Chapter 2 - THEY MOURNED ME WHILE SPENDING MY MONEY
By the following afternoon, Dominic Mercer was crying for television cameras.
He stood outside the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office with Ava’s mother on one side and Ava’s younger brother, Ryan, on the other. Snow had begun falling again, collecting on the shoulders of Dominic’s expensive charcoal coat.
“My wife is one of the strongest people I’ve ever known,” he said, his voice breaking at precisely the right moment. “We’re praying she found shelter.”
Chloe watched the broadcast from a hotel suite in Helena.
She muted the television when Dominic entered.
“You looked believable,” she said.
“I am believable.”
He loosened his tie and poured bourbon into a glass.
“Search and rescue found the abandoned rental vehicle where we left it. They’ll assume she walked north.”
“What about the cabin?”
“It isn’t on county maps. My grandfather used it before the land was transferred to the state. Nobody’s been there in twenty years.”
Chloe crossed the room and slipped her arms around his waist.
“When can we stop pretending?”
“When the funeral is over.”
“And then?”
“Then you become the grieving family friend who helped me survive.”
She smiled. “That sounds respectable.”
Dominic kissed her forehead.
“Respectability is mostly timing.”
Fifty miles away, Ava crawled beneath the cabin floor with a hatchet clenched between her teeth.
The front door was reinforced. The windows were too narrow to climb through without breaking the frames, and smashing glass would expose the cabin to deadly wind before she could escape.
But old structures settled.
Behind the rusted stove, she had found a gap where the floorboards had pulled away from the wall. After four hours of widening it with the hatchet, she lowered herself into the crawlspace.
Rusted nails tore her sleeve and sliced her forearm. The cut was shallow, but blood darkened the fabric.
She kept moving.
Under the porch, packed snow blocked the exit. Ava dug with the hatchet, then with her gloved hands, then with bare fingers when the gloves became too wet to use.
Her fingertips went numb.
Her breathing slowed.
She counted backward from one hundred to keep her mind focused.
At dusk, the snow wall collapsed inward.
Ava pulled herself into the storm.
The padlock hung from the chain beside the door.
She could have left it.
Instead, she used the hatchet to split the rotting porch post where the chain had been anchored. The metal loop came free with a section of wood still attached.
Ava slipped the padlock into her pocket.
Evidence.
Then she turned toward the tree line.
Dominic had taken her compass, but he had not taken the sky, the slope of the land, or the prevailing wind. She remembered every turn from the drive in. She knew the access road lay east, with an old ranger station approximately eighteen miles beyond it.
Eighteen miles in a blizzard was not a hike.
It was a campaign.
Ava traveled in short intervals, using fallen pine branches to test drifts before stepping into them. She sheltered beneath dense trees when the wind rose. She ate snow only after warming it against her body inside a strip of plastic cut from the mattress.
On the second night, she heard wolves in the distance.
On the third morning, she slipped down an icy embankment and struck her cheek against a rock. For several minutes, she lay still while snow gathered on her shoulders.
Dominic’s voice returned to her.
You taught classes.
Ava rolled onto her back and laughed once, dry and bitter.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “I did.”
She got up.
In Helena, the Mercer and Ellis families met with funeral director Paul Kessler to select a coffin for the memorial service.
Dominic chose polished mahogany.
“Ava wasn’t flashy,” Linda said quietly.
Her eyes were swollen from crying.
“She would’ve preferred something simple.”
Dominic touched her shoulder. “She deserves the best.”
The funeral package cost more than one hundred thousand dollars after military coordination, cathedral fees, flowers, catering, private transportation, security, and a reception at a downtown hotel.
Linda looked horrified when she saw the estimate.
“We can’t afford this.”
“You don’t have to,” Dominic said. “I’ll handle everything.”
He did not mention that he was paying with money transferred from Ava’s joint investment account.
Ryan sat across the table, staring at the photograph selected for the memorial program.
Ava wore her dress uniform in the picture, her blonde hair pinned beneath her service cap.
“She hated that photo,” he said.
Dominic frowned. “No, she didn’t.”
“Yes, she did. She said it made her look like a recruiting poster.”
“It’s dignified.”
Ryan looked at him. “You keep talking about her like you knew her better than we did.”
“I was her husband.”
“That wasn’t my point.”
Linda reached for Ryan’s arm. “Please. Not now.”
Dominic’s phone lit up on the table.
A message preview appeared.
CHLOE: Did the lawyer confirm when you can access the policy?
Ryan saw it before Dominic turned the phone over.
“Why is Chloe asking about Ava’s policy?”
Dominic did not blink.
“She works in communications. She’s helping organize the financial paperwork.”
“At ten o’clock at night?”
“Grief doesn’t follow business hours.”
Ryan’s jaw tightened.
Linda whispered, “Your sister may be dead. Stop looking for someone to blame.”
Dominic gave Ryan a calm, forgiving smile.
It was the expression of a man certain the room belonged to him.
That same night, Ava reached the abandoned ranger station.
The building had no electricity, but an emergency supply locker remained bolted to the wall. She broke it open and found a wool blanket, iodine tablets, road flares, and an outdated battery radio.
The radio worked.
Ava turned the dial until a local station emerged through static.
She heard the weather warning first.
Then her own name.
“A memorial service for decorated Army veteran Lieutenant Ava Mercer will be held Saturday at Saint Matthew’s Military Cathedral in Helena. Mercer disappeared during a solo wilderness retreat and is presumed dead following the historic blizzard.”
Ava sat motionless.
Saturday.
It was Thursday night.
The announcer continued.
“Her husband, prominent developer Dominic Mercer, described the service as a celebration of courage and sacrifice.”
Ava closed her eyes.
Dominic was not waiting for the storm to confirm her death.
He was manufacturing it in public.
She found a cracked wall map and traced the ranger road south.
A maintenance highway lay nine miles away.
May you like
Ava wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, slipped the padlock into her pocket, and stepped back into the snow.
She had forty hours to attend her own funeral.
