Winter Study Read online

  “When the coffee’s done, ask Jonah to bring it to me.”

  They didn’t recognize the dismissal.

  Anna made it clearer. “Go away.”

  Having no idea how much Robin had consumed, what her tolerance was or if she was on any other drugs or medications, Anna had no intention of letting her sleep until some of the effects wore off. At a guess, besides the wine she had taken a barbiturate of some kind. Tranquilizers or sleeping pills from her mother’s medicine cabinet secreted away for emergency meltdowns. If her system was too depressed, sleeping could push her from unconscious to dead. Coffee, poking, prodding and making witty conversation were all Anna had in the way of antidotes.

  She settled Robin on her bed, back against the wall, legs out straight. Like a Raggedy Ann, Robin’s head cocked to one side and her arms limp, palms up. Twice she blinked, then her eyes opened preternaturally wide. The beneficent image of Raggedy Ann was replaced by that of Chucky. The illusion lasted long enough for Anna’s adrenaline to spike one more time.

  “You’re in our room. You are safe,” Anna told her. “Whatever demons are chasing you will have to come through me. Can you tell me how much you had to drink?”

  Robin didn’t answer. Her eyes drifted closed and she mumbled, “Demons.”

  “No demons,” Anna said with obnoxious good cheer, her voice pitched sharply enough to penetrate the biotech’s fog but not to carry beyond the closed door. “How much did you drink?”

  “Drink,” Robin parroted. “Ish.” Fingers numb with whatever was in her system, she began fumbling at the hem of her sweater, unable to clutch it hard enough to lift the wool over her head. “I’m wet.”

  “You have wine spilled on you. That sweater is soaked in it. You smell like a wet dog,” Anna told her. “A wet, alcoholic dog.” She moved to help Robin off with her sweater and she batted at Anna.

  “No. No. No.” Each was a single, pitiful cry, as if against an inevitable and familiar evil she was helpless to stop. Anna sat back down. Women who had been raped or sexually abused, either as adults or as children, occasionally exhibited a fear of having their clothes removed by anyone else, even an EMT or physician. Most overcame the instantaneous terror, at least enough to hide it when they were sober. Drunk or drugged or distraught, it often resurfaced.

  “You’re okay,” Anna said. “When you want help with your clothes, you tell me. Till then, I’m going to sit right here and make sure nobody bothers you.”

  “How’s our girl?”

  Fucking Bob. “Go away.”

  With a jolt of guilt, Anna remembered Katherine had told her to keep Robin away from him. At the time, she’d written it off as the hissing of a jealous woman. Now she heard it as a warning. Bob had been eyeing Robin since he’d hit the island. Would he be evil enough to rape a young woman, mentally unstable from shock, who had gotten drunk?

  Not raped, Anna thought. Had rape occurred signs would have been evident. A wave of relief, startling in its intensity, buoyed her up. Robin was, in some indefinable way, the essence of innocence. Not the coy, shy innocence the Victorians peddled but the fearless innocence of young wild things.

  Robin’s hands, palms up to either side of her thighs on the mattress ticking, twitched like cats’ paws do when they dream. They stilled, and Anna saw not Robin but Katherine, the stumps of her gnawed fingers, the torn mess of her palms.

  Anna had walked in on Bob, in the dark, on his hands and knees, over the corpse. Katherine’s parka was unzipped. The thought Bob had been sexually involved with the body had crossed Anna’s mind in a stampede of cloven hooves.

  Katherine dead, Robin dead drunk. There were men who liked women to be objectified in this ultimate way.

  Anna shook her head the way a dog with a sore ear will shake trying to rid itself of a pain it cannot stop or touch. America had changed radically from when she was a girl. Women – girls – had gone from the underrepresented in numbers and inferior in ratings to the majority and the best rated in a huge number of areas: college, graduate school, medicine, law. A woman had been Secretary of State, a woman Speaker of the House, a presidential candidate. Women were mayors, governors and university deans. No longer was it said that girls weren’t as smart as boys; now the focus was on how the system had failed the nation’s sons.

  That’s what had changed.

  Rape was what hadn’t changed.

  Women were in the military and they were raped by their fellow soldiers. Girls were in college and they were raped by their fellow students. Rape crisis centers had sprung up and rape counselors. Yet it was still ignored in the most essential way: people in power didn’t want to touch it lest they get their hands dirty.

  This was true in the armed forces, corporate America, universities. And in the National Park Service. A friend of Anna’s had been raped; she’d been working seasonally as a fire technician. She’d been struck down and raped by an NPS employee, a permanent, someone close to the Assistant Superintendent. Anna and the woman’s parents convinced her to report it.

  The rape was never turned over to law enforcement. Higher-ups in the park talked to the victim, offered to set up “mediations” between her and her rapist that they might learn to work and play well together. The rapist was not fired. The crime was treated as a spat between roommates rather than as a felony assault. NPS employees raping seasonals wouldn’t be good PR.

  And maybe she was lying. Maybe she was exaggerating. Maybe she had it coming.

  That was the unsaid, the way otherwise-decent men and women could refuse to help and still think themselves good people.

  “Arthritis.”

  Still limp as a rag doll, Robin was staring at Anna. “Arthritis,” she said in an eerie monotone a thread above a whisper.

  Anna’d been cracking her knuckles and clenching her jaw.

  “Thanks.” She shook out her hands and let them hang loosely between her knees. Bone and muscle ached. “Drink some coffee.”

  Anna helped with holding the cup and raising it to Robin’s lips. “Not bad,” she said when only a tablespoon or two slopped on the ruined sweater.

  “My mom made this,” Robin said.

  The sweater was a classic pattern, deep chocolate with a band of white reindeer marching single file across the chest and the back. “It’s beautiful,” Anna said. It had been, before the wine stained the reindeer the creepy color of cheap stage blood.

  Robin bent at the waist to take off her knee-high mukluks and fell over sideways on the bed. Anna made no move to help her till the young woman asked for assistance. Having set her back up in her Raggedy Ann pose, Anna unlaced the soft boots and worked them off.

  “There.” Robin pointed at her sock-clad feet.

  “What?” Anna didn’t see any damage. The socks weren’t wet and the skin beneath radiated body heat.

  “Mom knitted my socks for my feet. They fit better than any other socks.”

  “Wow,” was all Anna could say. “Beats baking cookies all to hell.”

  “All to hell.”

  Anna helped her to another sip of coffee, then took a drink herself. The long day was beginning to wear on her.

  A tap at the door was followed by the pilot’s grizzled face. “More coffee?”

  “Food?” Anna asked.

  “Coming up.” The door snicked shut.

  Another tap quickly followed. “Robin?”

  Bob.

  “Go away.”

  Jonah brought them each a bowl of beef-and-pasta casserole and more coffee. The food fortified Anna, and the few bites she could be induced to take seemed to help Robin some. Finally she asked Anna to help her remove the wine-soaked sweater.

  As the fire was banked and others went to bed, the bunkhouse stilled and cooled. At ten, the lights went out; Jonah had shut down the generator for the night. Had Anna been sure Robin was loaded on booze, and only booze, she would have let her sleep it off and been grateful to do so. As it was, she lit a candle and propped herself next to the biotech where she
could nudge her awake for at least another hour or two till her system wasn’t so depressed.

  To keep them both from falling asleep, Anna began asking questions. In the next ninety minutes, she learned that Jonah was seventy-three years old, Ridley’s wife was probably a bona fide genius, Gavin, Robin’s sweetheart, loved Proust and classical guitar and the early works of Andrew Wyeth, had wonderful hands and thought Isle Royale was America’s last chance at saving Eden, that Adam had been married but his wife had committed suicide, slit her wrists and bled to death in the bath while he fixed the sink in the dressing room not ten feet away, and that Rolf Peterson had great legs.

  By eleven-thirty, the candle was burned to a stub, and Robin was waxing fairly coherent. Anna watched her get undressed and slip into her sleeping bag. Her clothes didn’t look as if they’d been messed with and there was no bruising visible on arms, back or thighs. Reassured, Anna blew out the candle.

  Before she crawled into her own sleeping bag, she turned the lock on the bedroom door. Without the heat from the stove, the room would be cold, but at least she would know no one was watching them as they slept.

  24

  Anna had hoped to plummet deep into the land of Morpheus as her roommate had done. Sitting, talking by candlelight, it had been all she could do to keep from falling asleep midword. Now her legs twitched and her mind raced and she couldn’t get comfortable.

  To stop the racketing thoughts, she focused into the night, hoping its deep quiet would creep into her soul. The bunkhouse groaned and popped in a satisfied manner as it cooled. Robin snored softly, something she never did sober.

  Now that Katherine slept in a black plastic shroud on the floor in the carpenter’s shop, the room across the hall was empty. Anna could move in. It would be a simple matter of dragging her sleeping bag and pillow fifteen feet to another single bed and another bare mattress, but her usual need for aloneness had given way to the comfort of safety in numbers. Even if that number was two, one of whom was semicomatose.

  Jonah or Adam might take the room. Adam, probably. When he was in the bunkhouse and not on the couch, he shared a room with Bob. Anna couldn’t figure out that relationship. Adam seemed to want to be Bob Menechinn’s friend one moment and showed nothing but contempt for him the next.

  Bob, as the axman from Homeland Security, wasn’t in much of a position to make friends. Anna doubted if he fared much better when he was elsewhere, then wondered what it was about him that set her teeth on edge. When a person – or a situation – brought out a strong sense of unease, she’d learned to pay attention to it. A thousand “tells” were broadcast every minute: a tic, a wince, a smell, a shadow, a draft, a flick of the hand, a door ajar. The human senses experienced them all. The human brain registered them. The human monkey mind, clamoring with the shouting littles of life, was lucky if it recognized one or two. The message from the gestalt trickled down in intuition, gut feelings, geese walking on one’s grave, déjà vu. There was a reason or reasons she didn’t trust Bob. She just didn’t know what they were yet.

  A shivering ululation cut into her thoughts, reminding her that she had been seeking to quiet their flames, not fan them. A wolf’s howl embraced rare magic; sound transforming into pure emotion, the kind that exists beneath the level of language. Train whistles had it. They touched a chord in the human breast that echoed a longing for things unknown. For Anna, the sound of a cat purring or the tiny thunder of their paws racing over hardwood floors had the power to cause instant, unthinking delight, but that might not apply to everyone.

  Train whistles and wolves howling seemed to be universal in their ability to pass through the paltry defenses of civilization to the more fundamental primitive heart of people. Anna loved the sound, loved the pleasurable shivers it sent up her spine. At least until she remembered the wog, the pack coming through the housing area, the attack on Katherine.

  Giving up on the idea of sleep, she slid from her sleeping bag and into Levi’s and a sweatshirt. It occurred to her as she completed this abbreviated toilette that, should an unfortunate incident befall her, she would be found without underwear, clean or otherwise. She’d be careful not to get hit by a truck.

  Lighting her way with a battery-powered headlamp secured around her brow with an elastic strap – the preferred headgear of the Winter Study team from ten p.m. till sunup – Anna found the kit Katherine had used to extract blood from the wolf. Two of the eight vacuum tubes remained. She took them both, returned to the bedroom and put the headlamp on the table, facing away from Robin.

  The biotech was deeply asleep, but her breathing was even and twelve breaths per minute so Anna wasn’t unduly worried. In fact, she hoped the girl was far enough out she wouldn’t wake up when the needle plunged into a vein in her antecubital site. Robin did flinch, but she didn’t wake. Anna watched as first one vial, then the second, filled with rich, dark blood. She’d neglected to bring a bandage, so when she’d finished she folded Robin’s arm over the ruined sweater.

  The blood should have been drawn hours before, but Anna had other things on her mind. Tomorrow morning, when she could get Robin’s permission, would be too late. She hoped it wasn’t too late already. Pocketing her purloined hemoglobin, she left the bedroom. The door locked only from the inside, and she locked it before she closed herself out. If need be, she’d bang until Robin woke to let her in.

  In the faint glow from the fire, Anna donned the necessary layers of clothing and then laced up the Sorels. Her body felt heavy and tired, but she ignored it. Till she could shut down her mind, her body was going to have to lump it. Another wolf’s howl threaded beneath the doors and around the window glass, and she stopped to listen. This call sounded closer, and she wondered if she was a fool to be heading out into the woods alone. Even having seen Katherine’s body, Anna harbored a belief that the wolves would not attack her. She felt that way about mountain lions and bears as well – about most wild animals in parks where she’d worked. The major exception was the alligators of Mississippi. They, she was sure, would like nothing better than a bite of Pigeon meat.

  Her sense of safety with other carnivores was based on nothing factual. It was a powerful and totally illogical feeling that they knew she loved them and would leave her untouched. Aware it was irrational, and probably born from watching too many animated Disney films as a kid, Anna was careful never to test this notion. She wasn’t testing it tonight. Given a choice, she would have waited till daylight, but she wasn’t sure how long the blood sample would be viable.

  Trudging along in tracks – hers and half a dozen others, several of them being moose – she reached the head of the trail to the V.C. A shape shifted beyond the tree line; not a visual shape, a sound, the squeaking the snow made when crushed, the peculiar, dry Styrofoam sound.

  Moose, she told herself. Moose, like deer, were curious and would come to see what was happening. Hunted only by the wolves, moose on ISRO had little fear of people and often wandered through housing areas, campgrounds and by the sundries store.

  Anna walked into the woods. Trees, naked with winter, closed around her like a barbed-wire fence. The flashlight cut swaths through the black: tunnels of white tangled with twisted branches and gray-scaled tree trunks. The fear that had been with her earlier on her first ill-fated trip down this hill returned.

  “Damn!” she whispered.

  At each step, she began to think she heard the faint echo of snow being compressed in the trees alongside the path. She stopped. The echo stopped. Hard as she listened, as far as she tried to push her senses and her flashlight beam into the darkness, it was impossible to tell whether she was being stalked, followed or was hearing things. Panic stirred beneath her sternum, not the fear that motivates action or caution but the unreasoning whine of buzz saws in childhood nightmares.

  Turning out the light, she let the fear have her, let the panic throb on violin strings out of tune, sirens and screeching tires on concrete. When the first wave had passed, leaving her feeling light-head
ed and breathless, she spoke to the darkness, within and without.

  “Being scared is beginning to bore me. Do what you have to do and I’ll do the same.” Speaking aloud in the frigid darkness was oddly daring; a wild act of sanity enacted in a classically insane way. It reminded her many things were a choice. Fear, to a great extent, was a choice.

  “I’m headed to the Visitors Center,” she said to her monstrous, malevolent or imaginary friend. “If you need to devour me, or whatever, I’ll be in the back offices.”

  She thought she heard a snuffle or a smothered laugh trickle back through the thick underbrush. It was so faint and quickly aborted she couldn’t be sure it was anything more than the scrabble of a raven’s claw on a branch.

  The building housing the V.C. and the ranger station was not locked. The key was on the chest of drawers that served her and Robin as bed table. Stopping before the double glass doors, she stomped the snow off her boots so the first seasonals to arrive in summer wouldn’t have too great a mess to clean up. Once inside, she closed the doors behind her. The mindless fear was gone, but if a wog did wander the island seeking human flesh there was no sense in tempting furry fate.

  She went to the District Ranger’s office, stopped in the open door and automatically swept the light switch into the ON position. No illumination was forthcoming. In the second it had taken her hand to push the switch, she’d remembered it wouldn’t work. Finishing the sequence made no sense, due to lack of electricity, but she pushed the switch down again in the OFF position anyway.

  Searching by flashlight had its advantages. Able only to see the three-foot-by-three-foot spotlighted area, the eye was not distracted. Occasionally Anna’d turned the lights out when there was electricity to burn and used a flashlight to concentrate her mind on details.

  The box of merlot was on the floor where they’d left it, the overturned mason jar nearby. Anna shined her light on the bottom: number 4427. Adam’s. Robin did well in the largely male world of wolf research by keeping as much under the radar as a beautiful young woman can hope to. In the days Anna had known her, she was careful not to call attention to herself and did her best to fade into the woodwork when others did. Breaking the tradition of the mason jars was out of character. If she’d been sufficiently drunk, she might not have noticed she was taking Adam’s jar – or noticed but been beyond worrying about consequences. Robin might have taken Adam’s glass for spite. Had she been a silly young woman, Anna would have considered that she could have taken it for love, the island equivalent of wearing the boy’s letterman’s jacket, but Robin wasn’t silly.