In the Bleak Midwinter

All right. Ten miles to Alan’s Gas and Grocery would take her four to five hours. What about another cabin? She could hike down the mountain until she reached the closest camp road. She had passed one two or three miles before reaching her turnoff. If it was another mile to a cabin it would still be less than half the distance to the store. She could have shelter. Blankets. Probably a fireplace. Maybe even, God willing, a working telephone.

Snow collected on her cheeks and chin. She scrubbed her face with her glove, trying to dry her skin as much as possible. Not heading straight for the Gas and Grocery would be risky, of course. If she couldn’t find a place within a mile of the main road, she would have to retrace her steps. She pulled the parka sleeve away from her wrist and lit up her watch. Almost five o’clock. By the time she reached the next camp road, it would be full dark. Could she trust herself to stay on a narrow, unplowed road at night with a heavy snow falling? Already the underwater blueness was thickening, making distance impossible to judge, swallowing the details of the forest only a few yards away.

The thought she had been pushing aside crystalized, unavoidable. I could die out here. Her stomach lurched as if she’d dropped a thousand feet of altitude in a few seconds. She could become just one more missing person, her whereabouts a mystery to her family and friends, until some autumn day who-knew-how-many-years in the future, when hunters stumbled over her bones wrapped in a Millers Kill police parka.

“God,” she said, her voice very small in the immense quiet of the woods, “I don’t want to die. Please help me.”

She poked her walking stick into a particularly deep depression one of her tires had spun into the snow. There didn’t seem to be much more she could add to that prayer, unless it was, “and let me find the so-and-so who sent me directions to this place so I can throttle him or her.” No, that wouldn’t do.

She braced and stepped, braced and stepped. The 139th Psalm. It had been a dim twilight, like this one, the sky dark with rain instead of lit by snow. She had been sitting by Grace’s bedside, her sister’s hand resting weightlessly in hers because it hurt Grace to be touched firmly. Their father had read the 139th Psalm in his deep, soft voice. “If I say, surely, the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.” It had been the last time they had all been together. In the silence and the dark, so far from where Grace had lived and died, she felt an urgent closeness to her sister, a moment of absolute certainty that death was just a pocket-trick, that the dead were all around her, supporting her, giving her strength, pricking her with warnings to watch the road, watch the road—

A dark shape emerged from the bend in the road before her.

Clare blinked. Her heart thumped once, hard. She tightened her grip on her walking stick, wondering, even as she halted in her tracks, muscles tensing, why she wasn’t running forward.

The bulky figure moved ahead another step. It was a person in a jumpsuit, one of those allover padded things they wore snowmobiling around here. Clare eased a fraction and opened her mouth to speak when a flashlight beam suddenly speared her.

“Take off your coat,” a voice hissed.

Clare squinted, dazzled by the sudden light, trying to make sense out of this bizarre sequence of events.

“What?”

“Off!” The voice was guttural, deep, like a man’s, but as unidentifiable as the figure behind it. The flashlight beam dipped low, as if the person had shifted it in his grasp, and Clare heard the distinctive sound of a round being chambered in an automatic pistol.

Her throat closed. Heat surged through her body. She hurled her walking stick as hard as she could toward the flashlight and dove headfirst for the brush at the side of the road.

The gun went off, shattering the stillness like an axe through thin ice, dwarfing a strangled scream of “Goddamnit!” A trio of deer exploded from a thicket of trees, careening into the camp road, the beating of their hooves echoed by wings everywhere overhead, winter birds fleeing in terror.