Winter Study (28 page)

As
they were dividing up the trails for the search, Adam dragged in. He
had the body type Anna associated with the cowboys where she’d grown up
and, later, the die-hard wildland firefighters: long muscles and bones,
big knuckles, wide shoulders and skinny legs. The kind of men that can
just keep on working, keep on digging firebreaks or building fence or
riding line as if their lanky bodies were made of sterner stuff than
mere flesh and didn’t burn as much fuel as other humans.

Adam
looked like he’d finally run out of gas. No longer held at bay by the
strength of his personality, age dragged down his cheeks and made
pouches beneath his eyes.

“You look like hell,” Ridley said without sympathy.

“Yeah,
well, freezing your butt off all night, then hiking nine miles in deep
snow before breakfast, will do that to a guy,” Adam snapped, and
shrugged out of his coat.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Ridley warned.

“Katherine’s gone missing,” Anna told him.

Adam put his coat back on.

“Grab
some food,” Ridley said, “then search the Hugginin Trail loop. That’ll
free Jonah up to stay near the airplane in case the weather breaks.”

Bob
announced he would stay at the bunkhouse near the radio. In case Jonah
flew and they needed to coordinate, he said. Given the missing woman
was his graduate student and, at least on her end, there seemed to be a
proprietary interest, he didn’t seem overly anxious to help find her.
“Recheck the permanent-employee housing and check the maintenance
buildings at least,” Ridley said. He didn’t bother to disguise the
scorn in his voice. “She might have broken into one of the equipment
sheds if she was upset enough.”

Bob
turned his face slightly away. Maybe Katherine’s going missing had hit
him harder than Anna’d given him credit for. Before this, Bob might
have goldbricked out of fear of wild beasts or plain old sloth, but he
wouldn’t have bothered to look guilty about it.

“What did you and Katherine fight about last night?” Anna asked bluntly.

His
shame, or whatever it was, vanished, replaced by the tucked-back smile
of false bonhomie. “We didn’t fight. I don’t fight with women.”

He didn’t wink. Anna was making progress.

There,
snow was deep enough for skiing. The best skier, Robin, was given the
Minong. It was the roughest trail on the island, running as it did
along the broken crest of glacial ridges. Anna had skied a little,
she’d seen others — people who were good at it — ski, but she’d never
seen anything like Robin. It was as if the snow conspired with the skis
to carry her effortlessly like

Winged Victory

into battle.

Ridley
would cover the Greenstone Trail. Because of the shortcut from the
housing area to the head of the trail, if Katherine had found a trail
and not just stumbled off into the bushes the Greenstone would be it.
He pushed off. Ridley’s style was more prosaic than Robin’s, but the
power in his legs and his familiarity with wintry things was apparent.

Anna
took Feldtmann Lake Trail. Adam had returned to Windigo that way, but
he’d been traveling fast in bad light, not looking for a sign. She
considered taking the one remaining pair of skis, but, in the end, she
laced on her Sorels. She wasn’t proficient enough on skis not to wear
herself out with them.

In
full winter regalia, passing through a snowy landscape, her suit bulky
and her face peeking out through a bucket, the wheeze of her breath and
the squeak of her boots all that penetrated to her muffled ears, Anna
felt cut off from the natural world.

Isolation exacerbated by a sense of being crowded.

A neurotic wouldn’t know which way to flinch.

When
she was a ranger on Isle Royale, she’d hiked the Feldtmann many times.
It was easygoing, running over small hills and occasionally a basalt
outcropping high enough to afford views of the lake.

Easy

.

Except
the cold was a wall. Sweat ran beneath the parka, while her toes,
fingers and face burned like frost was gnawing on them. She unzipped
her coat and pulled off one glove — the equivalent of sticking a foot
out from under the covers to cool off. Taking Robin as her example, she
tried to embrace winter but kept finding herself trudging along without
thinking much and seeing even less. On a search and — it was still to
be hoped — rescue, this was bad.

In
frustration, she pulled off hat and balaclava. The cold hurt, and she
wondered if Paul would still love her if the tips of her nose and ears
turned black, but the sense of being bundled into helplessness
diminished. At least she could hear the rat-tatting of the woodpeckers
and the chittering of squirrels.

Life
had come back while she wasn’t paying attention. She tilted her head
back and looked at the sky. The snow had stopped. The clouds were still
too low for Jonah to take the airplane up, but they looked like they
might lift in an hour or more. The thought of backup — or an audience
to witness her weakness — gave her usable energy and she pushed on in
better spirits.

Another
two hours elapsed before she reached Feldtmann Lake. It was too far. A
woman running from a bad exchange with her mentor/ tormentor, or
whatever Bob was to Katherine, didn’t run nine miles on the proverbial
“dark and stormy night.” Either she didn’t want to be found or she’d
gone off trail. Still, like the postman, Anna made her appointed
rounds. When she got tired, she had to remind herself to drink. The
body didn’t give the same clues in a Michigan winter as it did in
summer in the south.

She
didn’t have to remind herself to eat. The pathetic little
peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich was gone before the morning was out.
By noon, she was so famished she wondered if she could catch a squirrel
and force it to give up the location of its stash.

She
saw a red fox, woodpeckers, red squirrels, chickadees, wolf tracks,
moose tracks and what looked to be martin tracks. Nothing to indicate
Katherine had been this way.

Ridley radioed in. He’d skied ten miles up the Greenstone and seen nothing but two half-starved moose and more wolf prints.

Robin
radioed in soon after. She, too, was turning back. She’d skied as far
as Lake Desor, a brutal jaunt for a lesser person, and was still
talking without gasping. Robin had seen nothing. Not so much as a fox.

Nobody could raise Adam.

“Battery must have gone dead,” Ridley said drily.

“Yeah.”
For a man supposedly in charge of the physical plant, he seemed to be
developing a penchant for being out of pocket and unreachable.

The
sun didn’t show its face, but the wind dropped to nothing and the sky
lightened. When Anna was halfway back to Washington Harbor, she heard
the buzz of the supercub.

Half
an hour later, Jonah found something. Color, he said. Like a piece of
clothing thrown off, and a disturbed area in a cedar swamp between the
Greenstone and the Feldtmann. He couldn’t see much, just that there was
color on the snow where there shouldn’t be, and it was the same gold
and barn red as the old parka Katherine had been wearing at the
necropsy.

No
place to land that was any closer than the supercub’s tie-down on
Washington Harbor, Jonah circled low and slow to see if he could get a
rise out of anything in the trees around the scrap of gold and red.

Anna radioed Ridley. “When you get to the bunkhouse, bring the Sked, a body bag and flashlights. Where’s Robin?”

“Two miles out,” Robin’s voice came back over the air.

“Head down the Feldtmann,” Anna told her. “I’ll mark where I go off trail.”

Jonah
circled till he spotted Anna, then waggled his wings and led off trail
toward the scraps of color. She followed like a baby trumpeter swan
following an ultralight.

The find. Scraps of color.

Anna suspected they no longer went to rescue a victim but to recover a body.

She’d never have said it aloud. Bad juju.

16

Following
Jonah’s lead, Anna made it to the cedar swamp in forty minutes. At
every moment, she expected to be overtaken by the skiers but was still
solo when Jonah made his last transmission: “See that rise ahead of
you? Got a big nose of rock sticking out of it and trees like nose
hairs?”

“I got it,” Anna radioed back.

“The
body is right beyond that. Trees’ll clear out and there’ll be a rock
about the size of a refrigerator, then you turn left. Can’t miss it.
Wind’s coming up. I’ve got to head back.”

Jonah
had said “body” out loud. Out loud and over the radio. The breach of
tradition gave Anna a shiver akin to that of an actor when the Scottish
play is mentioned by name or peacock feathers are worn on stage. Till
they knew for sure Katherine was dead — and that this was Katherine —
time had to be considered of the essence. Close on quarter till four,
wind rising, and fatigue dragging her steps, Anna had no choice but to
keep on, but she was not averse to a little company at this point.

“Where is everybody?” She didn’t whine, but she felt like it.

“They’re coming,” Jonah promised. “They got held up leaving the bunkhouse.”

Anna
wondered what in the hell could have held them up. Cell phones didn’t
work on the island, the radio was out, the island was socked in so
seaplanes couldn’t come and go.

Maybe somebody dropped by.

Given recent events, that thought bordered on the sinister.

She
topped the rise by the nose, spotted the refrigerator, half slid down
and turned left as she’d been directed. Jonah said, “You can’t miss
it,” and he was old enough and wily enough not to say that unless it
was true.

In
swampy areas, cedar trees fell like jackstraws, one over the other, the
living with the dead, branches entangled. During the growing season,
the swamps were water filled and choked with under-growth. In winter,
they were navigable, but just barely. Fresh snow cloaked the branches
of the upright trees and filled tiny ledges in the bark. Downed trees,
fallen willy-nilly, made a lumpy quilt, protecting the living trees’
roots. Snow hid where one deadfall crossed another, and maybe three
more below that, till walking through was like negotiating an icebound
jungle filled with Lilliputian tiger traps.