The snow woman, p.1
The Snow Woman, page 1
Table of Contents
The Snow Woman
Remember Me
The Perfect Proposal
The Snow Woman
By B.J. Daniels
Copyright 2011 B.J. Daniels
Smashwords Edition
Reese felt for her in the dim light of waking and found the bed beside him cold and empty.
“Casey?” He glanced at the clock. It was late morning. Through a crack in the curtains he saw the snow falling outside. Damn.
He got up, pulled on his jeans and went looking for her.
In the living room, the fire had burned down to glowing embers. In its warm, golden light he found Casey curled upon the couch, sleeping quietly.
He pulled the quilt up over her bare shoulders and knelt beside her. As he listened to the soft rhythm of her breathing, he assured himself she was fine.
But still he couldn’t shake the bad feeling he’d awakened with. Reaching under the quilt, he gently placed his hand on her swollen belly to wait for the familiar movement of their child.
Casey opened her eyes. “Hello,” she whispered.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
“I couldn’t get comfortable and I didn’t want to wake you.”
“How are you feeling?” He knew it was getting close now. Just a few more weeks.
She pulled her feet up to make room for him on the couch, but he stayed where he was, his hand on her stomach, waiting.
“I’m feeling terrific,” she said. “Fat but terrific.” Her smile warmed him, and he told himself there was nothing to worry about. The chance of something happening to this baby were slim. Dr. Anderson had assured them of that.
But Reese couldn’t forget their first baby. Stillborn. And all the plans they’d had for that child, all the excitement they’d felt and then the terrible pain.
This time Reese knew he was holding back, afraid of loving this baby too much for fear of losing it. For this child, they hadn’t made a million plans. They hadn’t even discussed a name.
Anxiously he waited for the baby to move, needing that reassurance this morning more than ever.
“It won’t be long now,” he said to Casey.
“A few more weeks.” She put her hand over his. “We’re all right, me and the kid, you know. Really.”
He smiled as a tiny foot pushed against his hand, promising him all was well.
“See, there he goes again,” Casey said.
He nodded, the wonder of the movement making him want to laugh and cry at the same time. “He? What makes you think it’s a boy?”
She shrugged. “Woman’s intuition.”
“Oh, I see, the scientific approach.” He let his gaze run leisurely over her face. “I miss you.”
“It won’t be much longer.”
Pulling her into his arms, he hugged her tight against him. “I love you, Casey.”
She pulled back a little. “Is anything wrong?”
“It snowed again last night,” he said as he got up to put more logs on the fire.
“And you have to go.”
He nodded and came back to the couch. “I wish I didn’t.”
Running her fingers through her short brown curls, she grinned at him. “Whatever possessed me to marry an avalanche specialist?”
“You used to think playing in the snow was fun. In fact, I remember one winter night…”
She laughed and slapped him playfully on the arm. “Hush! Not in front of the baby.”
But he couldn’t deny that his job kept him away from her too much, especially this winter.
“I heard they need a hydrologist in Phoenix, Arizona. It doesn’t snow there much.” He watched her face, not sure what he wanted to see.
She laughed. “Reese, you love your job. You’d hate living anywhere it didn’t snow. So would I.”
He suspected she was fibbing about that, but he loved her for it. “I’m going to have to go,” he said, glancing toward the window. “With all the snow that’s fallen over the past few days, those mountains out there will be powder kegs just waiting to go off.”
He bent to kiss her as the phone rang. But even before he went into the kitchen to answer it, he knew it was going to be bad news.
“What is it?” Casey asked when he returned from the kitchen.
“An avalanche up Kellner Canyon.” He stooped to pull his gear out of the closet. “Two cross-country skiers touched it off. A witness saw it happen from her cabin window.”
“And the skiers?”
Reese looked up at his wife. She was hugging their unborn baby. “They were caught in it.”
“Oh no,” Casey whispered.
“I might stay and help with the rescue if they are shorthanded. Otherwise, I’ll just make sure the area is stable for the search and come home.”
He had a bad feeling about leaving her, but he pushed it away. It was normal that he be worried about Casey and the baby, he told himself as he bent to kiss her goodbye.
“Reese, by careful.”
* * * *
After he left, Casey curled up on the couch again. She and the baby hadn’t slept much last night. As she watched the fire, she said a prayer for the two skiers and their families. The burning logs popped and crackled in the fireplace. Outside, the snow continued to fall.
She thought of Arizona. No snow. Right now that sounded wonderful. But she knew Reese would never leave the Rocky Mountains. She’d known that from the day she met him.
Not surprisingly they met during an avalanche seminar at the university. Reese was getting his masters in snow dynamics and teaching seminars. Casey was a senior majoring in photography – and she found both Reese and snow dynamics fascinating.
On weekends she photographed Reese while he dug snow pits. Reese in any of her photos made them special, but she preferred shooting the snow in its pure, untouched beauty.
She loved to capture it glistening in the sun, melting slowly into icicles on a pine branch, drifted into freezing sculptures or capping the high mountain peaks in white splendor.
Snow. Outside, it fell like diamonds from the sky, each unique, each brilliant in the thin cold light. Inside, Casey let sleep take her to a place where it never snowed. Or avalanched.
* * * *
On the side of the mountain above the avalanche, Reese dug a snow pit. As he studied the layers of snowpack, the textures on the side of the pit wall showed what he’d feared.
He pulled out his two-way radio. “It looks bad,” he said. “The old snow surface is wind-crusted and slick. There’s nothing holding this new snow to the mountain.”
From the mountainside below, Charley Turner, the accident-site commander asked, “Do you suggest calling off the search?” The radio squawked.
Charley and his team had been doing a coarse probe, pushing long poles into the broken snow of the avalanche at about 10-inch intervals in hopes of hitting one of the bodies beneath.
They’d come up with nothing. The slide was huge, and the skiers hadn’t been wearing transmitting devices, so it left the searchers not knowing even where to begin looking for them.
“Affirmative,” Reese answered. Continuing the search was too dangerous for the rescue personnel.
“What do you say, Bill?” Charley asked. As rescue team leader, it was up to Bill Arnold at the search operations base down the mountain to make the final decision.
Bill looked up the huge pile of snow rubble from the avalanche. With two men already buried underneath, it was hard to call off the search. But it had been more than five hours since the men had been buried. Within 30 minutes after the avalanche their chances had been only 50-50. He couldn’t risk losing more lives if another portion of the mountain fell.
“Reese, come on back down here,” Bill said into the radio. “I’m calling off the search until we can shoot the cornice up there and secure the area.”
“I’m on my way,” Reese radioed back. As he started to load his gear into his backpack, the cornice to his left broke off. The snowy mountain slope beside him fell away.
* * * *
Casey woke from her dream just as the Snow Woman was about to turn her into a Popsicle. Disoriented, she sat up on the couch and looked around the room. Smoke curled up from the fire, the coals long dead. She tried to shake off the cold horror of her dream.
The Snow Woman had been “Yuki-onna,” the evil, ghostly-white spirit of Japanese mythology. Reese had told her about the Snow Woman one night when they were sitting in front of the fire. Outside, it had been snowing hard.
“Snow isn’t really white, you know,” he’d said. “It’s translucent gray. It just looks white because each flake acts as a tiny prism. The sunlight hits it, is refracted into the colors of the spectrum and the snow appears white to the human eye.”
“Fascinating,” Casey had said and pretended to yawn. “Destroy all my illusions if you want, but look out that window and tell me it isn’t the most beautiful, wondrous thing you’ve ever seen.”
He’d laughed. “Obviously you’ve never heard the stories about the Snow Woman.”
Casey grinned. “I can hardly wait.”
“Her name was Yuki-onna. She was beautiful—not as beautiful as you, of course. An unlike you, the Snow Woman was icy-hearted. She used her beauty to lure travelers into snowstorms. Once they were caught, she lulled them to sleep and eventual death.”
“You call that a bedtime story? Don’t you ever tell that story to our child! Snow is mystical and magical. It’s the stuff dreams are made of.”
“W
Casey sat up now, throwing off the quilt and wishing she could throw off the dream as easily. Yuki-onna had been so real in her dream.
Reese had lied. The Snow Woman was much more than beautiful. She was gorgeous. And much more than icy-hearted.
In the dream, Yuki-onna had taken Reese.
Casey got up, shaking her head. “Boy, this pregnancy is making me crazy. First it was sauerkraut sandwiches and peanut butter. Now it is snow women and Popsicles.”
But on the way to the bedroom, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the Snow Woman had Reese. She told herself she was being silly. But Reese was in the mountains working with the rescue team. Dream or no dream, the Snow Woman had stolen him again.
Reese and his snow. Why couldn’t he have been a hydrologist, she asked herself as she climbed into the shower. What had lured him into snow mechanics? The Snow Woman?
For all their joking, the Snow Woman was the “other woman” in their lives. From the first snowfall to the last, Reese’s time and energy were taken up with the Snow Woman and the evil she could do. But the Snow Woman couldn’t have him.
Still Casey felt a sudden chill even under the hot spray of the shower.
* * * *
The small avalanche cut off Reese’s safe escape route along the outcropping of rocks that ran the ridge line.
“Charley, that slide cut me off,” he radioed. “I’m going to have to come down through the bowl. Better move back in case it slides.”
Reese prepared for the worst as he removed the loops on his ski poles from his wrists. On the high ridge above him, a bright white plume of snow billowed out, beckoning him to come higher up the slope – probably the same way it had lured the lost skiers. The mountain looked so innocent, so breathtakingly beautiful, the untracked snow above him beckoning.
Like Casey, he saw the beauty and the magic, but he also knew the danger. And right now he knew fear.
He stood in the deep powder afraid to move. While this new snowfall was 90 percent air, one foot of it covering an acre weighed more than 250,000 pounds. In an instant, it could slide, thousands of tons of snow moving at the speed of a locomotive – and with the same impact. That’s what he feared.
He checked to make sure the electronic transceiver attached to his belt was switched to transmit and zipped up his coat.
The mountain seemed alive. He could almost feel it breathing beneath him. His own breath turned frosty in the cold air as he stood listening for the snow to make a sound, to give him even a hint of its plans.
Silence. Cold, white silence.
With one last look at the mountain, Reese picked out a spot to shoot for below him – a lone stand of tall pines partway down the bowl. They stood on a rise, a gully on each side. They would provide the only safety if the mountain decided to slide.
Putting his skis together, he thought of Casey and their unborn baby, then he made a rapid downhill traverse toward the pines.
* * * *
Casey heard the avalanche warnings on the radio as she was making herself breakfast. She half listened to the radio announcer because she already knew all of it by heart.
“Never ski alone, beware of slopes beneath cornices and deep drifts…”
She felt a contraction.
“…Always wear a radio transmitter device and…” She gripped the kitchen counter as her stomach cramped again. No. “It’s too early,” she told the baby.
She timed the contractions, then went to the phone. “Dr. Anderson, I’m going to have a baby!” she cried when he answered.
“Why, Casey, I’ve suspected that for months.”
“I’m having contractions. Isn’t it too early?”
“Babies come when they’re ready. But this could just be a false alarm. Why don’t you lie down for a while and let’s see if the contractions get stronger and closer to together.”
Casey put down the phone. Their baby was coming and no matter what Dr. Anderson said. It was coming today. She knew it.
* * * *
Reese’s ski tracks lay silver and slick in the dim light from where he’d climbed the slope earlier. All he wanted now was to get off the mountain, to get home to Casey and his son.
He smiled to himself. His son. Casey knew he didn’t care one way or the other whether it was a boy or a girl. He just wanted to hold their child in his arms. But a son would be just fine.
Reese was two-thirds of the way to the pines when a sharp crack like a rifle shot pierced the silence.
The slope lurched beneath him. A slab of snow swept away below him with a deafening roar. He fell into the mountain, driving his ski pole into the snow to hold him. He clung to the edge of the massive fracture as a huge section of snow accelerated down the mountain away from him.
Stillness. Down slope the slide ended in a pile of rubble. Nothing moved.
“Reese?” Charley barked over the radio. “Reese, are you all right?”
The second slide began on the ridge above him. He heard it thundering toward him, felt the snow above him begin to shift and knew there was nowhere to run. He could never reach the trees in time.
He dropped his poles and jerked off his skis and backpack. As the snow caught him from behind and pulled him into the roaring chaos of the avalanche, he swam for his life.
* * * *
Casey clocked her contractions until she was convinced it wasn’t a false alarm. First she called Dr. Anderson. Then she dialed the search-and-rescue number. It was time to let Reese know she was in labor.
* * * *
The world blurred frosty-white in front of Reese as he was caught in the avalanche.
“Casey!” Reese cried silently as the snow sucked him under. He cupped his hands over his face. What little space his hands provided might give him enough breathing room to last for a while.
And then he was tumbling in a mountain of snow, no longer sure where earth and sky were as he was encased in cold packed snow. He stopped moving as the snow’s deep cold darkness settled around him.
“Keep him in sight!” Charley yelled on the mountain below. “Don’t lose him.”
“I saw the spot where he went under,” one of the searchers cried.
“Mark it,” Charley told him, switching his electronic transceiver to receive. It picked up the faint beep of Reese transmitter.
“Post an avalanche guard on the ridge over there,” he ordered one of his men. “I need volunteers for column leaders. Let’s get a line of men going fast.”
Armed with shovels, first aid equipment and transceivers, they climbed up through the rubble to a spot just below where they’d last seen Reese and tried to home in on his transmitter signal.
The sooner they found him, the better chance they had of finding him alive.
* * * *
“Equi-temperature metamorphism. Paratectonic Perecrystallization.”
“What?” the elderly nurse asked, looking annoyed. She had a face that had wrinkled from time, not from too much smiling, Casey thought.
She closed her eyes as she felt another contraction coming. “Equi-temperature metamorphism. Paratechtonic perecrystallization.” She said the words as if they were a magic incantation.
Actually she wasn’t even sure what they meant. They were just words she’d heard Reese use when he talked about the dynamics of snow. They were words she prayed would bring him to her. She needed him now more than she’d ever needed him before.
“Have you ever heard of the Snow Woman, Yuki-onna?” Casey asked the nurse. Her name tag said her name was Edna. Casey watched her put a fetal monitor on her extended abdomen. Edna didn’t answer her.
“Yuki-onna is this really spooky lady. There is a story that she once saved a young man in a blizzard. But in exchange, she demanded he promise never to tell anyone about her.”
