Whatever the answers to those questions were, right then he had work to do. The find wasn’t just a boon to Eco-Travel—it was also the sort of thing that national magazine awards were made of. He had to pay attention and not muck it up. Before backing off, Joe Gillespie, his editor, had actually given him grief that he’d come back without any pictures from his tragic misadventure in the Cascades. Sometimes Michael suspected that the scoop was all that counted with Gillespie.
Once Michael had decided on the right cameras and equipment, he took a series of shots through the ice—first of the man, whose face was still largely concealed, then of the woman. Capturing the quality of the ice, without losing too much to the reflections and refractions, made the work extremely tricky, but Michael liked that. The good stuff was always the hardest to get. At his behest, Betty and Tina went back to work and he took a couple of dozen shots of them, as they shaved or cut away more of the ice, and one or two of Ollie, who’d waddled over to see if the ice shavings littering the ground were edible.
The wind was really picking up, and the sheet-metal fence, though firmly planted, was rattling so loudly it was hard to talk over it. Michael had to shout at Tina and Betty just to get them to move to the right or the left, into the light or out of a shadow, and he quickly sensed he was making them uncomfortable. The ice queens weren’t the kind of people, he suspected, who relished publicity or having their pictures taken. “Just one more,” he said to Betty, “with the hand drill about six inches higher.” It was obscuring the face of Sleeping Beauty.
Betty obliged, holding the drill in place while Michael hastily adjusted a light that the wind had blown out of position. The full illumination was falling on the ice, and he moved closer to pick up as much detail in the shot as possible. Whether it was from the extra wattage, or the work that Betty had been doing all morning, the face of the woman came into fuller view than ever before. Michael could see the auburn hair caught beneath the rusted chain, the glimmer of a white pin, and the emerald gleam in her eyes. Her expression was the one he remembered from the second time he’d found her underwater, and he marveled that he could have thought it had changed. Funny, what tricks the memory could play on you. He ran off a couple of shots, but his own shadow was falling into the frame, and he had to lower his shoulder and move a few inches to one side. He focused another shot, and even as he did so, he could swear that something had changed again. He had a great eye for detail—his photography teachers had always remarked on it, and so did his editors—and he knew that something in the image was different. Something tiny, something ephemeral. But as he shifted position again, he saw it happen—he saw the pupils of her eyes contract.
He lowered the camera, then looked at the digital images he had just recorded. Back and forth, from one to the other. And though the change was infinitesimal, he could still swear it was there.
“Found you!” he heard Darryl call out, over the windy rattling of the metal fence. “You’ve got a call on the SAT phone—someone named Karen! They’re holding it for you.” Darryl took in the work that Betty and Tina had done on the ice block. “Wow! You’ve made a lot of progress.”
Michael nodded, and said, “Leave everything just the way it is. I’m coming back.”
“I don’t think you should leave the lights on,” Betty said.
She was right. Michael tucked his camera back inside his anorak, then, before heading for the administration module, flicked them off. The block of ice instantly went from a shimmering pillar to a somber monolith.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
December 11, 3 p.m.
“I’M SORRY,” Karen was saying, “did I take you away from something important?”
“No, no, I always want to hear from you. You know that.” But his heart was in his mouth every time that they did talk on the SAT phone. It was very unlikely she was bringing him good news. “What’s up?”
With his foot, he pushed the door to the communications room closed, and hunkered forward on the armless computer chair.
“I just thought I’d let you know that Krissy’s leaving the hospital, so you don’t need to try calling there anymore.”
For a second, his spirits lifted—Kristin was going home?—but there was nothing jubilant in Karen’s tone, so he asked, “Where is she going?”
“Home.”
Now he was puzzled again. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? “The doctors think she’s improved enough to go home?”
“No, not really, but my dad does.”
That sounded about right. Mr. Nelson was not one to let professionals get in the way.
“He thinks they’re not doing enough for her—enough physical therapy, enough cognitive stuff—and he’s decided to hire all his own people and just have them come to the house, where he can monitor them.”
“Who’s going to run the car dealerships?”
“Don’t ask me. This is his big idea, and we’re all just along for the ride.”
That, too, sounded like the family dynamic; Kristin had been the only one who ever actively refused to go along. And though Michael did not doubt for one minute Mr. Nelson’s love for his daughter, he also saw this as a way—a final, irrefutable way—for him to gain control over her again, entirely.