Sadly, Derrick’s lackluster sexual performance wasn’t much different from that of the few men she’d dated before him. By now, she’d largely grown out of her shyness and embraced her geeky scientist side, but her few relationships had been formed while she was still figuring out what she wanted in a man, and she’d pretty much learned from the men she’d dated what she didn’t want—awkwardness, either socially or in the bedroom. Annabelle wanted a man who was easy to be around, a man who knew himself and was confident and decisive and didn’t need to be coddled or have his ego boosted just to make it through the day. She wanted a man who, for once, knew his way around a bedroom and a woman’s body.
Oh, and someone who found her utterly irresistible—that was important, too.
Gazing out the window of the airplane, she took in the dark landscape. The faint gleam of a late waning moon flashed off the ice and snow. To the north, an aurora glimmered in neon green ribbons, and Annabelle felt at peace.
Until Derrick interrupted it.
“Hey, did you read Kimble’s new article in the Journal of Glaciology?” he asked her.
She tensed. “I did read it.”
Here we go, she thought. She called it The Game Of Derrick. If she hadn’t read whatever article Derrick mentioned, she lost and he won. If she had read it, he’d ask for her analysis and then disagree with it, whatever it was. About a month ago, a massive argument over a journal article had almost precipitated a breakup—although how could they really break up since their relationship had never even been official?
“And?” Derrick said. “What’d you think?”
“I think I’m not awake enough yet to argue with you.”
“Argue?” He looked at her in affronted surprise, and his voice came out too loud in the small cabin. “We don’t argue, Annabelle. We discuss. And debate.”
No, Derrick. We argue.
“Well, I don’t feel like doing either one of those things, but if you want to tell me your thoughts on the article, I’ll listen,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t. He probably didn’t even know what he thought until he heard what she said and could pick an opposing viewpoint. Sometimes she suspected that was how he’d chosen his thesis topic—they were both developing models of glacier movement and the interactions of ice and the rock beneath it. Both were using particulate levels, ice core readings, sonar, and GPS data. The difference was in their approach: Annabelle’s model emphasized the thickness of the ice and slope of the underlying rock, and Derrick’s emphasized air temperatures and meltwater rates.
Peter turned in his seat. “Or you could save the discussion for when you see Dr. Kimble in person yourselves at the symposium in Anchorage in September.” In his early sixties, Peter was black, with short silver hair. His dark eyes twinkled at her. “I’m sure he’d be happy to discuss it in depth; in fact, you’d better have a few hours to spare. Once that guy gets going on pollen deposits, he won’t stop.”
Thank you, Annabelle mouthed to her professor.
His mouth twitched a little smile beneath his white mustache.
Peter Eubanks was more than her doctoral advisor. He and his wife Linda, a Tlingit Eskimo artist and art professor, had taken Annabelle under their wing from the time she’d arrived in Golden Falls six years earlier. They brought her soup when she was sick, and frequently she drove Peter home at night from the lab because Linda had mentioned his night vision wasn’t what it used to be. She celebrated holidays with them, and everyday dinners, too. She considered them her surrogate parents, and she cared for them as such.
Annabelle wondered what they thought about her relationship with Derrick. They’d never said anything disapproving, exactly, but neither had they admitted Derrick into their warm familial circle.
She already knew what Lottie thought about Derrick, and it wasn’t great. Lottie, a no-nonsense lesbian, thought Derrick wasn’t worth the energy Annabelle spent on him. More than once, she’d asked Annabelle what she got from Derrick that she couldn’t get from a vibrator. About the only honest answer Annabelle could give was that Derrick’s “sort-of” status got her mother off her back regarding a lackluster dating life.
The landing onto Kahiltna Glacier was bumpy and terrifying, as always. After the plane bounced its way to a stop, Annabelle unbuckled her seatbelt and put on her parka, which she’d removed for the flight. It took just minutes to unload, as they traveled light with provisions only enough for safety: food for twenty-four hours, emergency shelter tents, small snow-melting heaters, avalanche beacons, ropes and crampons, and handheld radios.
The sky to the east was already lightening. At this elevation, Annabelle could see the curvature of the earth, a black line against the vivid purple-blue of the dawn. To the northwest, Denali’s massive bulk rose above her, its snowy peaks catching the faintest hint of daylight.
An experienced glacier hiker, the sight never failed to fill her with awe. To understand the world and the mechanisms of its climate, geology, and biology only made it more magical to Annabelle.
Next to her, Peter had also paused to take in the landscape as well. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It never fails to amaze,” she said. And it didn’t. Ever since a field trip to Denali with her fifth- grade class from Anchorage, she’d known she wanted to be a scientist.
They didn’t dawdle at Base Camp. Headlamps lit, they strapped on their boxes of gear and started up the slope of the Kahiltna Glacier. There was a trail, but it was subject to sudden changes in route to account for the shifting ice, snow, and the occasional crevasse. Every so often the glacier spoke to them in groans, cracks, and shudders. Annabelle took them in as she would the harmless but never-ending complaints of an elderly relative.
Their faces bathed in alpenglow, the scientists were silent as they made their way to the first of their three beacon sites. They would use GPS to compare the exact position of the beacon to where they’d placed it the previous autumn. In addition, they took surface samples, ice cores, and did sonar readings before moving to their next site. Despite the freezing air, the strenuous work of hiking and operating the heavy equipment kept them warm, and their breath puffed in quick clouds around their faces.
The morning sun was high and bright several hours later as they hiked toward their third and final site, a few miles up the glacier from where they’d started at Base Camp.
“Hey, Annabelle, which animal has the largest brain?” Lottie asked.
Annabelle, Lottie, Derrick, and Cameron Doyle, another glaciology grad student, were part of a trivia night team that got together every Wednesday at The Salmon Eye, a dive bar near campus. They called their team by the tongue-in-cheek name of “David Attenborough’s Pants.” Only fellow scientists or documentary lovers understood that the name was in honor of naturalist Sir David Attenborough, presenter of the “Planet Earth” series, who was known for always wearing the same khaki chino trousers.
“The sperm whale,” Derrick said before Annabelle could answer.
“Actually, I think it’s the blue whale,” she said, remembering it from an undergrad oceanography class.
“No, it’s the sperm whale,” Derrick said.
“Wrong,” Lottie said. “It’s the blue whale.”
Annabelle grinned. It was nice beating Derrick, mostly because he took such an extreme pleasure in beating her.
Peter looked over his shoulder with a mischievous smile. “Who’s the only head basketball coach to win both an NCAA national championship and an NBA title?”
“Not nice,” Annabelle said, laughing. Their trivia team always lost the sports round. “Michael Jordan?”
She guessed Michael Jordan for every basketball-related trivia question.
“Not Michael Jordan,” Peter said. “Lottie?”
“Uh, Bobby Knight?”
“Guesses the woman from Indiana,” Peter said with a smile. “Sorry, nope. Derrick?”
Derrick rolled his eyes and refused to guess.
“Peter, would you please be our sports guy for trivia night
?” Annabelle asked.
“You know I’m in bed by eight,” he said. “Old guys like me need beauty sleep.”
“Sports are stupid,” Derrick said, not for the first time. “It shouldn’t even be a category.”
Annabelle didn’t think he’d ever lifted a weight, thrown a pitch, or tossed a football in his life. Derrick was tall, skinny, and energetic. Maybe jittery was the better word. In any case, no one would ever accuse him of being athletic.
At the third data-collection site, the ice drill stopped working just as they set it up to collect their core sample. Muttering curses under her breath, Annabelle opened the gear panel and tried to figure out what was wrong with the damned thing while Derrick hovered at her shoulder.
“Try the—”
“I’ve got it.” She had to take off her gloves to work on the small components, and because the midday sun was hot, she took off her hood and wool hat.
“It’s getting late,” Peter said. “Let’s wrap this up and head down the mountain. I don’t like the look of those clouds to the east.”
Annabelle glanced up. A long bank of thick clouds had appeared on the eastern horizon. The wind had picked up, too, sweeping away the boot prints of other climbers on their way down from the higher camps. The changing weather made her anxious, but she reasoned through the situation. If worse came to worse, they’d stay at Base Camp overnight until the weather improved and the plane could pick them up.
After fifteen minutes of messing with the drill, she got it working again.
“I’m done here,” she said.
“About time,” Derrick said, who’d been standing nearby.
“And what is it you see in him?” Peter said as Annabelle packed the drill.
Annabelle suspected it was a serious question behind Peter’s unserious tone because in all the years she’d known him, he’d never heard him utter a cross word to or about his wife, Linda. Annabelle chose not to answer, not wanting to provoke Derrick into an unpleasant mood for the remainder of the day. Often, the best strategy regarding Derrick was to pretend he didn’t exist at all.
But Derrick replied. “She likes that I’m a gentleman and a scholar.” He gestured in the direction they’d take. “Ladies first, Annabelle.”
Taking the lead, Annabelle set off back down the glacier. Her boots crunched through the soft crust of snow. Before every step, she tested the ice with her trekking poles, punching through the snow. If it felt solid, she moved forward. If she had any concern, she tried a different spot.
The others walked single file, and a few times she heard Derrick sigh with impatience. Feeling the pressure of his gaze behind her, she moved a little faster, thinking Derrick might be a scholar, but the gentleman part, not so much. She was as capable as any of them, but his “ladies first” gesture hardly felt chivalrous on the tenuous ice of an active glacier.
Glancing behind her a few minutes later, she realized the others weren’t right there anymore, which meant she must be going a decent pace. A short distance behind her, Annabelle’s fellow scientists were stark, colorful spots in an all-white, too-bright world.
And then she heard the bang.
It was followed by a lurch—an awful tilting of the world—and all of a sudden, there was no more ice beneath her feet, just a yawning slash of black that rushed forward to meet her.
3
Being dead is cold, Annabelle thought. I didn’t expect that.
But at least it wasn’t dark. Not completely, anyway. A dim, bluish light surrounded her. Sparkling crystals danced in front of her, and for a moment she wondered if they were fairies.
Then she took a shuddering, painful gasp and realized she wasn’t dead at all because if she were, her left ankle wouldn’t be throbbing and she wouldn’t be lying flat on her stomach with the wind knocked out of her and her face squished against a pile of ice.
You fell, dummy, she realized. You fell into a crevasse and you are well and truly stuck.
From far above her, she heard a frantic voice calling her name.
“Annabelle! Can you hear me?”
She opened her mouth to reply but only sucked in more air. She didn’t have her wind back yet well enough to speak.
“Annabelle!” It was Peter, and she heard the alarm in his voice. “Annabelle! Can you hear me?”
“I’m okay!” she managed to say, but it came out in a croak. She gulped air into her lungs a few times and then called, “Guys, I’m here! I’m here!”
This time, they heard her.
“Thank God, Annabelle,” Peter called. “How far down are you? I can’t see you.”
She wiggled her uninjured right foot. It was hanging off a ledge; so too, she realized, was her right arm.
Fear spiked through her.
Shit, she thought. She wasn’t at the bottom of the crevasse at all. Slowly she turned her head away from the wall of ice and saw just how precarious her position was.
She’d landed on a ledge of ice barely more than two feet wide. When Annabelle peeked over its hard edge, the main gap of the crevasse loomed wide and deep and endless below her, a cold black gash of emptiness. She couldn’t see the bottom.
This is bad.
She plucked a small piece of loose ice from her ledge and tossed it down. There was no discernible sound of it hitting bottom.
Annabelle swore softly under her breath. Hold it together, she told herself. All you have to do is literally not move, and you’re good at that. You’re good at being a wallflower.
“I’m about twenty feet down,” she called. “I’m on a ledge. A really tiny ledge.”
“Which side are you on?” Peter called down.
“The far side from you.”
As she said it, she realized what it meant, and it wasn’t good.
All the scientists were familiar with basic crevasse rescue and carried ropes, ice anchors, and a belay system from having taken rescue courses. If Annabelle had been on the same side of the crevasse as the others, it would have been a relatively simple matter of sending a rope down to her. As it was, however, she estimated the chasm was at least thirty feet wide, and there might not be a way for them to cross to the other side.
“Can you go around?” she called, thankful that her scientist’s mind was working logically; one never knew how they’d react in a real-life crisis, and she’d sometimes worried she might turn into a puddle of panic.
“Derrick’s checking on it now,” Peter said. “We’re gonna get you out of there, Annabelle. Just hang tight.”
She wanted to ask about the weather—had that ominous bank of clouds rolled in?—but instantly decided she couldn’t bear to learn the answer if it was yes, which it almost certainly was.
While she waited, she made sure her pack was secure—another spot of luck that she’d landed flat on her stomach, since the pack might have unbalanced her and rolled her off the ledge. Then she unhooked one of her ice axes from her wrist and swung it hard into the sidewall above her, firmly planted in case the ledge gave way. She gripped her other ax in her hand, at the ready.
She tried to flex her injured ankle but winced from the immediate pain.
“Hey, Peter?” she called, wishing she could see his reassuring face. “Just so you know, I think my ankle is broken.”
There was no reply for a moment, and she had an instant fear that maybe he, too, had fallen into a crevasse. But then he called down.
“Annabelle? This crevasse intersects with another one, and Derrick couldn’t find a safe way around to the other side so we could pull you out.”
She wondered what the proper reply was. Okay? Bummer? A blood-curdling shriek?
Her mind was turning into a puddle of panic.
“Now what?” she said, trying to keep the alarm from her voice.
“I’ve already called in an air rescue,” Peter said. “Search and Rescue is on the way from Golden Falls. It’ll be about an hour, but they’re coming. So just hang on, okay? Are you good?”
“Except for my a
nkle,” she said because he hadn’t seemed to hear her the first time. “I think I broke it.”
She could feel her foot swelling against her boot, and it felt like every single bone had popped out of place. Ouch, ouch, ouch, she thought. A new worry set in—would she go into shock? What would it look like if she did? Did she have other injuries she didn’t know about? She’d lost consciousness briefly. What if she’d hit her head and even now, blood was leaking into her brain?
“How are things up there?” she called, trying to keep her fears tamped down.
She heard Derrick’s voice, finally. “There’s a nasty storm system coming in.”
“Not to worry,” Peter called down immediately afterward, and Annabelle imagined the chastising look he was giving Derrick. “Help’s on the way, and we’ll be right here with you until they arrive.”
“Hey, Annabelle?” Lottie called.
“Yeah?”
“Who discovered penicillin?”
Annabelle laughed. Good old Lottie, tossing her an easy trivia question so she’d feel better. Not for the first time, she felt a wave of gratitude for Lottie’s friendship.
“Sir Alexander Fleming,” she answered. “1928.”
“Nice job,” Lottie called. “Don’t worry, Annabelle. We’ll be back in time for trivia night.”
Annabelle certainly hoped so.
As Lottie called down question after question, Annabelle felt reassured by her presence. At the same time, she had to wonder why it wasn’t Derrick trying to set her at ease.
Derrick hadn’t told her to hang on. He hadn’t asked if she was okay. He hadn’t reassured her help was on the way. She imagined him standing up there, mouth twisted in annoyance, sighing impatiently.
As she lay there in the cold semi-darkness, all kinds of thoughts tumbled through her head about how stuck she felt, not just in her immediate physical situation, but in her life. Her scientific career had progressed, but nothing else had. At that moment, staring over the edge at death itself, her research seemed like a thin replacement for the other things in life she wanted: friends, family, a cat, children, love. Most of all, love.
Forget Me Not (Golden Falls Fire Book 4) Page 2