Winter Study Page 20

  Finished, Bob turned to them and, pulling on his gloves, said, “Katherine and I were closer than just teacher and student.”

  Anna felt a shiver down her spine and realized it had nothing to do with her nervous system. The muscles in Adam’s chest and abdomen flinched, as if he’d taken a rabbit punch.

  “We’re sorry for your loss,” Adam said, his words like splintering wood in Anna’s ear. The cliché, made famous by a thousand TV shows, struck her as thinly veiled mockery, but Bob took it as his due.

  “Thank you again, Adam. Ms. Pigeon seemed to think I was practicing cannibalism. Or black magic.” Bob smiled briefly. “It’s okay, Anna. You’ve been through a lot in the past few days. More than the rest of us. You’re excused a bit of overreaction. I’m glad you cared enough for Katherine to be upset.”

  “I’m freezing to death,” Anna announced without too great a degree of hyperbole, slithered around Adam and hurried back toward the sauna. The heat of its dry fire had been sucked away. The sense of safety she’d enjoyed in her corner of the womb was gone. What remained was fatigue so deep and cold so sharp, she could scarcely walk. Mostly she wanted to crawl into her sleeping bag and slide into delicious unconsciousness, but, with her reserves burned away, she knew she would never be able to warm herself. If she didn’t take the sauna’s heat to bed with her, she’d be cold all night.

  Ridley was the only one still inside. The sauna was cooling as the fire was no longer stoked, but up near the ceiling there was still plenty of heat Anna could store in her bones.

  Ridley opened his eyes. His long dark lashes were covered in tiny beads of moisture that rivaled the glitter of a Vegas showgirl, till he sat forward and lost the light.

  “What?” he asked with the intuition of a man used to trouble.

  Anna told him.

  “Jesus!” He leaned back again but the angle was wrong and the magic of the eyes didn’t manifest. “You know he’s here to shut the study down, don’t you?”

  “Can he do that with the wolf’s behavior so off?” Paradoxically, now that she was getting warm, she was beginning to shiver.

  “He’s an idiot but he can probably do what he wants. Or what he’s told,” Ridley said. “He wouldn’t know one end of the wolf from the other if it bit him on the rump.”

  Rump.

  Anna’s brain caught at the word, a nice, round friendly word. Paul said things like that, his language never degenerating into cursing or obscenity. One day, she would have to clean up her vocabulary…

  “Adam must have been out of his mind.”

  “Out of his mind,” Anna echoed. She had no idea what Ridley referred to and no energy to pursue it.

  “Seemed to think he was God’s gift to science. Some of the people on the list were real scientists. None of them were any good – government hacks – but at least they’d seen a microscope at one time in their lives.”

  Ridley wasn’t really talking to her; he simply needed her there that he wouldn’t be crazy enough to be talking to himself. Anna lay down on the top bench and stretched out; something there’d not been room to do before.

  “Bob’s your basic prostitute; he screws whoever the man with the paycheck tells him to screw. Homeland Security wants the border parks open year-round. Bingo! Bob discovers the longest-running, most highly respected and – get this – popular study in the country is a piece of garbage.”

  That was the last sentence Anna heard. Vaguely she was aware of Ridley shaking her awake, of walking back through the snow with his arm around her shoulders, of sliding into her sleeping bag and – in the morning, she wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined this part – of Jonah saying: “Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  SHE WOULD HAVE LOVED to sleep the clock around, if for no other reason than, in her dreams, she didn’t have roommates, she had a husband. Nonetheless, twelve hours was sufficient for knitting up the raveled sleeve. At ten-fourteen, she awoke, tiptoed from the room, lest she waken Robin, and wandered into the common room. Where the harness had pulled across her shoulders was aching and the backs of her calves were stiff and painful. Other than that, she was in surprisingly good shape.

  A fire was burning in the stove, as it was every morning. Anna suspected elves, wanting tiny mukluks, till she found out Jonah got up at five every morning to check the weather, built up the fire, then, if there wasn’t going to be any flying that day, crawled back into his sleeping bag to emerge a couple hours later with the rest of them.

  The common room was uninhabited. She could hear men’s voices in the kitchen. Her parka was on the drying rack by the stove, as were the felt liners of her boots. Salvaging her gear, she dressed and slipped out the front door. The sky was still at the level of the treetops and the wind from the northwest was bitter cold, but it hadn’t the fury of the previous night. Temperature too low for proper snow; flakes, tiny almost to invisibility, drifted sharp as shards of glass in the air.

  Gray light, a world without three of the primary colors, clothes that swaddled and bundled out of doors, bodies and smells that swaddled and bundled indoors: winter wrapped a web around Anna. Without the rising of the sun and the rotation of the stars, time had taken her prisoner, and everything seemed endless, as if she’d done it a thousand times before and, like Sisyphus, was doomed to go on doing it for all eternity.

  Pushing through new drifts between the outhouse and the sauna, she wondered how the prisoners sent to work camps in Siberia survived. She had warmth, good clothing, plenty to eat, a place to sleep – Winter Study was not a place of privation; it was a place of simplicity. Yet the suffocating timelessness disoriented her all the same. She reminded herself never to do anything to annoy the Kremlin.

  The door to the carpenter’s shop was closed. Fresh tracks marked up the snow. Great big tracks: Bob.

  She opened the door and remnants of the stench she’d thought she’d dreamed were there to greet her. Katherine’s body hadn’t been put back into the garbage bags; they were smoothed neatly over her where she lay in the Sked. The severed foot was wrapped in plastic the way it had come from the scene. Bob had not seen fit to expose it in his worshipful frenzy. The hollowed-out remains of the wolf and its bagged organs were on the table in the center of the room.

  The story of the wolf who had invited Katherine to go with him into the snowy woods came back to Anna. The wistful look of longing as Katherine told the story of the meeting. The final scene from Wuthering Heights, the version starring Laurence Olivier, unfolded in Anna’s mind: Heathcliff and Cathy walking together into a snowy distance. In Anna’s version, Heathcliff was played by a wolf.

  Shaking the vision off, she lifted the bags off the body. For reasons known only to wolves – perhaps the way Katherine had wedged herself beneath a downed cedar before she died – but for one gash on her forehead her face was largely unmarked, yet it was not pretty in death. Freezing temperatures and rigor had set it in a mask of agony, a scream sculpted in flesh. The parka had been zipped.

  Bob had returned early this morning and tidied things up. Or finished what had been interrupted the previous night, then covered his tracks.

  Anna unzipped it, then sat back on her heels.

  Looking for a cell phone.

  What a crock.

  Cell phones didn’t work on the island. There wasn’t a tower within hitting distance. Cell phones hadn’t existed when Anna was a ranger on ISRO, but now the fact they didn’t work would be a huge plus in her opinion. No hikers or boaters chattering away with their pals in the office while the glory that was Isle Royale rolled by them unnoticed.

  Bob was looking for something, though. He’d been searching for it at the scene while the rest of them were packaging the remains. He’d left them, speeding off with the flashlight, because he’d found whatever it was and wanted to hide it before they returned, he’d not found it and wanted to search Katherine’s room or he was a lazy piece of shit and decided it was “wine time.”

  He might have been se
arching the body as he’d said. If he’d had a flashlight with him, it hadn’t been on when Anna arrived in all her naked glory, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t used it earlier.

  Staring at the dead woman’s face but without seeing it, Anna put herself back in the sauna and retraced her steps to the carpenter’s shop. Memories of the night before weren’t sharp. There’d been too many things dulling her brain.

  She left the sauna. She flew with the wind. She heard a clanking sound – probably the Sked banging into the metal legs of the workbench under the window. She opened the door and turned on the overhead light.

  Without the wind raking her back and Bob’s eyes her front, Anna was able to see more clearly in memory than she had at the time. Bob Menechinn had been on his knees. His butt had been in the air and his head down, hiding that of the corpse. That’s why Anna had the sudden thought he was eating it.

  The time for rescue breathing was long past. Had he been kissing Katherine? Love lost and good-bye and rest in peace with Baby Jesus, like Bob claimed?

  Or did he like making love to dead women?

  That was a gruesome thought. Though, should Anna ever have to have sex with the likes of Menechinn, it would be preferable to be dead at the time.

  Shuddering out of that mental place, Anna turned her attention to cause of death. Wolf, certainly, but wolves weren’t what had taken Katherine to the cedar swamp in the first place, nor, did Anna believe, had they taken the researcher down. The tracks at the scene, those that hadn’t been totally obscured by snow, told the tale of a meal, not a hunt.

  Anna got a pair of latex gloves from the box Ridley had left on the counter from the wolf necropsy and turned back the stiffened edge of the shredded trouser leg. A splintered femur thrust through the tattered flesh – broken, snapped, not gnawed through. A considerate beast of some sort had licked the bone clean.

  Katherine had probably stepped in one of the swamp’s natural traps and broken her ankle. Maybe the pack was hounding her, but it seemed more likely she’d broken her ankle and the pack had come upon her. Wolves could have smelled the blood from the compound fracture. There were vials of the dead wolf’s blood in her pocket. She might have smashed them against a stone or the bole of a downed tree.

  If they were in the area, the wolves would have smelled it. But wolves smelled blood all the time: crippled moose, injured pack members. Every meal was served up with the smell of blood. All summer long, they smelled the blood of tourists, scraping and blistering and cutting themselves with cooking utensils. It wasn’t like chumming in shark-infested waters; at the scent of blood, wolves didn’t go into a feeding frenzy. The odor of humans was enough to send them running.

  The only thing that made much sense was a confluence of events: Katherine breaks her leg, wolves come upon her, she reeks of fresh blood – hers and theirs – and they kill her.

  Reeks.

  The breath of the windigo.

  Smell, the most primitive of the senses, flooded Anna but brought with it no memory, only the knowledge that something was unutterably wrong.

  21

  Anna returned to the bunkhouse, let herself in the unused kitchen door, took Katherine’s sample-gathering paraphernalia and carried it back to the carpenter’s shop. There she began the painstaking process of collecting and preserving trace evidence.

  She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. A smoking gun maybe, though the murder weapon was clearly tooth and claw. Could be she was bored or paranoid or suffering from the madness of the Far North, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Katherine’s death was not accidental, not entirely. Nor could she shake the feeling that Bob had something to do with it. But, then, she seemed pretty anxious to pin something on the Homeland Security guy and couldn’t be trusted to be objective.

  She swabbed and preserved and noted. What struck her most forcibly was how little trauma there was. Researchers hypothesized the size of a wolf pack was determined by how many animals could fit around a kill. When wolves brought down an animal, they surrounded it and ate it warm, often alive – for a while. Canis lupus were designed to eat en famile and efficiently; an adult wolf’s jaws exerted fifteen hundred pounds per square inch, about twice that of a German shepherd and five times that of a human being. A mature wolf could gnaw through a femur in six or seven bites. Speed was also in their nature. They might be the most ferocious of predators, but they weren’t nearly as focused as ravens when it came to scavenging. A single raven could carry away as much as four pounds in a day, meat cached in the branches of a nearby tree for later consumption.

  Soft, small-boned, Katherine would have been torn to pieces in minutes. Yet the corpse was relatively undamaged: a foot torn off, throat slashed, arm severed and hands eaten. The rest was superficial damage. In a starvation winter, when moose were scarce, the wolves would not have left fresh meat of their own volition. They had to have been frightened off the kill.

  Something had scared the wolves away, then didn’t eat the body itself. The noneating, scary thing vanished before the snow stopped falling. Either that or it traveled in such a manner it left no tracks.

  Anna rose to her feet and stomped to get the circulation moving. The stiff-soled Sorels were not made for kneeling. Or walking. Or fashion. They were simply designed to keep feet dry and toes from turning black. Dead wolf parts to one side, dead woman to the other, clapping and stomping in true zombie-jamboree fashion, Anna cast back to the night Katherine had been killed.

  She couldn’t even be sure Katherine left the shop intending to confront Bob. Nature might have called; Anna did come upon her near the outhouse. Bob might have waylaid her for some reason and they’d gotten into a fight. She might have run into Bob accidentally and taken the rare moment of privacy to unload on him about something that had been on her mind for a while.

  Again Anna knelt and began searching Katherine’s clothing. In the right front trouser pocket was a tube of Chap Stick. In the pocket of her parka was a handkerchief; not the great square of cotton of the present day but a smaller square of linen edged with crocheted silk. Anna had carried one very like it down the aisle when she’d married Paul, the “something borrowed.” Her sister, Molly, inherited a box of them when her husband’s mother died. They weren’t the sort of thing one carried into the wilds to mop the frozen mucus from one’s nose and eyes.

  Hoping the delicate handkerchief had given Katherine comfort, Anna tucked it into a paper evidence bag. If there was organic matter on it, paper would preserve it better than plastic. That done, she did a thorough frisk of the body. A lump in the lining of the parka brought on the familiar rush any cop – green or blue – got when they were onto something.

  Excitement dwindled as she discovered it hadn’t been covertly sewn into the lining like smuggled jewels but fallen through a rip in the pocket. She worked it up the fabric to the light of day. Blood; one vial of wolf’s blood had not been smashed.

  Had Bob been looking for the cell phone like he’d said or was this what he was after? That made little sense when there was enough wolf meat in bags on the tool bench to glean any number of samples. Anna slipped the tube into an envelope, dated and sealed and initialed it. In every case, the chain of evidence had to be preserved: who collected it and anyone else who accessed it had to be recorded. One link in the chain broken, one unauthorized moment out of the chain, and an attorney would say the evidence could have been tampered with and was inadmissible.

  Anna wasn’t sure there’d been a crime. She wasn’t even acting under color of law. Her jurisdiction was in Rocky Mountains in Colorado. It did not extend to a park in Michigan. Still, she worked with precision and strict adherence to the rules.

  When she’d finished, she wondered what the hell she was going to do with her neatly labeled packets. There was no place to lock up the stuff. In the Visitors Center-cum-ranger station there would be an evidence locker, but the NPS wouldn’t have given Ridley a key. Besides, Anna wasn’t sure she trusted Ridley. At this point, she hardl
y trusted herself.

  There was the storeroom off the common room between her bedroom and Bob and Adam’s, a narrow, windowless room full of cobwebs and outdated backcountry gear. She dismissed it. Little used as it was, it was accessible to anyone who was interested. Besides, under normal circumstances, freezing organic matter would render it worthless. Since this had already been frozen, it would do more damage to thaw it and subject it to the possibility of refreezing.

  A few minutes of rummaging about and in the rear of the shop, at floor level beneath a workbench, Anna found a partially rotted board; she could see the shallow crawl space beneath the shop. An old toolbox, rusted but still mouseproof, was pressed into duty as an evidence locker. She placed the box in the hole, then covered the opening with paint cans.

  There was a bit of Nancy Drew about the entire episode that appealed to her. How serious could a situation be if the lead investigator was hiding metal boxes under the floorboards in old sheds?

  Lunch was being consumed when she returned to the bunkhouse. Dinner was the only planned meal. Lunch was peanut butter and jelly on toast – or on biscuits, if there were any left from the night before. Adam wasn’t in attendance. Ridley was but wasn’t particularly chatty. The weather – or the threat of losing his vocation and avocation at the whim and will of Bob Menechinn – had left bruise-colored smudges under his eyes.

  Anna pulled out a chair and sat down. Ridley nodded politely and passed the bread and peanut butter. She was hungry, but not with the insatiable, almost desperate hunger of the first days.

  Katherine is butchered and you are sated. The thought jarred her. The ravenous nature of the island jarred her.

  Bob sat in his usual place, looking larger than he had the day before.

  A tick filling up.

  Given to black humor and a certain dark turn of mind, Anna was accustomed to thoughts better not expressed in groups, but, what with eating and being eaten – the whole food chain thing spelled out in gobs of flesh and strawberry jam – the words, rising unbidden, had a sinister cast, as if she were going mad. Or the world was.