Winter Study (20 page)

“Bob!” she called. Tried to call; his name came out on a whisper of air so faint she wasn’t sure she’d managed to speak aloud.

“Bob!”

Audible,
but only to her ears. The part of her that believed the vibrations of
her voice against the air would be enough to tip the balance had shut
down her voice box.

For
a dizzying second, she saw the ice patch flipping like a coin, her feet
going from under her, hands scrabbling uselessly, as she slid into the
black death waiting below the ice, the patch of ice rocking back level,
shutting her away from the promise of life and light. Iron-clawed
terror gripped her insides. Courage drained out as blood from a severed
artery.

“Stop
that,” she hissed. “Die of hydrophobia — how stupid is that?” Dragging
her vision out of the bowels of the lake, she looked for ways to stay
alive.

The
edge of her iceberg wasn’t quite the length of her body away. Too far
to make a clean jump, but if she hurled herself forward she should be
able to get her arms and shoulders up on solid ice. The shoulders and
upper back were key. Her backpack, seemingly light after removing one
trap, would be a significant anchor underwater. Mentally she rehearsed
the action. Bend the knees, going straight down so the ice wouldn’t
tilt, push off like a standing broad jumper, throw her arms out like
Superman and hit the surface of the lake in a belly slide. Home free.

Unbidden,
the movie in her head played past the Hollywood ending. A gap opened
behind her. The push of her feet spun the ice. Water the color of ink
flicked out a reptilian tongue; the ice plate spun on its axis and
reared like a living thing, dropping from under her heels and smashing
into the front of her thighs. Gravity and the weight of her pack
dragged her back and down. Black water closed over her face. The ice
island smashed down, driving her under.

“Bob!” she yelled.

She’d
left him on the land behind her and was shouting her feeble pleas to
the woods in the opposite direction. Desperate, she turned so her voice
would carry. Ice lurched sickeningly under her boots and she screamed.

“Easy,
easy, easy,” she murmured to herself and the lake. “No need to prance
about. Center. Breathe. Still.” Talking herself back into balance, Anna
wished she’d studied yoga, learned to stay perfectly motionless and
balanced for hours.

“Bob,”
she wailed. As the words flew from her throat, Anna’s eyes flew with
them till she was in the sky over her own head, looking down on the
pitiful creature, bundled up and hooded, crying out in a snowstorm. All
she needed was a tin cup of matches to sell to complete the pathos.

The
Dickensian image made her laugh. The laugh destabilized her, and the
ice slid down an inch or more on the left side. Her soul was sucked
back into her body so hard, reality lit up like sixteen million
candles, and she was so alive her hair hurt with it. “Whoa!” she
breathed, arms out like a child learning to snowboard. Gently she slid
her feet wider apart, shifted her weight the slightest bit. The ice did
not come back to level. The lip had caught on the edge underneath.
Black water pushed out, turning gray as it ate up her world.

Bob
had to come, she told herself. He was following her. All she had to do
was wait without moving. The ice hadn’t shattered; it had broken in a
piece. If Bob stabilized one side, took a wide grip and held it so it
couldn’t rock up out of the water, she should be able to move from the
center to the opposite edge without getting her feet wet.

Maybe Bob didn’t have to come.

The thought floated into her mind as the snowflakes floated onto her eyelashes and shoulders, soft, silently, dead cold.

He’d
been stacking excuses like cordwood: knee injury, losing the light,
making a report. When he wasn’t armed with telescoping sights, beaters
and a high-powered rifle, the sight of an oversized animal track scared
him. Anna liked to think he was scared because he knew his karma was
about as cheery as the inside of a taxidermist’s workshop, that word he
was a serial killer had gone out through the animal kingdom along with
the order to devour him on sight, but she doubted he respected those
who died for his entertainment sufficiently to consider them a sentient
danger.

Bob might have decided to quietly follow their trail back to the snug kitchen at Malone Bay.

Or
maybe he was watching her from the fringe of boulders, waiting for the
ice to swallow her. Cautiously she pivoted her head and peered back the
way she’d come.

Fat
Christmas card flakes she’d so admired earlier in the day drifted in a
veil of lace, blurring the shore. A shape hunkered near the water — not
particularly informative, given the finger of earth was littered by
boulders of all shapes and sizes.

“Bob!”

A
shadow big enough to be Menechinn broke away from the others. Anna
couldn’t tell if he’d been standing, watching, or had that moment
emerged from between the rocks.

“Help
me!” she hollered, and he moved out onto the lake. Neck aching under
the strain, she turned back to stare at the far shore. What was it
about Menechinn that made her think him capable of any evil? Of
standing by, watching another human being die? Before she’d climbed out
of the Beaver onto Washington Harbor, she’d never heard of him. Since
then, he’d proven annoying, a little sexist, a little mean-spirited and
a little cowardly, but Anna had friends that were meaner, more macho
scaredy-cats, and she enjoyed them despite it. Occasionally they
annoyed her, but she never seriously considered them capable of acts of
craven cruelty.

She
risked another look back. Bob was halfway. “Stop there,” she said,
relieved not to have to shout, to move too much air between her and
another solid object.

He
stopped. He didn’t say anything. Snow leached what drab colors there
were woven into his scarf and mittens. The lower half of his face was
covered and his eyes were shadowed by the fur of his hood.

“I’m
on a chunk of ice broken free from the lake,” Anna said, trying to be
as clear and concise as possible. “The whole thing is loose. I can’t
move without tipping it over and spilling myself in the drink.”

Still, Bob said nothing, not: “How did it happen? Are you okay? Why did you do an idiot thing like that?” Nothing.

Anna
had to turn and face forward before her skull broke free of her spine.
The fear boiling beneath her breastbone solidified into a jagged piece
of ice colder than the lake. “I need you to kneel there, directly
behind me.” She pitched her voice to carry. “Put both hands wide on the
ice — the piece I busted loose — and don’t let it come up when I move
forward. Don’t push it down; just don’t let it come up. Got that?”

Wind
sang across the parka’s hood over her ears. Beneath her, broken edges
of ice grated against one another, the sound of teeth grinding in a
nightmare.

“Bob?” She was afraid to try to look over her shoulder. She was afraid he wouldn’t be there.

“Answer me, God dammit!” she snapped.

“You
broke through?” he asked. Relief that he responded at all, that he’d
not left her, was so great, irritation at his slowness almost vanished.

“Yeah. You need to stabilize the floating ice so I can get off.”

“Why don’t you jump?”

“Jesus!”
Anna started to turn; her world tipped, the low edge sinking farther,
water rushing up to touch the side of her boot. “Fuck! Jesus. God.”
Anna got religion all of a sudden. “That’s why,” she snapped. “Hurry
up.”

There was no reassuring sound of size-thirteen boots crunching closer.

“I weigh twice as much as you do. If you broke it, I’ll go through,” he said.

“No
you won’t. I think it busted along a fault line, or whatever ice gets.
It’s not thinner here than anywhere else. The whole thing just broke
loose when I stepped on it.”

Jumped on it,

she
reminded herself. Should she die, she wanted to be sure she knew who’d
been responsible. “I jumped on it,” she amended, hoping the confession
would give him courage. “If you lie down and slither on your belly,
your weight will be distributed over a greater surface area. It’ll hold
you. You probably don’t even need to do that, but it wouldn’t be a bad
idea. Lay down and…” She was starting to babble, as if by keeping a
rope of words spinning out she could drag him closer, talk him down
like the clichéd stewardess-cum-pilot in old disaster movies.

“That’s
not a good idea,” Bob said. “We’ll both go in if I get any closer. Let
me call Ridley.” He sounded mature, reasonable; he sounded as if she
should believe him.

“What
the fuck is Ridley going to do?” she said, suddenly more angry than
afraid. “He’s on the other side of the island in a snowstorm. My legs
can’t hold out much longer.”

Till
she said it, she’d not allowed herself to think it, to notice that her
muscles, tired from two days’ hard walking with a heavy pack on her
back, were starting to twitch as she stressed them in her ongoing
balancing act. Tiny muscles, seldom used, were being called into play
as the infinitesimal weight shifts were executed. They weren’t strong.
They wouldn’t last. When a knee buckled or a leg cramped up, she was
going to lose her delicate balance.

“I’ll
call Robin,” Bob said, and she heard him busying himself with his
radio. “Hey, Robin,” he said. Winter Study didn’t bother with radio
protocol. With so few people, it wasn’t necessary, and their natural
contrariness when it came to NPS regulations demanded they eschew it.
“Anna broke through the ice. It won’t hold me, I’m too heavy, and
somebody’s got to get closer to her than I can. Where are you?”

“Lake Richie.”

While
Anna and Bob had set a single trap, she and Katherine had completed
their side of Intermediate and moved on to Richie, the next lake in the
short chain. They were an hour’s walk away.

“Why don’t you go ahead and start toward us,” Bob said authoritatively. “They’re coming,” he added unnecessarily.

“I heard.”

Bob
wasn’t going to do as she asked. He had it set in his mind that the ice
wouldn’t hold him. Or he was afraid that it might not, which amounted
to the same thing. Anna fought down the urge to scream and shriek
imprecations and obscenities. Sharp, hot tears sprang into her eyes and
promptly froze like the Ice Queen’s splinter.

Arguing
a person out of being afraid — particularly when they wouldn’t admit to
being frightened — seldom worked, and Anna didn’t try to do it now. A
tic started in her left thigh muscle above the knee, a flick of the
skin the way a horse’s hide will flick to shake off flies.