She breathed in deeper and more deeply, feeling for pain in her lungs or ribs. She shifted her legs carefully. Her knees felt like someone had been hammering on them, but all her joints moved and nothing seemed to be grinding or poking out. She reached for the door handle above her. Something twinged nastily in her side. Her gloved hand came short. She swallowed. She had to get out of the car. Hitching her hip up, she fumbled at her seatbelt latch. As she slowly shifted her weight, leading headfirst toward the passenger-side door, the car shivered. Metal screeched. Clare flung herself against the seats, clinging to the leather while the vehicle slid downward another half-foot, stopping with a kidney-bruising crunch. She was canted at an easier angle now, some of the car’s weight resting on its upslope side. She pulled at the passenger door latch. It stuck. She braced her boots on the remains of the driver’s door and yanked at the latch again, hunching over and throwing her shoulder against the door at the same time. It popped open with the scrape of metal against raw metal. Clare scrambled out.
She balanced unsteadily on a steep field of boulders and jagged rock, halfway down a crevasse that cut through the mountain as far as she could see upslope and down. Five or six yards beneath her it bottomed out in a wide stream, whose black waters ran fast enough to have kept it from icing over despite the past three days of below- freezing temperatures. Above her, the camp road slanted down to two blocky cement pilings and then vanished into thin air. Her car had gouged a scar along the snow, the pilings, the rubble, and scree. Reluctantly, she looked at the MG. She made a small noise in the back of her throat, resolutely turned away, and picked her way uphill slowly, testing each foothold as she climbed. When she reached the cement pilings, she propped her backside against one and rubbed her knees vigorously. Across the gorge, there might have been twin pilings underneath the unmarked snow. Hard to tell. There was certainly more road there. She could see the cleared width of it between the trees. A bridge had been here. Once.
Clare stamped her feet, knocking away some of the snow clinging to her boots. If there was a cabin in the woods over there, no one had gotten to it by this road. Which meant either the directions got garbled between Kristen and Lois, or she had taken a wrong turn somewhere, or . . . she looked again at where the road simply vanished. Or someone had sent her here. Deliberately. The thought made her stomach clench and her skin prickle coldly.
She pushed herself away from the piling and hiked the rest of the way up to the crest of the road. Whichever it was, mistake or malice, she was in a bad way. She was close to ten miles away from the last outpost of civilization she’d seen, and although her parka and sweater were keeping her upper body warm, she could already feel goose bumps beneath her cotton khakis. Her boots were a bigger problem. Even with heavy woolen socks, her toes ached with cold. How would she feel after one mile in the snow? After five? At what point would she stop hurting and start permanently damaging her flesh?
She pulled the parka hood up and tied it under her chin. The fake fur edging tickled her cheeks. Normally, she could walk a mile easy in fifteen minutes. She started down the road, stepping inside the rapidly filling tire tracks. Fresh snow, packed snow, uneven terrain—say it would take half again as long to go a mile. Twenty-two minutes or so.
Her heel came down on something slippery and loose. She skidded, flailed, and landed hard on her backside, grunting. She picked herself up, beating snow off her pants. Make that twenty-two minutes plus time to fall down and get back up again.
At the side of the road, a dead branch was wedged between the fork of a tree. Clare yanked it loose. It was straight and spar-like, thin enough for her to grasp in one hand and long enough to test the depth of snow a few feet ahead of her. She knocked off the snow crusting its bark and continued on, bracing her steps with the stick.
All right. Ten miles to Alan’s Gas and Grocery would take her four to five hours. What about another cabin? She could hike down the mountain until she reached the closest camp road. She had passed one two or three miles before reaching her turnoff. If it was another mile to a cabin it would still be less than half the distance to the store. She could have shelter. Blankets. Probably a fireplace. Maybe even, God willing, a working telephone.
Snow collected on her cheeks and chin. She scrubbed her face with her glove, trying to dry her skin as much as possible. Not heading straight for the Gas and Grocery would be risky, of course. If she couldn’t find a place within a mile of the main road, she would have to retrace her steps. She pulled the parka sleeve away from her wrist and lit up her watch. Almost five o’clock. By the time she reached the next camp road, it would be full dark. Could she trust herself to stay on a narrow, unplowed road at night with a heavy snow falling? Already the underwater blueness was thickening, making distance impossible to judge, swallowing the details of the forest only a few yards away.
The thought she had been pushing aside crystalized, unavoidable.
“God,” she said, her voice very small in the immense quiet of the woods, “I don’t want to die. Please help me.”
She poked her walking stick into a particularly deep depression one of her tires had spun into the snow. There didn’t seem to be much more she could add to that prayer, unless it was, “and let me find the so-and-so who sent me directions to this place so I can throttle him or her.” No, that wouldn’t do.
She braced and stepped, braced and stepped. The 139th Psalm. It had been a dim twilight, like this one, the sky dark with rain instead of lit by snow. She had been sitting by Grace’s bedside, her sister’s hand resting weightlessly in hers because it hurt Grace to be touched firmly. Their father had read the 139th Psalm in his deep, soft voice. “If I say, surely, the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.” It had been the last time they had all been together. In the silence and the dark, so far from where Grace had lived and died, she felt an urgent closeness to her sister, a moment of absolute certainty that death was just a pocket-trick, that the dead were all around her, supporting her, giving her strength, pricking her with warnings to watch the road, watch the road—
A dark shape emerged from the bend in the road before her.
Clare blinked. Her heart thumped once, hard. She tightened her grip on her walking stick, wondering, even as she halted in her tracks, muscles tensing, why she wasn’t running forward.
The bulky figure moved ahead another step. It was a person in a jumpsuit, one of those allover padded things they wore snowmobiling around here. Clare eased a fraction and opened her mouth to speak when a flashlight beam suddenly speared her.
“Take off your coat,” a voice hissed.
Clare squinted, dazzled by the sudden light, trying to make sense out of this bizarre sequence of events.
