Winter Study (54 page)

“Our offices are open from eight-thirty to five, Monday through Friday.”

It
was Saturday. Anna jabbed 411, and, sitting crippled in the snow, made
her way through the ether, into space, through a satellite and down to
the National Park dispatch office. As clearly as she could, she told
the dispatcher her situation. “Radio Ridley Murray,” she said. “Tell
him what I told you. Tell him he needs to bring the Sked. I’ll hold.”

A
scratchy muttering startled her, till she realized it was her radio,
and Adam’s bleating from the bottom of the cliff. Three more times,
they bleated.

“He’s not answering,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll keep trying.”

Anna
closed the phone and stowed it back in her pocket. In a bit, when she
was sure she had no more time, she would call Paul and say good-bye.

How weird will that be,

she thought, and heard her pathetic last words to her husband being replayed on the six o’clock news all over the country.

She could call Bob, tell him all was forgiven, she was in a serious smirking mood and would he come fetch her home.

That thought festered for a minute.

“Bob,
you bastard, you are coming back for me,” she muttered suddenly. Action
gave her hope and hope gave her courage and courage gave her the
strength to lift her crippled leg and lay the damaged ankle on top of
the sound ankle. Using her own body as a Sked, she inched herself
backward with her good arm till she’d reached the side of the
outcropping where the Greenstone descended into the trees. A dead
branch provided her with twigs she could break free with one hand.
Having snapped them into suitable lengths, she shoved them into her
boot between the sock and the thick felt lining.

The
ankle stabilized, Anna could stand. The branch that had kindly given
her its twigs was as big around as her arm and no more than eight or
ten feet long. A lesser branch, perpendicular to the main growth,
sprouted from near the end. The whole didn’t weigh more than thirty
pounds — forty, at most — yet shifting it with one hand, her weight on
one leg, was a circus act that might have been amusing to an audience
of sadists.

Whimpering
and grinding her teeth because she couldn’t seem to stop herself, she
dragged the longest, sturdiest part of the branch across the Greenstone
Trail where it came into the open on the basalt ridge. Wind, carving up
over the escarpment, had taken much of the snow from the rock. Where
Anna laid her branch, it was scarcely six inches deep and powdery.
Using the feathery end of a pine bough, she whisked the powder over the
wood.

It
was a lousy job. She moved with tedious slowness; her tools were crude
and wielded with one weakening arm. A Boy Scout, a rank green Cub
Scout, could see the branch and the attempts to cover it, if they were
paying attention. Anna kept on. It was better than sitting and freezing
to death, and if her Rube Goldberg, jury-rigged, half-baked plan
failed, as it probably would, at least the sweat she worked up would
hasten her freezing to death adventure when the time came.

The
blueprint of her plan was simple and finished in five minutes: the
branch lay across the head of the trail, its tip buried in the snow,
the end where the smaller branch grew out at a right angle from the
main branch, resting on a flat stone a foot and a half high. The bough
she’d used for a broom leaned against the wood where it angled up out
of the snow.

“It’s
good to have a plan,” she said and wondered if she was getting
hypothermic. One of the first symptoms was mental confusion. She
remembered that from her white-water rescue training in the Russian
River in California. It had been winter; the water rushing down from
the Sierra was cold. The instructor had also said a person with
hypothermia could not raise their arms over their head.

Anna raised her good arm over her head.

“Hope
you weren’t full of shit,” she said to the bygone instructor.
Straddling the main part of the branch that crossed the path, she sat
on the rock. She rotated the L-shaped offshoot upward till it was
vertical and running parallel to her spine like a skinny chairback.

Having
gotten as comfortable as she could with broken bones and a four-inch
branch under her behind, Anna dug the cell phone from her pocket,
pulled off her glove with her teeth, found Bob Menechinn’s number in
CONTACTS and pushed SEND. It rang four times, then went to voice mail.

Anna didn’t leave a message.

She
stopped, just stopped. She didn’t move or replace her glove or close
the phone or pray or curse or plan. She barely even hurt. At best, the
plan had been frail, absurd; she’d known that when she blew the last of
her reserves on it. Like Adam’s hate, it was something to do when the
alternative was unthinkable.

There wasn’t another plan.

Try and stay alive till Ridley decided to answer his radio.

That
could qualify as a plan, but to stay alive till the cavalry came one
had to keep one’s body temperature above eighty-six degrees so the
organs didn’t start shutting down. To do that, one had to move, and
Anna couldn’t, not enough. Isometrics might give her a little time;
they generated a modicum of heat. But the trauma to muscles, grating
over splintered bone as she tensed and relaxed, would undo any benefit
the exercise might have.

Coward.

Anna
tried to goad herself into action, but there was no action to take. The
peace she’d glimpsed at the bottom of the lake would have been nice,
but it had apparently been induced by oxygen deprivation. All she felt
now was frigid depression tinged with a sour note of self-pity and a
terrible guilt at the misery her death would cause her husband and her
sister. Dying because a pervert banged one on the ankle with a wrench
and absconded with the snowmobile wasn’t the sort of death that
comforted the living. Defusing a nuclear bomb about to explode in a
nursery school full of crippled kids — that would be a good death.
Saving a busload of nuns from a fiendish death at the hands of ninja
assassins would be a decent death. Stepping on a land mine while
carrying the last man in the battalion out of enemy territory would be
a nifty death.

This one was going to suck for everyone concerned.

It was time to call Paul.

Anna stared at the tiny miracle of the phone.

A wolf howled.

Maybe I’ll get eaten,

she thought and was somewhat cheered by the prospect of not dying alone.

The
wolf howled again, and she realized the sound was coming from the phone
in her hand. Bob’s ring tone was the call of a loon and Katherine’s was
the howling of a wolf. What else? Anna squinted through the rime that
had built up on her eyelashes at the screen.

Bob.

He must have heard his cell, stopped the snowmobile, and seen Katherine’s number.

The plan was back in place; frail, absurd, but up and running.

“Hallelujah!”
Anna whispered and pushed the button lighting up with green. “Bob.” She
blew the name out on a soft, long breath, the cliché of the call from
the great beyond. Paranoia, guilt and ketamine were on her side. She
heard a sharp intake of breath from the other end.

“Katherine?” came a choked voice.

Anna’s lips made it all the way to a smile this time. “Cynthia,” she breathed in the same long, hollow tone. “Cynthia.”

“Bullshit,”
Bob said, but his voice was shaky and uncertain. Anna said nothing,
just breathed gently into the mouthpiece. A whining sound interrupted,
and she realized he was turning the ignition key to start the
snowmobile again. She wasn’t going to get the chance to lure him to the
cliff top with apparitions.

“Dickhead,”
she said sharply, “I’m not dead. I’ve got Katherine’s phone, pictures,
notes on the blackmail and your name’s all over it. I’m calling
everybody I can think of to tell them the good news. Give my regards to
the boys at San Quentin when you get there.”

She hung up. The phone howled again.

Bob.

She
ignored it. Having replaced her glove, she scooped snow over her boots
and lap as best she could with one hand and a shoulder that attacked
its host every time she moved.

Zach,
her first husband, had been an actor. One of the things he loved most
in the theater was waiting in the wings to go on. Quiet, in the living
dark of backstage, he said he knew he was where he was supposed to be,
in a space only he could occupy; he knew who he was and who he could
be. He could be as brilliant as Laurence Olivier, as graceful as
Nureyev. The audience might come to its feet in wild applause when he
finished his monologue. In the wings, all things were possible.

The
shriek of the Bearcat came into the edge of her hearing. Bob hadn’t
gotten far. As high as he was, he probably could barely keep the
machine on the trail. Anna pulled her white hood down over her eyes.
She wedged her good hand underneath the branch between her knees, bent
forward and, showing the trail the top of her head, she waited.

33

The
growl of the snowmobile grew reassuringly louder. Anna focused on the
noise to keep her mind from drifting. There would be just the one
chance and it was slim. If she failed, she would be joining Adam at the
bottom of the cliff. Closing her mind to the distractions of her body,
she used the racket to marshal the energies remaining to her. The roar
filled her head, and she directed it down her spine and into her good
leg, down her uninjured arm and into the working hand until she
thrummed with vibrating energy.

The
engine pitch changed. Bob was making the last hairpin turns, climbing
the switchback to the ridge. Anna repositioned her fingers beneath the
branch and pushed her butt against the offshoot running up her back.

There
was a final burst of horsepower and the snowmobile came into view. Bob
hunkered over the handlebars, thick shoulders rounded down, face raw
with cold and wind. He was still bareheaded.

His ears will be frozen off,

Anna
thought with grim satisfaction. Win or lose, Bob would have something
to remember her by every time he looked in the mirror.

He reached the short, steep climb before the trail opened onto the basalt shelf.

The
snowmobile ate up the last ten feet with startling speed. Every cell in
her body screaming in protest, Anna threw herself back against the
upright branch, simultaneously pulling on the one between her knees.
Her back slammed against the limb. She felt it give, her weight forcing
it back. As she went over, she saw a line of gray bark rearing up from
its lair in the snow, the butt caked in white, a shaky pole levered up
over the trail.