'We're nuts,' I said. Kelly drove the boat straight for the dimple. Our long line trailed behind us toward the nearest shore, some two hundred feet distant, ready for my belaying act.
Kelly looked happier than she had since I first met her. 'Nick's down there.'
'I'm not knocking on any doors.' I already had mud in some very uncomfortable places.
Her smile was like the sunrise. 'Just see what you see.'
What I saw was what Nick Maclnnes had seen in her. What I wondered was what she had seen in him: the record suggested he had been a monomaniacal nutcase who happened to have gotten it right.
The Ranger Cherokee slid down into the dimple, and my stomach did a sharp flop -the world's shortest log- flume ride. Kelly cut the trolling motor, and the boat circled loosely in the base of the dimple, a forty-foot wide bowl. The ten-foot walls of water around us were incredibly disconcerting, a violation of every sense and sensibility. It didn't help that our trailing line strained upward, vanishing into those angled waterfalls.
We tipped the stripped aspen pole overboard. The oak block pulled it straight down until it was stopped by the bootlace loop I'd slipped over a cleat, rocking our little boat. I stared down at the rippling black water beneath which lay the mascon.
'Don't think too hard,' said Kelly. 'You won't do it.'
I checked the knot of the lifeline on my ankle. I was only doing it for her, and she was doing it for her husband-she was right, I'd better not think too hard. 'Count to thirty, then start pulling up, as fast as you can.' I slipped my hand through the loop on the gunwale cleat, pulled the pole free with the tether around my wrist, and fell in headfirst, clutching the wheel rim to my chest.
The water wasn't any colder than I expected, but it pushed up my nose in a way that seemed stronger, sharper than reasonable. Venting a little air from my lips, I released the wheel rim; I was getting enough downward pull from the weighted aspen pole.
My ears throbbed with mild pain. The breathing panic started, but I ignored it, letting the pole drag me down past the visible light.
The water got cooler as I sank. I wondered how deep I was, wondered if Kelly had tossed my line over, sending me off to meet her husband. My ankle jerked up short, and I almost lost my grip on the pole, but the bootlace loop around my wrist held.
I bobbed head down for a moment, the pole pulling me down, the rope holding me back. I worked my hands to get a firmer grip on the pole. With my eyes open, there was a vague greenish quality to the darkness. The water pressure on my body was like a giant fist slowly closing.
That was when I realized my fingers were cold, way too cold. I brought my free hand up in front of my face, but there wasn't enough light to see it. I touched my fingers to my lips -ice scum. I knew what the reports had said, but still… water froze from the top, not the bottom.
Then the pole jumped in my hands. The downward pull was gone, the pole floating slowly upward. What had happened to the weight? My chest tightened with anoxia and fear. The water felt much colder. Where the hell was Kelly? I tried to turn my body, but with the pole in the way, I started to get trapped in the rope.
My ankle jerked.
Kelly.
Thank God.
I held the pole while she tugged the rope from somewhere inside the blue sky far above. I followed my heart toward the bright air.
Kelly wrapped me in two blankets when I rolled into the boat, and I shivered in their scratchy depths. I didn't have the strength to swim to shore yet.
She examined the aspen pole. 'Looks like it snapped off.'
I shook my head. Now that I wasn't panicking, it was easier to figure out what might have happened to the pole. 'No applied pressure -I would have felt that.'
Kelly pointed the broken end toward me. The end looked more like it had been blown off. Would my hand have done the same, under the pressure of the rapidly expanding ice?
Kelly came to the same conclusion at about the same time. 'Cold,' she said, her voice strangely satisfied. 'The aspen shattered from the cold.'
'What's so great about cold?' The cold could have killed me. I was feeling groggy from the dive, chilled in the half-hearted sun of the Canadian Rockies.
Her smile flashed. 'Very slow entropic progression, that's what's so great about cold.'
Very slow entropic progression. I'd never heard her talk like that before.
The following winter, we were enjoying a comfortable afternoon in front of the lodge fireplace when we heard shots. We looked at each other in shock for a moment before we jumped up, pulled on our Gore-Tex snowpants and parkas, and headed out for the snowmobile.
Less than a mile from the lodge, we found Sergeant Perry's body in the snow, his skis sticking up at an odd angle, his blood spattering the pristine white of the landscape.
Kelly stifled a sob, then bent to close his eyes. I had to stop myself from reaching to comfort her, so I scanned the woods for signs of movement instead. Nothing.
I called Maryland. There wasn't much point in seeking cover -if the shooter was still out there, we were in their sights.
'Perhaps it was a hunting accident?' Marge said over the static-filled connection.
'A hunting accident?' Islamists, Chinese, environmentalists -I could think of a lot more likely explanations than that. 'Marge, no one should be able get past our security for there to be a hunting accident. You need to initiate an outside investigation.'
Kelly knelt in the snow next to the body, tears streaming down her face. We hadn't known the Mountie well, but he had been one of the few people we'd had any contact with in the last four-plus years.
On the other end of the line, Marge sighed. 'You're right, this needs to be looked into. I'll take care of it, Bruce.'
'Thanks.'
An NSA helicopter flew in to collect the body and take Perry back to wherever he had come from. Kelly and I watched it wing away again, and to my surprise, her arm slid around my waist.
I had the odd thought that I wished I could die right then, standing in the snow like one half of a couple with Kelly Maclnnes.
The dimple was definitely changing. During the summer following Sergeant Perry's mysterious death-which NSA had failed to clear up -it had grown visibly wider and shallower. Even with our crude measurements, the heat rise was becoming noticeably greater. Radiation levels remained stable, however the dosimeters and my Geiger counter were consistent.
I suggested calling in surveillance aircraft from the agency once more, but Kelly would have none of it. 'What good are they? That could have been one of us out in the snow-and no record of a breach in security according to your precious Marge!'
She was right, of course. I had taken to carrying a pistol, something I'd never done before -I no longer trusted my agency's ability to keep us safe. But that didn't have anything to do with whatever was happening in the lake. 'Their equipment could still give us valuable data on the dimple.'
'And how do we know whether we can even trust their data?'
I wasn't happy with how Marge had handled the security breach either, but I still thought Kelly was overreacting. 'What if I ask for the CAF Orion again?'
Kelly shook her head. 'No. Not if they're sent by your NSA.'
Damn me if I didn't let her talk me out of it.
She couldn't talk university research teams out of coming, though. Suddenly, interest in the dimple revived, and we were no longer as alone as we had been. It seemed like they were everywhere, bitching about agency controls on their equipment, about the mosquitoes, about how we wouldn't let them use the restrooms in the lodge. But we still didn't allow the journalists clamoring for a permit into the park.
Kelly eyed the researchers suspiciously, as if they were going to take her dimple away from her or something. She sat in the tree fort and watched Emerald Lake with a simple pair of binoculars, jealous of anyone else who went near it. I joined her sometimes, but the more the lake changed, the more she left me. I didn't need that reminder of how far away she was again after what had seemed so close.
