Winter Study Read online

  As Anna closed the log, The Shining unreeled behind her frontal lobe, the scenes where Jack Nicholson grinned his I-am-one-crazy-bastard grin. Was she growing paranoid and delusional in a snow-bound building? No secrets, no plots, no ulterior motives or sinister intent, just a mix of strange bedfellows trapped in a very strange bed with one claustrophobic hypervigilant law enforcement ranger?

  Anna put the book back precisely the way she’d found it. The log’s owner would never be back to notice; she did it from habit. Methodically she checked each of the various samples in their vials and packets. No seals were broken, no envelopes slit open, no papers in disarray.

  Wog DNA wasn’t what triggered Katherine. For a scientist, a find at that level of idiosyncratic bizarreness was tantamount to a cat finding a real live mouse full of catnip. Something she’d discovered during the necropsy precipitated her mad dash into the woods. Anna walked to the window and stared past her reflection in the dark glass, trying to see around the corners of memory to that precise moment.

  Ridley’s hand was cut and bleeding. Anna handed Katherine the chunk of meat from the wolf’s throat. Katherine mewled like a newborn kitten lost in its mother’s fur. Shortly thereafter, according to Jonah, the researcher pocketed the blood samples and ran out of the shop.

  Jonah said she’d pocketed the samples and run out.

  Feeling anxious but not knowing why till she realized she was half expecting another message to appear on the window glass in spectral words, Anna wondered what Jonah had to gain by the lie. He could have slipped the vials into Katherine’s pocket; he could have said she’d run out when she’d merely strolled, but Anna couldn’t come up with one moderately rational reason why he would do so.

  The old pilot was as attached to Ridley as a father to a beloved son. Lately he had been watching Adam the way he’d watch a dog bitten by a rabid skunk. Jonah had no use whatsoever for Bob but didn’t appear to harbor the hatred of him Ridley did or the schizophrenic anger and obsequiousness Adam displayed toward the man.

  Anna gave up. She took the tube of blood from her pocket and stared at it. It was just a sample from a dead wolf, and there were plenty more where this came from.

  Maybe.

  Maybe the importance of the vials was in the fact that there weren’t more. Would Jonah have reason to tamper with vials of blood, then switch the doctored versions for the real samples when Katherine wasn’t paying attention?

  “You’re reaching,” Anna chided herself. Even a diabolical, dyed-in-the-wool, honest-to-comic-book professional nemesis had to have means, motive and opportunity. Unless Jonah was the great professor he played at being when on a roll, such a convoluted methodology was uncharacteristic.

  Anna decided to quit stirring in her brain and Katherine’s lab before she began making up crimes just to keep herself amused. What she needed was a good book.

  “Hey, Ridley.” Anna leaned in the doorway of his room. His back was to her, his long, delicate fingers poised on the keyboard of his laptop, hair loose and shining around his shoulders. He looked the very image of Christ Jesus without the halo and the white nightgown.

  When he turned, the renaissance artists’ vision of Jesus vanished. Rings of purple beneath his eyes had deepened since breakfast and his winter-white skin looked coarse and loose. “Hey,” he replied. Weariness flattened his voice. Anna snuck a look past his shoulder to see what he was working on. Unoffended, he followed her gaze. “Yeah,” he said. “Yet one more defense of the study. Fifty years we’ve been at it. Fifty years of watching and what we know is, we don’t even begin to know what we don’t know about wolves and their relationship to their prey. Yet every bozo with a dog and a high school diploma knows it all. David Mech says one thing, Rolf Peterson agrees; I back it, and some NPS brass says: ‘But the girl who sits next to me in homeroom thinks…’”

  “‘You’ve got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.’” Anna quoted Butch Cassidy.

  Ridley’s eyes went hard, and it occurred to her he would have been five or six years old when the movie came out. Chances were good he’d never seen it. And he certainly hadn’t memorized the good parts, as a percentage of her generation had. As far as he was concerned, he’d offered her a glimpse of himself and she’d mocked him. Anna wished it wasn’t so but knew if she tried to explain herself it would make things worse. It always did.

  “I need the key to the ranger station,” she said instead.

  “Sure. The lights aren’t on. The generator serves only the housing area. What do you need?”

  “A book,” Anna replied. “The Visitors Center must have a library of some kind.” The Visitors Center and the rangers’ offices were located in the same building, the beautiful new facility overlooking Washington Harbor.

  “Not much of one,” Ridley said as he rummaged through the top drawer of his desk. It was full of pens, paper clips and other detritus that Anna thought would have taken more than a couple weeks to amass. “Reference stuff, is about all there is there.”

  “I’ve finished the Newsweek,” she said drily.

  Ridley laughed, and she was glad he chose not to carry a cross moment further than necessary. “The key is somewhere in this mess, but I don’t know where. Adam!” he hollered.

  Looking like a man who’s been awaiting a call rather than someone roused from sleep, Adam appeared soundlessly in the doorway beside Anna. So soundlessly, she started when he spoke.

  “Yeah?”

  “Give Anna the key to the V.C. She says she’s read the Newsweek.”

  “Already?” Adam cocked one eyebrow in a way that made Anna think of her high school principal, Sister Mary Corinne. “You’ve only been here a week.”

  “Speed-reader,” Anna said.

  Adam reached into the front pocket of his jeans and took out a small ring of governmental-looking keys. It was Ridley’s turn to cock an eyebrow, but, not being gifted in that department, he managed a mere wrinkling of the forehead. Years in the wilderness or small isolated communities to inform her, Anna knew Ridley thought it peculiar that Adam carried keys. Nothing – or nothing they needed – on the island was kept locked. When he’d first arrived, Ridley unlocked the buildings they would be using and left them that way. There was no one to lock them against. The V.C. was only locked because it was unnecessary to the study.

  In summer, with the exception no doubt of employee housing – NPS people were notoriously trusting – buildings would be locked at night against visitors with larceny or vandalism in their souls. The major thieves on the island in winter were the mice, and few locks deterred them.

  Ignoring the skepticism, Adam removed a single key from the ring and handed it to Anna. “The door jams, so don’t let it fool you. When you turn the key, it’s unlocked. After that, brute force is your best bet.”

  For the length of time it took her to walk through the common room to her own room, Anna entertained the wisp of a fantasy that she could just zip out to the V.C. and zip back; that she didn’t have to put on her heavy socks, ski pants, fleece overshirt, balaclava, gloves and boots. Like the Sun King’s Versailles, much of one’s time in the frozen north was spent dressing and undressing.

  Outside, the temperature was minus seventeen. With the windchill, it was closer to minus forty. A jaunt to the outhouse was scarcely bearable. Without gear, the quarter mile to the V.C. could prove deadly.

  THERE WAS NO WINDCHILL. The wind had stopped, and the forest felt as if it were holding its breath, the island in stasis, waiting. Despite the fact she’d been steeping her brain in boogeymen and monsters of the id, the waiting didn’t feel threatening, merely a stillness through which Anna moved, a moment out of time in which her breath was stilled as well. The good version of death without the annoying part where one died.

  This frozen idyll was ended when she heard a shuffling in the dark beyond her flashlight and, before the beam had rooted out the squirrelly culprit, her mind had shown her a slavering, long-toothed, red-eyed wog skulking in the ni
ght.

  “Damn!” she whispered. Being frightened of being alone in the woods pissed her off. The woods, the wilderness, were where she hid from the monsters of the populated world. To become prey, even in her mind, was intolerable. Despite the prickling of her neck hairs and the cringing along her spine, she forced herself to walk slowly and deliberately down the trail.

  By the time she stood on the wooden porch of the V.C., stomping the snow from her boots, she was cold to the bone. Clumsy in gloves, she inserted the key, turned it counterclockwise, and exerted the recommended brute force. The door came open so easily, she fell backward, stumbling over her big feet and landing on her rump with a grunt that would have done a wild boar proud. For a moment, she lay there, staring into the blank sky. It crossed her mind that this was the perfect opportunity to wave arms and legs feebly, experience the worldview of a topsy-turvy beetle. That insight into the insect mind might be the most enlightening experience she’d have on ISRO. Sloth, not an innate sense of human dignity, decided her against it. She rolled over, got to hands and knees, rose and started in the open door.

  Halfway across the lintel, a cry stopped her. Not a breath of wind, not a decibel of sound pollution, the voice cut into her eardrums with the force of a slap in the face.

  “Is somebody there? Is somebody there? Help me! If somebody’s there, help me!”

  Bob.

  It was fucking Bob.

  23

  Bob had left the door open and caused Anna to fall on her keister. Now he wanted her help. God knows, with what, and Anna didn’t much care. Had she been a lesser person, she might have turned and slipped into the night from whence she had come. For the time it took for her heart to beat twice, she considered that perhaps, as an act of humility, she should become a lesser person for one evening.

  Switching off the flashlight, she stepped quietly into the Visitors Center. Stale air, marinated in winter, harbored a chill that the outdoors, fierce with life even at forty below, could not attain. Inside cold, like inside dark, was harsher and scarier than anything under the moon.

  Instinct – or antipathy – dictated she keep her whereabouts in question. Without moving, without making a sound, she waited for Bob to call again. Thick and slow and glacial, silence flowed around her till she felt if she didn’t move she would suffer the fate of the mastodons, encased in living ice for millennia. Gliding as best she might in the clown-sized boots, she moved from the door to the right, where an open, half-spiral stairway led up to a viewing area.

  The main room of the Visitors Center was at least thirty by forty feet. Tall picture windows gave onto a view of Washington Harbor. To the west side of the windows was a skeleton of a mature moose, reassembled and displayed in a glass box. Beside it, trapped in an eternal howl to a mate long dead, was a wolf preserved by the art of taxidermy.

  Anna’d seen the displays the first day when she’d looked in the windows. That she could see them now surprised her. Above the level of the trees, the white of the harbor ice and the white of the sky cast a faint silvery light.

  “Is anybody there?” Bob’s voice emanated from the offices on the opposite side of the building. He didn’t sound particularly panicked for a man who had been hollering for help moments before. Anna said nothing. Dead, cold air settled more firmly around her.

  A minute passed, two: he didn’t call again and didn’t come out. She started across the hardwood floor. Ski-pant legs whistled together, big boots creaked and snuffled.

  “Who’s there?” Bob called.

  Yeti didn’t sneak, she thought sourly as a beam of yellow light raked down the hall and shot by her.

  Anna switched on her light. “Anna Pigeon,” she said, and Bob’s beam blinded her. “Get that damn light out of my eyes. What’s the problem? What are you hollering about?”

  The instant he moved his light from her face, she aimed her flashlight at his. His eyes were bright, virtually twinkling, and his skin had a rosy glow. His balaclava was crunched down around his neck, but the hood of his parka was up as if he’d dressed for the cold in a hurry. With those jowls, it couldn’t have been comfortable.

  “You look fine to me,” Anna said. A groan and a thump came from down the hall.

  “It’s not me; it’s Robin,” Bob said.

  Sick fear washed through Anna on a wave of nausea. “Lead me to her,” she said. Bob started to speak, but she cut him off: “Now.” The flashlight beam on his back, she followed him down the short hallway. Years of experience and training told her she should have listened to what he had to say, but Bob managed to tap directly into a deep vein of irritation.

  “What happened?” she meant to ask, but it was a demand.

  “Robin’s been pretty upset since Katherine’s accident,” Bob replied, his voice warm with concern.

  “And?”

  At the end of the hallway, he turned right. Anna quickened her steps; she didn’t want him out of her sight. He stopped in the last doorway, the corner office with a view of the lake. A plastic name-plate, printed with DISTRICT RANGER, was in a faux-brass holder to the right of the doorframe.

  Blocking the entrance with his bulk, big on a bad day, bigger still with the down coat, he said: “Not everybody can handle violence with your aplomb, Anna.” He used his nice-fellow voice, but the intent to insult was clear. Anna was not insulted. With guys like Menechinn in the world, she was liking the idea of violence better and better.

  “Robin,” she called. A retching sound trickled on a moan from the dark room.

  “Step away from the door,” Anna said.

  “She’s been drinking pretty heavily,” Bob said. “I think she started sneaking it not too long after you left for your ski outing.”

  “Move away from the door.”

  “Aren’t we the officious little woman,” he said, but he moved.

  The office reeked of wine. Robin was on the floor, her long legs curled up, knees under her chin. She was hatless and her hair fanned out around her head. Damp strands stuck to her face.

  Half her attention on the young woman, half on Bob’s hulking shadow, glimpsed in stripes and washes as the beams of their lights moved, Anna knelt. “Robin, it’s Anna. Can you talk to me?” she asked gently as she pried open one eyelid, then the other, and shined her light in. Both pupils reacted sluggishly. Dilation could have been caused by drugs or darkness. Robin’s skin was cool to the touch and diaphoretic. Any number of things could account for that.

  “I went out for a walk,” Bob said. “When I came by the V.C., I heard noises and came up to see what was going on. I found her back here with a box of the wine she’d taken from the bathroom fridge.” He played his light to the box of merlot on the floor a few feet from Robin. A mason jar was tipped over next to it, a stain spreading on the carpet. “I was trying to get her up and take her back to the bunkhouse, so she wouldn’t freeze to death, when I heard you come in.”

  Anna flicked her light to his face. He threw up an arm as if the beam was a blow. With the cut of shadow, she couldn’t read his expression.

  “Yeah, well, here’s your chance.”

  Between the two of them, they got Robin to her feet and out of the Visitors Center. The trail from the bunkhouse to the V.C. and dock was swampy in summer. A wooden walkway, two planks wide, had been built to keep foot traffic from tearing up the muddy ground. Snow hid the planks, rendering the path tricky in much the same way the downed trees made traversing the cedar swamps tricky.

  “Better let me carry her,” Bob said. “You walk ahead with the light.”

  Anna hated that idea. Hated the idea of Bob doing a good deed, hated the idea of Bob touching Robin, hated the idea of being helped and hated the idea that she didn’t have the strength to carry the girl herself.

  “Thanks,” she said, wondering what it was about Bob – or about having one’s life saved – that was so irritating. “Watch your footing.”

  Bob picked Robin up easily. The biotech was tall, but slender as a blade of grass. “Go on ahe
ad. I can light your way better from behind,” Anna told him. This was marginally true; with an effort, she could shine the lights around him.

  As she followed in his tracks, the size of the man, the unconscious woman in his arms, the flickering of the two flashlights, brought to mind a dozen derivatives of King Kong and Frankenstein; the beast, lumbering from the torchlight, the damsel clutched to his chest.

  Anna opened the door to the bunkhouse and Bob shouldered in with his burden. At the computer on the rear wall of the common room, Adam glanced over his shoulder. Then he was on his feet. Anna didn’t see him gather himself and stand – one moment, he was sitting; the next, standing.

  Jonah stood as well. “Ridley,” he called without taking his eyes off them. “Get in here.”

  Bob didn’t put Robin down on the couch or move toward her room but stopped a moment to savor the spotlight. “Drunk as a frat boy on Friday night,” he said.

  “Robin’s drunk. Passed out. Drunk,” Adam said tonelessly, his face gone the color of ashes, his hands knotted in fists at his sides, knuckles hard-boned and sharp.

  “Yep,” Bob said. “I guess this wog business was getting to her. I, for one, will be glad when the Forest Service gets us off this island. Sooner is better.”

  To Anna’s amazement, the permafrost that had replaced Adam’s skin melted and his fists uncurled. “I’m glad you were looking after her, Bob. She’s a good kid.” Adam reached to take the unconscious girl. His arms were as stiff as a Hollywood mummy’s.

  Bob wasn’t about to have his prize snatched away. Anna stepped in before they started fighting over Robin like dogs over a bone.

  “Jonah,” she said as she pried Robin from Bob’s embrace and draped one of the girl’s arms across her shoulders. “Would you mind making a pot of coffee?”

  “I’m on it,” he said.

  Supporting the younger woman, Anna began their stumbling way to the bedroom. Bob and Adam followed. She stopped, braced Robin against her hip, turned and held them with her gaze for a moment.