Nathan's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Nathan came home from a four-county run with frozen hands and saw the red light blinking on the answering machine. He had bought the machine eleven years ago, the week after his daughter drowned. The casing was yellowed and one corner was cracked from a drop he didn't remember. In all that time it had blinked for him twice. Both calls had been nothing. He kept his coat on and pressed the button. A man's voice came through the speaker, low and unsteady. He said he had seen something at the lake that day. He said he had waited too long to call. Then he said he was sorry and the line went dead. No name. No number. The machine clicked and reset. Nathan stood in the dark kitchen with his keys still in his hand. He played it again. Then four more times. The voice belonged to someone older, and there was wind behind him, and something else — a dog, maybe, or wood splitting. Nathan wrote down every sound on the back of a gas receipt. He called the phone company and waited forty minutes to be told they could not give him the number without a warrant. He called the sheriff who had worked the case. The sheriff said he would try and they both knew he would not. Nathan drove out before sunrise to the lake where his daughter had been last seen. The water was locked under a slab of pale ice, banked with snow that had hardened into ridges. He walked the shore the way he had walked it a hundred times. He looked for anyone who might live close enough to have watched a child that summer day eleven years back. A stone arch marked the trailhead up the ridge, the kind hikers used as a meeting point. A young woman in a white parka stood under it, watching him come. She said her name was Arizona. She said she had grown up on this mountain and knew who left the message. Nathan asked for the name. She did not give it. She said the man who called lived up past the treeline and did not come down except for supplies, and that he would not answer his door for a stranger from the lowlands. She said she could take Nathan to him. She said it would take two days on foot and the weather was turning. Then she said, flat, that someone had asked her to watch for him. Nathan asked who. Arizona looked at the ice and did not answer. He thought of the machine at home, still blinking, still holding the only voice that had ever said the right words. He told her he would go. She nodded once and started up the trail. Nathan followed her through the arch and the lake fell away behind them.