Then we took a drive around as much of Lac Tremblant as we could, past the Tremblant Club and the other new resorts, the Mont-Tremblant Lodge, with its clay tennis courts and sandy lakefront beach, the Manoir Pinoteau, the Chalet des Chutes, and houses both elegant and rustic.
The idea, I suppose, was that either or both of us might recognize the lodge, whether (in Molly’s case) from memory or from the photograph. But no luck there either. Most of the houses were not visible from the dirt road that abutted the lake. All we could see were names on signposts, some hand-lettered, some professionally drafted. Even if we’d had the time to drive off the road, down each path to every lakefront house-and that would have certainly taken days-it would have been in fact impossible, for a number of the driveways were rather persuasively blocked to incoming traffic. And then, quite a few houses were located on the lake’s secluded northern part, which could be reached only by boat.
At the end of our little reconnaissance mission, discouraged, I pulled the car up in front of the Tremblant Club and parked.
“Now what?” Molly asked.
“We rent a boat,” I said.
“Where?”
“Here, I imagine.”
But it was not to be. There were no boat-rental places to be seen, and none of the hotels we stopped into rented boats. Evidently the town made it as difficult for tourists as possible.
Then the buzz of an outboard motor broke the silence of the beautiful, glassy lake from a distance, which gave me an idea. At Lac-Tremblant-Nord (which was in fact not at the northernmost tip of the lake, but the end of the road, beyond which there was no access) we found several deserted gray-painted aluminum and wood boat sheds. They were padlocked, of course. This seemed to be a docking area for residents of the lake who had no waterfront access.
Picking the padlocks was a matter of a few minutes. Inside was an array of small crafts, mostly fishing boats. I spotted a yellow Sunray with a seventy-horsepower outboard motor-a good, fast boat, but more important, its keys had been left in the ignition. The motor kicked right in, and a few minutes later, amid clouds of blue smoke, we were zipping along the lake.
The houses were various: modern ersatz Swiss chalets and rustic cabins, some right up on the water, some barely visible through the trees, some perched prominently on the mountainside. There was a false alarm, a stone and mortar house that at first looked right and then turned out to be a modern architect’s pun on an old lodge.
And then it appeared without warning, the old stone-fronted lodge on a gently rising hill maybe a hundred meters from the shore. A veranda faced the lake, and on the veranda were two white Adirondack chairs. It was unmistakably the house in which Molly had spent a summer. In fact, it appeared not to have changed one whit since the picture had been taken decades before.
Molly stared at it, stricken and entranced. The color drained from her cheeks.
“That’s it,” she said.
I killed the motor as close to the shore as I dared, and let it drift the rest of the way in, and then I tied it up to the rickety wooden pier.
“My God,” Molly whispered. “This is it. This is the place.”
I helped her up to the dock, then clambered out myself.
“My God, Ben, I remember this place!” Her voice was a high-pitched, excited whisper. She pointed toward a white-painted wooden boathouse. “Dad taught me how to fish there.”
She began walking down the pier toward the boathouse, lost in her nostalgic reverie, when I grabbed her.
“What-?”
“Quiet!” I commanded.
The sound was barely audible at first, a rustling of grass from somewhere near the house.
A thup thup thup.
“What is it?” Molly whispered.
I froze.
The dark shape seemed almost to fly toward us over the overgrown lawn, down the hill, the thup thup thup mingling now with a whine.
A low growl.
The growl became a loud, terrifying, warning bark, as the creature-a Doberman pinscher, I realized-bounded toward us, teeth bared.
Moving so fast it was virtually a blur.
“No!” Molly shrieked, running toward the boathouse.
My stomach turned inside out as the Doberman leapt into the air, bounding over a distance that seemed inconceivable, and just as I reached for my pistol, I heard a man’s voice commanding: “Halt!”
I heard a splash from the water behind us and whirled around.
“You could hurt yourself that way. He doesn’t like surprises.”
A tall man in a boxy navy bathing suit emerged from the water. The water cascaded from his gray beard as he rose to his full height, a deeply tanned if aging Neptune come out of the underworld.
A sight that was so illogical it failed to register in my brain.
Molly and I both gaped, eyes wide, unable to speak.
Molly rushed to embrace her father.
PART VII: WASHINGTON
SIXTY-FOUR
So what do you say at such a moment?
For what seemed an eternity, no one spoke.
The lake was still, the water glassy and opaque. There was no buzz of motorboats, no shouts, not even the call of birds. Absolute silence. The world stood still.
Weeping, Molly squeezed her arms around her father’s chest hard enough, it seemed, to crush him. She is tall, but he is taller still, and so he had to hunch forward to allow the two of them to hug.
I watched in dull shock.
Finally, I said: “I barely recognized you with the beard.”
“Isn’t that the point?” Harrison Sinclair said solemnly, his voice raspy. Then he cracked a wrinkled, lopsided smile. “I assume you made sure you weren’t followed here.”
“Best I could.”
“I knew I could count on you.”
Suddenly Molly broke her embrace, drew back, and slapped her father across the face. He winced.
“Damn you,” she said, her voice breaking.
The lodge was dark and still. It had the distinctive odor of a house that has long been closed up: of countless crackling fires over the years that have permeated the floors and walls; of camphor and mothballs; of mildew and paint and rancid cooking oil.
We sat together on a love seat whose muslin upholstery was discolored with years of dust, watching her father as he spoke. He sat in a canvas chair that was suspended from the high ceiling on a cable.
He had changed into a pair of baggy khaki shorts and a loose navy blue pullover sweater. With his legs sprawled in front of him, casually crossed at the ankles, he looked as relaxed as could be, the amiable host settling down for a martini with his weekend houseguests.
Sinclair’s beard was full and untrimmed; it appeared to be the result of several months’ growth, which made perfect sense. He had gotten a lot of sun, probably swimming and boating on the lake, and his face looked tough and leathery, the skin of an old mariner.
“I had a feeling you’d find me here,” he said. “But not this quickly. Then Pierre La Fontaine called me a few hours ago and told me a couple had been asking questions in St.-Jerome about me and the house.”
Molly looked baffled, so he explained: “Pierre’s the keeper of the records, the mayor of Lac Tremblant, the chief of police, and the general chief factotum. He’s also the caretaker for a number of summer residents. An old and trusted friend of mine. He’s looked after this house for quite some time now-years, in fact. Back in the fifties he arranged the sale of this place-quite cleverly, I must say-so that it passed out of Grandma Hale’s hands and basically disappeared, its ownership tangled and impossible to trace.