Melting the Ice

by Loreth Anne White

  “Come, have something to eat.” He changed the subject, moving over to the breakfast tray and lifting the silver lid. The warm scents of food curled out from under it.

  Hannah felt her stomach clench in response. “No, I’m not hungry right now. I just need a shower.”

  She started to throw back the covers and make for the bathroom when she realized she was still buck naked. She pulled the covers back up over her chest.

  Rex grinned, lines fanning out from eyes that held a mischievous spark. He was finding her morning-after modesty amusing. She could feel herself starting to bristle.

  He could see it. He reached for her white terry robe hanging over the chair and brought it to her.

  “I’ll see you in twenty minutes. Dress for the mountain if you’re still up to it.” Rex closed the door to the inter-leading room behind him.

  Right. They were going up to Grizzly Hut.

  It was around 10 a.m. when they made their way across the village toward the gondola building, the sun already warm. The day would be hot, but up high where the air was thin, over to the north, Hannah could see fine threads of gathering clouds.

  Rex followed her gaze. “The weather today should be good, but there’s a front moving in. Weatherman said it could arrive early in the weekend, possibly as soon as Friday.”

  Friday. That was when Danny was due home. Hannah felt a band constrict about her chest. Her time was running out.

  They dodged through crowds of tourists gathering in the square, waiting for the clowns to start their acts. The village was getting busier, noisier, people flocking in for the long weekend, for the festival, for the conference.

  So, thought Hannah, if the forecast was correct, it would rain on this parade. It would be the first time in years. White River had been unusually blessed with sunshine for at least the past four years over the long weekend that eased August into September, summer into fall. It was traditionally the last holiday fling before schools opened for the year and before locals knuckled down for the busy winter ski season.

  Rex had insisted on carrying Hannah’s jacket and water in his backpack because of her rib injury. His pack hulked huge on his back.

  “What have you got in there, anyway?” she asked as she led the way into the gondola building.

  “Stuff.” He grinned. He was in a good mood this morning despite the sober talk about his family. He was obviously used to sweeping those emotions under the rug. Like his dad, he didn’t give much away when it came to feelings.

  And now they’d slept together. Again. Would he sweep that under the rug again, too?

  “That’s the boon of staying in a five-star hotel. You tell ’em you’re going on a hike and they organize the backpack and the picnic. Have it ready and waiting in the morning. So, this is where Amy went up?” Rex approached the little glass ticket booth. The hole cut into the glass was designed for a man of average height. He had to bend down to ask the vendor for two lift tickets.

  Hannah stopped him. “I have a pass. It’s valid year-round. You only need a ticket for yourself.”

  He bought one and signed the waiver absolving the mountain of all responsibility for injury. The lift attendant scanned his ticket and Hannah’s pass as the gondolas swept continuously round, into the building, knocking against metal as they were mechanically guided into the railings, doors opening like little subway trains pulling into the station, closing again as they swept out and were lifted by creaking lines into the sky.

  Rex and Hannah allowed the gondola doors to close on a family of five ahead of them, opting for the next car. The doors swung closed as they were rocked free of the moorings and lifted skyward, swaying from side to side.

  “Would Amy have had her pass scanned down there?”

  “Yes. There’s a computer record kept. Her pass was scanned at 4:30 the afternoon she disappeared. The last gondola ride comes down at 5 p.m. She would’ve just made it to the top before it was time to come right back down.” Hannah watched the town shrink as they climbed. “It takes about twenty-five minutes in total to the top, about fifteen to midstation and then another ten to the peak.”

  “She may have had no intention of coming down via gondola.”

  “Perhaps not. But she had no gear for an overnight stay.”

  “Maybe she was going to hike down.”

  Hannah watched a colorful group of hikers making their way up the gravel road below. They were oblivious to a bear grazing just beyond the trees to their right. “Perhaps.” She looked at Rex. “But I doubt it. She would’ve known they were calling for crappy weather that afternoon.”

  He was relaxed, leaning against the little seat that ran around the cabin. His limbs were all tanned muscle. He was wearing khaki shorts, hiking boots. He definitely had presence. He filled a vacuum with masculine power, even in repose.

  “The weather up here is notoriously fickle as we head into fall. You can have snow up in the Alpine one minute, a heat wave the next. I checked. The freezing level was forecast to plummet the day she went up. Amy would’ve checked, too.”

  Hannah rested her head against the glass. It was cool, but the sun was warming her back. “You know, Rex, I can’t help feeling there was a sense of urgency about her movements that day.”

  He leaned forward, reached out, took a tendril that had escaped her neat ponytail. He tucked it in behind her ear, the gesture gentle, as if he cared for her deeply.

  They were high now, closing in on midstation. The wind at this elevation gently swayed their glass bubble. They were suspended from reality, just the two of them together, a sense of no past, no future, just being.

  Hannah felt as if it was possible to just live in the moment up here. Not think, just be.

  She closed her eyes, enjoying the sun on her back, drinking in the moment, just being with this man. The man she’d hated and craved all these years. The father of her son.

  The crash and bump as the car was rocked and guided into the midstation building jolted her out of her reverie.

  The doors of their little cab opened, then as the car moved along its metal moorings, they started to shut again for the second stage of their journey.

  Rex sat forward. “How would we know if someone joined Amy here at midstation?”

  Hannah hadn’t thought of that. “I guess we wouldn’t. Not unless the lifty saw something.” She pointed to two mountain employees chatting in the sun, just outside of their gondola building posts. “As you can see, not much attention is paid to anything up here, unless it gets really busy or the alarm goes off.”

  “Hmm.” Rex reached down, opened the flap of his pack and fished out the reporter’s notebook that had been found on Amy’s body. He flipped it open to the inside cover, where Hannah had discovered the notations about Grizzly Hut.

  He studied the scrawl again. “Looks like she was going to meet Grady Fisher up at the hut.” He pointed to the notation. “See, here it says 5 p.m. If she caught a 4:30 gondola ride up from the village, she would have made it up around five, wouldn’t she?”

  “Almost. It’s about a ten-minute hike from the gondola station on top to Grizz Hut.”

  “And she would’ve used the Grizzly traverse, the path above Grizzly glacier where she was found?”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone could’ve been waiting,” mused Rex. They were on the last leg of the gondola ride up Powder Mountain. The trees below were getting shorter and stubbier, gnarled from the colder temperatures and shorter summers at the higher elevation. Soon they would be above the tree line, nearing the peak. The air coming through the small window had a different quality. Crisp. Thin.

  “But whoever might have been waiting would’ve had to know she was coming.”

  “Right. Or lured her up. A trap.”

  “Rex, that’s bizarre.”

  “Believe me, I’ve seen bizarre. This looks pretty straightforward by comparison.”

  “But why would someone want to hurt Amy?”

  “Like I said, she was g
etting too close to something.”

  “You think Grady lured her up here?”

  “I’m not ruling out anything. Just thinking aloud. He could’ve asked her to meet him. Someone could’ve forced him to ask her up here, or someone might have known of their meeting.”

  Hannah could see the blue roof of the gondola station up ahead, the glass and chrome throwing back the cutting glare of the Alpine sun. She put on her sunglasses. “Georgette said Amy got a call at the office that afternoon, before she left. She was the last person to see her alive, apart from the lifty.”

  “Any idea where that call came from?”

  “Nope. We could check records, I suppose. It’s going back a year now.” Hannah felt her old anger starting to fester. “If the police had only started looking back then we might not be here now.”

  Rex caught her chin with his knuckle as their gondola knocked into the station. “I’m kind of glad we are.”

  She faced him as the doors swung slowly open. “I’m not so sure it’s a good thing, Rex.” She turned and stepped onto the platform.

  He caught his hands around her waist from behind and leaned his chin onto her shoulder. “Sure felt good last night.”

  She stopped. A little lick of lust started to unfurl in her belly at the breath in her ear. It twisted with anger and resentment, a complex braid of emotion. She didn’t turn to him. She looked straight ahead, up at the glare coming off old snow in the crevices of the peak. “But where to now, Rex?”

  “Let’s take it one step at a time. You lead.” He nudged her gently forward.

  Damn him. He was content to just fall into the moment, take it as it came, then part ways, like six years ago. She didn’t know if she could handle that.

  She started up the precarious trail.

  Chapter 11

  H annah drew the crisp Alpine air down deep into her lungs as they climbed the rocky trail from the gondola station up to the traverse across the top of the basin.

  She was enjoying the burn in her calves, the pull in the muscles of her thighs. Little stones rolled and clacked down the mountain, dislodged by their boots as they made their way to the traverse. She could hear Rex breathing deep behind her as she set the pace.

  They were alone. The sky, not above them but around them, was a lucent atmospheric dome of shades ranging from bright white and pale blue to a cerulean that melted into a deep far-off indigo. Hannah imagined the indigo was where the earth’s atmosphere met the blackness of space and infinity beyond. All around them were jagged white-capped peaks. They felt as if they were above it all, on top of the world.

  To the north, over on the horizon well beyond Moonstone Mountain, sparse wisps of cloud were filling out and beginning to mushroom into monstrous columns of white cotton candy.

  She stopped when she reached the point on the traverse above where they’d found Amy and turned back to face Rex. He looked so vital, his powerful chest rising and falling with each deep breath, a dark male silhouette framed by the bright dome of sky. His eyes were the same pellucid blues. It was like looking right through him into the infinity beyond.

  Danny’s eyes.

  It threw her.

  She often teased her little boy by saying she could see through him right into the heavens. He would shutter those eyes with his thick dark lashes and say, “No you can’t, Mommy, not if I don’t want you to.”

  She turned away from the image and looked down at the unforgiving planes of Grizzly Glacier below. The glacier appeared innocent enough to the uninitiated but below the surface lurked fissures and crevasses, convoluted caves of sheer blue ice. The rope below the trail warned that the glacier was out of bounds.

  “This the spot?”

  Hannah nodded, still trying to catch her breath. “They found her down there, near that band of rock that forms a lateral moraine.”

  Rex slipped the pack off his shoulders. It thunked to the ground. He took sunglasses out of his pocket and shielded those eyes. Hannah was glad for her own dark lenses. The glare off the glacier was blinding.

  “I recognize it from the television news coverage.” He turned and followed the trail with his eyes. “Does that lead up to Grizzly Hut?”

  “Yup.” She held her hand to her brow, shading her eyes, and looked up the trail. “Grizz Hut is the first in a series of huts along a loop of a trail through the backcountry. The cabins are really quite rustic, basic stuff. They’re used by hikers in the summer and skiers in winter. It’s not in the ski area boundary.”

  “How far to the hut?”

  “About a five-minute hike from this point.” She sat on a rock outcrop alongside the trail and stared down at the stony gray ledge close to where Amy had been entombed for a winter. She pointed at the rope. “They take that down when there is enough snow and people ski here. Thousands must have gone right over her while she lay sleeping under the ice.”

  Rex sat beside her. She could feel the warmth emanating from his muscular thigh. The hair on his olive-toned skin was dark. He was looking at the moraine where the glacier dropped sheer and almost vertical below it.

  “I saw you on TV.”

  “What?”

  “On the news, when they found Amy’s body.” He was still assessing the scene. “And I saw Mitchell in his suit, and a man beside you, thick hair, mostly gray. I thought I recognized him but it turns out I don’t know him. It was Dr. Gunter Schmidt.”

  “Oh, right. Gunter was up here that day, going for a hike.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Hell, no. He’s a fitness freak.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  Hannah rubbed her nose. It felt cool despite the warmth of the late-morning sun. After noon they would cook up here, but when the sun dipped, the ground could freeze. “Gunter’s a nice enough guy. I don’t know him that well. Not married. Very European, as you could see. He’s well respected for his work and his research in the field of cosmetic surgery.”

  “Does he socialize much?”

  “With Al, he does, and other top dogs in the community, like the mayor and his wife and the CEO of Powder Mountain, that kind of thing. He helped bring the conference to town, the toxicology conference.”

  Rex turned his attention from the ice to her. “Really?”

  “Well, it’s no big deal. A gazillion conferences come to the resort each year, some of them on an annual basis. White River sells itself worldwide on its conference facilities. One week it’s a gathering for the funeral industry, the next, a world trade organization and everything in between.”

  “But Gunter had a specific interest in the International Association of Toxicologists Conference this year?”

  “He told the mayor it would be good for the community, that more of these scientific organizations may follow suit. The way I understand it, Gunter was instrumental in getting the resort to put in the bid to host it.”

  “So, Gunter Schmidt, plastic surgeon extraordinaire, wanted those particular delegates in White River.”

  Hannah picked up a stone and tossed it down onto the ice, watching it slide and bounce its way down to the moraine. “Is that so curious?”

  “Mmm. I’ve seen that list of delegates. Interesting participants, scientists who were disenfranchised after the end of the cold war. Some are for sale to the highest bidder. And there are countries attending who unofficially thumb their noses at biological weapons control. Gatherings like this are not uncommon, but it is what brought me here, and it looks like that’s what brought the CIA, too.”

  She tossed another pebble, harder, faster, this time. Who did Rex really work for? And who would’ve thought that White River, the small town where she’d come to hide, to raise her son, was looking to be the center of some sinister international affair. What had Amy stumbled into?

  “And Dr. Gregor Vasilev, how well is he known about town?”

  “I really don’t know Gregor at all. He’s been around for dinner once or twice. He’s not that forthcoming. I just know that he’s Gunter�
�s right hand, literally, when it comes to surgery. I suspect he’s being groomed to take over the clinic when Gunter can’t hold back the inevitable tide of retirement any longer.”

  Rex picked up a stone and launched it in a skittering chase after Hannah’s pebble. “What about the rest of the staff at the spa? Where do they come from?”

  “Many are local. I’ve heard potential employees get a pretty thorough screening.”

  Rex stood up, stretched like a bear and hefted the pack onto his back. He held out his hand to Hannah. “How’re you feeling. How’s that rib?”

  She grabbed on to his arm and pulled herself up. “Good, actually. I’m feeling really strong today. Thanks, Doc.”

  The elevation gain to Grizzly Hut was minimal, but the scenery spectacular. There was freedom out here. Rex sucked it down into his lungs. He would love to see the night sky from this vantage point.

  By the time they reached the hut, the sun was high and white in the heavens. The clouds on the northern horizon had bubbled higher and changed shape as Rex watched. The view of Hannah’s backside wasn’t bad, either. He was enjoying the low level of arousal he experienced as he hiked behind her, watching her muscles flex in those long lean legs, the curve of her behind in her shorts, the fall of her ponytail sashaying across her back.

  She stopped suddenly and bent forward to tighten the lace of her boot, her shorts exposing more of the back of those lean, tanned thighs. Something slipped in his belly. All he had to do was reach forward and grab her around the waist…

  She turned around to face him, and he adjusted his sunglasses. Now was not the time. They had work to do.

  “The cabin is there.”

  He saw where she pointed—a rustic, wooden A-frame building set off the ground, presumably because of deep winter snowpack. Beyond the hut was an aquamarine tarn, still as glass, fringed on one side by a tumble of sharp white-gray rock and scree.