‘Come on, what are you waiting for?’ Holly cried.
I took a running leap over the debris into Grace’s arms.
‘Everyone’s getting ready for the party,’ Grace told me breathlessly as we sprinted past the pool and spa back to the main hotel. ‘The Starlite lighting guys are setting up in the bar. There’s going to be a giant screen with videos of the Venice carnival, there’ll be music, the whole deal.’
‘Where’s Jack?’ I asked. ‘Did you get to talk to him?’
Holly shook her head. ‘He wasn’t with Rocky and Lisette. They said he needed to clear his head so he went hiking up the mountain.’
‘Bad idea in these conditions,’ I groaned. Snow drifting over hidden crevasses, threat of avalanche, wind chill … I ran through a list of dangers. ‘When exactly did he leave?’
We’d reached hotel reception and could see the techie guys in the bar, hard at work setting up for tonight as Grace had said. Behind her desk Amber was already wearing an elaborate costume of pink lace with huge white flowers in her hair. She spoke on the phone as we passed.
‘Early this morning,’ Holly told me. ‘We didn’t get to him with the message about Natalia’s plans.’
‘So he can’t still be hiking,’ I decided. ‘He has to be back in the hotel somewhere.’
As if on cue a familiar figure emerged from the bar. The stumble and slurred greeting gave him away.
‘Hey, girls. Let me buy you a drink.’
‘Jack!’ It felt like a kick in my guts. I hurried towards him and tried to grab the whisky bottle he held in his right hand. ‘You swore you wouldn’t …’
As he snatched his hand away, the liquor sloshed on to the bearskin rug. ‘Too slow!’ he laughed, then made a display of raising the bottle to his lips and taking a slug. ‘See – there’s nothing wrong with the old hand–eye coordination.
‘Jack, if you carry on this way Natalia will never speak to you again,’ Holly warned.
He laughed again; took another drink.
‘She’s threatening to fly out of here with the kids,’ I told him. ‘It’s crazy in this weather. You need to stay sober, talk to her – persuade her not to leave.’
‘Too late,’ he sneered, veering towards the cowhide couch and slumping down on to it. ‘The chopper flew in and they already left.’
I swallowed hard. ‘They can’t have. I warned her not to.’
‘When did my wife ever listen to advice?’ Suddenly Jack’s drunken bravado collapsed and he started to sob. ‘I didn’t get to say goodbye. They already left on guess-who’s advice.’
‘Charlie Speke,’ I said faintly, aware that Holly and Grace had kept a safe distance and stayed close to the reception desk.
‘Right first time.’ Jack sniffed and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Charlie cleared the helipad. Charlie talked to the pilot. Charlie told him to fly right back to Aspen.’
‘So where are they now?’ I asked, trying to control my racing heart with long, deep breaths.
Jack took another drink before he answered. ‘It’s all over,’ insisted. ‘Right now they’re in the air over Carlsbad.’
‘Jack totally lost it,’ I told Holly and Grace. Time was racing on. We were running up the stairs to my room to put on our costumes. ‘The second Natalia and the kids took off in the helicopter with Charlie, that’s when he fell apart.’
‘Wait.’ Grace stopped on the landing between the second and third floors. ‘Jack is under the impression Natalia flew to Aspen with Charlie?’
I nodded. ‘He just told me.’
‘So how come Amber was just talking to Natalia on the phone?’ Grace asked. ‘Honestly, Tania – Amber told Natalia she’d send a room-service guy to collect her bags. The chopper isn’t due to leave until four o’clock.’
‘Say that again – this time slowly.’
‘Watch my lips,’ Grace insisted. ‘Amber talked to Natalia. Natalia is still in the hotel.’
Holly was set to take more stairs. ‘Come on, we’re wasting time.’
‘No.’ I insisted on staying where I was, gazing out at the helipad and the parked chopper. It confirmed in my mind that the girls were right and Jack’s version was wrong. I watched a pair of grey doves alight on a tree in the grounds. As they landed they shook snow from the branch. The snow dropped and dislodged more snow from the branch beneath, and so on until it thudded to the ground.
‘Come on, Tania,’ Holly repeated.
‘No. If Natalia is still here then so is Charlie.’
‘So?’ Grace stayed with me while Holly took the stairs.
‘So who was that I just spoke with – was it Jack or was it Charlie faking it, making me think it was Jack?’ However hard I tried with the deep breathing, my pulse raced like an express train.
‘Why? What reason would he have?’
‘Don’t you see?’ I cried, making Holly wait on the next landing and peer over the banister to listen to what I was telling them. I saw from the shocked look in Grace’s eye that she was already halfway there. ‘Jack confronted Charlie over my dark angel theory—’
‘Wait. Hold on just a second,’ Holly demanded. ‘Run that by me again. Jack knows about the whole dark angel thing?’
I nodded.
‘How?’ Grace asked.
‘I told him,’ I said quietly.
‘And somehow Charlie found out and saw the need to eliminate Jack from the picture.’ Grace was ahead of me, fitting the pieces together.
‘Maybe … probably. One thing I do know – Charlie played a good drunk back there in the lobby but he wasn’t totally into the role.’
‘Meaning what?’ Holly had come back down to our landing to demand an answer.
‘His hand didn’t shake enough; his coordination was too sharp.’
‘So where is Jack?’ Holly wanted to know.
Deep breath. Stay focused. ‘Dead or dying,’ I guessed. ‘The body double just took over the starring role.’
18
There was no time for us to do anything except sprint to my room and grab thick jackets to go and look for the real Jack.
‘How many hours of daylight do we have?’ Grace asked as we ran out into the snow.
‘Three, maximum,’ Holly told us.
We reached the gates at the end of the drive then paused to look over our shoulders at the chopper resting on its giant metal rails.
Grace picked up on what I was thinking. ‘Let’s split,’ she decided. ‘You and Holly go look for Jack. I’ll backtrack and find a way to stop Natalia.’
‘Report a freak storm over Aspen. Stop that chopper from flying out,’ Holly agreed.
Which left two of us searching for Jack on Carlsbad.
‘He could be anywhere,’ I sighed.
Holly took a deep breath then set off at a run towards the ski-lift terminal. ‘If Charlie did kill Jack, where are the most likely places he would dump the body?’ she demanded, only stopping when she reached the base of the metal steps leading up to the platform. ‘Not in the hotel – it would be too easy for someone to find. It has to be out here on the mountain.’
‘Climb up and take a look inside,’ I gasped. ‘I’ll go on ahead.’
I heard Holly take the steps two at a time as I struggled up the smooth slope, heading into a vast white space. I stumbled and sank into a drift, went down on to my hands and knees to haul myself out and when I looked up again I saw Holly emerge from the terminal in a gondola.
‘There’s no one inside the building!’ she yelled down at me. ‘But there was a fight. There’s a smashed partition and a rip in one of the seats – looks like it was slashed with a knife. Oh, and there was this!’ She held up a pair of shades with a missing lens. ‘Who wears this style of Oakleys?’
‘Charlie does,’ I yelled back.
‘OK, so maybe this is where it happened.’ Holly’s voice grew fainter as the gondola carried her up the mountain. ‘It looks like Charlie used a knife on Jack then took him up the mountain and dumped th
e body on the overlook.’
‘It’s worth a shot,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll carry on towards the old mine. That’s another possibility.’
‘OK, and I’ll get to the top then make my way down. Whatever we find, I’ll meet you halfway, OK?’
‘Gotcha.’
The cable car carried her smoothly over my head while I fought to make progress through the drifts. It‘s hard to make out landmarks after recent snow fall and it was harder still not to be awed by the smooth, sparkling whiteness of my surroundings. The sun was low, already casting long violet shadows. There was no wind.
‘Look for something you recognize, I told myself as Holly’s gondola rose higher towards the overlook. Keep the cables and towers of the ski lift to your right, the red and white poles bordering the dirt track to your left. The mine entrance lies a few hundred metres straight ahead.
I held to this route, climbing out of late afternoon sunlight into shadow as the sun vanished behind the peak. Eventually I spotted the canvas awning used by the film crew – the place where Holly and Grace had found Adam after his ordeal. It still stood despite the weather, though the roof sagged and supporting poles were buckled under a weight of snow. I reached it and stood a while to catch my breath.
What next? Say I made it to the silver mine – would I be brave enough to face my demons and step inside? And if I was, and this was the place where Charlie had dumped Jack’s body, what would I do then? Wait for Holly, call for help, take the corpse down off the mountain and announce to the world that Jack Kane was dead?
‘Yeah, right,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Like Charlie is going to let us go ahead and do that!’
I faltered. My legs and lungs ached. No part of me wanted me to go on.
Only the prospect of the look on Holly’s face if I turned back stopped me from turning and trudging back to the hotel.
No, I couldn’t turn round now. I could see the mine entrance a hundred metres from where I’d taken shelter – a dark tunnel into the rock. I set off towards it, picking up the first signs in the snow that someone else had been here recently – faint scuff marks, a trampled area on a flat ledge and then a dark, shiny fragment of glass from a pair of sunglasses. I picked up the broken lens, turned it between my fingers then slipped it into my pocket.
Then I saw blood – real blood in the snow, not fake blood from Gwen’s box of special effects. This time there were no cameras rolling, no actor wielding a gun and running out of the mine, no one spouting lines from a script.
I stooped to examine the crimson patch. It was about ten metres from the entrance and there was a trail leading into the mine – a trickle then a few specks, then another bigger area, where a serious amount of blood had been lost.
Don’t stop now! I fought a second, even more powerful urge to run away as I stood at the entrance to the tunnel, smelling the old animal stench. Hold your nerve, walk forward one step at a time.
I bent my head and entered the mine.
It was almost dark – just enough light to make out the unravelled coil of razor wire and the branches dragged in by bears then left to decay. The dull yellow skull of the wolf caught in the wire reminded me that this wasn’t the first time that someone or something had come here for shelter, only to die.
The smell of wet earth and death was so strong that I cupped my hand over my mouth. It was sharp and bitter at the back of my throat.
Wolf spirits materialize. Their eyes shine amber in the dark. They slink towards me, tails raised, bodies close to the ground. I reach out to steady myself. Then there are creatures worse than wolves, seeping through the rock. They have no name, no recognizable, fixed shape. Pale and bloodless, unseeing, they are in pain. They howl and wail, twist and writhe as they fall over a ledge into a vortex, fall for ever and drag mortal souls to hell.
I resist but there is no air to breathe, no exit into the world of the living. I am close to the edge, looking into darkness. I say again, there’s no air and my knees buckle. I get ready to fall.
Be brave. Look for the light. Adam, Zenaida and Maia are at my side.
Gathering together every scrap of mental energy, I resisted and lurched back from the spiritual precipice, stumbling over a decaying branch and falling to my knees. I made contact with something solid and investigated with my fingertips – touched the cold metal line of a zipper, soft fabric, cold flesh.
I jumped. My breath became shallow. I leaned forward again and made out more detail. The flesh I’d come into contact with was a hand, the fingers curled tightly around a small plastic object – a child’s toy, a superhero. Instinctively I tried to ease the hand open to retrieve it.
The fingers resisted. The hand would not let go.
Gasping and trying not to sob, I felt for a pulse – very faint and uneven.
Quickly I took off my jacket and threw it over the injured man. I leaned in to listen for breath. His eyes opened slowly and tried to focus.
‘It’s me – Tania,’ I murmured.
The eyelids fluttered closed then open then shut again.
‘Don’t die on me now,’ I pleaded. ‘Jack, please don’t die!’
Between us Holly and I knew enough first aid to stem the flow of blood from the knife wound in Jack’s arm. He was unconscious as we raised the arm and improvised a tourniquet then talked about how we could get him back down to the hotel without causing more problems.
‘It’s good that I showed up,’ Holly told me, carefully trying to work Adam’s little plastic toy out of Jack’s grasp.
‘No, let him keep hold of it,’ I said quietly, noticing his eyelids flicker open for a moment as if to say thanks.
‘No way could you have done this alone,’ Holly went on.
I worked with numb fingers to tie a knot in the strip of fabric. ‘Yeah, thank God you got here fast,’ I muttered. I’d just had time to discover that Jack was alive and to apply pressure to the wound before I’d heard Holly yelling my name. I’d run out of the shaft entrance to see her plunging down from the overlook, running part of the way but mostly sliding on her ass and raising a wake of powdery snow.
‘I came as quick as I could,’ she told me now, having helped me ease Jack out towards the exit from the mine. ‘I could see from the gondola that no one had been on the overlook in twenty–four hours – no tyre marks, no footprints. So I jumped out and headed straight down to you.’
‘So do we carry him?’ I wanted to know. ‘How do we do it?’
‘We make a stretcher,’ she decided, and went back into the mine to choose two sturdy branches from the bears’ old den-making stockpile. ‘Let’s hope they’ll take Jack’s weight,’ she mumbled as she took off her jacket and ordered me to do the same. ‘We zip them together and use the sleeves to attach them to these pieces of wood, so we have a hammock. OK, get ready to lift him. Easy now.’
Jack groaned as we eased his weight on to the makeshift stretcher.
‘He feels pain – that’s a good sign,’ Holly insisted.
I sighed. ‘We hope.’ There was a hell of a lot more blood on the floor of that tunnel, I’d discovered.
‘Come on, let’s go.’
Holly and I took the strain and lifted Jack. Clumsily we made our way down the mountain – Holly in front, me behind.
‘Tania, you did good,’ Holly told me as we drew level with the ski lift terminal. ‘I know how hard it was for you to step inside that old mineshaft.’
‘You don’t know how close I came to wimping out.’
‘I totally do,’ she insisted. ‘I admire what you did. What are we gonna do when Jack wakes up and the shit hits the fan?’
‘As in, Jack gives a blow-by-blow account of how dark angel Charlie stabbed him in the arm then threw him in the mineshaft and left him to die?’
‘Exactly.’ Sliding and slipping, we carried our heavy load down the final slopes and through the gates of Carlsbad Lodge, where Holly came to a sudden halt. ‘Uh-oh,’ she grunted.
She’d heard it before I did – the churning
of a chopper engine. ‘Looks like Grace’s plan didn’t work out,’ I gasped.
The noise of the helicopter’s engine grew louder and soon we could see its blades rotating, preparing for take-off.
‘That sucks,’ Holly groaned.
‘No, no – it’s all good! Quick, Holly, move!’
‘Which way? What are we doing?’
‘Hurry. Carry Jack towards the chopper. This is a big emergency, right? They’ll have to fly him to the hospital.’
‘Out of Charlie’s grasp.’ Changing course, Holly cut between the trees festooned with Christmas lights and across the snow-covered lawn. ‘Look, there’s Natalia and the kids coming out of a side entrance,’ she reported.
I spotted them too, Natalia carrying Charlie with Adam in his sky-blue ski jacket carefully holding Phoebe’s hand and following close behind. The wind from the chopper blades made them bend forward and keep their heads down.
‘Natalia, wait!’ Holly called.
The noise from the engine meant she didn’t hear. We saw the pilot come down a short ladder and shake her hand. Then he stood aside for her to carry the baby up the ladder.
Jack lay senseless as we struggled to heave our makeshift stretcher. We saw the pilot hand Phoebe up into the chopper then turn to Adam.
‘Wait!’ I yelled.
Adam pulled back from the stepladder. He turned, saw us carrying his dad on a stretcher and started to run towards us.
The pilot followed while Natalia reappeared in the doorway.
‘Daddy!’ Adam reached us as we were two thirds of the way across the lawn. His eyes were wide, his face pale under the mop of dark-brown hair. He grabbed his father’s hand – the one that carried the plastic toy.
‘Who’s this?’ the pilot wanted to know. ‘What happened?’
‘This is Jack Kane. He’s hurt bad, he lost a lot of blood. You need to get him to the hospital,’ Holly explained.
The pilot took one look, nodded and quickly retraced his steps, telling us to follow.