
It was not the description I would have chosen.
“So if you’re a warden, and you’re looking for Adam, does that mean you think he might be lost in the woods somewhere?”
“No.”
Trying to follow my train of thought had made Davidson confused, which was just what I had hoped. “Did you bust him for poaching or something?”
“Was Adam a poacher?”
“Not that I know of.” He couldn’t stop himself from smiling. “But who knows? He liked causing trouble, seeing what he could get away with.”
“Including with girls?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Like I said, I’m just making some inquiries because his probation officer has her hands full. You never know what information might be useful in finding someone.”
He rubbed his chin and nodded, but he didn’t seem entirely convinced. “What is it you want to know?”
“Tell me about the fight.”
“The fight?”
“You confronted Adam when you found out he’d been having sex with Alexa. You two got into it.”
Davidson touched the corner of his eye. “He broke my eye socket. My orbital bone.”
“And that was how the school found out?”
He knocked his head back against the window of the cockpit so hard, I could hear it. “The nurse asked me what happened, and I was so pissed off, I said some things I shouldn’t have. The next thing I knew, the headmaster was there, asking me all these questions, and a detective showed up, and I got freaked out.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That I was mad at Adam because he was my friend, and he’d been banging my little sister.”
I could imagine what had happened next. The detective would have gotten the parents’ permission to confiscate Alexa’s phone, and they would have found texts (almost certainly lewd) and photographs (even worse). Then, after they’d managed to convince Alexa to cooperate, the cops would have orchestrated a pretext call. It was a recorded conversation between the boy and the girl to get him to admit what he’d done. A simple “I’m sorry” was all it took to send people to prison for statutory rape.
“I would have been pissed if someone had raped my little sister,” I said.
“Yeah, but it wasn’t rape. I don’t know what the right word for it is, but it wasn’t rape. They’d been having sex for a month. Alexa wasn’t even a virgin when they started going out.”
Davidson had begun to perspire from the heat inside the cockpit.
“It’s still against the law,” I said. “You did the right thing by coming forward.”
“But I didn’t know what was going to happen to him!” He let out a groan, as if overcome with nausea. “If I’d just made up some story about how I’d broken that bone, Adam would have moved on to some new girl, and Alexa would have been sad for a while. But she’s always had her skiing to focus on anyway. Just talk to my dad for two minutes, and he’ll tell you who’s the champion skier in the family. Alexa just made the U.S. Ski Team. And here I am working on the Widowmaker ski patrol, trying to figure out what to do with my life.”
Davidson really did seem to be a sensitive, emotional kid. Not at all like other college athletes I had known. I had a hard time believing it had been his idea to attend ASA.
“Did you end up testifying at the trial?” I asked.
“They didn’t need me,” he said. “My dad got Alexa to do it. He convinced her, like he always does. Plus, the police had that phone recording, and some dick pics Adam had sent her. They didn’t need me to testify. I never even went to the courthouse. I was too ashamed to look my friend in the eye.”
“You still consider him your friend?”
He laughed bitterly. “I’m not sure the feeling’s mutual.”
“Adam’s mom said you kept in touch with him in prison.”
“I sent him some letters, apologizing for what happened. But I never heard from him until after he’d gotten out. That was a couple of weeks ago. He was living at some kind of logging camp over in Kennebago with a bunch of other— It sounded horrible. The guy who ran the place was a slave driver, Adam said. He asked if I could meet him at the Snow Bowl. That’s the bowling alley in Bigelow.”
“When was this, exactly?”
“Two weeks ago Thursday,” he said, stroking his lips with his long fingers. “He was waiting for me in the lot. It kind of spooked me, because I didn’t know how angry he was going to be.”