“Better leave it,” Carlyle said. “A lawyer will want to see the boat.”
Carlyle and Marshall walked back toward the lodge.
“You still going ahead with your trip on Wednesday?” Carlyle said.
“DEC says I’m good to go so long as I never have another accident like this one.”
“How you going to do that?”
“They told me to find someone qualified to supervise my entire operation. I said you’d do it.”
“No way. I only agreed to come up here today to check out Sanders.”
“You were right next to him. Why didn’t you do something?”
“Are you serious? You know how hard I tried to save that kid.”
“Don’t you feel any responsibility for what happened?”
“I can’t just leave my students this time of year.”
“I’ve got eleven people on my payroll,” Marshall said. “If we shut down, they all go on unemployment.”
“Nothing doing.”
“Are you really going to walk away from us like that?”
Carlyle stopped when he got to the front steps of the lodge. “I’ve got one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You let me handle everything on Wednesday. I mean everything.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Just to make sure no one gets hurt like this again.”
“Fine,” Marshall said. “Then you can go back to that desk job of yours.”
Two
Wednesday
He left his cabin at 3:00 a.m. and drove slowly down a series of switchbacks, past boarded-up ice cream shops and antique barns, past all-night convenience stores and gas stations, past shuttered motels, second homes, and cabins, and finally, when he had left the last town behind, past a half-dozen foreclosed dairy and cattle farms.
Thirty minutes later, just as the right-wing commentators began lashing out at liberals on the local news station, he pulled off into the woods a half-mile past Bell Mountain and started unloading his truck.
If the police discovered that Sanders’s death was no accident, he wouldn’t be able to launch another attack from anywhere near the Gooley Steps again. The top end of Cedar Ledges, where the Hudson appeared out of the north and overwhelmed the Indian, was his only option now.
They would never expect him to come in from the main road. The area had no trails, not even a decent footpath. It was too remote for the snowmobile guys, people who cruised half-sober all night in terrain that sane people would not approach. There were no houses, backwoods cabins, or ranger outposts where a man could hide or lay over in case he got in trouble. Even hunters, afraid of getting lost in the dense woods south of the river, stayed clear of the region.
But he knew something that even the locals had long forgotten—a single, long-abandoned footpath that ran in from the main road past Lake Francis and Bad Luck Mountain and ended no more than an eighth of a mile from the Confluence. The route was easy enough in the fall, but at this time of year he would have a three-mile slog through knee-deep snow, a round trip that could take five or six hours.
No one would be out there now. If he broke his femur, slipped down a cliff face, severed an artery with his axe, or lost his way in the nearly impenetrable underbrush, he would die.
With his truck shielding him from the road, he put on knee-high gaiters, two pair of gloves, and a headlamp. His pack contained a twelve-inch saw-toothed knife, twenty-five feet of three-quarter-inch nylon line, a folding snow shovel, duct tape, three large carabineers, four high-strength prussic loops, and spare batteries wrapped in wool. He pulled a pair of backcountry snowshoes from the truck and shoved his boots into the bindings.
If he’d forgotten a single piece of equipment, the map, compass, or pocket thermometer, the four-by-six tarp or the fire starters, candles, water bottle, energy bars, knife or matches, he could be in desperate trouble. Without the extra pair of laces, the glove liners, or a space blanket, he would not survive long. If he turned an ankle, dislocated his shoulder, or fractured a rib, he would be forced to dig his own grave out there. It was a region with no trail markers or reference points to guide him back to the road.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
Three hours later, after following the trees he had notched a week ago and stopping only once to drink hot tea from a thermos, he broke from the woods a hundred-and-fifty yards due east of where the Hudson collided with the Indian. A large sheet of pack ice glided past him, crashed into a submerged granite boulder, and broke into a thousand jagged fragments.
It was 6:55 a.m. Sunlight washed over the summit of Pine Mountain. The snow at his feet went from dull gray to ivory and began to glisten. He would have to be out of here in no more than two hours. He dropped his pack on the snow and went to work.
A thick canopy of pines blocked sunlight from reaching the valley floor. It was thirty-seven degrees, but, breathing hard from his hike, he was still warm. Dangerous as this stunt was, he liked being out here alone. There was no one to order him around, lie about why he was losing his job, or remind him that his family had been outcasts for two generations.
Walking back and forth, he found a rotting sapling eight feet tall and six inches in diameter just ten yards from the water. He dragged it toward the Indian and spent twenty minutes maneuvering it into place. For a brief time, he was forced to place his left foot in the river and the right on a slimy, lichen-covered rock. He refused to think about what would happen if he fell into the water. This job was insanely dangerous, but people like him could not choose what kind of work they took up. They either cut wood, milled logs, or drove a school bus. Better to die like this than in some nursing home.
An hour later, his work done, his tools packed, and his boot prints brushed out of existence, he turned his
