Which had resulted in my being, once more, his immediate boss.
Willy finally raised his eyebrows. “Guess that means we’re supposed to risk our lives, drive out to Tucker Peak in the middle of a snowstorm, and see if we can’t help the good sheriff tell the difference between his butt and a hole in the ground?”
I rose to my feet and crossed over to where my own parka hung on the wall. I noticed that the snow had pretty much stopped falling. “Right.”
TUCKER PEAK LIES IN SOUTHERN VERMONT,
which for a ski resort is both good and bad news. Like its sisters—Stratton, Mount Snow, and Bromley—it’s closer to the money states of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and to New York City, but unlike more northern mountains, such as Stowe, Killington, and Jay Peak, Tucker suffers from the south’s chronic climatic stinginess. As with almost every other resort, it’s piped for snowmaking, if only partially, but even artificial snow requires freezing weather, and there are winters in Vermont, especially recently, when that kind of cold, not to mention plain old-fashioned, natural snow, has been a precious and rare commodity.
Of course, that’s one reason the pipes appeared in the first place, and with them other, less winter-dependent options for financial survival. Golf courses, tennis courts, horseback riding, summer alpine slides, swimming pools, old-car shows, antique fairs—along with the requisite hotels and condos—have slowly crowded around base lodges all across the state to help make Vermont’s occasionally threadbare skiing a smaller piece of the economic pie.
Which is not to say that this type of mixing and matching isn’t still a tricky recipe, conditional as it is on such imponderables as customer loyalty, community and governmental support, and the ability of a resort to turn its customers into its own best ambassadors. In fact, while I’d heard of Tucker Peak’s ambitions to diversify, this last ingredient was something rumored to be in short supply.
“You’re close to the grapevine,” I told Willy as we left Brattleboro for the Green Mountains that ran up the state’s middle like a spine. “Give me the lowdown on Tucker Peak.”
Willy was staring glumly out at the barely falling snow that was both dry and sparse enough to make windshield wipers unnecessary. “Bunch of bored people sliding down a mountain so they can drink too much and jump each other’s bones after a night at the disco. Never made much sense to me.”
I ignored the preamble, knowing there was no information about his fellow human beings Willy didn’t find interesting, and waited patiently for him to address the actual topic.
“According to the barflies I know who work there,” he admitted after a pause, “up to last year, no one could count on being paid for the full season—attendance was down, equipment was falling apart, and maintenance was sucking hind tit. Now, it looks like they’re betting the farm.”
I knew they’d added condos, boutiques, and a nightclub, to negligible effect, but this was obviously something bigger. “How’s that?”
“They’ve lined up some big investors to spruce up everything at once. Summer and winter stuff both: a hotel, twice the condo units, tennis courts, and a golf course. They’re talking over fifteen million dollars, which is huge on our piss-ant scale.”
“Why haven’t I read about it in the paper?”
“They haven’t hit stride yet. They got a fancy model in the base lodge, a few contracts out for hardware and engineering studies, and surveyors and guys cutting trees for new trails and a lift line, but basically they’re limping through this winter so they can make a big splash in the spring.”
I absorbed all this without comment. Willy took my silence as encouragement.
“My sources are hardly Wall Street types, but they see no reason this should work.”
“Why not? A total mountain makeover might be a home run.”
He was shaking his head. “My people feed these wannabes, clean their toilets, change their sheets, pick up after ’em. They hear the bitching about ticket prices, lousy service, how boring the slopes are. It’s the proverbial pig’s ear, according to them. You can gussy it up all you want, you can’t change the basics.”
I drove through the tiny village of Lifton in three seconds flat and then turned onto Tucker Peak’s access road a couple of miles farther on. It was identified by a slightly weather-beaten sign next to a small cluster of retail buildings, including a bar. “So you’re not buying stock?”
“How’re they going to pay for it, even with investors? Prices’ll have to go up, and the mountain’ll still be what it’s always been, a mole hill with attitude, just like the rest of this woodchuck state.”
Sad to say, even if untrue, but that had a ring of familiarity to it. Vermont’s economy wasn’t far different from the rest of the country’s, but it was miniaturized to where it looked quaintly third-world. No matter what we did commercially up here, or how well, our best was always a blip when compared to places budgeted in the billions. The one exception was maple syrup, where we topped the nation by a fat margin, but even there, who really cared? A half-million gallons a year still only supplied a demand less than that for caviar. So, I understood what Willy was saying about little Tucker Peak. Spend what it might, it could never hold a candle to resorts in Utah and Colorado. Worse still, it couldn’t even compete in sheer size and height to the best in Vermont. In a market rewarding bigger, steeper, faster slopes, Tucker didn’t look slated for survival, much less rebirth.
But then, I’d thought the Internet was a pipe dream, too.
And I had to give it to Tucker Peak on aesthetics. Like Stratton, although smaller, it lay encased in a bowl of mountains. A single road led into it, up and over a humpbacked cleft, and the initial view of the resort, as the car turned the last curve at a low-flying, bird’s-eye level, was straight from a fairy tale. The base lodge, surrounded by buildings, stores, sheds, and the nightclub, looked like an alpine village, the slopes and lifts fanning out like anchor lines from the heart of a spider’s web. The sprinkling of slopeside condos resembled outlying rural homes.
The most striking feature, however, towered far overhead, above the buildings, the access road, and even the broad, carved mountain bowl cradling the ski trails. Lining the horizon, with the blank white sky as a backdrop, looking spectrally indistinct in the barely falling snow, was a row of modern windmills—stark, pale, streamlined, and huge—eight of them with rotors so wide, it seemed unlikely they could move. And yet move they did, with the same ghostly, silent, otherworldly grace that elephants have drifting through the night in a herd.
In another effort to pay the bills, Tucker Peak had leased its ridge-line to a local power company for this experiment in alternative energy, granting itself in the process the single most unusual feature of any ski resort in the country.
All of it—the village, the fan of trails, the beautiful mountains, the surreal windmill farm, and the colorful sprinkling of brightly clad skiers across the white snow—made me think that in a world so given to appearance over substance, I might have been too harsh in giving Tucker Peak an early requiem. Faced with such an ethereal picture, this isolated, small, vertically challenged ski bowl just might find a way to compete with its brawnier rivals.
“Where do we go?” Willy asked, as impressed as if we’d just come to a crossroads in Kansas.
“Western slope. Something called Laurel Lane. Number 318.”
I drove down into the pseudo village, noticing how its alpine image fell apart under closer scrutiny. The buildings, of ersatz Swiss design, began losing their picturesque appeal. Dark, supposedly shingle roofs emerged as painted metal; the pattern of wooden beams on fake stucco walls turned out to be only brown paint. The whole vision became threadbare, cheap, and perilously impermanent. I was abruptly forced to wonder if fifteen million would make much of a dent, a thought driven home by the addition of a quiet group of placard-wielding protesters camped out by the base lodge’s front entrance.
I passed between the lodge and the nightclub opposite, paused where the road split into a Y, and headed uphill to the left, skirting one side of the crazy quilt of interlocking ski trails. I noticed that the skiers I’d seen earlier, traversing the slopes like ants crisscrossing a sugar spill, weren’t present in the kind of numbers to give a resort owner much joy, especially during a weekend. I also saw there were as many empty building lots as condo sites.
Willy was checking off road signs. “Summit Road, Powder Lane, Snowflake Circle… Christ almighty, Joe, why don’t they give it a rest? Here we go, the tree section: Maple, Fir, Hemlock… Laurel’s on the right.”
The scattered houses we’d passed had varied in opulence from the functional, tucked away with no view apart from a few trees, to the marginally upscale, with a glimpse of a meadow or a nearby ski trail. Laurel Lane brought us up a significant notch.
“What d’ya think?” Willy asked. “A half-million each? Three-quarters?”
I watched the procession slide by as the road emerged from the trees and stretched taut behind one perched palace after another, like a ribbon with gaudy baubles glued to one edge. Most of the houses were cantilevered out over a steep incline, allowing them the panorama their less affluent neighbors merely aspired to. For the first time since our arrival, here were signs of real wealth—and of potential salvation for the whole.
“I have no idea,” I said quietly, suspecting the economies of such places had little to do with true value.
Number 318 looked vaguely western to me, low and spread out with an expansive, oversize roof that was more flat than peaked, unlike most New England buildings. It was built of logs and had huge windows and a wraparound deck that looked deep enough to hold a tennis court.
We parked next to a sports utility vehicle deserving of a rope ladder and stepped out into the cold air. The snowfall had completely petered out.
As we set foot on the porch, the front door opened abruptly, revealing a short, round, balding man wearing a bulky, expensive white knit sweater and a permanently angry crease between his eyes.
“Who are you?” he asked abruptly, his tone of voice matching his expression.
I couldn’t stop Willy in time.
“Be nice, asshole,” he said without hesitation, “we’re cops.”
The owner’s mouth dropped open. Feeling like the straight man in a comedy act, I pulled out my shield and announced as nonchalantly as possible, “Vermont Bureau of Investigation—Special Agents Gunther and Kunkle. I gather you asked to see us?”
To my surprise, our presumably type-A host merely gave Willy a grudging look of admiration and stepped back into the open doorway. “’Bout time. Come in.”
We walked past him as he continued, “I’m glad that idiot sheriff got the message. I thought I might have to call the governor.”
“We’re only here because the sheriff invited us,” I explained. “It’s still his case.”
The short man waved his hand dismissively. “Whatever. I just wanted someone who could read and write. Guess you’ll have to do.”
“Wild guess,” Willy interjected, “you must be William Manning, from New York.”
The crease deepened between Manning’s eyebrows. “You got by the first time, sonny. Don’t push it.”
“Could we cut this out?” I asked them both.
They looked at me as if I’d just spoiled a good windup. Manning was the first to recover. “Right. This has really pissed me off. I didn’t come to the boonies to get robbed like it was the city.”
He preceded us toward a glass-walled living room beyond the entryway. I held up a hand to stop Willy from responding.
“Why don’t you take it from the top, Mr. Manning?” I suggested.
He motioned us toward one of three large sofas, all positioned to enjoy the scenery outside. Everything was there, from the sweep of ski slopes, to the base lodge far below, to the windmills looming high in the distance like gigantic praying mantises. I noticed there was a long, graceful ramp connecting the deck to the nearest trail, allowing Manning and his guests to ski directly from home.
Despite the overcast day, the living room was saturated with light.
“You’re not going to want coffee, are you?” Manning suddenly asked.
We both shook our heads.
He sat back and crossed his legs. “There’s not much to tell. My wife and I come up weekends this time of year. Last weekend everything was fine. This one they ripped us off.”
I pulled a sheet of paper from my pocket, rose, and crossed the thick wool rug to hand it to him. “That’s the list of missing items Sheriff Dawson prepared from your statement. Any changes you’d like to make?”
Manning pulled a pair of half-glasses out of his breast pocket and scrutinized the list, eventually saying, “That’s it. The watch was the only thing I couldn’t replace.”
“What was so special about it?” Willy asked. “Besides the cost?”
Manning responded to the implication. “Yeah, that would stick out for you guys. The cost is irrelevant. It was a custom job, from my son on my sixtieth birthday. It’s a sentimental thing, one of a kind.”
“You have a picture of it?”
He gave us a sour smile. “Yeah, I do. The insurance company made a big deal out of it, bastards.” He reached over to a long table behind the sofa, opened a wooden box, and pulled out a wad of photographs. “I had these delivered to me this morning. It’s everything that’s missing, including the watch.”
He extended the pictures to me but didn’t bother getting up, forcing me to cross the rug again to take them. I was half tempted to tear a page from Willy’s manual of style by fake kissing the man’s ring.
Instead, I returned to my roost and handed the photos to Willy to study. He pointedly tucked them into his pocket without a glance.
The sooner I was out of this gladiator pit, the better, I thought.
“Did you sense anything unusual when you drove up this last time?” I asked.
Manning shook his head but then answered in contradiction, “Yeah. Some snow had drifted onto the deck, in front of the front door, but it had been swept clean. I thought it was the caretaker, at first, why, I don’t know. Dumb yokel wouldn’t know a broom if he fell over it. It was obviously to get rid of footprints, but I didn’t figure that out till later, when I found the broken window they used to get in, around the far side of the porch.”