Swallow The Hook Part 14

"Finally," Meredith said, "we believe the system of catwalks and observation decks at Raging Rapids is quite unsafe."

In the dim light Roy Fenstock leaped to his feet. "We've never had a serious accident in fifty years of operation!" he shouted to more scattered applause.

"Sit down, Roy," Reid commanded. "You'll get your chance to respond." Roy allowed his brother to pull him back into his seat, although he continued shaking his head.

The slide on the screen now showed a grotesquely fat man backing up to take a picture. His broad backside was pressed against a metal guardrail, which bulged outward under his weight. The crowd t.i.ttered, despite the man's precarious situation.

"That was repaired weeks ago!" Abe burst out, then glanced guiltily at Reid and lowered his gaze to the floor.

"As you know," Meredith narrated calmly, "Raging Rapids is the site of many school field trips. I think you'll be interested in this series of slides." The first image on the screen showed a group of grade school children, all wearing name tags and marching along a catwalk behind their teacher. The next showed the last boy in the line lagging behind. The third showed him placing one sneakered foot on the cross support of the catwalk railing, which begged to be used as a foothold. The fourth slide showed a terrified adult pulling the child back as he straddled the railing, one foot flailing in s.p.a.ce. The final slide showed the dizzying drop below, as water surged powerfully over huge, jagged rocks.

After a moment of stunned silence, the room burst into a cacophony of debate. "I'm never letting my daughter go there again!" "Oh, they're blowing this all out of proportion. Skiing's dangerous and you don't hear anyone saying Whiteface should be closed."

Frank glanced around the room, trying to antic.i.p.ate where free speech might escalate into trouble, but after repeated, vigorous pounding of his gavel, Reid managed to bring the room to order.

"It's time to hear from Abe Fenstock. Please give him your undivided attention."

Abe came up to the podium clutching a sheet of tablet paper that had grown limp in his sweaty grasp. His short upper lip and prominent chin combined to give him a naturally pugnacious look, although he was generally the most affable of men. Tonight he seemed neither frightened nor angry, simply determined.

"h.e.l.lo, everybody. I think you all know me and my sons. All I want to say is this. I don't want no two million dollars, I just want to earn an honest living. People have offered to buy my land before and I always turned 'em down. Don't forget, I employ sixty people over there in the high season, and these fellas"-he gestured across the stage-"won't employ none. Like Roy said before, we've never had a serious accident in fifty years, and we don't intend to ever have one. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing to discuss, because my family has owned that land since 1873 and we intend to keep it." Then he sat down.

Determinedly loud applause broke out in several pockets throughout the room; then Reid opened the floor for questions. Alma Kurtz immediately strode up to the stage. Short and wiry, she barely cleared the podium, but her voice rang out, doubly amplified by anger and the microphone. "I think you all know my husband and I own the Trim 'n Tidy Motel in Verona. We get a lot of business from bus tours, and Raging Rapids is one of the main attractions on the bus tours. You'll lose all that business if they turn the rapids into a hiking trail." She spit the last words out like pieces of gristle and stomped off the stage.

Frank noticed several people in the audience nodding their heads in agreement. One head bobbed harder than the rest. It belonged to a thin, dark-skinned man sitting between two empty chairs-Sanjiv Patel, who had recently bought the old Mountain Vista Motel on Route 12. Deserted for more than two years, the motel had attracted kids who broke into the rooms to have s.e.x and smoke pot. Some college boys on a ski trip had even crashed there and started a small fire. The place had become a nuisance, and Frank knew he wasn't the only person to be relieved when Mr. Patel bought it and cleaned it up.

Still, Patel wasn't exactly part of Trout Run's inner circle, and Frank smiled as the slender man leaped out of his seat and started toward the front, then paused as if horrified by what he had done. But Reid waved him on, and then introduced him as he took the podium.

"Miss Alma is correct," Patel began, his voice quavery and high-pitched. Frank thought he probably made fewer grammatical mistakes than half the men who worked at Stevenson's, but the singsong rhythm of his speech set him apart as foreign, exotic. "We motel owners are not the only ones who would be affected. Closing Raging Rapids would hurt Malone's and the Farmer's Market and you, Miss Beth."

Patel turned and pointed at Beth Abercrombie. "The hikers and backpackers"-he said this word carefully, with the emphasis on pack-"will not be the ones to buy your vases and rugs. Not on your life!" He nodded, looking pleased that he had thought of this Americanism. "This Nathan Golding stayed at my motel, but if I had known who he was and what he wanted to do, I tell you, I would have turned him away!

"Mark my words, closing Raging Rapids will hurt the whole local economy." With that prediction hanging in the air, he slipped back to his seat, keeping his eyes focused straight ahead.

The room buzzed with debate as people twisted in their chairs to discuss this angle with their neighbors. Frank felt a pang of sympathy for Beth, being singled out for reproach in front of the whole town. But Alma and Mr. Patel had a point, and he wondered why Beth aligned herself with the Green Tomorrow group against her own best interests.

Marooned in the center of the room with the slide projector, Beth looked like a Puritan sinner sentenced to the stocks. On all sides, the people of Trout Run talked and shot her looks, but no one spoke to her directly. Frank thought she maintained her composure pretty well, keeping her eyes fixed on the stage as if simply waiting for her next projector cue, but her hands twisted restlessly in her lap, folding a Green Tomorrow brochure.

The buzz of conversation died down as Katie Petrucci rose and approached the podium. Everyone knew full well who she was, so she just began talking. "It seems to me," she said in a preachy tone, "that we're all forgetting just what it is about the High Peaks region that attracts all the tourists in the first place. It's the natural beauty of the last remaining wilderness area in the Northeast. Without that, my friends, we have nothing. We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to preserve the land, protect it, and pa.s.s it on. Forever Wild!" she shouted with a raised fist.

This battle cry produced a tumult of shouts and whistles from the audience, but how many were supportive and how many were catcalls, Frank couldn't tell. "Forever Wild" was the slogan of the Adirondack Park Agency, and not everyone in town endorsed their efforts. Still, he could see plenty of people nodding in agreement. Rod Extrom glanced up at the podium as if he might want to say something, but Frank noticed Sean Vinson tug on his boss's arm and shake his head.

Katie had left the stage, and now the three Fenstocks had their heads together at the podium. Frank watched as Abe laid a restraining hand on Roy's arm, but the younger man shook him off and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the microphone. "I just want to say that the Fenstock family loves the Adirondacks as much as anyone in this room. We've lived here for five generations, and G.o.d be willing, we'll live here for five more. If any person or organization tries to take away our land, it'll be over my dead body!"

Roy's performance effectively ended the meeting. Two men tried to ask questions above the noise of the crowd but soon gave up, and the hall began to empty out.

"What did you make of that?" Edwin asked as Frank stood outside, making sure all the partic.i.p.ants went quietly to their cars.

"I don't like any meeting that ends with talk about dead bodies."

Edwin patted him on the shoulder. "Relax. It's just a figure of speech."

21.

"YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS! No sooner did I place Mary Pat's baby with the couple in Syracuse than I notice a bunch of posts in the adoption chat rooms from a couple looking for a baby and willing to really pay."

"Don't tell me you're going to take that child away from the new couple the way you took her from the Finns!"

"No...relax. But I hate to let this new couple get away. Maybe I'll contact them."

"I haven't even got a baby for the Braithwaites yet. Now you want two?"

"Just see what you can do."

Earl entered the office whistling. He looked different somehow, cleaner; Frank couldn't put his finger on it.

"Did you get a haircut?" Frank asked after studying him for a while.

"Uh, yeah," Earl ran his hand nervously over the neatly trimmed nape of his neck. "Why?"

"It looks good. And they trimmed your mustache, too." That was what really made him look different-trimmed and evened out, the woolly caterpillar on Earl's upper lip didn't look half bad. "You didn't go to the Butcher of Verona, did you?"

"No, I went to the place in Lake Placid you and Edwin go to."

Frank raised his eyebrows. It wasn't like Earl to part with twenty bucks when Joe's Barbershop would mutilate your hair for half the price. Something was up.

"Do anything last night?"

"Melanie and I went to the movies."

Ah, Melanie again. Frank couldn't imagine that pairing; Earl hardly had the training wheels off his bike and now he was racing in the Tour de France.

"We saw Berserk, that serial killer movie. It was great!"

"Earl, that's not the kind of thing you should take a girl to on a date."

"She picked it," Earl protested. "She loves mysteries and cop shows and stuff."

Maybe that was behind Melanie's sudden interest in Earl, now that she knew he planned to go to the police academy. He hoped Earl wasn't headed for a broken heart. Frank opened his mouth to offer some advice, then shut it again. What the h.e.l.l did he know about women? Earl was doing fine.

"Dr. Hibbert's on line one," Doris announced.

Frank was almost sure what the medical examiner was going to say. Probably poor Dean Jacobson had a couple of beers under his belt, and his blood alcohol level was slightly over the legal limit. For that he'd gotten the death sentence, and Frank couldn't help feeling as if he were the executioner.

"Hi, Chuck, what do you have for me?"

"Your crash victim was pumped full of PCP. He probably would've crashed into something before long, even without you on his tail."

"PCP...angel dust? I haven't seen that around since the eighties," Frank objected.

"I know, and we never had much of it up here, even then. But I was just reading a journal article the other day-apparently it's making a comeback. Teenagers today don't have any memory of how screwed up PCP makes you. Prolonged use leads to extremely irrational behavior: paranoia, delusions, hallucinations."

Frank felt relieved. PCP did make people crazy. There had been a case years ago in Kansas City of a college kid diving out a fifth-floor dorm window because he was convinced he could fly. And Dean's grandfather had said the boy hadn't been himself lately. But relief was immediately followed by worry.

"Where the h.e.l.l did he get it?" Frank had arrested Trout Run's foremost pot dealer a few months ago, for blatantly conducting a sale in the parking lot of the Mountainside. Since then, Earl had reported that the scuttleb.u.t.t around the tavern was that dope was now hard to come by without a long drive.

"Maybe over in Burlington," Hibbert speculated. "This article said PCP's becoming a popular party drug on campus."

"Possible, I guess. But Dean didn't strike me as a kid with a lot of U. Vermont frat-boy friends."

"You don't have to be their friend to be their customer. Anyway, finding the source is your problem-I've got patients waiting."

"Thanks for the call, Doc." Frank hung up and made a note to call Mr. Jacobson to find out who Dean's friends had been.

"Anita Veech is here to see you." Doris's voice came through the intercom dripping with disapproval.

What would Anita be doing, coming to the town office to see him? Frank crossed the room and opened the door. Sure enough, there she sat with a grimy little girl beside her.

"h.e.l.lo, Anita-come on in." Frank bent down to the little girl as Anita lumbered past. Why wasn't this kid in school? "Hi there, sweetie. What's your name?"

The child squinted at him through a tangle of hair as if he were a two-tailed cat. She looked like she had never had a real haircut in all her six or seven years; that when the stringy brown strands got in her way, someone came along and whacked off the offending pieces with dull nail scissors.

"This here is my Olivia." Anita prodded her daughter. "Say h.e.l.lo, girl."

Olivia stared resolutely at her tattered Little Mermaid sneakers.

"She's shy," Anita explained, lowering herself into a chair that creaked in protest. "Say, I appreciate what you done for my brother Ralph."

Frank started to say he hadn't done a thing, but caught himself. If Ralph had wormed his way out of trouble with the Lake Placid police, there was no harm in taking the credit. "Sure. Have you come to repay me?"

"I always hold up my end of a bargain." Anita grinned, exposing her dentist's nightmare of teeth. "I know you been wondering what Mary Pat was doing out on Harkness Road so much, thinking that might have something to do with the baby and all. But she was just coming out to visit Olivia, here. Ain't that right, Olivia?"

Olivia nodded vigorously without looking up.

"You told me she didn't visit you."

Anita raised a sausage-finger. "I never actually said she didn't-I just said Pap don't like visitors, and that's the truth. So we had to set up times for Mary Pat to visit when I knew Pap wouldn't be around. See, Olivia here is real smart. Ain't that right?"

Again the nod.

"So Mary Pat would come out and help her with her schoolwork. Because I never was one much for school myself, and I'm not much help with the spelling words and the multiplying, am I, Olivia?"

A shake this time. Frank watched the performance, fascinated.

"But Mary Pat, she was real good with that stuff. She liked working with Olivia on the studying and the handwriting and the reading. That's why she was out on Harkness Road so much."

"But that last day-she was with you right before she died. Didn't you notice how sick she was?"

Anita shook her head, clucking sadly. "We never did see her that day. We made a plan for her to come, but then Pap didn't go out like we expected, so I had to send Olivia down to the signpost to prop up the big stick. See, that was our signal-if the stick was leaning against the sign, it meant Pap was in and she shouldn't come up to the house, right, Olivia?"

Frank looked at the forlorn little bundle of rags with the bobbing head that was Olivia Veech. He could certainly see Mary Pat taking the child under her wing; he felt like doing so himself. "Why didn't you tell me this when I talked to you at the Stop'N'Buy?"

"I didn't like to, just in case it got back to Pap. I figured it didn't really matter, since it didn't have nothing to do with why she died. But I know you been spendin' a lot of time worrying on it, so my conscience got to botherin' me."

Conscience? He didn't figure Anita had a conscience. "What about the father of the baby-have you given any more thought to that?"

Anita stretched back in her chair and folded her hands over her ma.s.sive belly. Frank felt his eyes drawn perversely to the slab of flesh that hung down over her crotch. Sometime in the past seven years, Anita had had s.e.x with a man, and he didn't care to dwell on the logistics required to pull that feat off.

"I have been thinking, and you know what? I think the fella was not from around here."

Typical Trout Run att.i.tude. When in doubt, pin it on an outsider. "Why?" he asked, giving up hope that Anita really knew anything about Mary Pat's lover.

"Because it seemed like she knew he would be coming in on certain days, and she would try to get me out the door early then. It was like he pa.s.sed through on a schedule, see? But I don't remember the exact days."

"Just because he came in on a schedule doesn't mean he was from out of town," Frank said.

Anita pushed off from his desk to boost herself out of the chair. "You got a point. I guess that's why you're the detective."

Was she mocking him? It was hard to know what to believe from this woman.

Anita waddled to the door with Olivia trailing behind. As she crossed the threshold, the child turned back and met his eyes for the first time.

"I miss Mary Pat," she said. He couldn't doubt the sadness etched in her wan little face. "She was my real friend."

The call from Sean Vinson, reporting vandalism at the Extrom house building site, came in just as Anita left. Frank left for the scene immediately, curious to see this house he had heard so much about.

Extrom's place was located at the summit of one of the higher peaks in the Verona Range. These mountains weren't part of the forty-six named High Peaks, and the locals referred to this mountain as Beehive because of its conical shape. There were several homes nestled in the woods at the bottom third of the mountain, but the top two-thirds had generally been considered too inaccessible for more than a rough hunting shack. Then Extrom had come along, bought up the entire top of the mountain from several different owners, and set about building an access road, drilling a well, and installing his own power generator. What all this cost was a subject of constant speculation among the regulars at the Store and Malone's Diner, with the tally rising by tens of thousands of dollars every week.

Frank turned onto the unpaved road marked with a hand-painted plywood sign that read: EXTROM SITE. The road grew increasingly steep, winding through the dense maple and birch forest, but it had been worn smooth by the constant traffic of trucks and earth-movers. At the higher elevation the trees thinned a bit, and wind-stunted hemlocks and balsam wrapped their roots around boulders, searching for some nourishing soil. Frank followed one last twist in the road, and the Extrom house appeared before him.

The house seemed to cling to the rocky peak much like the resilient trees, cantilevering out from the mountaintop, a vast, multileveled structure of natural field-stone, huge log beams, and cedar shakes. One wall appeared to be made of nothing but gla.s.s. The rhythmic explosion of nail guns echoed in the cool morning air as a crew installed shingles.

Frank parked and walked toward the house, amazed and appalled at once. Extrom's new home commanded a panoramic view from Lake Champlain in the east to Lake Placid in the west. Stretched out below was a blanket of brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges, broken only intermittently by a thin ribbon of road. Frank knew there were houses down there, but he couldn't see them through the dense leaf canopy. The phrase "master of all he surveys" popped into his head. Yes, a man would feel like a feudal lord in his castle in this place.

Frank was so intrigued by the feats of engineering that the house presented, and the stunning craftsmanship of the stonework, that he didn't even look for signs of the spray-painted vandalism that Sean Vinson had reported. Staring up at the trusses supporting one wing of the house, he jumped at the sound of a voice right behind him.

"The damage is over here."

Frank whirled around to face Sean Vinson, an exceptionally thin man wearing work boots with blue jeans and a flannel shirt that looked as if they had been professionally laundered and pressed. With several silver rings on his fingers, a diamond stud in one ear, and a precision-trimmed mustache, it was no wonder Vinson came in for so much grief at the Mountainside Tavern.

"This is quite a place," Frank said. "I haven't been up here before."

"I haven't had occasion to call you until now," Vinson said as he led Frank away from the house. "But we've had a major episode of vandalism that threatens the work on this project." Vinson stopped in front of a small construction trailer at the edge of the clearing. Spray-painted in bright orange across the siding, door, and window was the message: HIRE LOCAL OR THE HOUSE IS NEXT.