“In Colorado they get the airports open fast after storms.”
“I’m sure, I’m sure. May I ride back up with you?” He nodded in the direction of the security guard. “Sam brought me down in a golf cart, and there’s a space heater in the guardhouse, but I chill very easily now, even on a day as springlike as this one. Do you remember what we used to call spring snow, Jamie?”
“Poor man’s fertilizer,” I said. “Come on, get in.”
He limped around the front of the car, and when Sam tried to take his arm, Jacobs shook him off briskly. His face didn’t work right, and the limp was actually closer to a lurch, but he was pretty spry, just the same. A man on a mission, I thought.
He got in with a grunt of relief, turned up the heater, and rubbed his gnarled hands in front of the passenger-side vent like a man warming himself over an open fire. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“Knock yourself out.”
“Does this remind you of the approach to The Latches?” he asked, still rubbing his hands. They made an unpleasant papery sound. “It does me.”
“Well… except for that.” I pointed to the left, where there had once been an intermediate-level ski run called Smoky Trail. Or maybe it had been Smoky Twist. Now one of the lift cables had come down, and a couple of the chairs lay half-buried in a drift that would probably be there for another five weeks, unless the weather stayed warm.
“Messy,” he agreed, “but there’s no point fixing it. I’m going to have all the lifts taken out once the snow’s gone. I’d say my skiing days are over, wouldn’t you? Were you ever here when you were a child, Jamie?”
I had been, on half a dozen occasions, tagging along with Con and Terry and their flatlander friends, but I had no more stomach for small talk. “Is she here?”
“Yes, arrived around noon. Her friend Jenny Knowlton brought her. They had hoped to get here yesterday, but the storm was much worse Downeast. And before you ask your follow-up question, no, I haven’t treated her. The poor woman is exhausted. Tomorrow will be time enough for that, and time enough for her to see you. Although you may see her today, if you like, when she eats what little dinner she can manage. The restaurant is equipped with closed-circuit television cameras.”
I started to tell him what I thought of that, but he held up a hand.
“Peace, my friend. I didn’t put them in; they were here when I bought the place. I believe the management must have used them to make sure the service staff was performing up to expectations.” His one-sided smile looked sneerier than ever. Maybe that was just me, but I didn’t think so.
“Are you gloating?” I asked. “Is that what you’re doing, now that you’ve got me here?”
“Of course not.” He half turned to regard the melting snowbanks rolling past us on either side. Then he turned back to me. “Well. Perhaps. Just a little. You were so high and mighty the last time we met. So haughty.”
I didn’t feel high and mighty now, and I certainly didn’t feel haughty. I felt caught in a trap. I was here, after all, because of a girl I hadn’t seen in over forty years. One who had bought her own doom, pack by pack, at the nearest convenience store. Or at the pharmacy in Castle Rock, where you could buy cigarettes at the counter right up front. If you needed actual medicine, you had to walk all the way to the back. One of life’s ironies. I imagined dropping Jacobs off at the lodge and just driving away. The idea had a nasty attraction.
“Would you really let her die?”
“Yes.” He was still warming his hands in front of the vent. Now what I imagined was grabbing one of them and snapping those gnarled fingers like breadsticks.
“Why? Why am I so goddamned important to you?”
“Because you’re my destiny. I think I knew it the first time I saw you, down on your knees in your dooryard and grubbing in the dirt.” He spoke with the patience of a true believer. Or a lunatic. Maybe there’s really no difference. “I knew for sure when you showed up in Tulsa.”
“What are you doing, Charlie? What is it you want me for this summer?” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him, but there were other questions I didn’t dare ask. How dangerous is it? Do you know? Do you care?
He seemed to be thinking about whether or not to tell me… but I never knew what he was thinking, not really. Then Goat Mountain Resort hove into view—even bigger than The Latches, but ugly and full of modern angles; Frank Lloyd Wright gone bad. Probably it had looked modern, even futuristic, to the wealthy people who had come here to play in the sixties. Now it looked like a cubist dinosaur with glass eyes.
“Ah!” he said. “Here we are. You’ll want to freshen up and rest a bit. I know I want to rest a bit. It’s very exciting having you here, Jamie, but also tiring. I’ve put you in the Snowe Suite on the third floor. Rudy will show you the way.”
Rudy Kelly was a mountain of a man in faded jeans, a loose gray smock top, and white crepe-soled nurse’s shoes. He was a nurse, he said, as well as Mr. Jacobs’s personal assistant. Judging by his size, I thought he might also be Jacobs’s bodyguard. His handshake was certainly no limp-fish musician’s howdy.
I had been in the resort’s lobby as a kid, had once even eaten lunch here with Con and the family of one of Con’s friends (terrified the whole time of using the wrong fork or dribbling down my shirt), but I had never been on any of the upper floors. The elevator was a clanky bucket, the kind of antique conveyance that in scary novels always stalls between floors, and I resolved to take the stairs for however long I had to be here.
The place was well heated (by virtue of Charlie Jacobs’s secret electricity, I had no doubt), and I could see some repairs had been made, but they felt haphazard. All the lights worked and the floorboards didn’t creak, but the air of desertion was hard to miss. The Snowe Suite was at the end of the corridor, and the view from the spacious living room was almost as good as that from Skytop, but the wallpaper was waterstained in places, and in here a vague aroma of mold had replaced the lobby’s smell of floor wax and fresh paint.
“Mr. Jacobs would like you to join him for dinner in his apartment at six,” Rudy said. His voice was soft and deferential, but he looked like an inmate in a prison flick—not the guy who plans the breakout, but the death-row enforcer who kills any guards who try to stop the escapees. “Will that work for you?”
“It’s fine,” I said, and when he left, I locked the door.
I took a shower—the hot water was abundant, and came at once—then laid out fresh clothes. With that done and time to kill, I lay down on the coverlet of the queen-size bed. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and I can never sleep on planes, so a nap would have been good, but I couldn’t drift off. I kept thinking about Astrid—both as she’d been then, and as she must be now. Astrid, who was in this same building with me, three floors down.
When Rudy knocked softly on the door at two minutes to six, I was up and dressed. At my suggestion that we take the stairs, he flashed a smile that said he knew a wimp when he saw one. “The elevator is totally safe, sir. Mr. Jacobs oversaw certain repairs himself, and that old slidebox was high on the list.”
I didn’t protest. I was thinking about how my old fifth business was no longer a reverend, no longer a rev, no longer a pastor. At this end of his life, he was back to plain old mister, and getting his blood pressure taken by a guy who looked like Vin Diesel after a face-lift gone bad.