Chapter 23
Pike froze, body and expression gone wooden as he asked, “My Ginny?”
Bram nodded. “It’s her. It’s Ginny.”
Zach had only met Bram’s secretary once, when his father showed Grace, Zach, and Bonnie around his new office near the base of Ajax.
“You see? If you’re smarter, if you work harder, you might earn something like this,” Bram had said as they all dutifully acted impressed and pretended to care as he highlighted the gaudy, gold-edged desk. The antique rug. The size of the place.
There was a snapping sound somewhere in Zach’s head, as if a gear had audibly clicked into place, and the buried face metamorphosed; no longer his mother.
“It’s not her.” Zach rocked back and forth where he sat on the snow, repeating the words to make them true. “It’s not her, it’s not her, it’s not her.”
Ginny had given him and Bonnie candy out of her desk drawer in the anteroom of Bram’s office. Held a finger to her lips. “Our little secret, okay?”
Zach had long ago recognized that his mother conformed to a sameness.
It was as though she’d tuned into a channel that issued undeniable orders regarding appearance; messages Ginny also received and complied with, as did almost all the other mothers.
Which meant that both Ginny and his mother had sun-kissed skin in all seasons.
Both their faces were lineless, despite his mother, Zach guessed, being about a decade older.
They had the same fine, straight nose. The same long hair (in both Ginny’s and his mother’s case, blond, though a glossy brown also seemed permitted).
Similar dark brows on polished foreheads.
Bodies that curved thin to not thin. Lips that stayed full even as they smiled down at him.
Not that Ginny, not that these other women, were as beautiful as his mother. Other than Bonnie, no one was as beautiful as his mother. That would be impossible.
Ginny’s rimed hair had platinum streaks. Her frozen lips were larger. The whole shape of her face different, nothing at all like his mother’s now.
He should have realized. Was he already forgetting her? He closed his eyes tight against this possibility, head echoing with ocean sounds as if submerged, too soggy to think.
Bram and Dave worked with shovels to widen the hole Zach had created, slowly exposing Ginny to the sky.
“You said she wasn’t coming. You said she texted she wasn’t coming,” Pike said from his remove, punctuating each “you” by pointing an accusatory finger at Bram.
“Who is it?” Dave asked Bram.
“Virginia George,” Bram said low. “My secretary. The one who was supposed to come help set up yesterday, but canceled.”
“You’re sure it’s her?”
“Yup.”
“It can’t be her.” Pike slammed his probe into the snow and released it, the metal vibrating with a twang, then began stalking back and forth, still refusing to approach but muttering to himself, thick arms crossed and eyes fixed on the snow.
“Did he know her?” Dave asked Bram in a low voice.
“They dated for a couple of months last year,” Bram said, then grimaced in a way that silently communicated he thought that Pike was overreacting, overemotional.
Dave pursed his lips tight and nodded in silent agreement with Bram’s disapproval.
But Pike’s anger, his denial, didn’t appear unreasonable to Zach. Zach’s heart beat so hard it pained him. He couldn’t breathe quite right, as if he were sipping air through a narrow straw.
He blinked back tears. He’d never see his mother again, even dead. It was as if she’d somehow been snatched away yet again.
“You think she might’ve had a sat phone?” Dave asked as he continued digging.
“No idea, but we need to check.”
“Don’t dig it out,” Pike said. “It’s not our responsibility.”
“Wait.” Dave paused his work. “If she had a sat phone, had anything that could help, wouldn’t she have used it yesterday?”
Bram’s shovel hesitated in midair. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—she had to’ve have gotten lost yesterday, right?
She probably changed her mind after texting you.
Hell, even if she tried to get in touch to let you know she’d changed her mind, how would you have known?
You wouldn’t have had a signal. So she’d have tried to hike up alone, maybe thinking you knew she was on the way.
Had to’ve gotten off the trail somehow, or else she accidentally overshot the hut, got lost, and ended up here. ”
The weight of the scraping, dragging noise outside the outhouse. The figure whipping like a blackened flag in the wind, too malleable, too loose, to be human.
Had it been Ginny? Ginny lost in last night’s storm, too frightened or disoriented to notice or understand or see the lure of the hut’s light, trekking uphill until she tripped, wallowed, got hurt, or until she became so exhausted that she collapsed and—
His silence in the outhouse, the way he’d watched that dark outline travel through the bitter cold while he’d been safe and warm in the firelight, imbued his blood with a slug trail of guilt and horror.
You gotta be able to speak up, kid.
It was his fault. It had to be. And Ginny had been punished for his mistakes, as if there was no fairness to the world at all.
Zach slouched into himself as if his very core had been culled out. Would the men be able to read the awful mistake on his face? Somehow intuit that he could have helped Ginny, could have called out to her from the outhouse?
It was his fault. A nauseating urge to confess washed over him.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
“You’re right,” Bram said. “It would’ve been easy enough to accidentally take the Mariah trail. I nearly did it myself yesterday. From the angle the trail’s at, Pan was so snow covered you could barely see it. And that was before the storm.”
A deep, pained moan caused Zach to look up.
Pike leaned over the place where Ginny was trapped, hands steepled over his mouth and nose.
He fell to his knees, whipped off a glove, and stroked Ginny’s cheek, her hair, with his bare hand.
He leaned down, and his lips brushed her frozen skin in a way that made the others flinch.
Pike looked up at them, face stretched strange and pained. “I don’t understand. This can’t happen. How could she do this?”
“She must’ve gotten lost, Pike. She’s been out here awhile.” Dave turned to Bram, tapped at his own eye to indicate the way Ginny’s eyes were iced over, and added quietly, “Did you see?”
His fault. All his fault.
“How could she do this?” Pike asked everyone and no one.
Dave put a hand on Pike’s shoulder. “She must have come up yesterday and gotten disoriented. Confused in that storm, maybe. And then the avalanche—brought her down. I’m so sorry, Pike.”
A crazed, overstretched smile flashed across Pike’s face before vanishing. He stood. Stared down at his hands and turned them palms up, then palms down as if trying to figure out what to do with them before meeting Dave’s eyes. “I can help you dig.”
“Sure,” Dave said. “But it’s okay if not. It’s obvious she…meant something to you.”
Pike nodded rapidly, unable to look at any of them now. He chewed on his lower lip, and seeing Pike draw blood, Zach wondered if hurting himself like that helped Pike repress tears the same way it did Zach.
“I think we should still check,” Bram said. “Still dig her out. Just in case she has some way to call for help on her.”
Dave gave a curt nod. “As long as we move fast. I don’t want Russ waiting.”
The men redoubled their efforts digging. It didn’t occur to Zach to offer to help or even to move. He could only stare.
All his fault.
Ginny’s profile was visible, her long hair lacing in and out of the snow, and as the men exposed more of her body it became obvious the avalanche had folded her in half, leg next to her neck, boot extended out of the snow at a slight angle.
That was why Zach had exposed her face despite digging next to her foot.
Glimpses of something bright pink and knit. A turtleneck sweater.
The surge of questions provided a momentary distraction from the sickening chew of Zach’s guilt. How was it possible? Had the avalanche torn off her helmet? Her goggles? Her coat and pack?
Out came an arm twisted over her breasts, the spot between elbow and wrist bent as if a new joint had been created there.
Zach winced. The bone had obviously snapped, though the break was hidden in the sleeve of her sweater.
Maybe Ginny had taken her coat off to assess it.
Or maybe it had happened when the avalanche had tumbled her dead body down, down—
“What the—? What’s that?” Dave dropped his shovel and its scoop of snow, his voice gone high-pitched. The hand he pointed with trembled. “Is that—what is that?”
Zach had to know. Had to bear witness to all he’d done. He stood up to see better.
In removing a shovelful of snow, Dave had exposed a thick, curving stick, crusted an icy red.
“The hell?” Bram muttered. He levered his shovel beneath the block of compacted snow where the strange object was stuck, and hoisted it away.
Bram stumbled backward. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”
Ginny’s ribs reached out toward the sky like curled fingers. The blood that remained on the bones, the webbing of muscle that was left, burned bright in the flat light, the vivid red of it preserved by ice and cold.
Snow packed Ginny’s abdomen. Snow dotted the bloodied bones. The pink sweater wrapped around her belly torn, raveled, stained, and did nothing to cover where skin was missing, where seemingly all the muscle and viscera of Ginny’s stomach and lower chest was simply gone.
One of the exposed ribs was broken, its jagged edge an eggy white.
The viciousness of the sight felt like the puncture of a previously unknown part of Zach’s brain. And yet the grotesqueness of it all had a gnawing, insidious familiarity.
The elk. It was like the elk.