The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  He checked his watch. Banks would most likely have finished by now. Walking back to the plane, he managed to recover his sense of a wide future opening up. A tall guy in navy-blue overalls stood tightening up the nuts in the Stationair’s side panel. He flashed Chuck a broad smile and held out a clean hand.

  ‘Mayor Hillingberg, it’s such an honour to meet you. You got my vote for governor, sir. Foggy got called away again, so he put me onto the last few bits and pieces, just clean-up stuff. He didn’t want to delay you any more.’

  Chuck felt himself relax. Right now, that wide future felt like it was only a short flight away. Tonight he’d be on camera shaking up the champagne with the winner of the toughest, most prestigious dogsled race in the world, and making what was almost certainly the most important speech of his career, so far. He opened up the cabin door, slung his papers inside and gave the thumbs up to Foggy Banks’s friend.

  Thirty minutes later, he was up at 15,000 feet flying in good weather over Talkeetna. Before him, the outline of Denali dazzled in the sun. For the first time in his life he felt as though he and the mountain were one of a kind, kindred spirits. He laughed at himself. OK, so that sounded kinda tree-huggy. What he meant was he felt solid, impressive, open to the sun. The plane bumped over some loose air. Up ahead, a large cumulus hung at the plane’s altitude. Chuck checked the altimeter and decided he could afford to dip a little, get himself out of the way. The plane dropped, skimmed the bottom edge of the cloud and burst out into sun on the other side. He pulled on the elevator to correct the altitude but nothing happened. The lining of his stomach curled up, as though someone had poured bleach into it. He shook the feeling off and told himself to calm down. The plane buffeted into another cloud and began to roll a little. He straightened up, but still found himself descending, the nose still refusing to lift. His heart began to pound now, the blood draining from his brain, making him light-headed. He knew he was in trouble but his previous feelings of invincibility still lingered, like some old unwanted habit. He thought to himself: this isn’t happening, whilst knowing simultaneously that it was. And then he knew. This was happening. Foggy Banks’s friend had made sure of that.

  The Stationair was dropping rapidly now. He figured he only had a few more minutes before he would cease to be able to stabilize the wings. At that point, the plane would start to spin before plummeting to the ground. Thoughts flashed before him like shooting stars. The pressure of the adrenaline racing through his veins was almost unbearable. He started to feel dazed, as removed from the situation as he would have been if he were looking at it on a TV screen. He adjusted the ailerons and the plane began to roll as though it were a boat in a high storm. For some reason, he found the movement momentarily calming. He thought back to himself as a baby when his mother used gently to rock him in a cot made by his father. Below him the mountains dazzled. He closed his eyes for a second, trying to regain the feeling of communality he’d felt with Denali only moments before. The plane began to list, then spin, and he became vaguely aware of desperately flipping switches. But it was all too late. He could hear the rush of the air on either side of him. He raised his arms and unbuckled his seat belt. Being free of it suddenly there was a moment in which he felt he was flying and wondered if he had already died. But then he saw the mountains looming at vast speed towards him and knew that the impact was yet to come. He tried to will himself into unconsciousness but the terror of his situation only came more fully into relief.

  The last thing Mayor Chuck Hillingberg remembered in this life was what his wife had said to him. Take your time. He heard himself give a bitter little laugh. She knew. Marsha knew. In spite of everything he felt himself smile. I’m taking my time now, Marsha, he thought. I’m taking all the time in the world.

  38

  She woke cold and with the sense that she had left her body. She could see that she was lying on what seemed to be a concrete floor, but the feeling she had was that every part of her had liquefied and was swirling and cresting, uncontained by anything. There was a rich, sharp smell which was familiar but which she could not identify. Her mind felt as fluid as her body, like a blob of oil floating on a swelling sea.

  A woman’s voice percolated into her consciousness. She opened her eyes but nothing happened. The voice continued, soft, insistent. She tried to imagine a snow house and put herself inside it. This seemed to help her focus. Turning her head in the direction of the voice, she gazed through a screen of metal mesh. A pale face loomed, topped with a mess of dirty blonde hair.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘It’s OK.’ The woman’s voice sounded like it was coming up from under the waves. ‘She gave you Nembie, why you feel weird.’

  Edie didn’t know what Nembie was but it didn’t seem to matter. She tried to blink away the pain at the side of her head. Reaching up with a hand her fingers came back rusty-coloured and sour smelling. A word popped into her mind. Ammonia. That was it. There was a pervasive smell of piss. The voice broke her train of thought.

  ‘You got thump on head, Edie. On top of another one, looks like.’

  The voice waited while this sunk in. So the woman knew who she was.

  ‘It’s Lena. I called, remember? You came to my house.’ She broke off suddenly. Edie blinked some more and pictured herself sitting safe inside that snow house again.

  A door opened and a second voice broke in from outside the cage.

  ‘You’re dumber than I thought. This isn’t your fight, hell, this isn’t even your country!’

  This voice she knew immediately. It went on, insistent:

  ‘I played nice, I even gave you a warning, but you got the hide of a freakin’ walrus. You brought this on yourself. You should have stopped when I took your ex out of the race, but you were too dumb to get the message. This is the worst possible time. I should be up at the race now and you’ve put me out.’ Aileen Logan sucked on her teeth. Her face loomed huge behind the wire mesh. ‘Get this message. You’ve put me out.’

  A door opened, they heard the sound of a lock and Aileen was gone. Edie sat up, leaned against the mesh and scrabbled around in her mind.

  ‘Nembie?’

  ‘Nembutol. Aileen say she uses to euthanize dogs,’ Lena whispered, ‘but listen, stay awake, you can fight it.’

  Edie focused her eyes first on the mesh then on the figure of Lena. She heard her breath come long and slow, pinched herself hard to quicken it. Before long, she could see both the mesh and Lena. It was then she understood they were in two wire pens, like those in a dog kennel. They were boxed in, their front gates secured by padlocks. The pens gave onto an internal boardwalk lit by two windows under high eaves. Clearly, the building hadn’t always been a kennel. The high roof suggested some other, earlier use. Aside from a small meshed viewing window, the external door looked solid and locked from the outside.

  ‘Has this got something to do with the CCTV tape you told me about on the phone?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  This took a while for Edie to process. Then she said, ‘How’s Aileen even know about it?’

  ‘Marsha Hillingberg,’ Lena hissed. ‘Aileen and Marsha speaking on the phone when Aileen was bringing me here in car. I think they have relationship. Aileen say “darling”.’

  Edie wondered for a moment whether she’d heard right. Aileen Logan and Marsha Hillingberg lovers? That sounded crazy. In any case, it probably didn’t matter so much who was screwing who, as to how they were going to get themselves out of the mess they were in.

  ‘We must find way out very quick,’ Lena said.

  Edie felt herself going. In her mind, she saw Sedna, the sea spirit, how she held men and women captive in great forests of seaweed, drowned men and women, on the seabed, in order not to be alone. A memory bubbled up of her as a girl, being dragged under the water by a seal, being taken to Sedna. She saw a face under the water but it was not Sedna’s face. It was her murdered ex-stepson Joe’s face and he was calling out the name he used for her. Kigga, Kigga. And
then she was a bird and flying and she flew up and found herself on the back of the spirit bear and the spirit bear was clambering up rocks and out of the forest and then she was on the tundra again and all around she could see the frozen rocks and sparse, tufted vegetation, the brilliant yellow and red lichens, the frozen sea and green-blue icebergs of her home on Ellesmere Island.

  Then she blinked and felt the water and remembered that she wasn’t in the sea at all and she opened her eyes fully and put her hand to her face and felt a cool liquid and saw that, in the next pen, Lena was dipping her fingers in a bowl and flicking them in her direction, keeping her from sleeping and for an instant she felt her eyelids droop and a wave of resentment came over her because all she wanted to do was rest but she kept blinking and shaking her head and the wave crested over her and died away.

  And that was when the only thing she knew about padlocks came to her. She knew how to pick them. The thought seemed to rouse her. As though from somewhere far distant she felt a tiny spike of adrenaline. The pain in her mind flew away suddenly and a pocket of clarity opened up, like a splash of sun on a cloudy day.

  ‘Lena,’ she hissed, ‘look for something sharp, something like a toothpick or a hook.’

  Edie pressed her teeth into her lip and felt the blood trickle, the warm, metallic taste in her mouth. Taking six deep breaths in, hoping the oxygen would clear her head, she blinked herself back into focus and began to scour the pen, looking for anything she might use as a pick. The pens had been swept and cleaned and they were screened off by two layers of wire mesh, secured to supports with what looked like solder. Aside from the dog bowl full of water, there was nothing inside. She tried to focus on the wire mesh itself, looking for a loose end, a fracture or stress line she could try to exploit, but the mesh was heavy grade and looked new.

  After a long while, she heard a hissing noise. Lena was pressed up against the side of the pen closest to her. She’d managed to wedge her fingers part way through the mesh.

  ‘What you got?’

  ‘Hairpin.’

  ‘Show me.’ She leaned into the mesh and focused on the hand. The fingers moved and a slim two-pronged object appeared.

  ‘Was stuck in the middle of my hair,’ Lena said. ‘Aileen pulled my bun but this was left.’

  Edie looked at the pin, then at the padlock. This was as good as it was going to get. She shuffled forward. Her eyes swam. She pushed her finger through the mesh but the gauge wasn’t wide enough to accommodate her whole hand. Her fingertips made contact with the padlock but it slipped away. What she needed, she knew, was focus. She closed her eyes and thought about the scene in Safety Last! with Harold Lloyd swinging unprotected from the moving hands of the clock high up above the city. For a moment she put herself on those hands until it felt as though her head might dissolve into a tiny ball of fierce, white light, then, without opening her eyes, she pushed her fingers through the mesh, hooked the two outermost fingers of her right hand around the padlock to hold it in place and using her index finger and thumb inserted the hairpin into the lock and pressed each pin in turn until the lock gave and she was free.

  In the neighbouring dog pen Lena had begun panting. Feeling unsteady on her legs, Edie staggered over and grabbed the padlock. Lena was shaking now, her breath heavy in her throat. It was hard to say whether it was the effects of the drugs she’d been given or a panic attack. Either way, it didn’t make Edie’s job any easier. She closed her eyes and pictured the clock scene again, steadied her breath, inserted the hairpin and felt it suddenly snap. She pulled it out, broken. The two women looked at it for a second. Lena’s face scrunched. She took a deep breath in and opened her eyes. Her jawline was tight now and a new light blazed from her eyes.

  ‘You go,’ she said.

  ‘Lena, I’m going to get you out of here.’

  Lena was shaking her head. She raised a hand to her hair and pulled out a skein from the side.

  ‘Take this to Detective Truro. He’s a good man, Edie. A bit of a religion fanatic, but good to working girls.’

  Edie looked at the lock of hair but she did not take it.

  ‘We’ll go together, Lena.’

  Lena shook her head sadly. ‘If Aileen does not kill me, they will deport me anyway. Listen, Edie. I want you to know this. Jonny Doe, this baby, he was son of me. His name Vasilly Chuchin. This hair prove. Another thing. Olga know where is tape. She run away, protect her baby. She will let you have.’ Lena was crying now. ‘Please, for Vasilly.’

  Edie’s head began to throb and a wave of nausea overtook her. She stood bent over for a moment then took a deep breath.

  ‘Lena, tell me this once we’re out of here.’

  She edged up to the door. It was locked from the outside. Going slowly, she peeped through the viewing window. The door to the yard had been padlocked from the outside. The lock itself was a simple pin construction, easy to pick, but she could see an iron bar fixed to the wall on the other side with a large padlock which held in the door frame. And the door faced directly onto Aileen’s house. Inside the house she could see Aileen juggling phones. From the looks of things she wasn’t coming back any time soon. Once she’d got Lena out of her pen, they’d have to find a way to clamber up to the windows and squeeze through. She looked about for something with which to break the padlock. Just in front of her feet she noticed a dog’s dewclaw. She picked it up. It was curled and dry, sharp as a tack. Perfect. Moments later, the padlock gave and Lena was standing on the boardwalk.

  They scanned the room for something to climb, then Edie had an idea. ‘Lena, you wearing thermal liners?’

  ‘Of course,’ Lena said, ‘is March in Alaska.’

  ‘Can you strip?’

  Lena shot her a bitter smile. ‘I’m professional.’

  Moments later Edie had two pairs of long johns in her hands and was busy knotting them together and making a loop at one end. ‘One of us is going to give the other a leg-up. Whoever’s on top will have to lasso this loop over the latch there and haul herself up and out.’

  Lena looked up, following Edie’s gaze.

  ‘I don’t know is secure,’ she said.

  ‘You see any other way we can do this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK, then, you’re going to have to lean your shoulder against the wall and brace your hands like this.’

  On the fourth attempt the loop hooked over the latch. Edie quickly pulled it tight and hung on. The effort had sent blood to the wound in her head and she had to wait for the pain to subside. Using the wall, she clambered upwards, swung a leg up to the window ledge to give herself some leverage and, using all the force of her arms, pushed herself out and onto the roof. She lay flat in the snow against the shingles for a moment, catching her breath, feet balanced on nearby snow hooks. She was at the back of the kennel building, but most likely visible from the house, should Aileen look up. Untying the loop from the latch, she attached it to a snow hook and took a few tugs. She leaned back inside the window and signalled for Lena to begin to climb. The rope of liners grew taught. Halfway up the snow hook squealed and bent, but held. Then, from the house, a clatter came. For an instant Edie froze. In her peripheral vision she could just see the back door fly open and Aileen emerge, striding down the path towards the kennel. Edie snaked her way up to the window and leaned in. Lena was three-quarters of the way up now.

  ‘Hurry, hurry, Aileen is coming.’

  Lena stopped climbing and looked up. There was resignation in her eyes.

  ‘Don’t you do this, Lena, don’t give up.’ Edie stretched out a hand. The woman was only a metre from the window and freedom. Edie saw her look down, then look up, uncertain as to what to do.

  ‘Lena, look at me.’

  The young woman looked up, her hair tumbling down her back as she did so. At that moment a phone rang. Edie heard Aileen’s voice. She had stopped on the path. Another wave of nausea spread up from Edie’s belly. She took a deep breath.

  ‘You can lose a child and li
fe can still be worth living. Believe me, Lena. Climb up, climb out of the window.’

  She saw the woman’s lips form a hard line and her jaw tighten. Her hand reached out, then she was manoeuvring herself up onto the roof. Edie put a hand around her mouth to stop her talking and gestured to her to keep low. Aileen was still on the phone, with her back turned to them. Edie frantically snatched up the rope of thermal liners. Lena grabbed it and began rappelling down. Reaching the end of the rope, she looked down at the ground a couple of metres below. Then she let go. Edie dropped down after her but as she did so, her foot slipped on ice and bent under, twisting her ankle. Aileen was finishing up her conversation. Edie pointed to a thicket of alder beside the kennel and they ran, their footsteps soft in the snow. They heard Aileen fiddling with the padlock and they turned and fled further into the thicket, Edie biting her lip so that she would not cry out in pain. Not long after, they came to a deer fence electrified at the top. Edie began to climb, instructing Lena to follow. At the top, Edie wrapped her hands in her fleece then she reached out and, bracing herself, grasped the fence wire. A pulse raced across her palms and sent a burning sensation into her wrists and up her arms but she knew the voltage wasn’t sufficient to kill her, so she clung on until Lena clambered over then released her grip and followed. They jumped and found themselves on a suburban highway with the skyscrapers of downtown Anchorage a few miles distant. Behind them they could hear the sound of an engine firing up.