Chapter 25
Zach trailed behind the silent line of men, every bit of him taut and his mind reverberating with a humming swarm of dark thoughts.
The diamonds were the same size. The same shape. They were a set. A matching set. There was no way around it.
The curling thing dangling from the hairs had to be that missing piece of scalp. That’s why the hairs wouldn’t release it. They were rooted there. It explained why all of it was dark and flaky. Blood.
The irreconcilability of the facts detached Zach from his exertions, and he floated instead of hiked up, up, up over deadly terrain toward the spot Russ waited.
His fingertips swelled with the urge to wash his hands, scrub his nails. Yesterday he’d touched the earring, the scalp, the hair, the calcified blood and dust.
The earring in the hut. But Ginny buried in the snow, broken by the avalanche, her stomach opened. The monster had consumed her to hollowness; had left behind that wrecked hull of ribs.
What had Dave said?
She must have come up yesterday and gotten lost. Confused in that storm, maybe. And then the avalanche—brought her down.
But the earring had been in the hut before Zach and Bram arrived.
The group stopped, startling Zach out of his grim reverie.
Russ sat with the Mylar blanket cowled over his head and Zach tried to accept that they were already here.
Time could stretch long during bad things, tight during good.
And now? It contorted into bendy, unknowable shapes because things were at their very worst. Their least comprehensible.
“How you feeling, Russ?” Dave helped his son stand and rubbed his arms through the crinkle of the blanket.
“Great. No animal attacks,” Russ said with a crooked smile.
Seeing his father’s stricken expression, Russ grew serious.
“I’m better, Dad. I can walk okay. But breathing still hurts.
” Russ took in the assembled group. A realization bloomed and he went as sickly as when Zach had first dug him from the snow.
“Where’s—where’s the others?” Russ stammered.
Dave cleared his throat. “We found Shane. He—didn’t make it. We couldn’t find anyone else. And—and we found Virginia.”
“Who?”
Dave leaned close to whisper, to protect Pike from the words.
But Zach could still hear what Dave said, and he supposed Pike could, too.
“Bram’s secretary. Pike’s ex-girlfriend.
Ginny. The one who was supposed to join but didn’t?
She must have decided to come after all.
Got lost. And…something happened to her.
An animal had been at her. Either killed her?
Or got to her after she got hurt. We found her. Her body.”
Russ shook his head, the Mylar blanket falling down to reveal his dented helmet. “What? What do you—”
Dave cut him off. “The point is, we need to get out of here. Between the avalanches and whatever…happened…to Virginia, we need to get back to the hut as quick as we can, all right?”
“Won’t there be a helicopter or whatever?”
“It’s been about”—Dave glanced at his watch—“three hours since the guide called. They could still come, but with the storm, who knows. We’ve got to do what we can for ourselves.”
Russ’s shoulders slumped, but he nodded. “Okay. It’s just—how am I supposed to hike out? There’s so much snow. It hurts and…my skis, my pack? They’re gone.”
“How do we do this?” Dave asked the group.
“He can take my kid’s skis,” Bram said. “His poles.”
Zach’s head whipped to his father so quickly pain shot through his hurt shoulder. But Bram focused only on Dave.
“Zach, I’ll give you one of my skis,” Dave offered. “It’s big, but it’ll do.”
They reshuffled equipment and began to climb uphill toward the ridge following the softened tracks the men had made searching for Russ and Zach hours before.
The bruises, cuts, and aches of whiplash were starting to show themselves as the group’s adrenaline faded.
Bram shrugged off his coat, lifted his sweater to have them assess a dark purple bruise along his neck, shoulder, and back, like a folded wing.
Pike complained of a pulled thigh muscle, sharp, incoherent jabs of pain in his midsection, a high-pitched humming noise.
He rolled up a sleeve to inspect an elbow gone deep blue-black.
Zach floundered through the powder. Though his feet were large for his age, the adult ski binding didn’t fit right, the leg without a ski plunging down deep and useless.
Even so, he was faster than Russ and Dave.
Whatever was wrong in Russ’s chest turned the teenager’s breathing to a wheezing rattle when his heart rate ticked up.
Though Russ’s face went tight with pain at each step, he pressed forward with a persistence that kept Zach moving, too.
They’d ascended less than fifty feet up the steep pitch when Dave declared the situation untenable.
Someone needed to get to the hut and bring back a sled so that they could pull Russ uphill.
It reminded Zach of a riddle: How to get a fox, a cabbage, and a rabbit across a river without anything being eaten, and only one at a time fitting in the boat?
“Dave, you agree you and I are in the best”—Bram’s eyes rested on then shot away from Pike before he continued speaking—“uh…condition? To pull Russ up?”
Dave nodded. “Yeah. But I’d like to stay with my boy. You okay with getting the sled and coming back? Then I’ll be rested, and can pull Russ up.”
A barely perceptible grimace passed over Bram’s face, but his response was quick.
“Of course.” He gestured at Pike and Zach.
“The three of us will head to the hut. Then I’ll come back here with the skis Pike used, the kid-size skis, and the sled.
That way you, me, and Russ will each have a pair of skis, just in case there’s any trouble pulling him. ”
They redistributed equipment. No longer in motion, the sweat on Zach’s spine went icy and a deep tremor snared him, looping all the way into his stomach to pull at the snow he kept eating to stave off dehydration.
He needed to get back to the hut. Needed to strip off his soaked base layer and get himself dry and warm as soon as possible.
“Stay safe,” Bram said to Dave and Russ. “And keep your radios on.”
Bram silently took the lead, breaking trail as Pike and Zach fell into line behind him.
Though Zach’s muscles burned, though his neck and shoulders ached, the warmth of exertion was a relief and his mind returned to its confused churn.
Ginny’s coat, backpack, mittens, goggles, skis, and poles—missing. But she was wearing her ski boots. Her snow pants. Could the avalanche have ripped all that off her? It had torn skis and poles from the others; ripped away Shane’s and Russ’s packs. It was possible.
But her coat? And the avalanche couldn’t explain the missing earring. Couldn’t explain her stomach; the way her sweater had been torn to reveal chewed ribs.
An animal had been at her. Either killed her? Or got to her after.
No matter how logical it was, he couldn’t picture a coyote or mountain lion destroying Ginny. The violence of it spoke to needled teeth, scabrous skin, switchblade claws.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
Only Shane and Jon had arrived at the hut before Zach and Bram. Maybe one of them hid an Underself, a cold-blooded viciousness that could rip away earring, scalp, and belly. Maybe behind the closed door of the hut, Shane or Jon had shown his true self to Ginny.
It seemed impossible that Jon’s lazy affability could turn to violence.
But Shane knew Ginny. On the way up Mariah, Bram had mentioned a relationship, said Ginny was acting crazy and talking too much.
That Ginny might tattle about something to Shane’s wife.
Then out of Zach’s earshot Shane and Bram had come to some kind of understanding, and after that Shane hadn’t seemed bothered at all.
It was difficult to picture Shane doing anything messy, anything difficult. But no one liked a tattletale. Especially a bully. If the secret Ginny had was big enough, if she was really going to tell Arlo, would Shane have hurt her?
Zach’s head pounded at trying to untangle the knots of the grown-ups’ cares and worries. He’d lay out the chain of events, the order of things. That would be more straightforward.
Ginny had to have arrived at the hut earlier than Bram and Zach, because her earring had been waiting there.
No way to know if Shane and Jon arrived before or after Ginny, but they had already left the hut by the time Zach and his father got there.
Bram had gone downhill to get service and call Ginny.
Shane had returned soon after Bram left, complaining he’d lost track of Jon.
And Jon hadn’t had his radio on, or at least hadn’t responded.
Jon had come back to the hut before Bram.
At some point Bram had gotten reception, texted with Ginny, then headed back uphill.
But that didn’t make sense. Ginny couldn’t have arrived at the hut before Zach and his father, the earring torn from her, scalp ripped, then later on been low enough on the trail to have reception, and whole enough, alive enough, to text with Bram.
Unless his father had lied. Or unless someone else had used her phone.
And Ginny’s car. Her Jeep hadn’t been at the trailhead when Bram and Zach began their ascent. There had only been one other car when they arrived, presumably the one Shane and Jon had driven in together.
Steve, Dave, and Russ had come up next. Pike soon after. And they hadn’t seen Ginny.
Maybe Ginny had driven with Jon and Shane. They’d all gone to the hut. Jon or Shane or both had done—that—to Ginny, unknowingly leaving the earring behind.
The memory of the earring spindled ever upward in Zach’s throat like something that needed to be spat out. Purged.
It was possible Jon hadn’t been out skiing at all, that he’d been downhill texting Bram using Ginny’s phone.
Had hurried up to arrive before Bram returned.
He was faster than Bram, more skilled. It was possible.
Then in the dark he or Shane might have dragged Ginny’s body up the mountain, just like Dave planned to drag the injured Russ up on a sled.
Already Zach saw fissures open in these theories.
Bram had said Shane didn’t know Ginny was even coming, so why would Shane, Jon, and Ginny have driven up together?
How could Jon have avoided Bram if they’d both descended to get reception?
And more than anything, why? Why would they have done it?
How big could a secret really be if Shane had hardly seemed to care about it earlier that day when he spoke with Bram?
He’d tell his father about the earring. Who else was there to tell? Bram knew things about Shane and Ginny Zach didn’t fully understand. And though Zach had no idea what to do, Bram always had strong opinions, as if what he thought should be done was always the most obvious thing, the most correct.
A woosh noise startled Zach, who looked ahead to see the source. Bram was about thirty feet ahead, and had grabbed a branch that had released a rush of powder. He coughed deep and rough.
Again Zach was struck by his father’s strength. Despite being hampered by his injuries and a lack of technique, Bram still managed to break trail and stay ahead of Zach and Pike.
The slope tipped to its most vertical as they neared the Bowl’s rim, forcing them to sidestep uphill until they broke out onto the open ridgeline and stood catching their breath, each looking instinctively toward the break that had released the second avalanche some impossible-to-measure distance away.
Though obscured by the falling snow, the line that had cut free all that death seemed to pulse with power and warning.
“You know what they say,” Bram said with a tight smile. “It’s all downhill from here.”
The ski down the gentle slope to the hut was so pleasant, so easy after the difficult climb, after the whiplashing terrors of the day, that despite the cold, as he skimmed through the powder Zach laughed. At hearing it he sputtered, choked. It sounded so foreign.
Like a child’s laugh.