Sleeping Beauty (74 page)

“Nah,” Ned muttered. “Do I get an extra piece of pumpkin pie 'cause I cleaned my room, even being lame?”

“I did, too,” Robin said. “And I'm lame, too. Ned tried to beat up Simon McGill,” she said to Leo.

“We weren't gonna say anything!” Ned shouted.

“Well, I thought you were brave.”

“What was it about?” Gail asked.

“Nothing!” Ned shouted more loudly.

“What was it about, Ned?” Leo asked.

Ned shook his head stubbornly.

“Robin,” Leo said.

Robin looked away from Ned. “He said we'd be moving away 'cause you were fired and the company was sold, and we didn't even have a right to be in school 'cause”—her eyes filled with tears—“we didn't belong here anymore.”

“Oh, no,” Gail said. “Why didn't you tell me when I picked you up?”

Ned gave an exaggerated shrug. “We figured it was true,” he muttered.

“Christ,” Leo muttered. “Listen,” he said, putting his arms around the two of them. “I haven't been fired. We're not about to move away.”

“But the family did decide to sell the company,” Gail said. She sat on the arm of Robin's chair, her arm around Robin's shoulders. “We can't pretend they didn't. And they
have a buyer. And that means, maybe, sometime, we don't know when, we will have to leave.”

“But it hasn't been sold, has it?” Anne asked. She and Josh were sitting on the other side of the table. “I didn't know anything was final.”

“Not yet, but—” Gail looked at Leo.

“Your grandfather signed a letter saying he was accepting an offer for it,” Leo said to Ned and Robin. “And when it becomes final, the new owners probably will bring in their own people to run it. So then we'll have to think about going somewhere else, where I can get a job. But we don't know when it's going to happen, and until it does, you two belong here as much as anybody. You don't have to beat up Simon or anybody else to prove it, Ned; just keep going to school the way you always have. They'll get the point.”

“No, they won't.” Ned forced the words through clenched teeth. “They're staying and I'm not. They're
home,
and I'm not!”

Robin looked at Anne through her tears. “You just got here and everything was so nice and now it's all changing.”

“It won't change with us,” Anne said. She came around the table and knelt in front of Robin and Ned. She put out her hands and the children took them. Her heart ached for them. They had never had to wonder about where they belonged. “It's hard, I know it's hard; it feels so empty when you're not sure where home is anymore. But the important things aren't going to change; we won't let them. And it's important to me that I'm part of this family and I always will be. And I'll be with you, wherever you live. I couldn't let you go.”

She had never said those words before.

“Oh, Anne,” Gail said softly. Her eyes were shining. Anne looked up and they exchanged a long look. “It would be awful if you weren't here. Ned, wherever we are, as long as it's all of us together, that's home. You can't ever get fired or kicked out of that; it's all ours. Forever. And Anne will be part of us.”

“Josh, too?” Robin asked.

There was a pause. “Josh, too,” Josh said easily.

“Yeah, but—” Ned began.

“We have plenty of time to talk about it,” Anne said. She stood and began to stack their plates. “And I wouldn't be so sure we know what's going to happen to the company. I'd hang in there, Ned, and not make any quick judgments or try to beat anybody up. Just tell them a lot of things are happening and nobody knows anything yet.”

“Is that really true?” Ned asked.

“Word of honor.”

“I'm going to cut the pie,” Gail said. “Two pieces for Ned and Robin because they cleaned their rooms, casts and all. Two for Josh, because he did a lot of work today, in the snow. Two for Leo because he's getting better. And one for Anne and one for me. There goes the pie.”

She bustled about while Anne poured coffee, and as soon as possible Gail and Leo shepherded the children to their rooms to do their homework. “Okay,” Leo said, “where are we?”

“You first,” Josh said to Anne. He sat back, enjoying the feeling in the room, a kind of electricity that had begun when he said, so casually,
Josh, too.
It was as if events were settling around him and Anne, giving them a calm place to find each other in the midst of the stormy happenings surrounding Tamarack. So now the four of them sat around the table in a circle of light—friends, partners, family. “Should I take notes?”

Anne smiled. “I already did.” In a level voice, she described her meetings with Zeke Ruddle and Bud Kantor.

“Vince
did that?” Gail cried as Anne told them about Ruddle. “To his own
brother?”
And when Anne talked about Kantor, Leo shook his head. “It had to be something like that; there wasn't any reason to start here. . . .” When she had finished, Leo burst out, “God damn son of a bitch! How could he do that to Charles? And to us? What did we ever do to him?” He saw Gail and Anne look at each other. “For Christ's sake,
we
weren't the ones who kicked him out!”

Anne shrank back, thinking they had told Josh everything
about her. In an instant, the warmth and closeness of the room collapsed; she felt trapped. She pushed back her chair, wanting to flee.

“I remember, we talked about that,” Josh said casually. “One of these days I'd like to hear that story. But most families quarrel, you know, without one of them trying to ruin the others. It sounds to me as if there's a lot more going on. You haven't heard about what I did today.”

“Oh, yes, tell us,” Gail cried.

“You and Bill went up there?” Leo asked.

“This afternoon.” Josh could feel Anne slowly relaxing beside him. As he spoke, she quietly slid her chair back to the table and leaned forward, watching him. When he finished, he took a small rock he had pocketed that afternoon and showed it to Leo. “Of course it could be a fresh break from a natural slide, but if you put this together with the blast fractures we found, there's no doubt in my mind that it was dynamite. Whoever it was probably found a section of the rock that had already separated from the cliff, and set a few dynamite charges in the crack, fused to go off together.” He reached into his pocket. “Leftover fuse wire,” he said, laying it on the table. “It wouldn't have had to be a big blast, certainly not big enough to be heard in town. Hikers might have heard it, but there aren't any well-known trails around there, and even if someone did hear it, there's always blasting of some kind around here, in the winter for avalanche control and in the summer for construction. Anyway, it only had to be big enough to start a small slide; they pick up speed and force as they go, and the drainage ditch probably was weak to begin with. He might have checked that first.”

“He,” Leo repeated.

“I'm assuming it was the person who went to check out the area after it happened and said he didn't find anything unusual.”

“He might have thought it was a natural slide,” said Leo.

“He might,” Josh said.

“Who checked it out?” Gail asked.

“Keith.” Leo was turning the rock around in his hand.
“But I don't see Keith doing anything like that. He's involved here, he knows how tourists are, how they'll go somewhere else if they read about things going wrong here.”

Anne was looking across the room, remembering isolated events of the past few months, particularly Keith's piercing interest in her at dinner months before, and his too-bright smile and close looks at her and Leo the morning he met them at the gondola. She had never understood that peculiar interest in her; she remembered thinking he looked like a schoolboy memorizing her for a report he had to make.
A report he had to make . . .
“Is Keith close to Vince?” she asked abruptly.

“I don't think so,” Gail replied. “Why?”

“I wondered if there might be a connection. If Vince was trying to damage Tamarack by getting the EPA here, and someone started the rock slide to hurt Tamarack—”

“Oh, no,” Gail breathed. “You mean Keith might have done it on orders . . . oh, no, oh, no, he couldn't. Anyway, where would he get dynamite?”

“The ski patrol uses it for trail clearing and avalanche control,” Josh said. “As assistant mountain manager he'd have easy access to it.”

“Vince never comes up here,” Leo said. “So if they spend any time together, it's somewhere else.”

“Denver,” Josh said. “Or Washington.”

“With Ray Beloit,” Leo said. “Vince's campaign manager.”

“Who wants to buy The Tamarack Company,” Anne said quietly.

They looked at each other. “Christ,” Leo swore softly, “you could go crazy with all these guesses. We don't know who set off the dynamite and if it really was Keith, we don't know if he ever talked to Vince, or that Beloit was part of anything they talked about. . . .”

“We might be able to prove whether Vince and Keith were in touch,” Anne said thoughtfully. “They wouldn't have had to meet in person; they would have used the telephone most of the time. And if Keith called from the office, you'd have records of that.”

“You mean phone bills.” Leo grinned. “It takes a divorce lawyer to think of that.” His grin faded. “My God, what we're talking about . . . Well, sure we have a list of every long-distance call we make, and the length of the call. But damn it . . .” He was shaking his head. “Damn it, have you thought about what we're saying? All of them together—the highway, the EPA, the rock slide . . . If he really did all of them, what kind of man is he?”

“Oh!” Gail cried. Her eyes were wide and fearful. “The gondola!”

“We can't say that,” Josh said. “We don't know enough about it.”

“We know someone tried to frame you,” Leo responded. “Someone who knows the gondola, who could have taken out that bolt, and planted it at your house. And maybe he did it on somebody's orders.”

“He wouldn't,” Gail said. It was almost a moan.

“If he did, he would have had to do more than take out the bolt,” Josh said. “He would have had to disable the J-grip.”

“Right,” Leo said. “And we don't know what happened there. They've done a week of testing and they can't find any reason for the grip to fail.”

“But something happened and it had to be deliberate,” Anne said. “Someone wanted a gondola accident. Someone tried to make one of the cars fall. I don't suppose it was planned that two cars would collide, but we can't be sure of that either.”

Gail poured more coffee. Her mouth was tight and her hand shook. “What kind of man is he?” she murmured.

“Suppose you wanted to make a car fall,” Josh said thoughtfully. “How would you do it?”

Leo shook his head. “I don't know enough about the mechanics of it. The real expert on that is probably the tramway inspector who's been testing all week. Jim something. We could call him, I guess, but I don't know where he's staying in town. And I can't remember his last name.”

“Matheny,” Gail said quietly. “And he's staying at the Red Lion Inn; he called here once and left a message for you.”

“I'll call him,” Leo said, and reached for the telephone. They sat in silence. The enormity of it, which had struck Anne again and again in Washington, seemed to fill the room, dimming the lamplight. When Leo turned back to them, he found them sitting exactly as he had left them. “He says, hypothetically, that the simplest way would be to jam something into the J-grip so, literally, it couldn't grip.”

“You'd have to be up there, then, on the second floor,” Josh said, “waiting for a car to pass, and then jam something in.”

“What would you use?” Anne asked.

“Could be anything,” Leo replied. “A hunk of wood, a piece of pipe, anything hard that would wedge it open. Jim said it would have been knocked out in the crash, but nobody's found anything that looked out of the ordinary.”

“Leo,” Anne said. She was frowning, trying to remember. She was sitting in the gondola, holding Robin and Ned, looking out at the peaceful scene, wondering at its beauty. Below, a single patroller had remained behind to let them know they were not forgotten until they could be rescued. He was sitting in the sunlight on the bright snow, looking up at them or out across the valley, and there was a rhythmic noise. . . . “Jazz,” she said. “The patroller who stayed below when we were in the gondola was tapping a jazz beat on his ski boot. He'd picked up a piece of wood, maybe a two-by-four, and was using it to beat out a rhythm.”

Josh got it first. “He picked up a piece of wood
in the middle of the slope?”

“Yes,” Anne said.

“No way,” Leo said. “We don't allow junk on the slope. How long was it?”

“Oh, maybe a foot.”

“No way,” Leo said again. “The ski patrol would have seen it before any skiers came up. I'd bet anything it wasn't there before the gondola opened.”

“Maybe it's still there,” Gail said. “Oh, you couldn't tell; we had all that snow the other night.”

“I'll call the head of the patrol,” Leo said. “He may have heard something about it.” He reached again for the telephone,
and again they waited until Leo turned back to them. “He'll call whoever it was and get back to me.”

“But what do we do with it if we find it?” Gail asked. “You can't prove anything with a piece of wood.”

“Jim said there probably would be gouges in it from the J-grip mechanism if it had been jammed in. Theoretically, we could match the marks and prove it was that piece of wood in that particular grip.”