Reality Check (2010) (13 page)

Welcome to this warming hut, maintained for the comfort and safety of hikers, skiers, and snowshoers by the Vermont Trailblazers Society. If unfamiliar with

the operation of the woodstove, please do not use. Please leave the hut the way you found it. Pack out what you pack in! Safety first! Enjoy our beautiful mountains!

Cody moved over to the bench, got down on his hands and knees--one knee, anyway, the good one--and peered underneath. Why bother, if, as Townes said, the hut had already been searched? Cody didn't know. He saw a big circular spiderweb hanging from the underside of the bench. Two flies, a moth, and another insect Cody had no name for were caught in the web; he couldn't find the spider. He remembered how Junior was afraid of spiders, just about the only thing in the whole world that scared him. Kind of weird, what with Junior being such a warrior.
Wish you were here.

Cody rose, walked to the woodstove. He knew woodstoves: Junior's mom had one, heated their whole house with it in winter. Cody raised the cook lid; the little cooking bowl beneath it was empty. He opened the feed door at the side, bent down, saw a pile of white ashes; and what was this? Cody reached in, took out a beer bottle, the top broken off, the end jagged. He examined the bottle. It hadn't been inside while the stove was hot: The paper label was intact. Bud Light.
Bud,
he thought; completely meaningless, of course, unconnected to Bud the horse.

Cody sniffed at the bottle. He detected no beer smell at all, just ashes. Completely unconnected but--from behind came a voice, so sudden and unexpected it made him jump.

"What are you doing?"
Cody turned. Townes stood in the doorway.
"Looking for Clea," Cody said.
"Hard of hearing?" Townes said. "They've searched all

Cody knew the huts had been searched, didn't need reminding. Also, he didn't like the stick or that particular way of pointing it. But most of all--what was that expression Alex had used? About things not computing? How did you compute that bit from Clea's letter--
I've been thinking about you a lot, can't help it--
with this new boyfriend, Townes DeWitt, or whatever the hell his stupid name was? Cody didn't think about all those things; they were just there, egging him on. "Here," he said, and tossed the broken bottle to Townes.

A soft toss, neither spinning nor rotating, unbroken bottom end first: in other words, catchable. But Townes made no attempt to catch it. He leaned slightly out of the way--a bit like a matador Cody had seen on TV--and the bottle arced past him and smashed on the floor.

"What's your problem?" Townes said.
"No problem."
Townes looked down at the broken glass, toed some of it

aside, then gazed at Cody, maybe actually seeing him for the first time. "You from the high school?" he said.
"I dropped out," said Cody.
"Yeah?" Townes said. "How ballsy."
Cody shrugged.
Townes glanced around the hut. "Seen enough?" he said.
Cody didn't know about that. He wished he hadn't broken the bottle, although it couldn't have anything to do with Clea: She didn't even like the taste of beer.
"Isn't it obvious she's not here?" Townes said.
"Maybe she was," Cody said; not because he thought so-- he'd just proved the opposite to himself--but more because he didn't want to agree with Townes about anything. He realized he was jealous and felt ashamed. It took him a moment or two to even understand the feeling, put a name to it. Cody had never felt a whisper of jealousy in his life. It was a bad feeling, tumultuous, dark, powerful. And indulging in it now, with Clea missing, in trouble, maybe even something worse? That was low.
"What do you mean,
maybe she was
?" Townes said.
"What I said. Maybe she was here."
"Is there evidence of that?" Townes looked around the cabin again, slower and with more care this time. "I don't see anything."
"Maybe she likes Bud Light," Cody said. He realized he was toying with Townes, a sneaky little game cooked up by this new jealousy demon inside him.
Townes glanced down again at the remains of the bottle. "Are you suggesting that she wandered in here with a concussion and funneled down a quick one?"
"You'd know," Cody said. He was out of control now, the jealousy demon in full command.
Townes's face changed; hard to describe how, exactly: It was almost as though he suddenly felt unwell. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" he said.
Cody shrugged. "Alex says you're going out with her."
"Alex has a big mouth."
"Meaning you are going out with her."
"What's it to you?"
"Nothing," Cody said.
Townes gazed at him, at the same time easing more of the shattered glass against the wall with his foot. His face--a good-looking face, the kind that might turn up in some clothing catalog, no way Cody could avoid noticing that--returned to normal, as though the sudden illness had passed. "I can tell you that Clea is not the funneling type," he said.
"But does she like beer?" Cody said.
"Margaritas are more her speed," Townes said. Cody nodded.
A composed sort of nod, perhaps, but inside he was very mixed up, as mixed up as he'd ever been. Margaritas? That wasn't Clea, not at all. How well did this guy, this rich asshole, the new boyfriend, even know her? The wind rose, blowing a little twister of snow through the open doorway.
"How about we get going?" Townes said.
Cody didn't want to leave the warming hut, although for no reason he could express. He moved toward the door. Townes stepped aside. They didn't look at each other. Cody stepped out of the hut, Townes following and closing the door.
They walked out to the trail, Cody still leading the way, trying not to limp. The wind blew harder now, and the snowfall thickened. Cody pictured his winter boots--sturdy, waterproof, lug soles for traction--in the closet back home. His feet were cold, his ears, too; just about all of him. He should have made a list before packing; making lists was something he never did. That was one thing he should change about his life, and soon. Clea made lists all the time.
They reached the trail, turned right; the footprints of Alex, Simon, and Larissa were quickly filling up with snow, getting smoothed away. The trail soon widened, and Cody and Townes were side by side.
"What's she like?" Cody said.
"Who?"
"Clea."
Townes glanced over at him. Cody kept looking straight ahead. "Anyone ever mention you ask a lot of questions?" Townes said.
"No."
"Well, you do."
They continued without talking, rounded a bend, passed through a dense stand of evergreens that for a few moments blocked the wind and snow, muffled all sound.
"It, uh," Cody began. What was he trying to say? These Dover kids were all so articulate; somehow he had to step it up. "It makes sense," he said.
"What does?" said Townes.
"Asking questions," Cody said. "In a situation where someone's lost." The truth of that hit him as he spoke.
Cody felt Townes's gaze on him again. "Fair enough," he said. "Clea's cool."
"Cool?"
"You asked what she's like. Cool is the answer, although I don't see how that's going to help find her."
Cool? Clea was cool? True, in a way, Cody supposed, but if asked to describe her, that wasn't where he would have started.
"What else?" he said.
"What else?"
"About her. Something that might help."
"Like what?"
"I don't know," Cody said. "She's new here, right?" "How do you know that?" said Townes.
"Alex."
"Of course," Townes said. "Yeah, she transferred in as a junior--comes from some hick town out west."
Cody had a thought; a genuine, possibly useful kind of thought, having nothing to do with the jealousy demon. "Maybe she didn't like it here," he said. He had to study that letter of hers, first thing.
"Huh?"
"And wanted to get away."
"That doesn't happen. People kill to come here."
But Clea hadn't. Her father made a few calls, end of story. Without really knowing why, Cody decided he had to find out for sure whether Townes knew anything about him. "Why did she come here?" he said.
"For the opportunity, like anyone else."
"But why junior year?"
"Why not? It happens all the time."
So Townes didn't know. They walked out of the muffled space between the evergreens--more like a high-ceilinged interior space, a chapel, say, than the outdoors--and back into the snow and wind. The trail led them to a lookout with a picnic bench, all covered in snow. Down below they could see the highway, three figures standing beside it, gazing back up in their direction.
"How come she went off riding all by herself?" Cody said.
Townes shrugged. "She likes riding, can never get enough." That was just about the only positive thing he'd found about Townes so far: Unlike some of the others, he never referred to Clea--or started to refer to her and then caught himself--in the past tense.
And the answer was believable, totally. Clea loved riding. There was just one little thing. "You're on the team too," Cody said.
"I'm captain."
Cody turned to him. "Why didn't you go with her?"
A tiny muscle in Townes's face twitched. "Midnight overheated during the workout. I wanted to get him back in the barn."
"Midnight is your horse?"
"Correct."
A big lump of snow fell off a branch, thumped down right beside Cody, a quiet white explosion. The jealousy demon retreated into Cody's internal shadows.

They walked down to Route 7. Cody produced his cell phone. Simon knew the number by heart. A few minutes later a battered-looking taxi arrived and they all squeezed in. The driver dropped them on the Dover Academy campus in front of Baxter Hall, a big brick building with yellow trim and yellow columns by the door. Cody gazed up at the windows, wondering which one was Clea's.

The fare came to twenty-six dollars. The Dover Academy kids scrounged around for money. Alex had three dollars and fifty cents, Larissa two dollars and some euros, Simon a crumpled-up $5000 birthday check from his grandfather, Townes nothing. Cody ended up paying the driver.

Memorial Museum of Art--a neon sculpture resembling a rocket ship glowed outside--and the temperature was falling, too, as well as the snow: everything falling. He took the road by the hockey rink, and through the glass walls saw a game in progress. Cody didn't know much about hockey--his athletic life, meaning much of his whole life, had always been football in the fall, baseball in the spring, basketball in between, mostly to stay in shape--but he lingered outside the rink, long enough to see Dover Academy, in red and gold, score a goal against a team in green and white. The Dover players all raised their sticks as the puck went in the net. It looked like fun.

The road, recently plowed, took him past the tennis courts, a flat whiteness with dark net posts poking up in regular patterns, and up the tree-lined street with nice houses, everyone inside except for one man trying to shovel his walk while his dog raced around undoing all his work. The lane leading to the barn soon appeared on Cody's right. No plow had reached it yet, but there were tire tracks going down the middle, and Cody walked in those, sneakers wet, feet moving beyond cold toward numb. He'd gone about halfway to the barn--mostly dark, just one or two lights showing through the windows-- when a car came his way, snowflakes black in its headlights. Cody stepped aside, up to his mid calves in snow, to let it go by, but the car didn't go by, instead rolled to a stop beside him.

A cop car. The window slid down and Sergeant Orton peered out. "That you, Cody?" Snowflakes blew into the car, got caught in his mustache.

"Yeah."
"Must be freezing your ass off."
"I'm okay."
"Find those kids all right?"
"Yeah."
"Anything to report?"
Cody shook his head. "Did anyone else, uh . . ." "Nope," said Sergeant Orton. "Can I give you a lift someplace?"

"I'm okay."
"I forgot, been so busy--you go to Ethan Allen?" "Ethan Allen?"
"The high school."
"I dropped out of high school," Cody said.
"How old are you?"
"Going on seventeen."
"Old enough to make your own decisions," said Sergeant

Orton. Cody nodded. That cop episode at Black Rocks made him wary, but Sergeant Orton didn't seem so bad. Then the sergeant added, "Right or wrong." And the wariness returned.