But he was one of those people who simply could not shrug and move on. He called an old friend of his, the local sheriff’s deputy in the district center. Ryabtsev gave Eugene Markell every detail of the strange flight.
The deputy listened carefully, then said something startling. He admitted that an old missing-person file had been sitting in his office safe for years. Back in 1979, a female doctor had vanished from a remote settlement.
Officially, she was believed to have drowned, but no body had ever been found. Her sister still sent regular requests asking that the case be reopened. That settlement lay about 185 miles south of the place the helicopter had found.
It sounded like a long way, but if someone had traveled north through the forest, it was possible. Ryabtsev, now fully alert, asked for the missing woman’s name.
The deputy gave it to him at once: Nina Petrovna Surmach.
She had worked as a surgeon, and at the time of her disappearance she had been thirty-four years old. If she had survived, she would now be forty-six. Ryabtsev closed his eyes and pictured the woman by the dugout.
He hadn’t seen her face clearly from that height, but she was plainly neither elderly nor young. She looked exactly the right age. He told the deputy they needed to get out there as soon as possible.
Markell agreed. To understand why Nina Surmach had run in the first place, though, you have to go back to 1979, to a small timber town called Cedar Hollow.
At the local hospital, a thin, overworked surgeon spent her days and nights saving people. At the time, she had no idea she would soon be forced to save herself. It might seem that the worst part of her story was the twelve years she spent alone in the wilderness.
But the real horror lay in what happened before she disappeared. Nature can be brutal, but at least it is honest. It can kill you, but it doesn’t stab you in the back.
People, on the other hand, proved capable of a colder kind of betrayal. It was human treachery that drove Nina into the woods like hunted game. In those days, Cedar Hollow had about 1,500 residents and revolved around a logging operation.
The local district hospital occupied a drafty two-story building with wood heat and a leaking roof. Three surrounding settlements depended on its twelve beds, one operating room, and an aging X-ray machine. Nina was the only physician with a full medical degree within sixty miles.
She had come there right out of medical school on a state assignment. After the required term, she could have gone back to the city. She chose not to. She stayed because the people there needed her…
