“I’d like that.” Alex still wasn’t sure what to make of the woman, but Jolene was kind and generous, and she definitely liked her.
Alex got out of the truck and grabbed her pack out of the back.
“Take care!” Jolene told her, and pulled away, leaving Alex standing in the crumbling driveway with her backpack.
As Jolene’s truck bounced back down the driveway and out of sight, Alex slung her pack onto the ground and began to explore. The place had been built in the style of a Swiss chalet, with dark wood and painted panels of griffins and lions and flowers. It stood three stories high, and wooden decks wrapped all the way around the building on the two upper floors.
A weather-beaten double door, made of heavy wood, was set into the center of the ground floor. Walking to it, she tested the handles, finding it locked. Skirting around the building, she explored it from all angles. It was too late in the season for many wildflowers, but she saw the vivid red stalks of pinedrops, a flowering plant in the heath family that Alex had always loved. It didn’t use chlorophyll, instead relying on a symbiotic relationship with the fungus under the ground for its food. In other places, a few purple blooms of lupine held on in the face of the oncoming cold.
She returned to her pack, sitting down on it to wait for the wildlife coordinator.
Above her, cumulus clouds drifted by lazily, stark white against the deep blue of the mountain sky. The high-altitude sun was intense, and Alex could feel how much hotter it was than at sea level. On all sides of her towered steep mountains, their forested slopes deep green in the sunlight. A few of them sported massive avalanche chutes, places where the crushing blow of speeding ice and snow had wiped out all the trees in its path. In a few shadowy places, snowfields clung to the steep slopes. A fresh dusting of snow covered the tops of the peaks.
She breathed deeply, smelling the sweet smell of subalpine fir. Above her, a red-tailed hawk cried out, circling lazily on the thermals. Moments later, a honking sound brought her gaze back to the sky, and she watched as four trumpeter swans flew by, their white plumage gleaming in the sunlight. Two were juveniles that didn’t have their white plumage yet, still looking gray.
She pulled out her phone and checked the time. She’d expected the coordinator to be here before her, but he must have been delayed. She checked to see if Brad had called or texted but had no bars, just the icon of a satellite dish with a red slash across it.
She stood up again, walking around. A friend of hers in college had always sworn by “stirring” his phone to get a signal. She thought he was joking at the time, but now she tried it, moving her phone in circles in the air. Nothing. She walked around the building, returning to her backpack without getting a single bar. Sitting back down on her pack, she switched the phone off to save the battery, then suddenly wondered if she had electricity in this place. She owned a nice little portable solar panel, perfect for charging small USB devices, but she’d left it in her closet in Boston.
Above her a raven wheeled on the wind, landed on top of a tall, thin lodgepole pine, and looked down at her. It croaked and gurgled, making strange raven noises, and Alex was charmed. “Hello,” she said to it, giving a small wave. It gurgled back.
Above the sigh of wind in the pines, she heard a vehicle making the long trek up the mountain to the lodge. She hoped it would be the coordinator and not the highway murderer.
A few moments later a pristine red Honda came into view, slowing down as the driver saw her. He was about her age, with tousled sandy brown hair. He smiled as he saw her and gave a wave. He parked where Jolene had and stepped out. He was fit and tall, and Jolene was right. He was definitely attractive. His tawny, angular face was classically handsome, and he wore a black T-shirt under a brown and green flannel shirt. His faded jeans and hiking boots looked like they’d seen a lot of wear.
“Sorry!” he said with a big grin. “I was hoping to beat you here, get the place presentable.” He walked forward as she stood up. “Ben Hathaway.”
She held out her hand. “Alex Carter.”
They shook, his handshake warm and firm. She disliked it when people grasped only her fingers, giving her a weak handshake. His handshake was confident. He smiled again, his whole face lighting up. “We can’t tell you how much we appreciate you uprooting your life and coming out here at the last minute.”
“I’m happy to be here. It’s beautiful.”
He gazed around, lifting his face to take in the mountains. “It certainly is.” He nodded toward the ski lodge. “And how about this old place? Quite a sight, isn’t it?”
She turned to follow his gaze. “It’s huge.”
He walked past her and motioned for her to follow. “C’mon, let me show you inside. A lot of the place isn’t livable, but we’ve fixed up a couple of the rooms for researchers or potential donors who want to come out here and see what we do. There’s a working kitchen, too—electricity, hot water. Even laundry. I just have to turn everything on.”
Electricity and hot water were indeed luxuries. And laundry meant she wouldn’t have to wear the same dirty jeans day after day. Most of the time when Alex was in the field, it was just her tiny tent, a cold rinse-off in a river for a shower, and the small solar panel to run her laptop if she needed it.
She followed him to the main doors, his strides easy and assured, the mark of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors and felt very comfortable in his own body. He fished out a set of keys. Above her the raven gurgled again, then flew off. The door swung open, admitting them into a cavernous darkness. “Hang on,” he said, and vanished.
Moments later, lights flooded the lobby. It truly was beautiful, even now. Huge wooden beams crisscrossed the ceiling. A massive stone fireplace stood in the center of the room, ringed with seating. A bar stood in one corner, and even had bottles gathering dust on the shelves. Some of the bottles still had alcohol in them.
In another corner, couches and chairs clustered around tables, and along the far wall stood wooden writing desks and wicker chairs, with small lamps on each desk. Two enormous bronze bear sculptures loomed on tables on either side of the front entrance. They stood on their hind legs, mouths open in a roar. On the wall, framed black-and-white photographs showed long-ago guests enjoying themselves, drinking champagne and dressed in costumes for amateur theatricals. The place was charming.
To her right, the reception desk was covered in a layer of dust, too, with cobwebs in the corners. An old dial phone from the early eighties sat there.
Ben noticed her gaze. “It still works. No cell signal up here, so if you need the phone, it has to be the landline.” Then he moved back toward the main doors. “Let me just get these shutters off,” Ben said, and went outside. A moment later, sunlight spilled in through one of the big windows as he lifted off a wooden shutter. Alex went outside and helped him, and soon all the windows on the bottom floor were streaming with sunlight.
“Much better!” he said as they went back inside. “Let me show you the kitchen.”
He took her through a pair of double doors in the rear of the main floor to the kitchen, a sprawling affair with stainless steel preparation tables, pots and pans still hanging from a rack suspended from the ceiling, a walk-in refrigerator and freezer, and shelves full of other tools of the restaurant trade—meat thermometers, ladles, stockpots.