There had been something directly ahead of him, a vague gray shape, no more. Why had he thought it was the girl? He realized that if it were Charlotte Kane, he hadn’t had enough time to turn aside before he hit her, yet he’d felt no impact. Had the blizzard simply played a cruel trick on him?

He had no idea where the Polaris was, and nearly blind in the white, he began to grope around him.

This was exactly what Schanno had been afraid of, losing one of the search team. Cork, in his arrogance, believing that he might yet find the missing girl, had only made matters worse. Unless he was able to locate the snowmobile or the radio, Search and Rescue would have no idea where he was, no knowledge that he’d screwed himself, tumbled onto the ice of Fisheye Lake and got lost in a whiteout there. He was about to become another weight on the shoulders of the other searchers.

He tried not to panic, telling himself he could wait out the storm. But that was a supposition, not a known. For all he knew, the blizzard could last a week. Where would he be then?

He’d just resettled the goggles when he saw it again out of the corner of his eye, the flicker of gray behind the white.

“Charlotte!” He stumbled in that direction.

Blindly, he groped ahead a dozen steps, then another glimpse of the phantom, left this time, and he turned and hit his shinbone against the snowmobile, which was sitting upright, half-buried in a drift that was growing deeper even as Cork stood there, amazed and grateful.

The compass was hanging from the handgrip. Cork did a three-sixty, one last scan of the small circle his eyes could penetrate. He took his bearing, kicked the machine into action, and headed toward safety.

It took him another hour to reach the graded road that led him to Valhalla on Black Bear Lake.

Valhalla was the Northwoods retreat of Dr.