Full Tilt

21

Banff, Alberta

Driving west through Banff National Park amid the grandeur of the towering snow-crowned Rockies filled Kate with an overwhelming ache.

She missed her daughter.

She pulled over at a rest stop and called home.

Service in the mountains was spotty, but the line rang through to Nancy’s voice mail. Kate left a message for Grace, then sought consolation in her daughter’s picture on her screen.

Taking in the majestic landscape as she got back on the road, Kate realized that she’d been climbing mountains all her life in search of the truth. How fitting her search would lead her back to the same highway she’d traveled twenty years ago when everything changed, leaving her the lone survivor of her family, haunted by not knowing what had really happened to her sister.

The new information she’d unearthed these past few days was so startling she’d started doubting it herself. Yet a voice, an unyielding emotional force deep inside, impelled her to hold on to the faint hope that Vanessa had actually been alive all these years.

Don’t let go of it. You can’t let go.

She passed Lake Louise, then entered British Columbia. The thick sweeping forests and jade rivers pulled her back through her life and the memories rushed by her.

Kate’s mother was a supermarket cashier and Kate’s father worked in a factory that made military truck parts. She remembered how her mother smelled like roses, how she felt safe in her father’s big strong hands whenever he lifted her up and said, How’s my Katie? She remembered how Vanessa’s eyes twinkled when she laughed and how happy they were in their little house near Washington, DC.

Then came the night when Kate and Vanessa were home together with their babysitter, Mrs. Kawolski, and police came to the door. Kate’s parents had been at a wedding in Boston. Fear had clouded Mrs. Kawolski’s face as the officers filled the kitchen, their utility belts making leathery squeaks as they cleared their throats, the policewoman giving Kate and Vanessa little stuffed bears to hold. “There was a terrible fire at the hotel. I’m so very sorry, your mommy and daddy won’t be coming home. They’re with the angels now.”

Kate was seven and Vanessa was four.

In the month before her death, Kate’s mother had given her and Vanessa each a tiny guardian angel necklace with their names engraved. Vanessa wanted to trade them so she wore the one with her big sister’s name on it and Kate had the angel bearing Vanessa’s name.

They cherished those necklaces.

After their parents died, Kate and Vanessa pinballed through a succession of homes belonging to increasingly distant relatives. Ultimately, they lived with strangers. All Kate remembered from that time was how they were forever moving, city to city, state to state, but lucky to stay together. They were with new foster parents from Chicago when the crash happened.

Not many miles from here.

Kate glanced at her GPS, then at the map folded on the seat, and adjusted her grip on the wheel as the images loomed…the car sinking…everything moving in slow motion… They never found Vanessa’s body…

No.

She couldn’t think about it now.

After the accident, Kate lived in a never-ending chain of foster homes. Some were good, some weren’t. As soon as she was old enough, she ran away and survived on the streets. She panhandled, lied about her age and took any job she could, but she never stole, used drugs or got drunk. She never prostituted herself.

Somehow Kate managed to follow an internal moral compass, which she believed-no, knew-she’d inherited from her parents.

During that time, Kate couldn’t help dreaming that Vanessa might be alive somewhere. She kept reading news stories about people finding long-lost relatives after enduring years of pain. Those stories and the reporters who wrote them gave Kate hope, gave her direction.

She would become a journalist. She would search for the truth.

At age seventeen, Kate was living in a Chicago group home and taking night classes. She wrote an essay about her yearning to know what really happened, to be forgiven for, the night Vanessa’s little hand slipped from hers. Her teacher showed it to an editor friend at the Chicago Tribune. Impressed, the editor gave her a part-time news job. From there, Kate went to community college, then on to reporter jobs across the country.

All the while she was quietly searching for Vanessa. She’d sent age-progressed photos to missing persons groups and chased down Jane Doe cases, always in vain.

She was working at the San Francisco Star when she fell in love with a cop. After she got pregnant she learned that he’d been lying about his divorce and was married and had two sons. She left California for a job with the Repository in Canton, Ohio, where she had Grace at age twenty-three.

Kate thrived at the paper where, through relentless digging, she’d tracked down a fugitive killer. While her work was shut out for a Pulitzer, she won a state award for excellence. But after several years she’d fallen victim to downsizing and was laid off. Things got dire. Kate was juggling bills when she landed a spot on a short but paid job competition at the Dallas bureau of Newslead, the worldwide wire service. She’d helped cover a devastating tornado and broke a national story about a missing baby boy. The competition had been ferocious but it led Chuck Laneer, a senior editor, to hire her last year as a national reporter at Newslead’s world headquarters in Manhattan. Since then, she’d often led on coverage of major crimes and disasters across the country or around the world.

Throughout everything Kate had accepted that her life was an ongoing search for the truth about her sister and forgiveness.

A highway distance sign flashed by.

Kate was now less than forty-five minutes from the crash site.

She let out a long breath and pulled into a gas station in the tiny town of Field, British Columbia. She got fuel, used the restroom, bought a bouquet of fresh flowers and returned to the highway.

As she got closer to the site, her memories of that day twenty years ago grew stronger and…singing voices echoed.

Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O…

Kate and Vanessa were in the backseat. They were both wearing their necklaces. It was a happy time. Their foster father, Ned, a bus driver, was at the wheel, beside him, Norma, his wife, a secretary. They were on vacation, singing and marveling at how the mountains were so close to the road you could almost touch them as they formed sheer rock walls shooting straight up so far you couldn’t see the top.

It got darker and cooler in the shadows of the mountains. Kate remembered Norma telling Ned to slow down each time they’d passed a road sign warning of falling rocks. She remembered that when they came to a great valley the car started making a noise, Ned saying how they’d stop in the next town so he could take a look at it.

They were about ten miles east of Golden, British Columbia, where the Kicking Horse River intertwines with the Trans-Canada Highway.

And on his farm he had a duck…

Suddenly Ned’s swearing, turning the wheel…bang…Norma’s screaming…they’re flying-how could that be-flying, spinning…off the road…the world is rolling upside down…the car’s crashing into the river…sinking…everything’s in slow motion…the windows breaking open…cold water rushing in…holding her breath…Ned and Norma screaming, struggling underwater…dark…the dome light’s glow…the car’s upside down…roof banging against the rocky riverbed…the strong current pushing the car…Kate unbuckles her seatbelt…unbuckles Vanessa’s…grabbing Vanessa’s hand…lungs bursting…pulling her out…they’re out of the car swimming…nearing the surface…the current’s sweeping them downriver…numbing her…her fingers loosening…Vanessa’s slipping away…her hand rising from the water, then disappearing… VANESSA!

It all happened here, right here.

Kate had stopped her rental on the shoulder, stood next to it and stared at the river, listening to its rush. It was here. She checked the photographs in the timeworn newspaper clippings, checked the highway’s curve, the rock formations near the river-Three American Tourists Killed When Car Crashed Into River…

Kate didn’t remember much of the aftermath. Images blurred by police, rescuers, flying back to Chicago with a young social worker who cried with her, the memorial services for Ned, Norma and Vanessa, a grief counselor and more foster homes.

And the nightmares.

Vanessa’s hand.

They dragged the river where they could. They used divers and dog teams, search groups and a helicopter, to scour the banks but found nothing after five days of searching. Vanessa’s body may have been wedged in the rocks, they said. It may have been washed up and dragged into the wild by wolves, cougars or a bear. All were possibilities.

Kate was the lone survivor.

Why did I survive? Why me?

She squeezed the flower stems tight as she carefully made her way to the river’s edge. One by one she dropped flowers into the flowing water, watching each of them twirl downstream.

Please forgive me, Vanessa. I’m so sorry I let you slip away. Why couldn’t they find you? I have to know what happened. I can’t go on like this. Are you dead? Are you here, somewhere? Or did you somehow survive? Where are you Vanessa? What happened?

Kate studied the river and scanned the vast forests and glorious mountains. She sat on the bank. It was beautiful, peaceful and spiritual. She didn’t know how long she’d been there when her phone rang.

Surprised that she had service here, she looked at it, thinking it might be Nancy with Grace returning her call.

The number was for Newslead in Manhattan. She answered.

“Kate, Reeka at the office. Can you talk?”

“What is it?”

“The Associated Press has just moved a story out of Rampart, citing unnamed sources, saying that additional human remains have been found in what police suspect are multiple murders at a remote barn site. Kate, why didn’t you alert us to this?”

“What?”

Kate’s mind raced. Reeka’s nerve! More victims! Was Vanessa one?

“Why didn’t you advise me of this, Kate, given your involvement?”

“You wanted me fired for my involvement, Reeka.”

“You’re still a Newslead employee.”

“But you wanted me fired. You said there was no story there.”

“Obviously things have changed.”

“What do you want from me?”

“This is poised to become a huge story and we can’t let our competition beat us on it. I want you to tell me all you know so I can pass it to our bureau people in Rochester and Syracuse.”

“No.”

“What did you say?”

Kate hung up and stared at the river.