In the Bleak Midwinter (33 page)

Clare stamped her feet, knocking away some of the snow clinging to her boots. If there was a cabin in the woods over there, no one had gotten to it by this road. Which meant either the directions got garbled between Kristen and Lois, or she had taken a wrong turn somewhere, or… she looked again at where the road simply vanished. Or someone had sent her here. Deliberately. The thought made her stomach clench and her skin prickle coldly.

She pushed herself away from the piling and hiked the rest of the way up to the crest of the road. Whichever it was, mistake or malice, she was in a bad way. She was close to ten miles away from the last outpost of civilization she’d seen, and although her parka and sweater were keeping her upper body warm, she could already feel goose bumps beneath her cotton khakis. Her boots were a bigger problem. Even with heavy woolen socks, her toes ached with cold. How would she feel after one mile in the snow? After five? At what point would she stop hurting and start permanently damaging her flesh?

She pulled the parka hood up and tied it under her chin. The fake fur edging tickled her cheeks. Normally, she could walk a mile easy in fifteen minutes. She started down the road, stepping inside the rapidly filling tire tracks. Fresh snow, packed snow, uneven terrain—say it would take half again as long to go a mile. Twenty-two minutes or so.

Her heel came down on something slippery and loose. She skidded, flailed, and landed hard on her backside, grunting. She picked herself up, beating snow off her pants. Make that twenty-two minutes plus time to fall down and get back up again.

At the side of the road, a dead branch was wedged between the fork of a tree. Clare yanked it loose. It was straight and spar-like, thin enough for her to grasp in one hand and long enough to test the depth of snow a few feet ahead of her. She knocked off the snow crusting its bark and continued on, bracing her steps with the stick.

All right. Ten miles to Alan’s Gas and Grocery would take her four to five hours. What about another cabin? She could hike down the mountain until she reached the closest camp road. She had passed one two or three miles before reaching her turnoff. If it was another mile to a cabin it would still be less than half the distance to the store. She could have shelter. Blankets. Probably a fireplace. Maybe even, God willing, a working telephone.

Snow collected on her cheeks and chin. She scrubbed her face with her glove, trying to dry her skin as much as possible. Not heading straight for the Gas and Grocery would be risky, of course. If she couldn’t find a place within a mile of the main road, she would have to retrace her steps. She pulled the parka sleeve away from her wrist and lit up her watch. Almost five o’clock. By the time she reached the next camp road, it would be full dark. Could she trust herself to stay on a narrow, unplowed road at night with a heavy snow falling? Already the underwater blueness was thickening, making distance impossible to judge, swallowing the details of the forest only a few yards away.

The thought she had been pushing aside crystalized, unavoidable.
I could die out here
. Her stomach lurched as if she’d dropped a thousand feet of altitude in a few seconds. She could become just one more missing person, her whereabouts a mystery to her family and friends, until some autumn day who-knew-how-many-years in the future, when hunters stumbled over her bones wrapped in a Millers Kill police parka.

“God,” she said, her voice very small in the immense quiet of the woods, “I don’t want to die. Please help me.”

She poked her walking stick into a particularly deep depression one of her tires had spun into the snow. There didn’t seem to be much more she could add to that prayer, unless it was, “and let me find the so-and-so who sent me directions to this place so I can throttle him or her.” No, that wouldn’t do.

She braced and stepped, braced and stepped. The 139th Psalm. It had been a dim twilight, like this one, the sky dark with rain instead of lit by snow. She had been sitting by Grace’s bedside, her sister’s hand resting weightlessly in hers because it hurt Grace to be touched firmly. Their father had read the 139th Psalm in his deep, soft voice. “If I say, surely, the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.” It had been the last time they had all been together. In the silence and the dark, so far from where Grace had lived and died, she felt an urgent closeness to her sister, a moment of absolute certainty that death was just a pocket-trick, that the dead were all around her, supporting her, giving her strength, pricking her with warnings to watch the road, watch the road—

A dark shape emerged from the bend in the road before her.

Clare blinked. Her heart thumped once, hard. She tightened her grip on her walking stick, wondering, even as she halted in her tracks, muscles tensing, why she wasn’t running forward.

The bulky figure moved ahead another step. It was a person in a jumpsuit, one of those allover padded things they wore snowmobiling around here. Clare eased a fraction and opened her mouth to speak when a flashlight beam suddenly speared her.

“Take off your coat,” a voice hissed.

Clare squinted, dazzled by the sudden light, trying to make sense out of this bizarre sequence of events.

“What?”

“Off!” The voice was guttural, deep, like a man’s, but as unidentifiable as the figure behind it. The flashlight beam dipped low, as if the person had shifted it in his grasp, and Clare heard the distinctive sound of a round being chambered in an automatic pistol.

Her throat closed. Heat surged through her body. She hurled her walking stick as hard as she could toward the flashlight and dove headfirst for the brush at the side of the road.

The gun went off, shattering the stillness like an axe through thin ice, dwarfing a strangled scream of “Goddamnit!” A trio of deer exploded from a thicket of trees, careening into the camp road, the beating of their hooves echoed by wings everywhere overhead, winter birds fleeing in terror.

Sprawled beneath a fir tree, Clare saw the flashlight beam arch crazily into the sky and took off, scrambling hand and foot downslope, away from the sounds of thrashing and swearing. She made it to her feet and ran a yard, two yards, three, before tripping over something buried in the snow and tumbling. She kept her momentum going, rolling forward, regaining her footing, dodging ancient oaks and dense, matted stands of fir, steadying herself on deadwood and saplings. Branches whipped her face. She changed direction, ran until she fell, pawed the snow from her face and shifted direction again. A long-thorned bush scratched and caught at her parka. She plunged through snow up to her thighs, hauled up a slide of scree and branches, her heart pounding and her breath sawing in her ears as loud as jet exhaust.

At a slight rise, she climbed a toppled pine tree and stood, gasping, to get her bearings. She couldn’t see any light from where she had come. Where she thought she had come from. She shook her head, disoriented. If, as she thought, her attacker had dropped his flashlight, as soon as he found it he’d be on her trail. Her all-too-obvious trail. She gulped air, turning away from where she’d been, staking out the lay of the land ahead. Somewhere to her left, hopefully not too far, was the mountain road. If she lost that, she was dead, whether the shadowy man in the snowmobile suit caught up with her or not.

She struck out for where she thought the road must be at a diagonal, picking her route more slowly and carefully, jumping from treefall to treefall and squeezing under the thick shelter of hemlocks and firs whenever possible. She couldn’t leave a clean trail, but she could put breaks in it, make it hard to follow, slow him down.

If she went straight for the road, it would only make it easier for him to catch her. Even if she could manage to run in the slippery snow, he must have a vehicle somewhere, not too far from where he ran into her, near the junction of the camp road and the mountain road.

He had a gun. He had a flashlight, was dressed for the environment, was bigger and probably heavier than she was. He wanted her dead.

She had… a branch of feathery needles whacked Clare in the face. She spat out the taste of pine tar. She had a head start. She would be able to see his flashlight a long way before he saw her. Her night vision would be sharper, not relying on artificial light. He was carrying something small-caliber, without much stopping power, so he’d have to get right in close to her in order to drop her. And one other advantage: he had underestimated her, and chances were he’d keep on underestimating her. Her survival school instructor at Edgeland AFB, a shiny-headed old warrant officer nicknamed “Hardball” for obvious reasons, told them, “Biggest advantage any woman’s got in an escape and evasion situation is the fact that ninety-nine percent of the men she runs into won’t look past the fact she’s a girl! So don’t use your tits for brains!” The first time she had given up in an exercise, he made her do push-ups in the mucky Florida swamp water until she threw up. She had never surrendered again.

She could use some Florida heat right now. Her feet felt like they were being squeezed in an icy vise. She paused near an old hemlock, its trunk studded with dozens of branches starting only a few feet from the ground. She looked up, the snow pelting her eyelashes, blinking furiously. Time for her to locate an ambush site. The only way out of this forest now would be over the body of the man hunting her.

She went up the tree hand over foot, showering down snow and the odd abandoned nest. Small branches broke against her arms, smearing her coat with gummy pine tar. She climbed as high as she could, until the tree trunk shivered beneath her weight, and bent back a heavily needled branch to take in the view.

Through the murky underlight, too close for comfort, she could see the bobbing and twitching of a flashlight. Her St. Elmo’s Fire, heralding death and disaster. She shifted another branch, straining to see through the snow and the darkness. She needed to find high ground. Someplace she could lure him up to, bringing him to her, letting him tire himself out.

To her right, at a distance impossible to judge in the gloom, a series of steep little hillocks rose from the general downward slope of the mountain. It would mean heading away from the road, which was a disadvantage, but there were thickets of evergreens mixed in with the birch and maples, perfect for what she had in mind. She clung to the hemlock trunk and swivelled around. If she were quick enough, she could backtrack to the small ridge she had stumbled over and make her trail from there, something big and obvious to lead him to the ambush. And her real route… she squinted, willing in that moment to trade a year’s pay for a single set of binoculars. The last hillock was cut by a darker gash. She followed it as far as she could with her eyes. It looked as if it might be part of the crevasse that had taken her car. Running water would explain the little hills, harder stone rising from the softer earth of the mountain, eroded away each spring.

She bit her lip. The crevasse it would be. She descended from the hemlock gracelessly, crashing and dropping as fast as possible. If her assailant caught her out in the open, all the clever plans in the world wouldn’t amount to a snowball in hell. She retraced her trail to the spot beneath the lip of a ridge where she had stumbled and fallen. From the well-thrashed disturbance in the snow, she set out for her ambush site, trotting in a fast, low shuffle that left a clear path plowed through the snow. She took the most direct route possible, avoiding any cover, arrowing straight for the thickest clump of fir trees at the edge of the first small hill.

It would look, she hoped, as if she had seen a potential hide and bolted. She turned and shuffled back the fifty yards or so to the ridge, more slowly, careful not to stray outside the path she had laid down. She was damp with sweat under her parka, her heart rattling the cage of her ribs from exertion and fear. Back at her starting point, she picked her way downhill, stepping on fallen branches as much as possible, swinging around tree trunks to conceal her footprints from her hunter’s view. She wanted him to see nothing but the dense clumps of evergreens, see that she would have picked it as a good hidey-hole, see there were more places to huddle unseen at the top of the hill, where a frightened woman could crouch and pray to be overlooked.

From behind her, she heard a noise. She froze, crouching, her gloved hands folded against her mouth to still her breathing. It came again, a crackling. Then a scrape. She fought the urge to close her eyes like a little kid, hiding from the monsters’ sight by refusing to see. There was a rushing, a clap of air, and from the corner of her eye she saw a snowy owl take wing. Her lungs wrung every ounce of oxygen from her body. For a second, she couldn’t move while she tried to remember how to breathe.

She headed downhill again, moving faster as she got farther away from her starting point at the ridge, risking obvious footprints in order to gain time.

She hit the crevasse unexpectedly and nearly went headfirst to the bottom when she fell short of the rocky outcrop she had picked for her next foothold. She slid belly-down a few uncomfortable yards before hooking onto an exposed root, breaking her fall. She grimaced at the wide trail she had left. Just like her car. She would simply have to hope he wouldn’t track her this way, because she was committed now. No time to make alternative plans. She clambered down the remaining length of the crevasse, wincing at the feel of snow-dampened pants clinging to her legs.

Balanced on a rock edging the black, rushing water, she hesitated for only a heartbeat. She might have been able to make it all the way to the hillocks hopping from stone to stone, never wetting her feet, if she had half an hour. But her time was measured in minutes and seconds now. She stepped in. The water was shallow, rising just over her ankles, but so cold, it brought tears to her eyes. She jogged downstream, slowly at first, picking up speed as she got her footing on the smooth cobbled stones lining the stream. It felt as if she had two great toothaches at the ends of her legs, and every joint in her body throbbed with sympathetic pain.