“Better to wear it,” answered Ray as he turned on and checked his VHF radio, returning it to the top, left-hand pocket of his life vest. Once they had all their gear attached to the decks of their boats—extra paddles, hydration packs, cell phones in watertight bags—they slid into their boats and secured their spray skirts to their cockpit coamings, creating a watertight unit. After pulling on thick neoprene mittens, they seal-launched into the water, sliding down icy banks. They carefully negotiated the twisting path the stream had cut through the shelf ice that extended more than fifty yards out past the beach. The forward edge rose more than ten feet above the water, built up by floating ice being piled up during violent winter storms. Finally they emerged onto the big lake, the enormous stretch of water, the curve of the planet visible on the vista where the dark water met the lighter sky.
“Wow, this is incredible. The view always knocks me on my ass,” Hannah observed. “Where to, chief?”
“Where do you want to go?”
“You’re the guide.”
“Let’s start toward that headland, Empire Hill.” Ray motioned with his hand. “That’s about 10 miles. We can turn back whenever you’ve had enough or it looks like the weather might be changing.”
“What did NOAA say?”
“For the rest of the afternoon, winds from the southwest at five to ten, waves one foot or less. But there’s a system coming in and things should start picking up before dark. As you can see, given the steep face of the shelf ice, there aren’t many places to bail out along here if the weather deteriorates. We’ve got to be vigilant.”
“Does your radio have the ‘weather alert’ feature?” Hannah asked.
“It’s turned on,” he answered. “That said, sometimes the weather is on you before an alert is issued.”
They started north, moving quickly in the gentle swell. Ray was happy to note that Jeffers was a strong and skilled kayaker. He usually picked his paddling companions carefully, especially in conditions that might become challenging or dangerous.
“I’d like to do a couple of rolls. Will you spot for me?” asked Jeffers.
“Are you ready for an ice cream headache?” Ray responded.
“I haven’t rolled in cold water for a while. I need to know that I can do it.” She pulled some nose clips from her vest, checked the position of the release strap on her spray skirt, and looked over at Ray, who had positioned the bow of his kayak a few paddle strokes off the center of her boat.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, prepared to quickly move in and give her his bow to pull up on if she missed her roll.
Jeffers sat up straight, slowly took a couple of deep breaths, then made a forceful lean to the right, capsizing the boat. She almost righted the boat on her first attempt, falling back at the last moment. Ray watched as she set up a second time and successfully rolled. “What’s the problem?” she asked, after coughing a couple of times.
“You brought your head up too fast the first time.”
“Damn, I always do that when I’m out of practice. I’m going to try a couple more.”
Jeffers performed a series of smooth, elegant rolls.
“Those looked good,” said Ray. “It’s a good thing to practice, especially in these conditions. It’s easy to ride up on some submerged ice and get flipped.”
They headed north again, picking up the pace to warm up after her submersion in the icy water. They stopped along the way to explore some of the bigger ice caves, Jeffers capturing interesting configurations with her camera, Ray carefully checking for signs that Tristan Laird might have been there. He saw none.
The hours quickly passed as they paddled and played along in the ornate ice sculptures. Suddenly, Ray’s radio came to life. He stopped paddling and listened to the alert, which was repeated several times.
“I didn’t get all of it,” said Jeffers.
“They’ve just posted small craft advisories, looks like that front’s coming in sooner than expected. We better get going,” Ray cautioned.
They turned south again.
A thin overcast had moved in dulling the delicate afternoon light, and beyond it Ray could see a long band of heavy dark clouds. The wind had started to pick up, and the wave heights were increasing. What had been a leisurely paddle became a dash for their launch site before the conditions completely deteriorated. There was little banter; just two seasoned paddlers focused on getting safely back on land before dark.
The sun disappeared in the gray overcast as the wind and waves increased.
14.
As they began to battle the wind and surf, they moved into deeper water, away from the reflecting waves coming off the ice shelf. Ray took a more direct heading on the curved bay toward their launch site. Slowly the miles slipped by and their destination grew larger.
Ray panned the shoreline, making adjustments to their course and constantly monitoring his companion, who seemed little bothered by the rough water. Every time his bow broke through a wave, Ray was showered by a freezing spray of water. Ice built up on the deck and clung to the lines, bungee cords, and his spray skirt. When he could clearly see their goal, little more than a mile away, he started to relax a bit, knowing that in about fifteen or twenty minutes they would be safely on land.
He was thinking about Tristan Laird, wondering where he was, and hoping he wasn’t camping out in an ice cave. As his boat rose and fell in the increasing swell, he scanned the shoreline, his attention suddenly pulled to objects and motion on the water near the shelf ice. He turned his bow in that direction, trying to understand what he was seeing, his vision often obscured by the waves.
“We’ve got company,” he shouted. “Let’s take a closer look.”
They started paddling toward the dark forms, kayaks. As they neared they both could tell something was wrong.
“Looks like trouble,” Jeffers yelled.
As they approached the kayaks they could see four boats, three with occupants, one capsized. The paddlers were struggling to control their boats in the surf and the swirl of reflecting waves rebounding off the shelf ice. As they drew closer, Ray could see a figure bobbing in a life vest near the capsized kayak. The other members of the group, fighting to remain upright, could offer little assistance to the swimmer.
Ray and Jeffers sprinted toward the form in the water.
As they drew closer, Ray began to assess the situation. A group of kids, teenagers, in small recreational kayaks. They appeared to be wearing ski parkas under their life vests. He imagined that they were probably wearing jeans, nothing to protect them from the effects of the frigid water.
Ray took control of the scene, yelling at the three boaters to move to deeper water, away from the swimmer, a girl who was flailing around in the surf, struggling to keep her head above the surface. Ray went to retrieve the kayak, while Jeffers paddled to the swimmer.
He tried to right the craft. Without floatation or bulkheads, the water-filled boat barely broke the surface. Ray tried to pull the kayak onto his foredeck, but quickly realized that he didn’t have the strength to fight the hundreds of pounds of water that flooded its interior. He pushed it off his deck.
Ray paddled next to Jeffers, who was holding onto one of the straps of the swimmer’s life vest at the other side of her boat. He ramped his boat against hers.
“What’s her condition?”
“Deteriorating fast, barely responsive. It’s rush, rush.”
“We’ll get her on your deck, and I’ll try to tow you the rest of the way. Think you can hold her?”
“Yes. She’s small.”
Ray reached over Jeffer’s deck, using her kayak to stabilize his. He pushed his neoprene mitten through a strap on the girl’s vest and pulled her small frame across the decks of both boats and then positioned her on Hannah’s boat, her chest flat on the bow deck, feet dangling, one on each side, facing Hannah.
“Sure you can hold her?”
“Yes.”
While they
were still ramped, Ray pulled out his radio, and keyed the transmit button, repeating “Mayday” three times. There was an instant response. He gave their location and nature of the emergency, and waited briefly for a comeback.
Then he pushed his boat forward, clipping his towrope to the loop on the front of Jeffers’ boat and paddling away from the shelf ice, the line spooling out of his tow bag, then growing taut, several feet of thick shock cord at the end of the line dampening the pull of the rope. He yelled at the other three kayakers to follow them, hoping that they could make it in safely without anyone else capsizing.
He had about a mile to cover, ten or twelve minutes in flat water, but in these waves and wind and towing a bow-heavy boat, he struggled to move forward. Ray could feel the adrenalin kicking in as he struggled through the deepening troughs, hoping that Jeffers would not be capsized. Ray glanced occasionally back at her and the other paddlers.
As he neared the opening to the river, he could see figures standing on the shelf ice. He paddled beyond the opening and then headed straight in, the trailing boat following him into the river. By the time he was near the shore, firefighters, dressed in cold-water rescue suits, scrambled into the water. They pulled Jeffers’ boat up the bank, and then quickly moved the victim to a stretcher. Ray caught a glimpse of Jeffers following the stretcher toward the waiting ambulance.
Then he released his spray skirt and pulled himself out of the cockpit, near exhaustion and struggling to get to his feet. Two firefighters helped him up the embankment and retrieved his kayak for him. He sat on the bank and watched as they got the other three boaters, two boys and a girl onto the shore. Ray wanted to scream at the kids, but he only sat, struggling to catch his breath.
• • •
An hour later Ray caught up with Jeffers. She was standing and working at a keyboard in the large open area of the trauma center that was surrounded by treatment rooms, her yellow and blue drysuit looking out of place against the sea of pale green scrubs.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Tired,” he responded.
“I’m almost done here,” she said, looking up and smiling.
“How’s the patient?” he asked.
“She’s responding well, but it was a close one.” After a few keystrokes, she looked up again. “Okay, I’m logged off, and we’re out of here.”
As they walked toward the car, Jeffers asked, “How did you know where to find the keys?”
“I saw you put them in a dry bag that you stashed in your day hatch before we launched.”
“And you drove here on your own. If you’d had a stroke along the way you could have destroyed both my car and my kayak.”
Ray handed her the keys. “Yeah, it’s your lucky day.” He collapsed into the passenger seat, happy to be chauffeured. After a few miles he asked, “How close was it?”
“Close, another ten or fifteen minutes in the water, and she’d have been gone,” she said, watching the oncoming traffic as she waited to make a left turn. “By tomorrow this will just be a bad dream. Although I bet she’s probably given up winter kayaking for life.”
Ray was too tired to respond.
“What if we’d had four swimmers?” Jeffers asked. “What if the four swimmers had capsized us in their desperation?”
“We were lucky,” he said.
There was little conversation for the rest of trip, and Hannah Jeffers stayed only long enough to change out of her drysuit. She explained that she needed to get back to her apartment to shower and get some sleep before she went back on call at midnight.
15.
Ray was startled when he looked at the clock on the stove as he began to make coffee. He was always up early, even on the weekend, an internal clock pulling him to consciousness every morning between five and six o’clock. But on this Sunday morning he had slept in and not by intention. And even with all the extra sleep, he was still feeling weary, his body sore from the events of the last few days.
As he sat at the table eating oatmeal and sipping coffee, he studied two maps, one pinpointing the location of Tristan Laird’s trailer, the other showing the possible location of a tree house that Molly Birchard had identified as one of Tristan’s hideaways. Her directions to the second location were less exact. The place marked on the map was Molly’s best guess of where it might be, a remote piece of private land near the south end of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
Ray decided that he would start with the trailer first, since the tree house would probably be impossible to find given Molly’s rather fuzzy description of its location. He opened his laptop to check the weather and temperature so he would know how to dress for his outing. Then he looked at his email. Finally there was a note from Sarah sent from her Blackberry apologizing for being incommunicado. She explained that she was at O’Hare waiting for an early morning flight. She asked if he was available for dinner this evening, noting that she would bring dessert.
He quickly keyed a response, saying he’d love to make dinner for her, suggesting five o’clock.
As soon as he hit the send button, his thoughts turned to the menu and things that were on hand or had to be purchased at the market on his way back from the trek in search of Tristan Laird. He pulled a lamb rib roast from the freezer and put it in the sink to defrost. Then he looked through the contents of the refrigerator. The possible makings for a salad were mostly dead, and there were no fresh vegetables. When he checked a bag of petite potatoes, he found that they had started to sprout. It immediately became clear that other than the lamb, the menu would depend on what he found at the local market.
• • •
The road into Tristan’s was exactly as marked. Ray had brought both skis and snowshoes. Given the heavy covering of snow and the deep drifts, including the several inches of fresh powder that fell the previous afternoon and evening, he decided that the snowshoes would be the most efficient way to get to his destination. As he started up the road, there were no hints of tire ruts or snowmobile tracks, not even animal tracks, just the even blanket of snow, several months of accumulation, layers on top of another, collapsing with age and weight.
As he worked his way along the narrow trail, the brilliant sunshine that had put him in an ebullient mood started to disappear. Soon the sky went gray and snow began to fall, a gentle dusting.
Ray guessed that this road was barely passable during the best of times. Trees and bushes had made a steady incursion in the seldom-used trail, and there were places in a low, swampy area where it had all but disappeared.
Ray found the dwelling at the terminus of the track, a sagging house trailer with a flimsy rust-covered set of stairs leaning into the structure just below an entry door. Cloaked in snow, firewood was stacked on each side of the stairs. The front and back walls of the trailer were raked in from the roof to the floor, a failed attempt at modern design dating from the ’50s.
An old Toyota pickup truck, the body propped high over the wheels, stood some distance from the trailer. It was covered by a heavy mantle of snow, suggesting it hadn’t been moved for months. Ray wondered if it was in running condition.
The entrance door was secured by a large, brass padlock that dangled from a badly corroded hasp. Ray could see that someone had made an effort to reinforce the right side of the doorframe near the area. A crudely shaped piece of wood, probably oak, had been secured by lag screws over the side of the hasp to protect it from being pried away from its mounting screws. He suspected the interior had been similarly reinforced.
The vandalizing of remote seasonal homes and hunting cabins was a common occurrence, especially during the winter months when even the most secluded locations were easily accessible by snowmobile. The more remote the location, the more time the vandals had to kick down doors or tear through walls or windows. Usually by the time the owners discovered the damage, weeks or months had passed and any evidence that might lead the police to the culprits was long gone. Ray suspected that most of this was done by young men,
either locals or from downstate, who ranged through the area in the dead of winter, often at night, enjoying an alcohol and testosterone-fired wildness that would put them behind bars under normal circumstances.
Ray circled the trailer in a clockwise direction. There was no skirt at the base and he could see that occasional stacks of concrete blocks provided the foundation for the trailer. There was no evidence that anyone had been near the structure. He moved close to the structure, trying to see into the interior. Faded, tattered curtains almost completely obstructed his view. Two rust- covered propane tanks stood at the front of the trailer, unconnected to the couplers and oxidized copper tubing. He could see the washed out remains of the manufacturer’s logo, a crescent shape and the words New Moon. He noted the irony.
Ray completed his circuit and moved away from the building, stopping to look back at the scene for a long moment. The reclusive Tristan Laird clearly had not been at this location for a long time.
As he worked his way back toward the highway, he grew aware of how quickly he was becoming fatigued. Lifting the snowshoes at each step became increasingly arduous. He was greatly relieved to see his vehicle slowly taking form in the distance. He glanced at his watch. The search for Tristan Laird was over for the day.
16.
Walking across the parking lot at the market, Ray, sore and stiff, moved with difficulty. Once inside the store, he grabbed a cart and headed toward the produce section to look for salad ingredients. During the growing season, locally produced greens and fruits fresh from nearby farms were a specialty of this family-owned store, but in the dead of winter, most of the produce on display looked travel weary, even with the constant misting from overhead sprayers.
Ray Elkins mystery - 04 - Shelf Ice Page 7