Chapter One: Wreck
Bighorn Mountains, Buffalo, Wyoming
Saturday, March 5, 1977, 11:00 a.m.
Patrick
“Make a wedge with your skis, Susanne. Like a piece of pie.” With whipped cream on top, Patrick Flint thought, looking down at the fluffy spring snow. He lost sight of his wife for a moment as he fought to control the demon sticks at the end of his own legs. He’d just recovered from a faceplant after an early and imprudent exit from the Poma lift.
The Poma lift. It was 1977, for goodness sakes, and ski resorts worldwide were moving toward chair lifts, even enclosed gondola lifts, or so he’d read. The Poma lift was a throwback, like Wyoming itself. Everything about the damn contraption was unnatural to Patrick. The smell of diesel in his dry nostrils, in the middle of otherwise pristine winter wilderness. Scrambling into position as if he were a fawn on roller skates. Grabbing the pole, similar to the ones strippers used in movies, only this version swung freely from an overhead conveyor cable and ended in a hard rubber disc at knee-height. Jamming the disc between his legs. Learning not to lean back into it or, God forbid, sit on it and end up butt first in the snow. Trusting it to drag him by the rump slowly up hill. Fighting the opposing force of gravity when the lift strained against the steepest stretches, as if it were being powered by a team of elderly and infirm mice.
On his first lift ride, the engine had shut down with a shuddering moan while he was still mid-slope. Some poor schmuck probably bit the dust loading or unloading. He thanked the good Lord it wasn’t him and marveled at the view. The snow-topped Bighorn Mountains around him. Frozen Meadowlark Lake below him at eighty-five hundred feet. The elevation this far north was analogous, weather-wise, to something one thousand feet higher in Colorado, and two thousand feet higher in New Mexico. The rivers flowed north. The Rocky Mountains themselves—of which the Bighorns were a part—extended three thousand miles from northern Alberta down into New Mexico. The size and scope took his breath away. But there was majesty even in the small details. A magpie chattering in the distance. Snow falling from tree limbs. A snowshoe hare juking and jiving. It energized him. Made him feel completely alive and in touch with his senses in a way he didn’t feel back in town.
After ten minutes waiting, though, he grew impatient. He decided the lift must be broken. He surveyed his surroundings. The snow to his left looked perfectly skiable. There was no reason to stick around unless he just wanted to freeze his tush off. He let go of the bar and skied over what appeared to be a gentle hump.
It wasn’t.
Five sweaty minutes later, he’d finally extricated himself from a deep drift of heavy snow. A very humiliating five minutes during which the re-started lift dragged a captive audience uphill past him, including his amused wife, who had been vocal in questioning his decision from her perch safe on her own disk.
So, standing here beside his wife now and struggling to stay upright, he was determined. He wasn’t going to fall again so soon.
“We should have taken lessons.” She sounded testy, and when she looked up at him, her doe-like eyes flashed with heat. But even in irritation she was so adorable that he would have given in to the urge to hurry over, bend down, and kiss her, if only he were certain he could have gotten back up afterward. He loved this feisty Southern beauty, with her slap-red checks and strands of long brown hair blown into her mouth. She pushed at the hair with her bulky mittens, not that it did any good. “The stupid skis won’t do what they’re supposed to.”
Teaching himself and his wife to ski wasn’t going as easily as Patrick had planned. He’d been offered a chance for them to ski free of charge today thanks to Meadowlark Ski Lodge’s “Doctor of the Day” program, and he’d jumped at it. The ski resort was forty-five miles on wintery mountain roads from the nearest hospital in Buffalo, so they offered family lift tickets to doctors who would spend the day onsite and on call. Patrick had been careful not to mention they were beginners when he’d picked up their lift passes and equipment, without outright lying about their levels, even though this was the first time skiing for all the Flints—Patrick, Susanne, their sixteen-year old daughter Trish, and their newly-thirteen son Perry. Patrick had read a book on alpine skiing the week before and passed the information along to his family, under the theory that they could learn to ski at a fraction of the price that expensive lessons would cost at the slope. His mind returned to his less than masterful debarkation from the lift. As a doctor, he’d grown accustomed to being skilled at his profession. To knowing more about his field than anyone else in the room. This experience—being a rank amateur—was the pits, but it was a temporary condition. Hadn’t most of his time in Wyoming been a study in this exact same phenomenon? All he needed was practice and willpower.
He was about to say mind over matter to Susanne in an encouraging voice, when the tips of Susanne’s skis crossed. Down she went, her wail cut off by an oomph. She landed awkwardly, like a pretzel in her brown and yellow jacket and matching snow pants. He almost laughed, but it died on his lips when she didn’t move or make a sound.
“Are you okay?” he shouted.
She didn’t answer.
He went through a mental checklist of possible injuries. The head—a concussion or an intracranial hemorrhage. A broken bone. A sprain. Even a puncture or other damage to the spleen.
“Susanne, if you can answer me, are you all right?” He moved as quickly as he could toward her, heart rate accelerating.
Then Susanne lifted one of her ski poles and shook it, like a fist. Or a middle finger.
She was conscious, anyway. That was good. So far, assuming Susanne was okay, Patrick hadn’t had any patients. He hoped he didn’t get any. Not just because of well wishes for his fellow skiers, but because his own family needed to spend some peaceful time together having fun. Trish and Susanne were the star witnesses in a death penalty trial that was starting soon, where he and Perry would play supporting roles with their own testimony. It would be one long, hard flashback for all to them to their ordeal with Billy Kemecke, a convicted murderer who’d busted free during transport to the state penitentiary. After his escape, he’d held Susanne hostage while he ransacked their family home and pried information from her about Patrick’s whereabouts. He’d kidnapped Trish from a campsite in the mountains and dragged her up into rugged and remote Cloud Peak Wilderness. He’d even slit the throat of his own cousin right in front of Trish, and he’d attacked their friend Deputy Ronnie Harcourt. He’d only stopped his reign of terror when Susanne put him down with a bullet through his shoulder. And all of this was because Kemecke wanted to punish Patrick. He believed Patrick had caused the death of his mother, although she’d been too far gone with sepsis for Patrick to save her when she’d arrived at the emergency room in Buffalo a few weeks before. Kemecke hadn’t acted alone on his rampage, and Patrick had been forced to kill Chester, Kemecke’s brother and accomplice, during the showdown. Kemecke’s teenage nephew Ben was currently residing in juvenile detention for his role—albeit coerced—in Trish’s kidnapping. Since then, Kemecke’s family, especially his sister Donna Lewis, had made things uncomfortable for the Flints in Buffalo. Donna didn’t just hold Patrick responsible for the death of her mother, like Kemecke did. She also blamed the entire Flint family for the fate of her brothers and nephew.
Patrick expected the proceedings to put them all under a lot of stress and pressure.
“What hurts?” He stopped to retrieve Susanne’s other ski pole a few yards up the hill from her.
Something whizzed past him so close that he gasped and nearly lost his balance. It was low to the ground—short and pudgy—and hatless, with blond hair sticking up and out from under a goggles strap.
It shouted, “Hey, Dad.”
His son, Perry, skiing like he’d been doing it all his life.
“Where’s your sister?” Patrick shouted after him.
His son vanished behind a rooster tail of snow. It was hard to hear him, but Patrick thought he heard him say, “I dunno,” before the tail disappeared around a bend in the trail.
They hadn’t seen Trish since five minutes after they got to the slopes. Patrick tried to block thoughts of the current Trish out of his mind in favor of the sweet little girl she used to be. The one who’d curled up in his lap and listened to him read his medical school texts aloud—his personal blend of parenting and studying. She was erratic now. Hormones, mostly, but also a result of what she’d been through, and was still going through, thanks to Kemecke. Of course, she didn’t make things any easier on herself or the rest of the Flint household by dating Donna Lewis’s son Brandon. Donna had forbidden Brandon from seeing Trish, and Patrick and Susanne did their best to keep the lovebirds apart, but the two were doing their Romeo and Juliet best to stay together.
Which meant that since Trish wasn’t with her parents or Perry, there was a better than even chance she was with Brandon. Well, Patrick couldn’t do anything about it up here on the mountain. He and Susanne could deal with Trish at lunch.
Patrick crept closer to his wife. His downhill ski lost traction and sent him into a standing split, but he clenched his gluteus maxiumus and stayed upright. It wasn’t okay to grab the parts that hurt, so he kept a stiff upper lip. When he reached Susanne, he planted his pole tips deep in the powder, into the packed accumulation below it, and leaned on them. He pulled off his gloves and stuffed them in his pockets. His wedding ring glinted bright gold against the stark white of the snow. He’d only started wearing it a few months before—after nearly seventeen years of marriage without one—and he still hadn’t gotten used to it. He kept expecting to catch it on something and rip his finger off at any minute.
Wind whipped snow off the ground and around them as Susanne tilted up her tear-streaked face.
The sight of it almost did him in. “What hurts?” He laid the back of his fingers against her cheek.
“Skiing gives me a headache.” Her teeth chattered. “These clothes aren’t waterproof. I’m freezing, and I can’t get up.”
He made a show of checking her face and ears. “I don’t see any signs of frostbite.” They both knew she hadn’t been out long enough, and that it was actually too warm for it. But given that he hadn’t sprung for ski wear for any of them, he didn’t mention it. His own Scotch-guarded blue jeans felt a little damp. “Are you injured?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Just uncomfortable. And frustrated.”
“Okay.” He made a grab for one of her skis, ready to turn it, but he lost traction and went into a split with the other leg. He didn’t handle this split as well as he had the one on his other side, and he fell like a rifle-shot bear. He rolled to his back. He definitely needed a lot more practice. Maybe being twenty years younger would help, too.
Blowing snow dusted his face. He stared at the blue sky, startling in its intensity, thanks to winter’s lower temperatures and humidity decreasing the water vapor in the air. He rested, thinking and blowing warm breath on his icy cold fingers. Helping Susanne would go faster and more safely without his skis on. He sat up, released his boot bindings, and unfastened the straps from around his ankles that kept his skis from running away. When he was done, he stuck the butt of the skis in the snow so they wouldn’t glide off. Kneeling beside Susanne, he lifted one of her skis with her foot still attached and turned it around one hundred and eighty degrees, in line with the other.
“Is that better?”
She sighed. “Much.”
“Why don’t you sit up and swing your legs around so they’re perpendicular to the incline. If they’re pointed downhill, they’ll spurt out from under you when you try to stand up.”
Susanne tried, but it wasn’t pretty.
Maybe he should have coughed up the money for ski lessons. He could sign them up when they got down the mountain. He looked around, hoping they were close. The lodge was nowhere in sight.
Make that if they ever got down the mountain.
Susanne cocked her head. “What are you mumbling about?”
Patrick clamped his lips together. He had an incurable habit of talking silently to himself. A man’s voice from above them saved him from admitting he was about to cave in for lessons.
“Need any help?”
Patrick recognized the voice and turned toward his friend Henry Sibley. “Hey, Sibley. Haven’t seen you in a while.” Henry was skiing in Levi’s, a felt cowboy hat, sunglasses, and an oil cloth jacket. Even on skis, he looked like a rancher.
Henry did a double take. “Patrick? I hardly recognized you with that molting marmot attached to your face.”
Patrick rubbed his sparse whiskers, dislodging chunks of ice. His beard was kind of marmot-orange. In contrast, Henry had a thick black beard, neatly trimmed. Patrick’s hadn’t gotten long enough for scissors yet, even though he’d been babying it along since New Year’s Day. It’s just in its training phase. He winked. “Winter’s long. Gotta do something to stay warm.”
Susanne piped in. “He’d grow it on his back if he could.”
“Hey, it works for bears.”
“They hibernate in caves in the mountains, which may be where you end up if you don’t let me shave it off soon.”
Patrick grinned. So far, she hadn’t attacked his beard with a razor in the middle of the night, but he knew the day was coming. “Hey, where’s Vangie?” Vangie was Henry’s very pregnant wife, and Susanne’s good friend.
“She’s down at the lodge having hot chocolate and told me to go on without her. We’re shorthanded at the ranch, so I haven’t gotten out on the slopes much lately.” Henry expertly positioned himself downhill of Susanne and grabbed her hand. “Here you go.” He pulled her to her feet.
She leaned against him while she steadied herself. “Thanks, Henry. You don’t happen to teach skiing, do you?”
Loudspeakers crackled from one of the poles supporting the cables of the Poma lift. After a piercing squelch, a woman’s voice boomed, “Doctor of the Day, you’re needed at the base of the main run. Doctor of the Day, report to the base of the main run.”
Patrick raised his hand. “Duty calls.” He glanced down the hill. The slope was daunting. He hoped whoever was hurt wasn’t in need of immediate assistance. It would take a while to get Susanne there.
Henry nodded. “Me, too. I’m giving Susanne a lesson. We’ll all see you at the bottom.”
Susanne and Patrick said, “Thank God,” at the same time.
“You’re a good man, Sibley.” Patrick saluted with two fingers to his forehead. Then he put his skis back on and pointed them across the mountain.
Take it slow, he coached himself. Traverse the mountain. Don’t fall—it’s easier to stay up than get up. Luckily, there wasn’t much traffic on the run, so he was able to control his speed by making the wide turns his book had recommended for beginners. I’m getting the hang of this. Maybe the expensive lessons wouldn’t be necessary after all.
He glided shakily into a curve. Movement in the trees to his right drew his eyes. He saw something tawny and low slung with a twitching black-tipped tail. Mountain lion—here and in broad daylight? He knew they lived up in these mountains, had his own up-close-and-personal experience with one. As quickly as it appeared, though, the animal was gone, and he couldn’t be sure he’d seen it at all.
He returned his concentration to finishing his turn. The imposing lodge and its wide wooden deck came into view. Relief flooded through him. He could hear the din of happy voices as clearly as if he was standing in the middle of the crowd. Lunchtime? He was feeling more confident, and he hated looking like a loser, so he tightened his turns and fought his skis out of the snowplow position and into something more respectable. His speed picked up. Despite his sunglasses, the wind teased tears from his eyes and burned his cheeks. His confidence grew. He was skiing. He was really skiing. As he neared the bottom of the run, he saw a group of about ten people clustered, their backs to him and eyes on a person reclined in the snow. That had to be his patient.
He planned his approach, and, more importantly, his stop. His ski instruction book recommended a deep snowplow for beginners, but he was no longer skiing like a beginner. His turns had gotten pretty good, if he did say so himself. Intermediate skiers stopped by turning against the hill and digging in their edges. That is what he would do.
He started looking for a place to initiate his turn, one that would leave him well short of the group. The slope had been swept bare of powder by the wind and a multitude of skis, and he couldn’t find a spot to his liking. The run was wider down here, and the longer he traversed it without a turn or a wedge, the more speed he built up. He saw that he was drawing too close to the lift. He had to turn immediately, or he’d careen across the tow line. His stomach fluttered, but he ignored his nerves and threw himself into his turn. His skis slid sideways out from under him. He heard the sickening sound of their metal edges scraping against ice, felt the sensation up through his legs. He didn’t fall, though, and he only flailed his arms a little.
But now he had a long stretch of real estate in front of him before he reached his patient, and no more room on his downhill side for another turn. To his dismay, he was picking up speed much more quickly on the packed snow. As he barreled toward the group, he shifted his weight uphill to dig in his edges, but that only seemed to make him go faster.
He was out of control, with only fifty feet to go.
In sheer desperation, he shifted deep into the snowplow position, with his legs bent and his front tips together and back tips wide apart. His skis knocked against each other, and within seconds, his thighs were burning. He sunk deeper, praying. Dear God, please help me not make a buffoon of myself in front of all these people.
His prayer went unanswered. He rode over the backs of the first person’s set of skis, which brought him to a grinding halt, and he straddled the legs of the next skier. One by one, people tumbled like dominos until he’d taken out everyone in the group beside his patient, except for one woman. For a moment, there was complete stillness and silence. His brain went silly on him, and he thought, Maybe the game is bowling instead of dominoes. I’m only one pin short of a strike.
He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Is everyone okay?”
A man under him shouted, “What the hell? You skied over my wrist. Could have chopped it off. Those things don’t grow back, you know?”
“Belongs in ski school,” another muttered. “A danger to himself and others.”
“My son is hurt, and you almost skied right over him,” a woman said from the ground beside him. She lifted her face. Her eyebrows were frosted in snow crystals. “You shouldn’t be out here if you can’t control yourself.”
Patrick closed his eyes. If he was hurting anywhere, the sting of mortification distracted him from it. This wasn’t good. Not good at all. But he had to tell them who he was, so he could help his patient.
He opened his eyes, smiled grimly, and said, “Did someone call for the Doctor of the Day?”
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