Smugglers Notch Read online

  “That’s a pretty sweater,” he said. “I’d hate to see it torn up. So why don’t you do us both a favor and take it off yourself?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Okay, have it your way.” He ripped the sweater open, the shell buttons popping like scattershot against the wall of the truck. Then he wrenched her into a sitting position and pulled the ruined cloth from her shoulders.

  “Leave me alone.” She brushed her wrist under her nose. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

  “Not yet,” the earnest voice said, and gave way to a brittle laugh.

  He shoved her down, and she crossed both arms over her chest, holding onto her bra straps as if they were lifelines. As he unbuckled her belt, she saw him backlighted in a halogen glow. He flattened himself against her until the grinding of a heavy car receded down the hill, then knelt between her ankles, tugged her jeans below her hips, and bunched them against the top of her boots.

  “Now your underwear.” When the girl began swinging her head from side to side, he said, “And this time I want you to do it yourself, Rebecca.”

  Her head moved faster, and he cradled it in his hands and put his mouth close to her ear. “Would it make a difference if I said, ‘Please?’” he whispered. “Pretty please?”

  “What if I ask like this?” He showed her his fist, but only for the time that it took to drive it into her stomach.

  The air rushed out of her in a sob and she doubled onto her side. Her hands clenched involuntarily into fists of her own, and he took both of them in one of his and with the other punched her over the heart.

  “Now, Rebecca?” he asked. “Now will you do that one little thing for me?”

  So faintly that he almost missed it, the girl nodded. She reached behind with trembling hands and fumbled with her bra.

  “Can I help?” he said softly, and brushed her hands away. He unhooked the bra and dropped it on the rug and then stepped back to study small breasts cloaked in a fabric of gooseflesh. “Now your underpants, Rebecca.”

  Again the girl shook her head. She was whimpering, trying without success to choke back the tears that seemed to excite him.

  “Please, Rebecca,” he said, and made another fist.

  The girl raised her legs and kicked feebly at him, as if to say I tried to resist, and then she pressed her thumbs under the elastic and pulled her panties down around her ankles.

  “Good, Rebecca. That’s very good.”

  He backed away again, and it occurred to her that maybe now he’d take out a camera and snap a few pictures and throw her naked into the snow, maybe that was all. She’d settle for that, be grateful for anything but to have him at her again. But then he began taking off his own clothes, folding them neatly over the seat until he had on only his underwear and she was wondering where all the muscles came from.

  “Always save the best for last,” he smiled as he stepped out of his shorts.

  His knees were between hers, spreading apart, opening her. His mouth clamped onto hers, his tongue maneuvering inside until she remembered what Ben had said to do in such a situation, and she gritted her teeth and then she ground them. She heard the boy grunt. But when she opened her eyes, the smile was still there. He said, “You shouldn’t have done that, Rebecca. Really, you shouldn’t.”

  He brought both fists down on her stomach, and when she covered up with her arms, the fists found her face and then her stomach again, and after a very long time that was really less than a minute she began to lose consciousness. But before she did she saw him reach for her belt and felt the webbing scrape against her throat, and then she felt another kind of pain, more intense than anything she’d ever experienced, and deeper, as if she were being torn apart. …

  When she opened her eyes, he was lying at her side with one leg wrapped in hers, snoring lightly. Her entire body burned, the pressure of her fingers on her breasts enough to make her wince. There was the taste of salt in her mouth, and as she moved her tongue over her lips she licked away flecks of blood. The belt was still looped around her neck, the other end between the boy’s fingers, so that when she pushed herself up on her elbows he stirred. She lay back again, glimpsing more blood between her thighs.

  If only she could get her hands on the wrench … Her eyes fastened to the gray iron, as if a magnetism of her own making could draw it into her grasp, but there was no way to move past the boy without waking him. Softly, so as not to frighten herself more, she began to cry. Not even Ben could help her now. About all that was left was to pray. But what came to mind from eight years of Sunday school were only a few scraps from the Bible. Behold, Rebecca … Under her breath she cursed God instead.

  Never looking away from the sleeping boy, she began to undo the belt. She worked the loop around her chin and had it nearly over her forehead when he tugged her down and pinned her arms under his.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “You’re choking me.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to take off,” he said matter-of-factly, and gave her some slack. “Only I can’t let you go yet, you understand?”

  The girl didn’t nod or say anything.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Rebecca the attorney general’s helper’s daughter. I never did get your last name.” Waiting for an answer, he tugged at the belt again, but not so hard.

  “Beausoleil,” she gasped.

  “Your family originally Canucks?” He seemed impressed. “Pretty people, the frogs,” he said, and kissed her.

  Her hands rushed up against the side of his jaw. But then the belt closed around her windpipe and she lay still and shut her eyes and counted slowly to 50 as he climbed on her, counted to 100 and then 150, trying not to let him see her tears, 200, 250, until the numbers ran out. And finally he was beside her again and she thought he was going to sleep, but then he said, “I like you, Rebecca Beausoleil, I like you a lot. It’d be nice if we could get together sometime and do this again.”

  He laughed and scratched his chest, which was as smooth and hairless as hers. “Well, not exactly like this. Now that we’re an item,” he said, and laughed some more, “we could take in a movie and then go to my place and really have ourselves a high old time. What do you say to that, Rebecca Beausoleil?”

  He put his face close to hers, and she thought that he was going to kiss her again. If he did, she’d try to do the one thing Ben had never told her about, which was to smile and pretend she was enjoying herself and wrap her arms around him as if she couldn’t get enough of him and moan to him and whisper in his ear, and maybe then he’d have enough of her. And as she made up her mind, she began to hate Ben for being too jealous to tell her how easy it was. And, more than that, to hate herself, too. But just then the boy’s mouth tightened and he looped the belt another time around his fist.

  “Except we sure as hell can’t if you blab about what happened,” he said. “I could get in a shitload of trouble if you did that.”

  “I won’t tell anybody.”

  “Well, then, I guess there’s not going to be a problem after all, is there, Rebecca?”

  The girl opened her mouth, but made no sound. She mouthed the word “No.”

  “Let me hear you say it.”

  She shook her head.

  “Say it, Rebecca.”

  “No … no problem,” she gasped.

  “I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that.” He let go of the belt and was loosening the loop around her throat when suddenly he said, “Only how can I be sure you’re not lying to me?”

  “I wouldn’t—” Her head, her whole body shaking.

  “You could just be saying that.”

  “I don’t want to make trouble.”

  “It’s not like I don’t want to believe you.” He pressed his cheek against hers and she lay still again and tried not to squirm away. “But what if it slips out what happened and somebody puts a bug in your ear about going to the police, and the next thing I know they�
�re looking for me?”

  “I … I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know your name,” she said, “or your address. I didn’t get a look at your license plates. I wouldn’t know how to find you again.”

  “No?” He looked hurt. “That’d be a shame. Worse than the other. So in case you do want to call, my name is Paul Arthur Conklin, and I live on Sturgeon Cove Road in Malletts Bay, and my phone—”

  “Stop,” she screamed. “I don’t want to know.”

  “I thought you said you’d see me.”

  “You have to call.”

  He kissed her neck and her face, and then he was on top of her again. She shut her eyes and wallowed in the thin mattress, tunneling away from him. “Now you’re getting into it,” she heard him say. But then his hips stopped moving and he hiked himself up on his arms. “Only you do know my name, Rebecca, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.”

  The belt shortened around her throat, pressure building inside her head as if all the blood in her body were being squeezed into the space behind her eyes. “Do you get off on this, Rebecca? I hear some girls do.”

  She tried to answer him, but the words were trapped deep in her throat. She needed air, but the trapped words blocked her windpipe and she felt herself growing light-headed. She said, “Fuck it,” but only to herself, and dug her nails into his back and sliced his shoulders, then jabbed them at his neck and dragged them to his cheeks, feeling the slippery warmth in her fingers, clawing at his eyes while he twisted away to cinch the belt against the fragile bones in her voice box. She heard his heart pound, drowning hers out, hers barely making any sound as he said, “Do you like it, Rebecca? Do you like it? Do you? Do … Do …”

  Ben, she thought, why didn’t you tell me about …

  Her heart beating faintly.

  Then not beating at all.

  He pressed a cheek against her breast, listening, and when he heard nothing pulled away to stare at her. Other than a lopsided grimace frozen on her lips, she wasn’t much different from before. Tears had formed in the corners of her eyes. As he slipped the belt over her head, they began to roll down her face, and he flicked his tongue at them and swallowed them.

  “Such beautiful eyes. Such beautiful, beautiful …” He nestled against her and tilted her hips toward him. Again his knees burrowed between hers, muscling unresisting legs out of the way, forcing himself into the still body. “Rebecca,” he whispered, and kissed the bluish lids.

  He slept. In forty minutes the cold woke him and he pulled the velveteen spread around his shoulders and snuggled against the girl. Already her skin was cool and clammy, but he warmed himself spilling kisses on the back of her neck until he dozed.

  When he got up a second time, he hurried into his clothes. He placed the girl on the carpet and scavenged beneath a mound of oily rags for a dented kettle which he emptied of corroded battery clamps and scraps of cable and then carried outside. The storm was at its peak, crystalline spear points cutting through his flannel shirt as he dug the pot into a snowbank at the edge of the road, tamping the flakes beneath bare hands till he had all he could use.

  He found clean rags in the glove compartment. He dipped one into the snow and washed the girl’s body, glazing the grayish skin. A trace of red had dribbled from her mouth, and he blotted it away with the mascara that caked her cheeks like sorrow’s residue.

  “So beautiful …” He discarded the soiled rag and used a fresh one to pat the body dry, then swaddled it in the velveteen spread. “So clean.”

  The light from a passing car paralyzed him like a jacked deer, and he listened for other vehicles before shouldering the body into the woods. In a clearing ringed with bare trees he stumbled, and the girl slipped from his arms. He let her down between the roots of a large oak and then leaned against the trunk, taking great gulps of frosted air. Papery bark fluttered from the limbs of twisted birches like silver flags.

  “And they blessed Rebecca,” he whispered, “and said unto her, Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.”

  He peeled away the cloth to kiss the dark eyes one last time as the blizzard began to hide her. Then he walked back through the pines between piles of blown snow.

  2

  BEFORE DAWN, ON FOUR hours of sleep, Lawrence St. Germain loaded his skis into the back of a Cabot County sheriff’s car and bulldozed a path from his cabin to the gravel township road. He drove fifteen miles to I-89 and exited at Waterbury, riding the cleared lane north past the Trapp family lodge turnoff to Stowe and into the mountains. Where Route 108 was closed to traffic through Smugglers Notch, he entered the Mount Mansfield ski area and parked at the foot of the gondola.

  Careful not to scuff the unmarked finish, he slid his new K-2’s out of the back seat. He kicked off spit-shined black oxfords and hurried into racing boots and nylon gaiters that protected the legs of his tan uniform trousers. As he stepped clumsily away from the Ford, he was hatless, his .38 Chiefs Special heavy against his thigh. Through the streaked windows of the gondola house he could see the woven cable on which red cars were strung like battered beads. Safety inspectors were due by that afternoon, and in two weeks the lift would open to the public. But for the next several hours he had the mountain to himself.

  The early light was alive with pogonips, particles of frost that glinted in the frigid air. He carried the skis around the empty lodge and fit his boots over the blunt track of a snowshoe rabbit that followed the shadow of the cable up the mountain. A clump of whittled alder showed where deer had come to browse at the edge of the trail, and higher up he saw the stringy droppings of a lone coyote. He kept climbing—not quite 7,000 feet to go, 2,000 of them vertical.

  Beside a gash in the trees where the Rimrock trail met Gondolier, he hesitated. The Front Four, the mountain’s steepest terrain, hung over Rimrock like plummeting fairways. But the challenge of frozen mogul fields would have to wait for January’s deep snows. Keeping to Gondolier, he trudged toward a waterfall that was hardening into rippled slabs against the slope. There he paused to swing his skis to the other shoulder before continuing toward the top.

  Alongside the Toll Road off the Lookout double chair was the tiny fieldstone chapel where he had been married. Hard to believe now that the mountain had been such an important part of his life that he had insisted on a slopeside ceremony with everyone schussing down afterward to the reception at the base lodge. Following the honeymoon—two weeks at Aspen—he’d gone years without putting on his skis, preoccupied more with the new lieutenant’s bars on his uniform collar than with the bride he made so little time for that eventually she had left him, saying something about marriage being the doom of romance—theirs. He’d started skiing again after the divorce, and missing Annie so badly that he burned up the phone lines to her parents’ place in Key West, keeping on her case till she moved back in with him and they fashioned the cautious arrangement that kept them mildly engaged and out of each other’s hair and that surely was the death rattle of both marriage and romance.

  The sun was inching above the Octagon warming hut when he reached the Cliff House. He stood by the ruled stick that measured two feet of accumulated snow, sighting north along purple mountains dissolving against the Canadian border. To the east heavy clouds pressed down on Mount Washington’s uncertain summit. Almost reluctantly, he dropped the skis and stepped into the bindings and poled toward the Perry Merrill.

  The new K-2’s turned effortlessly in the virgin powder, and he glanced back with satisfaction at the precision of his curved track. Around a corner of the mountain where the wind had blown off most of the cover, he tightroped down a narrow strip of white bordered by granite outcroppings. With his poles on his hips he crouched into a racer’s tuck, savoring the burst of speed it produced. Then the Perry Merrill—the merry peril, he’d called it as a kid—veered back to Gondolier, and he skied the fall lin
e down its rocky heart toward the waterfall between the gondola towers.

  Over the years he guessed he’d seen seven broken legs there, expert skiers sitting back defensively as the mountain fell away beneath them, surrendering to the urge to panic. Though he could spot its symptoms at a distance, fear was mystery to him, something he took pride in never having had to conquer in himself. Relaxing, maintaining his tuck, he raced to the lip of the waterfall, holding back until his ski tips were over the edge before throwing himself forward to soar toward a patch of soft snow and land awkwardly on one foot, then regaining his balance and gliding easily down the slope.

  He stayed on Gondolier, building speed as he let his skis run free, and then moderating his descent with gentle traverses. After a while he entered lower Chin Clip, which dropped gradually through hardwoods toward the base lodge. His skis were on his shoulder again when the crackling of his radio through a window left open two inches sent him hurrying into the lot. A voice he recognized as a sheriff’s dispatcher was asking where he was.

  He pulled off a pigskin glove, unlocked the Ford, and reached for the microphone with fingers stinging from old frostbite. “St. Germain here,” he said.

  “Thought you went missing, Lieutenant. We’ve been looking for you all morning.”

  “Couldn’t have.” He slid onto the seat, clawing at the snaps on his boots. “It’s not eight o’clock yet.”

  “That ain’t the point. Marlow wants you now, wants you an hour ago.”

  “What about?”

  “Somebody has gone missing,” said the voice on the radio. “Marlow wants you to find ’em.”

  “Hold on.” St. Germain took off one boot and then the other, then stuffed his scarcely feeling feet inside his shoes. “Now who did you say—”

  “Name’s Rebecca Rachel Beausoleil. W F 18, 323 Ethan Allen Street, Montpelier. Brown hair, brown eyes … you getting this?”

  “How old?”

  “Eighteen today,” the dispatcher said.