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lead the ambulance back into Marquette.”
    Viekko held the door open as the paramedics began pushing the gurney.   Del watched the woman’s face, the blue-white of her skin.   Her eyelids were large, with long blond lashes.   It was hard to believe she was the same woman whose husband and daughter had been killed in that accident.   He was trying to think of a painting by Andrew Wyeth he’d seen once, long ago, in a magazine, or in one of those large coffee table books.   Wyeth had painted a woman, a woman with Scandinavian features, painted her many times.   There was one painting that this Liesl Tiomenen reminded him of—a woman sitting at a table in an old farmhouse, wearing a heavy turtleneck sweater, her head turned aside.   There was in this woman’s face the same sense of quiet, of patience, of looking to the side of things.   But there was something else—a sense of endurance, and perhaps resignation.   He wished he could see her with her eyes opened.   They must be large, under those lids.   Her license said they were blue.

 
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    Del sat in his Land Cruiser while the paramedics secured the gurney and Liesl Tiomenen in the ambulance, then the truck led them out onto County Road 644.   Viekko went slowly, the blade of his plow throwing new snow up on the bank along the side of the road.   It was accumulating at least six inches per hour; if the plows didn't keep working, this road—perhaps all the roads in Marquette County—would be shut down soon.   About two hundred yards from the Stop & Go, Viekko's arm came out of his cab window and his gloved hand pointed toward the snowbank on the right.
    Del pulled over and watched the plow and the ambulance lights disappear in the snow.   He put his flashing lights on and climbed out.   The wind came down the road, straight out of the north.   The snowbank was at least eight feet high, but it was angled so that he could get enough purchase to climb up and kneel on the crest.   From there he could see Viekko’s tracks leading up to where he had found Liesl Tiomenen.   There was the tip of a snowshoe, but no sign of what might have caused her to collapse at that point.   The tree line was a good fifty yards back, and the hill rose steeply from there.   He could see the trail she had left as she had come down from the hill; the depressions were now softened, filled in by new snow.
    He kept a small pair of binoculars in one of the pockets of his coat and he took them out.   Through them he looked more closely at the tracks, following them from the depression where she’d collapsed back to the tree line at the base of the hill.   Then Del lowered the binoculars and carefully got to his feet on top of the snowbank.   Putting the binoculars to his eyes again he refocused and looked toward the trees again.   It was nearly dark beneath the evergreens, but it looked like she might have fallen a second time in there.
    He went back down to the Land Cruiser and got his snowshoes out of the back.   They were wood shoes that he'd bought at a garage sale years ago.   The lacings were still good.   He kept them in his Land Cruiser six, seven months out of the year, and during the summer he hung them on the coat rack by the front door.   Just in case.
    He climbed back to the crest of the snowbank, put on the snowshoes and began walking across the snow.   He walked wide of the first depression where Viekko had found the woman and continued on into the woods.   There had definitely been another fall there.   Del followed the tracks up the base of the hill, and found a third depression below a granite ledge.   It was different from the other two depressions—deeper.   He stared up at the top of the ledge, maybe seven or eight feet high.   The snow there had been broken too—here in the woods the impressions were sharper because less new snow had fallen.   If she had fallen off this ledge, which is what it looked like, he wondered why there were