The wind caught at his red hair as he drove along. The sun beat down on his head and shoulders. It was a good day, and he was beginning to feel in a slightly holiday mood, almost forgetting why he was driving to upstate New York. He remembered again when he passed Castleview Prison. He could look across the River Harb into his own state, and there he could see the gray walls of the prison merging with the sheer face of the cliff that dropped to the river’s edge below. Directly opposite, almost on the road he drove, was the castle from which the prison derived its name. The castle had allegedly been built by a Dutch patroom in the days of early settlement. It stared across the river and into the next state, providing an excellent view of the prison walls. And from the prison, the castle could be seen, and so it was called Castleview. He looked at the prison now with only passing interest. It would one day, in the not too distant future, become an integral part of his life, but he did not know that now, and he would not know it until long after the Kramer case had been solved.
On that July morning it only reminded him of crime and punishment, and it brought his thoughts back to the reason for his trip to the Adirondacks. When he stopped for lunch that afternoon, his mind began to wander because, alas, he fell in love.
The girl with whom he fell in love was a waitress.
She wore a white dress and a white cap on her clipped blond hair. She came to his table, and she smiled, and the smile knocked him clear back against the wall.
“Good afternoon, sir,” she said. When he heard her voice, he was hopelessly gone. “Would you care to see a menu?”
“I have a better idea,” Hawes said.
“What’s that?”
“Go back and change into your street clothes. Show me the best restaurant in town, and I’ll buy you lunch there.”
The girl looked at him with a half-amused, half-shocked expression on her face. “I’ve heard of speed demons,” she said, “but you just broke the sound barrier.”
“Life is sweet and short,” Hawes said.
“And you’re getting old,” the girl replied. “Even your hair’s turning white.”
“What do you say?”
“I say I don’t even know your name. I say I couldn’t possibly have lunch with you because I don’t get off until I’m relieved at four. I also say you’re from the city.”
“I am.” Hawes paused. “How’d you know?”
“I’m from the city myself. Majesta.”
“That’s a nice section.”
“It’s fine. Especially when you compare it to this hick village.”
“You here for the summer?”
“Yes. I’m going back to college in the fall. I’m a senior.”
“Have lunch with me,” Hawes said.
“What’s your name?”
“Cotton.”
“Your first name, I mean.”
“That’s it.”
The girl grinned. “Like Cotton Mather?”
“Exactly. Only it’s Cotton Hawes.”
“I’ve never had lunch with a man named Cotton,” the girl said.
“Go tell your boss you have a terrible headache. I’m the only customer in the place, anyway. He won’t miss either of us.”
The girl considered this a moment. “Then what’ll I do the rest of the afternoon?” she asked. “Working helps me kill the time. You can go crazy in this miserable village.”
Hawes smiled. “We’ll figure something out,” he said.
The girl’s name was Polly. She was an anthropology major, and she hoped to go on for her master’s after graduation and then for her doctorate. She wanted to go to Yucatán, she said, to study the Mayan Indians and learn all about the feathered serpent. Hawes learned all this during lunch. She had taken him to a restaurant in the next town, a restaurant that jutted out over a pine-shrouded lake, cantilevering over the waters below. When he told Polly he was a cop, she didn’t believe him, and so he showed her his gun. Polly’s blue eyes opened wide. Her wonderful mouth curved into a long O. She was a deceptively slender girl with a well-rounded bosom and wide hips. She walked with the angular sveltness of a model.
When they finished lunch, there wasn’t much to do in town, and so they had a couple of drinks. The couple of drinks weren’t sufficient on a day that was turning hot, and so they had several more. There was a juke box in the lounge off the restaurant, and so they danced. The afternoon was still very young and a good movie was playing in the local theater, and so they went to see it. And then, because it was time for dinner when they once more came into the daylight, they ate again.
There was a long evening ahead.
Polly lived in a two-room cottage near the restaurant for which she worked. The cottage had a record player and whisky, and so they went there after dinner.
Polly lived alone in the cottage. Polly was a very pretty blond girl with blue eyes, deceptively slender with a well-rounded bosom and wide hips. Polly was an anthropology major who wanted to go to Yucatán. Polly was a city girl who was bored to tears with the village and tickled to death she had met this entertaining stranger with a white streak in his hair and a name like Cotton.
She fell in love with him a little bit, too.
She lived alone in the cottage.
And so to bed.
10.
FROM THE SHORES of the lake and the entrance to Kukabonga Lodge, you could see the green-backed humps of the mountains and the clear blue of the sky beyond. The lodge was small, built of logs that seemed a part of the surrounding greenery. A double flight of wooden steps rose from the flat rock almost at the lake’s edge, rose in tentlike ascent to the front door of the lodge. The front door was a Dutch door, the top half open now as Hawes mounted the stairs. He mounted the stairs wearily and almost dejectedly. He had already checked half a dozen of the lodges scattered through the mountains, doggedly working his way north with Griffins as his starting point. None of the lodge owners remembered a man named Sy Kramer. Most of them admitted that the real hunters didn’t come up until the end of October, when the deer season started. September wasn’t such a good time. One lodge owner admitted his place was full of what he called “cheater hunters” during the early part of September. These, he said, were men who came up with girls after telling their wives they were off to the wilds to hunt.
Hawes was disappointed. The country was lovely, but he had not come up here to admire the scenery. Besides, he was no longer in love and he was becoming rather bored with the continuous slope of the land, the brazen cloudless blue of the sky, the constant chatter of birds and insects. He almost wished he were back in the 87th, where a man couldn’t see the sky for the tenements.
It grows on you, he thought. It’s a hairy bastard, but you get to love it.