“Tell me about it,” I sighed. “I tried to do some fancy footwork around that and fell all over my feet. How’d the other suspects do, fielding it?”
She lifted one eyebrow for a moment. “A couple of them, it really threw. Specifically, Tom and Pete. Tom actually broke character for a moment and said he didn’t know anything about that.”
“Hmmm. How about the questioners?”
“I’ve got the names of a few intense types written down in my little notebook.”
“Good. Let’s go back to the room; I want to try to call Rath again.”
“Okay. Then some lunch, and then you have to give a little talk, right?”
“Right.”
“And then maybe we can bust out of this joint.”
“I don’t think so. I’m supposed to be on a panel after that, filling in for the missing Mr. Rath.”
“No you aren’t,” she said, with a certain glee. “Tom told me to tell you his private-eye panel won’t be till tomorrow afternoon; Curt’s own talk has been moved up in its place. So it’s official. We’re going over the wall, pal.”
I sat up; sought to be a man despite my nebbish exterior. “Oh yeah? You’re not going to drag me along on some damn nature hike, are you?”
“I most certainly am.”
“Jill, you disappoint me. What was the first thing the pioneers did when they got to the wilderness?”
“I know, I know. They built a cabin and went inside. You’ve told me a million times. But I’m not standing for being cooped up all afternoon with these mystery maniacs and puzzle paranoids — not when there’s a big beautiful outdoors waiting for us out there!”
“Okay. But you owe me one.”
She looped her arm in mine and batted her cornflower blues. “Sure. You can collect right now, back in the room.”
“Before lunch?”
“Why not? But you have to promise me one thing.”
“And what’s that?”
“You’ll leave the little mustache on...”
10
The Mohonk Hiker’s Map listed Sky Top as a “moderate walk” (as opposed to those walks labelled “short and easy” or “strenuous”). If this was a moderate walk, Mussolini was a benevolent dictator.
Of course, just on general principles, I hate the Great Out-of-Doors. I grew up on a farm, and from my early childhood swore I would one day live in the city — Port City, as it turned out, but that counts, technically at least. Will Rogers said he never met a man he didn’t like; I never milked a cow I liked.
The last period of my life during which I spent an inordinate amount of time in the Great Out-of-Doors was a place called Vietnam, where roughing it meant something other than a Winnebago and a six-pack of Bud. Camping trips don’t appeal much to those of us whose boondockers got soggy in a rice paddy. I swore to myself if I ever got back on good old dry American soil I’d spend as much time as possible indoors. Or, as I like to put it, the Great Indoors.
If this seems irrational and rambling, well, so was my state of mind as I climbed with the lovely Jill Forrest — whose very name suggests a kinship to trees, and she can have them — making our way up a seemingly ever-narrowing path with the mountaintop our goal.
Why does one climb such a path? To get to the top. And what does one do once one gets there? One hikes back to the bottom. Ask me why I do not want to climb a mountain and I will tell you simply: because it’s there.
“Quit grumbling,” she said, a few steps ahead of me but not, unfortunately for her, out of earshot. Her rear end looked cute in the black ski pants, which matched her black ski jacket, which matched her black-and-white stocking cap.
“I hate this,” I said. My jacket wasn’t wintry enough and, even with the sweater on underneath it, I was cold. The path, which had begun deceptively wide, now left barely room for two people; my legs ached from walking on this bed of snow-dusted pine needles and twigs and rocks.
“No kidding.”
“Let’s turn back. The snow’s really coming down.”
And it was. Not a blizzard, but it had been lightly snowing all day, and it did seem to be picking up.
“Sissy,” she said.
“No, really,” I said. “There’s some ice in it. If it keeps at it, we could have a rough time getting back down, once we get up. By rough I mean slippery.”
And, I should point out, that while at our left was a forest not unlike Jill’s last name, at our right were a few rocks and a whole lot of drop-off. Of the plummeting-to-the-earth-flailing-your-arms-and-legs-and-screaming-holy-hell-all-the-way-down variety.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, stepping on one of the roots that served as a step and slipping just a little, despite her boots. I caught her, even though I was wearing Hush Puppies, and she looked back at me and, with friendly malice, stuck out her tongue. She got snow on it.
“Let’s go back,” I said.
“No! We’ll rest a minute.”
Well, I needed the rest — we were probably halfway up this goddamn glandular-case hill, and I had shin splints and sore calves — but, as I pointed out to her, pausing to rest would only allow the snow to gain on us.
“Coward,” she said, and veered off from the path to the right — you remember the right: a sheer drop-off to nothingness? — across some boulders to a gazebo, where she plopped her pretty butt down on the rough wooden bench and waited for me to develop the cojones to join her.
I did, finally, even if my cojones hadn’t yet developed, and if they hadn’t by my age they were unlikely to, and we sat and squinted down at a cold, gray, but eerily beautiful vista that included the blue-gray expanse of frozen Mohonk Lake and the oversize Victorian dollhouse that was the hotel. Mountain house.
“Takes your breath away,” she said.
“So does a seven-hundred-foot fall.”
She pursed her lips in a smirk. “You’re so romantic.”
“I’m so cold. Let’s press on.”
We both slipped a little on the boulders, heading back for the path, where I pointed out the snow was undisturbed.
“So?” she asked, taking the lead again.
“So, we’re the only ones today foolhardly enough to make this trek, in the snow, in the cold.”
She glanced back. “That’s because the hotel is filled with crazy people. They don’t want to enjoy the scenery. They don’t want to drink in God’s grandeur.”
“You can’t drink it if it’s frozen.”
“They,” she continued, ignoring me, not glancing back anymore, “would rather stay inside and try to solve some phony mystery.”
I didn’t quite understand the appeal of that, either, but I didn’t admit it to Jill; I had enjoyed playing a suspect, but playing detective — if the crime wasn’t real, anyway — held no fascination for me.
“They,” she continued to continue, “would rather sit in a drafty hall and listen to some pompous windbag talk about his theories on mystery writing.”
“Low blow!” I said.
“You wish,” she said. And now she glanced back, and her smile would’ve been impish, if I were the kind of writer to use a word like impish.
I caught up to her; there was just room enough on the snowy path to walk two abreast. Depending on the size of the breasts.
“I thought my little talk went pretty well,” I said, in a mild pout.
She smiled warmly, despite the cold. “So did I, really. You were cute as lace pants.”
“That’s a Raymond Chandler line.”