The last hole is the hardest to drill. The ice seems to have turned to stone, and I can’t feel my fingers on either hand. My feet throb as if they are being crushed in a vise. My arms and chest are so cramped and gnawed by fatigue that I can barely turn the crank. Every few turns, I have to stop and rest, but resting only prolongs the suffering. The wind has picked up with gusts that push me into the auger. I feel like I may fall down at any moment.
A full moon is rising in the east, casting a dark-blue patina across the lake and rolling my shadow out ten feet behind me. I can see well enough to know that Mikhail is shivering violently, his words rattling as he speaks. “You can’t do this,” he says. “This is wrong—it’s murder.”
I gave him his trial. He could have come clean. No one—not even Nancy—can say I didn’t try. Lie upon lie upon lie. He had all day to do the right thing. I gave him every opportunity, and I feel half dead from the effort. He knew what was coming; he chose this path.
I can no longer push down on the auger with my arm. It hurts too much. I lean forward and rest my forehead atop my hand on the cap of the auger. As I turn the crank, I use my neck muscles to press the auger into the ice. The sounds and vibrations pulsing up through the shaft fill my skull with noise. I welcome it because it helps to block out Mikhail’s pleading. But I can still hear him. Like a runner at the end of a marathon, I push until I think I will collapse. But I don’t break through and I have to rest. I’m so very close.
“Please, I told you, it was all Ana. You can’t do this; you can’t live with this. For God’s sake, listen to me.”
I don’t want to talk to Mikhail, but I ask a question that, he has to see, is his last chance to purge his sins. “Tell me about Zoya,” I say. My words are cracked and weak as they climb from my tattered throat. “Tell me how she died.”
“She’s dead?”
My shoulders slump with disappointment. “Come on, Mikhail. We’ve come too far for you to pretend now.” I try to swallow, but I have no spit left. “Tell me how she died.”
“I don’t know. I swear to—”
“I know . . . you swear to God.” I shake my head. “You’ve sworn to God so many times today. And every time that you said that, you were lying to me.”
He’s gritting his teeth to keep them from chattering and doesn’t answer me.
“Haven’t I been fair, Mikhail? Don’t you want to save yourself? I’m going to ask you one last time . . . and I want you to answer as though your life depends on it—because it does. How . . . did . . . Zoya . . . die?”
“I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about. I had nothing to do with her death.”
I smile. “That’s right. You’re an innocent man. You don’t know how Zoya died. You weren’t involved in my wife’s death. This is all a big misunderstanding.”
“I told you what happened. That’s the truth.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear you say that, Mikhail.”
I stand back up and go back to drilling my last hole.
“This is wrong,” he yells.
My auger catches and breaks through to the lake.
“You’re doing this because of Ana,” he says. “She’s manipulated you, and you can’t see it.”
I have eight holes, each one six inches in diameter, making my oval forty-eight inches around, big enough to fit this man through. Each hole is separated from its neighbor by a wall of ice about as thin as a pane of glass. With the head of the auger, I stab into each hole at an angle, chipping away those final impediments.
“You can’t do this. Please . . . please, I beg you, look at the facts. It’s not me. It’s Ana. You’re being used.”
As long as I keep my shadow behind me, I can see well enough by the moonlight to finish my pit.
“Think about it. With me dead . . . and Reece Whitton dead, she has it all to herself.”
When I cut through the last wall, the chunk of ice in the center lifts in the water and floats a few inches higher than the rest of the icy surface. I know that I am too weak to heave it out of the water, so I use the auger to push it down. When it clears the bottom, the chunk turns sideways and knocks against the underside of the lake ice. The pit is open, jagged and dark and cold.
“You’re insane,” Mikhail says. He’s working the cord against his zipper. In the moonlight, his eyes seem as big as hen’s eggs. I have my hands on my thighs. I am exhausted. I begin to cough, and it feels like my lungs are tearing free of my chest.
When I catch my breath, I search through the darkness until I find the loose end of the rope. I’m breathing as if I’d just summited Mount Everest, and I curse at my poor condition. It won’t be much longer.
“Listen to me,” Mikhail pleads. “You can’t do this. You have no proof. I’m telling you the truth. It was Ana.”
I tie the sack of rocks to the rope around Mikhail’s legs, three feet of slack between his heels and the bundle.
“God dammit! Stop!” Mikhail’s voice carries up and seems to fill the entire sky. “Would you just stop?”
I finish tying Mikhail to the rocks, and I crawl up to sit beside him, my elbow in the snow near his head. “I’ve given you a chance to come clean,” I say.
“But I’m telling you—”
“No. Don’t say another word. I want you to be quiet and listen to me now.”
Mikhail is breathing heavily. I can see the fear in his eyes, but he stops talking.
“Before I came here, I was with Ana. You saw me at the club, so you know this already. But she told me a story, and I want to tell it to you now.”
I think back to that moment when I was about to leave the lodge and Ana held me back. I have to tell you something, she said. I know about your wife’s death. I know what happened to her. In that brief conversation, Ana handed to me a final piece of my puzzle, a nugget of proof that has been here on the lake with us the entire day, hiding, waiting to be unveiled.
I speak. “Four and a half years ago, Zoya Savvin was beaten by one of your clients and thrown through a motel window. A patrol officer found her and took her to Hennepin County Medical Center, where she met my wife. Because her assault appeared to be related to prostitution, the Vice Unit was called. Reece Whitton took the call himself and went to the hospital. Zoya must have known that Reece worked for you, because when Whitton showed up, Zoya got scared and wouldn’t say a word.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Mikhail says. “I don’t—”
I slap my hand down on Mikhail’s broken arm and give it a squeeze. He lets loose a howl that tears open the night sky. I probably squeeze a bit harder than I need to, but I really want him to shut up and listen.
A faint green light, like the smoky flame of burning copper, is pulsing above the crown of the Canadian hills. The Aurora Borealis—the Northern Lights. I pause in my story for a moment to take in the beauty. In some weird way, that glow makes me feel warm inside. But that could also be hypothermia setting in.
“I’m guessing you thought you were in the clear,” I continue. “Maybe you thought Zoya would be a good soldier—keep her mouth shut after she saw Whitton. But that didn’t happen. Zoya talked to my wife. She said quite a bit once she thought she was safe from Whitton. The problem was that Zoya spoke in Belarussian. Jenni wrote the words down in a notebook, not knowing that those words would lead to her own death.”