Winter Study (46 page)

The
virus needed certain conditions in which to grow; its victims had to be
willing to believe; they had to want, on some level, maybe even
unbeknownst to themselves, to do what the virus would tell them to do.
And they had to be greedy: for profit, for importance, for revenge, for
entertainment, for adventure. Only the greedy could be effectively
conned. One never read of Zen masters being taken in by scams. They
didn’t crave anything, and, therefore, con artists couldn’t set the
hook.

Ridley wanted to keep the park closed winters so the wolf/moose study could continue.

Bob
wanted to open Isle Royale to the public in winter because he’d been
paid to find a way to do that, if not in cash, then in future work.
Travel writers and professional “experts” had to find what the client
paid them to find. Honesty might be the best policy, but it didn’t pay
as well or get one invited back.

Katherine
had seemed to want to keep the island open but was more concerned that
Bob accept her thesis and pass it on to her graduate committee. At
least until they’d come to a parting of the ways after the necropsy and
Katherine had run off.

Robin
wanted to keep ISRO closed in winter and the study up and running.
She’d also seemed to want to be scared, the way teenagers love to
terrify themselves with tales of the homicidal escapee from the insane
asylum, Jason, Hannibal the Cannibal and countless assorted purveyors
of horror.

Anna
didn’t know what Adam wanted. His vanishing acts seemed to indicate he
wanted to be by himself, his words that he wanted to be of help to the
team, his actions that he disliked Bob one day and wanted to be his
best friend the next. Had a crush on Robin one day and was indifferent
to her the next. Maybe Adam didn’t know what he wanted either. Maybe he
hadn’t known since his wife died.

The
wolves, the ice, the windigo, the weather, the very blood and bone of
the island seemed to want them dead or confused or insane or gone.
Wolves came so close, it was as if they wished to be near humans,
wished to be seen. Wolves killed Katherine. Ice three inches thick,
thick enough to ride horses across, broke in a mouth-shaped hole at the
weight of one small woman. Snow blocked vision and wind tore at nerves
and cold ate away at hearts.

If
the wolves, wog led or otherwise, wanted the island to themselves
winters, they’d probably get what they wanted: the unusual behavior
patterns, the alien DNA and the oversized track sightings were
sufficiently unique and exciting that the National Park Service and
Michigan Tech would fight to keep ISRO closed to the public from
October to June and the study ongoing.

Ridley would get what he wanted for the same reasons.

Bob
would not, but it wouldn’t be through his annoying his employers with
excessive truthfulness, so, in a way, he would. Anna doubted he cared
about the study, the island, the wolves or anything but himself.

Robin was undoubtedly getting to be as scared as ever she’d dreamed.

Katherine would never get her dissertation published.

That left Adam, a widower or a murderer or both, a man who moved out of sync with the moods of the others.

ANNA
CREPT INTO THE COMMON ROOM. The old computer, plugged into the wall for
the use of seasonals, shined a single green, beady eye. The wood in the
stove had been banked and a line of embers showed between two logs,
casting enough light she could make her way without bumping into the
furniture. Adam’s outline darkened the couch, where he snored softly.

Stopping,
Anna looked down at his recumbent form for a minute or more. Adam
played possum; she’d figured that out. There was no way of telling if
he played possum now. It didn’t much matter, and, if he was playing
possum, she had the satisfaction of knowing the visitation of a
bedraggled middle-aged specter in the still of the night had to be
giving him the willies.

She moved the chair in front of the computer at an angle so she could watch both the screen and Adam and clicked on the blue

E.

The
island’s Internet server popped up. They lived in a bunkhouse warmed by
a woodstove, electrified by an old gasoline-powered generator, water
brought up from the lake and an outhouse, and they were on the
Internet. As she clicked on Google, it occurred to her that the odd
thing was she didn’t find it odd. As a kid, she didn’t have television.
It was all done with towers then, and she’d lived in a tiny town in a
mountain valley where the reception was lousy. Now she took instant
global communication from a remote island for granted.

She typed in “Katherine Huff.”

Katherine
had published in seven scientific journals, articles on DNA research in
mammals, and sixteen magazines and periodicals, on the subject of
wilderness education. On the latter, Bob Menechinn’s name was listed
first, with her as his graduate assistant.

The
articles on DNA were painfully technical, written for other scientists
and virtually incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Anna slumped against
the back of the chair, feet thrust far under the table, chin nearly on
her chest. She wasn’t sure what it was she had leapt out of bed to seek
in cyberspace. The mystery of who Katherine Huff was, why she’d been
savaged by wolves, wasn’t in journals. There wasn’t anything else, no
newspaper articles reporting murder or mayhem connected to her, no
MySpace revelations or vanity Web site with pictures of her dog and a
diary of her summer vacation in Europe.

According
to Hollywood, savvy Internet users could find out everything right down
to the subject’s bra size and favorite food. Maybe in real life they
could, too, but Anna wasn’t on that level. Google and Wikipedia maxed
out her cyberspace cunning.

Adam
snorted from a snore into deeper sleep, his breathing more a vibration
against Anna’s mind than her eardrums. The light from the banked embers
painted the angular planes of his face dull orange, his fancy mustache
black as an ink drawing against it. The warm glow erased years from his
face, the shadowed room the gray from his hair, and he looked no more
than twenty. Supposedly he was an old hand at Winter Study, a friend of
Ridley’s, a Park Service renegade who traveled with ease between
researchers and NPS staff. So Jonah had intimated. Anna had seen little
of it. Adam had let Ridley and the rest of them down as often as not.
When they needed him, he was nowhere to be found, and the batteries in
his radio died and came back so often they could have had regular roles
on

Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

He
shirked his work, then skied out in the dark when the body recovery
went sour. Behind Bob’s back, Adam praised, excused and mocked him. To
Bob’s face, Adam was obsequious and scornful by turns, the way a kid
will be when forced to curry favor with a person he or she loathes.

Why would Adam need to curry favor with Bob Menechinn?

Anna typed “Adam Johansen” into the box on Google’s home page. Seventeen hits. The front page of an old

Lassen County Times

had
a photograph of him standing with three other men. They were dressed in
fire-retardant Nomex and leaning on shovels. They’d been with the
wildland firefighters credited with saving the tiny town of Janesville,
California, from being burned. The rest were from local papers in
Saskatoon. These were archival and covered the suicide of Cynthia Jean
Johansen.

The
first reported only the barest of facts. Cynthia Johansen, nee Batiste,
a twenty-two-year-old senior at the University of Saskatchewan, had
been in the bathroom of the apartment she shared with her husband of
eleven months, Adam Johansen. The bath was separate from the sink area
and she had closed the door. Her husband, a thirty-one-year-old
freelance carpenter, had been cleaning the trap under one of the sinks.
When he realized she had stopped speaking, he tried to get her to open
the door. By the time he broke it down, Cynthia had bled to death from
three deep cuts made by a man’s straight razor, two to the left wrist
and one to the right.

According
to the school newspaper, Cynthia’s best friend, Lena Gibbs, said
Cynthia had miscarried two months prior to the incident and had gone
into a severe depression. Gibbs said Cynthia had never talked about
killing herself, but she had talked about being a bad person and
suffered crippling guilt over the loss of the baby.

Twenty-two.

Anna
slid farther down in the chair, the picture of a lowrider sans muscle
car. Anna’s older sister, Molly, had been born when their mother was
twenty-three. This was not abnormal. The body wanted to reproduce at a
young age, when the chances of conceiving and the mother living through
the birth to care for her offspring were greatest. From Anna’s vantage
point, twenty-two seemed impossibly young to be dealing with college,
marriage, pregnancy and miscarriage, yet women managed it without
killing themselves — or anybody else. Often, younger women dealt with
miscarriages better than their older sisters. Youth was resilient in
body and mind. The future still held the possibility of many live
births.

Anna
wondered if Cynthia Jean’s guilt was brought on or exacerbated by other
factors. Drugs, maybe, or intentionally rash actions designed to end an
unwanted pregnancy. An abusive husband had brought on more than one
miscarriage. Because Adam’s wife’s death was ruled suicide didn’t mean
he didn’t kill her; it only meant that if he did, he’d gotten away with
it.

The
next article, written the following day and on page two of the paper
instead of page six, reported that Adam had been removing the sink trap
because his wife said she’d lost her engagement ring down the drain. He
told police that while he worked, Cynthia had talked with him through
the door about how much she loved him and how glad she was he had given
her a home and that the eleven months they’d been married were the
happiest of her life.

The
phone rang and he went to answer it. He said his wife asked him to stay
and talk to her, but he said he’d be right back. The call was from one
of Cynthia’s teachers, and he brought the cordless phone into the sink
area from the kitchen.

Cynthia
wouldn’t respond when he spoke, and the door to the bath was locked. He
told the police and, later, the newspaper reporter that he thought his
wife was mad at him for answering the phone when she’d asked him not to
so he ignored her and went back to working on the sink, occasionally
making remarks. He said he got angry, then worried, and that was when
he broke through the door and found her.

Anna
saw her husband, Paul, in her mind, felt him in her heart and couldn’t
imagine the kind of pain Adam must have suffered. That is, if he was
telling the truth.

The
only story she’d heard that was more tragic was the accidental death of
a three-year-old who’d sneaked out and crawled behind his mother’s
Camaro to surprise her when she left for the grocery store.

Paul
Davidson was a Christian, an Episcopal priest, he believed in a loving
God. Paul was also Sheriff of a poor county in Mississippi. He saw
suffering of the worst kinds, cruelty and ignorance, predator and prey
on the human scale, and it was far more vicious than anything between
wolves and moose. Anna’s husband didn’t believe in the magical thinking
of God granting wishes, but he did believe in the importance of prayer.
He didn’t believe in pearly gates or Saint Peter or crossing the river
Jordan. He didn’t believe in any other hell than the ones found on
Earth. He didn’t believe in angels or ghosts or miraculous answers to
prayers. Yet he believed he would be at one with his God when he died.