Winter Study Page 26

  THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS NEGATIVES ANYMORE.

  The list that followed was nothing but negatives. “Everybody’s on the Net,” Anna read aloud. “Who would hire me? I would die.”

  She minimized that screen and clicked on a file named “Pictures” from the main menu. Given the propensity to save everything when space is measured in gigabytes, Katherine hadn’t saved many photographs. Most were of animals, wild and domestic, that had been taken with more love than skill. There were a half dozen of Katherine taken with the woman on the screen saver, winter shots with mufflers and skis, both women smiling and laughing.

  There’s no such thing as negatives anymore.

  Because few people used film. Katherine had been talking about digital photography. Anna returned to the list saved in “The Great Escape” folder. Viewed from the perspective of photography, it made sense.

  There’s no such things as negatives – in the classic stories of blackmail, victims had to buy back the negatives of incriminating photographs.

  If Mother was dead, who would care? If Katherine was referencing compromising photographs this suggested, not that no one would miss Mother but that Mother was the person Katherine was most concerned about seeing the photographs.

  What one didn’t want Mother to see was usually sexual in nature. Though born from Mother’s womb and because of her sexual congress with Father, girls – women – did not want Mom to see them in bed with some guy. Or some girl, Anna reminded herself.

  MURDER OR SUICIDE.

  Anna doubted the murder referred to Katherine’s mother. More likely it referred to the man who had impregnated her. Given the list of graded Internet “Matches,” it didn’t appear that Katherine had any steady boyfriend. She might not have had a flesh-and-blood beau at all. The men in “Possibilities” could have been fantasies, a virtual love life.

  IF I WERE DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE? MOTHER.

  Suicide was ruled out because of the devastating effect it would have on her mother. Katherine was thinking clearly enough to realize whatever the digital photographs contained, they would not damage her mother as much as the death of her daughter would.

  MURDER’S A DONE DEAL.

  The powerful emotion evoked by the concept of murder, with the other choice being self-annihilation, gave Anna the gut feeling that this line referred to the D &C, the death of an unborn child. Abortion was the word Anna would use. If Katherine used the word murder and still went through with the D &C to end her pregnancy, she had to have had a powerful motivation. The obvious one was that the child was terribly disabled or was a product of rape.

  EVERYBODY’S ON THE NET.

  WHO WOULD HIRE ME?

  I WOULD DIE.

  The rapist had sexually explicit photographs or videos of Katherine that he was threatening to put on the Web if she didn’t…

  What? Anna wondered. Katherine had no money. A graduate assistant, it was unlikely she had any power.

  If she reported the assault? If she pressed charges? If she didn’t continue to allow herself to be raped?

  “Jeez, other people’s lives,” Anna whispered and shook her head, feeling suddenly sad.

  Though prying eyes – should any be braving the night – had been shut outside, she closed the laptop partway and leaned her back against the wall.

  The inferences she’d made from the list didn’t seem connectable to Katherine’s death. Blackmailers didn’t normally kill their victims; it was the other way around. There was also the annoying but inescapable fact that Katherine had not been coshed on the head and tossed into a Dumpster. She’d been brought down by Middle pack or Chippewa Harbor pack. There was no way to be certain since the only one on the island who could have run DNA from scat was dead.

  It was an accidental death. Anna announced this in her brain. The feeling that the death was key to the sickness of the island did not abate. Anna stretched her legs in front of her, flexing her feet in their thick wool socks, cracking her ankle bones. Till this moment, she’d not thought of Isle Royale as sick, but the word fit. Wolves, moose, researchers, all were suffering an illness not unlike the disease that must have swept through Salem before the witches were burned. Hatred and insanity were virulent and highly contagious. The infected lynched their fellows, gang-raped women, burned down buildings, saw the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches and were beamed up to alien spaceships to have their innards probed.

  The virus needed certain conditions in which to grow; its victims had to be willing to believe; they had to want, on some level, maybe even unbeknownst to themselves, to do what the virus would tell them to do. And they had to be greedy: for profit, for importance, for revenge, for entertainment, for adventure. Only the greedy could be effectively conned. One never read of Zen masters being taken in by scams. They didn’t crave anything, and, therefore, con artists couldn’t set the hook.

  Ridley wanted to keep the park closed winters so the wolf/moose study could continue.

  Bob wanted to open Isle Royale to the public in winter because he’d been paid to find a way to do that, if not in cash, then in future work. Travel writers and professional “experts” had to find what the client paid them to find. Honesty might be the best policy, but it didn’t pay as well or get one invited back.

  Katherine had seemed to want to keep the island open but was more concerned that Bob accept her thesis and pass it on to her graduate committee. At least until they’d come to a parting of the ways after the necropsy and Katherine had run off.

  Robin wanted to keep ISRO closed in winter and the study up and running. She’d also seemed to want to be scared, the way teenagers love to terrify themselves with tales of the homicidal escapee from the insane asylum, Jason, Hannibal the Cannibal and countless assorted purveyors of horror.

  Anna didn’t know what Adam wanted. His vanishing acts seemed to indicate he wanted to be by himself, his words that he wanted to be of help to the team, his actions that he disliked Bob one day and wanted to be his best friend the next. Had a crush on Robin one day and was indifferent to her the next. Maybe Adam didn’t know what he wanted either. Maybe he hadn’t known since his wife died.

  The wolves, the ice, the windigo, the weather, the very blood and bone of the island seemed to want them dead or confused or insane or gone. Wolves came so close, it was as if they wished to be near humans, wished to be seen. Wolves killed Katherine. Ice three inches thick, thick enough to ride horses across, broke in a mouth-shaped hole at the weight of one small woman. Snow blocked vision and wind tore at nerves and cold ate away at hearts.

  If the wolves, wog led or otherwise, wanted the island to themselves winters, they’d probably get what they wanted: the unusual behavior patterns, the alien DNA and the oversized track sightings were sufficiently unique and exciting that the National Park Service and Michigan Tech would fight to keep ISRO closed to the public from October to June and the study ongoing.

  Ridley would get what he wanted for the same reasons.

  Bob would not, but it wouldn’t be through his annoying his employers with excessive truthfulness, so, in a way, he would. Anna doubted he cared about the study, the island, the wolves or anything but himself.

  Robin was undoubtedly getting to be as scared as ever she’d dreamed.

  Katherine would never get her dissertation published.

  That left Adam, a widower or a murderer or both, a man who moved out of sync with the moods of the others.

  ANNA CREPT INTO THE COMMON ROOM. The old computer, plugged into the wall for the use of seasonals, shined a single green, beady eye. The wood in the stove had been banked and a line of embers showed between two logs, casting enough light she could make her way without bumping into the furniture. Adam’s outline darkened the couch, where he snored softly.

  Stopping, Anna looked down at his recumbent form for a minute or more. Adam played possum; she’d figured that out. There was no way of telling if he played possum now. It didn’t much matter, and, if he was playing possum, she had
the satisfaction of knowing the visitation of a bedraggled middle-aged specter in the still of the night had to be giving him the willies.

  She moved the chair in front of the computer at an angle so she could watch both the screen and Adam and clicked on the blue E. The island’s Internet server popped up. They lived in a bunkhouse warmed by a woodstove, electrified by an old gasoline-powered generator, water brought up from the lake and an outhouse, and they were on the Internet. As she clicked on Google, it occurred to her that the odd thing was she didn’t find it odd. As a kid, she didn’t have television. It was all done with towers then, and she’d lived in a tiny town in a mountain valley where the reception was lousy. Now she took instant global communication from a remote island for granted.

  She typed in “Katherine Huff.”

  Katherine had published in seven scientific journals, articles on DNA research in mammals, and sixteen magazines and periodicals, on the subject of wilderness education. On the latter, Bob Menechinn’s name was listed first, with her as his graduate assistant.

  The articles on DNA were painfully technical, written for other scientists and virtually incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Anna slumped against the back of the chair, feet thrust far under the table, chin nearly on her chest. She wasn’t sure what it was she had leapt out of bed to seek in cyberspace. The mystery of who Katherine Huff was, why she’d been savaged by wolves, wasn’t in journals. There wasn’t anything else, no newspaper articles reporting murder or mayhem connected to her, no MySpace revelations or vanity Web site with pictures of her dog and a diary of her summer vacation in Europe.

  According to Hollywood, savvy Internet users could find out everything right down to the subject’s bra size and favorite food. Maybe in real life they could, too, but Anna wasn’t on that level. Google and Wikipedia maxed out her cyberspace cunning.

  Adam snorted from a snore into deeper sleep, his breathing more a vibration against Anna’s mind than her eardrums. The light from the banked embers painted the angular planes of his face dull orange, his fancy mustache black as an ink drawing against it. The warm glow erased years from his face, the shadowed room the gray from his hair, and he looked no more than twenty. Supposedly he was an old hand at Winter Study, a friend of Ridley’s, a Park Service renegade who traveled with ease between researchers and NPS staff. So Jonah had intimated. Anna had seen little of it. Adam had let Ridley and the rest of them down as often as not. When they needed him, he was nowhere to be found, and the batteries in his radio died and came back so often they could have had regular roles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  He shirked his work, then skied out in the dark when the body recovery went sour. Behind Bob’s back, Adam praised, excused and mocked him. To Bob’s face, Adam was obsequious and scornful by turns, the way a kid will be when forced to curry favor with a person he or she loathes.

  Why would Adam need to curry favor with Bob Menechinn?

  Anna typed “Adam Johansen” into the box on Google’s home page. Seventeen hits. The front page of an old Lassen County Times had a photograph of him standing with three other men. They were dressed in fire-retardant Nomex and leaning on shovels. They’d been with the wildland firefighters credited with saving the tiny town of Janesville, California, from being burned. The rest were from local papers in Saskatoon. These were archival and covered the suicide of Cynthia Jean Johansen.

  The first reported only the barest of facts. Cynthia Johansen, nee Batiste, a twenty-two-year-old senior at the University of Saskatchewan, had been in the bathroom of the apartment she shared with her husband of eleven months, Adam Johansen. The bath was separate from the sink area and she had closed the door. Her husband, a thirty-one-year-old freelance carpenter, had been cleaning the trap under one of the sinks. When he realized she had stopped speaking, he tried to get her to open the door. By the time he broke it down, Cynthia had bled to death from three deep cuts made by a man’s straight razor, two to the left wrist and one to the right.

  According to the school newspaper, Cynthia’s best friend, Lena Gibbs, said Cynthia had miscarried two months prior to the incident and had gone into a severe depression. Gibbs said Cynthia had never talked about killing herself, but she had talked about being a bad person and suffered crippling guilt over the loss of the baby.

  Twenty-two.

  Anna slid farther down in the chair, the picture of a lowrider sans muscle car. Anna’s older sister, Molly, had been born when their mother was twenty-three. This was not abnormal. The body wanted to reproduce at a young age, when the chances of conceiving and the mother living through the birth to care for her offspring were greatest. From Anna’s vantage point, twenty-two seemed impossibly young to be dealing with college, marriage, pregnancy and miscarriage, yet women managed it without killing themselves – or anybody else. Often, younger women dealt with miscarriages better than their older sisters. Youth was resilient in body and mind. The future still held the possibility of many live births.

  Anna wondered if Cynthia Jean’s guilt was brought on or exacerbated by other factors. Drugs, maybe, or intentionally rash actions designed to end an unwanted pregnancy. An abusive husband had brought on more than one miscarriage. Because Adam’s wife’s death was ruled suicide didn’t mean he didn’t kill her; it only meant that if he did, he’d gotten away with it.

  The next article, written the following day and on page two of the paper instead of page six, reported that Adam had been removing the sink trap because his wife said she’d lost her engagement ring down the drain. He told police that while he worked, Cynthia had talked with him through the door about how much she loved him and how glad she was he had given her a home and that the eleven months they’d been married were the happiest of her life.

  The phone rang and he went to answer it. He said his wife asked him to stay and talk to her, but he said he’d be right back. The call was from one of Cynthia’s teachers, and he brought the cordless phone into the sink area from the kitchen.

  Cynthia wouldn’t respond when he spoke, and the door to the bath was locked. He told the police and, later, the newspaper reporter that he thought his wife was mad at him for answering the phone when she’d asked him not to so he ignored her and went back to working on the sink, occasionally making remarks. He said he got angry, then worried, and that was when he broke through the door and found her.

  Anna saw her husband, Paul, in her mind, felt him in her heart and couldn’t imagine the kind of pain Adam must have suffered. That is, if he was telling the truth.

  The only story she’d heard that was more tragic was the accidental death of a three-year-old who’d sneaked out and crawled behind his mother’s Camaro to surprise her when she left for the grocery store.

  Paul Davidson was a Christian, an Episcopal priest, he believed in a loving God. Paul was also Sheriff of a poor county in Mississippi. He saw suffering of the worst kinds, cruelty and ignorance, predator and prey on the human scale, and it was far more vicious than anything between wolves and moose. Anna’s husband didn’t believe in the magical thinking of God granting wishes, but he did believe in the importance of prayer. He didn’t believe in pearly gates or Saint Peter or crossing the river Jordan. He didn’t believe in any other hell than the ones found on Earth. He didn’t believe in angels or ghosts or miraculous answers to prayers. Yet he believed he would be at one with his God when he died.

  He believed Anna would, too, but she couldn’t quite get there with him. She couldn’t get her mind around a God who was purported to know – and care – about the ins and outs of human suffering. If there was such a watcher of the falling sparrows he – it was always he – was a bloodthirsty son of a bitch. Or he was a helpless son of a bitch.

  Spending all eternity with either incarnation didn’t appeal to her.

  The next article she clicked on brought her upright in her seat. The headline read: “No Ring Found in Trap.” Beneath it was a quarter-page color photograph of a young Adam Johansen on the front steps of a brick fourplex, car
rying a bloody, naked woman. The woman’s arms hung at her sides. Her hands were completely red, and blood trailed down the leg of Adam’s khaki shorts and painted the side of his calf and the top of his running shoe. Cynthia’s head was back in the classic Fay Wray swoon, but the woman in the photograph was either dead or soon to be dead. Long hair, brown or dark blond, streamed to Adam’s ankles, the ends pointed and dark with water and blood. Anna could see the white paint on the doorframe behind Adam streaked from where the hair had been drawn across it when he carried Cynthia outside.

  “It’s a still from a videotape.”

  The voice was no more than six inches from her ear. Years of not responding to the machinations of people whose day she was ruining for one reason or another, Anna didn’t leap out of her skin, shrieking.

  “Did I wake you up?” she asked.

  Adam leaned down, looking at the photograph on the screen. He was shirtless. Heat radiated from his skin. Threads of long hair trailed across Anna’s neck like the tickle of spiderwebs walked through in the dark. Muscles at the corner of his jaw worked as he clenched and unclenched his teeth.

  Fear on men smelled sour. Adam smelled of molten iron and metal ice-cube trays, red coals and rocks brittle with cold.

  Adam reeked with a distillation of rage.

  27

  Anna sat perfectly still, her eyes on the picture on the monitor, and waited for the scalding anger boiling off Adam to dissipate. The back of her chair moved fractionally, the oak creaking as Adam leaned on it hard, using it as a lame man would use a crutch to push himself upright. The palpable heat of the man moved away from Anna’s cheek and the sense of being on thin ice over a raging volcano abated. She clicked the BACK arrow, getting rid of the bloody photograph.