The Baker's Wife (32 page)

“If Wilson can get a helicopter here, they'll see the condensation from the exhaust,” Audrey said. “I hope.”

“What if we run out of gas?”

“One question at a time, Miri. Right now I'm still working on what's going to happen if we can't find your mom.”

“Are they allowed to land a helicopter down there?” she asked.

Audrey didn't answer that. Surely an emergency vehicle could be set down in a vacant parking lot. The snow clouds had cleared out here, though it was impossible to say where they had gone or what skies they might be clogging up elsewhere. The white winter rays of sun glancing off the clean earth gave Audrey a weak sense of hope and ears straining for the sound of thumping rotors.

“I haven't seen any footprints but ours,” she said to Diane's back.

“I'm sure we're going the right way,” Diane said. “That's Snaggletooth Peak over there.” She pointed east. “And there's Pinpoint Lake.”

A glittering sheet of ice that Audrey would have called a pond was directly south of them, lined by a tight row of trees.

“The cabin's behind the windbreak.”

“Good place to hide a vehicle if someone wanted to,” Audrey said.

“I don't see any route a car could have taken,” Miralee said.

“Farther east, along the old mining road,” Diane said. “Trucks can come and go the same way horses and carts used to.”

She trudged ahead, hugging herself for warmth. Audrey saw that her generic sneakers were soaked through.

It took the trio another ten minutes to drop into the valley and reach the frozen drinking hole dusted with powdered-sugar snow. Numbness had settled on Audrey's nose and ears, and her spirit as well. This was what despair felt like, she thought, the absence of heat, the belief that it would be impossible ever to feel warm again.

At the windbreak Diane paused and placed her hand on the trunk of the closest tree as if it were a weeping friend.

The cabin was a one-room shanty, really, a four-walled box with a weak sloping roof, one window, and an exhaust pipe for what Audrey assumed was a woodstove. A split-rail fence with a few fallen crossbeams poking the earth surrounded a plot barely large enough for a summer garden, if such a desolate place could be cultivated. There was a rusty water pump to the right of the door, and ruins of another shack, a shelter for a horse perhaps, a short distance behind the cabin.

It looked abandoned.

“We can't just walk in,” Miralee whispered. “If there's a kidnapper, a gunman . . .”

“There's no gunman in this story but your father,” Diane said.

Visions of Julie ran through Audrey's mind, of Julie standing solitary in the center of a stage while scenes crash-changed around her. She saw Julie outside of a full church, doors closed. Julie sobbing in her husband's home office. Julie in her cold kitchen without Jack or Miri to cook for. Julie standing in a graveyard. Julie in a hospital room after surgery, no flowers. Young Julie on a witness stand, cheeks streaked with tear tracks.

Julie alone in swirling fog.

“But she might not be alone!” Miralee insisted. She sounded afraid.

“She is alone, Miri,” Audrey said. She left the shelter of the trees and moved toward the cabin. “If you don't believe me, you can always trust your dad's gun instead.”

“How do you know? How can you really know
anything
?”

Audrey talked back over her shoulder as she strode to the shack. “I know it in my heart. That's the problem, isn't it? That she's always been alone, that we've all walked away when she needed us most, because we thought she didn't really need us?”

The wind that was pushing the snow clouds out of the valley swept down over the tired plot of land in a chilling gust.

“There's the truck,” Diane said.

Audrey turned. Diane was looking uphill past the ruined horse shed. The gray pickup was a mere boulder atop the landscape, balanced on a hillcrest.

At the sight of the vehicle, the first tangible evidence that something terrible had happened to her mother, Miralee's face was transformed. The sharp lines of her picture-perfect angles softened into something lost, the expression of a child who realizes she's lost sight of her guardians in a big and terrible world.

At the same time, Audrey and Miralee rushed to the cabin, all emotion gone but dread of what they were about to find. Miralee beat her there and gripped the tarnished knob, throwing her shoulder into the door. It flew open on oiled hinges. Audrey reached to catch the girl's arm, but her fingers only grazed Miri's jacket.

Miralee shrieked and dropped to her knees.

Julie Mansfield lay facedown in the center of a strangely comfortable space that didn't match the unwelcoming exterior. Her body was sprawled across a clean braided rug, her head pointing toward the gaping doors of a shiny woodstove gone cold hours before. A puff of gray ash awakened by the bursting door rose in the cavity and floated out onto Julie's fine hair. Her outstretched hand touched a slender cut log that had not been placed on the fire in time to keep it going.

Miralee rolled her mother over before Audrey could stop her.

“She'sdeadshe'sdeadshe'sdead.”

The inside of the cabin was as cold as the outdoors. Audrey kneeled and touched Julie's hand. It was too hot. She turned over her wrist and saw blisters on Julie's palms, not the shredded skin of a fall onto coarse asphalt or a freeze burn, but the chafing of hands unaccustomed to wielding an ax.

“I'll find wood for a fire,” Diane said from the doorway.

“Look behind the cabin,” Audrey said. Light filled the space that Diane's shadow vacated.

“My mother's dead!” Miralee's words were distorted by disbelief. “She didn't want me to go the way I did. She begged me to . . . to . . .”

“She's not dead, Miri, she's sick.”

“She's going to die because I left!”

“You're here now. Find a cloth and some water.”

Illness colored Julie's cheeks bright red. Audrey remembered the heat that had washed over her face while she stood at the gate across the Old Gauntlet Road. If the sensation had been timed with actual events, she could hope that Julie hadn't been here on the floor for too long.

Miralee stood and seemed to look around the space without seeing anything.

“Try the cupboards,” Audrey said gently. “Or under the bed. I can use the pillowcase if you don't see a towel. Ask Diane if she brought your mom's medications.”

Miralee found what Audrey needed. It seemed Julie—or whoever had brought her—came prepared to stay awhile, with blankets and bottled water and dried fruit and nuts and jerky and canned goods. The food was hardly touched.

Audrey didn't know anything about what Julie needed except that it was out of reach. The woman's heartbeat and breath were limp but audible. This fever seemed worse than the one Ed had when he was fourteen and his doctor admitted him to the hospital, or maybe it was just that Audrey's fingers were nearly frozen. It was too cold in the room for a damp cloth on the forehead to bring Julie any comfort, but Miralee needed something to do. They all needed something to do.

The stove shared the wall with the bed, its foot pointed toward the warmth. A duffel bag protruded from under the cot. On the adjoining wall opposite the door was a countertop with cupboards built over the top of it and a cutout that held a metal basin, presumably for water. Next to it was a wooden box filled with newspaper and tinder kept dry from the snow. There was something that looked like a chamber pot at the back of the open door, and a lopsided table, chair, and oil lamp on the remaining wall. A trail map was pinned up over the makeshift desk.

With few words the women worked together. Diane built a fire carefully and lit it on the first try with matches from the cupboard. Miralee helped Audrey get her mother off the floor and onto the cot while the room warmed up. They took off her wet shoes and found dry socks in the duffel. The skin of Julie's feet seemed thin and blue.

Her medications were back in Geoff's truck, and Diane prepared to hike back to get them, but Miralee found keys on the desk and everyone thought of the truck. “Dad has a CB on that truck,” Diane said. “Unless he took it out before Juliet bought it.”

Audrey told Miralee to go help Diane.

The cool cloth on Julie's brow warmed through within five minutes. Audrey rinsed it, wrung it out, and put it back, wondering if this, too, was pointless. She found a percolator and ground coffee in the cupboard, then poured water into the pot. She set the coffee to brew on top of the woodstove.

The wind outside picked up but didn't penetrate the cabin walls.

Audrey sat down on the only chair and rested her elbows on the wood of the table, praying for her husband and son, and for Julie, and for the miracle they all needed.

She was staring at the desk without seeing it.
God, if you can
promise me that there's a purpose in all this pain, and that one day
you'll show me what it is, I might be able to endure it
.

There were papers on the desktop. A sheet torn from a lined notebook,
Dear Miri
across the top. That was all Julie had found in herself to write. Audrey pushed the pages around with her fingertips, reluctant to intrude but hoping for answers. If Julie had come up here alone, why? If she had set up the scooter accident, why?

There was a statement from an investment bank and a short sheet of paper from which a check had been torn off the bottom. A payout of a 401(k) plan, less penalties, for one Juliet Steen Mansfield, plus a letter about taxes that would be owed on the distribution. It was enough to buy an old truck with cash and have plenty left to live on for a while. Audrey hadn't seen any money in the cabin, though. There was a coffee can with a twenty in it on the top shelf of the cupboard, but none in the duffel bag or other obvious place.

Under the statement was a small stack of organized medical statements: hospital, surgeon, anesthesiologist, labs, and so on.
This is not a bill
, the statements announced.
The account has been
submitted to your insurance carrier. You may be responsible for any
portion not covered
. . . and so on.

One statement, however, stood out from the rest because the bottom right corner was circled in red and labeled
Amount You
Owe
, which was an amount much larger than the cost of Harlan's old gray mare. There was a receipt for this amount stapled to the top left corner of the statement.

Hemato Labs was the name of the billing entity. The itemization was for
autologous donation, self-stored, 4 units
. Audrey rubbed her temples. That would explain all the blood on the street.

“Oh, Julie,” she murmured, “what did you do?”

Under these was a letter to Julie printed on stationery from Mazy High.
Though we are grateful for your years of devoted service,
we regret to inform you that budget restrictions will prevent us from
renewing your contract at the end of the academic calendar year .
. .

The letter was dated in September.

Audrey sighed, feeling the weight of these burdens that Julie had been carrying. Why hadn't Jack said anything about her job loss?

“Because I didn't tell him,” Julie said to her from the cot.

Audrey shot out of her seat. “Did I ask that question aloud?”

Julie's eyes were still closed. “What question?” she murmured.

The coffee in the pot was percolating now and made soft bubbling noises. Audrey rose and moved it off the cooking platform, then found a cup and filled it with the drinking water that Miri had located. She carried it to Julie's side, dragging the chair behind her.

“Can you drink some water?” Audrey asked.

Julie lifted her hand, a weak barricade between her mouth and the cup.

“Darn you, Julie. Quit pushing me away. You don't know what this has cost me.” Audrey kneeled next to the cot and slipped her hand under Julie's neck to lift it. No doubt Audrey's icy fingers were part of the reason Julie gasped and became more fully aware. She finally opened her eyes and locked onto Audrey, frowning.

“You're that pastor's wife.”

“Baker's wife now. Drink this.” She pressed the cup against Julie's lips.

“I dreamed about you,” Julie said after a swallow. “You were in my house.”

“You were throwing things at me.”

Julie's delicate, naked fingers were clutching the top blanket. “You dreamed it too.”

“Oh, I don't think I was dreaming. Your wedding ring?”

“Left it at Jack's house. He owns it, you know.”

“The house or the ring?”

“Both. Everything. The world. I'm so tired.”

Audrey pulled the gold band out of her jeans pocket and held it in front of Julie's face.

Julie winced as if it were a bright light. “What happened to your hands?” she asked.