Snowfire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  I’d just poured myself a cup of coffee, when I saw Clay coming toward me across the lounge. He no longer looked angry—indeed, he seemed oddly pleased, and I couldn’t imagine why.

  “Your escort has come early,” he told me curtly. “He’s waiting outside because he’s covered with snow. You’d better get into your things and go back to the house while you can. If you can. The power is gone there too. I’ll handle things here.”

  I had alienated Clay, as I could see. He was pleased that I would have to struggle back to the house through the storm. I nodded to him without speaking and started to move away from him. He held something out to me in a flat envelope.

  “You wanted to read one of my stories,” he said, and turned away quickly as I took it.

  Under the circumstances I was surprised that he had remembered. But when I reached the rear vestibule I tucked the envelope carefully into a flap pocket of my parka so that it would keep dry. I didn’t open the door to greet Julian because of the cold that would blast its way in, but I hurried to put on my things, wound my muffler around the lower part of my face, drew on my boots, and shoved at the door. It was pulled from my hand and held steady as I stumbled into the fierceness of the night.

  “I’m to take you back to the lodge,” Emory Ault said. “Miss McCabe’s having one of her spells, and Julian’s got his hands full. I told them you should stay here, but then Adria put up a squawk. So come along and stop gawking at me. You’d better take hold of my belt at the back and hold on.”

  So this was why Clay had looked spitefully pleased. I didn’t want to go with Emory, but I had no choice. Wind and snow buffeted me on all sides. I could only put my head down, hang onto Emory’s big leather belt with my mittened fingers, and stumble along behind him. Sometimes I was dragged. Sometimes I slid, as my feet went totally out of control in loose snow, my boots unable to step surely in the drifting white masses of powder.

  X

  We moved very slowly. Lame or not, I was sure Emory could have made better time alone. I was often a dead weight stumbling behind him. At first all my attention was given to trying to stay on my feet, and to gulp air before the wind whipped the breath from my lungs. I didn’t attempt to see where we were going. Sometimes a snow-laden branch would slap back as Emory released it. The noise seemed worst of all. The roaring was no longer confined to the treetops, but seemed to rush like an advancing tidal wave along the ground, buffeting us with sound. Often there was a nearby crashing as some ice-laden branch gave way and broke off to fly through the night. The ice must be heavy everywhere and the slipperiness underfoot was increasing.

  We must have struggled through the forest for ten minutes before I began to take note of our surroundings. There were no longer hemlocks around us. The trees had changed to spruce and pine. The snow itself made a strange light and there was no darkness of an ordinary night to blind me, so that I could see better than I might have expected. As an awareness of the changed forest reached me, fear struck through the physical chill, adding to my misery. This was not the way to Graystones. We were neither on the short-cut path nor the driveway, but seemed to be tramping through an unmarked wilderness. I could no longer tell where the mountain lay—or the lodge, let alone guess the direction of the house. With all my strength I dug in my heels and pulled Emory to a stop.

  “Where are we going?” I mouthed at him, filling my throat with snow.

  He shook his rugged, wool-covered head. “Can’t hear you,” he shouted. “Keep going!”

  But I had heard him. There was nothing to do but hold on and follow. If I let go of that sturdy leather belt I would be lost in swirling whiteness. I could never find my own way alone.

  It was growing harder to keep moving because I was frightened now and weakened by fear. My lungs felt as though they were bursting. My cheeks above the muffler had numbed to the sting of snow, and my fingers were surely frozen to Emory’s belt. Then a dark shape loomed before us. It was a small hut, its slanting roof snow-layered, its window ledges piled with white. Emory attacked the door, pulling it open against the wind, and dragged me into a big room where a fire had burned to embers on a wide brick hearth, and candles burned on the mantel. I hadn’t the strength to stand and I slumped to my knees. It was almost as though I’d forgotten how to breathe when the buffeting ceased and my every breath wasn’t snatched away from me, so that I gasped and shivered.

  Emory was taking off his jacket, stamping his boots, dashing snow from his pants.

  “What would you do if you bad to take a real trek in a blizzard?” he asked me scornfully. “Get on your feet and get out of those wet clothes.”

  I obeyed him numbly, fearing that if I didn’t he’d do it for me. He was muttering violently to himself as he stirred up the fire and added fresh birch logs. I couldn’t tell whether his epithets were for me, or for those at the house who had sent him on this fool’s errand.

  I didn’t need to ask where we were. This was Emory’s hut. His mark was everywhere. There were skis lined up against one wall, a pair of snowshoes hung on a peg, and boots of every description marched in order on a rack. His bed was a bunk in one corner, and there was a round table in the middle of the floor, with chairs set about it. Against one wall stood an unfinished bookcase, stacked with both hard-cover and paper volumes. Apparently Emory was a reader.

  Beside the fireplace there was a wood-burning stove, which added warmth, and on which Emory probably cooked his own meals. A few pans hung from hooks above the stove, with a sink nearby, and running water. The cabin was not primitive and there was electricity—when the wires weren’t down—and a door stood open upon a small bathroom. Though the bare wooden floor was rugless and scarred, it was very clean, except for the snow we’d tracked in, as was the entire hut.

  All this I saw as I peeled out of my things and went to sit on a low wooden stool, holding out my hands to the wonderful warmth of the replenished fire. Emory moved about lighting more candles, and he brought one to hold before my face, his limp noticeable as he crossed the room.

  “Rub your nose and your cheeks gently,” he ordered. “There’s no frostbite yet, but you need to stir up circulation. I’ll phone the house and tell them we’ve got this far.”

  I began to relax. He meant me no harm. He had brought me here to break our journey, and he was only obeying orders to return me safely to Graystones.

  At the wall telephone he clicked the receiver up and down, and I began to tense again. As long as there was a telephone—

  “Phone wires are down too,” he grumbled and slammed the receiver on the hook.

  “How—how far are we from the house?”

  He ran a hand through gray hair and turned his massive head to look at me. “Five minutes fast walking on a good day. Another fifteen or more when I have to drag you through the snow.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “If I’d understood how bad it was I’d never have gone to the lodge in the first place.”

  He shook his head in disgust. “No sense to it. No consideration for anybody else. Just like your brother.”

  I stiffened on my stool. “I was thinking of Adria. It seemed terribly important to her that I return to the house tonight.”

  He turned his back on me and went to the small stove, taking off the lid to add wood, setting on a pot of coffee, and opening a can of soup to heat.

  My brain was beginning to thaw out, as well as my fingers and nose. I clasped my warming hands about my knees and stared into the fire. Here was my chance to talk to Emory Ault. But how was I to use it? I mustn’t be headlong this time. I must step warily. But there was no way to be wary. I had my chance and I must take it.

  “Clay told me something interesting tonight at dinner,” I said. “He told me that you weren’t really the first one to find Margot after she was thrown from her chair, Clay says Shan told him that Julian reached her first.”

  Emory set down the spoon with which he was stirring soup and turned to look at me, his heavy gray brows bristling, his mouth
a straight line.

  “Davidson’s a fiction writer. He makes up fantasies.” The harsh voice grated.

  “Shan looked out a window,” I said. “Shan saw what happened and she told Clay.”

  The growling sound he made disturbed me, but I held my ground as he came toward me.

  “Julian knows I’m with you,” I warned him. “You’ll have to account to him if anything happens to me.”

  He came to a halt directly before me and I sensed a black anger raging through him. Perhaps it was always there, though he kept it well checked. But it was surfacing this time, and he might give himself away.

  “I even thought you might have killed Margot,” I said—“until Clay told me Julian found her. Now I know it must have been someone inside the house who pushed her chair. Because Julian wouldn’t have hurt her. Julian still loves her.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, struggling to contain his anger.

  “Julian loved her all right—but what he loved was a woman who never existed. He made something up out of his imagination and he never saw her the way she was.”

  “Perhaps he knew her better than you did.”

  He snorted and limped back to the stove to take the steaming soup from the heat and pour it into an ironstone bowl. Then he brought it to me, with a carved wooden spoon to eat it with. I looked with wonder at the bowl, the hand-carved spoon. I wouldn’t have expected such amenities from Emory Ault.

  “Shan gave them to me one Christmas,” he said, as though understanding my look. He used their first names easily, since he’d known them as children.

  There was a greater complexity to this man than I’d thought. For the first time I wondered about him, wondered what his life had been like, why he was alone—whom he had loved. And what were the titles of those books he liked to read?

  He carried his own soup to the table and sat down to eat, paying no further attention to me. The hot soup tasted wonderful, and so did the coffee he brought me when it was ready. I could feel strength flowing through me again, a strength that came partly from the fact that I was no longer afraid—not of the storm, nor the man. Emory would get me back to Graystones safely. He didn’t like or trust me, but he would do as Julian wished.

  He nodded his head over his soup bowl and spoke as if to himself. “Yes, of course it was one of those inside the house. And we know which one, don’t we?” He raised his spoon and waved it at me like a baton, declaiming: “The golden Lucifer! Son of the fiery snow—child of the fastest slopes!”

  I gaped at him in astonishment. Some of these books must be classics.

  “When I was twenty-two I was an actor,” he said. “I trod the boards before the footlights and all my glory lay in an audience’s applause. And then one year when I wasn’t working I happened to go skiing. On this very mountain which towers above us now in the storm. I never recovered. The sickness of the snows took me. I became what they call a ski bum, until Julian McCabe’s father stepped in to back me as a skier. The rest you know.” He took a drink of hot coffee in the manner of a man who quaffed mead from a goblet, still leaving me astonished. “But we were talking about who pushed that chair, weren’t we? And we both know it was your brother.”

  “No!” I cried. “That’s not true. Stuart never touched Margot or her chair.”

  He growled like the bear he sometimes resembled; the brief glimpse of the actor was submerged, obliterated.

  “Why did you lie?” I demanded. “Why did you say you found her when it was Julian who did?”

  There was an intense silence within the room, while the storm roared outside the hut’s walls. A log fell on the hearth, sending bright golden sparks up the chimney. When Emory spoke again it was with a deadly calm that frightened me more than if he had raged.

  “I’ve warned you before. Go away from Graystones. Go away from Juniper Lodge. You can do your brother no good here, and you may destroy yourself.”

  “How destroy myself?” I challenged him.

  “Perhaps there will be an accident,” he said obscurely.

  I finished my coffee and began to put on my parka. “I want to get to the house. I’ve rested long enough and I’m warm now.”

  He waved toward the door. “Go along then. There’s nothing to keep you from going.”

  “Except that I don’t know the way.”

  I had never seen him smile before and I did not like it when he did. There was a dark mirth in his look as though the thought of me lost in a blizzard and freezing to death gave him considerable pleasure.

  “There’s that, of course,” he said. “Well then, come along and we’ll get going.”

  He was ready before I was, and I left the warmth and safety of the small hut regretfully. The storm had abated not at all and the sting of the icy blast seemed worse than before. I held to his belt once more, looking back now and then toward the hut, in order to keep some sense of direction alive. But the snow cut in, whirling it from view, and the forest was trackless, directionless. I had no idea which way Graystones lay.

  When Emory acted, it was so suddenly that it took me by surprise. With a movement that wrenched my wrists and tumbled me to my knees, he twisted the belt from my grasp and was free of me. He didn’t even look around, but stamped off among the trees, moving more swiftly than I’d have believed possible. I tried to follow him, calling out desperately, but he vanished as quickly as the hut and I was left totally alone in a darkness lit eerily by snow. Only the trees I bumped into were visible. I sank into drifts to my knees, struggling frantically.

  But in the way of frantic struggle lay disaster—death. It was better to stand still for a moment and try to think. If I could find my way back to the lodge—if only there were traces of our coming left in the snow—! I turned back along the immediate tracks Emory and I had made on the path from the hut. If I could find his cabin, perhaps I could find my way to the lodge.

  But I saw quickly that blowing snow had wiped out our tracks even more quickly than new snow could fill them. I stumbled into a drift and fell to my knees while the wind howled about my head and the coldness pierced my bones. It was all I could manage to stand again but I knew I must keep moving to stay alive. If I let weariness and despair conquer me I was lost. All I could do was judge the distance between the trees and try to imagine where a path might lie.

  How quickly the warmth and light of the cabin had been lost! Now the cold was penetrating, the wind sliced at me mercilessly. I stumbled a few feet in that blank horror that means a loss of direction. My disorientation was like being blind. No way had meaning for me, and if I took the wrong turn I would die.

  Snow fell away beneath my feet and I sank to my knees in the soft menace. My face was growing numb, dangerously losing the sense of cold. There was even the temptation to give up—to do what Emory expected me to do. I struggled to my knees and went on.

  When I first saw the light I could not believe in it. Something glowed softly through the blasting snow, moving, growing stronger. I cried out desperately, and the wind snatched away the sound of my voice. But the glow remained and grew brighter, and I stumbled wildly toward it, falling, picking myself up, stumbling on, until it resolved itself into the concentrated light from a storm lantern swinging from a man’s hand.

  “Help me!” I cried again. “Please help me!”

  Julian emerged in the glow of light and caught me about the shoulders. He asked no question, offered no explanation for being there, and I clung to him with relief and joy.

  “Hold onto my arm,” he said. “We’re not far from the house. I’ll get you there.”

  The lantern made an oasis of safety that the wind and snow could not obliterate. Light cut a small path ahead of us, illuminating little except more snow and trees. But Julian knew every tree, he knew the way. The house was closer that Emory had claimed, and I wondered weakly if he had meant all along to lose me in the woods before we reached the house.

  The candlelight and lamplight of Graystones gleamed in the windows and on the
tower stairs and were glorious to see. Shan flung open the door, and in my haste to grasp at safety and warmth I stumbled again before I reached the steps. Julian set down his lantern and picking me up in strong arms, carried me into the house. He bore me, snow and all, to the leather couch in the library and laid me down on it gently. There was a fire on the hearth, and an oil lamp burned on a table.

  Shan followed us and stood looking at me, anything but pleased. Whatever her earlier hysteria had amounted to, she appeared to be over it now, and I wondered vaguely if she’d developed it to keep Julian from coming after me, so that he’d had to send Emory.

  Her brother spoke to her curtly. “Go ring the outside bell, Shan, to let Emory know Linda’s been found. Then fix her some hot tea. Sweet. With cream and sugar.”

  Shan went off and moments later I heard the pealing of the great farm bell that hung near the back door. It clanged furiously as though some disturbing emotion drove the force of Shan’s ringing. Even with heavy snow blanketing sound, the voice of the bell would reach through the woods and call Emory—tell him his plan had failed.

  Julian pulled off my wet mittens, helped me out of the parka, and all the while he muttered over me with a sort of angry tenderness.

  “Little fool. As soon as I knew you were lost, I came out to look for you. Emory’s looking too. But in this storm it might have been hopeless. The woods go on for miles. Why did you run away from him? Whatever possessed you to run away when Emory was trying to get you back to the house?”

  I felt dreadfully weak—too weak to be indignant over Emory’s lie. Let Julian believe what he pleased. All I wanted was to rest. When my wet ski pants had been pulled off, Julian took a silk dressing gown from a closet and wrapped it around me. Only then did he get out of his own heavy clothes, and carried all the snow-encrusted things out to the vestibule.

  I closed my eyes and let warmth and a sense of safety—a strange illusion of being loved and protected—flow through me. Shan came with strong, hot tea and sat down near my couch to hold the cup for me.