Cold (6 page)

“If she was out there several hours,” Del asked, “wasn’t she covered with snow?”

“Just about, eh?” Viekko said.
 
“When I made my pass down the other side something caught my eye, but I thought it was just downed branches sticking up out of the snow.
 
I came down here to the crossroads, made my turn, and started up the other bank.
 
Then I see it’s the rounded tip of a snowshoe, ya know.
 
So I climb over the bank and pull her out.
 
Stuff’s so deep I could hardly get out myself.
 
I went back to the truck, got some rope, waded in again—it’s really more a crawl in the snow, eh?—then I manage to drag her out.
 
I called the dispatch, and by the time Tooley and I got her in here the ambulance had arrived.”

“The snowshoes are still back there in the snow?”

“Not quite two football fields maybe,” Viekko said.

The paramedics raised up the legs of the gurney under the woman.
 
She was perhaps in her mid-forties, large boned; her mouth was crooked, and Del suddenly thought he recognized her, but he wasn’t sure.
 
He removed his gloves.
 
First he took the long blond braid that hung off the side of the gurney and draped it over her shoulder so that it lay on her right breast.
 
He put his hands in the cold pockets of her parka.

“She’s l-local.
 
That artist no one ever sees much.
 
I see her in here sometimes.
 
Buys g-gas.
 
Lives up in the hills s-somewheres.”

Del removed the key chain, which felt like ice, and from the other pocket he found a wallet.
 
A man’s wallet; worn leather.
 
He opened it and read the Michigan driver's license:
 
Liesl Tiomenen.
 
There were a few credit cards, a business card for her sculpture, pottery and ceramics, and twelve dollars in cash.

“Any injuries?” he asked.

“Nothing we can see,” Mona said.

“She just collapses in the snow two hundred yards from the crossroads,” Del said.

“Her f-face,” Tooley said.
 
“What about that?”

The other paramedic, a man in his late thirties with a trimmed black beard, said, “Naw, it’s old.
 
From something else.
 
I’d say she had some broken bones in there, and the jaw, the cheek, and the muscles never quite returned to their original shape.”

“It was from a car accident,” Del said.
 
He remembered his search for the green truck, the months he’d tried to track down a vehicle that she said had caused the accident.
 
He never found it.
 
He had been deputy constable then.
 
“I haven’t seen her in years.”

“When?” Mona asked.

“Five years ago, maybe,” Del said.
 
“Happened during one of those spring blizzards.
 
She swore there was a green truck coming the other way that caused her husband to lose control.
 
Looks so different now, I didn’t recognize her at first.
 
Lost a lot of weight.”
 
He stepped back from the gurney.
 
“All right, Viekko, you lead the ambulance back into Marquette.”

Viekko held the door open as the paramedics began pushing the gurney.
 
Del watched the woman’s face, the blue-white of her skin.
 
Her eyelids were large, with long blond lashes.
 
It was hard to believe she was the same woman whose husband and daughter had been killed in that accident.
 
He was trying to think of a painting by Andrew Wyeth he’d seen once, long ago, in a magazine, or in one of those large coffee table books.
 
Wyeth had painted a woman, a woman with Scandinavian features, painted her many times.
 
There was one painting that this Liesl Tiomenen reminded him of—a woman sitting at a table in an old farmhouse, wearing a heavy turtleneck sweater, her head turned aside.
 
There was in this woman’s face the same sense of quiet, of patience, of looking to the side of things.
 
But there was something else—a sense of endurance, and perhaps resignation.
 
He wished he could see her with her eyes opened.
 
They must be large, under those lids.
 
Her license said they were blue.

•

Del sat in his Land Cruiser while the paramedics secured the gurney and Liesl Tiomenen in the ambulance, then the truck led them out onto County Road 644.
 
Viekko went slowly, the blade of his plow throwing new snow up on the bank along the side of the road.
 
It was accumulating at least six inches per hour; if the plows didn't keep working, this road—perhaps all the roads in Marquette County—would be shut down soon.
 
About two hundred yards from the Stop & Go, Viekko's arm came out of his cab window and his gloved hand pointed toward the snowbank on the right.

Del pulled over and watched the plow and the ambulance lights disappear in the snow.
 
He put his flashing lights on and climbed out.
 
The wind came down the road, straight out of the north.
 
The snowbank was at least eight feet high, but it was angled so that he could get enough purchase to climb up and kneel on the crest.
 
From there he could see Viekko’s tracks leading up to where he had found Liesl Tiomenen.
 
There was the tip of a snowshoe, but no sign of what might have caused her to collapse at that point.
 
The tree line was a good fifty yards back, and the hill rose steeply from there.
 
He could see the trail she had left as she had come down from the hill; the depressions were now softened, filled in by new snow.

He kept a small pair of binoculars in one of the pockets of his coat and he took them out.
 
Through them he looked more closely at the tracks, following them from the depression where she’d collapsed back to the tree line at the base of the hill.
 
Then Del lowered the binoculars and carefully got to his feet on top of the snowbank.
 
Putting the binoculars to his eyes again he refocused and looked toward the trees again.
 
It was nearly dark beneath the evergreens, but it looked like she might have fallen a second time in there.

He went back down to the Land Cruiser and got his snowshoes out of the back.
 
They were wood shoes that he'd bought at a garage sale years ago.
 
The lacings were still good.
 
He kept them in his Land Cruiser six, seven months out of the year, and during the summer he hung them on the coat rack by the front door.
 
Just in case.

He climbed back to the crest of the snowbank, put on the snowshoes and began walking across the snow.
 
He walked wide of the first depression where Viekko had found the woman and continued on into the woods.
 
There had definitely been another fall there.
 
Del followed the tracks up the base of the hill, and found a third depression below a granite ledge.
 
It was different from the other two depressions—deeper.
 
He stared up at the top of the ledge, maybe seven or eight feet high.
 
The snow there had been broken too—here in the woods the impressions were sharper because less new snow had fallen.
 
If she had fallen off this ledge, which is what it looked like, he wondered why there were also tracks that came down around the left side of the ledge.

Del began to climb the hill off to the right of the ledge, pulling himself up by grabbing on to tree branches.
 
Climbing stairs bothered his right knee and hip and this was much worse.
 
He did most of the work with his left side.
 
It was slow, difficult going.
 
This had not been a recreational walk in the snow for Liesl Tiomenen.
 
No one would choose to take this route just for the hell of it.
 
He was sweating by the time he reached the top of the ledge, and he paused to catch his breath.
 
It was nearly dark here in the woods and he took his flashlight out of his coat pocket.
 
Looking farther uphill he could see that the tracks descending to the ledge were much wider, and at times they appeared to diverge.
 
It looked as though there had been two snowshoers coming down the hill and here one of them, Liesl evidently, must have fallen off the ledge.
 
Or been pushed.
 
Del shone the light on the depression below the ledge.
 
It was difficult to tell how she had landed, though if it were face-first there might be deep holes where her arms went into the snow in an attempt to break the fall.
 
Then he saw the outline of an arch just beneath the snow a few yards from the depression.
 

Del climbed back down off the ledge.
 
He reached down and pulled a pair of snowshoes out of the powder.
 
They must have been Liesl’s.
 
He studied the depression again, and the single set of tracks that led out of the woods.
 
Deep tracks, because someone was carrying her after she fell.
 
Someone who had carried her out beyond the tree line to where Viekko had found her.
 
Someone who had left her there, about forty yards from the road.
 
What Viekko hadn’t noticed were the tracks leading away from where Liesl lay in the snow.
 
He was too intent on the woman, getting her out, and he must have waded through those tracks.
 
The other person—a man strong enough to carry a woman of her size on his shoulder—took off his snowshoes where he left Liesl and then somehow made it out to the road.
 
If that was so, why did he bother to carry her out from the woods at all?

Del went back to his Land Cruiser.
 
Once inside, his face stung from the wind.
 
He picked up the microphone on the Roadmaster unit that was perched between the bucket seats and called Monty at the station.

“I’m on Line Two,” Monty said.
 
“Please hold.”

“Knock it off.”
 
Del could hear the television on in the background.
 
“Any calls?”

“Nope.
 
Just the usual cancellations.
 
Schools, clubs, meetings, high school sports.
 
Days like this I don't know why they don’t just make one announcement at six a. m.:
 
‘Today has been cancelled in the Upper Peninsula.’”

“There was that thing from the prison the other day,” Del said.
 
“A walkaway.
 
They haven’t found him?”

“Haven’t heard anything.
 
Anybody who walks away from there in this stuff won’t be found till the snow melts.
 
Won’t be a pretty sight, particularly if animals get to him first.”

“Call over there and get a full description.”

“Really?
 
Think you got him?”

“No.
 
I just want to know who he is.”

“What’s going on out there?”

“A woman in the snow.”

“Dead?”

“No.
 
Just real cold.”

“Car wreck?”

“Snowshoer, found under the snow.”

“Know what does those people in?” Monty asked.
 
“Boredom.
 
They get out in all that snowy natural beauty and they get
real blissful.
 
Then, Del, they just get bored.
 
I swear it’s more dangerous than drunk snowmobiling.”

“Monty, call me back when you get something on the walkaway.”

•

The coffee at Stop & Go was lousy.
 
When he was out on the road Del seldom stopped there for coffee.
 
He preferred the Four Corners Cafe at the next crossroad, four miles south, or Louise’s Dinette, in the village, where he often ate meals.
 
But Tooley had brewed this pot fresh, knowing that Del would be coming back, so if nothing else it was hot.

“You have much business this afternoon, Tooley?”

“N-no, not in this stuff.
 
Truckers mostly.
 
Some gas ups.”

“See anything odd?”

He shook his head.
 
“Like w-what?”

“I don’t know.”

Tooley opened up his cash register and studied the roll.
 
“Gas, mostly g-gas.
 
Some food, c-canned goods ‘cause people don’t want to get stuck driving into Marquette.”

“Anybody on foot?”

“On foot?”
 
Tooley shook his head.
 
He closed the cash register, then said, “W-wait, there was a hitchhiker.”

“In this stuff?
 
When?”

 
Tooley had worked for years out at the Tilden mine, until he was hit in the head by a falling timber.
 
The injury caused him to stammer; he went on disability and he and his wife bought the Stop & Go.
 
“Young fella,” he said.
 
“Got a lift in a rig.”