I head down Old Mammoth Road to Main and stop at the light. I see a man loading a bicycle into the trunk of a long, older car in the Do It Center lot. He’s in overalls and a beanie, bearded, and moves quickly and nervously, like he just can’t wait to get that thing into the hole and away. The driver’s a bearded guy, too, and he looks straight ahead through the windshield, as if nothing unusual is taking place. I read about these guys in The Sheet. They’ve been spotted stealing bikes around town. I’ve seen them before, too. I can’t make out the license plate number from here. Binoculars are no good in the dark.
Abruptly, their car lurches, makes a 180, cuts across the lot, and bounces onto Main without stopping, heading up toward the village. The cop house is less than half a mile from here, so these guys have some real stones. Or real stupidity. Of course I must follow. I can’t run the red light with a Boar’s Head delivery truck lumbering down at me. When the light changes, I try to catch up, but by the time I make the signal at Minaret, I can’t tell if the bike thieves have gone right, left, or straight.
That’s okay, because I have an idea where they’re headed. I saw these two malingering behind a big empty house up near Canyon Lodge just three weeks ago. Up to no good, it looked to me. Their old boat of a car stood out in that tony ‘hood, I can tell you.
So I head up Main, cut through the village on Canyon Boulevard, cruise all the way down to Canyon Lodge, and sure enough, I see the old car pulling around behind the same home as before. Twelve Madrone. It’s a big river-rock and wooden Craftsman, two stories. Always one of my favorite styles. It’s got a FOR SALE sign out front. A light comes on inside. I drive past and around, and looking through the trees, I see the old car now parked in the garage of that big almost-mansion, and the garage door going down and one of the thieves lifting the trunk lid.
I loop back and park and watch for a few more minutes. Pretty soon the house light goes off and the garage door rises and the old car backs out. As it makes the slow reversing turn to exit, I catch, in the driveway motion-detector lights that suddenly spring on, a glimpse of the thieves. They look so different from the way they did just minutes ago, when they were stealing that bike. I rub my eyes and the old car rumbles back down toward town.
Chapter Twenty-Three
On a Saturday morning in early October, in the fragrant interior of Let It Bean, Wylie knelt behind the counter to clean the inside of a lower refrigerator. It was something to do. The place was almost empty. Not only was presnow autumn the slowest time for tourists but Gargantua had launched Y-Not? Days, which meant half-off prices from 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. “On Any Day That Ends in Y!”
Some of the locals were sticking it out with Let it Bean, but Wylie saw they were doing half the business they’d done in early summer, which was half of what they had done five years ago, when they were the most popular gourmet coffee shop and bakery in town.
With the Little Red Pastry Shed now history, and the fourteen-thousand-dollar roof job looming, and the lease here on Let It Bean soon to be doubled by a new landlord, Wylie felt the same cold undertow of shortage that was part of what had pushed him away five years ago. Again he wondered about his nontriumphant return home. Toil and trouble. Now he wanted to stay and make things right. He wanted to help his sisters, mother, and Steen get a better shot. He knew he had a chance at the cup. After that, the X Games and FIS circuit and the Olympics were higher levels. Could he be good enough? All of that was technically possible, but another part of Wylie wanted just to light out for new territory, get back into the bigger world that lay beyond this mountain.
Now Beatrice was banging around in the kitchen and Belle was tucked into one of the leather chairs by a window, reading her world history textbook.
Wylie, still crouched, heard the bell on the door chime and sensed incoming customers. He kept at the fridge, giving the newly arrived patrons a minute to read the wall menu. It was amazing how much time some people took to figure out what size coffee to buy.
“What’s a person have to do for some service around here?”
He recognized the voice and stood. “You have to want it badly.”
“I badly want a pumpkin scone and a double nonfat latte.”
“Welcome back from Portillo.”
“Thank you.”
Wylie watched Belle look up from the book as if surprised, then wave coolly. He knew Belle idolized April Holly by the offhand and often dismissive way that she brought April into conversations over and over.
“Looks like some serious homework there, Wylie’s sister,” said April.
“Like I need to know when the First Crusade left Constantinople.”
“One thousand ninety-nine. You should see Rhodes. It’s beautiful, and their coffee is Turkish — almost as good as yours. Wylie, you’ve lost weight.”
“Been training hard.”
“How’s the module?”
“Personal and portable.”
April was tanned from the Andean sun and snow and she wore an Inca-style knit sweater with a band of characters holding hands across a white background. The figures all wore gloves and caps and boots. Wylie watched her curls dangle as she unsnapped a colorful woven coin purse.
“This is on us,” said Wylie.
“But—”
“If Gargantua can give away skis, I can give a coffee and a scone.”
“Please accept our gifts!” called out Belle. “Is Portillo, like, the best resort ever?”
Beatrice peered in from the kitchen and April smiled at her. “It’s unbelievably fantastic. You should go there sometime. Not to train. But to have fun.” She pushed a couple of bills into the tip jar and hooked a bouquet of curls behind one ear.
“And you should come here every morning,” said Wylie. “You’d get great coffee and pastry and you’d bring us more customers. And I could give Gargantua the finger.”
April snapped the coin purse shut and dropped it back into her bag. “What? Still no inner peace? Haven’t you evolved at all in the last two months?”
“No. But they threw me off the Mammoth freeski team, if that makes you feel better. I’ll have to battle the tourists for X Course leftovers.”
She frowned. “Because of what you did to Jacobie and Sky?”
“I think there was some politics, too, but I don’t know for sure.”
“That’s an awful thing to do to you.”
“I’ll keep up my dry-terrain training program until the snow.”
“Splitting wood and running?”
“Correct.” Wylie bagged the scone and handed it to her, then moved down the counter to make her coffee. The previous week he’d spent another three days making his secret vertiginous moonlit runs down Madman. He felt right. Legs and eyes strong, spirit firm. But still no snow on this eastern slope. The earlier it came to Mammoth, the better. As he’d discovered on that first run down Madman back in August, he was twenty-five now, not twenty. He needed more time on snow. There was no invitation to the Imagery Beast from Bart Helixon. And when the snow finally did come, having to share the X Course with the tourists would be an expensive handicap, but he’d have to make it work.