“Help me,” Robin whispered.
“Anytime,” Jonah replied as he followed Ridley into the common room. “Who’s been writing on the glass?”
“Nobody,” Robin said. “It just appeared.”
Bob joined them. Jonah pointed to the window. “Writing,” he said.
“It just appeared.”
“By magic?” Bob sneered.
Anna didn’t have a better explanation.
“Help who?” Robin asked.
“Me, obviously,” Bob said, sporting his signature wink.
Adam was safely – if not comfortably – ensconced in the Feldtmann fire tower. Bob, Ridley, Jonah, Robin and Anna were in the bunkhouse.
“Katherine,” Anna said. “Where’s Katherine?”
Katherine Huff had been gone four hours. No one had noticed. Anna might have, but the door to Katherine’s room was shut and Anna’d assumed the researcher was sulking, sleeping or licking her wounds from her spat with Bob.
Grabbing a flashlight, Anna went out onto the deck. Below the ghostly writing on the window, the snow had been trampled to ice rubble where Adam had been fetching armloads of wood for the stove. If there were new tracks, they blended with the old.
Anna shined the beam on the steps. They had nothing to tell her. Whoever had crept up to write the eerie note had left no tracks. That didn’t mean the writer was a thing of air and mystery; it only meant he or she had been careful. The storm blocked the moon and stars. Far enough from cities to be free of light pollution, the night was blind black. Driving wind harried the snow until the flakes were small and mean, stinging skin and eyes. It wouldn’t take an Eagle Scout – or an Apache scout, for that matter – to come and go, unnoticed and untraceable.
She, Anna thought.
This had the earmarks of a woman scorned seeking revenge or attention. How the trick was played on the glass, Anna couldn’t guess, but surely a woman who played with DNA would know enough about chemistry to manage it. Mentally Anna brushed off her annoyance. She’d never stooped to such a trick, but she’d sure as hell fantasized about it a time or two.
She returned to the window. The words were still there, limned in ice. Beyond the glass, she could see the dumb show of the three men talking, shaking their heads, gesticulating, walking short distances only to walk back. Without the pseudologic of words, they looked mad as hatters, each locked in his own world where he was king or jester or god.
A crazy-making current was running through the island. That a wog had manifest, a windigo died at their feet and a wolf been slaughtered didn’t completely account for it. The unreasoning fear of children raised on fairy tales where wolves had an overweaning penchant for evil trickled under saner thoughts. David Mech, Rolf Peterson, Ridley and a dozen other wolf researchers had spent decades debunking this myth, but there was no rooting out the ogres of childhood.
Fear was the yeast stirred into the mix of human dysfunctions, a catalyst that could spin them out of control. Fear was the difference between neurosis and insanity. Ridley detested Bob Menechinn for endangering his livelihood, his status and his study. He hated him for being ignorant and having power over the educated, being worthless but out to destroy the worth in other’s lives. Ridley tried to hide the worst of these emotions, but even the beard and the mustache and the startling intelligence couldn’t mask things all the time.
Yet Ridley had been the one to bring Menechinn to the island, had, in effect, given him the power of life and death over careers and learning.
Katherine was cowed by her mentor but had pounded his chest, however pathetically, and run away. Anna would have suspected a love triangle; it wasn’t cliché for no reason. NASA, trailer trash, Rhodes scholars: it didn’t matter, love – or what passed for love in the tabloids – made people dangerous. Katherine’s first love was a wolf; perhaps, like a Freudian version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” she was waiting to be devoured or rescued from a prolonged childhood by a handsome ax-toting woodsman.
Jonah drifted untouched by the Sturm und Drang as he flew untouched by the earth for much of his life. He’d been Winter Study’s pilot for eighteen years; Anna’d seen a picture of him, slipped into the plastic cover of the daily log, when he was in his forties or early fifties. One assumed he had a life the other forty-six weeks of the year – Anna’d seen the Web site – but he never spoke of it. Never spoke of a wife or a home or kids or his other job. Never shared anything even remotely personal. He defended his internal landscape with jokes.
In the dumb show being played out on the other side of the glass, Jonah was slightly apart from the fray, leaning in the doorway to the kitchen, his arms folded over his chest, a slightly bemused expression on his face.
Robin had retreated to a low, narrow plank bench along the rear wall. Whether or not she brought anything but the TNT of youth and beauty to this stew, Anna didn’t know, but Robin was affected by the uneasy atmosphere; Anna saw glimpses of it on her face occasionally before she escaped into the icy embrace of winter with the ease of one born of the union of a snow leopard and a polar bear.
Anna and her mother before her and her grandmother – a fighting Quaker Democrat and a flapper – were feminists. Much of her life, Anna had worked in a male-dominated world. She would defend the right of any woman to do the same, but she was realist enough to admit women made things more complicated, more volatile. Not because women were stupid or incompetent but because their presence often made men stupid and incompetent.
Like Menechinn. Except she doubted he was stupid. Arrogance was a form of stupidity because it caused elective blindness. Bob Menechinn might be a fool, but there was nothing wrong with his brain. Anna hardly knew where to start thinking about him. He possessed too many degrees in education to actually know anything yet had the supreme confidence that he knew it all. When he smiled – which he did too much – he had a way of pulling his chin in and letting his cheeks rise to cover his eyes that suggested he was holding back, striking a pose the way a penny-ante lawyer will when he thinks he’s got an ace up his sleeve. Menechinn believed himself to be a ladies’ man. The ladies, with the possible exception of Katherine, were unmoved.
“HELP ME” was fading, dimming out the same way it had appeared, line by line, in reverse order. Before hypothermia drove Anna back into the confines of the bunkhouse, she touched one of the rapidly vanishing marks. Her fingers were so cold from gripping the flashlight without gloves, she couldn’t feel anything.
Ectoplasm, she mocked and went inside.
Bob either didn’t think his run-in with Katherine was important enough or, conversely, was too important to share.
Anna played tattletale.
“She was crying,” she finished. “She struck out at Bob, then ran. I don’t think she was in any shape mentally to plan an adventure.”
“Katherine was fine,” Bob said blandly.
“‘Fine’ is weeping and running off into a blizzard?” Anna asked.
“Snow was making her contacts go nuts, is all. She wanted to get back to the bunkhouse in a hurry, is my guess. You’ve been watching too much daytime television.” And he winked.
One day you’ll shoot your eye out with that thing, Anna thought.
They made a perimeter search of the housing compound, Anna and Ridley going to the left from the bunkhouse, Robin and Jonah to the right. Bob stayed by the radio.
And the fire. And the wine, Anna thought as she slogged through blind-black, bitter weather. A walk that should have taken ten minutes took twice that. The four met up at the bottom of the compound near the road down to the lake. Even with flashlights, they could scarcely see.
“We’re not finding anybody tonight,” Anna said. “We’re liable to lose ourselves.” She told them of her thought that Katherine was hiding, playing games.
“If she is, it’s the last game she’ll ever play,” Ridley said grimly.
“She’ll freeze to death.” He was shouting. They were all shouting to be heard above the wind. Their puny noise did little to dent the immensity of the night and the storm.
“There’s three places she could survive,” Robin said. “If she broke into permanent housing, she might find blankets. Or, if she took some, she could make it in a shelter for a few hours.”
“Good,” Anna said. “Ridley, you guys take the permanent housing. Robin and I will do the lean-tos. Then we’re done for the night.”
Ridley started to protest but Anna overrode him. He wasn’t versed in search and rescue. Anna was. “We can’t search in this. Period. It’s too risky. We wait till daylight.”
“Okay,” Ridley said. “You’re right. Come on, Jonah. You two be careful.” Ridley was one of those rare leaders who only choose to lead when they are in their area of strength. Maybe this once Anna’s first impression had been right, maybe he was a terrific man.
“Lead on,” Anna said to Robin and, feeling trollish and lumpsome, stumped down the road beside Robin’s fairy-stepping form. At the orange fuel tanks, they turned onto a smaller trail leading toward Washington Creek campground. The ugly monument to fossil fuels was invisible in dark and snow, but Anna could feel it being hideous all the same.
Lean-tos – screened-in sheds for campers – were scattered along the bank of Washington Creek above the harbor, about a ten-minute walk from the housing area.
“It’s hard to believe a rational woman would spend the night freezing in an open shed when her toasty bed is so close,” Anna shouted.
“Thermal wimp,” Robin accused good-naturedly.
They shined their lights into every shelter. As the cold, dusty emptiness of one lean-to after another whispered of summers dead and winters lasting forever, hope dimmed. Had the missing woman been Robin, Anna would have been more optimistic. Robin was acclimatized, winter was her friend and she was accustomed to physical hardship. Robin wouldn’t panic.
Katherine was none of these things.
Katherine was also not in any of the employee housing.
ANNA SLEPT FITFULLY, wriggling like an uneasy larva in her down cocoon. The single bed was adequate most nights, but this night she kept waking to find she’d squashed herself against the wall or was perilously close to falling off.
Robin didn’t sleep much better. Anna could hear her thrashing about. Once she leaped from her bed, dug through her rucksack – at least that’s what Anna assumed; the dark was impenetrable – clunked a found object down on the desk at the bed’s foot and squirmed back into her sleeping bag. Or maybe Anna only dreamed she did.
Her dreams were thick and convoluted, dragging images from unrelated drawers and cobbling them together into stories Harlan Ellison couldn’t unravel. She woke, thinking she heard the howling of coyotes on her mother’s ranch. The call of a loon dragged her from sleep. She woke again to wretched disappointment, finding she was not in Paul’s arms but curled up like a sow bug on a strange bed.
The sun didn’t so much rise as the snow, still falling but with less vehemence, grew gray. There would be no search from the air. Breakfast was quick. Each person would take a radio and a different trail. Ridley attempted to call in to dispatch in Houghton, Michigan, to alert them to the situation, but radio contact, always sketchy, had been obliterated by the storm and the phone lines allowed more static than language. He e-mailed.
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.