Chapter 11
February 28
The opening came sooner than Cilla expected. Hudson left for Boston at three. John Krestinski was the special agent in the FBI’s regional office, whom he’d met the previous October at a time he and Cilla were under attack from an unknown source. There was respect between those two, Cilla thought. She analyzed it. Krestinski had been with the Bureau twenty years, and little impressed him any more. Certainly not a Cambridge small-businessman - Hudson had a modest games and puzzles firm in Massachusetts before selling to his partner - who’d decided to play detective and had suffered the consequences. But Hudson had come through. The FBI man had found in him a chess mind able to solve a three hundred year old puzzle from the arrangement of a few pieces of thread, and the mental and physical strength to overcome superior forces while wounded himself.
Krestinski had earned Hudson’s respect by the job he held and the way he held it - with an open mind that hadn’t been shuttered by twenty years of bureaucracy. He and his wife, Anne, had come up for a ski weekend in January and, if the Rogers, who were most comfortable in each other’s company, could have been said to have close friends, the Krestinskis would have been among them.
So what did the respect these two had for each other tell her about how she should earn the same from Kurt Britton? Only what she already knew. She had to prove herself as something more than the “flower person” Britton saw.
His triple knock at the door. “A sprained knee in the Hayfields, sent her to Memorial. The slope was perfectly clear; she’ll probably sue anyway.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Women feel they should be taken care of. No matter how foolish or unskilled they are, we should arrange it so nothing happens to them.”
“Men don’t?”
“Some do, there’s always a wimp. With most when they crash they know it’s no one’s fault but their own. Besides, they’re tougher, and skiing isn’t an easy sport to learn.”
“That women shouldn’t attempt?”
He saw the glint in her eye and backed off a little. “Of course not. They just shouldn’t ski beyond their capabilities.”
“Which are limited to the easier trails?”
“You know the stuff women have been fed, anything a man can do, they can. Pick up any newspaper or magazine. So they come up here and damn near kill themselves trying to imitate the men.”
“Karla Schutz? There’s no one more competent on the ski patrol.”
“She’s Austrian. She grew up on skis. And even with that...”
“Yes?”
“Well, I guess you heard I beat her the other day.”
“And Greg and Jason.”
“On the racing hill.”
“Where else?”
“You feel a thirty-five second course is a true test of skiing ability?”
Nonplussed. “That’s where people race, Cilla.”
“Not the pros, they race the whole mountain. Maybe Karla would have beaten you over a longer distance where stamina comes into it.”
His shoulders straightened a little. “When I was a Drill Instructor at Parris Island my platoon broke the record for rifle exercises. There were five of us standing at the end. At Lejeune I led the all day marches with sixty-pound packs. At Quantico...”
“Semper Fi.”
“What? What did you say?”
“We were talking skiing, Kurt, not boot camp.”
“Lejeune and Quantico aren’t...”
“Or Eagle Scout hikes.”
He froze, his face turning beet color. “Just who do you think you are?” The dam broke, and weeks of frustration poured out. “You come in here in December, a skinny girl barely halfway through her twenties, no experience, and try to tell us how to run a ski area just because you skied a little when you were in school.”
“A lot in school.”
“A little, a lot, what the hell’s the difference. You talk about pros, we’re the pros here; we’ve paid our dues. What have you done?”
“I’ve got a lot to learn, I admit that.”
“Well learn on somebody else’s mountain. Don’t come in here and make fun of the Marine Corps.”
“I wasn’t making fun of the Corps. I was pointing out that you’d gotten off the subject.”
“We were talking stamina. Working your body, not riding around in a machine. Good old fashioned stamina.”
“In skiing.”
“Stamina’s stamina, whether it’s skiing or field maneuvers.”
“Not really; different muscles are involved. I doubt if I could carry a sixty pound pack around very long.”
“But you could outlast me skiing?”
“Shall we try and see?”
“Lady, you name the time and place!”
“How about now and Bale Out.”
“The whole length?”
“Of course.”
A broad smile spread across the mountain manager’s face. “I’ll get my skis.”
And alert the staff and crew, thought Cilla as he marched out to band music only he could hear. He won’t want anyone to miss this. She took her time, putting on her yellow jump suit, slipping feet into ski boots. After ten minutes of stretching she went down to the lockers for her skis. As expected, there was a crowd gathered on the slope side of the base station, Britton joking with some of the ski school instructors, idled by the absence of paying customers whose dollars had been spent the previous week. Cilla stepped into her skis and leaned far forward, then took them off and adjusted the tension. The supply room was next door. She took two aerial flares of the type used in mountain rescues, one that burst in the air as a white light and one a red.
Even the office staff were peeking out windows as Cilla glided up to the group on the snow. Britton was jovial and condescending.
“Shall we ride up together?”
“No. We start here.”
Britton laughed shortly. “And see whose chair is fastest?”
“We are racing Bale Out Trail, aren’t we?”
“Damn right. We ski the whole mountain.”
“Right, so let’s start. This red flare is yours; you set it off on the top to show you’ve reached it and are starting down. I have the white flare.”
Puzzled. “For the timer?”
“We won’t need a timer. Whoever reaches the bottom first wins. This is just so the spectators can tell where we are.”
“They’ll know where we are. On Bale Out. Stop stalling and let’s get going.”
“Fine. Go.” She turned to her left and started across the snow.”
“Hey! Where are you going? The lift is over here.”
Cilla stopped and turned back to him. “Weren’t we talking about stamina? Working the body not a machine?”
“So?”
“The lift is a machine. As you said, we’re racing the whole mountain. Both ways.” She turned back and headed for the bottom of Bale Out.
There was a stunned look in Britton’s eyes as her words sank in. Then with a roar he took off after her, poling hard across the flats. They reached the trail mouth at the same time and started to climb together. Britton, practically running, skis slapping the snow, moved quickly ahead, herringboning his way up. Cilla concentrated on steady rhythm.
Bale Out was a gentle grade at the bottom growing increasingly steep and sprouting giant moguls the last five hundred feet of its two-mile length. By the time Cilla reached halfway, Britton was a full hundred feet ahead, his breath coming in great gasps. She smiled to herself, the Marine was definitely gung ho. Maybe she shouldn’t have put down the Corps, but she had to get him angry enough. As a kid she had often climbed trails to ski - after school when the lifts had shut down. She doubted Kurt had ever climbed more than fifty feet before. There was a trick to it; one he would have automatically fallen into had his fury with her left him with a cooler head. Pace. That’s all. He wouldn’t have started one of his all day hikes at a run. But she had given him the opportunity to embarrass her, and then hidden the pea under a different shell at the last minute. He’d had no time to plan, just react.
They were nearly even at the foot of the mogul field. The Marine was blowing like a whale heading for the beach. His head was down, but there was a look of grim determination on his face. The massive mounds required different technique; the downhill sides were steep to climb over, but if you tried to go up in between, your skis slipped backwards. Cilla sidestepped up them and reached the top with Britton fifty feet behind. She set off her flare, knowing the effect of the burst of white light on those watching - which was nearly everybody that worked for Great Haystack plus more than a few curious recreational skiers. A little showmanship Hudson would have appreciated.
The run down was anticlimax. A loud cheer went up as she rounded the last turn in the trail and came into view of those watching. She sprayed snow on her stop and gave a little finishing hop. When Britton appeared the cheer had a sarcastic tone, which became more raucous when they could see he was covered with snow as though he’d gotten buried in a fall. The mountain manager skied through the spectators without a word - a rigid snowman - and disappeared around a corner of the base station.
Cilla watched him go, wondering if she had made her point. Or an enemy.