Haystack a month earlier, with social skiing before and after, and New Hampshire’s Chief Executive, Norman Ducharme, had fallen several ways for the skiing and personality of the Chief Executive of Great Haystack. Cilla had an open invitation to call on his office anytime. The event had been good PR, Boston newspapers running photos of the governors at Great Haystack.
“He isn’t the only one that’s been taken with you lately,” said Hudson with a mischievous grin.
“Not with me, who I look like.”
“Uh huh.”
Some women might be flattered at a man’s interest. Cilla felt only a deep disgust. Hudson quickly changed the subject.
“You heard Captain Midnight surprised Greg, Karla and Jason on the NASTAR course?”
She nodded. “And that’s typical of Kurt, single minded. He decided that’s where the competition is and made it a point to know the racing hill cold. He’s spent hours practicing on it.”
“So?”
“When we race it will be on
February 28
The opening came sooner than Cilla expected. Hudson left for Boston at three. John Krestinski was the special agent in the FBI’s regional office, whom he’d met the previous October at a time he and Cilla were under attack from an unknown source. There was respect between those two, Cilla thought. She analyzed it. Krestinski had been with the Bureau twenty years, and little impressed him any more. Certainly not a Cambridge small- businessman - Hudson had a modest games and puzzles firm in Massachusetts before selling to his partner - who’d decided to play detective and had suffered the consequences. But Hudson had come through. The FBI man had found in him a chess mind able to solve a three hundred year old puzzle from the arrangement of a few pieces of thread, and the mental and physical strength to overcome superior forces while wounded himself.
Krestinski had earned Hudson’s respect by the job he held and the way he held it - with an open mind that hadn’t been shuttered by twenty years of bureaucracy. He and his wife, Anne, had come up for a ski weekend in January and, if the Rogers, who were most comfortable in each other’s company, could have been said to have close friends, the Krestinskis would have been among them.
So what did the respect these two had for each other tell her about how she should earn the same from Kurt Britton? Only what she already knew. She had to prove herself as something more than the “flower person” Britton saw.
His triple knock at the door. “A sprained knee in the Hayfields, sent her to Memorial. The slope was perfectly clear; she’ll probably sue anyway.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Women feel they should be taken care of. No matter how foolish or unskilled they are, we should arrange it so nothing happens to them.”
“Men don’t?”
“Some do, there’s always a wimp. With most when they crash they know it’s no one’s fault but their own. Besides, they’re tougher, and skiing isn’t an easy sport to learn.”
“That women shouldn’t attempt?”
He saw the glint in her eye and backed off a little. “Of course not. They just shouldn’t ski beyond their capabilities.”
“Which are limited to the easier trails?”
“You know the stuff women have been fed, anything a man can do, they can. Pick up any newspaper or magazine. So they come up here and damn near kill themselves trying to imitate the men.”
“Karla Schutz? There’s no one more competent on the ski patrol.”
“She’s Austrian. She grew up on skis. And even with that...”
“Yes?”
“Well, I guess you heard I beat her the other day.”
“And Greg and Jason.”
“By a full second.”
“On the racing hill.”
“Where else?”
“You feel a thirty-five second course is a true test of skiing ability?”
Nonplussed. “That’s where people race, Cilla.”
“Not the pros, they race the whole mountain. Maybe Karla would have beaten you over a longer distance where stamina comes into it.”
His shoulders straightened a little. “When I was a Drill Instructor at Parris Island my platoon broke the record for rifle exercises. There were five of us standing at the end. At Lejeune I led the all day marches with sixty-pound packs. At Quantico...”
“Semper Fi.”
“What? What did you say?”
“We were talking skiing, Kurt, not boot camp.”
“Lejeune and Quantico aren’t...”
“Or Eagle Scout hikes.”
He froze, his face turning beet color. “Just who do you think you are?” The dam broke, and weeks of frustration poured out. “You come in here in December, a skinny girl barely halfway through her twenties, no experience, and try to tell us how to run a ski area just because you skied a little when you were in school.”
“A
“A little, a lot, what the hell’s the difference. You talk about pros, we’re the pros here; we’ve paid our dues. What have you done?”
“I’ve got a lot to learn, I admit that.”
“Well learn on somebody else’s mountain. Don’t come in here and make fun of the Marine Corps.”
“I wasn’t making fun of the Corps. I was pointing out that you’d gotten off the subject.”
“We were talking stamina. Working your body, not riding around in a machine. Good old fashioned stamina.”
“In skiing.”
“Stamina’s stamina, whether it’s skiing or field maneuvers.”
“Not really; different muscles are involved. I doubt if I could carry a sixty pound pack around very long.”
“But you could outlast me skiing?”
“Shall we try and see?”
“Lady, you name the time and place!”
“How about now and Bale Out.”
“The whole length?”
“Of course.”
A broad smile spread across the mountain manager’s face. “I’ll get my skis.”
And alert the staff and crew, thought Cilla as he marched out to band music only he could hear. He won’t want anyone to miss this. She took her time, putting on her yellow jump suit, slipping feet into ski boots. After ten minutes of stretching she went down to the lockers for her skis. As expected, there was a crowd gathered on the slope side of the base station, Britton joking with some of the ski school instructors, idled by the absence of paying customers whose dollars had been spent the previous week. Cilla stepped into her skis and leaned far forward, then took them off and adjusted the tension. The supply room was next door. She took two aerial flares of the type used in mountain rescues, one that burst in the air as a white light and one a red.
