Top of the Hill, page 13
The front door to the station opened and a burly, outdoor-looking man, dressed in rough woodsman’s clothes, came in. “Hi, Henry,” he said to the policeman behind the high desk. “Anything new on my truck yet?”
“Sorry, Mr. Ellsworth,” Henry said respectfully. “We got fliers all over the state. Nothing yet.”
“Kiss one truck good-bye,” Ellsworth said. “Damn it, it’s the first time in fifty years anything of mine’s been stolen. We’re getting the wrong element up here, Henry.”
Michael, who was sitting at a desk with Brewster and Fred, while they were laboriously filling out forms, recognized the voice, but didn’t say anything and waited for Ellsworth to recognize him.
Ellsworth looked curiously through the open door to the back room. He could see only the back of Michael’s head.
“Some smart alec New York fella,” Henry said. “Brewster’s throwing the book at him. Mostly it’ll come down to speeding, I reckon, when Brewster cools off.”
Then Michael turned around. Ellsworth looked surprised. Then he laughed. “Hello, criminal,” he said.
Michael stood up. “Hi, Herb.” The two men shook hands and Ellsworth clapped Michael on the shoulder.
The two policemen looked up at the two men, abashed. “Hello, Mr. Ellsworth,” Fred said, standing. “You know this fella?”
“Only for how long, Mike?” Ellsworth said.
“Fourteen years.”
“That long, is it? Only for fourteen years,” Ellsworth said to the policemen. “He saved my life, once.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Herb,” Michael said.
“Saved my life,” Ellsworth said emphatically.
“I thought you said you didn’t know anybody in Green Hollow,” Brewster said peevishly.
“I don’t like to boast,” Michael said.
“Lord, Mike,” Ellsworth said, grinning, “you haven’t changed, have you?”
“A bit,” Michael said. “This time I got caught.”
“You sure did, mister,” Brewster said.
“Come on, boys,” said Ellsworth, “you’re not going to make trouble for an old friend of mine, are you?”
“He was going eighty-five, Mr. Ellsworth . . .” Brewster whined. “Come on, Norman,” Fred said wearily. “Act your age.”
“I suppose ...” Brewster said reluctantly to Ellsworth, “if you vouch for his character.”
“It used to be mostly bad,” Ellsworth said, “but he must have grown out of it by now. You going to be a good boy now, Mike?”
“I promise,” Michael said to the policemen. “I’m sorry if I gave you any trouble.”
“Okay,” Brewster grumbled. “Just get your registration up here quick.”
“Will do,” Michael said. “Now will all you three gentlemen join me in a drink to celebrate my arrival in town?”
The two policemen looked at each other questioningly. “Well—” Fred said. “We’re knocking off in a couple of minutes, anyway. Why not? The saloon’s around the comer. It’ll take just a little while to finish up our paper work.”
“Okay,” Brewster said, but couldn’t resist one last parting shot at Michael. “Still—you’re lucky Mr. Ellsworth happened in, I tell you . . .”
“This is my lucky day, gentlemen,” Michael said.
“Here’re the keys to your car, Mr. Storrs.” Fred handed him the bunch of keys.
“Thanks,” Michael said and went out with Ellsworth, waving airily at the drunken old cop high up behind his desk.
Brewster stared at the retreating backs glumly. “You think he really saved Mr. Ellsworth’s life?” he asked.
“Herb Ellsworth don’t make jokes,” Fred said.
“You know,” Brewster said reflectively, “I’m beginning to feel that I know that fella from somewhere.”
“You can ask him over the drinks,” Fred said and sat down and squinted at the report lying on the table.
Outside, Michael said, “Wait a minute, Herb. I want to lock my car. I have stuff all over the back.” He locked the doors of the car as Ellsworth looked admiringly at the Porsche.
“You must be doing pretty good for yourself these days,” Ellsworth said.
“It’s not a bad little car,” Michael said, smiling at the modest description of a machine that had cost him over twenty-five thousand dollars. “Pretty good.” Then, more soberly, he added, “In a manner of speaking.”
They walked around the corner toward the saloon. “How about you?” Michael asked. “How are you doing? You must be a big shot around here—the way they treated you.”
“I can’t complain. The construction business is swinging along. People from all over New York and New England are building houses here, even from Canada. You have some hills these days and a little snow and you’re not too far from one or two big cities and you’re a major industry.”
They walked in silence for a little while. “I often wondered what happened to you,” Ellsworth said.
“A couple of things.”
“You married?”
“Sort of. Separated for the time being.”
Ellsworth grunted, as though that was a sufficient expression of his sentiments about modem marriage and modem divorce. “You still ski?”
“A bit.”
“Crazy as ever?”
“I try not to be.”
“Why didn’t you come back here from time to time?”
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “I skied out West—in Europe. Maybe I felt it never could be as good as it was here in the old days and I didn’t want to spoil what I remembered. Maybe there were a couple of people I didn’t want to run into again . . .”
“Mrs. Harris is still around,” Ellsworth said. “Only she’s not Mrs. Harris anymore.” He looked at Michael obliquely.
“Oh,” Michael said, “you knew about her.”
“It’s a small town, Mike,” Ellsworth said. “The word finally gets out. She bought a house a few years ago. Still likes them young.”
“That lets me off the hook.”
“I wouldn’t lay any odds.”
“How does she look these days?”
“Pretty good, considering. She keeps in shape, skiing and all.”
“Any permanent connection?”
“While the snow lasts. I don’t know about after.” Ellsworth looked at him quizzically. “You want to know her telephone number?” “Thanks, no. I play in the veterans’ tournaments now.”
Ellsworth chuckled.
“You sure raised hell in this town,” he said.
“I was twenty-one years old. I gave myself six months before settling down to being a responsible citizen, working in an office, getting ahead . . .”
“You get ahead?”
“I guess you might say that.”
“How long you plan to stay up here?”
Michael shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe forever.”
Ellsworth stopped walking, surprised. “What about your job?”
“I don’t have a job.”
“You get canned?”
“Quit. It was that or out the window.” ^
Ellsworth started walking again. “Well, that’s one good thing about Green Hollow. Ain’t a window high enough in town so a man could do more than sprain an ankle jumping. You got enough money to last you a long while?”
“A while,” Michael said. “I thought maybe I could teach skiing this season.”
“You won’t get rich doing that. What did you get when you did it back then?”
“I guess I averaged about sixty a week.”
“You won’t average much more now,” Ellsworth said. “In real money. What with inflation. You sure you know what you’re doing, Mike?”
“Pretty sure,” Michael said, as they went into the bar. Pretty sure was about all he could honestly say about anything he thought or felt. .
They ordered whiskeys and lifted their glasses to each other. “Herb,” Michael said, “it sure is good to see you.” He had roomed for a few weeks in the Ellsworth house and even after he left Mrs. Ellsworth had mothered him and had nursed him through a bout with pneumonia that had felled him late in the season and kept him in town for three weeks after the lifts had closed. Mrs. Ellsworth had fed him devotedly and their daughter, Norma, who was then seventeen years old, had silently adored him and he had had some memorable days on the mountain with Ellsworth who, despite his bulk, was a swift and graceful skier. It was the one time in Michael’s life that he had felt part of a real family. “Now,” Michael said, “what about you? Aside from being prosperous—which proves to me that capitalism has many things to be said for it—what about the family?”
“The wife’s fine. And Norma’s made me a grandfather. Twice. Two boys.”
“Little Norma.” Michael shook his head. “Who’d she marry?”
“The same one she was going around with when you stepped in.” Ellsworth looked at Michael soberly, waiting for a reaction.
“Old David Stone-Face. The town hero,” Michael said.
“Dave Cully. He waited you out. He runs the ski school now. He’s a good husband and father.”
“Is that enough for Norma?”
“You ask her yourself tonight. She’s invited for dinner. And you’re invited.”
“Thanks.”
“Dave can’t come,” Ellsworth said. “He has some kind of meeting.”
Michael hesitated before he spoke again. “You think Norma would want to see me?” He had had a wild, surprising scene with Norma, during which she had wept and told him she loved him and that he was the only man she could ever love. He had tried to be as gentle and friendly as possible with the girl, but after that he had made a point of never finding himself alone with her.
“I haven’t discussed the subject with Norma,” Ellsworth said. “Yet.”
“Listen, Herb,” Michael said earnestly. “Maybe you, and for all I know, maybe the whole town thinks I had an affair with your daughter. I didn’t. I liked her, I never had. a brother or a sister and she filled a place in my emotional life that was good for me—I rooted for her when she was racing . . .” He shook his head. “Ah ... all right, she had a kind of schoolgirl crush on me.”
“She wasn’t any schoolgirl,” Ellsworth said. “She was seventeen and you were twenty-one. Maybe I blamed you after you left. If I did, it’s finished now.”
“I was busy in other bedrooms,” Michael said. “Among others I was having a thing with a married woman . . .”
“Mrs. Harris,” Ellsworth said flatly.
“We thought we kept it a secret and almost the only other girl in town I was ever seen with more than a couple of times was Norma, so naturally—you believe me, don’t you, Herb?”
“All I know is that when you pulled out without saying good-bye, she was a very sad girl,” Ellsworth said. He was accusing Michael now, but sorrowfully, a father who had an inconsolable child to console, confronting a grown man who, innocently or not, had caused his daughter pain. “It was a long time, Mike, before she pulled out.” “I don’t like good-bye scenes now and I didn’t then. I’m sorry. What do you think, Herb, do you want me to leave town tonight? Say the word.”
Ellsworth played with his glass, brooding, for a moment. “Come to dinner,” he said finally.
“You make me feel like a bastard.”
“You weren’t a bastard,” Ellsworth said shortly. “People fall in love with the wrong people. That’s all.”
Brewster and Fred came into the bar and Michael ordered a round of drinks for them all.
“Say, Mr. Storrs,” Brewster said, brushing away the foam of the beer he had ordered from his moustache, “I was just telling Fred here I kind of think I know you.”
Michael smiled. “You did, Officer. I gave you a good licking when you were ten years old.”
“Oh,” Brewster said, laughing, “you’re the sonofabitch. I couldn’t sit down for a week. Sure I know you. You had a hand like a fucking iron bar. Welcome back.” He shook his head. “And to think I had the chance to put you in the clink and muffed it.” He grinned. “Wait till I tell my old man. My mother wouldn’t let him touch me and he said you did me more good with that whipping than ten years in school. He wanted to send you a bottle of whiskey but I didn’t know your name.” He put out his hand and Michael shook it. “Welcome to Green Hollow, Mr. Storrs.”
They had another round of drinks on that and Fred asked Ellsworth what the story was about Michael’s saving his life.
“Well,” Ellsworth said, “we used to ski a lot together, days when the ski school let him off, and we were skiing in a blizzard and it was beginning to get dark—one thing you could rely on Mike for was that anything could happen when you were out with him—high, high up— and I took a fall and broke my leg—later on they found out the tibia was snapped in two places. There was nobody else around and if Mike had left me alone to go down and get the patrol and then come back to try to find me, I’d’ve frozen to death. It was about twenty below zero and I couldn’t move an inch. I weighed two hundred and ten pounds and this little soft college fella picked me up and carried me piggy back down the hill.”
“Is that true?” Brewster asked incredulously.
“What Herb doesn’t say,” Michael said, “was that it was pure selfpreservation on my part. I was completely lost. I couldn’t pick out anything with the snow coming down the way it was. And Herb’d been skiing here since he was three years old and knew the mountain like his own living room, and besides he was born with a compass in his head. I just picked him up so that he could give me directions. I was ready to kill him for being stupid enough to break his leg in that sort of weather.”
“Yeah,” Ellsworth said. “Be that as it may, Mike Storrs is a son in my house anytime he shows up.”
They ordered another round and drank to the sentiment.
“Well, gentlemen,” Michael said to the policemen, “have you got that balloon I can breathe into now?”
“You know something, Mr. Storrs,” Brewster said generously, to cement the new friendship, “I believe you could whip my ass even now.”
“Just don’t throw any snowballs, Norman,” Michael said, “and you’re safe.”
It was a perfect way to end the long trip up from the city, Michael thought as he got into the Porsche and followed Ellsworth’s car to a new hotel that Ellsworth said was now the best in town and where he thought Michael might like to stay until he found a place of his own.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The hotel was called the Alpina and as they walked from their cars toward the entrance Ellsworth explained that it was owned by an Austrian couple, whose own house a few hundred yards farther down the road he had just finished remodeling. The hotel was pleasant looking, architecturally unpretentious, rambling in shape, of white clapboard, rooted in New England, making no claims to be part of a Tyrolean village.
Inside, Michael saw that it was furnished comfortably with Colonial and rustic pieces, everything impeccably polished. Ellsworth introduced the man behind the front desk as Mr. Lennart, the manager. Mr. Lennart was a stout, unflappable-looking man of about fifty-five and seemed friendly as he asked Michael how long he expected to stay.
“A week, maybe,” Michael said, as he signed the register. “At least for starters.”
“Treat him right, Joe,” Ellsworth said. “He’s an old friend of mine.”
“We’re still just about empty,” Lennart said, “so we can start by giving him the best room in the house.” He rang the bell on the desk and a young man in a checked shirt who looked like a skier appeared, and Michael gave him the keys to the Porsche so he could get the baggage out of it.
“Well, then, you’re all set,” Ellsworth said. “See you at the house about eight. I imagine you still know how to find it.”
“I’ll be there.”
Just as Ellsworth was about to turn and leave, a woman came down the main staircase into the entrance hall, followed by a big golden retriever. She was a handsome woman somewhere in her thirties, with a mass of ash blond hair done up in a neat, rather severe bun. She had blue eyes set in a long, pointed face and was wearing a light gray fur coat that Michael guessed was lynx.
“Good evening, Mrs. Heggener,” Ellsworth said. “May I introduce a friend of mine who’s going to be staying with you for a while? Mr. Michael Storrs.”
“How do you do, sir?” Mrs. Heggener said. Her voice was reserved, her accent slight but unmistakably foreign. She did not offer to shake hands. “I hope you have a pleasant stay, Mr. Storrs.”
“I’m sure I will,” Michael said.
“I hope your husband is doing better,” Ellsworth said.
Mrs. Heggener shrugged. “As well as can be expected. He’s getting the best care possible. At least in America.”
“Is he here?” Ellsworth asked. “I haven’t seen him around.”
“He’s still in the hospital. More tests. Ridiculous.” Her tone was sharp. Michael was glad that he wasn’t the doctor in charge of testing Mr. Heggener.
“I expect he’ll be back in a week or so,” Mrs. Heggener said. “And I should have the house ready for him when he comes. Now that you’ve finished your job on it, mine begins. I must tell you, I think it’s come out very well.”
“Thank you,” Ellsworth said.
“I have to make sure the new furniture gets here in time and the rugs laid and the curtains hung. Help is so hard to find these days . . .”
“Everybody’s busy getting ready for the season,” Ellsworth said, “but if I hear of anybody . . .”
“That would be kind.” Mrs. Heggener fluffed the collar of her coat up around her face and made a little clicking noise to the dog, which had been sitting beside her making small, impatient sounds. Michael and Ellsworth watched her go out. No nonsense there, Michael thought.
Then the bellboy came in carrying Michael’s bags and Michael followed him up one flight of stairs to a large room, with a big double bed, a fireplace, a wide desk, a rocking chair and two deep green corduroy-covered easy chairs. Everything was crisply clean and in order, brass lamps on the desk and tables throwing a subdued and comfortable light.
