Maeve stops on the thought. The first time she saw him lose his temper was out in the snow with Justin, ripping the camera from Justin’s hands. In retrospect, it seems strange that he agreed to let Anna film him at all.
Almost unbelievable, in fact. She remembers Anna’s halting response to the question. He doesn’t—he doesn’t love it.
But what if he didn’t know? Or what if she was using that film in ways he didn’t expect? What if Anna really did go and meet him that night, and there was an argument—
What if Sadie had caught something else on film, some other fight, something that might suggest the truth, only to discover after Anna’s death that the camera was missing? She’d been mucking about with that camera for weeks; even Sim said as much. Maeve didn’t watch every clip—she didn’t look at every memory card. Shocked to find so much of herself on there, she’d switched the thing off.
She looks over her shoulder, a strange chill coming over her. How quickly Dan had found Anna’s body—outside, from a window, when he should have been searching the rooms. She furrows her brow. How had he known where to look?
Dan, whose over-the-top CPR seemed even in the moment like some crazed display rather than the real thing.
It’s a terrible theory.
And Sadie, who dove headfirst into this mess to try to gain Sim’s favor, out there now, somewhere, with them both.
Snow catches on Maeve’s eyelashes; a deep silence all around. There’s no rip of civilization, no truck engine or snowmobile. No planes overhead. In fact, she can’t think of the last time she heard the hum of an airplane making its way through the clouds.
No echo of a rescue plow burrowing up through the snow.
It’s the kind of silence she used to covet: the way a travel brochure sells you peace and quiet.
Or an arts retreat. But that makes her think of Sim again, and she bites her lip.
If she ever gets home, she tells herself now, she’ll take every vacation in a major metropolitan center. Nothing but Manhattan, Chicago, LA. Crowded cruises; Disney resorts with the kids. No Airbnb farmhouses in the townships. No more studio cabins in the woods. Nothing with fewer than two thousand loud, annoying people in her immediate vicinity at all times. Oh, to be surrounded by people. Imagine complaining about that.
It’s a long moment before she catches herself.
Not if she ever gets home.
Not if.
When.
She gives the landscape one last good scan, a one-eighty-degree sweep of the eye, checking for any bit of motion, anything other than white. The fluorescent marker flutters where she tied it to the gate. She’s farther out than she meant to go. The trail made the going easier, but it drops off ahead. She turns back toward the center, retracing her steps.
She can see herself approaching from a distance, a vague reflection: the puffy jacket, the neon X, chugging along, growing brighter, taller as she gets near. She’s staring at the glass, trying to see beyond the mirror image and check on Karo, when something catches her eye.
She stops, alarmed. Over at the corner of the building, another reflection. Maybe? Some dark shape sweeping by.
Maeve waits. Alert, watching. There’s nothing there now. Maybe it was a cloud in shadow. Or a bird. They haven’t seen birds, it occurs to her now, for days. It’s why the landscape is so quiet.
Not even a crow.
The shadow she saw last night, she reminds herself, was nothing.
She waits a moment longer, but the reflection or the sweep of wing doesn’t recur. The silence seems to settle in around her in a new way, and she’s aware of all her layers acting like insulation. A barrier between herself and the world. Her own pulse in her ears, a muffled swoosh. Suddenly anxious, she pulls back her hood, rips the hat off. Listening harder.
The building blinks back at her, windows silvery in the snow glare, reflecting the great expanse of white, the drifts stretching on and on. Her stomach tightens and she turns, slowly, to look behind her.
There is something out there after all.
Between Maeve and the gates, something skims across the snow. She leans back, straining to see in the weird brightness, trying to adjust her perspective. The thing whips and catches, then skates along farther. What is it? Some animal? What could be out in the open in this cold?
It skirts closer, and Maeve goes after it, even though the snow here is dense. It’s not an animal, it can’t be; the wind catches it up, and it twists and falls like a plait of long hair, like a skein of silk. Like rope.
It’s red.
The second Maeve sees that, she recognizes it—she pulls off her gloves and sprawls ahead into the drift. It’s Justin’s scarf, his red cashmere. She pushes up to stand again in the wind. The scarf feels fine and damp in her hands, but as she turns it over, she notices the abrasion along one edge, and her finger splays through a new split in the fabric. As though it had been caught and torn, Maeve thinks. Not quite a hole. A wide fray.
She pulls her hand back and thumbs the damage anxiously. The finger thrusting through the hole seems carnal to her, almost gory. It makes her stomach turn. She has an impulse to dig the bear claw from her pocket and match it against the tear in the scarf.
Instead, her head snaps up, and she looks first over one shoulder, then back the other way, and again. The constant sheer of the wind against the empty landscape makes her feel as though she’s caught in a tunnel. Anything could be right there, behind you, and you’d never know until it was too late. She has to close her hand tight around the torn scarf to keep it from shaking.
If something happened to Justin, it was before they got to the village. He must have been closer to the center than not when the scarf was lost. She thinks again of how she imagined him, struggling to keep up.
The wind rises, and a seam of snow ripples off the drifts and sprays across the horizon. There is snow coming down and snow going up, snow on the ground. Maeve pulls her hood up against the cold and turns and walks around the building, forcing herself to keep her eyes down, to keep her own path in sight.
A perimeter check, that’s all. Three more trail markers left in her pocket: she needs to go only far enough to make some kind of report, to be sure that no one is out there coming for them. Or, she tells herself, to bring the good news if someone is.
She presses Justin’s scarf down into her pocket. The scarf does not feel like good news.
Around back, there is at least a sense of shelter. The building acts as a windbreak and she cuts a trail to the edge of the woods, being firm with herself—No backing out now—one hand on the bear spray in its holster. The scattered few trees here and there are a reminder that there used to be walkways, little gardens marking the bend in each gravel path. She brushes the snow off a long, protruding branch and attaches another marker. She’s smart about it, pausing to take a good sweep of the tree line and assure herself that nothing is there. When she’s about fifty feet out, she calls in the direction of the woods.
“Justin?” Her voice doesn’t echo but seems to whip away from her, instantly swallowed by the wind. She tries again: “Justin!”
There’s no answer. Close to the edge of the forest now, Maeve casts around, looking for tracks. There’s no sign of any other human, no animal’s trail to follow. Nothing watching her from the woods.
She gauges the distance to the building, then allows herself a quick glance in all directions, just to be sure. Moving herself along—step-step-step, head down, turn, check right, over the shoulder and back—until it should feel casual, just another daily routine. Almost done now. But the white-on-white makes her head hurt. She squints and then widens her eyes; nothing works. She can’t tell where one drift ends and another begins, and trying to see the nuance—what’s light and what’s shade, what’s a dip caused by wind and what might have been made by something else—feels futile.
She’s about to give up when a sudden drop takes her by surprise. The ground falls away: she trips and goes down hard, landing on one knee,
then an elbow, her face in the snow.
Maeve pushes up to a crouch and brushes the cold from her cheek.
When she rises, she can see the depression all around her—not tracks, but a cleft in the snow where something heaved its body through. Someone? No, it’s far too big for a person. As deep and wide, easily, as the path cut through the snow out front by all the others on their way out.
For a moment she doesn’t breathe at all. Her feeling the night before, that something was out here, watching her, comes heavy into her body. She fingers the scarf in her pocket and gets low again, looking more closely—for what? Some kind of hard proof. Red fibers, a trace of blood. But there’s nothing like that.
Deep in the cleft, there are a few sharper marks, more discernible. More like tracks.
That’s when she remembers the elk. Early that morning, only a few of them, three or four, charging out of the trees and off to the west.
Maeve steps back, her heartbeat calming. She can see how they came out through the trees, the branches snapped or swept clean where the animals brushed by them, the snow coming off in a spray. It’s odd to see bare branches now, or the deep green of fir needles scattered against the white.
Back in the trees, a branch wavers in some current of air, as though something has caught it and let go. A moment later, even the branch is still.
She pushes her hood off again and glances around. Down at the front gates, the silence had been almost claustrophobic, but here, there’s some kind of echo. Something whipping through the air.
Flapping. The same sound of a flag she heard earlier in the day.
But there is no flag, no awning, nothing on the building that she can see that would make that kind of noise, like the beating of a giant, distant wing. Her heart skips; she suddenly imagines the spinning blades of a propeller, a Search-and-Rescue plane. Maeve looks back a moment to the center. She’s already been gone longer than anticipated. But isn’t this the good news they were hoping for? A surge of adrenaline runs through her as she scans the area ahead, hyperalert. Impulsive, even. The echo must be coming off the ledge. The clear, open lip, high above the river and bare as tundra now, where she stood with Sadie that first day. An easy place to be seen, to signal for help.
She hesitates only a second before pressing on. Not right into the trees, not exactly, but along the edge, her gaze tracking deep into the woods. Just in case.
The building falls into the distance behind her. Karo, she tells herself, won’t care—or not much. Karo will in fact be glad of Maeve’s ingenuity if she’s able to summon a rescue. The noise feels nearer now, echoing, cracking in the cold air. She splits off to the right, where the woods break apart, and pushes her way into the open, trying to get a better view.
Something flashes at her from high in the branches and she hears it, right overhead, sharper than ever—the sound she’s been following all this time.
Just a sheet, whipping in the wind.
No, not a sheet. A tarp.
It’s the dark green tarp, one of them, that Dan packed. But where Maeve is standing is the opposite direction of town.
She runs through all the things this could mean. That the tarp blew up in the high winds last night, all the way up the ridge from wherever they set up camp. Or that they chose some odd, circuitous route. Weren’t they talking about that at one point? Going up to go down?
Or that the tarp somehow came free of the pack, or was taken out for some reason before they’d really left the property. Got caught by the wind and blew away.
Or that they never really left at all.
This last idea hits her like a blow to the chest and Maeve spins, checking behind her. There is no other sign of life, no equipment abandoned on the ground. Uneasy, she draws the red scarf from her pocket, scans the damage carefully. Next to the split, the fabric shreds away, the threads with an almost burned look and something else too—darker and gritty and somehow stiff. She fingers it.
Red on red. Dried blood.
Maeve looks up, then all around her, her heart pounding.
There was a disagreement of some kind. Another fight. The plan went wrong. Sadie, with her sharp, false loyalties, accused Dan of locking Anna out, and Justin retaliated, or maybe Justin knew about Sadie’s footage and tried to use it against her, a blackmail scheme. That’s why the video was still there, saved to the camera. Maybe Justin accused Dan himself or merely picked a fight out of jealousy. Anything was possible.
Or maybe this was always the plan. Maeve grows a little colder. If Anna’s death was no accident—
She thinks of Dan loading his revolver and slipping it into the holster at his side.
Who else would target both Justin and Anna? What if this was a way to draw things to a quick end when Anna and Justin got too close? They’d all seen Dan’s temper: with Justin, more than once.
She stuffs the scarf back into her pocket, then draws out its red tip once more, as though making sure she can trust herself, making sure it’s really there. She remembers Dan’s grip on Anna’s hair, the way he turned, dead-eyed, to the camera. Above her, the tarp whips and cracks. This isn’t what Maeve was hoping for. She was hoping to find—what? Search-and-Rescue, a helicopter. Someone she could flag down, like a woman with a flat tire at the side of the road.
Only there is no road. The sky is just sky. The truth of this starts to settle in and something colder runs through her again, a new desperation.
If Justin is dead, then it’s possible that Maeve is out here in the woods with whoever killed him.
The tarp, like a bad omen, snaps again from overhead. She’s standing in the emptiness when she hears something else. Louder, nearer. Everywhere at once. A shot? The crack of a gun.
Maeve’s heart jumps. She ducks, crouching low to the ground, listening. It comes again, but this time the noise is deeper and vaguely familiar. Not a gun after all, she thinks: more like the echo of a frozen lake breaking apart in spring. A wave of sound. Rolling in almost like thunder.
Like the sound of a train.
That’s when she knows.
Maeve turns and runs. Back along her own trail first, then off into the safer network of forest to the other side just as the ridge beyond where she was standing begins to cave in, down into the river valley below. The noise is there and then gone, enormous.
She spins in its wake, only a few hundred yards away. Watches as the ledge to the east collapses, then disappears.
Where there was land, there is no land now. Like the edge of the earth has fallen away.
But there was no earth there, she reminds herself. There was only snowpack, a cornice, a wide ledge. Impossible to know where the world ends under all this snow. Another hundred yards on, and Maeve would have gone with it.
The woods are quiet, her heart pounding in her ears.
She needs to get back to the center. Far out across the gap, she can see thicker clouds, the sky darkening again. The wind is sharper; it hurts her face.
Her own trail now seems too dangerous. Maeve turns to head back the other way, through the forest that surrounds the cabins. As far from the unstable edge as possible. There’s a steep incline to one side and a kind of trough, a natural path leading down, and she takes this second route. Moving steadily, she walks with her head bare, despite the cold. It feels too vulnerable to keep the hood up, to have both her hearing and her vision restricted. The going is easier in the woods—less snow at her feet and more caught in the trees above.
There’s the sound of snapping twigs, the odd whump of a clump of snow falling from branch to ground as she walks, and every time, she stops, frozen, listening to make sure there’s nothing there. No one. It’s only Maeve herself making the noise as she goes. It seems to take longer to get back than it did to come out—the snow is hardly as deep, but her clothes catch on the branches, and the woods here are thicker than before. The trees all start to look the same.
Sorry now that she didn’t think to bring water. She stops a moment to get her bearings and b
ends down for a handful of snow.
That’s the first time she sees the print.
It’s not what she expected. It looks more like a foot—like a giant’s footprint that has melted out at the edges and spread. She runs through any other possibilities, as though she could be making a mistake, but the print is real and bigger than her two feet together. The bear.
There are a few prints close in. They disappear again where tree roots break the surface and the snow turns to ice. The track is heading the same direction as Maeve.
She turns sharply left, moving away from the area as quickly as possible. Making calculations in her mind: if she’s been walking in a straight line, the turn should spit her out back along the edge of the woods where she can see. But another twenty minutes of walking and she finds herself almost exactly where she started.
“Okay,” Maeve says, and she startles at her own voice. What light there is in the woods is fading fast. She’s been out far longer than she meant to be. There’s a storm moving in and Maeve remembers the feeling of her dream the night before, trapped outside and blinded by blowing snow. Panic sets in and she struggles to keep her breathing even: lost is not an option.
Lost in the dark, even worse.
“Okay,” she says again. Inhale, exhale. Trying to calm herself. “Okay.”
If, instead of following the path, she climbs up higher, then what? She might gain a better vantage point—be able to see, for instance, the skylights of her studio cabin and from there get out of the woods and back to the center before she loses the light entirely. Angry with herself now for getting into this mess. What is she, a kid? She scrambles up an icy patch, smacking the snow from the lowest branches so she can use them as a grip. Her foot slips and she almost falls once, then again. A hazard, tree roots breaking the surface and the snow falling away between them. She reaches for the slim trunk of a sapling and pulls herself up the crest. On the other side, the ground falls away, rolling into a little gully. A ditch.
The Retreat Page 21