Monday's Child, page 11
Now it was Erik’s turn to blush.
“Do you want some water?” Briony asked. “I’m going to get some. I’d like to sit for a few minutes at the picnic table outside and rehydrate before we go back uptown. I can get a couple of shots in the greenhouse while I’m grabbing some bottled water.”
“That would be great.”
She pointed to the picnic table at the side of the store and disappeared inside, returning a moment later with two frosty bottles of spring water, tears of cold condensation dripping off them, and handed one to Erik. “Local water,” she said as she put it in his hand.
“Thank you,” he said gratefully, twisting off the cap and drinking eagerly.
“So how long and how extensive a tour are you expecting?” Briony said, stepping over the bench on the other side of the table and sitting down across from him.
“Whatever you’re willing to provide,” Erik said between sips of the water. “Your dad gave you the whole day off; I’d like to see whatever you’re willing to show me.”
“Well, I’d like to make certain you get the photos you came for,” Briony said, taking her own long drink from the bottle. “Obergrande is a pretty town, as are many of the towns in the Adirondacks, but you need to give me more guidance. There are awesome stores and the town museum, but you can always check those out on your own over the next six weeks when I’m actually working.
“The mountains around here are ripe for hiking, there are guide boats on the Hudson, the Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake is not far to the southwest of here, and, of course, since you have that much time, you can take day trips and excursions to some of the most beautiful areas—Lake George, Lake Placid, Saranac Lake, Schroon Lake, or the trail heads to the High Peaks, which are all within an hour’s drive or less.
“If you’re willing to go farther, there are lots of other fantastic lakes, towns, mountains, racetracks, performing arts centers and historic sites. There’s a lot of interesting stuff about the French-and-Indian War in the Park, and quite a bit of French-Canadian and Dutch culture. You could even go up into Canada, to St. Valentin or some of the other quaint places. I just need to know what sort of things you want to see today so that you get the shots you want.”
Erik recapped the empty bottle. “I truly would be happy to see whatever you think is special, Sarah,” he said as she took the bottle from his hand and rose from the picnic table. “You did a spectacular job showing me the alpines—they were exactly the kind of thing I’m looking to photograph. If there’s something like that around here, something rare and unique to this place, I’d love for you to show that to me as well.”
Briony deposited the bottles in the recycling bin and turned back to him, folding her arms.
“Are you willing to drive?”
Erik swallowed. “Of course—as long as you don’t mind riding in Seabiscuit.”
“Seabiscuit?”
“My hundred-year-old Corolla. It’s definitely a guy’s car—if I had known your dad would command you to show me around today I would have spent several hours yesterday vacuuming it out—”
“I’m sure it’s fine. I already like his name. Seabiscuit was one of the great historic racehorses; I imagine he’s quite a car.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s not even eight o’clock yet.” She looked up at him, and there was a sparkle in the famous gray eyes that even the thick glasses couldn’t hide. “You’ve never been here, ever?”
“Never ever. First time.”
“Did you bring hiking gear?”
“Yes, but it’s back at the hotel. It’s only a few minutes away.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think we’ll need it today, as long as you have sturdy shoes on.” He nodded. “Why don’t we start with a quick trip up to the Overlook so you can get a general view of Obergrande, and then I can show you the highest and the lowest place in all six million acres of the Adirondacks. By coincidence, they both happen to be fairly near here, or at least visible from here. Then we’ll be back in time to see the tree in the late afternoon, early evening; it’s really best to visit it right before sunset.”
Erik’s smile was bright enough to rival the morning sunlight.
“Sounds perfect,” he said.
“Give me a minute—I just want to let Dave know where I’m going, and grab the binoculars and tarp,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She went back in the side door of the shop.
Erik’s smile faded somewhat, resolving into contemplative expression. She was taking appropriate precautions with him, refusing to leave town without letting her father know her whereabouts; smart, he thought approvingly.
He had read enough about the murder mysteries that happened in the Adirondacks to see the wisdom of her actions.
—Manhattan—
The man sat forward in surprise as the door opened.
His colleague came into the dark, windowless room of screens, computers and recording devices and pulled up the nearest chair.
Wearing an expression that fluctuated between blank and dark.
“He wants a meeting,” he said to the man who had been monitoring the equipment in the room.
“Today?”
“Today.”
“For cripe’s sake, it hasn’t even been three full days yet,” the man said, crumpling a piece of paper on which he had written the OTB results and tossing it angrily into the waste basket below the table. “She’s been missing fourteen months.”
“I know,” said his colleague darkly. “But he’s used to getting what he wants, when he wants it.”
The man blew all the air out of his lungs through his mouth, making his cheeks expand like those of a blowfish.
“When?”
“We’re leaving now.” His colleague rose and headed for the door. He stopped and looked back in irritation.
“Is your life insurance paid up?” he asked, his voice deadly quiet.
Then he left the room without a backward glance.
The man rose, shaking, and followed him out the door.
Chapter 15
The Overlook, off of High Street, Obergrande
Briony had directed Erik along a series of highly slanted streets to a road that ran along the side of the rocky south edge of town, where several rows of houses, some of them with no driveways, sat on steep inclines, each of them led up to by rock steps carved or set into the hillside.
“High Street,” she said as they drove along the disappearing pavement.
“Aptly named,” Erik agreed. “Man, I would hate to see my grandmother in one of those houses. She’s pretty spry, but those stairs are intimidating.”
“Most of them are B&Bs—sorry, bed-and-breakfast places—usually catering to young people, hikers and the like.”
“Makes sense.”
“If you go all the way to the end of the street, we can park in the cul-de-sac, and I’ll show you the Overlook.”
Erik nodded agreeably and drove until he saw the cul-de-sac at the street’s end. He pulled the car to a stop at the farthest side of the street, then looked questioningly at Briony.
“This OK?”
“Perfect,” she said, unfastening her belt and opening the car door. “Come on.”
They gathered up their camera gear and she led him to a place where the paved road ended and a gravel path began, leading through a tall, thick line of poplar trees. Just before the tree fence was a historic sign, cast in metal in blue and gold, with text describing this as a place where American scouts watched for British ships during the War of 1812 and sent smoke signals across the Hudson to encampments to the east.
He took a quick photo of the sign, then followed her through the trees and came to an abrupt stop, taking in the view and a deep breath.
The Overlook was a massive meadow at the top of a wide, rocky cliff that seemed to jut out in a long, semi-circular edge hundreds of feet above the road and the town below it. The grass was just beginning to turn from the bruising brown of the previous year’s frost to the glorious pale green of spring, and the scrub trees that randomly sprouted here and there across the meadow were waving soft, new shoots of tiny leaves, lacy and translucent.
Beyond the edge of the cliff spread Lake Obergrande, a good-sized lake from the looks of it, sparkling in the light of the mid-morning sun.
“Man, this is beautiful,” Erik murmured as he lifted his camera and snapped away. He had already determined not to point the lens anywhere near her, suspecting it would make her panic. But Briony had just taken a moment to stare at the lake from the edge of the Overlook, then moved quickly out of the way. She sat down on the grass near a small copse of young trees.
“Eiggguchhhh,” she said from the back of her throat and looking around her in disgust, “this place should be dry by now, but parts of it aren’t. Be careful if you decide to sit down.”
Erik toed the grass near the edge.
“Looks pretty dry up here,” he said. “The wind must come up off the lake and the road—there’s even a little trash that must have blown up from it.”
“Probably not,” Briony said, rising and coming closer until she found a comfortable dry spot, then sat down again. “This was always a huge hangout for high school kids, as I’m sure you can imagine. That’s where the trash comes from; the cross-country and the football coaches usually make the teams run up to the Overlook during practice and spend half an hour or so picking it up, knowing most of them are responsible for it. Families come up here on special occasions, like the fourth of July to watch the fireworks, but most of the time it’s a party spot for teenagers and a lovers’ lane.”
“Perfect place for that,” Erik agreed as he continued to shoot the vista in front of him. He let the camera hang down to his side and joined her on the grass. “So what does my new Adirondack guide have to say about the history of this place?”
Briony laughed. She stared out at the lake, her arms wrapped around her legs, and told him the same tale of the drowning of Obergrande that she had related to Ed on their first day back in town.
Erik listened in rapt silence, then, when she had finished, he followed her lead of staring out at the lake and told her the story of his time in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when he was an eighteen-year-old college student confronted with the hell that had occurred inside the Louisiana Superdome.
He had paused almost at the end of the tale and turned to see her, stretched out on her side, sleeping lightly in the sun, occasionally shadowed by the branches of nearby trees waving in the wind.
Erik chuckled and stretched out beside her, studying her face behind the thick glasses. It was a face he found endlessly fascinating, and he watched it carefully until almost half an hour later when she stretched and woke, blinking at him in shock.
“What—did I—did I fall asleep?”
He smiled broadly. “Seems that way.”
Briony sat up quickly, looking around. “I’m so sorry.”
“No need to be. I’ve been having a lovely time watching you. The wind was tickling your nose, and you made some truly adorable faces.”
“Oh, my lord. I’m sorry—between the traveling I’ve been doing, and working the early shift, I still haven’t fully adjusted to the Eastern Time Zone.”
Erik laughed. “Hey, at least you waited almost until the very end of my story to fall asleep.” He sat up and crossed an arm over his knee. “And, best of all, it’s not even ten o’clock yet, and you’ve already slept with me. I’d say we are definitely on schedule to be on our honeymoon by midnight—maybe buying our first house.”
Briony blushed furiously. “You’d better hope not,” she said. “I imagine the wedding photos would suffer from the rake-wounds on your face. That would make anyone who looked at them wince. Not a good way to start out, I would say.”
“True,” Erik said, thoughtfully rubbing his chin.
“At least I’m well set for some lovely flowers to plant on your unmarked grave under the mulch pile. I can even do alpines, since you liked them so much.”
“Sounds appropriate. I’m sure my carcass will serve as good fertilizer for them.”
“Maybe. They don’t grow in manure in their natural habitat, however, so they might not take to you too well. The daisies will love you, however.”
“Ouch!” Erik groaned, struggling not to laugh. “Well, I have to admit you have my number, Sarah. All right, where to next?”
She was already heading back across the Overlook toward the car.
“Where we’re going next has no places to eat, so I think we should stop by the Meat and Greet, the deli on the outskirts of town, and grab some sandwiches or whatever you might want for lunch. And then we’ll be off to see the highest spot in the Adirondacks, and the lowest one after that.”
“Lead the way.”
All the way to their next destination, Erik was struggling with a clash of emotions and logic.
While the woman he addressed as Sarah handed him manageable pieces of his pastrami sandwich, followed by chips and thoughtful offerings of the water bottle while he drove, a sense of guilt was beginning to gnaw at his stomach.
For all that she had spent time in the cesspool, and stresspool, that was the world of high-fashion modeling, the woman sitting next to him, cheerfully pointing out interesting landmarks, seemed as innocent as a teenager to him.
She had a ready, unpretentious laugh that she let loose often and easily, as well as a quick wit and stinging sense of humor that almost made him drive off the road several times, laughing with her. He repeatedly found himself feeling as if he had known her far more than two days, the kind of knowledge that one would have of an old friend or even a family member.
Then he had to remind himself that he did have that knowledge longer, largely because of his own research and the depth of information that Katherine Bruce had smugly provided for him.
Which, of course, Briony had no idea about.
Whenever that thought occurred to him, he felt an oily residue at the back of his throat that he didn’t remember ever feeling before.
Perhaps, he thought sickly as she was pointing out the approaching mountain peaks or telling him about the other Adirondack treasures that resided within Essex County, including Lake Placid, Schroon Lake, Fort Ticonderoga, and most of the High Peaks, that was because every other time in his career that he had undertaken this kind of journalism, having a mark trust him without knowing he was an investigator, the subject had been a criminal, a rancid world leader, or a corrupt politician who deserved to be exposed for whatever secret he or she was keeping.
Not a beautiful, intelligent woman whose only crime had been, in the minds of the fashion industry, having the nerve to have left it without their permission.
Erik’s head was beginning to pound with sickening remorse when Briony suddenly signaled excitedly and waved for him to pull the car over.
“Here’s a great view of it,” she said, grabbing the binoculars and pointing eagerly out the window. “That’s it! That’s Mount Marcy—the Cloudsplitter, the highest of the High Peaks, and the tallest mountain in New York State.”
Erik glanced at his mirrors and, seeing no other cars, pulled over to the shoulder of the road, then into the small park beyond it.
Briony was out the door a moment later, hurrying to a middle-sized display reading Welcome to Newcomb: Heart of the Adirondacks, and adjusting the binoculars. Erik grabbed his camera and joined her, his jacket snapping in the billowing wind.
A Plexiglas cutout rose above the wooden base of the display, with a detailed outline mirroring the panorama of the gorgeous view of the peaks in the distance. Briony was standing in front of it, pointing at a peak near the right edge of the panorama.
“I know quite a bit about that mountain, having studied it for a project in high school, and having climbed Mount Marcy with my parents when I was seven and then again at twelve,” she said. “The first time I ever remember seeing it was from Mount Haystack, across Panther Gorge. We did eleven High Peaks that summer. My dad left the biggest one for last.
“Even though Mount Marcy is the highest of all the High Peaks, Algonquin, number two, is considered more challenging to climb, if I remember correctly, which is why we left it until the next year. Lake Tear of the Clouds is on the southwest slope of Marcy. It’s one of the most gorgeous sights I’ve ever seen. You have to hike almost a thousand feet more if you want to get to Marcy’s summit, which is a hundred feet or so above the tree line, where the alpines grow—but it’s beautiful sight. Well worth the climb.”
“Lake Tear of the Clouds? Great name,” Erik said, adjusting his lens.
“Sounds like a Native American name, but it’s not,” Briony continued. “The lake was discovered in 1872 by a man named Verplanck Colvin, a name that’s weird enough to have stuck in my memory all these years. Colvin was surveying the Adirondack Mountains, and his words were really poetic, so they’ve stuck in my mind ever since, too.”
“What were they?”
Briony closed her eyes in memory.
“ ‘Far above the chilly waters of Lake Avalanche at an elevation of four thousand, two hundred ninety-three feet, lies summit water, a minute, unpretending tear of the clouds—as it were—a lovely pool shivering in the breezes of the mountains and sending its limpid surplus through Feldspar Brook to the Opalescent River, the well-spring of the Hudson.’ ”
She opened her eyes and looked back at him seriously.
“Of course, it’s nowhere near as big as many peaks of the Rockies, or even elsewhere on the East Coast, but there’s something very special and wild about Mount Marcy,” she said. “The lake is the highest in New York State, and the highest water source of the Hudson, but the river itself actually begins near Newcomb, that place we stopped at a few minutes ago, in Henderson Lake. But, as far as a lot of folks are concerned, Lake Tear of the Clouds is its birthplace, its ‘hydrologic source.’ That ‘lovely pool shivering in the breezes of the mountains’ is what turns into the massive river you drove over, if you came here by way of the George Washington Bridge in New York City.”
