Wells shifted into low gear to climb a hill. “Marshall’s father is creating second homes for millionaires, not jobs for ordinary people. He cares about protecting the damn trees, not the men and women who need work.”
Twenty minutes later, their truck left the paved road and followed a gravel track through a forest of beech and red maple. Sunlight now washed over the windshield. Losing control for a moment as the back end fishtailed, Wells eased his vehicle through a sharp hairpin. They crossed the Boreas River and followed the valley road west and north. Six miles from the turnoff, nearly a half-hour from Riparius, Wells pulled over and stopped.
“You really want to go in here without backup?”
Carlyle opened his door and stepped from the truck. “We could call Pierce, but then we’d have to listen to him laugh at us all day.”
The two men gathered up their gear and moved down the trail. A thick stand of jack pine marched across the hillside above them. Two crows, wings folded, dropped out of the sky. Clouds and light rain returned to conceal the sun. A sign nailed to a tree read Blue Ledges, 2.3 Miles. Somewhere just below them, a stream coursed through dense vegetation.
Carlyle stopped for a second and looked around. “Jesus, it’s so beautiful.”
Wells gave him a gentle nudge. “You ought to quit that desk job of yours and spend more time out here.”
“And hang off a cliff like you? No, thanks.”
They stepped across a narrow footbridge spanning the creek and were engulfed by thick vines bearing greedy, adolescent leaves. A carpet of pine needles and white mushrooms muffled their footsteps. “Watch yourself,” Wells said. “You don’t want to turn an ankle on these rocks.”
Carlyle pushed his way through the undergrowth lining the trail that angled downhill toward Huntley Pond. They crossed a series of small streams seeping into the lake and made their way over slick rocks toward higher ground. An escarpment to their left kept the trail in semidarkness.
Just as they were about to reach the end of the pond, Wells tumbled to the ground. Carlyle rushed over to him and knelt down. “What happened?”
Wells rolled over on his side and pushed himself to his knees. “My boot got caught on something.”
“You okay?”
“I smacked my right elbow on a rock.”
Wells stood up. “It’s nothing. Let’s get going.”
After a quarter-mile, the trail turned its back on the pond, headed southwest, and entered a grove of beech trees. When the wind picked up, their pale brown leaves filled the air and covered the ground. “It looks like a snowstorm,” Carlyle said as he walked through the bright foliage.
“Old growth stays on during the winter until new shoots appear. I’ve been in white-out conditions in April.”
Twenty minutes later, the two men found a dry patch of ground and stopped to rest. Wells said, “You have any idea why this guy’s after Marshall?”
“This may surprise you, but I don’t think he’s out to murder anyone.”
Wells nearly dropped his water bottle. “Two guides from the same outfit have died. How can you say that?”
“He’s single-minded, obsessed maybe, but we really don’t know yet what he wants.”
“He’s a monster, for Christ’s sake.”
Carlyle chose his words carefully. “He’s got a grudge against Marshall, that’s all we can be sure of.”
“What more proof do you need that the guy’s nuts?”
“We don’t know that he’s insane,” Carlyle said. “He’s trying to send us a message, but, like most angry people, he’s not sure how to do it.”
“Okay, so how in hell do you get inside the mind of a killer?”
“You don’t. You can only try to predict where he’ll strike next.”
Wells fiddled with his bootlaces. “How’s Marshall holding up?”
“He’s getting hit from all sides. A local paper sent a reporter out to dig up some dirt on his father. They found that he owns a thousand-acre property in Connecticut with a fifteen-room house and a barn filled with thoroughbreds. You should see the hate mail Ryan got when that story came out.”
“So why’s Marshall living in an unheated bungalow when he’s got a millionaire father?”
Carlyle looked at his watch. “We’d better get moving or we’ll get stuck out here after dark.”
The trail wound through a field of granite boulders, skirted the bottom of a cliff, and entered a wide, well-watered valley. Moss covered every rock, and tiny white mushrooms carpeted the ground. Carlyle pointed to a stream rushing off the mountain and checked his map. “That must be headed to Virgin Falls.”
“So we’re near Entrance.”
“Less than a half-mile now.”
An ovenbird, shrieking wildly, plunged through the canopy over their heads. Thick clouds moved across the sun as they walked toward a gap in the cliffs that would take them to the gorge. The creek to their right, filled with blue-gray snowmelt, had carved a wide trench through the valley floor.
It was almost noon. In two weeks, black flies would begin swarming from the undergrowth. Anyone out here without a head net would be covered in bleeding wounds.
After another thirty minutes, Carlyle and Wells broke through underbrush and found themselves staring down on Entrance Rapid. Upstream, the Hudson emerged from a narrow space between two cliffs, veered right, and plunged downhill. Whitewater, backwashing waves, and bone-shattering drop-offs filled the quarter-mile boulder garden.
The sun, directly overhead now, had burned through the cloud cover. Every collision between water and rock became a light show. The river was turgid
