Winter Study Read online

  Gavin laughed.

  Unwrapping her was more of a job than she’d anticipated. Expecting to stay in her blue-and-brown cocoon for the foreseeable future, Anna’d rolled herself in the fabric more concerned with putting as many layers between herself and the elements as possible than with eventually getting free.

  “Help me stand,” she said, pushing away the last of the tarp. “I have to get up. Help me. Then we can reduce the shoulder.”

  Gavin put one arm around her back and gave her his other to brace herself against, so she could control how much pressure was on her shoulder and ankle, and began to draw her to a standing position beside the snowmobile. “Anna, maybe you should-”

  “No,” Anna interrupted him. “My arm is useless, numb. I’ve got to reduce it. I can wedge myself against the seat. You’ll have something to brace against-”

  “Anna, you’d have to take off your coat,” Gavin said reasonably.

  “No. Why would I?” Confusion was clouding Anna’s brain. Instead of making her cautious, it made her desperate, angry.

  “I couldn’t see what I was doing. Where the lump was. Which way to pull to make it go back into the socket,” Gavin said.

  “I’ll take the damn thing off,” Anna snapped.

  “You’d lose too much body heat, and it would hurt you too much unless we cut the coat off. It won’t be long. Robin’s fast.”

  Hysteria. Most of Anna wanted to give in to it, go with it. Breathing slowly through her nose, she gained enough rationality to wonder what made the human mind want to spin over the edge, what evolutionary genius thought this would ensure the survival of the species. Maybe it was the flip side of being self-aware. Dachshunds had bad backs because of the long spine. People had craziness because of the big brain.

  “I can wait,” Anna said after a time. Gavin looked relieved.

  “Let’s keep you warm,” he said kindly. He helped her to the seat of the Bearcat and wrapped her legs in the army blanket, then sat behind her and put his long arms around her. “Lean back,” he said.

  “Consider me your sofa.”

  Menechinn was dead wrong. The girl did get rescued.

  37

  Gavin stayed at the bunkhouse. Crude as it was, it had amenities that put his camp in the abandoned fire tower to shame. He’d come to the island from Grand Portage, seventeen miles in a kayak, and had been living at Feldtmann for thirteen days, his only heat a camping stove and a cooking stove. Food and supplies had been cached there over the summer. The plan had been hatched by the biotechs when they heard Homeland Security was to evaluate the study.

  They had stolen scent lure from a team of martin researchers to effect the wolves’ movements. The props, the black silhouette of the gigantic wolf, the moose and wolf prosthetics to make prints in the snow, had been created by Gavin. The alien DNA was procured by Robin. A friend and fellow researcher in Canada had mailed her a box of wolf scat. Robin simply bagged it up with the ISRO samples and delivered it to Katherine.

  The simplicity of the plan impressed Anna. It would have worked, created a tidy little mystery, had Adam not joined the conspiracy. He’d discovered what they were up to on a trip past Feldtmann in late summer and was mildly amused. It was only when, at his urging, Ridley had requested Bob Menechinn for the evaluation that he had taken an active part.

  Ridley had known nothing of the plot, a fact Anna could tell both annoyed and embarrassed him. He’d not even suspected until he and Jonah had gone to Feldtmann tower and noticed fresh tracks and turned off their radios, the better to sneak up on whoever was within.

  ANNA WAS LYING on the sofa closest to the stove, enjoying being warm and relatively pain free. Jonah had expertly reduced the dislocated shoulder. Forty years of flying hunters into the Alaskan wilderness had made him a de facto combat medic. Her ankle was elevated, but she’d refused to put ice on it. Enough was, occasionally, enough. She was fairly certain it wasn’t broken, the bone merely chipped and bruised. The result was the same: it hurt and she couldn’t walk on it.

  The bodies had been recovered by Robin, Gavin and Ridley and lay in the carpenter’s shop with Katherine’s. There’d been no more body bags and they were wrapped in cheery blue tarps.

  Three dead, not counting the wolf. The surviving five members of the Winter Study team shared the warm darkness of the common room, the sun long gone, the only light from the fire in the woodstove. Jonah had turned on the generator, but no one, it seemed, wished to see clearly and the lights had been left off.

  Those who remained alive on ISRO were all in the room. No one was talking. Anna was glad for the silence, for the heat, for the companionship and for the life that coursed through her veins. Never in her career has she been so close to dying and never before had she such magnificent reasons to resent it: Paul, a wonderful job, her sister, Paul.

  The hopeless tangle of human relationships would have depressed her had she not been in a mood of gratitude. Menechinn had destroyed Cynthia and, in the process, Adam. Menechinn had destroyed Katherine and, Anna didn’t doubt, her mother.

  Robin and Gavin, in their heroic desire to save the wolf/moose study, might very well have ruined their lives and those of their families. Despite the ruination on her mind, Anna found herself smiling in the dark. The mental picture of them stomping about with moose hooves strapped to their boots, sprinkling trails of stink to manipulate the movements of the wolves, cutting out and placing decoys to be seen from the air, planting alien scat and generally sewing the seeds of a wonderful mystery delighted her.

  She would love telling the story to Paul. Soon, a week at most, she would be with him, sitting in front of a fire, snuggled close, her life in front of her. A life she was determined not to lose to any fool that happened by with a penchant for evil and the will to carry it through. Soon Ridley would be back with his Honey, eating hot dish and preparing class lectures. Jonah would be up north, hauling wood and waiting for the next round of hunters. Life would go on. What happened at ISRO would become a legend to amuse visitors around the campfire.

  Blue skies would be there again.

  Except for Robin and Gavin.

  The thought dimmed some of the glow of her gratitude.

  “How bad is it?” Gavin asked, as if reading her mind.

  “Bad,” Ridley said. “I’ve told the NPS as little as possible, but, when the weather clears tomorrow or the next day, the island will be swarming with law enforcement.”

  “Could we go to jail?” Robin asked.

  “Tampering with research would get you a slap on the hand,” Anna said. “But your tampering contributed to the death of Katherine Huff. That could get you jail time.”

  The fire crackled. Jonah slid down in his chair like a teenager, almost horizontal, chin on his chest. Anna and Jonah were not innocents. Ridley, though young, was touched with world-weariness. Robin and Gavin had not considered jail, that what they were doing was a federal crime, that people could be hurt. Anna watched them from half-closed eyes. The two of them sat close but not touching on the couch opposite hers. The light of the fire painted their faces in translucent oranges and yellows, erasing what faint lines of age and worry recent events had carved there. They looked like children in a storm, lost and lovely.

  Gavin lifted his chin and the look was gone, replaced by the clear courage of a man born to carry his weight in the world. “I will make a full confession to whoever hears these things. Robin helped me but the plan was mine, the execution was mostly done by myself and Adam, and Katherine’s death is my sole responsibility.”

  Robin opened her mouth, no doubt to try and take the blame from Gavin onto her own shoulders.

  “Go for a walk,” Jonah said abruptly.

  There was a moment’s startled silence, then Robin said: “It’s night.”

  “Go to your room, then,” Jonah said.

  Anna laughed and he gave her a dirty look. “Sorry,” she said, though she didn’t know what she was apologizing for.

  “Go to our roo
m?” Gavin said, confused.

  “Yeah,” Jonah returned. “Just go away and let us talk.”

  “Let the grown-ups talk,” Gavin said evenly.

  Ridley jumped in before Jonah said anything else. “Would you mind, Gav? You and Robin are… too deeply involved as…”

  “Criminals,” Robin finished for him.

  Ridley smiled sadly. “Exactly. Would you guys mind?”

  Gavin said nothing, but he followed Robin as she left the common room. They went into the bedroom Katherine had occupied and shut the door.

  “What is it, Jonah?” Ridley asked.

  “We’ve got three dead bodies. The NPS, Homeland Security and probably the state of Michigan are going to come down on us like a ton of bricks.”

  “Adam was a suicide and Katherine was an accident,” Anna said.

  “I killed whatshisname. Maybe it won’t be so bad after the first excitement dies down.”

  It would be bad; she just said it in hopes it would be true.

  “Katherine’s death wasn’t an accident,” Jonah said. “Gavin could have helped her get her foot free and hauled her out of there.”

  “He thought rescue was coming,” Anna said reasonably. “It was farther back to Feldtmann tower than it was from here to the cedar swamp. Gavin said when he got there Katherine was expecting us at any minute. He couldn’t have known we weren’t coming, that good old Bob turned over and went back to sleep.”

  “Gavin could have radioed,” Jonah said.

  “Katherine had phoned. Why would he radio?” Anna asked.

  “Would you have?”

  Jonah grunted.

  “Me neither,” Ridley said. “You don’t expect people like Bob. That’s why they win.”

  “Bob didn’t win,” Anna said.

  “No,” Ridley agreed. “No he didn’t. You did what you had to. I hope you won’t lose any sleep over it.”

  “Not a wink.”

  “Gavin and Robin might’ve torpedoed your career,” Jonah said to Ridley.

  “I don’t think so,” Ridley said.

  “We’re going to have to explain. There’s too much. E-mails about the big tracks, the DNA. It’s not going under the rug,” Jonah said.

  “When it comes out, our little perpetrators are going to get slammed from every direction.”

  “Not if they’re dead,” Anna said with sudden inspiration.

  Before Jonah could snatch up the kindling ax to defend himself and Ridley from her homicidal mania – which he looked ready to do – Anna went on: “Adam and Bob set it up. Bob to… what? What would be good?”

  “Bob wanted to take over the study himself,” Ridley said slowly.

  “Become somebody in research circles.”

  “Right,” Jonah said. “Earn the big bucks.”

  Ridley laughed. Anna was glad to hear laughter. It had been a long time since she’d heard any that wasn’t tinged with some poison or another.

  “There’s fame attached,” Anna said. “You’re somebody. Bob was nobody. People who knew him might buy that.”

  “So when did he bring in the goodies?” Jonah asked. “The paw prints and scent lure and doggy cutouts? It won’t work.”

  “The windigo!” Anna exclaimed suddenly.

  “Are you feverish?” Jonah asked, his concern genuine.

  “No. Maybe, but that’s not it. It just occurred to me that was what I was smelling. The windigo is supposed to have this reek that announces its presence. I kept smelling a hint of it. I was smelling the scent lure. That stuff is the essence of all things vile. Dogs and wolves love it. Hah!” she said, pleased to have one more niggling question answered.

  “So when did Bob stash his tools?” Jonah went back to his question.

  “Adam did that,” Ridley suggested. “Adam was doing it to save the study. Bob figured it out, took over and there was a falling-out. Bob kills Adam and is killed attacking Anna.”

  “And Robin and Gavin skip away hand in hand – no harm, no foul?” Jonah said.

  “Why not?” Anna said. “Do you want to see them behind bars? Boy, would that ever make you a coldhearted bastard. Why don’t you just turn in Smokey the Bear and Woodsy the Owl and Ranger Rick for ecoterrorism?”

  Silence returned. From Katherine’s old room came the gentle murmur of Gavin and Robin talking. The thought of them going to prison, or even through the ruthless misery of the legal system, hurt Anna, an ache in her chest near where her heart was. Justice had been meted out already in the dribs and drabs of violence and insanity that Bob and Adam carried with them to the island. Evil had vanquished itself. What came now, if they let it come, would be politics. Politicians did not sacrifice themselves for the greater good, not if it meant losing their jobs.

  She wanted to push Ridley and Jonah, to preach and to beg if need be, but she sensed it would be best to let them alone. So she waited. Finally Ridley spoke.

  “We can burn the stuff they used for the hoax. There’s time. And clean up Feldtmann tower. It’s too cold for whatever law shows up to want to dig too deep. Too cold and too isolated.”

  Anna felt a surge of affection for the young man. The animosity he’d evinced toward federal law enforcement early in this adventure had annoyed her. Now she loved him for it.

  “So we play God?” Jonah asked.

  “People always play God,” Anna said. “There’s nobody else to do it.”

  ***

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