Winter Study Read online

  Scared of her? If he was, so much the better.

  “I’ll go with you,” Jonah volunteered.

  Anna hadn’t particularly wanted company. On ISRO, there clearly wasn’t any safety in numbers, but, of all of them, she distrusted the pilot the least.

  “Bring a flashlight,” she said.

  “I’ll bring two.”

  They went out the front door and down the deck stairs. At the bottom of the steps, Anna stopped.

  “What?” Jonah’s head came up like a dog seeking scent.

  “Nothing.” Anna had stopped because she didn’t know where she was going or what she intended to do when she got there. “Let’s just breathe,” she said, and Jonah laughed. For several minutes, they stood quietly, flashlights off, and drew clean air into their lungs. Woodstoves were charming and functional but polluted the indoor air as surely as a band of two-pack-a-day smokers.

  “Do we have a clue?” Jonah asked, and she appreciated the wisp of humor.

  “I am clueless,” Anna admitted. “Start over, I guess.” She led the way around the bunkhouse to the window that let into her and Robin’s bedroom. Without the distraction of many big-footed men milling about, Anna could see and think more clearly. Jonah stood back as she crouched down several feet from the area directly beneath the window and shined her flashlight beam across the snow, mimicking a setting sun.

  “What’s with Adam and Bob?” she asked, remembering the pregnant glance.

  “Beats me,” Jonah said. “Adam’s a good guy. He’s worked Winter Study a couple times before. Canucks tend to see the best in people. But Menechinn? Sheesh.”

  The moose that liked to scratch its back against the drainpipe had churned snow and earth into a mass of frozen clods and ice. With her light streaming almost laterally across the tiny field, Anna thought maybe she saw new prints. Maybe. Moose prints. She shined the light out in a circle from where she crouched. “Adam’s Canadian?”

  “I think he’s an American citizen. He grew up in Canada, got married there and came to the States after his wife died.”

  “That was the wife who killed herself?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Robin.”

  Nothing showed but the tracks they had made and several moose trails leading into the trees.

  “Adam doesn’t talk about it much. Evidently his wife had a miscarriage and went into a depression.”

  “Was Adam investigated for the death?”

  “Like for murdering his wife? What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing. Everything. Yeah, for murder, I guess.”

  “Probably. It’s always the husband first in a thing like that. Anyway, it is on TV. So he must have been investigated, but it didn’t amount to much. She’d left a note. She’d left a message on her therapist’s phone, apologizing. She made a video, begging Adam to forgive her.”

  “‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’” Anna said.

  “‘Rage, rage,’” Jonah said, startling her, then shaming her, with her own snobbery.

  “We’re done here,” she said. Her knees cracked like rifle shots as she rose to her feet.

  “Hah!” Jonah said. “Getting old is a bitch, isn’t it?”

  Her shame subsided.

  Anna moved slowly uphill, following moose prints. The tracks coming down were shallower than those leading back up the rise. The moose had grown significantly heavier while under the bedroom window.

  “You see that?” Anna asked and pointed out the disparity. “What could account for that?”

  “Maybe the moose ate Robin.”

  Anna snorted, not a good idea when the air is below zero and the nose is chronically running.

  “She could have ridden it,” Jonah suggested. He didn’t seem to be too concerned either way.

  “What do you know?” Anna demanded, shining her light in his face.

  “Cut that out, Dick Tracy,” he complained.

  “What?” Anna kept the light where it was. The lenses of Jonah’s glasses flashed and the white of his beard glittered.

  “I don’t know anything,” he said after a moment. “But you’ve got to figure Robin didn’t go hop-hop-hopping away in her sleeping bag like a kid in a sack race. And there’s more ways to make moose tracks than to be a moose.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. Did you happen to notice if the wog prints were always accompanied by moose prints?”

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither. What do you want to bet?”

  “I’m not a betting man.”

  “Me neither.”

  It was after midnight when Anna went to bed. She wanted to drag her sleeping bag into Katherine’s room and close and lock the door, but she stayed in the room she’d shared with Robin. Like Mrs. Darling, she wanted to be there if Peter Pan returned the children he’d stolen, but she doubted Robin had gone with an immortal boy. And she doubted she was anywhere as magical as Never-Never Land.

  26

  Adam was asleep on the sofa, or appeared to be. Bob had long since retired to his room and Ridley and Jonah to theirs. Sleeping was usually something Anna was good at under stress, that and eating. Years hiking trails in the backcountry had taught her to sleep and eat every chance she got, the way animals did. When one’s body was the only vehicle available to keep one’s soul from drifting into the ozone, it behooved the driver to keep the tanks topped off.

  Tonight was a glaring exception.

  Muscle and bone sank gratefully into the hard embrace of the mattress. Fatigue washed over her mind, warm and soporific. Then the delicious sense of drifting into oblivion morphed into sinking under the ice in Intermediate Lake, and she fought desperately back to wakefulness. The nightmare version was more terrifying than almost drowning had been. In the lake, there had been little time for anything but staying alive. In dreams, there was all the time in imagination.

  For reasons probably relating more to her sleeping habits than her near-death experience, she was naked in the water. The crippling cold wasn’t a factor. Below her lay not the limitless new world she’d glimpsed at the time but the terrors children suffer in nightmares: being helpless and abandoned to a force so utterly evil, one never musters the courage to look at it; a force that would not have the mercy to grant the relief of death. Again and again Anna dragged her bare breasts and belly up an icy edge, serrated like a knife, kicking legs weak to the point of near paralysis, to fend off the black, sucking certainty of what lay below.

  It didn’t take too many repetitions of this nocturnal entertainment before she decided staying awake was a spiffy alternative.

  She lay on her back in the dark and stared upward at a ceiling that she presumed was still there. In a lightless environment, the nothing above her eyes could have been two inches deep or gone on to infinity. The bedside lamp could restore the ceiling to its proper place; Jonah had left the generator running. He said it was in case of emergency, but it was for comfort, the knowledge that they could have light if they heard the stealthy footfalls of boogeymen creeping about. Or boogey-wolves.

  Bogus wolves, Anna thought. Werewolves.

  Not the species of legend that morphed from seersucker suits to snouts but man posing as a wolf, taking on the imagined properties of the wolf: stealth, strength, ruthlessness, viciousness, love of slaughter for its own sake. It didn’t take a trained psychiatrist to see the projection in that equation. Man gave the wolf all the dark bits of himself, then vilified the wolf.

  Isle Royale’s wog might or might not exist. It was said DNA didn’t lie, but it had also been said pictures didn’t lie until computers put the lie to that. What lied was people and they lied all the time, and for every reason under the sun. People lied with words and pictures, and, if it were possible, they would lie with DNA. Katherine could have faked the results for a reason that died with her.

  Anna couldn’t shake the certainty that why Katherine died was at the heart of the bizarre happenings, but the researcher had not been shot or st
abbed or smothered. She’d been savaged by a pack of wolves. It would take more time and expertise than anyone on the island had at hand to fake that: tracks, scat, urine, wounds, fur and tooth marks.

  Cause of death wasn’t in question and death by misadventure didn’t have a why. It had a cause: wrong place, wrong time, bad decisions, faulty machinery. Why needed motive and only humans had motives.

  Anna turned her back on the crowding infinity of night above her and stared at the eternal nothing where Robin’s bed had been when she’d turned out the light.

  The heart of the issue was, why Katherine died.

  Katherine had died accidentally at the auspices of wolves.

  There was no way Anna could work that equation that didn’t end up in the twilight zone.

  Sensing herself headed in the same direction, she fumbled over the edges of the desk between the beds, found the light, switched it on and sat up, her sleeping bag tucked in her armpits. Reoriented in space, her mind back in her skull, she marshaled what she knew about Katherine.

  Katherine met and fell in love with a wolf when she was three years old. Bob Menechinn was her graduate adviser. He had carried her up five flights of stairs when she was unconscious. Katherine had shown a desire to keep Robin away from Bob. She’d gone so far as to tell Anna to warn the pretty young biotech to stay away from him. Katherine was cowed by, in love with or frightened by her professor. She rarely stood up to Bob. The first time was in the camp between Windigo and Malone. The second was in the cabin at Malone Bay after Robin had gone to free the trapped wolf.

  In the tent, wog or wolf snorting around outside, Bob had gone nuts, shouting and waving his headlamp. Katherine said: “Be quiet. You’ll scare him away.” Remembering the look on Robin’s face when Katherine hadn’t gibbered with terror – Katherine had been concerned about the monster – Anna smiled.

  Did Katherine think it was her wolf lover come back for her after twenty-three years or more? In dog years, that would be one old lover. No, Katherine was not crazy; she didn’t strike Anna as even particularly fanciful. She knew wolves and she wasn’t afraid. Not then anyway. She’d told Bob to be quiet because she loved the wolf more than she did him.

  Early on, Anna hadn’t given Bob and Katherine as Bob and Katherine more than a passing thought. Lovers, married lovers, ex-lovers, jaded lovers were ubiquitous in every profession. Unlike wolves, humans weren’t engineered to be monogamous. Considering it now, she didn’t think Katherine was in love with Bob. Anna had found it impossible to so much as like the man, despite the fact he saved her life, but women often loved wretched men. Men loved vile women. In the infamous words of Woody Allen: “The heart wants what it wants.”

  During the Malone Bay adventure, Anna began to suspect that what she’d first taken for fear or jealousy on Katherine’s part was barely controlled fury, the acidic variety that the powerless suffer, the kind that eats away from the inside.

  Katherine had hinted Bob was withholding her Ph.D. Was that sufficient motive to hate? Probably. People hated without much provocation.

  The second time Katherine contradicted him was when he’d said the study must be shut down; she insisted the foreign DNA was sufficient reason to keep ISRO closed winters, keep the study intact.

  Protecting wolves again? Protecting scientific study? Anna wondered if Katherine had a greater investment in the island’s wolf/moose research than she’d let on. Had she an interest that made it worth her while to fake the DNA results?

  Katherine was all whispers and Bob all shouts, yet both of them were opaque, keeping their secrets.

  The woodstove had been stoked later than usual and, though the door was closed, the bedroom was warm. Anna let her sleeping bag fall down around her waist. Pulling it back up to cover her nakedness, she realized that the window, curtainless and without blinds – a fact she’d never noticed before – was making her modest. No longer did she feel the safety of an uninhabited wilderness beyond the glass.

  She switched off the bedside lamp and let the sleeping bag drop.

  Drifting unanchored in the dark, she replayed Katherine. Bob introducing her the first night, Katherine ducking, hiding behind her hair. Bob asking her if they’d ever used ketamine, Katherine blushing and turning away. Katherine insisting on telling the others at Malone Bay that Bob was so strong, he carried her up five flights of stairs.

  When she was unconscious. Anna turned the light back on.

  Bob had carried Robin back from the V.C.

  When she was unconscious.

  Bob asked, “Have we ever used ketamine?” Robin lost one of the jab sticks loaded with ketamine and xylazine. Katherine fought with Bob after collecting the dead wolf’s blood. Anna’d had trouble with that. Because Katherine had treated them as such, Anna guessed the blood samples were important but couldn’t figure out why, given the work the researcher had done in the kitchen/lab before the wolf had thawed.

  Anna had been assuming there were other samples from that wolf. There weren’t, she realized. Blood had not been collected earlier during the external exam; the wolf and his blood were frozen. There were no other blood samples but those in Katherine’s pocket. The dismembered wolf was blood dry and refrozen. Anna put the revelation that the samples were unique aside for later consideration and went back to Katherine.

  Bob was with Robin in the V.C. before Anna arrived. Bob was with Katherine’s corpse in the carpenter’s shed, frisking – or fondling – the dead woman.

  Anna wriggled free of her sleeping bag and, turning her back on the staring window, pulled on sweatpants and a turtleneck. She turned the light out again and, feeling her way from desk to door, opened it quietly, slipped through and into Katherine’s room. Making no sound, she closed that door and shoved something soft under it, a towel, she guessed, then turned on the light. The black staring of the uncovered window startled her. Night and wild had always been her friends. Now both made her jumpy.

  Katherine’s laptop was on her desk, plugged into the wall to save its batteries. Once, when Anna wished to pry into the lives of dead or uncooperative individuals, she looked for paper: diaries, letters, notes; she listened to phone messages. Now she went straight for the laptop. Unless Katherine had a BlackBerry or an iPhone, the laptop would be where she housed her life when she wasn’t using it.

  Having unplugged the laptop, she turned the light out again, dragged back the bathrobe she’d thought was a towel, returned to her own room and completed the operation one more time in reverse. Then she covered the window with Robin’s parka, shoving the sleeves into the grooves of the metal window frame to cover peepholes from the woods. There was probably no need for secrecy. There was probably no one out in the wee hours, peeking in frosty windows. But telling everyone everything hadn’t worked. Anna was switching back to telling no one nothing.

  The laptop wasn’t password protected. The screen saver that came up was a photograph of Katherine and an older woman who looked so much like her, she couldn’t be anyone but her mother or an aunt. The two women were laughing, the camera obviously held in front of them in Katherine’s hand, as they yelled “Cheese!”

  Anna clicked the START button and began methodically slogging through the files. Unlike paper files, computer files were snooper-friendly. There weren’t mountains of paper to hide the molehills of information. Katherine’s life was laid out and dissected as neatly as the wolf on the table in the carpenter’s shop had been.

  Number-oriented, Katherine kept spreadsheets of her personal finances. She earned barely enough to live on but was subsidized by a monthly stipend. From her mother, Anna guessed by the notes Katherine had typed beside two of the entries. She paid her bills by computer. The usual cost of living was there: gas, water, electricity, food, insurance. Not surprisingly, Katherine spent about three times as much on books as she did on clothing and got her hair cut at a walk-in shop at the mall for ten dollars a visit.

  She had been on the antidepressant Effexor for eighteen months. Half of America w
as on antidepressants, but Katherine had been given a hefty dose, 250 milligrams daily, plus.75 milligrams of Trazodone, an antidepressant and sleep aid. There were weekly payments to a Dr. Lewis. A psychologist, Anna assumed, from the regularity and frequency. Dr. Lewis’s name had appeared at about the time of the prescription payments for the antidepressants. The month prior to the advent of the mental health expenditures was an entry to another doctor with the note “D &C” alongside it. Other entries in the medical expenses were marked “co-pay.” This one wasn’t.

  Maybe an abortion.

  Then depression.

  Under the file named “Black Ops,” Katherine had saved sixteen articles from newspapers and periodicals as ridiculous as The Star and as sublime as The Journal of the American Medical Association on the subjects of amnesia, traumatic amnesia, fugue states, repressed memory and multiple personalities.

  The folder “Possibilities” contained short synopses of what Anna assumed were personal profiles from a matchmaking Web site. After each was written a number and a letter. Shorthand, possibly for the number of times they’d contacted and the letter grade Katherine had used to rate the contacts. There were considerably more F’s and D’s than A’s or B’s. The last entry had been two months before the “D &C” entered into the medical bills. One of the A’s or B’s might have been the father of the D &C. Or Katherine might have stopped dating – or shopping – at the time she became pregnant. What, if anything, this had to do with her death by wild animal attack a year and a half later Anna couldn’t fathom.

  Under the file name “The Great Escape” were fragments of sentences, as if Katherine had been jotting down ideas or keeping a list.

  THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS NEGATIVES ANYMORE.

  IF MOTHER WAS DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE?

  MURDER OR SUICIDE.

  IF I WERE DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE?

  MOTHER.

  MURDER’S A DONE DEAL.

  EVERYBODY’S ON THE NET.

  WHO WOULD HIRE ME?

  I WOULD DIE.

  “Well, that’s just cryptic as hell,” Anna muttered. The list gave the impression Katherine was thinking of killing her mother or herself or her mother, then herself. The mother that gave her money every month. The mother she was hugging and laughing with on her screen saver.