Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“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.”