Page 71 of Wind Valley

“He had degrees in several areas. Look at this.” He showed her a bio on the back sleeve of a hardcover book that Reed had written. “Chemical engineering, geology, and mechanical engineering. Impressive.”

“Is that more degrees than you have?” she teased.

“Oh yes.” Lachlan, she realized in that moment, wasn’t one for jealousy. How unusual and refreshing.

She turned the book over to look at the title. “Making the World Run Sustainably. So this is about alternative energy?”

“Yes. He was building something in Wind Valley that he hoped would run their camp. If it worked, he planned to patent it and get it out into the world.”

“Was it a windmill or something like that?”

“No. It didn’t have moving parts like that. It needed to be safe in a storm. He talks about that. The conditions in Wind Valley are so extreme that he knew if it worked there, it would work anywhere. It looks like it was using some form of magnetic energy, but highly concentrated. There was something about the magnetic fields specific to Wind Valley that made it perfect for his research. I don’t understand all of it, so I can’t say. But he ran into a problem—a big one. Every time he ran a test, he got the same result, which he doesn’t specify. The word he uses for it is ‘null.’ ‘Another null.’ ‘Worst null yet.’ He was trying to solve these ‘nulls,’ but I get the impression he was losing his grip on reality to some extent.” He leafed through the pages of the notebook.

“How do you mean?”

“He forgets from one day to the next what he was working on. He keeps losing the thread. One minute he’s talking about solar, the next about wind. Then he gets obsessed with the wolves in Wind Valley. I wonder what happened to all his equipment.”

“Wait. I found a sketch of all that.” She hopped over to the other box and rummaged through the sketches and drawings until she found it. This sketch took up an entire sheet of the pad and had been folded several times to make it pocket-size. Maybe it had been intended for a pocket instead of this box.

She spread it open and showed it to Lachlan. The only thing she recognized in the drawing was a satellite dish. He studied it closely. “These are mostly monitors. Measuring devices for sound waves, magnetic waves, wind speed, radio waves. I don’t recognize some of this equipment.”

“Maybe it’s his own invention.”

“Likely, yes.” He nodded, then pointed to the bottom of the drawing. “It’s all laid out on a pallet. And there’s a tarp folded next to it, as if they were going to cover it all up. Maybe they consolidated everything with the idea that they’d be back.”

She scrutinized the drawing. “Andrea Reed made this sketch. She was paying very close attention to what he was doing. Doesn’t it look almost like a blueprint?”

“It does.” He squinted more closely at the sketch. “Did she have some kind of tremor?”

Leaning in for a closer look, Maura saw what he was talking about. Although most of her lines were clear and steady, some of them wavered. She went back to the box and sorted through the sketches. She pulled out a drawing of a spring landscape and scrutinized it. Not a single wavy line to be seen.

“She didn’t have a tremor when she arrived. They probably got there in the spring, right? No one in their right mind would move to Firelight Ridge in the winter, and before you say it, I wasn’t in my right mind, I was desperate.” She quirked a smile at him. “But even if I was desperate, I wouldn’t have moved a family of five into Wind Valley in the winter. So they came in the spring, and this is what she drew.”

She laid out a few more sketches that showed the progression of the seasons. “There.” She pointed to a sketch of a spruce branch piled with snow. “That’s the first line of any of these drawings that shows any wavering. And then look at this.” She pulled out another drawing of two children pulling a sled made out of a piece of metal roofing. In this one, the waviness of the lines was even more marked. “Whatever was going on with her, it got worse the longer they were there.”

“The kids must have been affected too,” said Lachlan. “Is that why one of them got sick?”

Maura dug through the box and came out with a handful of the children’s drawings. Holding one up, she pointed to a flower in which the stem looked more like a lightning bolt. “This is even worse than the adults.”

“Dr. Reed sounded fine on the phone. Maybe the effects wore off after they left the valley.”

“Maybe. But that begs the question. The effects of what, exactly?”

“I bet the answer is in here somewhere.” He brandished one of the field journals in the air. “You don’t mind if I disappear into Dr. Reed’s research, do you?”

She shrugged. “Right now, it’s not like we have anything else to do besides watch the snow fall.”

She got to her feet and peered out the window toward the ground. “The snow is only a few inches from the bottom of the window frame. What happens if it covers up the window?”

“I heard about that happening one year. People would have to climb through their highest window and ski out of the house.”

“Well, since we don’t have a second story here, let’s hope the snow slows down soon.” She gazed around Pinky’s clearing, which was normally filled with old junkers and four-wheelers and other random pieces of machinery he hauled off people’s property when they wanted to get rid of them. Now it was an unbroken field of white, with a few bumps to show where all those old rigs lurked.

She tried to imagine living in an isolated yurt, as the Reeds had done, during a snowstorm like this. Existing on the edge of life or death must have been a constant stress. That was how the indigenous peoples here had lived, but they’d had a community. The Ahtna had lived in small bands of twenty or forty people, roaming the land according to the seasons, to fish camps in the summer and hunting grounds in the fall.

Dr. Reed and his family, on the other hand, had only themselves and a yurt. Firelight Ridge wasn’t far, but that distance, in the winter, might as well be a thousand miles. Had they simply gone a little…well, nuts? Humans weren’t meant to be so isolated.

We do better in packs, too, she thought. Just like wolves.

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