FOURTEEN
I raced back to the kitchen. A peek through the round window showed me that Chef Gaston was nowhere to be seen. I ducked inside and went straight for the woman who had given Annie the note.
“No, I do not know what it said,” she said indignantly when I asked her if she knew what was in the note. “What do you think I am? A snoop? I found it and gave it to her, that’s all.”
“Do you have Annie’s cell-phone number? It’s important.”
The woman, who up close didn’t look all that much older than Annie, gave me a sour look.
“If she didn’t give it to you, then I don’t see why I should.”
“It’s important.”
“Right.” She started to turn away.
I grabbed her arm.
She plucked it off as if it were a worm.
“It’s really important,” I told her.
She rolled her eyes, dipped into the pocket of her apron and produced a phone, from which she read me Annie’s number. I got out my own cell and punched in the number. Almost immediately the familiar strains of Annie’s ringtone sounded behind me. I spun around. Annie hadn’t magically appeared, but a hoodie was hanging from a hook behind me, and the ringtone was coming from it. I dipped into the pocket. Sure enough, a cell phone. In her excitement, Annie had forgotten to take it with her.
I guessed I could have found someone to tell me how to reach Rod. Better, I could have called Grandma, and she would have passed her phone to Rod and I could have told him what was going on.
But what was going on? And even if I could convince Rod that something didn’t smell right, what would he do? Call the cops? Where’s the crime, Rennie?
I raced to gather my ski gear—all of it, including my avalanche gear, shovel, beacon and probe. I took my cell phone too, just in case.
It wasn’t hard to track Annie. I’d seen the direction she’d gone in, and after last night’s snowfall there was exactly one set of ski tracks going in that direction.
“Annie!” I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted as loud as I could. “Annie!”
No answer.
She’d gotten a head start, and she was faster on skis than I was and in better shape too. I chased her until I was drenched in sweat and gasping like a dying man, but I couldn’t catch up with her. Every time I had to stop to catch my breath, I knew she was getting farther and farther ahead of me.
I pushed on.
Up ahead, I saw a splotch of something moving.
“Annie!”
No answer.
I plunged forward and a few minutes later found myself plodding up a slope that Annie must have flown up. As I followed the curve of her path, I caught sight of something below. A building. The park ranger station. Annie had gone past it. Had the ranger seen her? If he had, he’d know how much of a lead she had on me. Maybe she’d even said where she was going or had asked for directions. I tucked my ski poles close and raced down to the station, executing a pretty sharp stop in front of the cabin just as a man stepped outside. It was Chuck Morrison, the ranger Rod had thrown out of his restaurant.
“Did you see a girl go through here not long ago?” I was breathing so hard I could barely get the words out.
“Girl?”
“On skis. She came down this way. There’s her trail.” I pointed.
“If you know that’s her trail, why are you asking me if I saw her?”
“Did you? Did she say where she was going? Did she ask for directions?”
Chuck narrowed his eyes and took a long, suspicious look at me.
“What’s going on here? Why are you so interested in the movements of this girl?”
I didn’t have time for this.
“Never mind.” I reached for my ski poles, which I’d planted in the snow. But Chuck grabbed my arm.
“Why are you following this girl? What’s she to you? Are you stalking her?”
“Stalking? No!” Geez, don’t start thinking now, Chuck. “I’m staying at Rod Billingsley’s place with my grandmother. They’re friends. You can check it out.”
“That’s what I intend to do, and you’re not going anywhere until I do.”
He confiscated my ski poles. I had no choice. I had to kick off my skis and follow him into the cabin.
“Can you at least hurry it up?” I asked. I should have known better. Asking guys in authority to speed up only makes them slow down, especially if they already don’t like you or think you are up to something.
Chuck went behind a desk and started rooting around in a desk drawer for something. This was going to take forever. I glanced around. Maybe there were some poles in here somewhere that I could grab.
There weren’t. The place was small and cramped, and that was with a grand total of one desk and one chair, plus one bookcase stuffed with bulging binders. Every bit of wall was covered with maps and charts and notices. The one closest to me was the same avalanche map Rod had in his office and, next to it, the schedule of planned blasts. I hadn’t studied it the night before when I was in Rod’s office, but I looked at it now, mostly, I think, because I saw a red circle around today’s date. A blast had been planned for late this afternoon. The time had been written in black marker. But the numbers in black had been crossed out with a red X and a new time written in, also in red. I glanced at the digital clock on the bookcase. The blast was scheduled for twenty minutes from now. I sure hoped it was nowhere around here.
That’s when everything went cold, like I’d been touched by the King Midas of ice.
“Pike’s Ride,” I said to Chuck, who was still trying to get something out of the desk drawer. The way he was tugging at it and getting red in the face, the thing was stuck. “Where is that from here?”
He gave one last mighty tug and triumphantly held up a battered little book.
“Found it.” He flipped through it until he found what he was looking for. “Pike’s Ride? Why do you want to know that?”
“Just curious.”
He looked me over again before nodding to the window behind him. My eyes followed. Through the window, out in the snow, I saw the twin grooves of a pair of skis.
Annie’s ski tracks. I didn’t want them to be hers. But when I traced the direction from which they had come, I knew they had to be hers. Who else could have made them?
I grabbed my ski poles from where Chuck had leaned them against his desk and made a dash for the door. My boots were clamped into my skis and my hand was in my pocket, rooting for my phone to call Grandma and get her to tell Rod to stop the blast, when Chuck exploded out of the cabin and threw himself at me in a low tackle. Geez, what was wrong with him? He was acting like I’d committed a capital crime and there was no way he was going to let me get away.
I fought back. You bet I did. But there was more to Chuck than met the eye. He practically ripped my jacket off me as he fought to keep me down. When he finally got me solidly pinned, he yelled at me that I wasn’t going anywhere until he’d checked me out.
“You have to do something!” I screamed at him. “You have to stop that blast!”
He wasn’t listening. Like every adult I’d ever met, he wasn’t listening when it was important. That’s what makes me see red. Then black. That’s pretty much when I lose it, like I did then.
I stopped fighting him so hard. Let him think I was worn out. Or beat. When I felt his body start to relax, I brought up my knee as fast and as hard as I could. Ask me if I care if that was fighting dirty.
I took off while he was immobilized. By the time I had followed Annie’s tracks to the top of a rise behind the ranger station, Chuck was struggling to his feet. I held my breath, willing him to do something to call off the blast. But he didn’t rush back into the cabin, and he didn’t pull out a phone. He wasn’t going to do anything to save Annie. I would have to do it myself.
I dug into my jacket pocket for my phone to call Grandma and get Rod on the case.
My phone wasn’t in the pocket.
It wasn
’t in any of my pockets.
I stared back at the cabin. It must have fallen out when I was wrestling with Chuck.
Finally, Chuck wheeled around and stumbled through the snow to the cabin. Maybe he was going to make the call and stop the blast, and maybe the best and safest thing for me to do was go back and wait for that to happen. Maybe.
And maybe not, because what’s when I saw something I hadn’t been able to see before—Chuck’s ranger truck. It was parked behind the station. It looked an awful lot like the truck that Raj had met up on the road after his last argument with Annie.
I’d seen Raj at the ranger station the day before. Now it looked like Raj had called Chuck that night, and Chuck had come to meet him. They’d talked. But why? About what? What could they possibly have to talk about? Raj didn’t know the first thing about skis and ski resorts. He’d come up here without a pair of boots. So why had he sought out a park ranger—at least twice? What possible use did Raj have for someone like that?
It hit me like a jackhammer to the belly.
FIFTEEN
Pop quiz: What does Chuck the park ranger do? According to Rod, at this time of year Chuck coordinates avalanche information and makes decisions about avalanche control.
That includes scheduling preventive blasts.
He’s the guy in charge.
So Chuck must have been the one who had changed the time of the blast from late afternoon to—I swallowed hard—a time too close for Annie’s comfort. What if he’d done that because Raj had asked him to? Because Raj had paid him to?
Rod had said Chuck would do anything for money. Raj had been sitting with us when Rod said it. He’d gotten a good look at Chuck. He knew where he was and what his job was, so it couldn’t have been hard to find him. But why? Did he have a life insurance policy on Annie? Would he make a pile of money to pay off his debts if she died? Or was this an “honor” thing? She wouldn’t do what he told her, so he was going to get rid of her?
Not that any of that mattered right then. The only thing that mattered was that Annie was headed for a blast zone.
I had to get to her. I had to do it now. I had to warn her. It was my only option.
It was Annie’s only chance.
* * *
I don’t think I’ve ever pushed myself as hard as I did in the next fifteen minutes. I dug my poles in and leaned hard on them to help power me on the uphill parts, and I tucked and planted myself in Annie’s tracks going downhill. I ignored the sweat. I ignored the dryness in my throat and mouth. I told myself Annie mattered in a way that nothing else did. When I started to shake from exhaustion, from nerves, from being scared—I didn’t know which and it didn’t matter—I told myself that this time I knew it was coming. This time I had a choice. This time I wasn’t just there. This time I could do something about it.
My lungs were tight. My legs were shaking. My arms were like jelly as I planted my ski poles again and again and drove my weight against them.
Finally I reached a crest that gave me a clear view of the slope ahead. There, skiing diagonally down and across it, was Annie.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and called her name, but I was drowned out by the whoop-whoop roar of a helicopter that at first I couldn’t see.
I saw Annie turn her head, craning it toward the sound. If she just turned her head a little more…
“Annie! Annie!” I waved my arms. “Annie, he’s going to blast!”
Her head swung around to face forward again. She hadn’t seen me or heard me, and she didn’t seem to think the helicopter posed any kind of a threat. For all I knew, they were a common sight up here, and not just because of the blasting.
I looked up again. Rotors appeared, whirring above the crest of Pike’s Ride. I waved my arms above my head like an airport ground worker and prayed I could catch the pilot’s eye.
Something flashed in the air near the copter.
The sky was blue above the pristine, sparkling white of the high slope. The air was still and clear. Annie was tracing a swath across the virgin snow. The sun warmed my upturned face. If you’d come across me in that split second, you’d have felt nothing but serenity. Tranquility. Peace.
In the next split second:
Ka-BOOM!!!
The air turned white. Visibility plummeted. I saw the mountain, and then I saw air filled with snow, rising instead of falling and pushing outward, farther and farther, snow as blast debris, snow propelled outward with the blast wave until Annie slicing across the slope was Annie half visible through a blizzard of snow before she disappeared completely in thickening clouds of white.
My heart slammed to a halt in my chest, and I couldn’t breathe while I waited for the snow to settle. It seemed to take forever before the blanket of snow thinned to a fog and then to a mist. Suddenly the air was as clear as glass again. I stared out over the expanse of mountain where only a minute before I had been watching Annie describe a graceful downward swoop. Nothing was the same. Up near the top of the mountain I saw the crown of the slide—the place where a slab of snow had been jarred loose by the blast. I saw the slab’s now-empty bed and, below that, the path the slab had taken as it shot downhill at 130 kilometers an hour, like a freight train, picking up more snow and ripping up, bowling over or burying everything in its path.
And at the bottom of the slope, I saw the runoff. The place where all that snow and all that debris had finally come to rest.
It was deathly silent.
There was no sign of Annie.
SIXTEEN
You’d think I would have sprung into action instantly, calling up every piece of information I knew about avalanches and rushing like a hero to Annie’s rescue.
You’d be wrong.
I stood frozen to the spot where I’d stopped when the blast went off. I stared at the scene in front of me as it very slowly dawned on me that had I chased Annie even another three or four meters, there would be no sign of me either.
I started to shake. I was barely more than a couple of Rennie-lengths from having been swept away myself. Everything behind me was exactly the same as it had been when I skied across it. Everything in front of me was devastation. It was crazy how razor-thin the boundary was between the two, and it made me shake even harder to think it was a pure fluke that I happened to be on one side of the razor blade and not the other.
Unlike Annie.
“Annie! Annie!” I yelled her name over and over.
In return I heard the Major’s voice. Calme-toi, René. Tu ne peux pas penser si t’es pris de panique. You can’t think when you’re freaking out, so calm down.
Fact: the majority of people who survive an avalanche either dig themselves out or have a piece of equipment or part of their body showing so that a rescuer spots them and digs them out.
As far as I could see, neither of these described Annie.
Only one in five people who are completely buried is ever rescued alive—and that’s only if he or she is rescued quickly.
Time. It was all about time now. It was a race.
I patted myself down. I didn’t have a cell phone, but I did have my avalanche pack and the three things that could help me most now: a transceiver, a collapsible probe and a collapsible shovel. I fumbled with the transceiver and almost dropped it, my hands were shaking so badly. I turned it to Receive and prayed that Annie had put hers on Send either when she set out or, if she’d had time, when she realized what was happening. I headed for the run off. My legs were jelly before I was halfway across. The area was huge. A minute had already ticked by. Maybe two. Or more. I had no idea how long I’d stood paralyzed by the thought that I could have been buried alive too.
Breathe, Rennie. Suck in a long, deep breath. Hold it. Now exhale. Slowly. And again.
Annie had been at least halfway across the slope that had avalanched. Halfway across and maybe halfway down. That, at least, gave me a start quadrant for my search. It also scared me, because the avalanche had come to rest at the bottom of the slope, whic
h ended in a giant bowl-like depression. What if Annie had been swept into that bowl along with all the snow and whatever else the avalanche had picked up as it hurtled down the mountainside, the force and the volume of it more like a barrage of cold, wet cement than a flurry of snow? There’d been nothing lacy or frilly or Christmas-card-like about it. If Annie had been swept into that depression, I would never find her.
Calm down.
You have to look for her now, Rennie. The clock is running. If you don’t find her and dig her out, she’ll die.
So calm down.
I crossed the ravaged landscape to where I was sure I had last seen her. If I was going to do this right, I had to be thorough. I decided on a grid search. Sticking to it was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do. I picked up nothing. I wanted to run to a spot farther away to see if she was there. But if I did that, I risked heading in the wrong direction. I walked the grid.
I was never going to find her.
Maybe she’d forgotten her transceiver like she’d forgotten her phone.
Maybe she hadn’t turned it on.
Maybe she hadn’t had time to turn it on.
Stick to the plan, Rennie. Keep going.
Then I had it. A signal. A bip and an arrow on the display screen pointing me farther down and across the mountain’s scarred face.
I saw it almost immediately, but it took me a few seconds to believe it.
Something was sticking up out of the snow.
A tree branch? No, too thin.
A twig? Too straight.
A probe?
My beacon was blipping like crazy, and the arrow was pointing right at the straight, black, stick-like thing that was poking up at least thirty centimeters above the surface of the snow.
“Annie!”
I threw off my pack and assembled my shovel, telling myself the whole time to focus, take a deep breath, do not panic.
I dug.
“Hold on, Annie. I’m coming.”
I drove the blade of that shovel into the snow again and again. It was like trying to slice through concrete with a butter knife.
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