Archer Mayor - Tucker Peak

I drove through the tiny village of Lifton in three seconds flat and then turned onto Tucker Peak’s access road a couple of miles farther on. It was identified by a slightly weather-beaten sign next to a small cluster of retail buildings, including a bar. “So you’re not buying stock?”

“How’re they going to pay for it, even with investors? Prices’ll have to go up, and the mountain’ll still be what it’s always been, a mole hill with attitude, just like the rest of this woodchuck state.”

Sad to say, even if untrue, but that had a ring of familiarity to it. Vermont’s economy wasn’t far different from the rest of the country’s, but it was miniaturized to where it looked quaintly third-world. No matter what we did commercially up here, or how well, our best was always a blip when compared to places budgeted in the billions. The one exception was maple syrup, where we topped the nation by a fat margin, but even there, who really cared? A half-million gallons a year still only supplied a demand less than that for caviar. So, I understood what Willy was saying about little Tucker Peak. Spend what it might, it could never hold a candle to resorts in Utah and Colorado. Worse still, it couldn’t even compete in sheer size and height to the best in Vermont. In a market rewarding bigger, steeper, faster slopes, Tucker didn’t look slated for survival, much less rebirth.

But then, I’d thought the Internet was a pipe dream, too.

And I had to give it to Tucker Peak on aesthetics. Like Stratton, although smaller, it lay encased in a bowl of mountains. A single road led into it, up and over a humpbacked cleft, and the initial view of the resort, as the car turned the last curve at a low-flying, bird’s-eye level, was straight from a fairy tale. The base lodge, surrounded by buildings, stores, sheds, and the nightclub, looked like an alpine village, the slopes and lifts fanning out like anchor lines from the heart of a spider’s web. The sprinkling of slopeside condos resembled outlying rural homes.

The most striking feature, however, towered far overhead, above the buildings, the access road, and even the broad, carved mountain bowl cradling the ski trails. Lining the horizon, with the blank white sky as a backdrop, looking spectrally indistinct in the barely falling snow, was a row of modern windmills-stark, pale, streamlined, and huge-eight of them with rotors so wide, it seemed unlikely they could move. And yet move they did, with the same ghostly, silent, otherworldly grace that elephants have drifting through the night in a herd.

In another effort to pay the bills, Tucker Peak had leased its ridge-line to a local power company for this experiment in alternative energy, granting itself in the process the single most unusual feature of any ski resort in the country.

All of it-the village, the fan of trails, the beautiful mountains, the surreal windmill farm, and the colorful sprinkling of brightly clad skiers across the white snow-made me think that in a world so given to appearance over substance, I might have been too harsh in giving Tucker Peak an early requiem. Faced with such an ethereal picture, this isolated, small, vertically challenged ski bowl just might find a way to compete with its brawnier rivals.

“Where do we go?” Willy asked, as impressed as if we’d just come to a crossroads in Kansas.

“Western slope. Something called Laurel Lane. Number 318.”

I drove down into the pseudo village, noticing how its alpine image fell apart under closer scrutiny. The buildings, of ersatz Swiss design, began losing their picturesque appeal. Dark, supposedly shingle roofs emerged as painted metal; the pattern of wooden beams on fake stucco walls turned out to be only brown paint. The whole vision became threadbare, cheap, and perilously impermanent. I was abruptly forced to wonder if fifteen million would make much of a dent, a thought driven home by the addition of a quiet group of placard-wielding protesters camped out by the base lodge’s front entrance.

I passed between the lodge and the nightclub opposite, paused where the road split into a Y, and headed uphill to the left, skirting one side of the crazy quilt of interlocking ski trails. I noticed that the skiers I’d seen earlier, traversing the slopes like ants crisscrossing a sugar spill, weren’t present in the kind of numbers to give a resort owner much joy, especially during a weekend. I also saw there were as many empty building lots as condo sites.

Willy was checking off road signs. “Summit Road, Powder Lane, Snowflake Circle… Christ almighty, Joe, why don’t they give it a rest? Here we go, the tree section: Maple, Fir, Hemlock… Laurel’s on the right.”

The scattered houses we’d passed had varied in opulence from the functional, tucked away with no view apart from a few trees, to the marginally upscale, with a glimpse of a meadow or a nearby ski trail. Laurel Lane brought us up a significant notch.

“What d’ya think?” Willy asked. “A half-million each? Three-quarters?”

I watched the procession slide by as the road emerged from the trees and stretched taut behind one perched palace after another, like a ribbon with gaudy baubles glued to one edge. Most of the houses were cantilevered out over a steep incline, allowing them the panorama their less affluent neighbors merely aspired to. For the first time since our arrival, here were signs of real wealth-and of potential salvation for the whole.

“I have no idea,” I said quietly, suspecting the economies of such places had little to do with true value.

Number 318 looked vaguely western to me, low and spread out with an expansive, oversize roof that was more flat than peaked, unlike most New England buildings. It was built of logs and had huge windows and a wraparound deck that looked deep enough to hold a tennis court.

We parked next to a sports utility vehicle deserving of a rope ladder and stepped out into the cold air. The snowfall had completely petered out.

As we set foot on the porch, the front door opened abruptly, revealing a short, round, balding man wearing a bulky, expensive white knit sweater and a permanently angry crease between his eyes.

“Who are you?” he asked abruptly, his tone of voice matching his expression.

I couldn’t stop Willy in time.

“Be nice, asshole,” he said without hesitation, “we’re cops.”

The owner’s mouth dropped open. Feeling like the straight man in a comedy act, I pulled out my shield and announced as nonchalantly as possible, “Vermont Bureau of Investigation-Special Agents Gunther and Kunkle. I gather you asked to see us?”

To my surprise, our presumably type-A host merely gave Willy a grudging look of admiration and stepped back into the open doorway. “’Bout time. Come in.”

We walked past him as he continued, “I’m glad that idiot sheriff got the message. I thought I might have to call the governor.”

“We’re only here because the sheriff invited us,” I explained. “It’s still his case.”

The short man waved his hand dismissively. “Whatever. I just wanted someone who could read and write. Guess you’ll have to do.”

“Wild guess,” Willy interjected, “you must be William Manning, from New York.”

The crease deepened between Manning’s eyebrows. “You got by the first time, sonny. Don’t push it.”

“Could we cut this out?” I asked them both.

They looked at me as if I’d just spoiled a good windup. Manning was the first to recover. “Right. This has really pissed me off. I didn’t come to the boonies to get robbed like it was the city.”

He preceded us toward a glass-walled living room beyond the entryway. I held up a hand to stop Willy from responding.

“Why don’t you take it from the top, Mr. Manning?” I suggested.