pedestrian walkway on the right side modeled after a covered bridge.
“Where the hell do we start?” Bob asked.
A cell phone went off. I grabbed mine out of my jacket, but it wasn’t the one ringing.
“Oh,” said Bob, and fished out his own phone. “Yeah?…We just got here, just pulled into town a few minutes ago… Yeah, we’re okay, although we nearly got pulled over, Jesus… Uh-huh… Okay. Okay. Did Evan know any more than that?… Okay, okay, great… Okay, yeah, of course we’ll be careful… Okay. Bye.”
“What?” I asked as he put the phone away. I noticed, at the gas station on the corner, a pay phone. I wondered whether any of the calls made to Patty’s cell had come from it.
“Susanne talked to Evan, and then he tried to find this kid he knew, name of Stewart. He just found him, woke him up. Stewart said yeah, he used to work up here at a motel or inn or something.”
“What was the name of it?” I asked.
“The Mountain Shade,” Bob said. “Stewart said it was a good job, because they paid in cash.”
This underground economy was everywhere.
“Did Stewart know Sydney?” I asked. “Did he ever tell her about the place?”
“Evan says yeah. A few months ago, they ran into each other at a Starbucks or something, and Sydney was asking about it. I guess this was before she found something else to do for the summer.”
I thought about that. If Syd was on the run and knew she’d have to support herself while things got themselves sorted out, it would be the perfect job for her. A place where she could make some money and stay below the radar.
“So where the hell is this place?” I asked.
There weren’t exactly a lot of tourist information places open this time of night. The gas station was closed as well. I went straight ahead, but in less than a mile we were driving out of Stowe, so I turned around and came back to the T intersection, turning right onto Mountain Road and across the bridge with the covered walkway.
This route was filled with places to stay. I scanned to the left as Bob read off the names of places on the right.
“Partridge Inn… Town and Country… Stoweflake…”
“Up there,” I said. “You see the sign, just past the pizza place?”
“Mountain Shade,” Bob said. “Son of a bitch.”
I pulled into the lot, the tires crunching on the gravel. As I reached for the handle to open the door, Bob said, “Hey, you want this?”
He had a Ruger in each hand and held one out to me. “Which one is this?” I asked. “The one with one bullet, or three?”
He glanced down at one, then the other. “Fuck.”
I took the gun from him. Once we were out of the car, I tried to figure out what to do with it.
“It won’t fit in my jacket pocket,” I said.
“Try this,” Bob said, turning to the side and demonstrating how he could tuck the barrel of the gun into the waistband of his pants at the back.
“You’ll shoot your ass off,” I said.
“That’s how it’s done,” he said. “Then you hang your jacket over it, no one knows it’s there. It’s better than tucking it in the front of your pants. If it shoots off by mistake there, you got a lot more to lose.”
So, nervously, I tucked the gun into the back of my pants. It felt, to say the least, intrusive.
The night air was so still that when we closed the doors the sound echoed. There was a light over the office door, but no light on inside.
“What are we going to do?” Bob asked.
“We’re going to have to wake some people up,” I said.
I banged on the office door. I was hoping that whoever ran the joint had quarters adjoining the office and would hear the ruckus. You ran a place like this, you had to be prepared for the unexpected. A burst pipe. A guest with a heart attack.
I waited a few seconds after the first round of knocking, then started up again. Somewhere down a hallway a light came on.
“Here we go,” I said. “Someone’s coming.”
A shadowy figure started trudging down the hall, flipped the office light on, and came to the door. It was a man in his sixties, gray hair tousled, still drawing together the sash on his striped bathrobe.
“We’re closed!” he shouted through the glass.
I banged again.
“Goddamn it,” he said. He unlocked the office door, swung it open a foot, and said, “Do you know what time it is?”
“We’re really sorry,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Bob.
“I’m Tim Blake, this is Bob Janigan, and we’re trying to find my daughter.”
“What?” said the manager.
“My daughter,” I said. “We think it’s possible she might be working here, and it’s very important we find her.”
“Family emergency,” Bob chimed in.
The manager shook his head. The gesture seemed designed to wake himself up as much as to display annoyance. “What the hell’s her name?”
“Sydney Blake,” I said.
“Never heard of her,” he said and began to close the door.
I got my foot in. “Please, just a minute. It’s possible you might know her by another name.”
“What?” he said. “What other name?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I was reaching into my jacket for one of the photos of Syd I carried around with me everywhere I went. I reached through the door and handed it to him.
Reluctantly, he took it between his fingers and squinted at it. “Hang on,” he said and went around to the office desk, where a pair of reading glasses lay. That allowed us to open the door wider and take a step inside.
He peered through the glasses at the photo.
“Hang on,” he said again, and I felt my pulse quicken. “I’ve seen this girl.”
“Where?” I asked. “When?”
“She came in here, I don’t know, two weeks or more ago. Looking for some part-time work. I didn’t have anything.”
“Did she tell you her name?”
He shrugged. “Maybe, but I don’t remember it. I told her to try another place, one of their summer staff quit all of a sudden, they were looking for help.”
“What place?” I asked.
“Uh, hang on. Touch the Cloud.”
“What?” Bob asked.
“The inn. That’s the name of it, the Touch the Cloud Inn. It’s further up the road, on the way to Smugglers’ Notch, where the road starts climbing.”
“Do you know if she got a job there?”
“Beats me,” he said. “Now you can go wake them up.” He ushered us out of the office and killed the light.
Back in the car, the guns removed from the backs of our pants, we carried on up Mountain Road, driving slowly so as not to miss any of the signs.
