Helena stood beside Eli’s crib with a clothes steamer pointed between its bars.
White vapor drifted around the infant. He twisted away, coughing between frightened cries.
“Stop making noise,” Helena muttered. “You’ll wake everyone.”
I dropped the folded blanket I was carrying.
“What are you doing?”
She lowered the steamer. “Fixing my gloves.”
Her leather gloves lay dry on a chair across the room.
“Your gloves are over there.”
I stepped around her and lifted Eli. He caught the collar of my uniform and cried against my shoulder. I carried him toward the open window, away from the vapor.
“Give me the child,” Helena said.
“No. I’m taking him to the physician.”
A blizzard had closed the roads around Blackpine Lodge. Every guest was downstairs beside the fire, waiting for word that the pass might reopen. Helena owned the lodge, and Eli was her nephew. His father, her younger brother Adrian, had disappeared during a climbing expedition six weeks earlier. Helena had taken charge of Eli while the search continued.
For days, she had insisted that he needed quiet and should remain in a nursery beyond the lodge’s camera system. She had asked the lodge physician whether recurring breathing problems might indicate a condition Eli was born with.
I had thought she was frightened for him. Now I looked at the steamer in her hand and wondered what she had been trying to make us believe.
Helena moved in front of the door. “You’re overreacting.”
“Then let the doctor decide.”
Eli coughed again. She stepped aside when I called for help loud enough to carry down the staircase.
Dr. Vale met us halfway. He examined Eli in the sitting room while the guests moved back to give him space. I told him exactly what I had seen. He asked Helena to leave the steamer untouched in the nursery and stayed with Eli until the child was comfortable.
The lodge manager called the local emergency service over the unreliable phone line. Someone answered long enough to say a team would come as soon as the roads were safe.
I remained beside the physician. Eli had begun to settle in my arms when I remembered the small brass key beneath the steamer’s cord. Its handle carried a carved pine branch.
The same branch was engraved on the locked cabinet in Helena’s office.
Earlier that week, I had walked past her office late at night and heard what sounded like someone crying. When I asked Helena about it, she said an old recording was playing in the next room.
I asked the manager to take me upstairs. Helena objected, but Dr. Vale said he wanted the steamer preserved and asked the manager to keep others out of the nursery.
The key was still beside the crib. I photographed it where it lay and left it there for whoever came to investigate.
Downstairs, Helena watched me return.
“You have no right to search my office,” she said.
“I haven’t.”
The manager frowned. “Why would her office key be in the nursery?”
Helena looked at him. “Because I brought it with me.”
I wanted to know what was inside the cabinet, but Eli needed care first. Dr. Vale arranged for him to stay in a warm guest room near the main stairwell, where we could all reach him. The manager remained with us. Helena went to her office and shut the door.
An hour later, the lights flickered. The storm pressed snow against the windows, and the telephone line went silent.
Then I heard the crying again.
It came from behind Helena’s office wall.
The manager heard it too. He used his master key to open the office while I stayed at the doorway with Eli. Helena was inside, standing in front of the engraved cabinet.
“You can’t come in,” she said.
The sound came again: a man’s strained voice, followed by a burst of static.
It was a radio.
Helena’s face changed when she realized we could hear it.
The manager asked her to open the cabinet. She refused. He told her the sheriff would want to know about the voice. At last, she moved aside and unlocked it with the brass key she had taken from the nursery.
Inside was a radio receiver and a stack of handwritten notes. The top page listed times, weather conditions and a location near the old mountain shelter.
A voice came through the receiver.
“Blackpine, answer me. Is Eli all right?”
Helena reached for the radio. The manager picked it up first.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“Adrian.”
I looked at Eli asleep against my shoulder. His father was alive.
Adrian told us he had survived the expedition but had been injured and stranded at the shelter after the weather closed in. A search team had passed near him without reaching the building. He had repaired an old radio and contacted Helena three nights earlier.
“She said she was arranging help,” he told the manager. “She told me Eli was ill. Then she stopped answering.”
The notes in the cabinet recorded each call. Helena had known where Adrian was. She had also recorded his requests to speak to anyone who could send a rescue team.
“Why didn’t you tell the searchers?” I asked.
Helena looked toward Eli. “The route was too dangerous.”
“Then why keep the calls secret?”
She gave no answer.
The manager reached emergency services on a backup radio and relayed Adrian’s location. Dr. Vale stayed with Eli. I told the dispatcher what had happened in the nursery and about the notes in the cabinet.
By morning, the storm had weakened enough for a rescue team to reach the shelter. They found Adrian alive and brought him to the hospital. Another team came to the lodge. I gave them my account, the photographs of the key and the steamer, and the times I had heard the radio.
They separated Helena from Eli while they investigated. Dr. Vale accompanied the baby for a full examination. I rode with them because Eli had fallen asleep holding a fold of my uniform.
Adrian called the hospital that evening. His voice was tired, but he asked for Eli before he asked about himself.
“He’s safe,” I told him.
There was a long pause. “I kept calling.”
“I know. We heard you.”
When Adrian was well enough, he came to see his son. Eli reached toward him from my arms. Adrian took him carefully and pressed his face against the baby’s hair.
The roads to Blackpine Lodge had reopened. Investigators still had questions for Helena about the radio, the hidden notes and what she had done in the nursery. Adrian and Eli no longer had to wait inside the lodge for her to answer them.
I watched Adrian carry his son toward the hospital window. Outside, sunlight lay across the snow. Eli rested quietly against his father’s shoulder.
