Shelf Ice (10 page)

As he neared the opening to the river, he could see figures standing on the shelf ice. He paddled beyond the opening and then headed straight in, the trailing boat following him into the river. By the time he was near the shore, firefighters, dressed in cold-water rescue suits, scrambled into the water. They pulled Jeffers’ boat up the bank, and then quickly moved the victim to a stretcher. Ray caught a glimpse of Jeffers following the stretcher toward the waiting ambulance.

Then he released his spray skirt and pulled himself out of the cockpit, near exhaustion and struggling to get to his feet. Two firefighters helped him up the embankment and retrieved his kayak for him. He sat on the bank and watched as they got the other three boaters, two boys and a girl onto the shore. Ray wanted to scream at the kids, but he only sat, struggling to catch his breath.

• • •

An hour later Ray caught up with Jeffers. She was standing and working at a keyboard in the large open area of the trauma center that was surrounded by treatment rooms, her yellow and blue drysuit looking out of place against the sea of pale green scrubs.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Tired,” he responded.

“I’m almost done here,” she said, looking up and smiling.

“How’s the patient?” he asked.

“She’s responding well, but it was a close one.” After a few keystrokes, she looked up again. “Okay, I’m logged off, and we’re out of here.”

As they walked toward the car, Jeffers asked, “How did you know where to find the keys?”

“I saw you put them in a dry bag that you stashed in your day hatch before we launched.”

“And you drove here on your own. If you’d had a stroke along the way you could have destroyed both my car and my kayak.”

Ray handed her the keys. “Yeah, it’s your lucky day.” He collapsed into the passenger seat, happy to be chauffeured. After a few miles he asked, “How close was it?”

“Close, another ten or fifteen minutes in the water, and she’d have been gone,” she said, watching the oncoming traffic as she waited to make a left turn. “By tomorrow this will just be a bad dream. Although I bet she’s probably given up winter kayaking for life.”

Ray was too tired to respond.

 
“What if we’d had four swimmers?” Jeffers asked. “What if the four swimmers had capsized us in their desperation?”

“We were lucky,” he said.

There was little conversation for the rest of trip, and Hannah Jeffers stayed only long enough to change out of her drysuit. She explained that she needed to get back to her apartment to shower and get some sleep before she went back on call at midnight.

15.

Ray was startled when he looked at the clock on the stove as he began to make coffee. He was always up early, even on the weekend, an internal clock pulling him to consciousness every morning between five and six o’clock. But on this Sunday morning he had slept in and not by intention. And even with all the extra sleep, he was still feeling weary, his body sore from the events of the last few days.

As he sat at the table eating oatmeal and sipping coffee, he studied two maps, one pinpointing the location of Tristan Laird’s trailer, the other showing the possible location of a tree house that Molly Birchard had identified as one of Tristan’s hideaways. Her directions to the second location were less exact. The place marked on the map was Molly’s best guess of where it might be, a remote piece of private land near the south end of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

Ray decided that he would start with the trailer first, since the tree house would probably be impossible to find given Molly’s rather fuzzy description of its location. He opened his laptop to check the weather and temperature so he would know how to dress for his outing. Then he looked at his email. Finally there was a note from Sarah sent from her Blackberry apologizing for being incommunicado. She explained that she was at O’Hare waiting for an early morning flight. She asked if he was available for dinner this evening, noting that she would bring dessert.

He quickly keyed a response, saying he’d love to make dinner for her, suggesting five o’clock.

As soon as he hit the send button, his thoughts turned to the menu and things that were on hand or had to be purchased at the market on his way back from the trek in search of Tristan Laird. He pulled a lamb rib roast from the freezer and put it in the sink to defrost. Then he looked through the contents of the refrigerator. The possible makings for a salad were mostly dead, and there were no fresh vegetables. When he checked a bag of petite potatoes, he found that they had started to sprout. It immediately became clear that other than the lamb, the menu would depend on what he found at the local market.

• • •

The road into Tristan’s was exactly as marked. Ray had brought both skis and snowshoes. Given the heavy covering of snow and the deep drifts, including the several inches of fresh powder that fell the previous afternoon and evening, he decided that the snowshoes would be the most efficient way to get to his destination. As he started up the road, there were no hints of tire ruts or snowmobile tracks, not even animal tracks, just the even blanket of snow, several months of accumulation, layers on top of another, collapsing with age and weight.

As he worked his way along the narrow trail, the brilliant sunshine that had put him in an ebullient mood started to disappear. Soon the sky went gray and snow began to fall, a gentle dusting.

Ray guessed that this road was barely passable during the best of times. Trees and bushes had made a steady incursion in the seldom-used trail, and there were places in a low, swampy area where it had all but disappeared.

Ray found the dwelling at the terminus of the track, a sagging house trailer with a flimsy rust-covered set of stairs leaning into the structure just below an entry door. Cloaked in snow, firewood was stacked on each side of the stairs. The front and back walls of the trailer were raked in from the roof to the floor, a failed attempt at modern design dating from the ’50s.

An old Toyota pickup truck, the body propped high over the wheels, stood some distance from the trailer. It was covered by a heavy mantle of snow, suggesting it hadn’t been moved for months. Ray wondered if it was in running condition.

The entrance door was secured by a large, brass padlock that dangled from a badly corroded hasp. Ray could see that someone had made an effort to reinforce the right side of the doorframe near the area. A crudely shaped piece of wood, probably oak, had been secured by lag screws over the side of the hasp to protect it from being pried away from its mounting screws. He suspected the interior had been similarly reinforced.

The vandalizing of remote seasonal homes and hunting cabins was a common occurrence, especially during the winter months when even the most secluded locations were easily accessible by snowmobile. The more remote the location, the more time the vandals had to kick down doors or tear through walls or windows. Usually by the time the owners discovered the damage, weeks or months had passed and any evidence that might lead the police to the culprits was long gone. Ray suspected that most of this was done by young men, either locals or from downstate, who ranged through the area in the dead of winter, often at night, enjoying an alcohol and testosterone-fired wildness that would put them behind bars under normal circumstances.

Ray circled the trailer in a clockwise direction. There was no skirt at the base and he could see that occasional stacks of concrete blocks provided the foundation for the trailer. There was no evidence that anyone had been near the structure. He moved close to the structure, trying to see into the interior. Faded, tattered curtains almost completely obstructed his view. Two rust- covered propane tanks stood at the front of the trailer, unconnected to the couplers and oxidized copper tubing. He could see the washed out remains of the manufacturer’s logo, a crescent shape and the words
New Moon
. He noted the irony.

Ray completed his circuit and moved away from the building, stopping to look back at the scene for a long moment. The reclusive Tristan Laird clearly had not been at this location for a long time.

As he worked his way back toward the highway, he grew aware of how quickly he was becoming fatigued. Lifting the snowshoes at each step became increasingly arduous. He was greatly relieved to see his vehicle slowly taking form in the distance. He glanced at his watch. The search for Tristan Laird was over for the day.

16.

Walking across the parking lot at the market, Ray, sore and stiff, moved with difficulty. Once inside the store, he grabbed a cart and headed toward the produce section to look for salad ingredients. During the growing season, locally produced greens and fruits fresh from nearby farms were a specialty of this family-owned store, but in the dead of winter, most of the produce on display looked travel weary, even with the constant misting from overhead sprayers.

Ray looked through the sealed boxes of organic lettuce, noting the edges were less than crisp. He finally settled on a round container of bib, the blurb on the top purporting that the product within had survived the long trip from California. Next he examined the tomatoes, which were either green or starting to wither with age. The avocadoes were rock hard to the touch. Finally he found some pears, products of a South American summer. He thought the lettuce, pears, some walnuts, and the last bit of his stash of Stilton, combined with a dash of olive oil and lime balsamic vinegar would make an acceptable salad. Then he grabbed a package of fresh thyme and a bag of petite potatoes, checking first to see that the spuds hadn’t started to sprout like the ones in his refrigerator. He glanced at the rows of wine bottles and then his watch, deciding quickly to go with whatever he had at home. Finally he selected a baguette, a day old and damaged by time, but somewhat repairable with a few minutes in a hot oven.

Walking back toward his car, Ray felt like he was starting to move with greater ease. And once he was home, as he busied himself with the preparation of the meal, he forgot about his sore muscles.

By the time Sarah arrived, he’d made the salad and the potatoes were boiled and ready to go into the oven with the lamb. After a long hug, Ray said, “Glad you’re here. I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too. And there’s a special gift from Chicago for you,” she pointed at a square cardboard bakery box. “That wasn’t easy to get through security.”

“You do look a bit like the Unabomber,” said Ray, cutting through the tape and carefully opening the box. He peered at the tart, a fine lattice of pastry dividing individual raspberries, each one perfectly formed and ripe, nature’s beauty enhanced by a glistening glaze.

“I don’t think I can eat this,” said Ray in a joking tone.

“Why not?”

“It’s too beautiful. I think I’ll frame it.”

“I know you love raspberries, too bad they didn’t have thimbleberries. I got the tart at a highly recommended French bakery near my apartment building. Sorry about bringing day-old baked goods, but you do what you can do.”

“Your apartment, so much has happened. Tell me about it.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Tell me about the job, the apartment, what your life is going to be like.” As the words slipped from his lips, Ray was starting to think about what his life would be like without Sarah living close by, a topic he had been avoiding thinking about since she first mentioned it a few days before.
 
Over the last several months, Sarah had been with him through a difficult period of loss and physical injury, and Ray had started to assume that she would continue to become an increasingly important part of his life. But with this sudden change of jobs, everything was now in flux.

“So tell me about the job,” he said again, trying to make conversation.

“Don’t I get a glass of wine first?”

“I thought we’d start with one of Mawby’s sparkling wines,” said Ray, carefully removing the wire and foil, then covering the cork with a dish towel and carefully turning it until a controlled pop ended the process.

He filled two hollow-stemmed glasses, passed Sarah one, carefully grasped the second one and offered a toast, “Here’s to your new job.”

“Thank you,” she said, sipping the wine and setting the glass on the counter. “Where did you get these glasses? They are so delicate, and I love the art nouveau look.”

“They were a housewarming gift from Nora.”

“I should have known Nora was the source, they’re twice as big as any other champagne glasses.”

Ray continued, “She remembered how much I admired them over the years, and brought six glasses and a very good bottle of Champagne. She said she got the glasses 50 some years ago as a wedding present, from a grandmother or aunt. Nora said at her age she’d never be entertaining again at a level where she’d need a dozen champagne glasses, and I should enjoy them.”

Sarah picked up the bottle, looking at the scarlet label and gold lettering, “So clever, you men,” she commented.

There was a lull in the conversation. Ray noted an unnatural tension between them as he prepared the salad. “Tell me about the job,” he asked a third time, needing to fill the silence.