The Dead Season (21 page)

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They came out of the sea of snow like a foggy apparition, and I held my breath until I counted six figures, plus Cisco, staggering toward me. Cisco pulled free of Lourdes and barreled into me, happily licking the ice from my face before he shook off his own snow-sodden coat. Heather was dragging the weight of my backpack, plus her own. At least she had sense enough to realize that we’d need the survival supplies in my pack, as well as in Jess’s, and they’d all taken turns carrying both. As difficult as it must have been, they had made it down the slippery footpath with only a few scrapes and bumps, and all supplies intact.

I let Cisco go with one last hug and addressed Rachel, “Paul is safe,” I told her, “but I think he’s going into shock. We’ve got to get him out of this weather. We’re not going to be able to make it back to the top of the gorge tonight. I’ll help you set up his tent.”

She shouted back over the wind, “You do it!” She shrugged out of her backpack and began to unpack her own tent.

I stared at her. Regardless of her feelings about her husband, regardless of her callous disregard for the injured man, she was still technically the leader of this expedition. She should have given the kids their orders for making camp, their safety plan, the reassurance that she did, indeed, know how to get them through the night. Instead, she simply started beating down the snow for her tent site, ignoring us.

Frantically, I beckoned the others to come in close. They huddled near me with frosty, frightened faces and shoulders tightened bravely against the cold, straining to hear what I had to say. “Okay,” I said, “work in two-man teams. Set up all the tents in a circle, no more than two feet apart. Double stake all the tents. Brush the snow off your clothes before you go inside. Get in your sleeping bags and stay there. Take a bottle of water with you to keep it from freezing. Don’t leave your tents for anything, do you hear me? Not for anything!”

I don’t know how long it took. The gorge provided some shelter from the wind, but sudden sweeping gusts threatened to snatch the tent canvas out of our hands, sent snow driving into our eyes, and upended unsecured corners before we could drive the stakes into the frozen ground. I erected Paul’s tent by myself, got him wrapped in his sleeping bag, and made him as comfortable as possible with water and more codeine tablets. I left my camp stove running to bring up the temperature inside, though I knew there wasn’t enough fuel for the whole night. “I’m sorry,” I told him, feeling helpless to do more. “We’ll try to get help for you as soon as we can, but there’s a storm and we have to camp for the night. Try to rest. I’m leaving some protein bars and water here.”

I placed the food and water within easy reach and as I was turning to leave, he suddenly plucked at my sleeve. “Listen to me,” he said hoarsely, through dry, cracked lips. “It was Rachel who went after the Maddox boy. She heard him threaten me with the video… New Day was everything to her. It was Rachel.”

For a moment I just stared at him. Too much was spinning in my brain for me to even process the information, much less make a reply. A gust of wind tore across the fabric of the tent, rocking it a little. I said, “I’ll check on you later.”

When I crawled out of Paul’s tent, someone had put my tent up and secured Cisco inside. He was anxious to be out with the others, but I put him in a down-stay and used the blunt end of Paul’s hatchet make sure the stakes were driven as deeply into the ground as possible on both the tents. I helped Heather get her tent up and passed the hatchet to her while I went to help the girls. When Tiffanie’s tent was up, Heather used the hatchet to pound the stakes, and then gave it to one of the boys. Everyone was helping everyone else and no one was asking questions. I lost track of the hatchet.

When I got everyone inside their tents with final instructions not to unzip their tent flaps for anything during the night, I made my way to Paul’s tent and checked on him one last time. He was restless and in a lot of pain, but he was breathing normally and had almost stopped shivering.

I brushed off my clothes and my boots as best I could and zipped myself inside my tent with Cisco. Every muscle in my body was heavy and numb, and my chest hurt with the effort to breathe. I rubbed Cisco down with a chamois, taking care to pluck the ice balls from between his toe pads, and gave him food and water. I put on two pairs of dry wool socks and drank some water, then called Cisco to me and zippered us both inside the sleeping bag.

I thought I’d spend hours listening to the roar of wind and the pelting snow, but the next thing I knew I opened my eyes to a strangely quiet blue light. I had vague memories of disjointed dreams that were punctuated by the gunshot-like
crack
of falling trees and the scream of the wind: running the Iditarod with a team of golden retrievers, Cisco and I escaping from a gang of armed teenagers on cross-country skis, that sort of thing. For the most part I was too exhausted to even dream, and certainly too exhausted to wake in the night, even with the cold and the sounds of the storm. Even then, as I opened my eyes, my limbs were so heavy I could hardly make them move, and I was only vaguely interested in where I was. Cisco snored softly at my shoulder, his body heat like an electric blanket, and that was all that mattered.

Finally, I forced myself to snake one hand out of the warm cocoon of the sleeping bag and into the cold air of the tent—which was not, in fact, nearly as cold as I had expected it to be. Cisco opened his eyes and gazed at me, but did not volunteer to get up. I pressed firmly against the side of the tent, and then, sitting up, I pushed against the top, where ice crystals had formed from the condensation of our breath during the night. The canvas was as rigid as rock. Snow had buried the tent and created a virtual igloo. From the silence that surround us, I thought the storm was over. But we were sealed inside.

The first temptation was to stay there. The snow was insulating and we had everything we needed inside. The thought of leaving the warm sleeping bag was excruciating. But when I thought about how the others might have endured the night, particularly Paul, dread twisted like an icicle in my belly, and I knew I had to get out and survey the damage.

Cisco yawned loudly as I unzipped the sleeping bag, stretched, and shook out his coat, ready to face the day. I splashed some water into his bowl from the bottle I had kept warm in the sleeping bag, and he lapped it up happily while I pulled on my boots and gloves. I unzipped the flap of the tent and opened it on a block of solid snow.

I took my camp shovel from my backpack and started digging. The snow was soft and easy to move, and it didn’t take long for Cisco to catch on and start digging too. We broke through to a pale daylight after only a few minutes. The snow was still falling in slow, fat flakes, but the wind had stopped and the sky had lost its angry look. All around was a still white landscape of blue shadowed snow, as pretty as a Christmas card—and just as featureless. No landmarks, no trail, no footprints. No tents.

Cisco bounded out and immediately foundered to his chest in the snow. The expression on his face would have been comical under other circumstances. He paddled forward a few steps, then began to dive like a porpoise through the sea of snow. I waded out up to my knees, trying to get my bearings, and I noticed Cisco was digging in the snow a few feet to the right of me. I got to him as quickly as possible, feeling my boot knock against a ground stake when I reached him. I had found Paul’s tent.

I scooped away armfuls of snow and had the flap clear in a matter of moments. Apparently the meager heat of the camp stove had mitigated the accumulation of snow on his tent, which was both a good and a bad thing. I reached down to unzip the frozen zipper and had to push Cisco away in order to reach it. That was when I realized what had attracted Cisco’s attention to the tent I the first place. There was a darkish stain at the bottom of the tent canvas, and when I brushed away more snow, I saw red.

“Paul?”

I unzipped the tent to let in light, and I saw the red stain was in fact a frozen puddle of blood. Paul Evans lay stiff and unmoving in the middle of it, his eyes open, a gaping black fissure splitting his skull from ear to crown. He was dead.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

D
etective Ritchie passed me a piece of paper. “Can you draw a map of the camp site for me, showing the location of each person’s tent? Put the initials of the occupant on each tent.”

I did, and returned the paper to him.

“You said the tents were only a couple of feet apart.”

“That’s right.”

“And you were alone when you discovered the body.”

“Yes.”

“Where was the hatchet?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember who had it last, and we never saw it again.”

Agent Brown said, “So let me see if I’ve got the sequence of events right. You were the first one down the rope, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“And Paul Evans was still alive at that point.”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“When you heard the dog barking, did you run to meet the others?”

“No. I couldn’t see them. I took out my whistle and so did Jess. We blew our whistles to guide them.” I couldn’t prevent a note of pride in my voice as I added, “Cisco led them right to us.”

“And you put up his tent and unpacked his pack without any assistance.”

“I didn’t actually unpack anything. I made sure he had food and water, and put down a ground cover and wrapped him in his sleeping bag. That’s all.”

“And the hatchet.”

“What?”

“You took the hatchet.”

“I told you. We needed it to pound down the stakes.”

“But earlier you stated you hadn’t handled the hatchet.”

I foundered. “I meant—what I meant was… not until later. Not until we all did, to secure the tent stakes.”

“Would you say that the wound that killed Paul Evans, the one that, as you said, split open his skull, was probably made by that hatchet?”

Sonny said, “My client won’t be answering that.”

Mr. Willis added, “If we can’t keep the questions to Miss Stockton’s actual experience, I’m afraid we’ll have to end this.”

Agent Brown was unaffected. “You stated that when you got up the snow was pristine. No footprints, no sign the snow had been disturbed in any way?”

“No.” I swallowed hard. “Whoever… whatever happened must have been fairly soon after we all went to our tents. The bloodstains were under ten or twelve inches of snow.”

He nodded. “So you’re saying the murder occurred shortly after you put Paul Evans in his tent and took the hatchet.”

I stared at him, even as Sonny replied, “That’s not what she’s saying at all.”

I said, “Are you implying something?”

“Your tent was here.” He turned the map I had drawn around to face me and tapped the position of the little triangle marked
R.S.
“To the right of Evans’s, two feet away.”

“That’s right.”

“But you didn’t hear or see anyone moving to or from his tent.”

“I was asleep. There was a blizzard outside. I was inside my tent. No, I didn’t see or hear anyone.”

“And your dog? Wouldn’t he have barked if someone came that close to your tent?”

My tone was cold. “Only if he heard them. He doesn’t have supernatural powers. There was a blizzard.”

Detective Ritchie said, “When you came out that morning you said all the tents were covered with snow. You couldn’t see them, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Suggesting you were the first one to leave his or her tent after the blizzard struck.”

I said, “Heather came out a few minutes after I did.”

He made a note of that. “Would you be surprised if the blood on your jacket tested out to match that of Paul Evans?”

Sonny said impatiently, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

I spoke over her, sharply, “No, I wouldn’t be surprised, since he bled all over me while I was helping get him down that cliff. Everyone one on that mountain had blood on their clothes when we were rescued. Are you going to test them all?”

He replied matter of factly, “That’s precisely what we’re going to do.”

Agent Brown looked up from his note-taking, his expression somber and, for the first time, mildly sympathetic. I was immediately suspicious. “Miss Stockton, I can’t imagine what you went through out there. Your actions were heroic. You hadn’t signed up for this, but you took upon yourself the lives of five children and three adults, one of who was severely injured and a dangerous drain on your resources. Moreover, he was all but a proven child molester and possibly a murderer, whose own wife had turned her back on him. And, let’s be honest, for all your efforts to keep him alive, everyone in your party would have been better off if he had died, am I right?”

I stared at him. My voice was hoarse when I said, “What did you say?”

He replied mildly, “No one is here to judge you, Miss Stockton. Lives were depending on you. Paul Evans had virtually no chance of survival, and even if he lived, it would only be to face the justice system which, I’ll be the first to admit, hasn’t exactly proven itself just in the past few years.”