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.”
She hung up. The phone howled again. Bob. She ignored it. Having replaced her glove, she scooped snow over her boots and lap as best she could with one hand and a shoulder that attacked its host every time she moved.
Zach, her first husband, had been an actor. One of the things he loved most in the theater was waiting in the wings to go on. Quiet, in the living dark of backstage, he said he knew he was where he was supposed to be, in a space only he could occupy; he knew who he was and who he could be. He could be as brilliant as Laurence Olivier, as graceful as Nureyev. The audience might come to its feet in wild applause when he finished his monologue. In the wings, all things were possible.
The shriek of the Bearcat came into the edge of her hearing. Bob hadn’t gotten far. As high as he was, he probably could barely keep the machine on the trail. Anna pulled her white hood down over her eyes. She wedged her good hand underneath the branch between her knees, bent forward and, showing the trail the top of her head, she waited.
33
The growl of the snowmobile grew reassuringly louder. Anna focused on the noise to keep her mind from drifting. There would be just the one chance and it was slim. If she failed, she would be joining Adam at the bottom of the cliff. Closing her mind to the distractions of her body, she used the racket to marshal the energies remaining to her. The roar filled her head, and she directed it down her spine and into her good leg, down her uninjured arm and into the working hand until she thrummed with vibrating energy.
The engine pitch changed. Bob was making the last hairpin turns, climbing the switchback to the ridge. Anna repositioned her fingers beneath the branch and pushed her butt against the offshoot running up her back.
There was a final burst of horsepower and the snowmobile came into view. Bob hunkered over the handlebars, thick shoulders rounded down, face raw with cold and wind. He was still bareheaded.
His ears will be frozen off, Anna thought with grim satisfaction. Win or lose, Bob would have something to remember her by every time he looked in the mirror.
He reached the short, steep climb before the trail opened onto the basalt shelf.
The snowmobile ate up the last ten feet with startling speed. Every cell in her body screaming in protest, Anna threw herself back against the upright branch, simultaneously pulling on the one between her knees. Her back slammed against the limb. She felt it give, her weight forcing it back. As she went over, she saw a line of gray bark rearing up from its lair in the snow, the butt caked in white, a shaky pole levered up over the trail.
Her back struck the stone. The tree branch across the trail wrenched violently to the left. The limb jerked from her hand, tearing her glove half off. Her body hurled to the ground beside the rock. Torrents of hurt poured through her, and she wished she had state secrets that she might shout them from enemy rooftops, anything to stop the vicious knives inside her skin. Vision dimmed at the edges. She fought to stay conscious. To pass out now would be to waste all the trudging and weeping this sojourn into physics had cost.