They flew apart. Elisabeth went backward, and Alfred reeled to the side. The illustrations were what Elisabeth noticed first. They were doused in blood, so much dripping color against so much black and white. Then she saw its source. The bullet had eaten away at half of Alfred’s neck, and a great gaping wound bloomed with gore.
Partly on his side and partly on his stomach, Alfred was crawling along the northern wall. Crying. Frantic with a fear too great for what feeble life he still possessed. He could barely move, but God, if he wasn’t trying. One hand clutched at his throat while the other scrabbled at the floor. He was pulling himself forward—achingly, desperately trying to escape her. His legs were already dead. His breathing was a torrent of blood, and his eyes were closed tightly but streaming with tears. And then his voice.
“You shot me,” he said. “Oh God. You shot me.” He opened his eyes, turned his head, and stared at her in shock. “You shot me,” he said. “Elisabeth, you shot me.”
There wasn’t much time for it now. She had to get her answers, and the urgency with which she had to do the asking drove her forward, and she was calm. She stood. Her ankle throbbed, but it didn’t bother her. She cranked the rifle’s lever again, and she stared down at Alfred.
“Where’s my sister?” she said.
Alfred stopped crawling. He rolled onto his back, and his hand dropped away from his throat. He was bleeding fast—blood was everywhere now—but the pain had seemingly left his body. He looked up at her. Watched her.
“Jacqueline,” Elisabeth said. “Tell me where she is. Give me an address. Give me their names. I kept my end of the bargain, and now you have to tell me where she is.”
He was sputtering, drowning in himself. But his lips moved in earnest, working in vain to form a response.
“A farm in Illinois,” Elisabeth said. “Tell me a street. A town. Tell me where my sister is. Give me an address.”
His eyes were a vacant stare, but his lips kept moving, working again and again with the same single word. And then Elisabeth understood. “Up,” he was saying. “Up,” and with that she saw more than vacancy in his eyes. She saw direction. “Up.”
She followed his gaze. And there, taped to the wall, was a picture that Elisabeth hadn’t noticed before, not in detail. At a glance, she had mistaken it for a photograph of herself, but as she studied it now, she saw her mistake.
It was Jacqueline. A young woman, twenty or twenty-five, she stood in the center of a winding dirt drive. She wore a plain white blouse and a gray skirt checkered with stains. Her hair was simple and short, and a bobby pin lifted her bangs away from her eyes. She was thin, but not malnourished. Rough, but not unclean. She stood sideways to the camera, her arms crossed over her chest, and she seemed to be watching something. Waiting for something. Contemplative. Dignified. A young country woman, burdened but not without her pride.
Elisabeth reached up, plucked the photograph from the wall. It was her. It really was. Grown-up. Alive. She was floating. She was nothing. Elisabeth watched the picture turn over in her hands, and on the back was an inscription written in pencil: Bond County, Ill.
“Else,” or a sound almost like it. Alfred was gagging, suffocating in blood, but his eyes watched her. He was crying. “Stay,” he said. “Please.”
She unbuttoned her parka and slipped the photograph inside. Then she was holding the gun at him, pointing its barrel at his face. Don’t close your eyes, she told herself. If you close your eyes, you’ll miss again. You have to watch it. You have to look.
“Please,” Alfred said. “Stay.” His lips popped and stammered, smeared with sticking blood. His eyes widened, and the man who stared back at her was the most wretched thing she had ever seen. “I’m scared, Else. I’m scared.”
And she fired.
* * *
—
The blinding snow. The hurling, bitter wind. The crushing trees—everywhere, trees. Denser than ever. Darker than ever.
Night had fallen. The forest was black. The snow was past her knees. Her right ankle was broken. Her whole body ached. She could barely walk. But nothing would stop her from finding her daughter. It was all for nothing if she didn’t have Margaret. Holding the rifle in one hand and Alfred’s gas lantern in the other, Elisabeth trudged through the snow. She would find her. She would die out here if she had to, but she would find her daughter first.
And she did find tracks. The light thrown off from the lantern was little more than a dim custard halo, but in the darkness of the woods it was enough to see the snow. The tracks were faint, already blowing over, but they were footprints, clearly, deep pits narrowly spaced. A child’s gait. Yet they didn’t lead south. They weren’t headed for the town. From the cabin, the tracks veered southwest—stumbling, it seemed, in confusion. Lost.
Why wouldn’t she be? Never mind Margaret’s trouble with direction and geography; the full strength of a blizzard was sweeping through the Tanana valley. Even in Alaska, it had been years since Elisabeth experienced a blizzard like this; tonight the snow fell and the wind blew with a strength so powerful that she could hardly stand or see or move. This wasn’t a blizzard. This was a nightmare. A fantasy. Not a blizzard, but the legend of a blizzard.
“Margaret!” she shouted, but like the light from the lantern her voice seemed to travel only a few feet. The wind and the snow consumed everything. But that didn’t deter her, and she called out again and again. Margaret. Margaret. Margaret.
She would lose the tracks for ten feet and then find them again, just barely able to string along Margaret’s path. And as she trudged farther into the black woods, Margaret’s footprints got more erratic, veering south, then west, then north. Soon, even Elisabeth lost track of which direction she was moving, and that was when she reached into her parka and felt for the compass. The bullets were still there, but the compass—the compass was gone.
The fight with Alfred. The staggering, rolling fight. Was that when it had slipped out? Or was it lying somewhere in the snow behind her, having slipped from her pocket after a misstep gave way to a stumble? No matter. She had the tracks. Her ankle was broken and she was buried in snow, but she still had the tracks. Through the darkness and the wind and the blistering snow, she followed her daughter.
“Margaret!” she cried, over and over, until her throat was raw.
But no answer ever came. The snow never abated, and the woods never brightened. And yet she moved and searched and screamed for her daughter. Time had no meaning. Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. An hour. A lifetime. But at last she lost Margaret’s tracks. She could only guess how long she had walked—how long or how far—but finally she reached an area where the trees spaced out more widely, and there the wind whipped more fiercely and obliterated Margaret’s footsteps. The lantern’s light was dimmer now, nearly extinguished, so Elisabeth started crawling, searching the surface of the snow with the flailing desperation of a person drowning. She weaved left and right, forward and back, feeling at the snow, scrutinizing its every crest and ripple.
Yet she couldn’t find anything. The tracks were gone. She was screaming, but the wind consumed her voice. She fell forward, and the lantern plunged into the snow and went dark. But her legs kept pushing, and her arms kept moving, and if the cold came to take her, she wouldn’t be able to stop it. She would close her eyes, and she would die, but until then she would push herself, and she would stare into the darkness.
No, not darkness. Not complete. Like a mirage, she saw it: forty feet ahead, an odd splotch of color among the blackness of the woods and the whiteness of the storm. A boot. A leg. The domed hood of a parka. Margaret, facedown, collapsed in the snow. Elisabeth was moving for her. Screaming for her.
“Margaret! Margaret!”
But her daughter didn’t move. Elisabeth had her a minute later, and for a moment she thought that she was dead. Layers of scarves snaked around Margaret’s neck and face, but her eyebrows
were caked in frost. Somehow, somewhere, her left mitten had slipped off, and her naked fingers were as white as alabaster. Shaking, not from the cold but from exhaustion and terror, Elisabeth pulled off one glove and touched Margaret’s face.
She was alive. There was still warmth in her cheeks, and despite how little light filled the forest, Elisabeth could see how Margaret’s cheeks still possessed the slightest shade of pink. And she could feel her breathing. She held one finger beneath Margaret’s nose. Yes. Her breath was there, wet and warm. She had frostbite in her fingers—there was no doubt of that—but she was breathing. She guessed that Margaret had lain in the snow for only a few minutes. But why wasn’t she awake? Exhaustion? An injury Elisabeth couldn’t yet discern?
It didn’t matter. She had her. Miraculously, impossibly, she had her. But they couldn’t stay here, this unprotected clearing assaulted by the full power of the snow and the wind and the cold. Elisabeth unwrapped one of her scarves and tied it around Margaret’s exposed hand. Then she scanned the area around them. Darkness, punishing darkness, and she couldn’t see much more than that. Could they make their way back to the cabin? The compass was gone, but maybe she could follow her own footsteps, carrying Margaret in her arms.
No, they would never make it, not with her ankle broken and with the blizzard pounding them from every direction. They had to wait this out. The cold would persist—the temperature might even drop—but it couldn’t snow forever. It would pass, and the forest would clear, and the going would eventually be easier, even without the lantern.
With both arms, Elisabeth lifted Margaret out of the snow and slung her over her shoulder. Then she lifted the rifle, and she started to walk. She was almost blind, but she moved, and she looked. For a dense crop of trees. For a grouping of rocks. For anything that might afford them some semblance of protection. She staggered forward, her ankle crushed beneath her own weight and Margaret’s, and after fifty or sixty feet, she did find something: an uprooted tree, perhaps one that had fallen from this very storm. It had taken a swatch of the earth with it as it fell, exposing a gnarled pit of soil filling up already with snow. But the overturned tree and its severed roots sprawled open like a huge hand splaying its fingers, and even from a distance Elisabeth could tell that the wind and the snow would be lighter there. She moved for it.
It wasn’t much, but it was something. She lay Margaret down, and then Elisabeth sat with her back against the tree and its gash of roots. She pulled Margaret onto her lap, cradling her like an infant. And the wind was less powerful here, the snow not as thick. This was the best she could have hoped for. The tree. At least they had the tree. This was their home for now—perhaps for an eternity.
No, don’t think like that. They could wait this out. They could survive. They had their parkas and their scarves and their heaps of clothing underneath, and perhaps the snow would soon fade away. And the rifle—she still had the rifle, and she still had the box of bullets. She took them from her pocket now, and she pulled the rifle closer to her.
Teddy Granger. Daniel Nilak. They had both seen her go into the woods, and they must have sensed that something was badly amiss. Perhaps they would send a search party. Yes, that made sense. They would do that. They would almost certainly look for them. And maybe they would find them, too.
In fact, maybe Elisabeth could help them. She cocked the rifle and steadied it against her shoulder, and then she fired a shot into the air. She cranked the lever again, and she fired a second time. Then she cranked the lever once more, and one by one she loaded five bullets into the feed.
But she didn’t fire again. She had to conserve her ammunition. She would fire two shots every twenty minutes, but she couldn’t waste them all on the air. For now, she didn’t see any animals around them, but if the snow cleared and the wind relaxed, she couldn’t count it out. Bears. Wolves. They were here, or they would be soon, and she might not see them right away. She had to be ready to defend herself. To defend them both. And by God, she would.
She tried to breathe. She tried to stay calm. Listen, she told herself. Just listen, and she tried to concentrate. Listen: There’s the sound of the wind. There’s the creak of branches over your head. The swirling shuffle of snow. Listen: There’s the sound of your daughter breathing. Don’t you hear it? And isn’t it the most wonderful thing you’ve ever heard? You might die in this very spot, this very minute, but for now, just listen. That’s all you have to do.
“Mama.”
Barely a whisper. The shadow of a sound. But it was Margaret. She was looking up at her with sleepy, blinking eyes.
“Mama,” Margaret said, “we’re lost.”
But Elisabeth only smiled.
“No, honey,” she said, pulling her tighter. “We’re exactly where we need to be.”
CHAPTER 38
You’ll finish this yet.
At some point, you fall asleep. You’re not sure how long it lasts. Perhaps an hour, perhaps a single second, nothing more than the time it takes for your head to slip and your chin to touch your chest. But in that time, you dream.
You see your father. You’re back in Lititz. Your childhood home. You’re sitting on the top step of the front stoop, and your father is standing by the door. He’s looking back at you, and you know what he’s going to say. You’ve lived this moment so many times. In your dreams. In your wretched waking memory. This is the moment that’s haunted you. The pivot of your entire life.
“Else,” your father says. “Go find your sister.”
You stand. You turn and face him. And in place of what you really said, you stare at him and say, “I already have.” Your dream self shrugs. “She’s right upstairs.”
That’s when you feel a hand on your shoulder. You’re being lifted, Margaret and all, and in the frigid blackness of the forest there’s suddenly so much movement. You feel the strength of many hands. The heat of many bodies. A swirling, muted din. Your ears are ringing. Your eyes are foggy. But then you smell something—peppermint—and you know that they’ve come for you.
You drift in and out. You’re made to drink tea, eat bread, chew what tastes like pure fat. You’re in a cabin, and the voices around you are those of other women, and their words are quiet but calm and assured.
“Eat,” they tell you. “Drink,” they tell you.
When they strip your soaking clothes away, you cling to your parka and the secret it contains. But someone pats your hand and says, “Êy t’o.” It’s okay. “Êy t’o,” and you believe her.
They cover you in blankets, and already the world is coming together again. You’re in Mack’s cabin, or what used to be his cabin, and a fire is burning in the cast-iron stove nearby. Margaret is lying on a cot beside you. At first, you only sense her presence, but then you hear her speak—“Are we still in Alaska?” she says—and you begin to cry, overwhelmed with joy and relief and an almost holy sense of appreciation. Then you turn and vomit on the floor.
You’re flown to Fairbanks. Checked in to the hospital. They set your leg and wrap it in a cast three inches thick. Your fibula is broken in two places, and your lateral ligament is so badly damaged that you’ll walk with a limp for the rest of your life.
But that’s nothing compared to Margaret. Overnight, they amputate three fingers on her left hand, and she loses the tip of one earlobe, too. This is what you’ve done to your child. Your limp will never be enough. You wish that they would take your own fingers as penance. You’re a disgrace, and everyone knows it.
But you’ll make it up to her. Just wait. You’ll make it up to her.
When the police arrive, you know what to say.
“Ever since that summer,” you tell them. “My whole life.”
They’re circled around your hospital bed, half a dozen of them. No one writes anything down, not even Sam York. They accept what you say as fact, because for once you tell them exactly what they want to hear.
“You were right,” you say. “He took her, and he murdered her. He was disturbed. He was obsessed with me because I was her twin. He wanted to finish something he had started twenty years ago. All that while, he was toying with me, and as soon as he had the right moment to do it, he tried to kill me. He would have tried it sooner, but Mack intervened, and you know what happened after that.”
Margaret listens from the bed beside you, and she doesn’t contradict a single word you say. She sits quietly, her hands folded in her lap, and her face reveals nothing. They have no idea how incredible she is. How strong. How perceptive.
“Those are geese,” she says the second night. With her right hand, the one not enveloped in bandages, she lays one finger on the photograph, pointing to a blur in the sky above your sister’s head.
“Are you sure?”
She nods. “You can tell from the formation.”
This is how you pass the time. When the two of you are alone, you hobble to Margaret’s hospital bed and study the photograph. And already, you’ve learned so much. There’s a parked car in the background, a black Chevrolet half-ton. Only a few years old, it looks like. You can almost make out its license plate number: 156-84, you think. Or maybe 758-84. In the distance, there’s a distinctive silo in the center of a field: slightly flared at the top, with unmistakable freckles of rust near its middle. You’ll recognize it instantly in person.
And now, the geese. That means there may be water nearby, and when an orderly brings you a map the next day—“For lessons,” you tell him—you and Margaret find that there’s only one large body of water in the county, Carlyle Lake, a reservoir on its southeastern border.
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