Winter Study (35 page)

Ridley
was the only one still inside. The sauna was cooling as the fire was no
longer stoked, but up near the ceiling there was still plenty of heat
Anna could store in her bones.

Ridley
opened his eyes. His long dark lashes were covered in tiny beads of
moisture that rivaled the glitter of a Vegas showgirl, till he sat
forward and lost the light.

“What?” he asked with the intuition of a man used to trouble.

Anna told him.

“Jesus!”
He leaned back again but the angle was wrong and the magic of the eyes
didn’t manifest. “You know he’s here to shut the study down, don’t you?”

“Can he do that with the wolf’s behavior so off?” Paradoxically, now that she was getting warm, she was beginning to shiver.

“He’s
an idiot but he can probably do what he wants. Or what he’s told,”
Ridley said. “He wouldn’t know one end of the wolf from the other if it
bit him on the rump.”

Rump

.

Anna’s
brain caught at the word, a nice, round friendly word. Paul said things
like that, his language never degenerating into cursing or obscenity.
One day, she would have to clean up her vocabulary…

“Adam must have been out of his mind.”

“Out of his mind,” Anna echoed. She had no idea what Ridley referred to and no energy to pursue it.

“Seemed
to think he was God’s gift to science. Some of the people on the list
were real scientists. None of them were any good — government hacks —
but at least they’d seen a microscope at one time in their lives.”

Ridley
wasn’t really talking to her; he simply needed her there that he
wouldn’t be crazy enough to be talking to himself. Anna lay down on the
top bench and stretched out; something there’d not been room to do
before.

“Bob’s
your basic prostitute; he screws whoever the man with the paycheck
tells him to screw. Homeland Security wants the border parks open
year-round. Bingo! Bob discovers the longest-running, most highly
respected and — get this — popular study in the country is a piece of
garbage.”

That
was the last sentence Anna heard. Vaguely she was aware of Ridley
shaking her awake, of walking back through the snow with his arm around
her shoulders, of sliding into her sleeping bag and — in the morning,
she wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined this part — of Jonah saying: “Good
night, sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

SHE
WOULD HAVE LOVED to sleep the clock around, if for no other reason
than, in her dreams, she didn’t have roommates, she had a husband.
Nonetheless, twelve hours was sufficient for knitting up the raveled
sleeve. At ten-fourteen, she awoke, tiptoed from the room, lest she
waken Robin, and wandered into the common room. Where the harness had
pulled across her shoulders was aching and the backs of her calves were
stiff and painful. Other than that, she was in surprisingly good shape.

A
fire was burning in the stove, as it was every morning. Anna suspected
elves, wanting tiny mukluks, till she found out Jonah got up at five
every morning to check the weather, built up the fire, then, if there
wasn’t going to be any flying that day, crawled back into his sleeping
bag to emerge a couple hours later with the rest of them.

The
common room was uninhabited. She could hear men’s voices in the
kitchen. Her parka was on the drying rack by the stove, as were the
felt liners of her boots. Salvaging her gear, she dressed and slipped
out the front door. The sky was still at the level of the treetops and
the wind from the northwest was bitter cold, but it hadn’t the fury of
the previous night. Temperature too low for proper snow; flakes, tiny
almost to invisibility, drifted sharp as shards of glass in the air.

Gray
light, a world without three of the primary colors, clothes that
swaddled and bundled out of doors, bodies and smells that swaddled and
bundled indoors: winter wrapped a web around Anna. Without the rising
of the sun and the rotation of the stars, time had taken her prisoner,
and everything seemed endless, as if she’d done it a thousand times
before and, like Sisyphus, was doomed to go on doing it for all
eternity.

Pushing
through new drifts between the outhouse and the sauna, she wondered how
the prisoners sent to work camps in Siberia survived. She had warmth,
good clothing, plenty to eat, a place to sleep — Winter Study was not a
place of privation; it was a place of simplicity. Yet the suffocating
timelessness disoriented her all the same. She reminded herself never
to do anything to annoy the Kremlin.

The door to the carpenter’s shop was closed. Fresh tracks marked up the snow. Great big tracks: Bob.

She
opened the door and remnants of the stench she’d thought she’d dreamed
were there to greet her. Katherine’s body hadn’t been put back into the
garbage bags; they were smoothed neatly over her where she lay in the
Sked. The severed foot was wrapped in plastic the way it had come from
the scene. Bob had not seen fit to expose it in his worshipful frenzy.
The hollowed-out remains of the wolf and its bagged organs were on the
table in the center of the room.

The
story of the wolf who had invited Katherine to go with him into the
snowy woods came back to Anna. The wistful look of longing as Katherine
told the story of the meeting. The final scene from

Wuthering Heights,

the
version starring Laurence Olivier, unfolded in Anna’s mind: Heathcliff
and Cathy walking together into a snowy distance. In Anna’s version,
Heathcliff was played by a wolf.

Shaking
the vision off, she lifted the bags off the body. For reasons known
only to wolves — perhaps the way Katherine had wedged herself beneath a
downed cedar before she died — but for one gash on her forehead her
face was largely unmarked, yet it was not pretty in death. Freezing
temperatures and rigor had set it in a mask of agony, a scream sculpted
in flesh. The parka had been zipped.

Bob
had returned early this morning and tidied things up. Or finished what
had been interrupted the previous night, then covered his tracks.

Anna unzipped it, then sat back on her heels.

Looking for a cell phone.

What a crock.

Cell
phones didn’t work on the island. There wasn’t a tower within hitting
distance. Cell phones hadn’t existed when Anna was a ranger on ISRO,
but now the fact they didn’t work would be a huge plus in her opinion.
No hikers or boaters chattering away with their pals in the office
while the glory that was Isle Royale rolled by them unnoticed.

Bob
was looking for something, though. He’d been searching for it at the
scene while the rest of them were packaging the remains. He’d left
them, speeding off with the flashlight, because he’d found whatever it
was and wanted to hide it before they returned, he’d not found it and
wanted to search Katherine’s room or he was a lazy piece of shit and
decided it was “wine time.”

He
might have been searching the body as he’d said. If he’d had a
flashlight with him, it hadn’t been on when Anna arrived in all her
naked glory, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t used it earlier.

Staring
at the dead woman’s face but without seeing it, Anna put herself back
in the sauna and retraced her steps to the carpenter’s shop. Memories
of the night before weren’t sharp. There’d been too many things dulling
her brain.

She
left the sauna. She flew with the wind. She heard a clanking sound —
probably the Sked banging into the metal legs of the workbench under
the window. She opened the door and turned on the overhead light.

Without
the wind raking her back and Bob’s eyes her front, Anna was able to see
more clearly in memory than she had at the time. Bob Menechinn had been
on his knees. His butt had been in the air and his head down, hiding
that of the corpse. That’s why Anna had the sudden thought he was
eating it.

The
time for rescue breathing was long past. Had he been kissing Katherine?
Love lost and good-bye and rest in peace with Baby Jesus, like Bob
claimed?

Or did he like making love to dead women?

That
was a gruesome thought. Though, should Anna ever have to have sex with
the likes of Menechinn, it would be preferable to be dead at the time.

Shuddering
out of that mental place, Anna turned her attention to cause of death.
Wolf, certainly, but wolves weren’t what had taken Katherine to the
cedar swamp in the first place, nor, did Anna believe, had they taken
the researcher down. The tracks at the scene, those that hadn’t been
totally obscured by snow, told the tale of a meal, not a hunt.

Anna
got a pair of latex gloves from the box Ridley had left on the counter
from the wolf necropsy and turned back the stiffened edge of the
shredded trouser leg. A splintered femur thrust through the tattered
flesh — broken, snapped, not gnawed through. A considerate beast of
some sort had licked the bone clean.

Katherine
had probably stepped in one of the swamp’s natural traps and broken her
ankle. Maybe the pack was hounding her, but it seemed more likely she’d
broken her ankle and the pack had come upon her. Wolves could have
smelled the blood from the compound fracture. There were vials of the
dead wolf’s blood in her pocket. She might have smashed them against a
stone or the bole of a downed tree.

If
they were in the area, the wolves would have smelled it. But wolves
smelled blood all the time: crippled moose, injured pack members. Every
meal was served up with the smell of blood. All summer long, they
smelled the blood of tourists, scraping and blistering and cutting
themselves with cooking utensils. It wasn’t like chumming in
shark-infested waters; at the scent of blood, wolves didn’t go into a
feeding frenzy. The odor of humans was enough to send them running.

The
only thing that made much sense was a confluence of events: Katherine
breaks her leg, wolves come upon her, she reeks of fresh blood — hers
and theirs — and they kill her.

Reeks.

The breath of the windigo.

Smell,
the most primitive of the senses, flooded Anna but brought with it no
memory, only the knowledge that something was unutterably wrong.

21

Anna
returned to the bunkhouse, let herself in the unused kitchen door, took
Katherine’s sample-gathering paraphernalia and carried it back to the
carpenter’s shop. There she began the painstaking process of collecting
and preserving trace evidence.