Rob appeared to be sleeping. At least his eyes were closed. And he had barely moved in thirty minutes.
Gracie, on the other hand, had been puzzling over the realization that, in spite of everything, she was feeling an incongruous sense of contentment. It had been a patriarch’s age since she had felt remotely comfortable around a man other than her teammates, especially in anything resembling a prone position—multiple layers of fleece, down and polypropylene between them notwithstanding.
Until it hit her like a charge of dynamite—without her being aware of it, her feelings for Rob had moved into the mine-filled realm of the personal. He was no longer some nameless someone from whom she was clinically detached, uninvolved, emotionally remote. The man lying beside her was a living, breathing human being of whom, she realized with another jolt, she had grown quite fond.
Anxiety rose up to lodge a fist behind her sternum. The reality that she held Rob’s life in her own feeble hands suffocated her with a physical weight. If he died, she would never be able to live with herself.
“Tell me about your life.” Rob’s soft voice barged in on her thoughts.
“I thought you were sleeping,” Gracie said. “Are you warm enough?”
“Enough. Where did you come from? Your family. Things like that.” He asked the questions offhandedly, like one would if one was used to everyday personal conversations.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Gracie said, eyes focused back on the shelter ceiling.
“I want to know.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m interested.”
“Nothing to tell.”
“Liar.”
She turned over and propped her head up on her hand. She studied Rob through half-closed eyes, feeling as if she were teetering on the edge of a crevasse, arms windmilling, and she had to decide whether to leap across the abyss or remain safely where she was.
Come on. If I can jump out of a helicopter, I ought to be able to do this. “Born and raised in a small blue-collar town in the middle of Michigan,” she said.
Rob sat up inside his sleeping bag. “Michigan. Detroit, right?”
“I’m impressed.”
“Never been there.”
“Congratulations. Nah, that’s not fair. Parts of the state are gorgeous. It’s the cities I can’t stand.”
“Ever been to London?”
“No.”
“New York?”
“No. I told you, I hate cities.”
“How can you hate cities you’ve never been to?”
“I’ve never stuck a red-hot poker in my eye either. I don’t have to do it to know I won’t like it.”
“Why don’t you branch out a little from your placid, uneventful life? Do something adventurous for a change. Come to New York for a visit.”
“There are three chances of me ever going to New York City,” she said. “Slim, fat, and none.”
“Cheeky, aren’t you?”
“Cheeky. You asked me a question, so let me answer.”
“So answer already.” He grinned. “I’m tired of waiting for you.”
She shot him a look. “Reader’s Digest condensed version. Morris. Stepfather. Executive. Workaholic. Evelyn. Mother. Racquet Club wife.” A half brother and half sister from her mother’s first marriage. She glossed over a childhood filled with symphonies, theater and ballet lessons. U of M. Budding career in advertising. “You can’t find this interesting,” she said with a grimace.
“I consider myself a student of human nature.” He looked pointedly at her. “So you’re the youngest?”
“Yep.”
“What about your little sister?”
“What little sister?”
“The one you sold into slavery for that sleeping bag?”
“Huh, yeah. That little sister. Oops.”
“Uh-huh. What other lies have you told me?” he asked, eyes crinkling.
Gracie inhaled to protest, but clapped it shut again because at that moment Rob looked so beautiful it was surreal.
“What about men?” he asked. “You said you were engaged. What happened?”
“Burned. No, chewed up and spit out is more like it. That’s all I’m going to say. Your turn. I want to hear every boring detail straight from the horse’s mouth.”
Rob stretched out full length on his sleeping pad, resting his head back on his pine-needle pillow. “My life’s not nearly as interesting as yours.”
“Nice try,” she said, turning over onto her back again. “Spill it.”
As the snow piled up outside the shelter, Gracie listened as Rob presented to her a compendium of his life, which boiled down to born and raised in London, fifth out of nine children, two boys and seven girls. “My way of getting attention in such a big, noisy crowd was to act out, be the ham. I was a royal pain in the arse.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Eventually university. Cut to present day. Currently renting a flat in New York. Upper West Side. Great restaurants and pubs and bagel shops and newspaper stands. But quiet on my street.”
“Mmmm,” was all Gracie could muster.
“There’s an energy about the city. A vibrancy. You need a whole different set of skills to survive there.”
Gracie looked over at him.
“It’s true,” he said.
“Like I said before, three chances . . .” As if to punctuate the point, Gracie’s stomach rumbled audibly.
Rob smiled. “I heard that.”
“I’m hungry.”
Holding her eye, Rob drawled, “I’m so hungry, I could eat a sow an’ nine pigs an’ chase the boar half a mile.” Before Gracie had time to roll her eyes, he sat bolt upright. “Hold on! I had a rucksack!”
“Keep your voice down!” Gracie hissed.
Rob dropped his voice back to a whisper. “A . . . a backpack. I completely forgot about it. I was carrying leftovers from the lunch. Must have lost it when I fell.”
“Could I find it?”
His face fell. “Bloody hell, I don’t know.”
“That’s all right. I can backtrack up to it.” She scrambled out of her bag and grabbed her Gore-Tex pants, lying flat on her back to pull them on.
Rob watched her slip her radio chest pack over her head and clip it in place. “I want to go with you,” he said in a deep voice.
“I don’t want you re-injuring your ankle.”
“I don’t like you going out there alone. It’s not safe.”
“I’ll be careful,” Gracie said, wishing she felt as confident as she sounded. “I’m taking the pack. Block the entrance with my sleeping bag.” She grabbed her mountaineering boots. “If something happens and I don’t come back—”
Rob’s eyes widened. “Don’t say that!”
“If something happens,” she said, “stay here. Do not—Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening.”
“Do not try to hike out. You have the most important things—shelter and water. A person can survive for weeks without food.” At Rob’s panic-stricken face, she quickly added, “Not that there’s any way this is going to last that long. As soon as this storm breaks, they’ll send aviation in. Describe the rucksack.”
“Blue. Dark blue. Black straps.”
“Pass me my crampons.”
As she Velcroed her gaiters over her boots, he retrieved the steel spikes from the little storage area at the back of the shelter and handed them to her. “Nasty-looking things.”
“Very useful for walking on ice and slippery slopes,” she said, fastening them to the outside of her pack. “Ice axe.”
He held it up. One end of the axe head—the adze—was flattened to a cutting edge; the other end, the pick, well-honed to a sharp point. The three-foot metal shaft itself ended in a spike. “Another nasty-looking thing.” He turned it in his hands. “What’s it for?”
“Mostly a sort-of walking stick in the snow.” Taking it from him, she gripped the shaft in one hand, placing the other
on top of the axe head, the pick facing forward. “But if I fall, I jab it into the snow like this and, theoretically at least, slow myself down. It’s called self-arrest.”
“And you’ve done this?”
“In trainings. It’s really hard.”
“Bloody remarkable.”
“Takes a lot of upper body strength and a lot of practice to become really proficient. I’m not very good.”
Rob watched as she stuffed her arms into her parka sleeves and stretched a balaclava over her head, followed by the helmet, then flipped her hood up on top of everything.
She turned to crawl out of the shelter, then stopped. She pulled up her jacket, unsheathed the hunting knife and laid it carefully on the sleeping bag next to Rob.
“What’s that for?”
Her eyes lifted to meet his. “Just in case.”
She heard Rob curse under his breath as she turned again to leave. He grabbed hold of her arm to stop her. “Gracie,” he said in a low voice. “Be careful.”
“I always am.”
She tried to turn away yet again, but he held on to her arm. “Gracie.”
She turned back.
He looked her right in the eye. “Be careful.”
She looked steadily back. “I always am.”
Gracie tossed her mostly empty pack ahead of her into the snow and crawled out of the shelter.
CHAPTER
63
GRACIE climbed up the side of the mountain, her body falling into a natural rhythm to conserve energy. Breathing in through her nose, she planted the end of her ice axe, kicked a step in the snow and placed her foot until her crampons grabbed. Then, while breathing out through her mouth, she pushed up, straightening her leg and momentarily resting the muscle. Then she took another breath and another step. Another breath. Another step.
Every few minutes, she stopped to catch her breath or unzip the underarm zippers of her parka. She glanced around, squinting her eyes against the blowing snow, taking note of landmarks—an oddly shaped boulder, a fallen log, a tangle of manzanita—anything that would help her negotiate her way back to the shelter. Before she had left the shelter, she had set her GPS to track. But she never relied solely on technology. Technology often failed. The thought of not being able to find her way back to Rob chilled her bones in a way the weather couldn’t.
The wind grew even more ferocious as she worked her way up. It pelted her face with icy slivers and whipped the air from her lungs. Her breathing grew more labored. Gradually all thought ceased until nothing existed but: Breathe in. Plant the ice axe. Step right. Straighten the leg. Breathe out. Plant the ice axe. Step left. Straighten. Breathe in.
She stopped again, chest heaving, the exposed skin on her face burning with the cold. She could see not far above her head, the jumble of boulders that formed the base of the rock promontory.
Thank Almighty God.
Gracie turned around in a circle, eyes half-closed against the wind, searching the hillside for any sign of Rob’s knapsack. But no blue cloth stood out against the snow.
Gracie climbed up past the rock outcropping and hauled herself up onto the trail. As she straightened, a freight train of wind slammed into her, almost tipping her over. She staggered to regain her footing and braced herself against the wind as if against a solid wall. Then she tottered, zombielike with arms outstretched, across the trail and wedged herself into a narrow crack in the rock to catch her breath.
Gracie’s body was sweating even as her cheeks and fingers stung with cold. Any moisture on her skin would quickly sap away the heat her body produced and she would soon be shivering. She unzipped her parka a couple of inches, flapped freezing air inside onto her bare skin, then zipped it back up.
Her eye caught on a streamer of neon orange flagging tape whipping crazily in the wind a few feet up the trail from where she stood. Was that there the first night? She didn’t remember seeing it when she had aimed her flashlight up the trail. Flagging tape was the kind of thing she would have noticed. She hadn’t walked very far past the point where the prints had left the trail. Cashman had, but she was confident he hadn’t tied it there.
The only logical explanation for the orange tape was that a search team had hiked up the trail, marking their progress along the way.
Gracie’s spirits hit bottom.
The search team had bypassed the rock outcropping and continued on up the trail. They hadn’t known Gracie and Rob were down in the canyon, which meant they hadn’t received the GPS coordinates of the bivouac. The possibility was zero that Cashman had reached the CP and told someone where she and Rob were.
Cashman had never made it back to the Command Post.
No one knew where they were.
Another thought slammed into her. She leaned out from the crack in the rock and looked down the trail, searching for a flash of the neon green flagging tape Cashman had tied when they first descended into the canyon. The wind bit at her face and whipped tears from the corners of her eyes back into her hair. She squinted so her eyelashes blocked most of the blowing snow. No neon green stood out against the white surroundings.
Gracie ducked back into the shelter of the crack.
There was no question in her mind that Cashman had flagged the spot where they left the trail. She distinctly remembered him tying several lengths. A quick check of her GPS confirmed she was in the right place.
Flagging tape was tough. It required a concerted, deliberate effort to remove it. A search team bypassing the outcropping without blowing whistles or shouting or following their trail down the side of the hill meant only one thing—someone had removed the green tape with the express purpose of preventing the searchers from finding her and Rob.
The hair on Gracie’s arms prickled as she was struck by the feeling that someone was watching her.
Get off the trail! Go down! Now!
CHAPTER
64
GRACIE could barely see her feet in the gusting snow.
The feeling of eyes watching her had disappeared as soon as she had thrown herself down on the edge of the trail and pushed off the side.
Now she concentrated on working her way down the steep slope past the giant up-thrust of rock that formed the outcropping. She fought the impulse to hurry, firmly planting her ice axe, and then each boot onto the steps she had made on the way up. Stepping with her knees bent, she leaned forward on her ice axe so her feet wouldn’t fly out from under her. One false step, one misplacement of her ice axe, one caught crampon, and, courtesy of her slick, waterproof parka and pants, Gracie would find herself on an E-ticket ride to the bottom. Or worse—face-planting into a tree trunk along the way. The old adage “It’s not the fall that’ll kill you. It’s the sudden stop at the bottom” almost made her smile beneath her balaclava.
At the base of the outcropping, she stopped in the shelter of the tumbled boulders to drink deeply from her water bottle and look around again for Rob’s knapsack. As she twisted the cap back on, she scanned the mountainside below her. What she could see of the pines and firs, bushes and rocks appeared undisturbed by anything other than nature’s fury.
She looked down at the ground around her feet. Beneath the snow, she recognized the signs of a second path diverting from the main track and running along the bottom of the outcropping.
Was that something she and Cashman had missed in the dark when they descended what seemed like weeks ago? Or had it been made after that? Her consternation grew when she remembered that Cashman had passed that way three more times, twice on the first night, the third time the previous morning and had noticed nothing. At least he had made no mention of it to her.
She resigned herself to the fact that she was probably expending valuable energy for nothing when she was already running below empty and trudged along the base of the promontory.
Fifty feet in, she stopped and looked up.
The body had been shoved up beneath a protective lip of granite where no snow had been able to accumulate. What was visibl
e was thankfully not the face, but the back of the head, the torso, the lower portions of both legs, and one arm with a bare hand.
Bright red jacket. Bright yellow shirt. White-blond hair. Reeboks.
Gracie’s brain plucked the details from the Lost Person Questionnaire.
She had found Tristan Chambers.
CHAPTER
65
THERE was no need to check for signs of life. The body had been wedged back into the rocky crevice with the arms and legs tucked around it like so much limp spaghetti. Portions of the shirt and jacket appeared black, and the hair was matted with what was probably dried blood.
The body was confirmation that what Rob remembered about someone dying was, in actuality, fact. At least as far as Tristan was concerned, there was no more uncertainty. No more speculation. No more what-ifs and maybes.
Gracie felt the noose tighten around her neck.
She needed to get out of there. Fast. She needed to get back to where Rob waited alone, unsuspecting, unprotected.
Conscious the area was a crime scene, Gracie touched nothing on the corpse itself. She planted her feet firmly in the snow, pulled out her GPS again, and took a waypoint, labeling it DB. Dead Body.
Death was never pretty. Gracie never got used to it. The smell of fresh blood or decomposing flesh always made her insides roil. Tristan’s body was frozen solid. At least there was no discernible smell. She took in deep, frigid breaths to keep down what little food she had eaten that day.
But as soon as she turned to make her way back along the base of the rock outcropping, her mouth filled with saliva and the familiar metallic taste. She dropped to her hands and knees, and vomited into the snow.
Gracie’s body shook uncontrollably and her teeth chattered so violently she couldn’t keep her mouth closed. Her head hung almost to the ground. She took in deep, heavy breaths to the bottom of her lungs, willing back the vomit that threatened to rise again in her throat. Tears dripped unheeded onto the snow.
Zero-Degree Murder (A Search and Rescue Mystery) Page 18