The Marble Mask (6 page)

Auerbach shook his head. “I’m already getting enough heat as it is. You saying we can’t go?”

Woodman looked unhappy. “I don’t know enough to say for sure. That’s why I’m suggesting caution.”

That seemed to settle it for Auerbach. “Duly noted. We go.”

I glanced around the room. Most of the ten people there bore Woodman’s stamp of experienced casualness. Wind-tanned, lean, and sporting their outdoor gear with the ease that older cops wear their guns, they all but radiated self-assurance. My crew and I looked like neophyte hikers in borrowed clothes.

Which was in fact the case. Even Sammie, who’d come with her own equipment, had been further complemented with a few extra items. The rest of us had been outfitted virtually from head to toe. We’d also been given a crash course in climbing protocol, rope use, and how to use carabiners and ice axes, some of which harked back to familiar special weapons training, others of which felt foreign and awkward.

“Jesus,” Willy muttered as we all prepared to leave, “it’s not like we’re assaulting K-2 or anything.”

“Maybe not,” Woodman told him. “But it’s what you don’t plan for that’ll kill you.”

· · ·

An hour later, I was staring out the gondola window as we were pulled up the mountain’s face, wondering if this was what a spider felt climbing a silken filament up the side of a dormant human, knowing that if the host took notice, the end would be fast and brutal.

The bottom hadn’t been bad, surrounded by base buildings and a swarm of colorfully clad tourists. It had been entertaining looking down on the broad trail below us, watching skiers trying to strike a balance between self-control and speed. Farther up, though, I’d become aware of the mountain’s sheer mass overhead, and of my own comparative insignificance. To challenge such a huge, powerful, prehistoric chunk of the earth’s crust felt like tempting fate. I watched the approaching ridgeline, stretching across my entire horizon, with growing dread.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Ray Woodman said beside me. “Most people turn their backs to the mountain and look at the valley to admire the view. I like this better—it’s the mountain I have to deal with, whether the view’s there or not.”

I glanced over my shoulder. What view there was seemed imperiled by a series of ever shifting clouds. But what I could see was spectacular. “You can’t blame them, though,” I commented.

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t do that. Once I’m on top, I always look around. Be crazy not to. Besides, by then I’ve earned the right. It’s just that for me, the view’s like the cherry on top, and I always eat the cherry last.”

I resisted mentioning that I found it unsettling putting ice cream sundaes and life-threatening excursions into the same sentence, especially when the speaker was the climbing team leader. “I think I’ll just be happy when the whole meal’s over,” I said softly. “This is not my element.”

Woodman was sympathetic. “You’re in good company. It’s just what I like to do. I wouldn’t be a cop for all the tea in China. Up here, I only get in trouble if I make a mistake. You guys never know what’s going to hit you, no matter how careful you are. I couldn’t live like that.” He swept his hand across the approaching ridge. “You have to admit it does grab the attention, though. Even if all you want to do is slide down it.”

A few clouds were caught on the ridge like translucent ragged cotton, the stark cliffs below them dark and brooding in their shadow. “It is beautiful,” I had to agree.

“People have been taking runs at it for a hundred and fifty years,” he explained. “Ever since the Civil War, when they actually built a hotel right under the Nose, called the Summit House. That’s when the toll road began, too. They ended up having to hold the place down with cables, the wind blew so hard. Even then, they’d lose a roof or a porch every once in a while. It housed fifty people and their horses and carriages. Talk about guts or arrogance or whatever it was—those people were nuts. I never would’ve done that.”

“What happened to it?” I asked, trying to dispel the hint of foreboding that had caught my attention like the sound of something solid sliding under a boat’s hull.

“They tore it down and burned it in ’64. Lousy profit margin. Ironic when you think of all it went through—to be destroyed by the very dynamic that built it, like an out-of-date filling station on Main Street. We’ve pretty much treated the mountain that way from the start,” he added, his voice dripping with contempt. “Turning it into a ski slope, a place to plant radio antennas and entertain flatlanders who drive to the top for twelve bucks to claim they climbed Mount Mansfield. Through the years, they’ve talked about paving the ridge with a parkway, planting a Bomarc missile guidance system on the Chin, and even putting in an airfield.”

I glanced at his angular profile, weather-beaten and hard. Ray Woodman was probably in his fifties. Auerbach had told me he was a high-end building contractor by trade, benefiting from the very excesses he was currently belittling. Had he gotten the contract 150 years ago, I had no doubt he would have built the Summit House, taking pride in beating the elements. Such inconsistency is one of the quirks of our species, and certainly one of the big reasons we’re so amazed by our own behavior.

We were nearing the cave-like entrance to the gondola’s top station, perched on the slope a couple of hundred feet shy of the ridge, when Woodman abruptly pointed off to the right. “There’s the Chin,” he said. “That big dome on the end with the cliffs below it. Left of it and much closer to us, angling this way, is the swale I showed you on the map—like a shallow gutter running up the side of a roof. That’s our route to the top and back down Profanity.”

“Why not just cut straight across to the saddle between the Chin and the Adam’s Apple?” Sammie asked from behind us.

Woodman didn’t bother turning around. “You’d find out if you tried. It can be done, but it wears you to a stump. Once we reach Profanity, we have gravity on our side. Cuts down on the effort big time.” He finally faced her with a smile. “I may not like skiers much, but they do know how to slide downhill.”

· · ·

We soon discovered what he’d meant. Snowshoes strapped to my boots, plodding up the angled slope like a clown dressed in floppy shoes, I could only imagine the effort it would have taken to make a right angle traverse. I also had no doubt that’s where I would have ended up had Sammie been team leader.

As it was, I could see her far ahead of me, pressing Woodman from behind like a sports car trying to pass a pickup. Not that he paid her the slightest attention. He was now where he liked to be most, in control and in command, and extremely respectful of all the factors allied to kill him if he erred. No hyperactive cop was going to make him change his ways.

The mountain itself, however, was a different matter. We were still fifty feet shy of the ridge when he turned, raised both hands, and waited until we’d all clustered around him.

His concern spoke for itself. As I reached his position, I found he’d stopped right under the lee of a steady blast of freezing wind coming from the other side. The shredded clouds I’d seen earlier suddenly fell into context. We huddled on our hands and knees to hear his voice above the eerie howl.

“Things’re kicking up a bit,” he shouted. “It’s not too bad and we won’t be in it for long, but since some of you are new to this, you want to be extra careful. We’ll put our crampons on here, stow our snowshoes on our packs, and rope up in single file. Goggles and face masks on, hats secured under your chins. Make sure nothing’s loose anywhere. Keep low, use your ice axes, and keep your faces downwind to breathe.” He paused, eyeing Sammie, and added, “There’s no rush. This is where taking your time will keep you alive.”

We did as we were told, Willy allowing Sammie and me to help him switch his gear, before we all started up once more, in defiance of instinct or common sense, straight into the frigid, moaning, lung-searing blast.

And the shock awaiting us wasn’t just from the wind. As we topped the crest, the entire mountain fell away, revealing a vast, flat, empty stretch of clouds before us, obscuring the entire Champlain Valley to the west as completely as the Stowe side had been clear. The appearance of this featureless plain was so abrupt and disorienting that while we were being pushed back by the icy gale, the sheer emptiness ahead drew us forward like a magnet, tempting the beginners among us to step onto the vaporous field and proceed outward. Despite gasping for air, even through the protection of my ventilated neoprene face mask, I fought Woodman’s instruction to look away and tried to permanently imprint this one instant in my mind. Only the urgent tugging of the rope around my waist brought me back to the task at hand and the need to get under cover. For despite the dramatic feeling of being on an island surrounded by foamy sea, I realized I was precisely where Woodman loved to be most—right on the edge of life itself and in peril of making one of the mistakes he’d warned us against.

The trip to the top of Profanity trail was blessedly short as advertised, and we huddled there as before, just beyond the wind’s bite on the clear side of the mountain, awaiting Woodman’s orders.

“Okay,” he shouted, “that’s basically the worst of it. The rest, as they say, is all downhill.” He pointed to a narrow gap between two rocky outcroppings below us. “What you can see from here is as bad as it gets. It’s steep enough at the top that even the skiers mostly sidestep it, but then things open up a bit, plus we get to move laterally to the north once we reach the bottom of the cliffs surrounding the Chin. We’ll stay roped in for safety’s sake. All set?”

We headed out, looking, I guessed, like a string of mountaineers retreating from some Himalayan summit, masked, goggled, and groping carefully with axes and crampons. Now wishing for some clouds to obscure the dizzying view, I felt barely connected to the mountain’s almost sheer flank, dangling between this epitome of the Earth’s dependable solidity and thousands of feet of open space beneath. Aside from the rope linking me to my fellow climbers, there was nothing to stop me from simply tilting my center of gravity a scant few degrees and vanishing from their company as if I’d fallen through a hole. There was an odd exhilaration to that realization, and no doubt a faulty sense of insight into what drove people to do this recreationally. I sensed that tightrope walkers, stunt pilots, and bungee jumpers alike—while hiding behind the cool technical jargon belonging to each—shared with mountaineers the same fascination with walking survival’s edge, exulting in their lives being dependent on the smallest detail, like a rope, a misstep, or a slight miscalculation.

It was not a thrill I shared, however, nor was I shamed by Willy’s casual dexterity in doing everything I was, one-handed. Instead, I was merely delighted when the pitch finally lessened and we began working our way toward the more level plane of the saddle.

The contrast there was considerable. From hanging like pictures on a wall, we ended up back in snowshoes on a pasture-sized plot of land beneath the threatening mass of the Chin above and the gentle elevation of the Adam’s Apple ahead. This sense of standing in someone’s ample backyard was enhanced by the view’s having succumbed to the low-lying cloud cover. Where the summit ridge had been just adequate to dam it up from the eastern valley, this saddle served as a kind of overflow outlet, and was therefore socked in with a fast-moving, dense fog.

It wasn’t as viciously windy as at the top, where both height and exposure had conspired to create a gale, but strong enough to make the masks and goggles a necessity and to dictate that all conversation be held at a loud pitch.

We traveled to the far side of the saddle, where it began dropping off to the west, sharing—as the mist eddied and swelled—the same disorientation that must have misled Auerbach’s distressed skier. And in fact, despite the yellow tape someone had absurdly staked out in the snow, Woodman himself almost suffered the same fate, coming to an abrupt halt right at the edge of the grave-sized hole.

Its depth was confirmation enough for me that the body of Jean Deschamps had fallen from a considerable height, but whether from a plane or the surprisingly nearby cliffs of the Chin was suddenly open to debate.

The chain of command changed at this point, slipping from Ray Woodman as guide and temporarily falling to Gary Smith—the senior of Auerbach’s two detectives—as the man he’d put in charge of the entire investigation.

Smith, whom I’d only met that morning, didn’t share his boss’s ebullient nature nor his ready acceptance of my VBI-as-support-role speech. Though younger in years, Smith was more traditional in outlook and openly viewed us as a threat to his authority.

He was what I feared would be more the rule than the exception in the future. I approached him clumsily in a moment of sudden visibility, when the proximity of the rock wall overhead revealed itself so abruptly, I felt it was about to fall on us.

“How would you like us deployed?” I yelled at him.

His face turned toward me, his dark goggles blocking his eyes and his mask giving him the appearance of an oversized action figure. He waved a hand around. “Be my guest.”

“That’s exactly what we are. What would you like us to do?”

He didn’t move for several seconds and then said, “The chief tells me you think this guy might’ve been dropped from a plane.”

“Could’ve been, but I didn’t realize how close the cliff was.”

He looked over his shoulder dubiously. “Somebody climbed all the way up there to chuck the body over? Why?”

I shrugged. “Why drop him from a plane after keeping him in a freezer for half a century? We’re not even in the suburbs of normal here. He might’ve also bounced off the rocks before ending up here. Those body parts broke off somehow.”

Another pause. “All right,” he finally said. “I’ll put the Mountain Rescue people on the cliff. You guys can form a circle around the hole and work outward, using the rods we brought as probes. And take the metal detector in Mike’s pack, too. You all have radios?”

“I think so.”

He turned away from me and lumbered off to coordinate with his team, solidifying the them-and-us division in physical terms. But the plan was reasonable enough, given the environment, and we outsiders were still playing a useful role. For the moment, that would have to count as a victory.