He rested, breathing shallowly against the ice cradling his face. I’m not getting enough air, he thought. He could hear Nicky calling his name and the sound of rhythmic motion through snow. She’s digging toward me. Not enough air. My arms, he thought, twisting his torso a few degrees. If I can pull my arms back to my chest, there will be air from the arm holes. On his third attempt he was able to pull an arm out of its tunnel in the snow and bend it up underneath his chest. He swiveled his head and inhaled, trying to draw air from the vacated hole.

“Vin!” Nicky’s voice was louder now and the sound of digging had grown more frantic.

“Here!” he tried to yell, but the shell of his snow coffin reflected the sound and he wasn’t sure he could be heard. He struggled to twist his upper body, then pushed a hand up into the snow above him. Powder tumbled against his face.

“Nicky!” he yelled, punching into the ceiling of snow again. His arm went a few inches further. “Nicky, here!” He felt his voice fading and a prickly sensation encircled his forehead and temples, as if a vine had been looped around his head and was being tightened. It grew darker and he saw a row of diffuse orange spots. He punched once more into the snow overhead and felt his hand break through to the weightless air.

“Vin!” he heard Nicky scream again.

“Here!” he answered, but it was barely a rasp. He withdrew his hand into the snow, saw light reach the channel he had opened, and felt a taste of sharper, dryer air. He hyperventilated toward the air channel, then thrust his hand as far as he could back toward the surface.

This time he felt contact, and Nicky’s gloved hand grasped his own. He rotated his arm and Nicky pushed his hand into a widening spiral. Loose snow fell onto his face, and he blinked and shook his head as the widening hole filled his snow coffin with air and light. Nicky dug snow away from his upper body with both hands. The weight on his torso and neck diminished and he was able to twist onto his back and reach both arms toward her. She yanked him sideways and he managed to bend a foot beneath him, push his snowshoe down, find leverage at last. He dragged his other foot into the pit, then kicked and thrust until he managed to stand.

Panting and too tired to speak, he turned toward Nicky. She was breathless too, her face red with exertion and her arms, hat, and hair covered with snow. He leaned in to hug her, bracing his knees and waist against snow. He felt her choke through silent sobs that resolved into fast and shallow breaths.

“God, Vin! That was horrible!” She pulled away to see him through tearing eyes. “What happened?”

Vin felt his own eyes water. He wiped his face with his sleeve, freed the snow around his ears. “I don’t know,” he said between breaths. “I stepped right through the bridge.” He took off his hat and shook the snow loose. “Are you OK?”

Nicky nodded as he crawled out of the pit. They helped each other stand and their snowshoes prevented them from sinking deeper than their knees. Nicky collected her poles and they plowed to the far side of the gulley, where Vin helped her climb out to the trail beyond the bridge. As he started to follow her, he realized his shoulders were unencumbered.

“My pack,” he said. “It came loose when I fell. Hang on.” He waded back toward the bridge. Passing the snow pit he’d created, he tried to envision the trajectory of his fall. He saw Nicky’s tracks entering the gulley and a second crater in the snow. That must have been where she was digging at first, he thought. How could she have missed the right spot by six feet? His daypack had created its own hole in the snow. He fished it out, then leaned in to examine the underside of the bridge.

In the middle section the four right-most planks were missing, and the joists beneath the missing planks looked new. They’d been covered by a sheet of building-wrap that had been strong enough to support the snow but incapable of holding his additional weight. Swearing to himself, he reached under the bridge to pull the building-wrap loose. As it shed its snow blanket, he noticed a flash of orange beneath the bridge. He draped the wrap back onto the bridge, looked underneath again, and saw a flat, orange diamond splattered with fallen snow. It was a sign, and his head throbbed lightly as he read the words on its front. “Bridge Out. Trail Ahead Closed.” He jammed the sign into the snow with its words facing the trail behind them, then followed his tracks to the edge of the gulley and climbed out. Nicky leaned back and extended her poles for him to use as handholds.

They walked the remainder of the trail in silence and without incident, with Vin leading. The last stretch veered away from the river, up a gentle grade through thinning woods. The flat white towpath and the open space over the canal emerged through the trees. Approaching the trailhead, Vin saw that it was blocked by posts nailed together with cross-boards, and that another sign was affixed to these boards. They sidestepped around to the towpath, then stopped to read it. Vin already knew what it would say. “Trail Closed. Use Alternate Trailhead.”

While hiking in silence he had aligned the pieces in his mind, and though they didn’t quite connect, he was unable to abandon the framework. Whoever had etched the words on the railings must have seen Lee Fisher’s note. If it was Kelsey, that would mean she had quoted it twice. And that she had tried to lead him here.

And the question, “why are you here?” Did that mean Carderock? The Billy Goat Trail? Potomac? The D.C. area? Or did the question refer to his search itself? He thought about it in the context of the note. When he’d read the question on the railing, he had been standing between the tree of the killers and the tree of the dead. Was that what “here” meant? And what about the half-covered tracks leading from Carderock toward the footbridge? And the displaced “Bridge Out” sign, that obviously should have been attached to the naked wooden posts flanking the entrance to the bridge?

“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about broken bridges or missing signs from here on,” he said, still staring at the sign. Nicky laughed and sniffled. He turned to see her wiping her nose on her sleeve, and noticed now that she’d been crying. “What’s the matter, honey?” He put his gloved hands on her shoulders and lowered his head toward hers. She squinted through teary eyes and sniffled again.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t find you and was afraid I was going to lose you when you fell. And I felt like it was my fault. Like I was trying to help you but I was doing the wrong things.” She exhaled deeply. “I don’t know…” she repeated, shaking her head. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

Chapter 10

High-Water Marks

Sunday, January 21, 1996

Driving the downslope toward the American Legion Bridge over the Potomac, Kelsey saw the river emerge through the trees to her right. The silt-stained current rolled and twisted through bare trees that normally stood a hundred feet from the water’s edge. Looking upstream from the bridge, she saw a writhing brown body below the orange sun; it seemed as if the river had risen halfway toward the level of her eyes. And in rising, like a cobra, it had grown half again as wide.

The highway ascended into Virginia and she turned onto a serpentine road that ran through woods and pastures, tracking the river upstream. After a few miles she reached the entrance road to Great Falls Virginia National Park. A police car was parked across the road, its lights flashing. Kelsey slowed to turn and the officer waved her onward, instructing her to bypass the park. She reversed course in a driveway and drove back past the entrance, then retraced another half-mile to the dirt lot for the Difficult Run trailhead. Since it was 5:10 pm on a winter Sunday, she wasn’t surprised to see the lot almost empty. Difficult Run was a Potomac tributary that drained a local watershed and formed the southeast border of sprawling Great Falls Park. A muddy path from the parking area followed the stream toward its confluence with the Potomac, then joined trails leading west, back into the heart of the park.