Now I was staring at her, as if she were wrong to hold out on me. She relented, dropping her eyes and muttering, “No. I suppose you’re right.”
“So, we’re talking similar events, then,” I suggested. “Someone screwing with the equipment.”
She passed a hand across her mouth and pulled at her chin. “Looks that way. But I’ll fire you if you repeat it.”
“I’m here to help,” I said truthfully. “Not add to your problems. Was the water main sabotaged?”
“I’ll be going onto the mountain when it gets lighter to find out. It’s pretty hard now to tell exactly what happened, but I think so. Lines usually break at junctures: a valve, a Y, a coupling. This one was midline, just where the spillage could take out the top of an entire trail. We’ll have to close it till we can recondition the surface. That’ll cost us a bundle in expenses and lost revenues both. Insurance only covers so much.”
I tried the same line Mike the mechanic had used on me earlier.“Makes sense if the TPL had something to do with it-hits you in your pocketbook while making an issue of water.”
She sighed. “Yeah. I thought about that. I’m not sure I buy it, though. Environmentalists are pretty vocal in Vermont, and God knows they have a lot of power. But that also means they’ve never had to turn violent to get their way. Why do it now? We jumped through all the regulatory hoops, and McNally is still putting up with their crap and holding meetings with them. I know the TPL said we lied to get those permits, but that’s a common complaint. We’re always accused of being in bed with the politicians… Don’t I wish.”
“You’re not going to tell me Tucker Peak volunteered every stat they had available, are you? Including the ones suggesting this water project wasn’t such a good idea?”
Her face clouded with anger. “We’re not the ones who make this a damn near-impossible process. TPL cooks the numbers and lobbies, too. You better believe it. You work for these people or something? Why’re you so goddamn interested?”
I cynically used my current heroic stature. “Maybe because I stopped a woman from bleeding to death. That makes the stakes pretty high.”
Linda Bettina stood up, her coffee forgotten in the wake of resurgent frustration. “Look, Max, I don’t have the answers you want. I don’t know who did what or why. All I know is that a business I used to love is looking more like a used-car lot and I can’t do anything about it. That doesn’t make us the devil incarnate, and it doesn’t mean the TPLs of the world automatically walk on water. It’s a screwed-up world filled with grubby people gouging out a place for themselves, and sometimes they’ll do it at any cost. If that makes me one of the bad guys in your book, then so be it. I’m just trying to do what they pay me to do the best way I know how.”
I also stood and laid a hand on her shoulder. “I wasn’t blaming you, Linda. You have the best rep of anyone here, better than Phil McNally’s. Even Bucky admits you’re pretty good-for a girl.”
She shook her head with a disgusted but genuine smile and took hold of the doorknob, preparing to return to work. “He’s such a woodchuck. I doubt he’d say that about me right now, shooting my mouth off to a total stranger. You never did tell me if you’re the one asking all those questions.”
I figured I owed her that much. “I’m not. It’s a private detective. He asked me a few things, too. I got the feeling he wasn’t getting anywhere fast.”
She absorbed that for a few seconds and then smiled again, opening the door. “Crazy business, Max, getting worse fast. We’re a huge, dysfunctional family, everybody dependent on Big Daddy, only he’s bipolar and hiring private eyes to investigate himself. I’d start looking for another job, if I were you. Something safer, maybe-like mine-sweeping.”
Later that day, after a few hours’ sleep, I was fitting hardwood panels into the side of the new information booth on the base lodge’s main floor-trying not to be stepped on by the lead-booted, canary-colored skiers who were stomping around in a seemingly aimless herd-when Sammie crouched beside me, pretending to adjust her boot buckle. “You got Richie from eight o’clock. He’ll be fixing himself up at the dorm for his nightly routine at the club. That work for you?”
“Yup.”
She moved on and left me amid the chattering, fashion-conscious crowd. The marketing department had worked overtime once more, stressing the triviality of the pipeline “leak,” as they were calling it, and the speed with which the closed trail would reopen. Also, the TPL protesters had all but faded from view (since McNally and their leaders were meeting behind closed doors) and the continuing snowfall had made the yellow snow but a recent memory, so Tucker Peak, for all its troubles, was for the moment looking no different from hundreds of other resorts just like it.
Nevertheless, with Bettina’s comment about a dysfunctional family fresh in my mind, I watched the resort’s guests with new insight. If Tucker Peak’s management was Big Daddy, confused and struggling to meet a payroll, cater to the public, and make a profit, then these people with cell phones, fancy clothes, and ever higher expectations were the symbiotic flip side of that equation: a needy, fickle source of revenue as unreliable in its loyalty as management was to its own employees. I was beginning to understand both the nostalgia and the frustration of Bettina, Bucky Arsenault, and the others I’d overheard lamenting the fate of the ski business in Vermont. They were caught between two complex forces, neither one of which they felt they could control any longer, but which, back when they were young and naïve, they had helped create. I sympathized with their befuddlement.
Because of my nap, I wrapped up work a little later than usual, grabbed a sandwich from the kitchen, and went to the dorm to change into clothes more befitting a nightclub.
Shortly before eight I stood by my second-floor window and waited for Richie Lane to appear crossing the parking lot from the base lodge-discreetly followed by Sammie-before going downstairs to take over the surveillance.
Sammie had been right about Lane’s attention to personal hygiene, which, given his plans for the evening, I supposed was a good thing. Better a slicked-hair Romeo smelling excessively of aftershave than my roommate Fred, if you were heading for a bar in search of company.
Nevertheless, it took him an hour and fifteen minutes before he reappeared in the hallway outside his room, shot his cuffs from under the sleeves of his fashionable parka, patted his hair gently and affectionately with both palms, and headed toward the nightclub.
The nightclub, predictably called the Tuckaway, was located across the access road from the base lodge, next to a three-tier garage, and at the foot of the road Willy and I had taken to reach William Manning’s condo. It was one story, again faux-Swiss in style but with no windows, and was one of the resort’s newer, and therefore less tattered, additions.
It was also the only clearly designated outlet for after-ski excesses, barring the base lodge’s conversation-pit-with-fireplace next to the cafeteria, which closed at ten in any case. The employees had the Butte, and the landed gentry had access to the condo party circuit, but for everyone else the Tuckaway was it.
It was an enormous, sprawling building. Even on slow days, after all, the mountain averaged several thousand skiers. Assuming most of them spread out across the countryside after hours to surrounding motels, inns, and village bars, that still left a standard crowd of hundreds to fill the Tuckaway.
In an effort to avoid the low-ceilinged airplane hangar look, the nightclub was divided into different levels and sections for light eating, heavy drinking, dancing, staring into space, and general conversation, which, given the ear-splitting noise, amounted to shouting, pantomime, and lip reading combined.
It was a scene, almost tribal in nature, that had never appealed to me, more given as I was, even as a child, to solitude, quiet, and reading.