“Melissa! You’re pulling a Hayes on me! Don’t run off!”
Melissa heard Stewart’s voice clearly but at a perceptible distance. Without looking back, she could tell he was running after her. She thought she had about two hundred yards on him. Striding through snow this deep felt like running in heavy sand, and her coat and winter boots didn’t help. The crust of the snow cut into her shins. Her legs already felt heavy.
Come ON! When you were sixteen you could run three miles in twenty-two minutes thirty-eight point seven seconds. He may be super-fit, but you have twenty-five YEARS on him! Move it!
She darted into the woods, dodging white-barked trees and ducking leafless branches. In the virgin snow she was leaving a trail that anyone could follow, but the trees would provide some cover if he started shooting. She tacked to her left, seeking a route that would take her parallel to the lakeshore while keeping her in the woods. The sound of Stewart crashing through the timber twenty or thirty seconds behind her pumped her a bit.
But not enough. The frigid air she hungrily gulped seemed to sear her protesting lungs. She felt an ominous hollow in her diaphragm, the first warning that she was going to run out of wind before long. Those sub-eight-minute miles had come seventeen years ago, and thirty minutes on an elliptical now and then hadn’t kept her in shape for something like this.
Stewart sounded like he’d fallen a bit farther behind. She sensed, though, that this reflected calculation rather than fatigue. He was sacrificing distance to preserve endurance, figuring that he’d follow the clear trail she was leaving and then close the gap fast enough when she ran out of gas and collapsed. She’d had to start at a sprint instead of beginning slowly and building her pace gradually. The price in pain was steep, and she was already paying it.
Don’t quit! She sought some distraction, some mental exercise to take her mind off the pain. “You’re not a loser just because you’re defeated. You’re a loser only if you quit.” Who said that? G. K. Chesterton? No, an American. Hemingway? No, a politician. Theodore Roosevelt? Not orotund enough for him. Nixon! That was it, Nixon said it. She was quoting Richard Nixon! Well, he’d gotten that one right. That and China. Give him those two.
Glancing to her left, she glimpsed the lake through an uneven screen of birch and pine. Running less than five minutes now, she felt sweat freezing on her face and soaking through her shirt. Sharp stitch in her rib cage, on the right side. That’s okay, that’s okay. You can run through pain. Pain just means you don’t want to run, not that you can’t. The way your body lets you know you can’t run any more is that you start throwing up. Or you die, that’s another way you can tell.
She tripped on something buried under the snow and sprawled spreadeagled, bruising one knee and lacerating the other on a pointed rock. She swore fluently under her breath but willed the sobs not to come. You can cry later. What was Golda Meir’s line? “Tell Kissinger he can sleep when the war is over.”
She scrambled franticly to her feet. For a terrible instant she thought her legs would refuse her command to run again. Then they moved, two strides, three, and she was off once more. She’d managed less than a mile so far, and her breath was coming now in shallow, scorching pants. If her plan was going to work it had better work pretty soon, because she didn’t think she had much left.
She could still hear Stewart, a little farther behind than before but running steadily. No shouting and no shots. Just relentless mushing and an occasional branch snap.
Pumping her arms, she reached a little deeper. That bought her another hundred yards. That was it. She begged her body for more, pleaded for just ten more strides, and her body said no. With a piercing gasp she fell to both knees and began vomiting violently into the snow.
As soon as the retching stopped and she’d spat the last of the stomach acid from her mouth, she snapped her head around to look behind her. She saw trees and snow. She couldn’t see Stewart, just a vague, indistinct movement in the middle distance through the timber. Whatever he’d paid for that white camouflage jacket, he’d gotten his money’s worth.
She sagged back, resting her bottom on her heels. She lacked the strength even to stand. It wouldn’t be long now. Thirty seconds? Forty? Well, she hadn’t quit. Rep would know that, and he’d be proud of her.
She glanced back again. The obscure movement was much closer, no more than forty yards away. If she was right she had ten seconds to live.
Rifle shots barked crisp and clear through the frigid air. The indistinct movement abruptly stopped.
Melissa’s eyes widened. She recoiled, and a quick, shrill shriek escaped from her. If I was right, I just saved two lives. And whether I was right or wrong, I just killed a man.
With standing up still out of the question, she lurched forward, catching herself on her hands as they sank into the snow in front of her. On all fours, head sagging, she sucked air in short, shallow drafts. She forced her mouth closed, made herself breathe through her nose, held the breath as long as she could, then pursed her lips and expelled it through her mouth. Nine more of those and then she chanced a deep breath, gulping cold air into her lungs. She winced as pain lanced through the right side of her body.
No fun, but she could handle it. She jerked her torso upright. Her bare hands were raw from their immersion in the snow, but she scarcely noticed. She was kneeling now, with no light-headedness and no black dots dancing in front of her eyes. That was the important thing. She brought her right leg up, planting her foot in the snow. Then, laboriously, she pushed herself erect. A queasy wave of nausea rippled from her belly to her throat, but she closed her eyes and held her breath and it passed.
Numbly, senses dulled, she began to stumble back the way she had come, toward where the indistinct mass had stopped after the rifle shots. She had her hands buried as deeply in the parka’s pockets as she could get them. She couldn’t feel her fingers. So this is what it’s like to be in shock. She’d had that kind of reaction before. So this is what it’s like to smoke pot. And not long after that: So this is what it’s like to make love. Except that one had just been what it was like to have sex. Making love had come much later. Each time she’d had the same reaction, the reaction she was having now: That’s it? What’s the big deal?
She knew she was getting close when she heard chatter, first as a vague rumble and then sharpening into understandable words from three distinct voices. All male, she thought, one sounding a bit younger than the other two.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I was shooting at a deer. I didn’t even see him.”
“Wasn’t your fault. Not a thing you coulda done.”
“You saw the deer, didn’t you? I had him in my sights, I swear. This guy just came outta nowhere.”
“Look at him. No blaze orange, no red, no colors at all. Like he was trying to get shot.”
Melissa came within sight of the trio. They stood around Stewart’s body, splayed prone in blood-soaked snow. In a 1950s movie Stewart would still be alive, rolled over on his back, a gaping exit wound mysteriously reduced to a small puncture politely oozing manageable trickles of blood. He’d gasp out some helpful exit line. A confession, perhaps, but not necessarily. Maybe a wry, ironic commentary, a curtain speech with style and a touch of class.
But this wasn’t a 1950s movie. Melissa didn’t know if Stewart had been dead before he hit the ground. She didn’t know if he’d heard the shot that killed him. But she knew he was dead now.
The three men looked up sharply at her, their expressions surprised and a bit shocked, as if she were naked. Then she realized that, in a sense, she was: she didn’t have a rifle. One of the men hastily dug a flask from the side pocket of his hunting coat and offered it to her. Melissa hadn’t had undiluted bourbon in more than ten years, but she accepted the proffer and helped herself to a modest swig. The occasion seemed to demand it, and she figured it would warm her up.
It did.
“Who are you?” one of the older men asked.
“My name is Melissa Seton Pennyworth. I’m staying in the cabin about a mile from here, on Old Logging Road Lane.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“Listen,” the younger guy blurted, before she could answer, “did you see a deer a few minutes ago, running through here?”
“Yes,” Melissa said dully.
That was a lie, but she figured it was a lie he needed to hear. She glanced around the group. She hadn’t told them the body was Ken Stewart’s, and she didn’t want to, at least not yet.
“Has someone sent for the police?” she asked.
“Sven went hiking off to look for a warden. If he doesn’t come on one before he gets to a working phone, he’ll call it in. Worst case is he has to go all the way to the highway and flag someone down. Shouldn’t be too long. Is there a phone in that cottage?”
Melissa started to say, “Not working,” but checked herself. She needed an exit line of her own. She didn’t know the protocol for reacting to corpses lying in the forest, but she suspected it didn’t involve just walking away without some kind of official sanction.
“I actually haven’t tried the phone there yet.” The second lie came more easily than the first, just as Grammy Seton had warned her when she was seven. “I’ll go over and check.”
As she began to move, the men parted to make room for her.
“Excuse me,” one of the older ones said as she stepped past him, “but what were you doing out here? I mean, obviously you’re not hunting.”
Melissa supposed that, now that she’d started down the slippery slope of depravity, the third lie should have tripped effortlessly off her lips. But it didn’t. She told the truth.
“I was running from him,” she said, looking down at Stewart.
“Why was he chasing you?”
“I’m not sure.”
The truth again. It might get to be a habit.