Frozen Solid A Novel

12




WIL BOWMAN LIVED ON A HUNDRED REMOTE ACRES IN NORTHWESTERN Maryland, in a stone house built in the 1850s by a farm family named Mongeon and refurbished at odd intervals since. Bowman’s place was accessible by a dirt service road that curved and twisted more than a mile from State Route 550. The land was mostly mixed hardwood forest on the southern flank of Piney Mountain. Remnants of an orchard intermingled with native trees off to one side of the house. Bowman was slowly bringing the apple trees back, heirloom varieties like Northern Spy, Orange Pippin, Winesap, Roxbury Russet.

A quarter mile behind the house, a sheer granite face rose vertically for 150 feet and ran a half mile in either direction. In spring, freshets poured down the mountain above the cliff and joined into foaming cascades at several places. In winter, those waterfalls froze solid. In front of the house, Bowman had cleared several sloping acres to reclaim what, once upon a time, had been sheep pasture bounded by ruler-straight, knee-high stone walls. When time between operations allowed, he kept working to open things up beyond the fields. He liked making space for the big maple, beech, and oak trees to have light and flourish. He also liked clean, open sight lines.

He sat at an oak table in front of a cavernous fieldstone fireplace. It was fitted now with a Vermont Castings Defiant woodstove, which heated the house all winter on four cords of seasoned wood, which he cut, split, and stacked himself.

He had been trying to write an email to Hallie for some time now, starting and stopping, uncharacteristically twisted up in his own thinking. He had not liked the way they had parted on Thursday. On the way to Dulles, she’d told him that she had thought she was pregnant. It had come as a surprise, but no more so than the fact that she’d waited until they were almost at the terminal.

“Why didn’t you say anything before?” he asked, wanting her answer and fearing it in about equal measure.

“I wanted to be sure,” she said.

He looked over. Something in her tone. “That wasn’t the only reason, though.”

“No, it wasn’t the only one.”

Perhaps that was why she had waited until they were so close to the airport. Before more could be said, he double-parked in front of the terminal. He knew that she had to board in less than an hour and had two huge bags to check, not to mention passing security. He could feel her impatience. Cars were lining up behind them. A cabbie honked, then another. A dirty wind came up, making them both blink to clear the grit. He tossed her luggage onto a redcap’s wagon, then drew her aside.

“We need to talk more, Hallie.”

“We do. But I have to go.”

He held her with his eyes. “There are things you don’t know. About me.”

“And about myself, apparently.”

That surprised him. Shocked, almost. Hallie never spoke about herself that way, was virtually allergic to the argot of self-help books and guru mantras.

He held her, and they kissed. She promised to call from Los Angeles, or maybe it had been New Zealand. She waved to the redcap, who followed her into the terminal.

A green minivan pulled to the curb directly in front of him and disgorged people: business-suited man, woman in white parka and jeans, young girl with shining blond hair in red jacket and white cap. The man hauled a suitcase out of the van’s back, faced the woman, and they embraced. The girl fluttered around them.

Bowman turned away. More honking, a woman leaning out her car window, gesturing, yelling something. He heard none of it.

He started another email:

Hallie,

I didn’t like the way we left things at the airport. I was caught off guard by what you told me and did not respond appropriately. Since we hadn’t talked at all about anything relating to

No, he thought. Sounds like a fuddled college kid. He deleted that attempt, got up, walked around. Looked out the front windows. It was midafternoon, the sun dipping behind the mountain’s western shoulder, white woods turning blue, wind spinning through the forest, twirling up snow devils in the old sheep pasture. Bowman looked out, watched shadows stretch, thought about climbing one of the frozen waterfalls. Tossed that idea away. Quit stalling, mister.

He went to the bathroom, used the toilet, saw his reflection in the mirror while he washed his hands. Bowman liked living among old things. Some young Marylander might have gazed at himself in that mirror before heading off to Antietam. Bowman had bought it for the oval frame of hand-carved butternut and had never replaced the glass, though it was cracked and dulled with age. It was like looking at himself through fog—not such a bad thing, actually. Thirty-nine, not old, but not much youth left in that face. Had he ever looked young? Must have, once. The job ages you. Other people told you, so you knew that when you took it on. Like being a soldier. Or a cop in a big city. People thought the fighting ended when the bad actors swung, but it never really did end. Just smoldered underground, out of plain sight, waiting to flare again like roots that reignite forest fires.

There were certain rules he never broke. Some had to do with killing. Always finishing what he started was another. One of his favorite books was Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, and one of his favorite passages described young Grant’s attempt to ride home, on a short leave, before deployment separated him from family and friends. At one point he had to take a green horse across a rain-swollen river. Mixing fast water and young mounts was a good way to produce dead riders, as Grant, possibly the finest horseman ever to pass through West Point, well knew. But he wrote, “One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back or stop until the thing intended was accomplished.”

Bowman had never forgotten that sentence, thought it worth adding to his collection of personal commandments, and allowed it to guide actions large and small. An email was one of those small things that could have very large consequences, and he would not let this one go unfinished. Now, though, he felt the way he imagined Grant’s horse must have, knowing it had to go, wanting like hell not to.

Walking back to the table, he felt, rather than heard, some disturbance. Might have been a very faint sound like a slap. He stood where he was for several seconds, then went to the kitchen and moved a switch that killed every light in the house. He stepped out onto the small back porch—the noise, or whatever it was, had come from that direction—leaving the door open. He stood there for a long time, listening, feeling the dark, and finally went back in.

At the table again, he sat and stared at the screen and reeled in his mind when it started to wander. Finally, to break something loose, he sipped coffee that had grown cold sitting next to the computer, took a deep breath, and tried a jump-starting trick a writer friend had once showed him:

Dear Hallie,

What I really want to say here is

Stopped. Waited for more. Waited longer. Rubbed his forehead. Leaned back, closed his eyes, grunted. Stood, cursed, and went to make dinner.

He rose the next morning before sunrise, had coffee, and set out on snowshoes. Twenty minutes of easy cross-hill climbing brought him to the base of the biggest frozen waterfall. As far as he knew, he was the first to climb it, so he’d had the privilege of naming the fall: Revelation.

It rose vertically for almost 150 feet. The exit on top was barred by a rounded, bulging cornice that required very careful climbing. Unusual to have the crux of a route so near its end, but the velocity of flow in this stream caused water to shoot out beyond the cliff face, forming the cornice as layer after layer froze. At some point the cornice would break off of its own weight.

It was about ten degrees and still, perfect weather for climbing here. Everything—rock, ice, snow—was blue in the predawn, though the sun would appear soon, in an hour at most. Above him, the ice looked like giant drips of melted white and blue wax. His passage had silenced the woodpeckers and chickadees, ermine and hares, the wraith deer. The only sounds were his breathing and small, sharp cracks as the ice shifted, compressed, expanded. Every part of it that he could see was frozen solid, but deep inside there was always something happening.

He stamped a firm circle and stepped out of his snowshoes, clipped into his Grivel crampons, took two leashless Black Diamond Cobra ice tools from their holsters on either side of his climbing harness. Accustomed to solo climbing, he carried just a few carabiners and ice screws. The only other tool was a Desert Eagle Mark XIX pistol in .44 magnum caliber, black stainless steel with internal laser sight, carried under his left arm in a custom Bianchi shoulder holster, which also held two extra eight-round magazines. Bowman never went anywhere unarmed.

He stepped to the ice, found secure placements for both tools above his head, set one pair of front points, then the other at the same level. He hung straight-armed from the ice tools for a few seconds, knees bent and legs relaxed. He stood up straight, removed and replaced his left tool higher, stepped up with his right foot, moving diagonally to center his body on the tool, set the left front points, set the right tool, and stood again.

The ice was perfect, solid enough to be secure, with features and porosity for good penetration of the tools’ picks. Then he really began the climb, not stop-go, stop-go, but in a continuous flow, arms and legs always moving, body constantly, smoothly rising, as if he were being hoisted by an invisible cable.

When he had climbed sixty feet, the sun rose over the treetops and he saw it strike the ice twenty feet below him. He was tempted to hang and let it catch him, because it would feel good to be there like that, sandwiched between the heat of the sun and the cold of the ice.

He started up again, moving in that easy rhythm, and stopped at 130 feet. The cornice overhang loomed above him. Beneath that, a massive fracture had left a band of clean rock ten feet high and cutting completely through the ice column. He was surprised not to have seen the debris down at the bottom, but then he reasoned that it must have shattered upon impact with the ice column’s solid base. There had been less than full light, too, when he began. He understood that the ice section’s cracking and fall was what he had heard the night before.

He could try to climb past the smooth swath of granite. It wasn’t the rock he was worried about, though it looked dauntingly clean. Worse, all the ice above that section was now unstable, held in place only by adhesion to the face. It might carry ten climbers his weight or come off with one strike of an ice tool. The sun was moving. Warmth touched his calves like slowly rising water. In ten minutes, maybe less, it would reach that ice hanging above him.

He leaned back, surveyed the rock band, looking for a line. Saw two ledges the width of a guitar pick that could hold his front points and, above them, a crack that would take the pick of one tool. He could get that far, but the ice above would still be a foot beyond his longest reach. It would require a dynamic move, launching himself off those ledges and swinging the free tool all at once, to reach that ice above, with no guarantee that it would take his weight long enough for him to place the other pick.

Two hours later, climbing gear stowed and coffee poured, Bowman added maple logs to the Defiant and sat at the oak table. Like Hallie, he came to decisions quickly and did not look back. He put the mug down and started typing.

Dear Hallie,

I have been at this for some time without producing anything worth sending to you. So I’m going to let words come as they will. I said there were things you don’t know about me. I wasn’t referring to the work. Not directly.

I was married before, and we had a child. My wife’s name was Arden. Our daughter was named Sarah. One time some people came to where we lived then and killed them both. I was not there to save them.

It was never my intention to deceive you. Only guilt and shame kept this locked down. It cuts every day.

You doubtless would have thought me a paltry excuse for fatherhood before. I cannot imagine that this will improve your estimation much.

Wil

He sent the email, wondering which would disturb Hallie more: that he had had a family, or that they had been killed, or that he had taken a year to tell her about it.

His cellphone chimed while he was in the kitchen breakfasting on raw lemons and blood-red otoro.

“How’s BARDA today, Don?”

“All good. Are you planning to be in D.C. anytime soon?”

“Why?”

“Something I’d like to discuss with you.”

“About our mutual friend?” Bowman put his chopsticks down. He could not think of another reason Hallie’s boss would be calling him. And if Barnard had been on the phone with good news, he would not have hesitated to speak about it immediately.

“That’s right.”

“I’ll see you in two hours.”