“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.”