by Susan Wiggs
He had never experienced a feeling quite like the worry that had been gnawing at him since that sick moment of realization. He had worried about Asa, that was true. But he’d always known where the boy was and how he would fare, up until that last day.
That day, the sound of the rumbling explosion had frozen Tom’s heart. Blasting was a part of mining. He understood that. But somehow when the roar of the dynamite reached him that day, he knew.
He had raced up to the mine with his heart in his throat, but along with the rage and the panic had been ice-cold knowledge. The certainty had not comforted him, but at least he knew.
In Deborah’s case, the wondering made him crazy. The wondering and the self-disgust. He was not a stupid or incautious man. He had his moments of lunacy, such as believing he could shoot Arthur Sinclair in cold blood, such as taking a helpless debutante hostage, but in general he was a calm and considered man. He was not one to leave the island for the winter without checking, double-checking and triple-checking everything down to the last detail.
And yet where Deborah was concerned, he had done the unthinkable. He had let himself be persuaded she was safe aboard the Koenig without checking for himself. He had trusted his assumptions rather than test them.
Now his stupidity might have cost Deborah Sinclair her life.
And he was entirely to blame. A hostage taker had to obey the unwritten code. You didn’t let a hostage die while in your custody.
By the time he set off on foot, the cold was aiming straight for his bones and the wind slashed horizontally across the horizon. Yet never once did it occur to him to hesitate, turn back, give up. How could he, when Deborah had been left behind? She would starve. She would freeze to death.
The island was not entirely uninhabited, he reminded himself, shoving down a rise of panic. A logging company had left a skeleton crew on the south end to guard its claim over the winter. A fisherman or two in Rock Harbor might have decided to winter over. But that was miles from Deborah. She wouldn’t know how to seek help. The island was too big, too wild, to find another settlement even in the best of conditions. In a blizzard, an overland trek was impossible. And, truth be told, they might not be the sort of men to give her protection without exacting a payment Tom refused to contemplate.
The wind dragged at him, ripped at his clothes. He was grateful for his fur coat, mittens and leggings, even grateful for the small, ill-tempered dog huddled against him. Lightning Jack had been insistent on the matter of the coat in particular. He had given Tom a full-length hooded coat made from the hide of an entire grizzly bear. Tom hoped the garments would keep him from freezing to death before he reached Deborah.
He had no idea how much farther it was to the bay, but he recognized the curve of the natural harbor and knew Isle Royale lay just across the lake. He stood at the shore, his numb feet sunk deep in new snow. The lake had iced up, to be sure, but how deep was the freeze, and did it reach all the way to the island?
The wind made rivers of snow flow across the ice. Snakelike, they slithered over the frozen surface, beckoning, mocking him. He knew that once he went out on the ice, he would be at the mercy of the lake. He took out a flask and fortified himself with a swig of schnapps, then started walking.
Time passed. There was no sun and no dark, just the vast and endless white of the winter storm. He squinted his eyes, hoping to avoid the snow blindness. The bone-aching cold made him slow and stupid. It was all he could do to consult his compass and set his feet on a course across the ice. For some reason it helped to keep Deborah Sinclair’s face in his mind’s eye.
He found that strange, since he didn’t even like the woman. Yet not even he could deny that she was as beautiful as the winter moon, pale and perfect and distant. An ice princess. Her image glowed like a beacon, summoning him ever closer, one step and then another. He played a game in his mind, trying to remember every facet of Deborah Sinclair, beginning with the human missile sliding down the banister and crashing into him. He had seen her furious, frightened, stubborn, proud and vulnerable. He had watched her struggle to fit in with the people of the island, trying to learn their ways even if it meant dealing with fish guts and backbreaking physical labor. She had pursued the work as some sort of atonement, he supposed, because the islanders had proved him right about Arthur Sinclair.
Her disillusionment with her own father had been unexpected. As far as Tom knew, the rich usually stuck together and denied that any of their own could possibly do wrong. Yet Deborah had listened. She had believed. She had cared.
As he struggled through the driving wind, Tom thought of all the ways he knew her…and in the end concluded that he did not know her at all. She was as much a mystery to him now as she had been that first night. He knew she hid things deep inside her, and he wanted to know what those things were. Thoughts, fears, secrets—he wanted them all. He had no idea what to do with them, yet that didn’t stop him from wanting to know her. He felt like a fool for not realizing this sooner. She was a woman he wanted to know. He had started out her captor, but in a way, she had captured him. And he had been too stupid to see it happening.
As he battled the storm, his thoughts were the thoughts of a madman. The slow violence of freezing to death made it hard to reason. Did madmen pray? he wondered. Maybe he wasn’t so mad after all, because he found himself praying desperately for deliverance. Just get me to the island. Just get me to the island and to Deborah.
He refused to give up until he found her.
Almost there. But the force of the storm slapped down his intentions. He had been walking on the ice for hours. Surely he would see Isle Royale any moment now. He paused to squint through the needles of snow at his compass, to make certain he was on course for the island. The dog stirred and whimpered inside his coat. It really was hard to concentrate. Something was nagging at him. A feeling, a strange noise, perhaps.
Deep within the shriek of the wind he detected a new sound, a low, gradual click and rumble.
His gut knew what it was before his mind caught on, and he started to run. He ran for his life, seeing nothing but white, and hearing nothing but the sound he had learned to dread—the unmistakable snap of cracking ice.
The section of ice came away, the fissure crawling along like a black snake. He was at the mercy of the storm. Wind and lake currents bore him away from the mainland, and he could only hope he’d be pushed toward more solid ice, or miraculously, to the rock bound north shore of Isle Royale. The chances, he conceded with a sick feeling in his gut, were damned slim. Only time would tell.
Tom hunkered down, tucking his face into the hood of his coat, trying to hide from the wind. He had lost his bearings, and everything seemed to float in a sea of white toward a dreamlike place. Maybe he’d get through this, he thought. Or maybe the storm had set him adrift in the endless vast lake, never to be seen again.
* * *
Deborah stared dully at the shallow notches she had dug in the wall by the stove. Four days had passed since she had been left all alone on the island. She wasn’t sure why she felt it necessary to make a record of her days in the cabin, to mark them off, but some compulsion for order and history urged her to do so. The storm had abated, leaving great heaps and drifts of snow blanketing the wilderness. The strange empty beauty of the snow-covered land took her breath away even as it frightened her. The snow blotted out everything—the roadways and the shape of the land, the rocks and cliffs, even some of the smaller buildings like the Wicks’ weir house and Ilsa’s gardening shed.
How tempting it was to picture herself as a small part of the landscape, cloaked by a perfect covering of pure white. In her more eccentric moments she was tempted to walk out and let the snowfall take her, cover all her flaws and scars. But she always talked herself out of it, because she knew that the rough, jagged landscape inside her could never be fully hidden. It was something that had happened to her, something she had to learn to live with.
But it was hard. So hard.
She was
weakening. She could feel it in her chest, in her bones. The constant work of keeping the fire burning sapped her strength. A steady, bland diet of cornmeal cakes with syrup proved to be inadequate. Most of all, the complete nothingness of her isolation beat her down.
She didn’t know what to do with herself. If she wasn’t careful, her thoughts wandered to the deep, dark places inside herself, places she did not want to go for fear of what she would discover there. And if she somehow found herself in that dark place, she felt she would never find her way back into the light.
“I need an occupation,” she said aloud to the empty room. “I’ll go mad if I don’t find one.”
She searched the cabin, but found no paper, nothing to write with and reading failed to hold her attention for long. Tom Silver had been annoyingly thorough in clearing out the place for the winter.
It was a terrible blow to realize that she knew of no way to entertain herself. She had no inner resources for passing the time. All her life, entertainment and pastime had been provided for her, just like the tea that magically appeared each afternoon on a silver tray. She didn’t have to do anything but show up.
How pale and empty her life had been, she reflected. How shameful that she had not noticed. She’d existed as someone half-alive, letting the other half slumber in bland ignorance. Here in the terrible winter woods, she was coming to know herself in a way that used to be obscured by the dizzying social whirl of Chicago.
Her gaze fell upon the rickety box of quilting scraps under the bedstead. She remembered the images of birds in flight she had thought of during her first quilting lesson.
For the first time in days, she felt a hint of warmth; a pressure, a little surge, a thing so rarely felt that it took her some moments to recognize it. It was a clutch of inspiration. She realized the magnificent quilts made by Ilsa and the others came from years of practice. If she could create something half so fine, she would be satisfied. A project, then. There was a certain comfort in having a project.
As she laid out scissors and muslin, Deborah was amazed to hear herself humming. At last, a project to give shape and color to her days. No longer a prisoner of the white silence of winter, she had actually found something to do.
She began by strewing the colorful scraps across the muslin sheet. Most of the fabric came from torn child-sized shirts and nightgowns she knew had once belonged to Asa. How much nicer, she thought, to turn the scraps into a quilt than consigning them to rags. She had almost no memory of her mother. She couldn’t stand for that to happen to Tom. Perhaps this would help him remember the things he’d shared with the boy she’d never known.
Working by both instinct and the remembered instructions from Ilsa and Celia, she grouped the colors in patches. She stood on a stool above the work area, peering down at it with the concentration of a master painter. Unlike the dry, mechanical lessons she’d endured in her art classes, taught by starving artists who were bored and resentful of their overprivileged, uninspired pupils, this excited her. All on its own, an idea began to emerge, and suddenly she could see the finished quilt as if it actually existed. She pictured the goldeneyes and mergansers soaring over the lake or swimming along the shore. Creating the design was a new and curiously exhilarating experience.
She had no idea if it was good or bad. She only knew that it pleased her to snip the soft bits of cloth into shapes and to lay them out in a pattern. The deep blues and greens reminded her of woods and water, with faded denim for the color of the sky. Recalling the way Ilsa and Celia had worked, she separated the quilt into large sections. First came the cutting and piecing, then the application of the colored pieces to the muslin, making certain the pattern had logic and balance.
She fell to her task with a smile on her face, and the flash of the needle took on a rhythm all its own. She savored every moment of the sewing, wondering if it was the novelty of making her own quilt that appealed to her, or if she actually loved the work itself. It didn’t matter, she decided. She had found an occupation, and she would pursue it for as long as it took. Somehow, it made the idea of facing a long winter alone much more bearable.
The labor of her hands calmed her mind. It was quite remarkable, she realized, how the work of quilting seemed to quiet her thoughts. Even the posture of sitting with the blanket spread over her lap promoted warmth and serenity. The worries of the past slid away. By the time she sought her bed next to the fire, she felt calm and sleepy rather than nervous or jumpy. She knew she was growing weak from the poor diet and winter conditions, but even so, she was learning to rely on herself, to know what to expect from herself.
* * *
That night she dreamed about the bear again.
The nightmare came on tiptoe as it always did, whispering threats that spread like poisoned wine through her body. The rearing bear advanced on her, and she stumbled back, her feet pounding, pounding on the floor of the red-draped opera salon as she gritted her teeth and tried to run from him….
The pounding dragged her out of the dream.
She came awake with a start, sitting up straight and breathing hard.
“A dream,” she said between panted breaths. “It was only a dream.”
The glow from the banked coals in the stove cast a faint orange light across the planked floor, but everything else lay shrouded in darkness. Outside, the wind howled at the windows with the voice of a mezzo soprano. But within the black shriek of the storm, she heard a thumping sound.
Perhaps the door to the woodshed had flown loose, she reasoned. Perhaps a shutter or awning was banging against a building. But even as she rationalized her fear, she began to move, stumbling through the darkness. Groping along the wall, she found the buckshot gun where she had left it after the first nightmare.
The mysterious thud sounded closer than ever. She envisioned a man-eating bear trying to paw its way into the cabin. Her hands shook as she checked the chamber and cocked the gun. At least a bear made a big target, she thought, trying to still the trembling of her hands.
Shooting was one of those genteel pastimes her father approved of. It was considered the sport of the rich to destroy clay pigeons. At her father’s lakeside home she and her friends had laughed their way through shooting matches. She never dreamed she would have to shoot to save her life.
Now she was glad for those lazy afternoons, glad Phoebe’s brother had taken it upon himself to teach her to shoot along with his giggling younger sisters. She was even glad Phoebe Palmer had such a competitive nature, for she had goaded Deborah to practice.
She seated the gun against her shoulder.
The cabin door flew open. Wind and snow blew in with the force of slung blades. And with them came the bear.
The giant intruder stood at full height, filling the doorway, bigger and hairier than the one in her nightmare. She jerked the trigger with her finger, and the gun exploded.
The creature gave a strange moan of pain, then keeled over.
TWENTY-TWO
Pain from the recoil of the shotgun reared up Deborah’s arm and slammed into her shoulder. She dropped the gun with a thunk. The acrid burn of gunpowder filled the room as wind and snow poured in through the open door.
And on the floor lay the man she had just killed.
In that last instant, as her terrified finger had tightened on the trigger, she had seen that the intruder was no hungry marauding bear, but a man covered in bearskins for warmth. Yet the realization had come too late. Had she swung the barrel away in time? Had the old, unreliable gun misfired? No, for once her aim had been true and the weapon had worked.
Bright flames from the logs flickered over her victim. Merciful heavens, had she committed murder?
She sank to her knees beside the hulking, fur-clad form. Even now, fear buzzed through her. She’d rendered him helpless, but she was still afraid. He lay facedown, immobile, silent. In the dimness she could not see the gunshot wound. Gingerly she touched his shoulder.
“Are you…?” She didn’t know what sh
e wanted to ask. She pushed a little harder, but the man didn’t move. “Dear God, are you dead?” she whispered, pressing frantically at his shoulder.
The body rolled to one side. She pulled off the fur hood and firelight from the stove illuminated an unshaven, very familiar face.
“Oh my God,” she said, her voice rising in a sob. “I’ve shot Tom Silver!” Her teeth chattered uncontrollably. Please don’t be dead. Please God please please please….
The disjointed prayer shrieked in her mind as she opened the stove to light the room. At the same moment, Smokey scampered inside, his paws caked with snow and ice. He leaped around in a frenzy, but Deborah spared no time for him.
The slicing north wind intruded through the open door, chilling the tears on her face. Pushing the door shut, she turned her attention to Tom. Then, from a place she didn’t know she had inside her, Deborah found an eerie, focused calm. He was frozen, shot, maybe dead. Getting hysterical would not help him.
She took his face between her hands, wincing when she felt the hard chill on his skin. She supposed she had always known he had a wonderful face, stamped with strength and character, but she had never let herself see that until this moment. Now she might be too late. The coolness of his skin struck her like a blow. “I’m not losing you,” she said between gritted teeth. “I won’t let you go.”
She bent over him and put her ear very close to his nose and mouth, but couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not. Knowing she had to find out where he was wounded, she pulled at the leather buckles of the thick bearskin coat and parted it. He wore layers of clothing—a knitted shirt and two flannel chemises under his buckskins—and she had to pull these aside to see if she could detect a pulse in his neck. The smell of snow and pine emanated from him as she worked, and she wondered how he had come to be here.
At last she revealed his neck and put her hand there.
