The Marble Mask Page 5

  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 Ironic when you think of all it went through—to be destroyed by the very dynamic that built it, like an out-of-date filling station on Main Street.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.

  It didn’t feel like one, though, after three hours of struggling in the wind-whipped snow, sometimes working a methodical search pattern, other times simply standing stock still in the fog, all visual and tactile references so removed that to venture in any direction was to invite becoming lost or falling prey to the unpredictable terrain. Gentle saddle or not, the supposed “ground” we were standing on was only a thick mantle of compacted snow covering boulders, pitfalls, small cliffs, and a stunted forest of dwarfed evergreens, any or all of which could suck us in, especially if encountered sight unseen.

  Eventually, I discovered I wasn’t the only one growing concerned. During one of the few moments when visibility allowed a better view, I saw Ray Woodman about halfway up the Chin, gesturing at his watch to Gary Smith, and then pointing toward the sky. I wasn’t sure if it was the weather or the daylight that had caught his eye, since I thought both were deteriorating, but it was obvious the search team was going to metamorphose back into a climbing party soon.

  I was just about to confirm that suspicion by radio, when the entire subject was put on hold.

  “Gary? It’s Mike. I think I got something.”

  Another blanket of mist was quickly forming, but just before I lost sight of the rocks, I saw one of Smith’s men waving his arms from near the top. After that, I had to rely on my ears alone to learn what was happening.

  “What is it, Mike?” Gary Smith asked.

  “It’s sort of wedged in here, but it looks like a hand.”

  “Leave it where it is. I’m coming up. Did you copy, Gunther?”

  “Loud and clear.” I could hear from his labored breathing that Smith was working hard to join his colleague as he spoke. “If it really is jammed in there, I don’t want to mess it up by moving too fast. You want to get up here? It’s pretty easy. I think you could make it.”

  I ignored the pointed condescension. “On my way.”

  Ray Woodman spoke up just as I felt the unrelenting wind both pick up and become noticeably colder. “I’m not sure I’d recommend that. The weather’s changing. Might be best to just mark the spot and come back.”

  Smith tried a sidestep. “How ’bout a compromise? You take the rest of them down. The three of us’ll follow either as soon as we get the hand loose, or can’t and mark where it is instead. I hate to walk away now.”

  I didn’t back up Woodman as my instincts told me I should. Too concerned with appearing pushy, and privately fearful that Smith would take such caution as weakness, I allowed his intemperance to overwhelm my good judgment.

  Surprisingly—or because he felt outnumbered—Woodman apparently thought Gary Smith was enough of a climber to make this choice, although his tone of voice betrayed some doubt. “All right, but I’m lowering the boom on everyone else. And don’t take too long—you know how fast things can sour up here.”

  I made my way over to the Chin’s base, passing Sammie on the way, who murmured, “Show him what you got, boss,” and found that from the foot of the cliff, the climb didn’t look as daunting. During the summer, I remembered, the Long Trail came right down this same face, regularly traveled by people carrying thirty-pound packs. Snow and ice didn’t make it any easier, but I was pleasantly surprised at how fast I joined Smith and Mike on their elevated perch.

  Once there, I was also rewarded by Smith’s more subtly respectful demeanor.

  “Take a look,” he said and placed his back against the rock so I could squeeze by to where his colleague Mike was crouching by a crack in the wall.

  “It’s right in there,” he said. “You can see the ring on his finger. That’s what caught my eye.”

  I peered into the gloom of the crack and saw a faint glimmer of gold. Taking Mike’s flashlight, I then clearly saw the stump of a human hand, looking as if it had been broken off a discolored marble statue. I straightened and looked around.

  Smith pointed overhead into the mist. “I guess the body bounced here hard enough that the hand stuck like an arrow before breaking off. You may be right about the airplane. I don’t see that happening if someone just chucked him over the edge. It’s too close.”

  “How do we get it out?” Mike asked, still crouching over his find.

  I held up my ice ax. “Use these as crowbars?”

  There was only room for the two of us. Mike put his ax in on one side of the small crack, and I applied mine to the other. It took a while, but eventually we loosened it enough that I could reach in and extract the hand.

  I gave it to Smith, who examined it closely. “We can probably get prints from it, and the ring might tell us something.”

  A sudden whiteout drew our attention. We looked up at a world without any markers whatsoever. Even our precarious perch had disappeared from view, making me feel I was standing on a cloud.

  “Damn,” Mike muttered.

  “It’ll pass,” Gary reassured us. “It’s done it a couple of times already today.”

  “Not this bad, it hasn’t,” Mike said.

  He was right.

  “Let’s give it a few minutes,�
�� Gary said. “If it doesn’t blow over, we’ll just have to climb down by feel.”

  “We can barely see our feet.”

  Gary Smith was losing patience, perhaps goaded by his lingering against Woodman’s advice. “Mike, I’ve been in this crap before. It’s more psychological than anything. You take it slow, it works out fine.”

  No one spoke for a couple of minutes, until, as if yielding to an inner, heated argument, Smith wrenched his radio from his pocket and addressed it. “Smith to Woodman. Come in, Ray.”

  Woodman’s voice, clear and calm, sounded otherworldly from out of the clouds. “What’s up, Gary? You folks okay?”

  “Yeah, just socked in by the fog. What’re conditions where you are?”

  “Bad and getting worse. You still on the wall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The wind’s picking up. You better get off as best you can. It feels like a storm coming. We’ll head back to intercept you. If that fails, make for Taft Lodge instead of going back up Profanity. Things are a little better on the east face.”

  Smith signed off and looked up at me. “You should be in the middle. You got the least experience.”

  I was standing behind Mike, who expressed what I was thinking, “Already can’t see the ledge, Gary. We start switching places, we could all go off.”

  Smith nodded unhappily, saying softly, almost apologetically, “Wish we had some rope.”

  The going was slower than I’d imagined it would be. I’d envisioned the equivalent of climbing backward down a ladder with my eyes shut, but this wasn’t close to being that easy. Each move was punctuated by the fear of slipping, each tentative groping for a foothold accompanied by the doubt about what, in fact, was being trusted with my weight.

  And in the midst of such uncertainty, the wind grew harder, now pushing snow ahead of it.