He pulled a small ice axe from his truck and made his way through boot-high snow to the back of the Elijah J. Mayhew Local History Museum, a turreted two-story, yellow brick structure. Using the axe blade, he forced open the back door and entered the building. After switching on his headlamp, he walked down the main hall past rows of glass cages filled with the preserved remains of black bears, martens, badgers, wolves, beaver, and moose.
Halfway down the central corridor of the main hall, past rooms labeled Director, Administration, Taxidermy, Staff Lounge, and Friends of the Museum, he found the Archives.
He’d been here twenty years ago, on a high school field trip with his sophomore class. The room had changed little in two decades. To his right, just inside the unlocked door, was a small black safe. The desk of the sixty-two-year-old volunteer librarian, Mary Smith, sat to his left. Portraits of the Museum’s former trustees, logging barons and hotel developers who had made the wilderness safe for industry and tourism, were hanging behind the desk. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases covered both side walls. Two ten-foot-long oak tables ran down the center of the room. A row of ten gray filing cabinets sat against the far wall.
The archives had not a single piece of equipment found in up-to-date libraries—no Xerox or fax machines, no white cotton gloves or glassine envelopes for handling rare documents and photographs, no magnifying glasses, up-to-date reference works, microfilm readers, or Internet ports, and, most crucial, no guide to the holdings of the collection. He knew, however, where to find the one file drawer that contained something crucial—a piece of his past and a map that would keep him out of prison.
Careful not to touch any exposed surfaces, he walked down the center of the room toward the filing cabinets. Each one was devoted to a single decade, beginning in 1910 and ending in 1999. He pulled open the second drawer of the first cabinet. It took him only six minutes to find what he was looking for—a thick manila folder labelled Pasco.
He placed the packet of documents on the nearest table, removed its elastic strap, and rifled through its contents: photographs of the three towns where the tragic events took place; articles clipped from the Warrensburg Times from 1930 to 1934; a seventeen-page report from the state police, the agency that had coordinated the search for the fugitives; the yellowed telegraph message from Governor Herbert H. Lehman to Sheriff Thomas Davies, pledging his full support for the apprehension of the killers; copies of the four local and regional magazines that had covered the manhunt and trial; letters from relatives of victims and from defenders of the two accused men; a detailed summary of the autopsy conducted by Dr. Philander J. Adams at the Glens Falls Hospital; a bill for $17.50 for the services of two men and a trained bloodhound for two days; and a single sheet of paper entitled Catalogue of Evidence: The Pasco Affair.
He found what he had come for near the back of the folder: a rough, hand-drawn map of the gorge on a tissue-thin piece of eight-by-eleven paper that had been folded in half and placed in a plastic sleeve. Drawn in pencil, its edges in tatters, he could see by the slender but intense light of his headlamp seven tiny X’s and the faint corresponding lines between the interior and the river’s edge. There were two from the vicinity of the Gooley Steps, one each from the Confluence and Blue Ledges, and three between the Narrows and the Boreas, the far end of the gorge. After making a rough copy of the location of those trails, he slid the map back into its plastic sleeve, secured the folder, and returned it to the filing cabinet.
Twenty-four minutes after he’d entered the building, having wiped clean each flat surface and doorknob he might have touched, he exited the museum. Sweeping his tracks in the snow with a broom he’d taken from the hallway, he backed his truck onto the road and, keeping an eye out for Caleb Pierce, left town.
Just after nine thirty that morning, Carlyle turned off the two-lane road that paralleled the gorge and wrestled his truck down a dirt path. After a thousand yards, occasionally sinking axel-deep in mud, he and Pierce reached the Indian Lake dam.
Carlyle shut off the engine. “You ready?”
“Let’s go. I can’t be playing nursemaid for you every day, now, can I?”
Carlyle scrawled a note and dropped it on the dashboard.
Pierce picked it up. “What’s this for?”
“Backup. In case we get into trouble.”
“We’ll be frozen stiff by the time someone discovers that thing.” Pierce grabbed his twelve-gauge. “Here’s my backup.” He cracked his door open. “You sure we’re not going on some wild-goose chase?”
“We’ve got to find out where Marshall’s vulnerable. That means examining every foot of ground from the put-in to the Confluence.”
“You have no idea where this idiot’s going to attack next, do you?”
“I’m pretty sure he’ll come back to the west bank of the Indian.”
“How can you know that?”
“It’s the only place accessible by road.”
“Come on, admit it. You’re guessing.”
“Then tell me why he hasn’t moved to another spot on the river.”
Pierce ran a soft cloth along the barrel of his shotgun “What makes you sure he’ll attack again, anyway?”
“What makes you so sure he won’t?”
“I’m glad one of us had the good sense to carry a weapon today.”
Carlyle grabbed his day pack from the truck and set it on the ground. “You really think that gun’s going to save us if we get in trouble?”
“What would you do, throw a book at him?”
The two men shouldered their packs and headed north-west along a path that
