by Ruth Ware
I wave a hand at the window, where the wind has picked up into a full-blown blizzard.
“Get those peas off your ankle,” Danny says brusquely, “they’ve defrosted anyway.”
I hold out my leg meekly as he lifts off the soggy bag of peas and straps an ice-pack sleeve around my throbbing ankle. It hurts, but in a weird kind of way, I welcome the pain. It anchors me, reminding me that I’m here, alive.
Danny has found an old FM radio, and while he cooks, I sit quietly, listening to the accounts of the rescue attempts. The realization that keeps shivering up and down my spine is how incredibly lucky we have been—all of us. At least eight buildings have been totally crushed by the avalanche. Four were lift stations that were confirmed empty, since the lifts had been closed earlier that day. Two were cafés that are believed to have been closed at the time the avalanche hit. The remaining three were chalets. One, much farther down near St. Antoine le Lac, has been evacuated. Minor injuries, no fatalities. No one knows about the other two. Amid questions about responsibility and whether the resort authorities should have acted earlier, the newscaster emphasizes again and again how fortunate it was that so many pistes and lifts were shut. Even the funicular had only four people in it, and they have been safely evacuated down the smashed, glassed-in tunnel, but the announcer has already said, ominously, that it is going to take “many days to assess the repairs.” Not even complete the repairs, assess them.
Given that, a mangled swimming pool seems like getting off pretty lightly. If it wasn’t for Eva, we would be counting our blessings. But the knowledge that she’s still missing is like a dark, spreading poison, gnawing at the edge of everything. When I shut my eyes, I can see her—buried in darkness, growing colder and colder with every moment that passes, wondering if anyone is coming. If she’s lucky, the close-packed snow will suffocate her quickly. If she’s not…
The thought makes me feel suddenly weak with fear.
“How much food have we got?” I ask Danny, trying to distract myself from my thoughts, and he shakes his head dismissively.
“Plenty. Don’t worry about that. Tony Stark down there might have to go without fresh milk for a few days, but the store cupboard’s got enough in it for a siege.”
There’s always the possibility that Eva got bored of waiting for everyone, skied down into St. Antoine hours ago, and is absolutely fine, just unable to contact us. But as the hours tick on, that’s starting to look more and more unlikely. The landline and the internet are still both down, and the mobile reception has only worsened since the avalanche. The remaining masts presumably buckled beneath a hundredweight of snow, but Inigo’s phone continues to get a few erratic bars every now and again. He’s had a text from home—just one—and managed to reply saying he was okay. Wouldn’t Eva have texted to say she was all right when all this kicked off? Wouldn’t she have found a way, somehow, to get word through?
LIZ
Snoop ID: ANON101
Listening to: Offline
Snoopers: 0
Snoopscribers: 0
It is 3:11 p.m. when the electricity dies. I am sitting up in my room, trying to shut out the noises from downstairs, when the room is suddenly plunged into darkness. I fumble for my phone, wondering if a bulb has blown. Then I hear shouts of annoyance coming from up and down the corridor. It is not just me.
“Did your electricity just go off?”
It is Topher’s voice, right outside my bedroom. For a moment I think he’s talking to me, but then I hear an answering deep rumble: Elliot.
“Fuck,” Topher says, in response. “That’s all we need.”
I open the door to find the rest of the group congregating on the landing, discussing what to do by the light of their mobile phone torches. In the end, we traipse downstairs to consult Erin and Danny. I hang back as Topher knocks irritably on the kitchen door. He is grumbling under his breath about the fucking arse end of nowhere.
“What?” Danny answers. His expression is belligerent.
“Hello,” Topher says, abruptly changing his tone. He is out to charm now. He is not stupid. He knows he has got to get these people on his side. The effect is impressive. It is like a switch being flipped. “So sorry to disturb, but our electricity’s gone out.”
“You and me both, mate,” Danny says shortly.
“And, is there anything one can do?” Topher asks. He’s stressed, and I can tell because his accent has become indefinably more monied.
“Not really. The backup generator was in the pool house.” Danny waves a hand at the debris just visible from the kitchen window. Topher swears. His charm is slipping.
“So we just wait and freeze to death?”
“Not freeze,” Danny says. “We’ve got plenty of wood. You can start by putting a log on the living room fire.”
Topher opens his mouth like he is about to say something. Then he seems to think better of it and closes it again. He turns and walks slowly back through to the darkened living room. The rest of us follow.
In the lounge, Topher flings himself onto the sofa while Miranda lights candles. Rik opens up the stove, stirs the embers, and puts another two logs on top.
“Great,” Carl says. “Bloody great. This is all we need. We’re gonna be fucking ice cubes by the time they find us.”
“We’ll be fine,” Miranda says shortly, her voice clipped and annoyed. “It’s Eva we need to worry about.”
Eva. In all the commotion, I had almost succeeded in forgetting about her. My stomach crunches with mingled guilt and anxiety.
There is a long, horrible pause while no one asks the questions that are running in their heads. What has happened to her? Was she caught up in that avalanche? Is she dead?
“Wouldn’t she have, like, phoned, if she were okay?” Ani says at last, breaking the silence. Her usual diffidence is even more pronounced. “I know there’s not much signal, but just… like… a text, even?”
“She might not have been able to get through,” Miranda says, but I can tell she is trying to persuade herself, more than being convinced by her own argument.
Elliot is standing in the corner of the room, looking out at the darkening snow, and then he says something to Topher in his deep, abrupt voice and leaves. Topher gets up from the sofa and follows him without a word.
I frown, watching them go, watching their shadows leap and flicker in the light from the guttering candles. Where are they going? There is something in Topher’s expression I don’t like. A sense of sudden purpose. And it gives me a jolt of unease.
ERIN
Snoop ID: LITTLEMY
Listening to: Offline
Snoopers: 5
Snoopscribers: 10
“This is bad, Erin.” Danny is rummaging through tins at the back of the darkened kitchen. As I watch him, he straightens up, running his hands over his close-cropped hair. “This is very, very bad.”
“It’ll be okay,” I say, but the truth is, I’m lying, and I know it. My ankle has puffed up to twice its usual size and still won’t bear my weight properly. We have no lighting, and the only heat is from the woodstoves. Danny can’t even microwave a frozen curry for dinner. And Eva—but I can’t think about that now. I push the image of her white, cold face away from me, locking it behind the door in my mind where I keep images like that, frozen in ice. I have to hold on to the possibility that she’s okay, that she made it down into the village and just hasn’t been able to get through on the phone. God knows, the reception is bad enough.
“Your foot could be broken for all we know,” Danny says, but I shake my head, with a confidence I don’t feel.
“I don’t think it’s broken. I think it’s just badly sprained.”
“How the fuck would you know?” Danny asks, and then holds up a hand. “Never mind, I forgot you’re a bloody doctor. Tell me again what you’re doing cleaning up after posh wankers for minimum wage?”
I could give about eight different answers to this. I could remind him that I’m not a doctor, I
’m a medical school dropout. I could tell him the truth about what brought me to St. Antoine. I could give him a lecture on greenstick fractures. But I don’t need to say any of this because he’s gone back to looking through the tins.
“I could heat up soup or something on the woodburner,” he’s saying, his brow furrowed as he tries to read a label with the aid of his mobile phone. “Jesus, what a carve-up.”
The knock makes us both jump, and we stare at each other, and then Danny goes to the door. It’s Topher again, but he’s wearing a very different expression to the ingratiating one he used to ask us to magically fix the lights. He looks… I’m not sure. I don’t know him well enough to tell. He could be pissed off, or gravely worried.
“Yes?” Danny says abruptly, but I heave myself to my feet and hobble past him. There is a reason Danny doesn’t deal much with front of house. He’s got no tact and no patience. But the fact is that however bad the situation is, Topher and Snoop are still our guests, and we still need to behave like we’re representing the company.
“Topher,” I say, and then I see Elliot hovering behind him. “Elliot, how can I help?”
“Elliot thinks he’s found Eva,” Topher says without preamble.
“What?” It’s the last thing I’d expected. Questions jumble through my mind. Where? How? “Is she okay?”
“We don’t know.” Topher pushes past me and Danny and unfolds a laptop, putting it down on the stainless-steel kitchen work top. It lights up the circle of faces with an unearthly glow as he taps in a password. A screen of garbled code comes up. It means nothing to me.
“To be precise,” it’s Elliot’s deep monotone, “we know the location of her phone.”
“Her phone?”
“One of the reasons I didn’t want to agree to the buyout,” Topher begins, “is because Elliot’s been working on a major update to help monetize Snoop. We’re calling it geosnooping in beta, but that probably won’t be the final name. As you may know, Snoop is as anonymous as you want it to be at the moment—you can’t tell where someone is, all you’ve got to go on is what they declare in their profile.”
“Right,” I say slowly.
“But Elliot’s been working on an upgrade that will allow people to view other Snoopers within a fifty-meter radius. You won’t know exactly where they are, but you’ll know they’re close to you.”
“Okay, I get that.”
“It hasn’t gone live yet. But as part of the preparations for rolling it out we changed the permissions Snoop requires to give the app access to your location. Basically Snoop knows that information whether you choose to display it or not—it’s part of the data profile we share with stakeholders to create income.”
“Right…,” I say again, trying to get him to cut to the chase. I don’t care about the inner workings of Snoop, and I think I know where this is going. “Are you saying you used this information to find out Eva’s location?”
“Yes. Elliot’s been able to hack into the back end and get the GPS coordinates of Eva’s phone.”
“It’s here,” Elliot says, pulling up a GPS map, where a red flag shows the location of the coordinates he’s tapped into the search bar.
As soon as I see the pin, my heart sinks down into my stomach, and I feel myself going cold with dread.
“Where is it exactly?” Topher is saying, but his voice sounds very far away now. Danny suddenly puts a hand to his mouth, and I know that he has just figured out what I already knew.
The pistes are marked on Elliot’s maps, but not the elevations, and without the simplified three-dimensional rendering of the resort’s official piste map, it’s not very easy to put together the geography of the peaks and valleys. Eva’s little dot is showing very close to the La Sorcière run. So close in fact that she could almost be on the run.
But she’s not. Because if you’ve skied the run, as I have, many times, what you know is that there is a sheer drop to the side of La Sorcière. A drop that falls hundreds, maybe thousands of feet into a deep, inaccessible valley. Somehow, in the blinding snow, Eva must have done exactly what I feared in the first place—she has skied over the edge.
“If we can give these coordinates to search and rescue—” Topher is saying, with the kind of blithe confidence that only the CEO of a major international company could muster, but I interrupt.
“I’m sorry, Topher, I’m so sorry—”
“What do you mean?”
“This—” I swallow, I try to find a way of putting the news that’s not too brutal. “This dot, it’s off the side of the piste.”
“Eva’s an excellent skier,” Topher says confidently. “Off-piste, even in this weather—”
“No, you don’t understand. I’m not talking about a bit of loose snow. I mean she’s skied off the piste. Off the edge. La Sorcière—” I swallow. There is no way of saying this nicely. “That section of La Sorcière runs alongside a sheer drop. A very steep one.”
Topher looks at me blankly, unable, or unwilling, to understand what I’m trying to tell him.
“What do you mean?” he says at last.
“Topher, if Eva is really where that dot is showing, she’s dead.”
I regret the starkness as soon as the words have left my mouth, but they are said, and they can’t be unsaid.
Topher’s face goes white. Then he turns to Elliot.
“How accurate is this positioning?”
“GPS is typically accurate to about five meters,” Elliot says. He looks… God, I don’t know. Unperturbed almost? Can that be possible? Surely not. No one could be that callous. Even if they were, wouldn’t they at least try to feign some kind of concern? “But you can get interference—bounced signals and so on. I’m not totally sure how the mountains would affect it. It’s not impossible it’s a few meters off.”
“So, what, ten meters? She could be on the piste,” Topher says, desperately, but we can all see, looking at the map’s scale, that that’s not possible. Even fifty meters wouldn’t put her back on the run. “Or—or she could have dropped her phone skiing down.”
“If she’d dropped it, I think it would be on the run,” I say very quietly.
“She could have thrown it off the edge, for fuck’s sake!” Topher cries.
No one responds to this. It’s true, of course, but the obvious response is why, and no one can bring themselves to say it, not even Elliot, who simply nods in acceptance of the fact that Topher’s remark is essentially correct. All we have found is Eva’s phone. It’s just very hard to work out how it could have got where it is now without Eva.
“Fuck,” Topher says. He gropes his way to the footrest I was using to prop up my injured foot and sits, as though his legs will no longer hold him up. “Fuck.”
“If she’s dead,” Elliot says flatly, “what does that mean for Snoop? Is Eva’s husband a shareholder now? Will he get a vote on the buyout?”
“Fuck!” Topher looks wild-eyed, as if he can’t believe what’s happened. “Arnaud? I—I don’t know! Jesus, Elliot, how can you—”
He breaks off… I can see his brain ticking. Even now, below his grief, he is still Snoop’s founder as much, if not more, than he is Eva’s friend.
“I suppose—I remember now, when we set it up. There was something about this. It was supposed to stop the company passing out of control of the original shareholders without their agreement. I’m pretty sure that shareholders can’t sell or give away their shares—they can only offer them for sale to Eva and me. I mean—”
He stops. Swallows.
“To me.”
LIZ
Snoop ID: ANON101
Listening to: Offline
Snoopers: 0
Snoopscribers: 0
Eva is dead.
I don’t know how the word gets out, but once the whispers start they are like frost creeping across a window. Soon everyone knows. In the living room Miranda and Tiger are exchanging urgent whispers.
“I know,” I hear Miranda hiss. “But we hav
e to figure out some kind announcement for when we’re back online, Tiger. There’s no way we can keep a lid on news this big, and if it leaks, it’ll be worse in the long run.”
“I can’t believe it.” Ani comes to sit beside me on the couch. Her face is swollen and blotched, even in the dim light from the stove and candles. “Have you heard?”
I nod. I don’t trust my voice. In spite of everything, in spite of all that’s happened and all the years since I left Snoop, my feelings are still too raw.
“I can’t believe it!” Ani repeats desperately. “Oh God, this is awful. Poor, poor Eva. Rik says they may not even be able to recover a body. Oh God poor Arnaud. And he doesn’t even know. How will he tell Radisson? How do you explain to a child of that age that Mummy’s never coming home?”
Radisson. The name stabs me like a knife. I had almost forgotten that Eva had had a child in the years since we worked together.
“I don’t know,” I say hoarsely.
“Fuck knows what this means for the buyout,” Carl says morosely from the other end of the room, and Ani rounds on him.
“Carl! How can you even think about that?”
“I know.” Carl holds up his hands. “Look, I’m not being selfish here, I won’t be getting any million-dollar payouts, will I. I’m not talking about the money, I’m talking about the safety of the company. I’m still chief legal officer at Snoop and I have to think about this stuff. Snoop doesn’t poof out of existence because Eva’s had an accident. All our employees don’t go away. I’ve got a duty to them and to the company. I’d be saying the same if it was me who skied off a cliff. Well, I mean, assuming I could still talk.”
“Carl’s right.” Rik comes up behind us unexpectedly, looming out of the shadows, and puts his hand on his colleague’s shoulder. His face, in the candlelight, looks uneasy. “However crassly he’s phrased it. Eva’s death is a tragedy—there’s absolutely no doubt about that—but in the coldest possible way, it’s got very little to do with Snoop. The company is a completely separate entity to any of us—even Eva and Topher. The buyout offer is still on the table. The clock’s still ticking. We still have to come up with an answer. Eva’s death doesn’t change that.”