That was okay by Max. He was still wondering how the young vandal had managed to spray paint in his own eyes. He was aware that a rumor was circulating that the kid had used his flashlight to look through the wall. And had seen something.
The fence went up in twenty-four hours. Sky’s next act was to set up a string of security lights around the perimeter of the cut. He mounted cameras at five locations.
Uniformed Sioux guards appeared. The first that Max met fit quite closely his notion of how a Native American should look. He was big, dark-eyed, and taciturn. His name was John Little Ghost, and he was all business. Max’s views of Native Americans were proscribed by the Hollywood vision of a people sometimes noble, sometimes violent, and almost always inarticulate. He had been startled by his discovery of a Native-American lawyer and a security consultant. The fact that he was more at ease with John Little Ghost than with either Sky or Redfern left him paradoxically uneasy.
The police investigation of Harry Ernest’s death came and went. Forms got filled out, and Max answered a few questions. (He had been on the escarpment until midnight, he said, and he didn’t think there had been anyone else here when he left. He had completely forgotten the “animal” cry he’d heard.) It was an obvious case of accidental death resulting from intended mischief, the police said. No evidence of negligence. That’s what they would report, and that would be the finding.
Max went to the funeral. There were few attendees, and those seemed to be friends of the boy’s guardians. No young people were present. The guardians themselves were, Max thought, remarkably composed.
The next day Redfern informed him that no legal action appeared likely.
Tourists continued to arrive in substantial numbers. They were allowed onto the escarpment, but they were required to remain outside the fence. Police opened a second access road on the west side of the escarpment and established one-way traffic.
No one had yet found a door.
The security fence ran unbroken across the front of the roundhouse. Now that the area had been rendered safe, workers began to excavate the channel.
With TV cameras present, they brought in a girl in a wheelchair from one of the local high schools to remove the first spadeful of dirt. She was a superlative science student, and she posed for the cameras, smiling prettily, and did her duty. Then the work teams got started.
They knew it would be a drawn-out process because of the confined space. Only two people could dig at a time. Meanwhile, the sky turned gray and the temperature rose, a sign of snow. Around the circumference of the building, an army of people wielding brooms was clearing off the walls and the half-dozen braces that anchored the structure to its rocky base. April and Max watched through a security camera in the control module.
This was to be the last week for all except a few designated workers. The rest would be paid and thanked and released. Charlie Lindquist was planning an appreciation dinner at the Fort Moxie city hall, and he’d arranged certificates for the workers which read I Helped Excavate the Roundhouse. (At about this time, the structure acquired a capital R.) Media coverage was picking up, as was the number of visitors. Cars filled Route 32 in both directions for miles.
Periodically April went out, climbed down into the excavation, and strolled along the wall. She liked being near it, liked its feel against her palms, liked knowing that something perhaps quite different from her had stood where she now stood and had looked out across the blue waters of the long-vanished glacial lake.
But today there was a change in the wall. She stood at the rear, near the stag’s head, looking past the long, slow curve at the wooded slope that mounted to the northern ridge, trying to pin down what her instincts were telling her. Everything appeared the same.
She touched the beveled surface. Pressed her fingers to it.
It was warm.
Well, not warm, exactly. But it wasn’t as cold as it should have been. She let her palm linger against it.
The west grew dark, and the wind picked up. Max watched the storm teams assemble and begin distributing tarpaulins. The digging stopped, and workers rigged the tarps around the excavation to prevent it from being filled with snow. When that was completed, they sent everyone home.
No one wanted to be caught on the road when the storm hit. Including Max. “You ready?” he asked April.
“Yes,” she said. “Go ahead. I’m right behind you.”
Max put on his coat. The wind was beginning to fill with snow. Visibility would soon go to near zero.
“Hey,” he said, “how about if I stop and get a pizza?”
“Sure. I’ll see you back at the motel.”
Max nodded and hurried out the door. The wind almost took it out of his hands.
He walked to the gate and was greeted by Andrea Hawk, one of the security guards. She was also a radio entertainer of some sort in Devil’s Lake, Max recalled, and she was extremely attractive. “Good night, Mr. Collingwood,” Andrea said. “Be careful. The road is treacherous.”
“How about you?” he asked. “When are you leaving?”
“We’ll stay here tonight, or until our relief comes. Whichever.”
Max frowned. “You sure?”
“Sure,” she said. “We’re safer than you.”
Whiteouts are windstorms, gales roaring across the plains at fifty miles an hour, loaded with dry snow. The snow may accompany the storm, or it might just be lying around on the ground. It doesn’t much matter. Anyone trying to drive will see little more than windshield wipers.
April resented the delay caused by the storm. She seldom thought about anything now other than the Roundhouse. She was desperate to know what was inside and who the builders were, and she spent much of her time watching the laborious effort to clear the channel.
The day she’d seen Tom Lasker’s boat, she had begun a journal. Chiding herself for an attack of arrogance, she had nevertheless concluded that she was embarked on events of historic significance and that a detailed record would be of interest. During the first few days she’d satisfied herself with accounts of procedures and results. After Max had found Johnson’s Ridge, she’d begun to speculate. And after she had closed the operation down for the winter, she had realized that she would eventually write a memoir. Consequently, she’d begun describing her emotional reactions.
The stag’s head intrigued her. It seemed so much a human creation that it caused her to doubt her results. Somehow, everything she had come to believe seemed mad in the face of that single, simple design. She had spent much of the afternoon trying to formulate precisely how she felt and then trying to get the journal entry right. Important not to sound like a nut.
She put it in a desk drawer and listened to the wind. Time to go. She signed off the computer, and headed out into the storm. She was about ten minutes behind Max.
At the entrance, John Little Ghost forced the gate open against the wind and suggested that maybe she should stay the night. “Going to be dangerous on the road!” he said, throwing each word toward her to get over the storm.
“I’ll be careful,” April said.
She was grateful to get to her car, where she caught her breath and turned the ignition. The engine started. There was an accumulation of snow on the rear window. She got her brush out of the trunk and cleared that off, and then waited until she had enough heat to keep the snow off the glass. Then she inched out of the lot and turned toward the opening in the trees that concealed the access road. She drove through a landscape in motion. The storm roared around her.