Logan opened his mouth to call out through the thick barricade, only to find that his voice had left him. He swallowed, licked his lips, tried again. “Hello,” he called, in little more than a croak. He cleared his throat. “Hello!” he said more loudly. “My name is Logan. I wonder if I could talk to you for just a minute.”
Nothing. The compound beyond the fortification of twigs and baling wire was as silent as the surrounding forest.
Now Logan stepped back to look past and over the wall. Beyond it and to the right a mountain rose steeply, fringed heavily in dense pines. The upper section of a single structure was visible on its flanks, over the top of the walclass="underline" a very large, gambrel-roofed building, covered in rude, lichen-covered shingles. At this distance, it appeared to be in an advanced state of decay. He could see two ranks of windows, huddled together under the broadly hipped roof. Candles glimmered in the lower of the two ranks, their lights distorted by ancient panes of glass. The upper windows were shuttered and dark. Whatever other structures lay within, they were evidently on lower ground, hidden by the bizarre wall of fitted twigs.
It was growing even darker under the forest canopy; soon it would be too dark to see. Logan approached the fortification again, moving slowly along it, trying to find an aperture through which he could see what lay beyond. Suddenly he found one: it was near the center of the clearing, and had obviously been made intentionally — this was clear by the careful way the twigs surrounding it had been whittled away. The hole was at eye level and cone shaped, wider on the inside than it was on the outside. As Logan looked through it — making out in the briefest of glimpses a number of decrepit outbuildings, a barn of the most ancient appearance imaginable, a fenced area for crops, and what appeared to be a large refuse pile to one side — he realized that it must have been made for the residents to look out.
Even as he stared, his empathetic instincts told him, once again, something on the far side of that enclosure was strange — very strange.
At that same moment, the aperture was abruptly filled with the barrel of a gun, large-bored and rusted. “You git away now,” came a harsh, deep voice from the far side of the wall.
Logan swallowed. “I don’t mean to trespass,” he said. “I just wanted to know if I could ask you a few—”
He went silent at the sound of a shell being ratcheted into the chamber. “Git off our land,” the uncouth voice said. “Or the last thing you’ll be seeing on this earth is the muzzle of this here goddamn shotgun.”
Logan needed no further persuasion. Without another word, he backed out of the clearing and down the rutted, muddy path. Then he turned around, walked quickly to his car, scrambled in over the hood, and made his way in reverse down the hellish, branch-choked lane and onto the safety of State Route 3A.
8
Logan pulled up in front of Jessup’s small, tidy wood-frame home at a few minutes after seven. It was pleasantly situated on a small pond, just a mile outside the lively, tourist-friendly town of Saranac Lake. The setting felt worlds away from Pike Hollow, with its sense of remote desolation amid an unending universe of dark malignant forest.
The house was decorated as Logan had expected: simple, Craftsman-style furniture; framed landscapes by local painters; a coffee table littered with the odd dichotomy of philosophical journals and magazines devoted to outdoor living. Over an excellent dinner of boeuf bourguignon and scalloped potatoes with raclette, he became acquainted with Jessup’s pair of towheaded children and Suzanne, a lovely woman with an acerbic wit that Logan hadn’t expected. Before marrying Jessup, she had attended Radcliffe, then taught at the Friends Seminary, the old, prestigious private school in Manhattan. Academically, she was clearly a good match for his old friend the philosopher-cum-ranger, and though Logan privately wondered if she found enough to keep her intellectually stimulated in this sleepy backwoods community, she apparently had her hands full homeschooling their kids as well as doing volunteer tutoring of disadvantaged children around the area.
Dinner finished, Logan declined a slice of red velvet cake and, coffee cup in hand, followed Jessup out onto the front porch, where they sat in the inevitable Adirondack chairs and looked out over the pond. The windows threw cheerful yellow stripes of light out across the lawn, and the night was alive with the drone of insects. A waxing moon, almost full, shed a pale illumination over the surrounding forest.
Jessup took a sip of coffee, then set the cup down on the broad arm of his chair. “So,” he said. “What did you think of Pike Hollow?”
“Wouldn’t be my first choice to retire to.”
Jessup smiled a little wryly. “Let me guess. The people you spoke with didn’t agree with the official conclusion that we’re dealing with a rogue bear.”
“No. They had their own ideas about the responsible party.”
“Let me guess once again — the Blakeney clan.”
“That’s right. I went to pay a visit on them before heading back. Got a twelve-gauge in the face for my trouble.”
“I wish you hadn’t gone there. You’re lucky that’s all you got.” Jessup was silent for a moment. “It’s my experience there’s a short list of reasons why people live within the park. The first is that they were born here, it’s all they know, and they have no desire or aspiration to move beyond it. The second is the tourist who comes here, falls in love, and either retires to the area or opens a shop or B and B or the like. Then there’s the third reason. It’s the person who doesn’t feel he fits in today’s society; that he is out of place, walking through life half asleep. People like that are drawn to the Adirondacks because, in Thoreau’s words, they want to live deliberately, to ‘front only the essential facts of life.’ ”
“ ‘The world is too much with us,’ ” Logan quoted. “ ‘Little we see in Nature that is ours.’ ”
“And Wordsworth had the right idea. But in any case, some people in this third group do tend to be a little crazy. Face it: one reason to live deep in the woods, away from other people, would be defective socialization. So, yes, as a ranger I’ve heard of many odd people living off by themselves in various degrees of rustication. Such people tend to attract speculation and rumor — it’s only natural.” He took a sip of his coffee. “But the Blakeneys are a special case.”
Logan remained silent, letting his old friend talk.
“I’ve known about them for years, of course, but it wasn’t until after the death of the second backpacker that I began actively looking into their history. People in Pike Hollow say they’ve always been there, and the official records show nothing to the contrary: their compound had already been in place for decades, at least, before the park’s founding in 1885. All the park officials leave them alone, perhaps fearing that a confrontation would lead to some Waco-like tragedy. Their compound has never been officially surveyed, but that entire section of woods southwest of Pike Hollow has been grandfathered to the clan. No assessment has ever been made or taxes levied.”
“I see.”
“Of course, the Pike Hollow residents view the Blakeneys with the most suspicion, living as close to them as they do. There have been reports that others have had some limited success in getting acquainted. But there is no doubt they are an inbred, secretive, and most likely paranoid extended family, whose isolation over so many years has led to a warped view of the outside world.” Jessup hesitated a moment before continuing. “Did any of the Pike Hollow people you spoke to talk of, ah, specifics?”