by Wendy Clinch
* * *
The road was plowed for a little distance past the cabin, up to a shack that wasn’t quite big enough to be a garage and probably held tools, a snowmobile, maybe a little powerboat for trolling on the lakes come summer. Either that or chain saws and meathooks and bloody carcasses, swaying ever so slightly in the cold night air. Stacey shivered at the thought and a porch light snapped on, throwing light across the cabin’s front yard and pitching the shack behind it into deeper darkness. The paintless old pickup truck that had cleared the road was pulled up in front. The only real color in the whole stark tableau was the blade of the plow mounted on the pickup, a swath of wrenchingly brilliant yellow against the darkness. It looked like acid, ready to eat through something.
They looked back toward the window to see the woman standing there still, planted like a fireplug. She may have actually moved back a step or two now that the porch light was on. Her silhouette had taken on a little bit of color in the light of the room, but her presence had become vaguer yet, blurred and shadowy. Then the front door cracked open and the man swarmed out onto the snowy porch. He was even taller than they’d guessed, long as a scarecrow and just as thin, and he hollered something at them that they didn’t hear over the noise of the Jeep. He jutted his chin up and snapped his head back and shouted it again, and this time Chip cut the engine.
“Not a good idea,” Stacey said. “We want to stay mobile, right?”
Rather than take her advice, Chip had started rolling down the window. “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I don’t think turning around right now is much of an option anyway. And I’m sure as heck not backing the whole way down.” He got the window open—the night air was frigid even compared to the inside of the Wrangler, thanks to the constant blast of the heater—and he stuck his arm out. “Howdy!”
“You’re either lost or crazy,” said the tall man. “Which one is it?” He stood on the porch in a T-shirt and an orange down vest, grinning like a sphinx at Chip, both hands jammed deep into his pockets.
That’s a step in the right direction, Stacey thought. At least he doesn’t have a gun.
“I don’t believe I’m crazy,” Chip said, “but I’m hoping like anything to get a little bit lost.”
“There’s only one way down. You turn right around and go back where you come from.” He circled his finger around, making the universal symbol for U-turn. Stacey decided that he seemed reassuringly ordinary, now that she was getting a good look at him. Well, maybe not reassuringly ordinary, but at least ordinary. Which covered a lot of ground.
“I think I’ll do it the hard way,” Chip said. He pointed with his thumb back over his shoulder. “We’ve got skis.”
“Oh, for the love of Mike.” The tall man sighed. “Another one.”
“Another one?”
“This ain’t no rescue mission,” the tall man said. He came down off the porch and walked toward the car and leaned forward, almost but not quite sticking his head in the window. He tilted it and bobbed it this way and that, sizing up Chip and squinting at Stacey in the dark, trying to get a look at the gear they carried. His breath emerged sour and strong, even from the other side of the car, and Stacey realized he’d been drinking. “If I’d known how many morons’d be wandering around these woods, knocking on the door at all hours, I don’t think I’d ever built this place. There’s times I’ve got half a mind to shut off the lights and let ’em freeze.” He drew one hand from his pocket and put it on the door to steady himself.
“Lost skiers. You’re talking about lost skiers.”
“Damn straight, I’m talking about lost skiers. They go out of bounds and get a little bit mixed up, and the next thing you know they’re banging on my door. It’s like I’m running a ranger station up here.”
Chip offered the tall man a big smile, grinning right into the gusts of his whiskey breath. “See,” he said, “we mean to do just the opposite. We’re going to hike up to the peak, and ski down under the power lines. We left a car down there. In town.”
The man took his hand off the car door and ran his palm over his buzz cut. “There’s a new kind of idiot born every day of the week.”
“Really. It’s OK. I’m on the Ski Patrol.”
The man raised his eyebrows. “Oh,” he said. “A professional. That makes all the difference, now, don’t it?” He rapped his knuckles on the doorsill and moved away, backing off toward the porch. “Suit yourselves,” he said. “I guess it’s a free country. Ten thirty is lights-out, though, so don’t come knocking after that or I might have to run you the hell off.”
“Understood,” said Chip. He rolled up the window, started the Jeep, and pulled it past the cabin and next to the shack, just as far up the hill as it would go until the plowing ran out and the snowdrifts set in.
* * *
The groomers were just finishing as Stacey and Chip crested the peak, a dozen pairs of taillights in a long line far below, snaking across the lower slopes toward the maintenance shed. They winked on and off through the trees, one last intrusion of civilization against the wilderness, going black two by two.
There was a lot of snow up here, but it wasn’t consistent. Whole swaths of the mountainside were blown bare over broad expanses of naked rock, and the base of the fire tower with its jumble of boulders was almost entirely clear. In other places, it was God knew how deep. And everywhere the wind was a killer—brutal and biting and without mercy, even at this hour.
They slogged over to the fire tower and perched on the rocks to sip a little water, eat a couple of energy bars, and get set for the trip down. They unholstered their skis from their packs and clicked in. They swapped their knit caps for helmets, and stashed the caps in their packs. There was no need for headlamps up here, not with the moon as bright as it was. They’d needed them under the tree cover on the way up from the cabin, no question. And soon enough they would need them again, as they struck out beneath the trees toward the power lines.
It was a straight shot across the ridgeline, and on skis it didn’t take long. The trees and underbrush didn’t exactly thin out as they neared the edge of the clearing; it all just stopped dead, leaving Stacey and Chip to break out into a bright and moonlit right-of-way marked by dark woods on either side and a long march of electrical towers down the middle. They could see what looked like the whole world—make that worlds, since you had to include the infinite space that spun over their heads, blue space full of more stars than Stacey had ever seen in all her years in Boston. Not to mention the mighty Milky Way itself, a phenomenon which, prior to coming to the Green Mountain State, she had considered nothing more then a lovely rumor.
The town and the valley were spread out below them. There were great dark patches that were forests and small darker spots that were houses, and there were great swaths of gleaming white that were pastures and fields and open spaces, fresh and untracked still. Scattered all around were tiny yellow lights like gemstones, some of them moving and some of them fixed, and all of them heartbreakingly beautiful and faraway.
“Wow,” said Chip.
“Yeah,” said Stacey. “If I weren’t freezing my butt off, I could stay here forever.”
“You’re right,” he said. “You want first tracks?”
By way of answer, she clicked off her headlamp and pointed her skis downhill.
* * *
The snow was magnificent—light as air, deep as a well, smooth as butter. It practically skied itself, choosing Stacey’s line and modulating her speed, making her turns with no intervention at all on her part. All she had to do was keep her weight centered over the skis and lean a little bit to the right or the left. She wasn’t even sure she had to do that much. It was as if the mountain wanted her there. As if it understood what she was after. As if the line between the woman and the run, between the athlete and the trail, between the skier and the skied, no longer existed. Or at the very least as if it was of no consequence.
Everything, in other words, came together.
&n
bsp; Stacey had taken great runs before. Fantastic runs. A handful of them here in Vermont, once or twice out in Utah, and maybe a time or two up in Quebec somewhere. She’d had her share, make no mistake about that, but those runs had had a different quality about them, a quality that if you could name it, it would have to be something like an awareness of the limits of their greatness. Midway through each of them, she’d begun not just looking forward to the next run down the same slope, but analyzing what she could do to make that next run even better. Maybe the drifts will be a little softer over there near the trees. Maybe the fall line on the left side will be just a bit steeper. The kind of thought process that indicates analysis over engagement.
On the other hand, this time she wasn’t thinking. She didn’t have to.
At least not until her skis hit something—hard—and stopped dead.
Her bindings released and she pitched forward, going briefly airborne before plummeting into the snow in a burst of white powder, then finally tumbling twenty or thirty feet down the mountain. Her skis were back where she’d left them; her poles came loose and flew free. In short, it was what the smart alecks call a yard sale: gear everywhere, wall to wall. By no means would every piece of it, given the light and the deep snow, be easy to find.
“Rats!” She righted herself, stood up, and shouted into the night, “Rats, rats, rats!” She felt as if she’d been awakened from a dream, and an outstanding dream, at that.
Chip was a few yards above her on a line of his own, but stopped short at the sight of her explosive plunge into the snow. He heard her shouting and figured that she was probably all right. He sidestepped toward the spot where her skis had gone under, and she started slogging up in his direction. “That’s OK,” he said. “You stay where you are, and I’ll bring the skis down.”
She stopped, grateful.
“You all right?”
“Yeah, I’m all right. You fall in this stuff it’s hard to get hurt.”
“What’d you hit, anyhow?”
“I don’t know. A log, maybe. A limb. Something.”
He was clicked out of his own skis now, and up almost to his waist in powder. He hadn’t expected it to be that deep, but he didn’t mention it. “I think I see where they went in,” he said. Then, a few seconds later said, “I think.”
“Don’t think. Just do.”
“Roger that one, Yoda.”
“And while you’re busy with that, I’ll look for my poles.”
Which was fine with Chip. He was moving slowly through the snow, jamming his own poles in, then lifting them out again and jamming them back in, probing for any sign of her skis. He’d already obliterated any trace of the path they’d taken into the snow, and in the moonlight he was afraid that he was getting a little bit turned around. He backed up and started again, unsure whether he was going over new ground or old. He started breathing hard.
“You all right up there?” Stacey asked.
“I’m fine. I’m just not getting anywhere. Not yet.” He looked up from the snow and was struck by how far she was below him, vertically speaking. From here, she was pretty much straight down. Damn, this right-of-way was steep. Steeper than he’d thought.
“Got the poles,” she said. There was a little triumph in her voice, and a little teasing, too.
He shook himself and concentrated on the snow before him, trying to rid himself of a twinge of vertigo. It was just a passing sensation, no question. A short-term freak-out that could have happened to anybody. “Great,” he said, “Good for you. I’ll just be a minute.”
Below him, Stacey turned to look out over the valley. She planted her poles and whistled appreciatively between her teeth, then she called up to him over his shoulder, “I sure wouldn’t want to walk down.”
“You won’t.” He said it, but he wasn’t feeling it.
“Good. Because I think it’d kill me.”
He looked up for himself and felt his stomach turn over and thought the same thing—that it would kill him—but at the same moment one of his poles stabbed something hard. He smiled, put the pole down, and started digging.
He threw snow like a madman, and didn’t stop … until he saw the corpse’s face. Then—breathless, vertiginous, sick to his stomach—he passed out.
Stacey saw him go. One second he was up and the next second he was down, vanished into the powder. She couldn’t believe her eyes. She called his name, thinking he’d stumbled somehow—maybe over the edge of whatever log or limb she’d hit in the first place—then she started up toward the spot where he’d disappeared.
NINETEEN
“That’s what I like about this job,” Guy said to Megan and the kids over the supper table. “I mean, it’s not every day you get a guided tour of Hollywood.”
“You mean old Hollywood,” Jim said. He was fifteen years old, and anything that predated The Dark Knight was old. Star Wars was an antique. Murder Town was positively prehistoric.
“Granted,” said his father. “Although old is a relative term, sonny. My point is, you never know what stories people are going to tell. This guy Seville, he was there when it all happened. When they shot all the great stuff from when I was growing up. He was what they call the technical director on Lights Out. Can you believe it? That elevator scene? With the cables?”
“They’d CGI that these days and it’d be better. You’d think it was real.”
“It was real.”
“Dad. You know what I mean.”
“I do, but I don’t understand it.”
* * *
Chip didn’t think he’d exactly passed out. At least not for long. He was sitting up, wiping snow from his goggles with the thumb of his mitten, when Stacey worked her way up to the spot where he’d fallen. “Sorry,” he said, before she could ask. “I’m fine.”
“You’re fine.”
“Really. I’m fine.” He pointed toward the spot where he’d been digging. “That guy, on the other hand…”
She looked over and saw nothing.
“He’s definitely not so good.” He drew himself to his feet and leaned on her shoulder, putting more weight on her than he meant to.
She stiffened and pushed back against him. “Huh?”
“That guy. In the snow. He’s the thing you hit, I’m pretty sure.”
“There’s no guy in the snow.”
“There sure is. He’s a dead guy, but he’s there, all right.”
They pushed together toward the spot, and bent to clear away the snow. Stacey switched on her headlamp and Chip did, too, but soon enough they both wished they hadn’t. “It’s Stone,” she said, aghast and a little out of breath. “It’s Harper Stone. Oh. My. God.”
His face was blue in the blue LED light, pale as the snow that covered him. She thought it looked as though one of her skis had slid across the skin just above his eyebrows, the sharp metal edge cutting flesh that was too bloodless and too frozen to bleed.
She stopped but Chip kept on digging around Stone’s body, pushing snow away from his arms and legs, clearing out a margin around his torso. He was working fast, almost a little frantically, and Stacey reached out a hand to make him stop. “Leave him,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t do anything for him now, and they’re not going to want us to disturb anything.” By “they” she meant Guy Ramsey, the state troopers, whoever else might want things left the way they’d found them. At the edge of the cleared area in the snow she saw the tip of one ski, and went after it. The other was right alongside it, and she dragged them both from the loose snow.
Chip stood up straight, panting. “The good news, I guess, is that he’s not a missing person anymore.”
* * *
“We found him,” said Stacey, bursting in through the kitchen door, red-faced and blowing steam. “We found Harper Stone.”
Guy had a mug of coffee and a piece of yellow cake on a little plate, and he was heading toward the front room to watch the news. He shot a quick look over his shoulder when he heard Stacey’s voic
e, then he vanished through the door into the foyer, saying, “Hey there, Chip,” as he disappeared. Raising his voice as he went farther on, “Where’d he turn up? Where’s he been?”
They heard the low electronic burp and hum of the television coming on.
“It’s not like that,” Stacey said.
The television came roaring on at whatever volume Jim had been using to play some video game after school, and Guy cut it back with the remote. He walked back into the foyer and stuck his head around the door frame, chewing cake. “What does that mean?”
* * *
“We can’t just leave him up there till daylight.” Guy had pulled on his snowmobile gear and was standing by the kitchen door, scratching the stubble on his chin. He wished he’d had a chance to finish that yellow cake.
His wife, Megan, sat at the table in front of her coffee, shaking her head.
“Some animal’d find him for sure. The bears might be sleeping, but those woods are full of foxes and fisher cats and God knows what else. All of them starving this time of year. Hungry as bears.”
“Just be careful,” she said.
“I will.” He took a step toward the door and looked over at Chip. “You ready?”
“Why him?” said Stacey. “I’m the one who found the body.”
Chip didn’t dispute that. He started to, but before he got very far Stacey saw something pass across his face that looked like relief. The realization that he might not have to see that dead body again after all, which seemed to suit him fine.
It took a while to get ready. Guy and Chip had to gas up Guy’s snowmobile, load it onto a trailer, and back the patrol car up to hitch it on. They agreed that Chip would take Stacey’s car home; they’d work out getting his car from the other side of the mountain tomorrow sometime. The state troopers would want to talk with him, but since there were only two seats on the snowmobile, they’d have to wait.
“Did I miss something?” Stacey asked as they got into the patrol car. “Did you call it in?”