“Tell me about yourself,” Logan said. “Are you married?”
“Yes. I’ve got two kids, Franklin, twelve, and Hannah, nine.”
Logan smiled inwardly. Even the children were named after philosophers.
“How about you?” Jessup asked.
“I was.”
“Divorced?”
Logan shook his head. “She died several years ago.”
“Oh. God. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” Logan nodded at his friend’s uniform. “I should have guessed you’d end up a ranger. Far from the madding crowd and all that. Did you join right out of Yale?”
“No.” Jessup removed his hat, placed it on the sofa between them. “I bummed around the world for a year or two — India, Tibet, Burma, Brazil, Nepal. Hiked through a lot of forests, climbed a lot of mountains. Did a lot of reading, did a lot of thinking. Then I came home. I grew up about fifty miles from here, you know, in Plattsburgh. I knew the Adirondacks pretty well from half a dozen summers spent at camp on Tupper Lake. So I joined the forest rangers.” He gave a funny, self-deprecating smile.
“And you’ve risen to lieutenant, or so I hear.”
Jessup laughed. “Sounds more important than it is. Actually, I’m about halfway up the totem pole. Technically, I’m supervisor for Zone Five-A of Region Five. I’ve got six rangers reporting to me.” He paused. “I can guess what you’re thinking. I should have been a captain by now. I mean, it’s been over fifteen years. Oh, I’ve had the opportunity. But I just don’t want to sit behind a desk. We live outside Saranac Lake, part of my jurisdiction. Built the place myself. You don’t need a lot of money to live well here, and Suzanne and the kids are happy.”
Logan nodded. Sounded like the self-reliant, self-directed Jessup he remembered.
He knew his old friend had something on his mind — the fact that he’d come by twice today to see him said as much. Logan had a gift for empathy — he had an instinct that, when he chose to use it, let him sense, to a greater or lesser degree, the emotions and thoughts of the person he was with. But he chose not to employ it now; Jessup would, he knew, get around to it when he was ready.
Instead, he took another sip of his drink. “How did we ever become friends, anyway? I don’t recall.”
“We were rivals before we were friends. Anne Brannigan — remember her?”
“No. Yes. She had a moon and star stitched on her backpack and was a vegan even before the term was invented.”
Jessup laughed again. “That’s right.” He sipped his drink. “So you stayed at Yale.”
“Got my doctorate at Magdalen College, Oxford. Spent a few years of my own wandering the world, but not places as exotic as Nepal or Burma — mostly old libraries, monasteries, and the churches of England and the Continent. Then I came back to teach a colloquium on the Black Death when the Yale professor who’d been planning to give it fell ill.” He shrugged. “Never left.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard,” Jessup said, in a quiet voice.
“You’re referring to my, ah, avocation.”
Jessup nodded.
“The strange one. The one that tends to get my picture in the papers now and then.”
Jessup nodded again. “You were doing that even back at Yale. I remember our senior year, when you proved how that ghost that supposedly haunted Saybrook was just a secret tradition, handed down from one graduating student and entrusted to another.” He paused. “I read that profile of you in People a year or two ago.”
“Terrible photo. Made me look fat.”
“And you call yourself an…?”
“Enigmalogist. Somebody else came up with the term, actually, but it seems to have stuck.”
“I remember how the article described it. It said you study phenomena beyond the bounds of regular science: investigate the strange and inexplicable, prove things most people would label occult or supernatural.”
“Or disprove them — as with the Saybrook ghost.”
“Right.” Jessup hesitated a moment, seemed to come to some kind of decision. “Look, Jeremy — you’ve probably guessed my stopping by isn’t just to renew an old acquaintance.”
“Although it’s nice to see you again, the thought had occurred to me.”
“Well, do you mind if I share something with you? Between ourselves — for the time being, anyway.”
“Of course.”
Jessup shook the ice in his empty glass. “Can I get a dividend first?”
“How remiss of me.” Taking the glass into the kitchen, Logan splashed some more vodka into it and gave it back to Jessup. The ranger took a sip, paused a moment, looked around the room, and then — after taking a deep breath — started to talk.
5
“Over the last three months,” Jessup began, “two hikers — backpackers — have been killed not far from here.”
Logan waited, listening.
“There are a lot of similarities between the two killings. Both men were young and extremely fit, knowledgeable about forestry issues and the park. And they were both members of the Adirondack ‘Forty-Sixers.’ ”
Logan nodded his understanding. This was the group whose membership was limited to those who had climbed all forty-six Adirondack peaks over four thousand feet. The requirements included both mountains with blazed trails and the trailless peaks, and, as he recalled, at least one winter ascent. He and Kit had once, years back, entertained hopes of joining the elite club — before reality intervened.
“Both were savagely mauled to death,” Jessup went on. “Both were killed in roughly the same remote location — and both, as it happens, during a full moon.”
“What remote location, exactly?”
“West of the Five Ponds Wilderness.” Jessup paused a moment, and night sounds from the open window — the rustle of leaves picked up by a stray gust of wind, the hoot of an owl — filled the silence.
“These hard-core backpackers are a breed apart,” Jessup said. “No achievement, no matter how hard-won, is ever enough. So once they’ve bagged all forty-six peaks, some of them go on to score other bragging rights. Three mountains seem to be favorite.” He pulled a leatherbound journal from a breast pocket, leafed through it, studied a page for a moment. “Avalanche Mountain, number sixty-three — close to higher and more famous mountains and an obvious choice. North River Mountain, number fifty-six, just shy of four thousand feet and coveted because the official state surveyor, Ebenezer Emmons, climbed it immediately before his famous 1836 ascent of Whiteface Mountain. But the most coveted prize is Desolation Mountain. At only thirty-two hundred feet, it’s not even in the top hundred.” He replaced the journal. “But its claim to fame, and what makes it such an attractive target, is its remoteness. The Desolation Lake area is probably the wildest and most isolated section of the entire park — even more so than the Silver Lake Wilderness or Wilcox Lake. Not only that, but the terrain there is terrible for hiking — no access roads and few motorized lakes, covered with blowdowns, outwash bogs, all sorts of other hazardous conditions. Unless you know what you’re doing, and you’re incredibly motivated, it’s almost impossible to reach. The climb itself is the easy part.” He laughed almost bitterly, shook his head. “That’s why it’s known among the ADK climbing elite as ‘heartbreak forty-seven.’ ”
As quickly as it came, the laugh died in Jessup’s throat. “Both hikers were found in the vicinity of the mountain. As you can imagine, there’s not a lot of traffic through there, and by the time the bodies were discovered each was in an advanced state of decomposition. As a result, the autopsies were somewhat inconclusive, but given the violence inflicted on the corpses, the verdict in both was mauling by a rogue bear.”