Winter Study (40 page)

Jonah stood as well. “Ridley,” he called without taking his eyes off them. “Get in here.”

Bob
didn’t put Robin down on the couch or move toward her room but stopped
a moment to savor the spotlight. “Drunk as a frat boy on Friday night,”
he said.

“Robin’s
drunk. Passed out. Drunk,” Adam said tonelessly, his face gone the
color of ashes, his hands knotted in fists at his sides, knuckles
hard-boned and sharp.

“Yep,”
Bob said. “I guess this wog business was getting to her. I, for one,
will be glad when the Forest Service gets us off this island. Sooner is
better.”

To
Anna’s amazement, the permafrost that had replaced Adam’s skin melted
and his fists uncurled. “I’m glad you were looking after her, Bob.
She’s a good kid.” Adam reached to take the unconscious girl. His arms
were as stiff as a Hollywood mummy’s.

Bob wasn’t about to have his prize snatched away. Anna stepped in before they started fighting over Robin like dogs over a bone.

“Jonah,”
she said as she pried Robin from Bob’s embrace and draped one of the
girl’s arms across her shoulders. “Would you mind making a pot of
coffee?”

“I’m on it,” he said.

Supporting
the younger woman, Anna began their stumbling way to the bedroom. Bob
and Adam followed. She stopped, braced Robin against her hip, turned
and held them with her gaze for a moment.

“When the coffee’s done, ask Jonah to bring it to me.”

They didn’t recognize the dismissal.

Anna made it clearer. “Go away.”

Having
no idea how much Robin had consumed, what her tolerance was or if she
was on any other drugs or medications, Anna had no intention of letting
her sleep until some of the effects wore off. At a guess, besides the
wine she had taken a barbiturate of some kind. Tranquilizers or
sleeping pills from her mother’s medicine cabinet secreted away for
emergency meltdowns. If her system was too depressed, sleeping could
push her from unconscious to dead. Coffee, poking, prodding and making
witty conversation were all Anna had in the way of antidotes.

She
settled Robin on her bed, back against the wall, legs out straight.
Like a Raggedy Ann, Robin’s head cocked to one side and her arms limp,
palms up. Twice she blinked, then her eyes opened preternaturally wide.
The beneficent image of Raggedy Ann was replaced by that of Chucky. The
illusion lasted long enough for Anna’s adrenaline to spike one more
time.

“You’re
in our room. You are safe,” Anna told her. “Whatever demons are chasing
you will have to come through me. Can you tell me how much you had to
drink?”

Robin didn’t answer. Her eyes drifted closed and she mumbled, “Demons.”

“No
demons,” Anna said with obnoxious good cheer, her voice pitched sharply
enough to penetrate the biotech’s fog but not to carry beyond the
closed door. “How much did you drink?”

“Drink,”
Robin parroted. “Ish.” Fingers numb with whatever was in her system,
she began fumbling at the hem of her sweater, unable to clutch it hard
enough to lift the wool over her head. “I’m wet.”

“You
have wine spilled on you. That sweater is soaked in it. You smell like
a wet dog,” Anna told her. “A wet, alcoholic dog.” She moved to help
Robin off with her sweater and she batted at Anna.

“No.
No. No.” Each was a single, pitiful cry, as if against an inevitable
and familiar evil she was helpless to stop. Anna sat back down. Women
who had been raped or sexually abused, either as adults or as children,
occasionally exhibited a fear of having their clothes removed by anyone
else, even an EMT or physician. Most overcame the instantaneous terror,
at least enough to hide it when they were sober. Drunk or drugged or
distraught, it often resurfaced.

“You’re
okay,” Anna said. “When you want help with your clothes, you tell me.
Till then, I’m going to sit right here and make sure nobody bothers
you.”

“How’s our girl?”

Fucking Bob.

“Go away.”

With
a jolt of guilt, Anna remembered Katherine had told her to keep Robin
away from him. At the time, she’d written it off as the hissing of a
jealous woman. Now she heard it as a warning. Bob had been eyeing Robin
since he’d hit the island. Would he be evil enough to rape a young
woman, mentally unstable from shock, who had gotten drunk?

Not raped,

Anna
thought. Had rape occurred signs would have been evident. A wave of
relief, startling in its intensity, buoyed her up. Robin was, in some
indefinable way, the essence of innocence. Not the coy, shy innocence
the Victorians peddled but the fearless innocence of young wild things.

Robin’s
hands, palms up to either side of her thighs on the mattress ticking,
twitched like cats’ paws do when they dream. They stilled, and Anna saw
not Robin but Katherine, the stumps of her gnawed fingers, the torn
mess of her palms.

Anna
had walked in on Bob, in the dark, on his hands and knees, over the
corpse. Katherine’s parka was unzipped. The thought Bob had been
sexually involved with the body had crossed Anna’s mind in a stampede
of cloven hooves.

Katherine dead, Robin dead drunk. There were men who liked women to be objectified in this ultimate way.

Anna
shook her head the way a dog with a sore ear will shake trying to rid
itself of a pain it cannot stop or touch. America had changed radically
from when she was a girl. Women — girls — had gone from the
underrepresented in numbers and inferior in ratings to the majority and
the best rated in a huge number of areas: college, graduate school,
medicine, law. A woman had been Secretary of State, a woman Speaker of
the House, a presidential candidate. Women were mayors, governors and
university deans. No longer was it said that girls weren’t as smart as
boys; now the focus was on how the system had failed the nation’s sons.

That’s what had changed.

Rape was what hadn’t changed.

Women
were in the military and they were raped by their fellow soldiers.
Girls were in college and they were raped by their fellow students.
Rape crisis centers had sprung up and rape counselors. Yet it was still
ignored in the most essential way: people in power didn’t want to touch
it lest they get their hands dirty.

This
was true in the armed forces, corporate America, universities. And in
the National Park Service. A friend of Anna’s had been raped; she’d
been working seasonally as a fire technician. She’d been struck down
and raped by an NPS employee, a permanent, someone close to the
Assistant Superintendent. Anna and the woman’s parents convinced her to
report it.

The
rape was never turned over to law enforcement. Higher-ups in the park
talked to the victim, offered to set up “mediations” between her and
her rapist that they might learn to work and play well together. The
rapist was not fired. The crime was treated as a spat between roommates
rather than as a felony assault. NPS employees raping seasonals
wouldn’t be good PR.

And maybe she was lying. Maybe she was exaggerating. Maybe she had it coming.

That was the unsaid, the way otherwise-decent men and women could refuse to help and still think themselves good people.

“Arthritis.”

Still limp as a rag doll, Robin was staring at Anna. “Arthritis,” she said in an eerie monotone a thread above a whisper.

Anna’d been cracking her knuckles and clenching her jaw.

“Thanks.” She shook out her hands and let them hang loosely between her knees. Bone and muscle ached. “Drink some coffee.”

Anna
helped with holding the cup and raising it to Robin’s lips. “Not bad,”
she said when only a tablespoon or two slopped on the ruined sweater.

“My mom made this,” Robin said.

The
sweater was a classic pattern, deep chocolate with a band of white
reindeer marching single file across the chest and the back. “It’s
beautiful,” Anna said. It had been, before the wine stained the
reindeer the creepy color of cheap stage blood.

Robin
bent at the waist to take off her knee-high mukluks and fell over
sideways on the bed. Anna made no move to help her till the young woman
asked for assistance. Having set her back up in her Raggedy Ann pose,
Anna unlaced the soft boots and worked them off.

“There.” Robin pointed at her sock-clad feet.

“What?” Anna didn’t see any damage. The socks weren’t wet and the skin beneath radiated body heat.

“Mom knitted my socks for my feet. They fit better than any other socks.”

“Wow,” was all Anna could say. “Beats baking cookies all to hell.”

“All to hell.”

Anna helped her to another sip of coffee, then took a drink herself. The long day was beginning to wear on her.

A tap at the door was followed by the pilot’s grizzled face. “More coffee?”

“Food?” Anna asked.

“Coming up.” The door snicked shut.

Another tap quickly followed. “Robin?”

Bob.

“Go away.”

Jonah
brought them each a bowl of beef-and-pasta casserole and more coffee.
The food fortified Anna, and the few bites she could be induced to take
seemed to help Robin some. Finally she asked Anna to help her remove
the wine-soaked sweater.

As
the fire was banked and others went to bed, the bunkhouse stilled and
cooled. At ten, the lights went out; Jonah had shut down the generator
for the night. Had Anna been sure Robin was loaded on booze, and only
booze, she would have let her sleep it off and been grateful to do so.
As it was, she lit a candle and propped herself next to the biotech
where she could nudge her awake for at least another hour or two till
her system wasn’t so depressed.

To
keep them both from falling asleep, Anna began asking questions. In the
next ninety minutes, she learned that Jonah was seventy-three years
old, Ridley’s wife was probably a bona fide genius, Gavin, Robin’s
sweetheart, loved Proust and classical guitar and the early works of
Andrew Wyeth, had wonderful hands and thought Isle Royale was America’s
last chance at saving Eden, that Adam had been married but his wife had
committed suicide, slit her wrists and bled to death in the bath while
he fixed the sink in the dressing room not ten feet away, and that Rolf
Peterson had great legs.