When she got downstairs, she found Lydia Boland in the library which also served as her “office.” The room was lined with bookshelves that ran clear to the ceiling, all packed tightly with an unbelievable number of paperback and hardbound volumes. There was even a stool for reaching the titles on the middle shelf and a rolling ladder whose wheels fit into a tiny track in the ceiling, making it possible to move the ladder wherever one wanted it and then to climb up and easily obtain any volume in the room.
“Good morning!” Lydia said.
She was sitting at a large, pine desk with a massive slab top at least three inches thick, with legs as sturdy as bedposts. It was so huge and masculine that it dwarfed her and made her seem much smaller than she was, smaller than Katherine. This did not, however, make her look more aged, but rather younger, almost like a little girl in her bright yellow dress.
“Good morning,” Katherine said. “Did you sleep well?”
“Fine, thank you. And how was your first night in Owlsden?”
“I found out how it got it's name,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Yes.” She told Lydia about her middle-of-the-night adventure.
“How wonderful!” Lydia said. “I forgot to mention them to you. Most girls would have locked their door and pulled up the sheets and forgotten about the noise.”
“Maybe my curiosity will kill me some day,” Katherine said.
“Don't believe it. Only those people with curiosity ever amount to anything in this life.”
There was more pleasant conversation, and then the dictation of a few letters which Katherine took in shorthand and typed on rich, embossed vellum stationery, using the IBM electric that was the only modern thing in the library.
As she was finishing the last letter — Lydia was looking over something in a book she had taken from the shelves — Alex Boland poked his head in the door. “I think I'll be going into town, Mother. Still want Katherine to go with me?”
“Yes,” Lydia said. She put her book down and turned to Katherine. “I believe your records say you ski.”
“There's a run into town?” Katherine asked.
“An excellent one,” Alex said. “About a two mile winding slope that leads gently through the pines and feeds almost directly into Costerfeld Avenue.”
“I'd like you to accompany Alex,” Lydia said. “Let him show you the town. Roxburgh has been my life, or most of it, and I want you to become thoroughly familiar with it.”
“I'll have to change,” Katherine said. “Give me twenty minutes.”
“Right,” Alex said. “I'll meet you outside the kitchen door.”
The day was cold but, without the wind, she found it far more endurable than the day before. She was dressed in blue insulated ski slacks, black sweater, thermal jacket, sturdy boots and toboggan hat. When she came out the kitchen door, she saw Alex standing far off to the south, at the edge of the mountain slope where the first downward angling of the land began. She went to him, kicking at the snow as she did.
He said, “How much have you skied before?”
“Quite a bit,” she said. “The orphanage where I grew up was near a resort that used to let us kids in free if we were interested. I was one of the few who were interested, and I spent a lot of my free time there.”
He nodded. “This shouldn't be any trouble. Look.”
A wide swath of clean snow, guarded by towering pines, lead down the mountainside, cut at one edge by what appeared to be power pylons carrying two thick cables.
“It looks easy enough,” she said.
They put on their skis, and Alex went over the edge first, swishing through the clean snow, cutting two shallow runners as he went. She followed close behind, watching him, letting his movements dictate hers as they swept down the snaking trail.
The wind bit at her, whined off her vinyl slacks and jacket, snapped her yellow hair out behind her and tried to tug away the toboggan cap which was strapped beneath her chin.
Snow thrown up behind Alex spattered her goggles. She wiped them off and dropped back fifty feet until she was not bothered by his wake.
The trees flashed by so fast that, if she looked to either side, they almost seemed like a continuous rail fence of gargantuan proportions.
She felt gloriously free and renewed. One day on the job, and already she knew that she would be happy to be Lydia Boland's secretary and companion for the next fifty years if Lydia happened to live to be over a hundred.
Suddenly, the trail twisted and swept directly down toward the village of Roxburgh, the slope grading into a gentle run at the bottom of which, two hundred feet away, Alex waited beside the last of the tall, gray pylons. She brought herself to a stop beside him, showering snow over his head.
“Like it?” he asked.
“Wonderful!”
He drew her attention to the pylon beside them and showed her how to operate the simple controls. The cables did not carry electrical power at all, but formed a rudimentary ski-lift to the top of the mountain. One had only to grasp the lower cable, turn on the device and be dragged up the mountainside.
“It can be hard on the arms,” Alex said. “But you can stop and rest once or twice and then grab it again. It won't shut off until you reach the top and re-set the controls up there.”
“I was so excited about getting on skis again that I never wondered how we would get back. I guess the road isn't open yet.”
“Not yet,” he said. “But without the wind, the drifting won't be so bad. They'll have everything cleared up by tonight.” He sat down in the snow and began to unbuckle his skis. “Come on, let's get into town for a cup of coffee at the cafe. My face is still stinging from the cold.”
By the time they had walked into the square, pausing now and then while Alex commented on the town along the way, they were both slightly flushed from the exertion and no longer chilled. They decided to postpone the coffee until they had thoroughly prowled from one end of Roxburgh to the other.
Connecting the four main streets of Roxburgh like robins running from one spoke of the wheel to the other, were narrow, twisting alleyways and dead-end avenues which gave the town a feeling of size that it did not genuinely possess. They explored these streets, stopping to look at unusual pieces of turn-of-the-century architecture: an eight-room log cabin that had recently been renovated into a magnificent home; a stone grocery store and post office combination that, with its sunken windows and recessed double-open entryway, looked more like a fort than a grocery; the Catholic Church, which was done all in unpainted natural pine with wooden pegs used for nails, composed of a thousand fascinating angles and beams and struts, a miniature cathedral large enough to seat a hundred and fifty at one time, capped with such intricate detail as handcarved pew edging and altar panels.
As they walked, Katherine learned that the Roxburgh family had originally made their money in shipping, later in railroads and highway construction. It had been Lydia's father's conceit that the Adirondack wildernesses would swiftly open to the railroads and to the not-too-distant automobile which, he maintained, would cross these mountains on hundreds of roadways, bringing civilization into the heart of the back-lands. He had been too optimistic. Roxburgh and his land purchases around it was the only investment he had been wrong about. He had permitted his own love of the countryside to unsettle his normal business sense, had built the mansion because he wanted to make it the first cornerstone of a “showplace” town. At least, though his dreams for the land did not come to pass, he was happy here, away from the bustle of high society — a bigger fish than ever, because he was in a smaller pond.
They were climbing a steep, icy sidewalk which, though shoveled and salted, was still treacherous in places, when Michael Harrison turned the corner immediately in front of them, seemed to slip, grasped at Alex for support and sent the other man sprawling into the snow.