“Two.”

“We’re on channel two. Do not step onto any surface if you don’t know where it bottoms out. In fact, Duane, grab her one of the poles.” Duane ambled over to the Jeep and pulled something that resembled a long ski pole out of the back. He returned and handed it to her. “Use that to test for objects beneath the snow,” Huggins went on. “Return to the base, that’s here at the truck, after you’ve finished your section. And don’t take any risks. We’re here to rescue someone else, not you. Got it?”

“Got it.”

He waved her off, and she broke for the other side of the road before he could think of one of the many good reasons why she should be back in her car instead of joining in the search. She glanced back and saw Huggins pulling Duane in by the shoulder, as if to get the confidential on her “friendship” with the police chief. Double crud.

She paused at the edge of the road. If she plunged straight ahead toward the reservoir, she was likely to run into Debba and Russ, who wouldn’t pass on her search and rescue experience no matter how many topo maps she plotted. Instead, she headed down the road, walking around the Millers Kill cruisers and the state crime scene investigation van toward where a loudly huffing tow truck was maneuvering into place to ratchet Dr. Rouse’s Buick out of the woods. As she got closer, she could hear the clank of heavy chains as the tow truck operator went to work hitching up the ditched vehicle.

In the yellow-white glare from the various headlights, she could see deep ruts in the crusty snow where the car had gone off the road. She glanced behind her. There was a definite downward slope from the area where the doctor and Debba would have emerged after their visit to the cemetery. She could easily imagine a dizzy, possibly concussed man getting behind the wheel of his big old boat of a car, shifting it into drive, and then passing out, letting the car steer itself off the pavement, through the scrub brush at the side of the road, and finally into the tall pines, where it had hit nose first, crumpling the hood back to the engine block. She could also imagine someone-a voice inside her head supplied Debba Clow-opening the driver’s door, shifting the car into neutral, and running it down the road until it tore away toward the trees.

“Hey! You!” The bulky figure of a man hailed her out of the near-darkness just beyond the lights. She squinted to see who it was as he came closer. She could make out the brown police parka and winter hat, but his features were obscured beneath the balaclava protecting his face from the cold.

“Reverend Fergusson?”

The voice she recognized. “Officer Durkee?”

“What are you doing wandering around out here?”

She spread her arms open, displaying her pole, flashlight, and map. “I’m volunteering for the search and rescue team.” Before he could point out that she had no prior connection with the team or anyone on it, she added, “I was trained in search and rescue in the army.” Mark Durkee was young enough for references to a higher authority to carry some weight.

“Huh,” he said. He pushed the balaclava up, revealing his face. “I was just headed over there to talk with Jim.”

“About the search?” She glanced at the tow truck, shuddering and chuffing as it wrenched the Buick out of the trees. “Was there any sign that he walked away from the crash?”

Durkee nodded. “There were some boot prints around the car. Pretty indistinct. With the crust on the snow, every step just caves it in, leaves a big jagged hole.”

“Can you tell which way he went?” She looked at his expressionless face and thought, Don’t ever get in a poker game with this guy. “Let me rephrase that. Can you tell which way the footsteps went?”

“They intersect with the trail from the tires. Crunched flat.”

“So you can’t trace them from there?”

He shook his head.

“So maybe he made his way back to the road and was picked up…” She trailed off. “But if that happened, he’d be home by now, wouldn’t he?”

“I’d think so.”

“Did the crime scene investigation team find anything?”

“They always find something.”

“You’re a very closemouthed man, Officer Durkee.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” He smiled at her.

She looked around her, to where the unfathomable darkness of the Adirondack wood was held back by a few headlights and the whirling amber flashers of the tow truck. Even though she hadn’t started yet, her search of the reservoir frontage seemed suddenly futile, an exercise designed to soothe them into thinking they had some control over this great and terrible beast all around them. “Russ doesn’t think Dr. Rouse is going to be found alive,” she said. “Do you?”

He shook his head. “No. But I think the effort is worth it. Whatever we do to find out what happened, to find him, it’ll be a comfort to his family. There’s something to that.”

“Yes. There is.” She gestured with her pole. “I better get to it.” He lifted his hand in a salute that also pulled his balaclava back over his face, and headed up the road to deliver his news to the rest of the search and rescue team.

Clare waded into the snow. She discovered right away what Officer Durkee had been talking about. The stuff was covered with a frozen sludge of snow and ice, pitted with pinecones and broken bits of branches. It was just strong enough to hold her body weight for a second or two before breaking, so that each step jarred up her spine. When she lifted her foot for another step, the powdery snow hidden beneath the crust seeped in between the top edge of her boot and her rip-stop pants, so that within minutes, she felt cold rivulets running down her socks.

She would have thought that the clear, cold air would carry the sounds from the road aloft, that she would still be able to hear the truck axle grinding and voices talking, but the tall pines swallowed everything in a fine-needled screen. The light, too, disappeared shade by shade, which surprised her, since this was a mature forest, no scrub trees or opportunistic bushes to push through. Just northern white pines, one after another after another until, when she looked back to where she had come from, there was no sign of lights or movement, no indication that there had ever been any artifacts of civilization.

She plowed on, trying to ignore her wet socks and the quiet, trying to ignore the narrow thread of panic that fluttered beneath her breastbone, chanting Cold and snow and the woods and you’re out here all alone, because it was ridiculous. She had a map, a light, a walkie-talkie, and probably twenty cops and firefighters within a half-mile radius. It was just a leftover fear from an older and colder encounter with the Adirondack woods in winter. She paused for a moment, braced her mittened hands against a tree, told herself she had never had a panic attack in her life and she wasn’t having one now, and pressed forward, sloping downward.

She could see the reservoir through the trees now, white and shining, and she hurried to break through into the clear air and was astonished when she did. Up on the road, all the lights casting the rest of the world into darkness had dimmed the effect of the almost-full moon. And beneath the pines, neither the moon nor the sun ever reached the ground. But here-she turned her flashlight off and blinked at the dazzle. The frozen surface of the water was neither white nor black, but glinted like layers of mica. And the size of it! When she had heard the term reservoir, she had created a picture in her mind of a squared-off city-block-sized container, like a giant bathtub waiting to be drained. This thing was a lake, vanishing into the curve of the forest at either end, far enough across so that it would be a challenge to swim the round-trip.

She could make out more details of the surface now that her eyes were light adapted, and she could see grayer spots and pockmarks where the ice had melted, broken, re-formed, and refrozen. But even with Huggins’s warning playing in her head, the urge to step out onto that dazzling openness was strong. The Gospel writers had had it right when they described Jesus walking on water. What could feel more godlike than standing in the middle of a lake, water stretching away from you on all sides, the night turned to day by the light of the moon?