“But we are,” I said. “And you’ve worked enough scenes with us to know that.”
There was a thick silence, all of us looking past each other and the air heavy with retained snow.
And then Walter smiled. He has a beautiful smile, in a rough seamed face. Walter himself calls it a geologist’s face: it looks igneous. “Eric,” Walter said, “I will get there when I get there, which I can assure you will be no later than twenty minutes after you get there, during which time you can busy yourself with your own duties, and perhaps you, Stobie, can busy yourself photographing the scene, and as long as neither of you disturbs the geology before Cassie and I can put our eyes upon it, all will be well.”
Eric exhaled a long breath. “Your call.” He did a kick turn and took off up the trail.
Stobie pulled a rueful face, and fell in.
And then Walter and I were left stony-faced, looking at each other wondering what just happened here, why had half the team acted like the other half was downright unwelcome on this trip?
But the first half of the team was already leaving us behind and so we fell in as well. Walter set himself an ambitious pace. It took me some time to find my own. There’s a rhythm to be had on skis, even uphill, a rhythm that takes over the body and relaxes the mind, and I aimed for that.
A couple hours later we gained the last switchback and the land leveled into summit country. A wide snowfield lapped up to the jagged tips of the mountain range. The sole representative of the living was a whitebark pine, branches clawing the ground, battered into submission by ages of steady wind.
One by one, we stopped to add layers of clothing.
Eric started off again, leading the way across the snowfield.
We followed our own trails and our own thoughts.
In the distance, Eric stopped and faced up to the headwall of the range. As I neared, I saw what he was examining: a glacier cupped by a steep rock outcrop. This range was littered with remnants of the Little Ice Age, and this glacier was a larger one. Waves showed its progress, the spacing between the crests marking the amount of ice flow in a year. In places, the downflowing glacier had run over ridges and cracked open into crevasses.
The others drifted in. Walter was winded, but hanging on. I thought of the whitebark pine.
After a rest and power-bar snack, we advanced up the glacier. I anchored for a moment near a crevasse, peering at the bluish ice within, thinking what the world had been like when that old ice was water. Thinking how one could dive right down into oblivion.
“Here!” Walter called. He squatted at the head of the glacier.
We converged and looked down.
This was the bergschrund, where the downflowing ice separated from the rock headwall and opened a cleft. It looked to be fifteen or twenty feet deep. Down there on the floor of the schrund was a sprawled form, sheathed in ice but recognizable nevertheless as a woman. She was face-down, arms and legs askew, and a woman’s generous hips humped up. Someone — I assumed the ice climber who found her — had scraped her clean of loose snow.
Stobie dug a spotlight from his pack and planted it on the edge of the schrund, illuminating the scene down below, highlighting the details.
She wore hiking boots. She wore pants, parka, and gloves, matted with mud and ice. She wore a wool cap, beneath which darkish hair hung out. She could be a perfect stranger. She could be Georgia. Georgia had bottle-brown hair. Georgia had disappeared five weeks ago, in early December. It would have been cold. Not a lot of snow then; the big Thanksgiving ski weekend had been a bust. Georgia had complained to God but it wasn’t until mid-December, after she’d disappeared, that the storms came.
“Hiking accident,” Stobie said.
“We’ll know,” Walter said, “when we establish the career of the body.”
Eric’s eyes ticked to Stobie, the glass eye a tick out of synch. “He means what happened to her, Stobe. How she got here.”
The career of the body would be written in the soils she picked up. I glanced around. Certainly, the basin rock would feed minerals into the glacier, but down here on the schrund floor those soils were locked in ice. She could have picked up basin soil up top, around the glacier — walking, sitting, falling? — before she went into the schrund. Assuming the soil was bared then. There could have been bare patches in early December, before the storms hit. I realized I was already identifying her as Georgia. I stared down at her, my eyes aching with cold, as if she could be somebody else. Whenever, however, she got here, she’d come to the end of her career. The career of the body stank.
“Odd,” Walter said. “The climber noticing the body down there.”
“Nah,” Stobie said. “Ice climber wants to get to that rockwall, he’d be checking out the schrund before he crossed.”
Eric opened his pack. “Let’s get on with it.”
Walter and I began sampling the soil in the glacier basin, digging where it was thinnest beneath rock overhangs. Eric and Stobie rigged a rope ladder and climbed down to the bergschrund floor and then set to work with ice axes. By the time the sky had hardened into a gray roof, enough ice was quarried to loosen the body.
Walter and I clambered down to join them.
And now that I was down there, I took note that the body was that of a short woman. Just how short was hard to tell, the way she sprawled. The face was obscured, planted nose down into the ice, hair fanned like a frozen drape. I had the urge to sweep the hair back, get a look. Bad scene protocol. I kept my hands to myself.
Eric moved in first, to collect evidence that might jar loose when we move her. He exchanged his ski gloves for latex. He plucked out a thick fiber caught in the waistband, and bagged it. Looked like rag wool — heavy-duty winter wear. Could have transferred from her hat or her gloves. Or could have come from somebody else’s. It looked like the rag wool of my own hat. Or Stobie’s gloves. Or Walter’s socks. Eric moved to the right boot and plucked out something caught at the collar. He studied it. He took his time.
Walter said, “What is it?”
Eric said, finally, “Maybe a horse hair.”
I glanced at Stobie, as if the horse wrangler might have an opinion on the matter.
Stobie was silent. And then, almost in afterthought he whinnied.
That was for my benefit, I thought. Showing me the old Stobie, kidding around when things got dicey. Somehow, it did not ease my mind. I said, “Could she have ridden a horse up here? That makes no sense.”
“Her car was left at her office,” Walter said. “However she got here, she didn’t drive to the trailhead.”
“Maybe she caught a ride,” I said, “with somebody else.”
Eric finished his collection and moved back from the body.
Now it became Walter’s and my show. We gloved up. Walter examined her clothing, her hair. I took the boots. I was numb with cold, too cold to speculate whose feet were in those boots. I grasped the left heel, toe still locked to the ice. There was a generous layer of soil preserved in the waffle sole. With the small spatula I pried loose plugs, then with tweezers transferred the plugs to a sectioned culture dish. I shivered.
Walter cast me a sidelong glance. “Something?”
“Not a good match,” I said, “just eyeballing it.” It was a quick and dirty field guess, but the boot soil did not look much like the basin soil we’d collected. Which argued that she didn’t walk here, that she walked somewhere else and picked up soil in her boots and then was dumped here.
I was talking murder, but yet not out loud.
I heard the ratcheting of Stobie’s Nikon and glanced up. He was shooting a roll of the body. He aimed the Nikon at me, and snapped. “Beautiful.”
On my best day — auburn hair clean and shining, gray eyes framed with liner — I’m not beautiful. Been called pretty. And now…nose red, skin bleached cold, eyes squinting, hair roping out from beneath my wool hat. Knot in my chest, although that wouldn’t show in the photo.