though just before the accident she had thought she was devoid of hope
forever.
The chill of the water had thoroughly penetrated Lindsey, numbing mind
as well as flesh. When she tried to concentrate on forming a plan that
would get her from the middle of the river to the shore, she could not
bring her thoughts into focus. She felt drugged. She knew that
drowsiness was a companion of hypothermia, that dozing off would invite
deeper unconsciousness and ultimately death. She was determined to keep
awake and alert at all costs-but suddenly she realized that she had
closed her eyes, giving in to the temptation of sleep.
Fear twisted through her. Renewed strength coiled in her muscles.
Blinking feverishly, eyelashes frosted with snow that no longer melted
from her body heat, she peered around Hatch and along the line of
water-polished boulders. The safety of the bank was only fifteen feet
away.
If the rocks were close to one another, she might be able to tow Hatch
to shore without being sucked through a gap and carried downnver.
Her vision had adapted sufficiently to the gloom, however, for her to
see that centuries of patient currents had carved a five-foot-wide hole
in the middle of the granite span against which she was wedged. It was
halfway between her and the river’s edge. Dimly glistening under a
lacework shawl of ice, the ebony water quickened as it was funneled
toward the gap; no doubt it exploded out the other side with tremendous
force.
Lindsey knew she was too weak to propel herself across that powerful
eruption. She and Hatch would be swept through the breach and, at last,
to certain death.
Just when surrender to an endless sleep began, again, to look more
appealing than continued pointless struggle against nature’s hostile
power, she saw strange lights at the top of the ravine, a couple of
hundred yards upriver. She was so disoriented and her mind so
anesthetized by the cold that for a while the pulsing crimson glow
seemed eerie, mysterious, supernatural, as if she were staring upward at
the wondrous radiance of a hovering, divine presence.
Gradually she realized that she was seeing the throb of police or
ambulance beacons on the highway far above, and then she spotted the
flashlit cuers had descended the ravine wall. They were maybe a hundred
yards upriver, where the car had sunk.
She called to them. Her shout issued as a whisper. She tried again,
with greater success, but they must not have heard her above the keening
wind, for the flashlights continued to sweep back and forth over the
same section of riverbank and turbulent water.
Suddenly she realized that Hatch was slipping out of her grasp again.
His face was underwater.
With the abruptness of a switch being thrown, Lindsey’s terror became
anger again. She was angry with the truck driver for being caught in
the mountains during a snowstorm, angry with herself for being so weak,
angry with Hatch for reasons she could not define, angry with the cold
and insistent river, and enraged at God for the violence and injustice
of His universe.
Lindsey found greater strength in anger than in terror. She flexed her
half-frozen hands, got a better grip on Hatch, pulled his head out of
the water again, and let out a cry for help that was louder than the
banshee voice of the wind. Upstream, the flashlight beams, as one,
swung searchingly in her direction.
6
The stranded couple looked dead already. Targeted by the flashlights,
their faces floated on the dark water, as white as
apparitions-translucent, unreal, lost.
Lee Reedman, a San Bernardino County Deputy Sheriff with emergency
rescue training, waded into the water to haul them ashore, bracing
himself against a rampart of boulders that extended out to midstream.
He was on a half-inch, hawser-laid nylon line with a breaking strength
of four thousand pounds, secured to the trunk of a sturdy pine and
belayed by two other deputies.
He had taken off his parka but not his uniform or boots. In those
fierce currents, swimming was impossible anyway, so he did not have to
worry about being hampered by clothes. And even sodden garments would