was a big game hunter. Bob had wanted his rifle. Rifles could be broken down and carried in a day pack. Bob had slipped away, letting her go, alone and exposed, onto the ice. All this flashed through her mind in an instant of acute paranoia.
She started to look back to where she’d left Menechinn. Another
11
The sound Anna had mistaken for a rifle report was ice breaking. She felt the shift beneath her boots and engaged all her muscles in the act of remaining motionless. She hadn’t punched through a thin place caused by an underwater spring or a rock near the surface; the ice in the depressed area had broken free. If she’d been quicker, she might have jumped to safety after the first
If she moved, the free-floating island would tilt and she would slide into the lake. Under the lake. The land spit stretched thirty feet behind her. Another thirty or forty lay between her and the shore in front of her. Possibly the water was no deeper than her waist. Then again, glacial lakes could drop off fifty feet a yard from the shore.
The cold would kill her before she had a chance to drown. Stories of kids revived after forty-five minutes beneath the ice were legend in the north. The shock of the stunning cold produced a phenomenon called a mammalian reflex, causing the body to shut down without dying, the way a bear shuts down to hibernate or a frog to sleep under the mud. Anna was too old to qualify. The courtesy of mammalian reflex wasn’t extended to adults.
“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.
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.”
