One by One

And then, suddenly, there’s the clatter of ski boots on tiles, and I hurry into the lobby to hear noises from the ski entrance, the unmistakable sounds of people clumping along a hard floor, clanging open the heated ski lockers that line the corridor.

“Eva?” someone calls irritably. “Eva, where the fuck are you?”

No answer.

Then the insulated door to the lobby swings open and Topher comes in wearing ski gear and thick socks, looking pissed off.

“Oh, it’s you,” he says shortly when he sees me. “Where the fuck is Eva?”

“Eva?” A retort about his rudeness hovers on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it back. “Sorry, Topher, I have no idea.”

He stops, halfway to the stairs.

“You mean she’s not here?”

“No, you’re the first back.”

He stands there, quite still, the expression on his face wavering between irritation and concern. Then he calls over his shoulder.

“Miranda, she’s not here.”

“You’re kidding.” Miranda is the next out of the door. Her face is bright pink, with the painful flush that always follows extreme cold. “Huh. Well… I guess at least that means we didn’t freeze our arses off for no reason. But what do you think could have happened?”

“Maybe the lift closed before she could get on, and she skied back down into St. Antoine to get the funicular?” Topher says, but Carl has come out now and is shaking his head.

“She got on before me, mate. She was on that lift, I’d swear to it.”

“And I saw her,” Ani says. They gather in the lobby, sweaty and confused, melting snow dripping from their jackets. “I told you, Carl and I were coming up in the lift and I saw her skiing down.”

“What’s the matter?” Rik says, coming through in his turn, shaking the snow off his black salopettes. Miranda turns to him, and now her face is definitely worried.

“Eva’s not here.”

“She’s not here?” Rik’s expression is blank. “But—but that’s not possible. There’s nowhere else she could be.”

They all begin talking at once, offering up different theories, many of them totally impossible based on the geography of the resort.

“Hold up, hold up,” I say, and amazingly they all fall silent. Somehow, they want leadership, and I am the closest thing to it. “Start from the beginning. When was the last time you were all together as a group?”

“At the bottom of the Reine ski lift,” Ani says, promptly. “We had a discussion about whether to break for lunch there, or do one last run. Topher made the point that it was uphill from the ski lift to the chalet, so we had to do a run, and we agreed to go up to the top station and do either La Sorcière or Blanche-Neige, depending on ability.”

I bite back my reply to this. La Sorcière is a bitch of a run. I’ve been skiing all my life, and there’s no way I’d do it in this weather. Even Blanche-Neige with this visibility is no joke for inexperienced skiers. Not for the first time it strikes me that Topher is kind of a jerk.

“But when we got up there Liz had some kind of breakdown,” Topher says bitterly.

“Toph,” Rik says sharply, with a jerk of his head towards the ski door, and I look over Topher’s shoulder to see Liz plodding wearily across from the boot room. She is covered in snow and looks utterly exhausted, even more so than the others.

“When we got to the top the weather was pretty extreme, and Liz decided to take the lift back down,” Miranda says smoothly, but looking at Topher’s mutinous face I can well imagine the discussion that decision must have entailed. Part of me is amazed at Liz’s strength of mind, that she didn’t let herself be bullied into trying the run. But fear can make people amazingly resilient.

“The rest of us waited up there for the others,” Topher says. “But Eva never came.”

“But she did,” Ani puts in. “We saw her, Carl and I. Didn’t we?” She nudges Carl, who nods.

“Yeah, no doubt about it, mate. We saw her get on the bubble a few lifts ahead of us.”

“A few?” Topher says. “How’s that? There was no queue at all.”

Carl reddens.

“Well, look, there’s no point in beating about the bush. I—well I fluffed getting on the bubble if you must know. Ani and I were supposed to be getting in after Eva, but I tripped over my bindings. Fell over, and the lift doors closed, and Eva went up with my skis still stuck in the rack. It took me a few minutes to get myself sorted again, and then Ani and I caught the next lift after that.”

“Could she have got confused and got off at the first station?” Miranda says with a frown, but Ani shakes her head.

“No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I saw her, when we were coming up in the bubble. It goes right over that black piste—the really steep one that Topher wanted to do.”

“La Sorcière,” I put in, and Ani nods.

“That’s the one. And I saw a skier coming down it. She stopped for a second on the ridge and kind of raised her hand, waving at me. And I realized, it was Eva.”

“How could you tell at that distance?” Rik says, sceptically. “It could have been anyone.”

“I recognized her red jacket. It’s, like, really distinctive. No one else here has one like it, and we were the only people on that lift.”

I look around the circle, and she’s right. Topher is in mustard and khaki, Rik and Carl are both in black. Miranda is in a kind of purple jumpsuit. Inigo has a green jacket and black salopettes. Tiger is wearing kind of shabby surfer chic that looks like an eighties denim bomber jacket and cargo pants, but that I suspect is actually pretty expensive snowboard gear. Liz is wearing a faded navy-blue all-in-one that’s too big for her and looks as though it was borrowed from a friend. And Ani herself is wearing the bright sea-blue jacket and white salopettes that I noticed earlier. None of them could possibly be mistaken for Eva.

“When we got off at the top my skis were waiting,” Carl says. “She must have taken them off the lift and then skied off.”

“Didn’t you notice she wasn’t at the top?” I ask, and Rik shakes his head, looking rueful.

“No, the visibility was really poor and well… look, if you must know there was a bit of… well, argy bargy at the top.”

Argy bargy? What the hell does that mean? I’m about to ask when Miranda butts in.

“You might as well say it plainly, Rik. The lift attendant came out to tell us the avalanche warning had gone up to red, and they were closing the whole mountain, but half the party ignored the warning and deliberately skied off before they could get the nets out.”

“I’m so sorry.” Inigo at least has the grace to look embarrassed. “It was a total misunderstanding. I thought he was saying now or never, so I, uh, pushed off.”

“So wait, some of you skied home,” I say slowly, “and some of you took the bubble back down?”

Nods all round the circle.

“Naturally we stopped for a bit at the big pine by the shortcut back to the chalet to see if anyone was catching up, but when we saw people traveling back down in the bubble, we skied down to the bottom of the lift,” Topher says. “So we waited there for another twenty minutes, only for the bastards in charge of the resort to close that lift too. At that point we concluded Eva had fucked off back to the chalet, but since we were now downhill from the chalet with no functioning lift, we had no choice but to ski down to St. Antoine and get the funicular back up.”