Her limbs began jerking. Her body flopped like a hooked trout.
Alex refused to surrender to remorse. He’d done what he had to, protected the kid. He stepped closer and waited for Pia to come alive.
The spastic movement eased, and she opened her eyes. Their pupils expanded—her world coming into focus. Punctuating each word with a brief pause as if it required heavy thought, she said, “Is Frederick all right?”
“What the hell do you care?”
“Frederick,” she called out. “Where are you, baby?”
“Shut up.” Her determination reignited Alex’s temper. He lashed out with his foot but avoided connecting. The boot came close enough to her face to make her shut her eyes against the expected impact. “Just shut up.”
Her eyes opened again. “Where is he?” She glared at Alex.
He cocked his foot for another kick.
She did not flinch or turn away.
She was a hundred-pound woman. On the floor, beaten and roped. Alex took a step back. “He’s in the other room. Playing.”
A condemned prisoner awaiting the executioner’s stroke, she looked up at Alex. Her forehead was darkening and swelling where his knockout punch had landed. The skin had split as if cut with a surgical knife. A thin line of blood oozed out.
No regrets, he thought. She deserved it. “What’d you do with my phone?”
“Buried it in the snow.”
“And tried to kill me when you realized I was on to you.”
“What would you do if someone tried to take your child?”
“Your child, yeah.” He hoisted her to her feet and supported her until she could stand. Using the rope as a leash, he started to lead her into the living room. She tripped on the single snowshoe and would have fallen had he not spun and grabbed her arms. He loosened the snowshoe and steadied her while she stepped out of it. Walking behind and guiding her with his hands on her shoulders, he maneuvered her onto the couch and ran a length of the rope behind and under it to fasten her neck tether to her ankles from the rear.
Kneeling where Frederick played with the canteen and wooden spoon, he checked the kid’s diaper. It was wet. He changed it and tried to put the boy down but almost dropped him when Frederick lunged toward Pia, arms outstretched.
“Pee,” he called between whimpers. “Pee.”
“He wants to nurse,” Pia said, her voice low and hoarse.
Carrying him, Alex approached the couch. Uncertain about how to proceed, he stared down at his captive.
“He always nurses when he’s upset. Untie me so I can feed him.”
“And give you another shot at me?”
“Are you going to let him go hungry?”
Alex untied her wrists but left the rope that ran behind the couch to bind her neck and ankles together. He sat Frederick in her lap and stood behind her while the boy nursed. Then, sitting beside her, he shifted Frederick to his lap so he could bind her wrists to the neck tether as before.
He played with Frederick until, after two hours that seemed like two days, the boy began fretting and rubbing his eyes. They went through the nursing procedure again, and Alex carried him to the bedroom. Once there, he held the warm little bundle against his chest and rocked him from foot to foot, lulling him to sleep.
Frederick relaxing against him comforted Alex. Shortly before his mother’s death, when he exploded in anger over one of his father’s extended absences, she’d told him that during his early years his father had soothed him to sleep that way almost every night.
He and his dad had been so close. Then his father began disappearing for long, unexplained intervals, and it all unraveled. The rift grew with every unshared childhood triumph, every uncomforted adolescent hurt, until it became an unbridgeable chasm when his father missed his mother’s funeral. Living with his grandparents while attending high school, Alex had tolerated paternal visits with icy correctness. He and his father could have been client and paid counselor as they discussed Alex’s educational progress and his plans for the future.
Frederick’s breathing settled into the rhythm of sleep, and Alex pushed the childhood memories aside. He tucked the boy into bed, pulled blankets up to the chubby little neck, and brushed a smooth cheek with his lips.
Back in the living room, he put a big log in the fireplace. There was a good bed of coals, so the log would smolder all night.
Sitting with closed eyes, her face frozen in a pained grimace, Pia made no sound other than labored breathing. With her bound hands tucked under her chin, she looked as if she were praying. Swelling made the broken skin on her forehead gape. Blood-tinged tissue, bulging through the fissure, glistened in the firelight.
She would have killed me, Alex reminded himself. He dipped a cup into their pot of melted snow and rummaged through kitchen cabinets until he found a bottle of ibuprofen. “Open your mouth.” He placed two tablets on her tongue and held the cup to her lips.
“More,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
He fed her another cup of water, refusing to meet her gaze. Then he refilled the cup and swallowed two ibuprofen tablets himself. The ache in his shoulder where she’d connected with the iron skillet, and thoughts of what she might have done to Frederick, strengthened his resolve to leave her trussed overnight. Mostly, he felt stupid. He wasn’t about to give her a second chance. He covered her with a blanket and retreated to the bedroom.
Deep into the night he prowled the room, wall to wall, back and forth. He had done the right thing. She would have kept fighting until one of them was unconscious. It could have been him, and he would be dead by now. Who could say what she’d have done to Frederick? Lying in bed with the boy, he curled his arms around the warm little body. After a while, he turned his back on the sleeping form and stretched full-length. Would morning never come?
By degrees, the black rectangle that was the bedroom window turned gray. When morning light filled the cabin, he rekindled the fireplace and checked on his captive.
The lump on her forehead had turned a deep purple. Swelling held the wound open, and blood-laced mucus draining from the split skin had oozed into one eye, plastering it shut. Fatigue lines creased her face. Exhaustion dulled her open eye.
No need to feel guilty. He’d done what his training dictated: overwhelming force, maximum speed. He pushed the sofa closer to the fire, got more ibuprofen and another cup of water, and sat by her.
She opened her mouth, extended her tongue.
He placed two tablets on its tip and held the cup to her dry, cracked lips while she swallowed noisily. “More?” She nodded, and her usable eye burned into him as he held the refilled cup to her lips.
Sometime during the night, her bladder had let go. The cabin reeked of urine. Not likely she’d gotten any sleep. Even with the ibuprofen, her head would feel like it was being squeezed in a vise.
Nothing more than she deserves, Alex thought as he cooked oatmeal and made coffee, stealing glances at her while he worked. He laced the oatmeal with sugar and powdered coffee lightener and shoveled the overly sweet, rapidly coalescing goop into Frederick’s mouth directly from the pan. He ate half of what remained when Frederick refused more. Spoon in one hand, pan in the other, he approached Pia.
She clamped her lips and turned her head away.
He grunted and set the pan aside. By cutting leg holes in his nylon backpack, he converted it into a child carrier. An adjustment to its straps permitted him to wear it on his chest. As a test, he strapped it on and seated Frederick in facing him. Satisfied, he set the boy back on the floor and checked his utility belt, making certain the items attached to it—knife, canteen, cartridge holder, first-aid kit—were secure.
Frederick crawled to Pia and pulled at her legs. “Pee,” he whined. “Pee.”
She did not speak, but whenever Alex glanced her way he saw her one-eyed gaze following him. He had no choice but to leave her trussed. Otherwise, she would head into the frozen wilderness and die of exposure. Maybe he shouldn’t care, but h
e did.
Essential survival items that had been in the now-empty backpack—compass, flashlight, flares—went into his pockets, along with raisins and dry cereal from the cabin’s pantry. He warmed a pan of melted snow on the butane cook stove. Neither he nor Pia spoke while, holding her face steady by cupping her chin, he dipped a washcloth in the heated water and swabbed away the matter that had oozed from her split forehead into her eye. He built up the flame in the fireplace and put on the largest log from the woodpile.
With Frederick’s feet and legs wrapped in torn-off strips of blanket, Alex bundled him in blanket remnants. “You look like the Michelin man,” he said, and settled his now-bulky charge into the modified backpack.
At the last moment, he hesitated and set the boy back on the floor. He placed a cup of water and several ibuprofen tablets on the table by the couch and spread all the available blankets over Pia’s legs, leaving the excess material in her lap so she could pull it higher if the room got cold. By adjusting the tether that held her wrists to her neck, he gave her enough slack to reach the blankets, ibuprofen, and water. But he tested to make sure she could not reach the binding that looped around the rear of the couch and linked her ankles to her neck tether from behind. He rinsed the face cloth he had used to cleanse her eye, folded the cloth loosely, and placed it on the end table by the water and ibuprofen.
“That’s it.” He stepped back. “You’ll have to tough it out ’til the cops get here.”
“Please,” she said, her voice as rough as sandpaper and barely above a whisper. “Please, do not give my baby to those people.”
“Are we back to that? First you’re his mother, then you’re his nanny. Now you’re his mother again?”
“They took him from me. Look at him, Alex. Both Mr. Koenig and his wife are blondes.”
“Koenig’s an old man. His hair’s white.”
“Study Frederick’s face. Do you not see me in his eyes? His chin and his mouth?”
The similarities were uncanny, he’d grant her that. Good enough to get away with claiming to be the kid’s mother if Alex hadn’t learned the truth. The way she had attacked him, trying to kill him with that skillet, she clearly didn’t want to go back to civilization and prove who she was. He turned away, tossed Frederick in a maneuver that brought a cry of delight, and stuffed the boy’s blanket-clad feet through the leg holes in the backpack. With his parka snapped around both of them and the diaper bag tied to his waist, he gripped his rifle in one hand, his snowshoes in the other, and headed for the porch. At the door, he turned for a final glance at Pia.
She had set her mouth in a stubborn line. The eye that had been plastered shut was closed. She stared at him with the other. When she saw him looking at her, she spoke again. “Watch over him, Alex. Someone wants to harm him. Don’t let them.”
A new tack, another lie. He stepped onto the porch and strapped on his snowshoes. That should have been the last he saw of her, but the specter of her ravaged face and defiant expression stayed with him as he trudged across the sunlit expanse of glistening snow that sloped gradually toward the Warrior River Gorge. Pushing back at guilt that dogged him for hitting her so hard, he reminded himself that she had been the aggressor, that her determination to make off with Frederick could have led to the kid’s death in the frozen wilderness.
As he approached the gorge, Alex’s introspection gave way to thoughts about how to negotiate the icy slope. It was too steep for a direct descent. He would have to maneuver obliquely, looking for footholds. Perhaps soothed by the rhythmic movement as they approached the gorge, Frederick had fallen asleep. Alex prayed that the nap would last until they reached a place where the river, too swift elsewhere, stilled enough to ice over. He prayed also that the ice would be thick enough to support the two of them.
Chapter 7
Even though Alex knew the area, his first glimpse of the Warrior River Gorge always awed him. At three hundred yards, it appeared as a massive rent in the earth. As if an all-powerful landscaper had grown impatient, the terrain abruptly dropped thirty-odd feet to a narrow shelf lined with evergreen shrubs. Beyond the shelf, the ground fell away too steeply to be visible.
From the shelf, the slope down to the river was steep but negotiable over a mile-long stretch. Alex’s problem was that first thirty-plus feet. He hiked along the lip of the gorge until he found a gully that started as a tiny break in the snowpack but deepened as it approached the lip. He eased down into the gully to a point where it sloped abruptly to meet the shelf. Here the drop-off was only about twelve feet, but the line of evergreens that formed a protective fence along the shelf thinned.
If he moved Frederick around to his back, Alex could slide down to the shelf on his stomach and grab an evergreen to avoid slipping over the edge. At least, he hoped he could. Worried that he was burning too much daylight, he settled in the snow and anchored himself by digging his heels into the icy sheet under the loose powder. He pulled off the thermal mittens he wore over his gloves and unbuckled the backpack. “Just shifting you to the rear for a little while,” he said, trying to soothe Frederick. “When we get down to the river, we’ll travel face to face again.”
Frederick chose the moment of transfer to throw a temper tantrum. The wild kicking and squirming cost Alex his grip on the backpack.
Knowing he was going to drop it, he batted the pack so that it hit the snow uphill from him. Twisting like a wrestler trying to avoid being pinned, he grabbed it as it started to slip by on its way to the bottom of the gorge.
The move unanchored him from the ice. Belly down, feet first, he began sliding.
Gripping the shoulder strap of the backpack with one hand, he clawed at the snow with his other, trying to grasp something—anything—to arrest their slide. Twisting sideways, he angled his body to increase the likelihood of finding a handhold.
He became airborne for a moment and then landed with a jarring thud. His foot hit something solid—a root or a rock protruding from the shelf. He kicked hard and stretched his free arm, grasping for the trunk of a small evergreen. Got it!
Arresting his fall caused his body to swivel. His legs dangled over the edge of the shelf. Not enough strength left to pull himself up with one arm, but if he turned loose of the backpack it was bye-bye Freddy.
His fingers and forearm burned from holding onto the sapling. He couldn’t hang on more than a few more moments. Then both of them would splatter on rocks along the river at the bottom of the gorge. Praying that the evergreens were close enough together to keep Frederick from slipping between them, he flung the backpack up onto the shelf so that the boy, on his back, slid across the snow behind the tree line.
Using both arms, he muscled himself back up. He reached for the next shrub and then the next, pulling until he was behind the protective row.
Frederick regained his breath before Alex did. The boy’s howl announced his survival.
“That’s it, kid,” Alex shouted as he rested for an additional moment. “Let it out. Tell the world we made it.”
With Frederick once more strapped to his chest, he cut down, stripped, and sharpened a slender evergreen. Using the makeshift pike as an anchor, he worked his way along the face of the gorge. An hour later, he stood on the bank of the frozen river. Frederick must have worn himself out howling and kicking on the way down the wall of the gorge. He seemed content now to loll in the pack, his head resting against Alex’s chest.
Alex tested the ice with one foot and then put his full weight on it. It seemed solid. Holding his homemade pike parallel to the frozen surface, he took a deep breath and ventured farther out. If he broke through, there was a chance that the ends of the pole would lodge on still-solid ice and give him a shot at climbing out of the water. Not that it would do much good. Water-soaked and with no source of heat, he and Frederick would freeze to death in short order. The thought kept him moving as fast as he dared on the slippery surface. Only when his feet were solidly planted in snow on the far shore did he breathe easily once
more.
Scaling the opposite face of the gorge proved less tricky than descending the first, both because this side was less steep and because he had perfected his technique with the sharpened pole. But gravity working against him made it more physically grueling. Barely able to navigate on shaky legs, he reached the top, collapsed in the snow, and rested until worry about waning daylight propelled him to his feet.
With the pale sun dropping behind mountain peaks, he snowshoed along the shoulder of U.S. 50, almost too tired to move. He heard the roar of an approaching snowplow and fired off his flare to alert the driver, who would be concentrating on keeping the plow’s blade against the concrete highway. As the plow approached, Alex stood in its path and waved his arms.
The Descent From Truth Page 6
