Chapter Four
“Stacy isn’t with you this morning?” Nina didn’t even try to disguise her curiosity, questioning Connor as soon as he entered ski patrol headquarters Thursday morning.
“Who’s Stacy?” Brian asked. He dropped into a folding chair, and Daisy sat beside him, her chin resting on his knee.
“Stacy is an ‘old friend’ of Connor’s who was hanging out with him yesterday,” Nina said. “A very pretty old friend.”
“Cool.” Brian patted Daisy’s side. “I noticed the safety fencing at the bottom of Lift Ten is down,” he said. “It’s fallen over into the run. Someone’s going to get tangled up in it if we don’t fix it.”
“You can take care of that first thing,” Connor said. “Do you need some help?”
“Nah. If I have to, I’ll get one of the lifties to give me a hand.”
Connor picked up the clipboard from his desk and scanned the list of notes he had made before leaving yesterday evening.
More patrollers and dogs filed in until the room was full, men and women occupying every chair and ranged along the walls, dogs taking up most of the rest of the floor space.
Connor glanced at the clock. “Looks like everybody is here, so we’ll get started,” he said.
The door opened again, and Stacy slipped in, a slim figure dressed in all black again, down to her black ski boots and black helmet. Every head in the room swiveled toward her. “Don’t let me interrupt,” she said, staying by the door.
“We’re about to start our morning meeting,” Connor said.
“Go ahead.” She lowered herself to the floor and sat. “You won’t even know I’m here.”
He wanted to tell her to leave, that this was none of her business, but he wouldn’t bet against her arguing with him, attracting even more attention he didn’t want.
He consulted his list again. “Lily, I want you and Chase patrolling the Glades this morning. Nina, you and Brian are at Buttermilk Basin. Anders, you and Raz take the runs that dump into Lift Six. Carson and David, you’re at Lift Ten. I’ll take Top of the Mark.”
“Chase isn’t here yet,” Lily said.
The door burst open, letting in a flurry of snow, and patroller Chase Sergeant stumbled in, arms full of gear.
“Sorry I’m late,” he muttered and dropped his belongings on a bench in the corner.
A sharp-featured young man with spiky black hair, he had a reputation as a dependable, if sometimes anxious patroller.
He sat and removed his hiking boots, then reached for his ski pants.
“While Chase finishes dressing, I’ll go over the duty charts,” Connor said.
He rattled off a list of tasks to be seen to, like replacing the downed snow fencing and checking the ropes marking out-of-bound areas, as well as a list of special groups expected at the resort that day, from a group of tourists from Mexico to local ski clubs.
He was wrapping up when he was interrupted by swearing from Chase. Everyone looked to the bench.
Chase sat with one foot poised above his ski boot, something white and wet dripping from his sock. “Someone filled my boots with shaving cream,” he said.
Nina was the first to laugh, but the others soon followed suit. Connor had a hard time holding back his own mirth.
“It’s not funny!” Chase said and turned the boot upside down.
“Don’t let it drip on the floor!” Nina protested. She grabbed a T-shirt from the corner of Connor’s desk and launched it at Chase. “Clean up your mess.”
“Which one of you did this?” he demanded as he wiped the floor.
“Where were your boots?” Brian asked. “You carried them in with you just now, right?”
“I had my hands full of gear on the way to my car yesterday, so Cerise volunteered to keep them in the lift tech’s locker room overnight. I picked them up from there this morning.” Realization dawned. “You think the lifties did this?”
“Didn’t you put a bag of plastic spiders in Cerise’s locker last week?” Lily asked.
Chase made a face. “She loved them. She told me so.”
“Maybe she thinks you love shaving cream,” Renee said.
He looked down at his dripping boots. “This is going to take forever to clean up.”
“Look at it this way,” Connor said. “At least now they’re going to smell fresher than they ever have.” He looked to the others. “Anything else I’ve forgotten?”
Anders’s hand went up. “Any news on the stolen cast boosters?” he said.
Connor glanced at Stacy, who had her head down, brushing something from her knee. Everything about her posture said, Pretend I’m not even here.
He turned back to the group. “I haven’t heard anything. If any of you know anything, even if it’s just a rumor, let me or Doug know.”
“Does this have anything to do with the people who are protesting the resort expansion?” Nina asked.
“Has someone said something to make you think that?” Connor asked.
“No, but there are people who are pretty upset about it,” she said. “Maybe they’ve decided to go from chaining lift chairs together to blowing things up.”
Several of the patrollers exchanged worried looks.
“Again, if you hear anything, speak up,” Connor said. “And be on the lookout for anyone acting oddly or in places they aren’t supposed to be.”
“If I see anyone with a pocket full of cast boosters, I’ll be sure to let you know,” Raz, a tall redhead, said, garnering nervous laughter from her fellow patrollers.
Stacy stood. “I’ll just wait for you outside, Connor.”
“Little late for that,” Brian said as the door closed behind her.
“What are the local cops doing about the theft?” someone at the back of the room asked.
“They’ve called in the feds,” Connor said.
“You mean ATF?” Brian asked. “I’ll bet Doug is thrilled with the idea of a bunch of uniformed federal agents hanging around the place. Not a good look.”
“I haven’t seen anyone in uniform,” Chase said.
“Maybe they’re undercover,” someone else said.
“All of that is out of our hands,” Connor said. “All we can do is keep our eyes and ears open.” He set aside the clipboard he’d been holding and picked up his jacket. “Let’s get to work.”
The patrollers without dogs filed out, while the ones with dogs set about crating them for the morning. Nina paused beside Connor on her way out. “Stacy’s cute. How long have you known her?”
“A while.” He avoided looking at her. He wasn’t really good at subterfuge. “She’s just a friend. In town for a few days.”
She waited, as if expecting him to say more, but when he didn’t, she shrugged. “Well, enjoy her visit.”
Connor waited until everyone had left before he exited the patrol office.
Stacy was there, standing next to the ski rack. She had donned the helmet, the goggles pushed up to give a clear view of her brown eyes when she turned to look at him. “It doesn’t sound like any of your patrollers have heard anything useful,” she said.
“Hmm.” He knocked snow from his boots and clicked into his skis.
She laid her own skis beside his and clicked into the bindings. “Where are we headed?” she asked.
“I’m going to work,” he said.
“I’m going with you.” At his glare, she added, “I want to talk to you about the protest meeting I attended last night.”
“I don’t care about the meeting,” he said.
“But you should. It was very interesting.”
He said nothing but skied toward the lift, bypassing the half dozen skiers who had arrived early, waiting to board at 9:00 a.m. The liftie nodded as he skied to the line to wait for a chair. Stacy slid in beside him.
“I feel like a VIP,” she said as they settled into the chair. Connor didn’t bother lowering the safety bar, and she didn’t ask. Below them, the snow was a sea of white corduroy. “I guess you get first chair every morning, huh?” she asked.
“We do a sweep of the runs before they open, looking for any problems,” he said.
“Do you ever find any?”
“I once had to postpone opening of a run because of a lynx hanging out near the top.” He glanced at her. “It didn’t make me very popular with the guests.”
“A lynx? Really?”
“Yeah. They’re a threatened species, so we try to give them space. After an hour or so, it wandered back into the woods, and we were able to open the run.”
“That’s very considerate of the resort.”
“Consideration has nothing to do with it.” He swept a hand to indicate the terrain below them.
“Except for about fifty acres full of condos and shops in the ski village, this is all national forest land. The resort leases it for the winter, but it doesn’t belong to SkyCrest. The Forest Service dictates where, when and how we operate. ”
“And this expansion? Is that Forest Service land, too?”
“Yes. SkyCrest has petitioned the government to allow them to lease and develop the land.”
“Do you think the Forest Service will agree to the lease?”
“It depends. They’ll probably consider the environmental impact of development, as well as public sentiment.
” He glanced at her. “The protestors don’t need to resort to violence to sway the decision.
If they get enough people to sign petitions and show up at hearings to protest against the development—if they get people to lobby their government representatives—they have a good chance of persuading the Forest Service to rule against the resort. ”
“Cynics would say the resort has enough money to buy the government’s cooperation.”
“I never said I wasn’t a cynic, but I think the system still works, most of the time.”
They reached the top of the lift, and she skied out in front of him. “We’re headed straight back to the bottom of this run,” he said. “Then we’ll ride back up and ski over to Top of the Mark—the highest lift-served terrain.”
He hung back, letting her get ahead of him.
She was a good skier, carving effortless turns down the slope, her stance relaxed and graceful.
Her formfitting black pants and short jacket emphasized her figure, and he had trouble taking his gaze off of her.
If he had ever thought much about FBI agents, he hadn’t pictured one who looked like this.
At the bottom of the lift, they boarded again. “Let me tell you about the protest meeting,” she said.
“Fine. What about it?”