A Wall of White by Jennifer Woodlief

Author:Jennifer Woodlief
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

THIRTEEN

What flies without wings, strikes without hand, and sees without eyes? The avalanche-beast!

Old German folk riddle, reflecting the belief that avalanches were a product of witchcraft

Around the time the vacationing families had reshuffled the list of people hiking up to the resort that afternoon, Jake had called Pam from the Summit Terminal Building to tell her he wasn’t going to make it home for awhile. Afterward he hung out in the patrol room for a few minutes talking to Billy Patterson, the groomer who ran the graveyard shift and Jake’s devoted fishing buddy. Late March to early April was spawning season for the rainbow trout in Lake Tahoe, and it was a tradition for Jake and Billy to go fishing together off a pier in Tahoe Pines, pumping up night crawlers with syringes full of air to make them float a foot or two off the bottom. The two of them had been out fishing in blizzards at this time of year before—they simply tipped their aluminum boat over some pilings and cast out from beneath it. Storm of the century or not, Jake and Billy made plans to go fishing the following morning. Just before 3:30 they walked out of the Summit Terminal Building together, Billy heading over to the grooming office in the lodge and Jake to the vehicle maintenance shed to fill a snowmobile up with gas.

While awaiting word that the control team was in place at Squaw, Jake brought the snowmobile out to the parking lot, passing Anna and Frank on his way. He and Anna made eye contact, acknowledging each other with a brief nod, and then Jake rode off.

Anna could usually walk from her house up to the resort in about 20 minutes, but in the storm it had taken her and Frank almost an hour to make it on skis. The route was basically all an uphill slant, and they pushed themselves to ski the whole time. They were both runners, often taking five-mile runs together, used to that level of exertion. Along the way, Anna had worked up such a sweat that she shed both her hat and her mittens, giving them to Frank to store in his backpack. By the time they reached the parking lot, they were messing around, being dopey with each other, feeling good about having made it.

Tom Mosher, the head of lodge maintenance, was also in the parking lot at that time, over at the west edge, trying to attach a chain to his snowbound car so he could tow it to a plowed section of the lot. Meanwhile, Marty Marchese, the parking lot supervisor who Bernie had considered sending to Squaw in Thom Orsi’s place, was out trolling for coworkers to take a coffee break with him. He persuaded Tom to stop trying to extricate his car and they both went into the lodge. Once inside, Marty spied David Scott, another maintenance worker, removing snow from the upper sundeck of the lodge with a small Bobcat front-end loader.

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