Melting The Ice

He cleared his throat. “Wildlife activity. It alerted mountain staff this morning.”

Hannah knew search-and-rescue personnel had told Powder Mountain employees to keep a watch out for any abnormal wildlife activity as snows receded. It was standard procedure in these parts. But nothing had turned up in the spring. Nothing throughout the summer.

And, as long as there’d been no body, no proof that Amy had died, there’d always been hope. Al had hung on to that. All the while he had hoped. And he’d kept paying the rent on Amy’s apartment. “Just in case,” he’d said.

He turned to her, eyes, the same azure as Amy’s, shimmering with emotion. “Sven was the one who found her.”

Hannah’s chest felt tight. Sven Jansen was the mountain guide Amy used to go out with. Things cut so close in a small community like this. As a foreign correspondent Hannah had covered wars and natural disasters, yet there was nothing to compare; this touched her in ways those stories seldom had. When tragedy hit a town as small as White River, it touched everyone. It became personal.

Al dragged both his weather-beaten hands through his thatch of white hair. “God, Hannah, I was supposed to be watching over her.”

“This is beyond your control, Al, we all know that.”

Several phones were ringing. The news of the discovery was out, and media hounds would be baying for information. Amy’s parents were well connected in Canada’s political circles, and the White River Gazette, as Amy’s workplace, was part of this story no matter what.

Hannah placed a hand on Al’s shoulder. “Why don’t you go home. I’ll handle this for now. We can regroup when you’re ready.”

He looked up, angst deepening the age lines that mapped his craggy face, his effort to compose himself visible. “Thanks. I think I will. I need to call my sister.” He reached out and took Hannah’s hand. It was an unusual gesture for Al, a man as independent and robust as the Coast Mountain terrain. She had a sense it was more than her hand he was reaching for. He was reaching for answers.

“I don’t know what I would’ve done without your help this past year, Hannah.”

“It’s okay, Al. I owe you. You’ve always been there for me.”

The phones shrilled, relentless. Al stared at the flashing red message lights. Reality calling. It wasn’t going to go away. “This is one of the biggest news stories to hit this valley. I guess the Gazette should have someone up there on Grizzly.”

“I know. I’ll see to it.” She patted his hand. “Go home, Al.”

He stood, paused.

She knew what he was thinking. That Amy’s death wasn’t an accident. She couldn’t believe it, either. Especially after the suspicious break-in at Amy’s apartment at the same time Amy went missing. “I’ll be there. Don’t worry. We’ll get to the bottom of this. I promise.”

He nodded.

Hannah watched as Amy’s uncle left the office, his usually powerful posture crumpled.

The gondola doors swung slowly shut. Hannah was cocooned in the little cabin as it swung from its moorings and lifted into the air, swaying slightly from side to side.

It was a twenty-five-minute ride to the top and then a short hike up to the traverse.

She always found the gondola soothing, with its quiet mechanical hum. It was meditative, lifting her above the world, separating her. It helped her think. And she needed to think. She needed to compose herself for what she might find on Grizzly Glacier. She wondered what clues Amy’s body might yield after sleeping for so long under the ice.

The late-August sun was balmy, and bits of light white fluff, the seeds of the fireweed, waltzed on warm currents of air around the gondola. Summer snow—that’s what Danny called it. Hannah smiled, thinking of her boy. She was glad she had relented and let him go and stay with her mom for the last two weeks of his summer holidays.

She had never let him go to his gran’s smallholding on Vancouver Island for so long but Daniel had conspired with his granny to twist Hannah’s arm. Hannah had hoped to join them there for the Labor Day weekend, but with this latest development, she didn’t think she would be able to make it. She was pretty much working full-time at the Gazette now, balancing her schedule around Danny’s needs.

She had slipped into this routine after Amy disappeared last year. She had wanted to help Al out. It wasn’t a bad job, and with Danny going into first grade next month, she would have even more time.

The gondola lurched as it passed another lift tower. Hannah could see a black bear and its cub down on the ski run. White River Valley was a sparkling jewel far below, a community built around a string of glacier-fed lakes. From up high the lakes were shimmering beads, with hues from chalky green to crystal-clear sapphire. The town got its name from the river that cascaded down through the gorge separating Powder Mountain from neighboring Moonstone Mountain. The river was milky with glacial silt and the waters gushed frothing and creamy white into frigid Alabaster Lake below.

So beautiful, thought Hannah, yet so harsh. They always made her think of Danny’s father. Beautiful but hard. Cold. Secretive. Rex Logan was like these peaks around her, carved from stone and scarred by time. There was an underlying sense of wildness and danger about him. She should have recognized from the start that he would hurt her.

She hated herself for having fallen for him, for naively believing that he was the one she would spend the rest of her life with.

Never again would she let passion overrule her common sense. Never again would she be so deceived, so lacking in guile.

Never.

She would always stay in control.

Hannah left the gondola station and made her way along the rocky trail that led up to the traverse above Grizzly Bowl, which cradled the glacier and looked like a giant’s scoop out of the mountain. A marmot ducked and scuttled for cover as she approached.

She could see police tape up on the trail above the glacier. It screamed crime scene, except Amy’s death was supposed to have been an accident. The bright-yellow ribbon fluttered in the Alpine breeze against a backdrop of painfully bright blue sky and glacial snow. Behind it a crowd of curious tourists and media gathered on the hiking trail. They were all looking down, watching a group of search-and-rescue personnel and police officers on the glacier below.

Hannah could hear the dull thuck-thuck-thuck of a helicopter somewhere, closing in. From her vantage point below, she aimed her camera lens up at the crowd, focused, clicked.

She was used to having her own Canadian News Agency cameraman on a job, but this was not Africa and her CNA days were over. Balancing a career that could see her in Angola one month and Sierra Leone the next was no life for a child. She had experienced what that kind of lifestyle had done to her father, to her family.

As Hannah clicked, the yellow tape was sucked from its moorings into a brutal whirling frenzy. The chopper was coming in for a landing just off the trail, churning up everything in its path. A red hat went flying. People held their hair, ducked their heads. Gray glacial silt boiled up in a cloud around them.

Hannah kept shooting.

She jogged up the steep trail as the blur of the two lethal rotor blades slowed and came into focus. She recognized the coroner and members of a television crew as they alighted from the mechanical beast. A man in a suit followed. He stood out amongst the windbreakers and fleece. This story was pulling them all in, even the suits. Hannah guessed he was with one of the big U.S. outfits.

She joined the crowd, out of breath. There were other newspaper photographers capturing the scene. She tried to peer down into the glacial bowl but couldn’t really make out what was happening below. The TV crew started filming.

“Hannah, over here.” The Swiss-German accent and granular rasp was unmistakable.

“Hey, Gunter.” She moved over to join the plastic surgeon. He was deeply tanned with a head of thick salt-and-pepper hair and clear hazel eyes. Hannah couldn’t help thinking he carried his years exceptionally well. But then, Dr. Gunter Schmidt was devoted to the pursuit of youth. It was that same promise of eternal youth that attracted the rich and famous to his White River Spa.

“I was on a walk up here on the mountain.” Gunter could not pronounce words with a w. He said them as if they started with a v. But despite his pronunciation oddities and Germanic syntax, his English was good.

“And then I see all this commotion. They say it is Amy.” He was also out of breath. “That is right? They have found her?”

“It looks that way, Gunter.”

“Ach, poor Al. He must be taking it hard, ja?”

“He is. He’s struggling.” Hannah looked away from the scene below, her eyes following the trail she knew so well. From here, it climbed a little farther then leveled out along the ridge toward the ski area boundary. Then it rounded the ridge and led to a series of small, rustic cabins designed for overnight use. A hiker could spend a week doing the full loop. Back-country skiers used the cabins in winter. “I just can’t figure what Amy was doing up here.”

“She was perhaps hiking,” the doctor offered, following her gaze.

“No, Gunter. I don’t buy it. Her clothes were wrong. The weather, the timing, the break-in. Nothing fits.”

The doctor frowned.

Hannah lifted her camera and peered through her lens at the scene below on the glacier. She could make out the form of Sven Jansen. She clicked the shutter as the team started to slowly make their way with a body bag back up the glacier toward the chopper.

Rex Logan’s heart missed a beat.