Page 21 of Face Her Fear

“But what happened?” Brian asked.

“I don’t know,” Josie said. “Right now, I need my phone, journal and pen.”

A new voice came from behind Sandrine, Alice, Taryn and Brian. “Why do you need all that?” asked Nicola. The others parted to reveal her standing along the path. “Did you say that Meg’s dead? How can she be dead? What the hell happened?”

Alice handed over Josie’s phone, journal and pen and Josie held them up. “I don’t know what happened and because I don’t know what happened, I have to treat this as a suspicious death.”

“Someone killed her?” said Nicola.

“I didn’t say that,” Josie said. “I don’t have enough information to conclude that but what I’d like to do is to make a sketch and take some photos before we move the— her.”

Josie felt Alice’s eyes boring into her. Nicola said, “You wouldn’t do any of that if it was an accident. You think someone killed her.”

“That is not true, Nicola,” Josie said.

Taryn’s lower lip trembled. “Who would want to kill Meg?”

“You sure the bear didn’t get her?” asked Brian.

Alice pointed to the ground where the snow still swirled and eddied in the fierce wind. “Are those her clothes? Maybe she got hypothermia.” She turned toward the rest of them and explained how hypothermia caused paradoxical undressing. Then she added, “I’ve seen it before with people brought into the ER in various states of undress. Believe me, it’s probably best if Josie documents everything so that when help gets here, no one gets blamed for anything that didn’t really happen.”

Mollified, everyone fell silent. Alice turned back to Josie and gave her a barely perceptible nod. Her eyes spoke volumes. She wasn’t buying hypothermia either, but this would give Josie her best shot at preserving what evidence she could if it turned out that Meg had been murdered.

Josie looked at her phone. The battery was charged to seventy-eight percent. In the upper left-hand corner of the screen it said:Searching. The tiny icon that told her how good her connection was, was blank with an X in the center of it. Briefly, it blinked to a single bar of connectivity. A text notification flashed across the top of the screen. Gretchen’s name filled her with relief but then when she pulled up the message, the relief changed to horror.

Bona fide blizzard coming your way. Leave now if you can. Get everyone out of there. Hope this gets to you in time. PS Noah is a damn mess.

Tears stung the backs of Josie’s eyes briefly. She breathed as deeply as she could, pushing all thoughts of Noah out of her brain.

“Are you okay?” Nicola asked. “You look like you’re going to throw up.”

Brian turned to look at his wife. “She just found a dead body, Nic.”

Nicola sighed. “She’s a detective, isn’t she? That’s, like, her job.”

Josie pushed everything that did not have to do with the task at hand inside a box inside her brain and then she shoved the box deep into the back of a mental closet. “I’m fine.” She held up the phone, Gretchen’s message now safely hidden by the lock screen. “Before I do anything, I’m going to try to make an emergency call, just in case Cooper wasn’t able to use the SAT phone or get to the nearest town. Ideally, someone can get to us and get all of us out of here.”

She dialed 911 and waited.

It didn’t ring. She hung up and tried again. And again. On the third attempt, it rang once and then the call died with a series of rapid-succession beeps.

“What’s going on?” Nicola called.

Josie sighed. “I can’t get through.”

Alice took a step forward, careful to avoid any of Meg’s discarded clothes. “Even if you can, it could be hours before anyone can get up here. The snow is still coming down hard, Josie. It’s freezing. We can’t leave her out here, and we can’t station someone out here to stay with her until help arrives.”

Josie nodded. “Then we’ll go with my original plan.”

She left the group on the trail and went to work, making a quick sketch of the entire area inside her journal and then taking as many photos as possible with her phone. After documenting everything as they’d found it, she knelt and used a gloved finger to pull back the edge of Meg’s scarf. Her heart did a double tap, paused, and then roared into overdrive. The blood rushing through her ears drowned out the wind whipping and shrieking all around her.

“Oh Meg,” she whispered.

Without removing the scarf completely, she shifted it around enough to get the rest of the photos. She’d seen enough to confirm her greatest fear. She’d leave the rest for the county medical examiner. She considered Meg’s cast-off clothing. Under normal circumstances it’d be collected in order to be processed for evidence. However, Josie was in no position to do any sort of evidence collection. If she attempted it, she could damage or lose any evidence that might be there. On the other hand, if she left it, it could be blown away or buried by snow or even disturbed by animals. It was a no-win situation. Ultimately, she decided that the least damaging option was to leave everything in its place. She took photos and marked each item in her sketches.

Once she was finished, she made her way back to the others. They stood along the trail, everyone but Brian crying softly. His eyes shone with unshed tears, though, as he held Nicola to his chest while she sobbed. Josie, too, felt like sinking into the snow and crying, but there was no time. They would all freeze.

“We’re sorry,” Taryn sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of her glove. “It’s just so awful.”

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