Winter Study (33 page)

Little
of the ride back registered with Anna. The life of the candy bars and
the coffee was short-lived. The trail wasn’t made for machinery and the
ride was bumpy. Ridley seemed to waver back and forth between the need
for speed and the need for safety, and each waver carried a bump at one
end or the other. Mostly Anna hung on and tried to keep her face behind
Robin’s shoulder so the cold wouldn’t scour it off.

Finally
they drove out of the woods and onto the graded road. Anna was too
tired to be grateful. When they reached the bunkhouse, she couldn’t get
off the snowmobile. Jonah was out as soon as he heard the machine
coming up the hill, bare-handed, in his old ragged flannel shirt, his
boots unlaced. He hadn’t taken time to more than grab his wool cap and
shove his feet into his mukluks.

“Ovaltine
is on,” he called. “We’ll get you warmed up. I fired up the sauna.
Food, heat, hot drinks. We’ll make new women of you. Not that I’m
complaining about the old women, not to suggest you are old, Ranger
Pigeon. I doubt you are much older than I am.” While he chattered, he
helped take the bungee cords from around the three of them. Ridley let
him. He wasn’t as spent as Anna and he hadn’t been hit emotionally as
Robin had, but the man had skied over thirty miles among other things
and he didn’t seem anxious to take on any unnecessary tasks.

Anna
tried to get off so Robin could move and managed to only flap her arms
feebly. Jonah put his arm around her and lifted till, between the two
of them, she was standing, if unsteadily, on her own.

“Give
Ridley a hand,” Jonah said, just as if Anna was capable of doing so.
Because he treated her like she was able, she found she almost was. As
she tottered to the front of the machine, Bob Menechinn emerged from
the bunkhouse, hat and gloves on, coat zipped up.

“I
had the snowmobile warmed up and was about to come looking myself,” he
said as he clomped down the snow-covered steps from the deck. “Then
Ridley beat me to it. Supper will be ready when you’re ready to eat it.
I made beef stew. That ought to stick to your ribs.” He hustled down
and elbowed Jonah out of the way to tend to Robin.

“Honey made it,” Ridley said.

“Whatever,” Bob said. “It’s hot and ready.”

“You
heated it up. My wife, Honey, made the stew.” Ridley lurched from the
machine without any help from Anna and faced Menechinn. Bob had both
arms under Robin’s armpits and his hands on the front of her coat.

Copping a feel.

Anna shook that off. As many layers as they all wore, all anybody would feel would be fleece and goose down.

“Well, let’s get in and eat it before it gets cold,” Jonah said.

Ridley
stepped in front of Menechinn and the difference in their size was
apparent. Bob outweighed the lead researcher by a hundred pounds, if
not more. Still, Anna would have put her money on Ridley, if this had
been a betting match. Ridley pulled off his thick glove, and, for a
second, Anna thought he was going to slap the other man’s face with it
in classic challenge fashion. Instead he poked Menechinn hard with a
slender forefinger.

“Honey
made the stew,” he said. Ridley didn’t yell or curse or threaten, but
there wasn’t any doubt, at least not in Anna’s mind, that he was
dangerous.

Bob must have sensed it too. He backed down, and Anna doubted it was out of consideration for the feelings of the other man.

“I
just heated it up,” he said. Anna heard the fear in his words and saw
it in his face. So did Ridley. Bob tried for his smile but his face
wouldn’t cooperate. Then he saw the scorn in the faces around him. It
was a replay of the night in the tent when he’d freaked out. Anna
wondered who he’d use to build back his self-esteem now that Katherine
was dead.

“Robin, you must be about frozen to death,” he said and, curling himself around the biotech, he led her into the bunkhouse.

“Tell Robin to stay away from Bob.”

Katherine had said that the day before she died. Anna wondered if ghosts felt jealousy.

Or if the warning had nothing to do with affairs of the heart.

19

Anna
found the strength to eat two large bowls of Honey’s stew. Usually
Robin ate with a healthy appetite, replacing the calories her work
burned by the thousands. Tonight she stared at the bowl as if it were a
crystal ball too muddy to show the future. When Anna would remind her
to eat, she would take a bite. Bob decided to assume mothering duties
and all but spoon-fed her, till she stood abruptly and left the room.

He started to follow.

“Sit down,” Anna ordered. “You haven’t had dessert yet.”

Menechinn
reared back, pushing out his chest and pulling in his chin, and glared
around the table, searching for support. The message was in Jonah’s
eyes and the rigid way Ridley held his butter knife:

Eat cake or die.

Anna took another mouthful of stew. A woman had to keep her strength up.

Adam
made it back as the cake and ice cream with chocolate sauce was being
dished up. “What took you so long?” Ridley asked when Adam came into
the kitchen. The question was not friendly. Adam’s coming to the rescue
was canceled out by the fact that, had he been there in the first
place, no one would have needed rescuing.

“I
went back for the Sked,” Adam said mildly. “It wasn’t all that far.
Maybe three hundred yards from the trail.” He dished up what was left
of the stew, took a spoon from the deep-fat fryer with the clean
flatware and settled in the chair Robin had vacated.

Three hundred yards.

Every
cell in Anna’s body would have sworn it was closer to six or seven
miles. So strong was the feeling, she might have argued the point, had
she not been distracted with more important matters: watching to be
sure Jonah put enough chocolate syrup on her ice cream.

“I put her in the carpenter’s shop with the wolf,” Adam said as he slathered a piece of bread with peanut butter.

“She would have liked that,” Bob said gravely, and all of them stared at him for a moment.

“That
she will, Bob. I know how much she meant to you.” Adam spoke in the
same mild way he had when Ridley snapped at him. It was impossible to
tell if he mocked Bob or sympathized with him. Anna chose mocked. Bob
chose sympathized.

“She
did, Adam. Thank you. There’s been a distinct lack of feeling around
here. Robin’s the only one who seems to care and she’s being left to
isolate herself.”

Jonah clunked a full plate of cake and ice cream in front of Bob.

“GENTLEMEN
AND GENTLE LADY, it is time to get naked,” Jonah announced. He rose
from the table and returned shortly with a plastic bucket, which he
ceremoniously gave Anna.

“I’ll
see if poor little Robin wants to sauna,” Bob said, pushing his chair
back from the table. “Lord knows, it would do her good.”

“Allow me,” Anna said sourly. “It so happens I’m going that way, being it’s my bedroom and all.”

Bob did his pulled-back smile.

Sauna
was a tradition in the north. On Isle Royale, during Winter Study, it
took on its early importance; it was the most efficient way to get
clean in a cold climate where there was no running water. Anna’d
thought she was too tired to do more than fall on the bed, but the
promise of deep heat and a shampoo revived her sufficiently that she
could return to the room to get her towel and soap.

Robin was sitting on her bed, staring at her hands.

Anna sat on the bed opposite, no more than five feet between them.

“What
happened?” she asked simply. Normally the shock of seeing a chewed-up
corpse might account for a young woman’s imploding, but Robin had not
gone catatonic at the sight of the dismembered body. It had been later,
while the body was being packaged, or shortly thereafter.

“We—”
Robin began, then stopped. The decision to keep a painful secret was
clear on her young face. Robin wasn’t a practiced liar.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to work some things out.”

Anna
waited, giving her time to talk if she changed her mind. That she was
speaking at all was a giant step forward. “Okay,” Anna said. “Come
sauna.”

“No.” Robin tipped her head farther down and her hair fell around her face.

“You smell like Ridley’s feet,” Anna said untruthfully. “Take your clothes off. I’ll wait for you.”

Robin
stood obediently and stripped, as did Anna. Wrapped in towels, Robin in
her mukluks and Anna in her clogs, each with a plastic pail, they left
the room. Naked as the day he was born, Jonah was in the common room.

“Pure sex,” he said and slapped a wiry thigh frosted with white hair. “You girls control yourselves.”

Robin actually smiled.

“Even worn down as we are, it’ll be tough,” Anna said.

Jonah dashed out ahead of them.

They
left through the door of the working kitchen. Snow fell into Anna’s
clogs as they hurried through the narrow band of trees between the
outhouse and the building next to the carpenter’s shop that housed the
sauna. Wind snatched at their towels and whipped Robin’s hair with such
fury that strands of it stung across Anna’s cheeks and she let the
younger woman go ahead of her. They ran the last ten yards.

In
the small anteroom was a single bench and a row of pegs. Three towels
already hung there. Anna and Robin added theirs to the line, put their
footwear on the bench and, pails in hand like children going to the
beach, went inside.

The
sauna was built of fragrant cedar and heated by a cast-iron potbellied
stove. Benches rose in tiers on two of the walls. The stove and a
woodpile took up part of the third. On top of the stove was an iron
tank filled with water heated to just short of boiling. To the left of
the door was another tank with cold water. A single candle placed on
the lower bench near the cold water lit the room.

Candlelight
made the walls golden brown, the corners fading into darkness. Jonah
and Adam sat side by side on the top bench, arguing good-naturedly
about whether Matt Damon or Leonardo DiCaprio was the greatest actor of
the twenty-first century. Ridley was standing by the cold-water tank
filling his bucket.