One by One
And now suddenly that luck had turned.
And after it did, I found that I couldn’t stand to be there with the people still walking in that perpetual golden sun while I lived in a place that was black with guilt and grief. I couldn’t stand to see the pity in their eyes.
It’s almost completely dark in the living room now, and when I walk across to the clock over the mantelpiece, I see that it’s getting on for 6:00 p.m. Danny and the others should have been at Haut Montagne about two hours ago. It’s possible they could be starting back. It’s possible they have managed to contact the police and a chopper is on its way.
Possible. Not certain. Possible.
It’s equally possible the road is trashed and they are still trudging across icy rubble, or Haut Montagne was empty and shut up.
God, the possibilities are going to send me mad.
I don’t know why, but with Danny and the others gone, it feels like the atmosphere of the chalet is closing around me and Liz. I can feel the weight of the snow pressing against the roof and the walls, feel the tonnes and tonnes still resting on the mountain side, waiting for another trigger. I can feel the darkness seeping through the rooms and corridors.
I know what the edge of endurance feels like, because I passed it once before—sitting frozen on a cold mountainside with the dead body of my lover, not knowing whether help was going to come. I passed it, and I survived. I came back. Back to safety. Back to normality.
But there are times when I feel myself being dragged back across that line into a place where nothing matters anymore, where every heart beat drags you closer to the edge, and I think I am going to fall into the abyss again, and this time I won’t be able to claw my way out.
When I shut my eyes I can see his face, Will’s face, cold and white as marble, and peaceful, so terribly peaceful.
“Erin.” The voice comes from very far away.
I shake my head.
“Erin.”
I open my eyes. Liz is standing in front of me, looking anxious.
“Erin, are you okay? Should we get something to eat?”
I force myself to smile.
“Yes. Sure. Come through to the kitchen, and we’ll see what we can find.”
I lead the way, limping, and Liz follows me into the chilly darkened cavern of the kitchen, looking around her wonderingly as we enter, as if it’s Aladdin’s cave rather than a very ordinary professional kitchen.
“There’s a t-tin of cassoulet here,” I say, trying to read the label in the dim light. It’s extremely cold away from the fire, and my teeth are trying to chatter. “At least I think it’s c-cassoulet, it could be confit du canard. It’s hard to tell. Will that do?”
“Sure,” Liz says. She’s still looking at me like she’s concerned. “Are you all right, Erin?”
“I’m fine, I just—I’m just worried about D-Danny. I keep hoping we’ll hear something.”
Liz nods, and I realize she must be as worried as me, she’s just hiding it better, under that calm, stolid exterior. I find myself wondering what she’s thinking, and when the tin (it was cassoulet) is decanted into a pan and warming on top of the woodburning stove in the living room, I pluck up my courage to ask her the question I’ve been pondering but not quite daring to ask.
“Liz, what do you think happened? To Eva, I mean.”
Her face crumples and I realize she is holding back the unthinkable just as hard as I am.
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking and thinking—I just—I can’t believe any of it is true. It doesn’t seem real. I keep wondering if Eva was just in an accident, but then what about Elliot and Ani?”
What indeed.
“What do you think Ani meant?” I say, stirring the beans slowly, feeling the heat of the fire at my face and the chill cold of the room at my back. “When she said, She wasn’t there.” Or was it I didn’t see her? I can’t remember now, and that fact bothers me. I hear the rustle of waterproof fabric as Liz shrugs.
“I don’t know. I keep going over and over it in my head. I thought at first she must have been talking about Eva, but it makes no sense. She was there, on the slope, I saw her too.”
“Could it have been someone at the top?” I’m struggling to remember the exact wording now. Fuck. This could be important and I can’t remember. “I’m wondering… when she got to the top of the bubble lift. Was someone already missing, someone other than Eva? Someone who had already skied after her?”
“But who?” Liz says. “There weren’t that many women left at the top. I’d already gone down in the bubble. The two women left at the top were Tiger”—she ticks them off on her fingers—“in which case it seems very odd that she would report what Ani said. And Miranda—but she had no opportunity to go after Eva. She went down in the bubble with Ani.”
“Maybe she didn’t.” My heart is suddenly thumping. “Maybe that’s what Ani remembered. That Miranda wasn’t in the lift. It’s easy to get confused after all—there’s a shuffle of bodies at the top, people heading for one telecabine, it’s full, they go for another. Maybe that’s what Ani realized, that Miranda never got on the lift?”
“What are you saying?” Liz looks uneasy. Her brows, behind the thick glasses, are knitted together and in the darkness I hear the crack, crack, crack of her knuckles as she nervously flexes her fingers.
“Maybe she’s a better skier than she’s letting on. It’s quite easy to pretend to be worse than you are. Maybe she peeled off when everyone else was getting on the lift, and instead of going down in the bubble, she followed Eva down La Sorcière.”
“I… I guess…,” Liz says slowly. She looks troubled.
I’m ladling the cassoulet out into two bowls when I realize something. If it’s true, if what I’m guessing is correct, then I’ve sent Danny off with a killer. And my heart clutches like someone has put it in a vice.
Because yes, it’s true, there are two of them and one of her. But the path to Haut Montagne passes along some pretty treacherous stretches. How hard would it be to wait until someone was close to the edge, and then give a little shove.
I have no proof of any of this, I remind myself, desperately. It’s just a theory. It’s just a theory.
But my throat is constricted, and my stomach is closed and sick, and suddenly I can’t face eating the fast-cooling mess of beans and meat in front of me. I feel ill with the force of what I may have done.
Because I told him to go. With my instinct to organize, my certainty that I know what’s best for others, I told Danny to go out into the snow alone with Miranda and Carl.
Is it true?
Have I sent another friend to his death?
LIZ
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Erin hardly touches her supper. She has gone from being professional and friendly to something quite different in the space of about half an hour. I am at a loss to understand it. When I ask her about it she just mutters something about being worried about Danny, but I am not sure if that is completely true.
I eat most of her portion as well as my own. Then I get up and grope my way through to the kitchen to rinse the bowls under the cold tap. There is no point in trying to wash up. We are past things like that. This is starting to feel like survival. But when I turn the tap, nothing happens. I try the other. Still nothing.