He went to a smaller refrigerator and opened the door, sticking his hand in. “Cold. Great!”
Leaning against one of the steel tables, he said, “The fridge is new. It works and the stove runs on gas. Matches are in this drawer.” He walked to a small cabinet next to the stove and pulled them out. “Silverware, plates are all in here.” He opened another cabinet, revealing its contents. “Feel free to use any of this stuff.”
Next to a box of crackers she spotted a stash of old fireworks and a package of birthday candles. Ben noticed her gaze. “Left over from an old party, I imagine. Back before fireworks were considered not the smartest thing to set off in a forest.” He pointed to a cabinet on the other side of the room. “That one’s full of canned goods. I stocked it last time I was here. There’s coffee and tea, sugar. Help yourself to any of it. Keep track of anything you spend on food and we’ll reimburse you.”
“Thanks.”
He pointed to another set of double doors on the far side of the room. “Through there is the laundry room. Lots of washers and dryers, and most of them still work. I stocked the shelves in there with new sheets and towels last time I was here.”
“Sounds good.”
“Now let’s turn on the water heater.” She followed him again, going to a narrow door on the far side of the kitchen. It led down some stairs to a basement, where a huge furnace took up most of the space. The cellar was dark and damp, most of it in shadows. He moved to a water heater and turned up the dial. The heater looked brand-new. “Should be warm in about an hour. We put this in last year. It goes to the kitchen and the two rooms I mentioned before. The rest of the place doesn’t have hot water. We can’t afford to do that, and there’s really no reason to now, anyway.”
Ben led the way back up the stairs. “Great!” He clasped his hands together. “I guess that just leaves the sleeping areas.”
She followed him back to the lobby, then up a magnificent staircase to the floor above. He stopped at the first room on the left. “This room and the next one,” he said, pointing to the adjacent door, “have both been updated. I think you’ll want to sleep in one of them. The rest of the rooms are pretty bad off. Water damage, broken windows. In fact, I wouldn’t wander too much in here at all. There are weak spots in the floor, and in some places, storm damage has affected the roof.”
And murdered ghosts roam the halls, she thought, feeling a little spooked as she gazed down the long dark hallway beyond.
He opened the first door and invited her into a spacious room with a bed, a desk, a bedside table and lamp, and its own bathroom off to one side. “Feel free to use the fresh linens in the laundry room.” He ducked back into the hall. “And then there’s this room, too.” He opened the second door. She followed and stuck her head in to see an almost identical room, but with a different-colored bedspread on the bed.
“Both bathrooms work great,” he told her.
Having a hot shower was going to be a luxury on this assignment. Dunking into a river in this area to freshen up would have meant braving glacial melt. In fact, with laundry and electricity and hot water, this was the most posh field assignment she’d ever had. Of course, she knew that the rugged terrain and the sheer number of miles she was going to cover on foot meant there would be many nights in her tiny backcountry tent, but she looked forward to that.
“Let’s look at some maps. I’ll be right back.”
He jogged down the stairs and disappeared through the main doors. Alex took a moment to let the place seep in. It was certainly huge, and a little gloomy, but it had a rather good feeling of days gone by, of people coming here to ski and vacation with loved ones. She walked down the stairs to the lobby just as Ben came back in with several rolled-up maps.
Spreading them out on a table, he pointed out their location on the first one. She caught the barest hint of him, a combination of his shampoo and his own natural scent. It was inviting. “Here we are,” he said. She leaned over to see the lodge on the map. “And this is the extent of the preserve.” He switched the map out for one with a larger scale. His finger found their location on this next map, then he pointed to a yellow highlighted boundary going for miles and miles around the lodge. “It’s pretty rugged terrain up here,” he said, pointing to areas with so many steep contour lines that Alex’s legs already felt tired. “There are a few outbuildings lying around. We’ve left most of them up so bats can use them for roosting.” He unfolded a well-worn paper map. “Here’s a copy of the resort map that employees used to have here.” He handed it to her. “Out there in my rental car I’ve got remote cameras, a microscope, two GPS units, more maps, two-way radios, batteries, memory cards, a battery charger. Oh, and I brought you a few cans of bear spray. There’s also an old truck in the maintenance shed.” He fished around in his pocket, pulling out a set of keys. “Here’s a spare set. Keys to the main lodge, the maintenance shed, the truck, several other outbuildings, along with a key to the gate if you decide to close it.
“At the top of the mountain is an old restaurant and a shed with some gear in it—ropes, ice axes, that kind of thing. And there’s an old bunkhouse that the last biologist, Dalton Cuthbert, used as a sort of field station. It’s got a generator and should have plenty of gas if you decide to use that building. He split his time between the lodge and there. When the resort was open, the bunkhouse belonged to the guy who cared for the sleigh-ride horses. It’s still in pretty good condition.” He looked at her apologetically. “Sometimes, though, kids break into those buildings. Just fair warning. I cleaned up a hell of a lot of liquor bottles, beer cans, and cigarette butts from that restaurant at the top of the old gondola track.”
“What was Dalton studying?”
“Mountain goats, mainly. There are some amazing cliffs around the bunkhouse. He was about to switch to the wolverine study. And he took regular weather readings from the gondola restaurant.” He pointed on the resort map to three buildings set far away from the lodge. “Here’s where the bunkhouse is.” He straightened up. “As a matter of fact, he came from Boston, too. He’d just finished his postdoc at Boston University when we hired him. But he’s originally from London, which is where his family still is.”
“Huh, a fellow Bostonian.”
He handed the keys to her.
“Thanks.”
He pointed toward the phone. “I wrote down some numbers there. Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, the sheriff’s nonemergency number, the state troopers, the power company. If you run into any hostile poachers out there, don’t deal with it yourself. Just call 911.”
“Will do.”
Then he stood just looking at her. “This really is great of you. Do you have a plan of attack yet?”
She nodded. “I read a lot of the latest papers on wolverine research on the plane and am going to read more tonight. There’s a new field protocol researchers have been using, a combination camera trap and hair snare. In addition to more traditional tracking, like looking for scat, I’m going to build a few of these traps.” Biologists called them traps, though they weren’t traps in the traditional sense. An animal was being caught on film, or in this case on a memory card, not trapped in a cage.