First Tracks

by Catherine O'Connell

  ‘Did you just kill the father of your child?’ I asked, trying to buy myself some time.

  Her laugh was even more demon-like than her smile. ‘My God. There’s no child. I just invented one to keep Warren around until I could get the job done. I was worried he might just leave me. You see, his true interest lay elsewhere.’ She paused before throwing me the bone. ‘I knew he was getting ready to tell me his feelings toward you, to break things off with me. That’s when I invented the child. It was probably the only reason he followed me out of bounds.’

  ‘So did you put the bird’s nest in my chimney?’ I asked, wanting to keep her talking, trying not to think about what her words implied.

  ‘Of course. We were afraid you might remember seeing us cause the slide. We had plenty of time while you were in the hospital. It was my idea. He,’ she said, giving a nod to the body bleeding out in the snow, ‘was too stupid to think up anything so brilliant. As brilliant as an open paint can near a fire, don’t you think?’

  I scrolled through the other incidents. ‘The toboggan?’

  ‘Stu had removed a critical screw. Nothing you would notice on the flat, but a problem on a steep slope.’

  ‘And was he responsible for the bomb that could have killed Singh and me?’

  ‘Now you’re showing how smart you are,’ she cackled. ‘He found a fast-burning fuse to replace yours. But unfortunately you didn’t die in any of the mishaps. We would have tried burning you up sooner, but there always seemed to be a man in the house. Which reminds me. You forgot one.’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ I said in all honesty.

  ‘The dead car battery. We turned your lights on. The plan was Stu was going to offer you a ride home, but then the doctor got in the way. He’s cute, by the way. Maybe he’ll be my next conquest.’

  For some reason a jealous streak ran up my spine. ‘He’s in jail and you know it.’

  She studied me for a moment and then broke out into a laugh. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  She ignored me and glanced dismissively at Reininger’s limp body, the snow around it a bloody snow cone. She turned her attention back to me, the gun still trained at my head. ‘What some people won’t do for sex and the promise of money. Men are such fools. Make them feel good and you own them. I’ve never known it to fail. They think they are in love with you, but they are really in love with themselves and how you make their bodies feel. We women are so much smarter, don’t you agree?’

  While I would wholeheartedly agree that we women are smarter, in Zuzana’s case I would have to add more treacherous and cunning as well. She coldly murdered her first two husbands when they failed to live up to her aspirations. Magnus Bergstrom died because of his career-ending accident, Werner Mayer for lack of ambition. And then there was Warren, prematurely taken for a reason I didn't want to think about.

  I looked at Reininger all crumpled on the ground. He must have thought he was finally getting out of that van. All that effort for naught. And while I would have loved to debate her on the frailties of men versus the intelligence of women, I was thinking with her true confessions coming to an end, it was high time for me to get the hell out of there.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said, looking off behind her in the oldest ruse of all time. She bit and looked over her shoulder, but only for a second. I took advantage of the second to do a side kick turn and take off through the woods.

  She was on me in an instant; she was that good. But with Zuzana having just demonstrated that she had no compunction about cold-blooded murder, I had to do something to better my odds. At least I was moving instead of waiting to be put down like a lame horse. I was skiing like a mad woman, breaking every rule in the book, skiing too close to the trees, gaining speed I didn’t want as I held off on making a turn, at certain points out of control, staying on my skis by leg strength alone.

  We were crushing it though the glades, throwing it down as we shredded the snow, moving in synchronicity as she mirrored my every move. I tried to shake her, to outski her, but she was a better skier, even with a gun in one hand, even without her poles.

  The snow was deep and the terrain studded with obstacles. Once I felt my ski brush a stump, but I kept going, driven forward by the knowledge that a gun was pointed at my back. I fought to block the image of a bullet penetrating my helmet and my head blowing up the way Reininger’s had.

  I tried making unexpected turns in an attempt to shake her. She followed my every move, so close that I could hear her breathing, see the gun raising in my peripheral vision. I heard a shot and felt hot iron rip at my shoulder, tearing at the flesh like a fishhook. I could feel warm liquid seeping out and running down my arm. Then another shot. This one through my side. I pressed on through the pain, knowing if I stopped it was certain death. I couldn’t outski her, so I was going to have to outsmart her. And then it came to me, and I knew what to do.

  Making impossibly tight turns, I segued towards the edge of Traynor’s where ropes delineated the out of bounds area. I’d done trail work a couple of summers back and knew the terrain on the other side of the boundary markers. I skied straight for the rope, ducking low at the last minute to clear it. Getting under the rope slowed her, putting more space between us than there had been since the chase started.

  And then without warning, I smacked into a stump hidden under the snow. My bindings released and I ejected onto the mountain, rolling head over heels until I came to a stop twenty yards downhill from her. She had stopped too, of her own volition, and was glaring down at me. In no hurry now, she began a leisurely slide toward where I lay in the snow unprotected. As the real estate between us grew narrower, she raised the gun and pointed it at my head. I cowered and closed my eyes, certain the breath I was taking was my last.

  Then I heard a surprised gasp and opened my eyes just in time to see Zuzana disappear from sight, gun and all. Her screams were like those of a Tasmanian devil, echoing evil across the mountain until they came to an abrupt stop when she hit the bottom. This part of the mountain was riddled with abandoned mineshafts you could only see when there wasn’t any snow. Thank god I remembered this particular open shaft from doing clearing work in the summer. Actually, my calculations had been off a few feet and if I hadn’t hit the stump and ejected I would have gone in before her.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  By the time I limped down to the gondola there were only a few people in the locker room. Neverman was one of them. He took one look at all the blood and called an ambulance. I insisted I was fine and then fainted on to the floor. Evidently, I had gone into shock.

  And so I was wheeled into the emergency room for the third time in as many weeks. By now the overhead lights and the Spartan rooms were familiar to me, as was half of the staff. My favorite nurse, Adam, had hooked up an IV and was asking me if I had any allergies.

  ‘You mean after all my time here you don’t have it in my chart?’ I challenged him.

  ‘We always ask. As long as you’re awake.’

  My shoulder was beginning to throb and I closed my eyes against the pain. ‘This really hurts,’ I confessed.

  ‘I’ll get you some morphine,’ he said, leaving me alone in the room.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to figure out how soldiers shot in the field survive the pain since the hole in my shoulder was probably only a flesh wound. Flesh wound or not, it hurt like a mother. The gunshot in my abdomen hurt less. Go figure.

  I squeezed my eyes shut against the pain and thought about how Duane Larsen had attended to me on my two previous visits. The first thing I was going to do when I was released was find him and tell him how sorry I was to let him down. Evil did exist in this world. Zuzana was a perfect example. Reininger not so much. He was just dumb. But Duane? There was no evil in him anywhere, I was certain.

  The door opened and someone came into my room. I peeled my eyes back the tiniest bit expecting Adam with the happy juice. But the next breath I drew was one of disbelief. Dr Duane Larsen wa
s standing in the room wearing his familiar green scrubs. The last time I had seen him he’d been wearing orange. A rush of adrenaline surged through me, like when you barely miss being in an accident or you walk into a room full of people yelling ‘surprise’.

  ‘You just can’t stay away from here, can you? You really are going for the frequent flyer discount.’

  I was injured and I was in pain, but I wasn’t dead and I needed an answer. ‘You’re out. What happened?’

  ‘You didn’t see it in the paper?’ he said, his voice holding a degree of accusation.

  ‘I just got back from overseas.’

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at me with those earnest eyes, one green and one brown. ‘They got the guys who killed Kimmy. Sadly, she wasn’t the only one. There were two others. The missing girl from Breckenridge and the missing girl from Vail. It’s all on tapes that the sickos made. Kimmy had broken away from them and ran. That’s how she ended up in Castle Creek with a broken neck. She was the only one to get away.’

  ‘But who? How?’

  ‘It was those creeps doing the Ted Bundy documentary. They’d entice young women into their van under the auspices of seeing themselves on film and then they’d drug them and tape themselves doing … well you don’t want to know. They were staying in the room next to Kimmy’s at the Snowflake and grabbed her before she went inside. They were the two “witnesses” who saw me fight with her. Which of course never happened.’

  ‘But the blood in your house?’

  The look he gave me was both forgiving and final. ‘Like I told the cops. She cut her hand in my car and we stopped at my home to bandage it up.’ He didn’t ask me why I didn’t believe him before, and his eyes told me there was no swimming up that stream again. He was lost to me forever.

  Surgery went well and I’m on the mend. Should be back at work in a couple of weeks. Like Duane said, ‘Who needs a spleen anyway?’ I did my best to try and assuage him, to let him know in the end that I did have faith in him. But it was too little too late. He left town shortly after he was sure I was doing OK. He said he wasn’t comfortable living here anymore after what had happened to him. And I couldn’t blame him.

  Life in the A-frame is back to normal. No more fear of intruders like Zuzana and Reininger putting a bird’s nest down my chimney or tampering with sleds or changing fuses or burning me out of my house or running down my car battery. The Remington is back in the closet, and I don’t know if it will ever come back out again. I would never think of using it on an animal and the human ones seem to be at bay for the time being.

  And there’s one other good thing coming in my life. Next Monday I go to get my new dog.

  EPILOGUE

  The sun has yet to crack the mountains and the morning sky is a weak gray. The gondola sits still while the lifties curl their gloved hands around steaming cups of coffee and share stories of the previous night’s debauchery. I wrap my skins around my skis and head straight up the front of the mountain. Though the snow cats gave the run a last pass a half hour before, an inch or so of freshie has accumulated before the last of the storm lifted. Overall, a foot plus of new snow has fallen since the lifts closed the evening before.

  As I climb higher the new snow gets deeper and soon the snow I am climbing through is nearly knee deep. But the bitter cold keeps the snow light, making the task less arduous. I move in solitude in the shadow of the treed slopes to either side of me, each breath preceding me in a gray plume that floats upwards.

  The sun has risen higher as I near the top, my armpits soaked and rivulets of sweat running down my back. It breaches Independence Pass in a golden globe just as I reach the top and rolls across the new snow like a curtain coming up on billions of earthly stars, a sparkling galaxy. And I am the only one in the audience.

  I take the skins off my skis and fold them into my backpack before starting down. The snow parts before me as gravity carries me along, a wake of powdered sugar rising to either side of me, settling behind me. I plunge into the virgin snow with the enthusiasm of a bridegroom.

  I never wear a helmet on these solitary runs and my braid streams out from beneath my hat. My screams of ecstasy are only heard by the winter animals in their burrows as I continue downwards through open meadows and ancient trees, unencumbered, unstopping. My legs are screaming for a break, but I refuse to listen. There is plenty of time to rest afterwards.

  And then I’m ripping down Jackpot, my legs unfolding to bottomless snow, my body propped up by the mountain. My mouth is frozen in a smile as I pass beneath the still-unmoving gondola, and I think that the only thing that comes close to this sensation is sex, but it would have to be multiple orgasms. And then I reconsider. Even sex isn’t as good as this.

  And then I come to a stop at the top of Little Nell where I can see the line that has formed at the base of the mountain. It stretches down the steps of Gondola Plaza to Durant Street as hopeful skiers wait to get a first crack at the untouched snow I have so selfishly devoured by my lonesome. And I make no apologies.

  It doesn’t get any better than this.