by Alan Russell
Baer tromped out of the cabin with the food. The dogs were too important a resource for him to mistreat them for very long. Nina wished that was also true of her.
With Baer outside, Nina didn’t have to hide her emotions. The covers shook as she laughed quietly. Baer would only be this angry for one reason. La Loba was alive.
And so am I, Nina thought. And so am I.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Bears have the right idea,” said Martin. “Sleep away the winter.”
“Let me guess,” said Hamilton. “You’ll be eating Chinese food on Christmas.”
The year was passing far too quickly. Christmas was only three weeks away.
“Chinese takeout,” said Martin, “with the TV tuned to that channel with the log burning. That’s what I did last Christmas.”
“You sound like you’re an old man. What are you, thirty-one?”
“I just turned thirty-three.”
“Do you think Elese would approve of you spending Christmas eating moo goo gai pan?”
“As long as it doesn’t have MSG in it, she’d probably be okay.”
Hamilton saw a small smile come to Martin’s face. He continued, “Mu shu pork with plenty of plum sauce was always her favorite.”
Then Hamilton noticed the other man’s smile turning into a frown. “We never had a Christmas together.”
Hamilton nodded to show he’d heard and went back to looking out the window.
“I’m assuming you didn’t share our find with our friends at AST and Major Kong,” said Martin.
“And what makes you assume that?”
“You’re up here flying with me.”
“I let the fates decide if I’d tell them about our spaghetti-sauce find,” said Hamilton. “All they had to do was call me with an update. Since I never heard from either the troopers or Sergeant Wood, I decided not to share, at least not until we confirmed our find and searched the surrounding area.”
“Did Donnelly’s reward have anything to do with you keeping your mouth shut?”
“You think greed is the great motivator?”
“It inspired a lot of people to look for Nina Granville.”
“Sorry to disappoint you. I assume I don’t qualify for the reward. Law enforcement is typically excluded.”
“But you’re doing this on your own time.”
“You don’t need to remind me. My wife does a good enough job of that.”
“You should get some reward for all the unpaid time you’ve put in on these cases. Or at least a reward for the time you spent on the case when you weren’t investigating me.”
Martin’s words came with a smile, but Hamilton heard their undertones.
“Your wife’s disappearance got its hooks into me.”
It was Martin’s turn to nod to show he’d heard. A minute later he asked, “So, what would you do with a million dollars?”
“You mean right after I quarterback my team to a Super Bowl victory?”
“Even cops are allowed a pipe dream.”
Hamilton shrugged and shook his head. “I guess I’d put a lot of it into college funds. My oldest kid is already sixteen. You want sticker shock? Look at the prices of colleges these days. And I’ve been promising Carrie ever since we got married that we’d go on some nice trip, maybe finally get to Europe. We never really had a honeymoon.”
“I wish I could say the same thing.”
Hamilton wondered if his gallows humor was a defense mechanism or a sign that he was healing.
He raised his binoculars and once again began scanning the terrain around them. Martin had calculated various courses based on what he would have done if he’d been piloting a plane in trouble. If Tomcat’s plane had gone down, that would explain a lot of things. Of course, collecting Grizzly’s skeleton wouldn’t be as satisfying as bringing him in, but if Nina Granville’s skeleton was also identified at the crash site, they could connect the dots to Elese Martin and put two cases to rest.
Snow began falling. Earlier there had been rain. They’d also flown through clear skies.
“Isn’t this the kind of weather that got Tomcat into trouble?” Hamilton asked.
“His was a lot worse. This is just a little bit shitty. You’ll know a lot shitty when we encounter it.”
“You’re not the most reassuring pilot I’ve ever flown with.”
“And I’m sure I’m not the most experienced pilot, either.”
“There you go again.”
When the snow started falling harder, Hamilton asked, “Are we there yet?” When his kids were young, they’d driven him crazy asking that.
Martin checked the GPS reading. “Almost. Keep looking for a crash site.”
“I’ll keep praying I don’t end up as part of a crash site.”
Five minutes later Martin pointed his index finger toward the ground. “You want tomato sauce with that?” he asked.
“Glad to see that son of a bitch is still there. I’ve been wondering if we both might have seen the same mirage.”
“We’re lucky the tomato sauce was absorbed into the ice. Otherwise the rain would have washed it away.”
Martin nosed the plane down. They were flying with tundra tires, and he needed to find a suitable landing spot where there weren’t large snowdrifts. Most bush pilots were already flying with skis, but he’d explained that he hadn’t trained with them. He took his measure of a few likely spots. Hamilton had some misgivings as to how he was doing his measuring.
“Running into a tree isn’t my idea of a good landing,” he said. “How about getting this crate above the tree line?”
Martin nodded, and the plane gained some altitude. Then they circled the area again.
“It’s not only the landing I need to think about,” said Martin. “There’s also the subsequent takeoff.”
“I like the sound of landing, but I like the sound of takeoff even more.”
Martin made his choice, and the plane began its descent toward a landing area about a half mile away from the tomato sauce. Hamilton closed his eyes, unable to watch. He was glad his job came with a life insurance policy. The payout might be enough to cover the expense of college for his kids as well as his funeral.
“Smooth as could be,” said Martin.
“Was that after the fourth bounce or the fifth?”
The landing might not have been perfect, but at least they were down safely. “Let’s get moving before we freeze to death,” Hamilton said.
Martin consulted his handheld GPS, and the two men began walking. They’d gone no more than a hundred yards when they saw what looked like a flag flapping in the wind. As they drew closer, they saw their flag was actually a mesh bag impaled on a snag. Hamilton pulled the bag down and displayed the find.
“Long-grain enriched rice,” said Martin.
“I kind of doubt this was the setting for a wedding.”
“Fifty pounds,” said Martin, still reading.
Hamilton went down on his haunches, his eyes moving around the area.
“What are you looking for?”
“Traces of rice,” he said. “I can’t see much, but the wind could have scattered it, or voles, mice, and birds might have found it. Not to mention my eyes aren’t what they used to be.”
He ran his glove over the mixture of snow and ice and nodded. “Some of the grains are mixed in with the snow and ice, making it all but invisible.”
He straightened, then folded the remnants of the mesh bag and put it in an evidence bag he’d brought along.
“The plane must have been in a bad way for them to have been throwing everything out,” said Martin. “That’s desperation time.”
The two men continued forward; neither spoke. Hamilton hoped they wouldn’t stumble over any plane wreckage, or worse, bodies. Finally they came to the red-hued ice. He didn’t say what he was thinking: the whole area looked like one big blood splatter. He’d worked a few horrific crime scenes that looked similar to this.
He kneele
d down and pulled out a penknife. He chopped free a red icicle, stuck it in his mouth, and began sucking. His face didn’t give away anything.
“Well?” said Martin.
“You say to-mate-o, I say to-ma-toe.”
Martin didn’t look amused.
“It could use some garlic and basil,” said Hamilton, “but it’s definitely tomato sauce.”
“So what the hell do we do now?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The sun had set a few hours earlier, but the dusk colors lingered in the sky. Nina stood in front of the cabin’s only window. It seemed pathetically small and made the cabin seem that much smaller. There was only the one window to prevent heat loss, but she longed for more natural light. As the days had shortened, she’d begun to feel like a spindly plant desperately reaching for light.
Baer was working at his furs; there was no escaping the sights and smells of his handiwork in the small space. Nina hated the whole process. So much death went into his work. He was always busy stretching and scraping and tanning his kills. Nina especially hated the braining, which involved Baer’s taking the animal’s brain and essentially making a soup out of it that he rubbed into the hide. The stink was more than she could stand; luckily her morning sickness was more manageable now. Baer had given up asking her to help process the furs. Whenever Nina got too near his work and those rancid brains, she started retching.
The monster thought that was a sign of her being weak. He mockingly called her a “delicate flower.” One day he would learn she wasn’t.
Nina hoped that day would be soon. Was she already entering the second trimester? She tried to count the days of her captivity. The calendar date she came up with surprised her.
“Is today Christmas?”
Baer looked up from his work. “Why? Santa Claus might not live too far from here, but I don’t think he’ll be making any deliveries tonight.”
“So, it is Christmas?”
“I don’t follow the days on the calendar too closely. I’m more of a clock-watcher.”
She could hear the amusement in the monster’s voice but didn’t respond to it, hoping he wouldn’t say more. But he was already on his soapbox.
“Of course, I don’t watch the same clock that others do. They run around doing their nine-to-five being dupes to their timepieces. The clock I’m watching is the Doomsday Clock. You ever hear of it?”
Nina shook her head. It was her fault for having gotten him started.
“The Doomsday Clock is operated by a group of scientists. And before you assume they’re crackpots, that couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re all Nobel laureates. Imagine the ultimate brain trust. And where do you think all these geniuses have pegged mankind on the Doomsday Clock?”
“I don’t know,” Nina said.
“According to them, it’s five minutes to midnight. They just reaffirmed that time. Of course, it went unnoticed by the masses. People around the world are too blind to realize it’s almost midnight. And you know what happens at midnight? Game over. It’s the end of the line for almost all of humanity. We’ll have a good view of the end of the world from here.”
“I think it is Christmas,” said Nina, “which isn’t a day on which I want to hear about the end of the world.”
Baer made a disgusted noise, but she didn’t care. What were her parents and brother doing? Nina had spent Labor Day with her family and told them she wouldn’t be joining them for Christmas this year. She’d agreed to be with the Donnelly family in Greenwich.
Are they thinking about me tonight? Are they still looking for me? Does anyone believe I’m still alive?
“I love being in New York at this time of year,” she said, speaking more to herself than to Baer. “When you walk the streets of New York, you hear Christmas music playing out of department-store loudspeakers. And on every corner there’s a Santa Claus ringing a bell. The city is awash in colors. There’s red, green, and silver everywhere. The window displays are like pieces of art. Every year I go to Macy’s just to see what they have on display. It’s always something different and something unique.”
Nina had always thought she hated the commercialism of Christmas. In New York the department stores started actively pushing the holidays in October. More than two months of Christmas hype made it easy to burn out on the season. But now she was nostalgic for all of that.
“I’ve seen pictures of New York City,” said Baer. “It looks like an ant colony. I can’t imagine anything worse.”
Nina stared out the small window. She didn’t expect to see anything. There was just darkness beyond the double-pane glass. That’s all there ever was at night.
“Oh!” she said, an exclamation more than a word. “Oh!” she repeated.
The magnificent colors could not be contained by the small window and swept into the cabin. Unmindful of how cold it was, Nina ran to the door and opened it.
And there she saw the sky dancing, and the land awash in the Northern Lights. She found herself extending her hands to the shimmering waves of green, purple, and orange, and the hues of red and blue. The entire horizon was awash in wavy light.
Nina walked down the path, wanting to be closer to the light, wanting a vantage point where the vista wasn’t obscured by the silhouettes of trees. She found an open area. The sky was afire. The lights were alive, undulating and throbbing. In her head she heard music; the tune was as unknown to her as what she was seeing. Wild magic filled the air. If leprechauns, brownies, and elves had appeared in front of her and danced like dervishes, Nina wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
I would join them in their dance, she thought.
“The aurora borealis,” said a voice from behind her.
Baer tried to contain the uncontainable with a name.
Nina moved away from him. Her eyes were on the sky. She saw what Elese had seen and tried to show with her drawing. Nina had always thought Van Gogh’s Starry Night was merely impressionistic exaggeration. Now she would forever think of it as an understatement.
“You’re looking at electronically charged gaseous particles,” Baer said.
“The science can wait,” Nina said.
Her dismissiveness didn’t sit well with Baer. “I thought Harvard girls liked to know the science. Or do you want the explanation offered up by savages? They thought the lights were spirits.”
“They are spirits,” she said.
“You want a light show? Nuclear bombs will produce the greatest light show in history. From here we’ll see the nuclear display of color and winds after every big city in the world gets nuked.”
His talk was killing the magic and making the music in her head grow fainter. Nina wasn’t going to let that happen. She began to whistle, dance, and sing. She raised both of her hands to the pulsating lights, opening up her palms and spreading her arms as if imploring the lights to come closer to her embrace. She didn’t know what tune Elese had whistled; it didn’t matter. She called to the lights.
“What the hell are you doing?” said Baer.
Nina implored the lights to come closer. She wanted to dance with them. They would be her partner.
“You’re acting crazy.”
Baer moved away from her, unsettled. Nina thought of her secret sister.
“The lights hear me,” she said. “They’re coming closer now.”
“You’re fucking nuts,” he said, and then turned around and retreated into the cabin.
Nina heard the door slam, and she was left alone with the streaming lights.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Without a calendar Nina couldn’t be sure if it was New Year’s Day. It didn’t matter, she supposed. She only had one resolution: to get away.
It was scary cold outside, and she dressed carefully. They were going to work the trapline on the kind of inclement day when no one should be venturing outside. She covered herself from head to toe, but in the midst of her layering, she felt it again.
There was something going on in her stoma
ch other than nausea. It was almost like butterflies were fluttering around her gut. The tingling sensation hadn’t felt quite like a pinch, nor had it been indigestion or gas. Every so often she’d felt this little popping, almost like a carbonated bubbling. But now it was more pronounced.
She knew what it was. The baby was kicking.
But it was too soon, wasn’t it? Nina wished she could talk to a doctor or consult some manual. Was this normal? In the movies that first kick was always a joyful time. She’d had friends tear up talking about feeling that first kick. The only thing she was feeling was terror.
Her stomach fluttered again. Denial wasn’t going to help. The baby was giving her a wake-up call. Every kick told her it was time to escape.
She wasn’t ready yet. She was still working on putting together her survival pack. She had found some of the necessary items. They were hidden away, and she prayed that Baer wouldn’t find any of her stash. But she still felt grossly ill prepared.
Physically she was fit. Since her imprisonment her body had changed, and not because of the pregnancy. She’d become leaner and more muscular, had regained much of her old running form. She’d fought through blisters, muscle aches, and hardening herself to the elements. Every day was a rigorous workout. She was getting in shape for a purpose. Vanity wasn’t driving her; desperation was.
During their walkabouts Nina had learned to reconcile the lay of the land with Elese’s maps. Still, it scared her to think that the success or failure of her escape would likely hinge on her being able to successfully navigate the wilderness. She would have to rely on her pathfinding and Elese’s cartography.
At least dying was no longer a foregone conclusion. She wasn’t going out on a suicide mission. She’d become proficient in trapping, could make a fire under adverse conditions, could read tracks and field dress game. Through Elese’s instructions and watching Baer, Nina knew how to make an emergency shelter. She’d made wickiups and snow caves, and had sat out storms in them. And even though Baer had never let her use his rifle, she’d studied him firing it. Given any opportunity, she would be ready to shoot.
