not so quietly. Fiona simply didn’t have the energy to try to reassure them. In fact, she’d have liked to cry herself.
They’d gone off the road twice more. With all three boys pushing, each time they’d made it back onto pavement. This last time, the snow had been knee deep. That meant the undercarriage was pushing through snow. Clammy with panic, Fiona started forward again. Now even the sound of the chains was muffled. Thank God, the highway didn’t seem to run next to a river or creek. If they slid down an incline…
Don’t think about it.
For the thousandth time, she told herself, if we keep going, we’ll eventually come out of the mountains. Studying the map all those hours ago, she’d noticed a couple of little towns dotting the line of the highway once it crossed the pass and descended toward the Willamette Valley and Portland. There would be lights. Heat. Food and safety. Although it had been scarcely noticeable at the time, they must have gone over the pass an hour or more ago, because the road was definitely descending now, although not steeply.
But it seemed, if anything, that the snow was falling harder. Or perhaps her eyes were just so tired, she was less capable of seeing through that driving veil of white. Her neck and shoulders and arms were rigid. Somebody would probably have to pry her fingers from the steering wheel.
Her frozen fingers, she thought morbidly. After the van disappeared into a snowbank and its tracks filled in. Or perhaps her fingers wouldn’t be frozen anymore, if nobody found the missing teacher and her pupils until spring.
“Wait a minute!” Dieter jerked. “Did you see that?”
She braked. “What?”
“I think…wait. Let me get out.” He reached back for his parka, grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment and sprang out, disappearing immediately in the dark.
Fiona just sat, too exhausted to move. Too exhausted to worry, even when he didn’t come back for several minutes.
“Where’d he go?”
“Why are we stopped?”
One of the girls, voice high and rising, “Are we stuck?”
Fiona was too exhausted to answer, as well.
The passenger door opened again, and Dieter said exultantly, “There’s tire tracks. And a turn here. I think there’s a sign. I bet it’s Thunder Mountain Lodge. Remember how I told you my family comes up here?”
Tire tracks.
“What if whoever made the tracks came out?” Kelli asked. “And they’re, like, gone, and even if we find the lodge it’s cold and dark?”
A lodge. Fiona’s mind moved sluggishly over the idea.
“We could build a fire,” she said.
Voice pitched so only Fiona would hear him, Dieter said, “If this is Thunder Mountain, the next town is something like another hour. And that’s when the road’s plowed. I don’t remember much in between.”
The others were offering opinions, but she ignored them.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to back up. Can you guide me?”
He left the passenger door open and talked her through backing up ten yards or so. Then he shone the flashlight on the tracks in the snow. Now Fiona could see them, too. A vehicle had come from the other direction and turned into an opening between trees.
Please God, she thought, let the driver have known where he was going. Don’t let me follow someone else as desperate as we are.
“See?” Dieter turned the beam on a dark bulk to the right as she turned into the road or driveway or whatever it was. “Let me go look.”
She watched as he plowed his way through and took a swipe at whatever it was with his bare hand. Clumps of snow cascaded down, exposing writing that the dim beam picked out.
He yelled, “It is Thunder Mountain Lodge. Cool!”
When he got back in, Fiona asked, “Please tell me it’s not another five miles.”
He laughed exultantly. “Nope. It’s like…I don’t know, a quarter of a mile. Half a mile?”
“Okay,” she said. “Here goes.”
Whatever vehicle had gone before her had obviously passed by a while back; it was a miracle that Dieter had spotted the tracks, vanishing fast under fresh snowfall. She kept losing sight of them in the white blur.
The kids in back were talking excitedly now that salvation was at hand. Dieter started telling them about this great old lodge, the ancient trees and the river just below.
“There’s this huge fireplace,” he was saying, when the van lurched and the front end seemed to drop.
One of the girls screamed. Fiona braked, out of instinct—they had already come to a dead stop. Dieter jumped out again, coming back to shake his head.
“I don’t know if we can get it out.”
“Can you still see the tire tracks?”
He looked. “Yeah.”
“It can’t be that far. We’ll walk.” She turned. “Everyone, bring your stuff, especially if you have any food left over from lunch or dinner.” They had stopped at a hamburger joint on the way out of Redmond. “Put on all the clothes you brought.”
She took her purse, but left the tote that held only the schedule for the day, competition rules and her notes on questions she would drill students on in the expectation they’d be asked the same ones again someday. Once everybody was out, she made them line up single file behind Dieter, bringing up the end herself. Then, feeling silly, she locked the van.
“Lead on,” she called.
Her face felt the cold first, then her feet. Was this the right decision? she worried, as they stumbled through the dark and falling snow led by—God help them—a sixteen-year-old boy’s memory of a winter vacation.
Well, she had no choice—not after she’d gotten the van stuck. Within minutes, she was almost too cold to care.
“I see lights!” Dieter exclaimed.
Fiona blinked away the flakes clinging to her lashes and peered numbly ahead. Was that a dim glow, or a mirage?
“Keep going,” she ordered, her face feeling stiff.
Gradually she saw them: golden squares of windows. Not brightly lit, but as if there might be lights on deeper inside the lodge. Or maybe firelight was providing the illumination.
They were staggering, a ragged line of kids and Fiona, when they reached porch steps. Freshly shoveled, she saw in amazement, as if someone had been expecting them.
On the porch that seemed to run the width of the rustic lodge, her students clustered, waiting for her.
The door
