Anna skied home in the last of the afternoon. By the time she’d stowed the items she’d collected beneath the shop floor, the last of the light had gone. The cell phone she kept. If the battery warmed, it might have enough power to at least let her see to whom Katherine made her last call.
Though it was after dark when she returned to the bunkhouse, no one had radioed to see if she were alive or dead. No one seemed to have the spirit to care. Cabin fever had become epidemic. Ridley worked at his desk in the room he and Jonah shared. Adam lay on the sofa, sleeping or pretending to. Bob’s door was closed, and Jonah, for once uninterested in company, sat in the dim light of the common room’s overhead light, dividing his time between watching Adam, as if trying to guess his weight, and staring at a well-thumbed Newsweek. On the table by the magazine was a mason jar with an inch of red wine in it. Number 2787, Anna knew. Ridley, Jonah and, before he retired, Rolf Peterson drank their evening libation – served by Jonah – from mason jars. Each knew which was his personal jar from the number stamped in the glass. Wolves were not the only creatures whose evolution was affected by isolation.
Divested of her many layers and dressed in dry, if not clean, clothes, Anna stood in front of the woodstove amid racks of drying underpants and socks. The fever was upon her as well; she didn’t know what to do with herself. She wished she could call Paul, but she’d have to do it from the public phone in the common room and, since the storm moved in, the connection was so bad it was exhausting to try and converse. E-mail was a possibility, but Internet connection was patchy at best.
“Did Ridley get through to report Katherine’s death?” she asked of the room in general.
Jonah answered. “E-mailed. Got one back. As soon as it clears, the Forest Service will be here with the Beaver. Everybody goes.”
Bob had gotten his way, to a degree. That was the reason for the spiritual collapse of the Winter Study team. This season’s work was over unless Ridley could talk the Superintendent into relenting. Given the manner of Katherine’s death, it would be easy for the NPS to simply never reinstate the study. The high-profile nature of the research cut both ways. An ISRO researcher’s death by wolf would be big news.
“When do they think the weather will break?” Anna tried to keep the note of longing from her voice, but getting off the island was looking like a reprieve from a life sentence in a refrigerated lunatic asylum.
“Another front’s coming down from Canada. Three days, maybe a week. We’ve been here as much as two weeks without the Beaver getting in to bring us provisions,” Jonah said. “Too dangerous to fly in this stuff.”
Adam opened his eyes. “Three days?” he said. There was a note of alarm in his voice, as if three days was either not enough or too much to bear.
To Anna, seventy-two hours seemed an eternity. A week, a death sentence.
Adam closed his eyes again.
Silence descended again, punctuated by sneaky pops and hisses as fire consumed wood. Jonah went back to reading and watching Adam. The easy camaraderie was breaking down. Ridley didn’t laugh at Jonah’s antics and Jonah seldom indulged in them. Ridley distanced himself from Adam; Jonah watched him, and Adam took every chance he could to go off by himself.
Another week of this and Anna was going to get seriously cranky. In the twenty-first century, people assumed that nothing could stop rescuers, but, as advanced as technology had become, weather could shut it down. She thought of the climbers who died on Mount Hood in 2006. Storms were too severe for the search-and-rescue teams to do their work.
Mother Nature had sold them out and Old Man Winter held them hostage. No risks would be taken for a body recovery of a woman killed in an accident.
Anna wished she were in Natchez, Mississippi, cutting back the roses in Paul’s front yard.
Paul’s front yard. Anna had been on her own so long she wondered if she would ever lose the mental habit of thinking of “Paul’s” and “hers,” never “ours.” When she referred to “his” house, he would invariably take her in his arms and say “our house.” When they married, Paul truly did give “all that he had and all that he was” to her. Much as she would have liked to do the same, Anna was not made that way. A core of her remained unshared, a fortress she retreated to when she needed to marshal her internal forces.
The outer shell of her parka was dry to the touch. She lifted it off the rack. Turning the coat inside out to dry the lining, she felt a lump in the pocket. The vial of wolf’s blood; she’d forgotten to put it in the toolbox evidence locker. By now, it would have thawed. Stowing it beneath the carpenter’s shop would only serve to refreeze it and what little value it might have would be lost. She left it where it was.
The blood samples Katherine had carried with her to the cedar swamp stuck in Anna’s brain: burrs under her saddle, stones in her shoe. Crimes – or accidents – told a story. The protagonist did something for a reason and the result was the incident. When an action occurred that didn’t fit in the logical unfolding of the story, Anna couldn’t leave it alone. People who lied were invariably caught eventually because the lie never completely worked with the rest of the story.
It was possible that the blood samples didn’t fit into the story because they had no relevance. Katherine might have pocketed them with the intention of doing tests when she returned to her kitchen/ lab.
Katherine had fiddled with wolf parts nonstop for the better part of two days. The kitchen was filled with racks of vials containing samples of tissue, blood, bone, stomach contents, hair, ticks, mites and other marvelous things. What tests could be left to do? Why not use the blood she’d taken before the wolf was moved to the carpenter’s shop?
Leaving the heat of the stove and the oppressive peopled emptiness of the common room, Anna went to Katherine’s makeshift DNA lab. With its single bed shoved in a corner and the haphazard piles of a storeroom used by many and organized by none, the kitchen was bleak.
The PCR was in its travel case on the counter, the record book beside it. Anna opened the log and read what she could understand of Katherine’s notes. The researcher had not written anything she’d not discussed with the rest of them, no illuminating secrets.
As Anna closed the log, The Shining unreeled behind her frontal lobe, the scenes where Jack Nicholson grinned his I-am-one-crazy-bastard grin. Was she growing paranoid and delusional in a snow-bound building? No secrets, no plots, no ulterior motives or sinister intent, just a mix of strange bedfellows trapped in a very strange bed with one claustrophobic hypervigilant law enforcement ranger?
Anna put the book back precisely the way she’d found it. The log’s owner would never be back to notice; she did it from habit. Methodically she checked each of the various samples in their vials and packets. No seals were broken, no envelopes slit open, no papers in disarray.
Wog DNA wasn’t what triggered Katherine. For a scientist, a find at that level of idiosyncratic bizarreness was tantamount to a cat finding a real live mouse full of catnip. Something she’d discovered during the necropsy precipitated her mad dash into the woods. Anna walked to the window and stared past her reflection in the dark glass, trying to see around the corners of memory to that precise moment.
Ridley’s hand was cut and bleeding. Anna handed Katherine the chunk of meat from the wolf’s throat. Katherine mewled like a newborn kitten lost in its mother’s fur. Shortly thereafter, according to Jonah, the researcher pocketed the blood samples and ran out of the shop.
Jonah said she’d pocketed the samples and run out.
Feeling anxious but not knowing why till she realized she was half expecting another message to appear on the window glass in spectral words, Anna wondered what Jonah had to gain by the lie. He could have slipped the vials into Katherine’s pocket; he could have said she’d run out when she’d merely strolled, but Anna couldn’t come up with one moderately rational reason why he would do so.
The old pilot was as attached to Ridley as a father to a beloved son. Lately he had been watching Adam the way he’d watch a dog bitten by a rabid skunk. Jonah had no use whatsoever for Bob but didn’t appear to harbor the hatred of him Ridley did or the schizophrenic anger and obsequiousness Adam displayed toward the man.
Anna gave up. She took the tube of blood from her pocket and stared at it. It was just a sample from a dead wolf, and there were plenty more where this came from.
Maybe.
Maybe the importance of the vials was in the fact that there weren’t more. Would Jonah have reason to tamper with vials of blood, then switch the doctored versions for the real samples when Katherine wasn’t paying attention?
“You’re reaching,” Anna chided herself. Even a diabolical, dyed-in-the-wool, honest-to-comic-book professional nemesis had to have means, motive and opportunity. Unless Jonah was the great professor he played at being when on a roll, such a convoluted methodology was uncharacteristic.
Anna decided to quit stirring in her brain and Katherine’s lab before she began making up crimes just to keep herself amused. What she needed was a good book.
“Hey, Ridley.” Anna leaned in the doorway of his room. His back was to her, his long, delicate fingers poised on the keyboard of his laptop, hair loose and shining around his shoulders. He looked the very image of Christ Jesus without the halo and the white nightgown.
When he turned, the renaissance artists’ vision of Jesus vanished. Rings of purple beneath his eyes had deepened since breakfast and his winter-white skin looked coarse and loose. “Hey,” he replied. Weariness flattened his voice. Anna snuck a look past his shoulder to see what he was working on. Unoffended, he followed her gaze. “Yeah,” he said. “Yet one more defense of the study. Fifty years we’ve been at it. Fifty years of watching and what we know is, we don’t even begin to know what we don’t know about wolves and their relationship to their prey. Yet every bozo with a dog and a high school diploma knows it all. David Mech says one thing, Rolf Peterson agrees; I back it, and some NPS brass says: ‘But the girl who sits next to me in homeroom thinks…’”
“‘You’ve got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.’” Anna quoted Butch Cassidy.
Ridley’s eyes went hard, and it occurred to her he would have been five or six years old when the movie came out. Chances were good he’d never seen it. And he certainly hadn’t memorized the good parts, as a percentage of her generation had. As far as he was concerned, he’d offered her a glimpse of himself and she’d mocked him. Anna wished it wasn’t so but knew if she tried to explain herself it would make things worse. It always did.
“I need the key to the ranger station,” she said instead.
“Sure. The lights aren’t on. The generator serves only the housing area. What do you need?”
“A book,” Anna replied. “The Visitors Center must have a library of some kind.” The Visitors Center and the rangers’ offices were located in the same building, the beautiful new facility overlooking Washington Harbor.
“Not much of one,” Ridley said as he rummaged through the top drawer of his desk. It was full of pens, paper clips and other detritus that Anna thought would have taken more than a couple weeks to amass. “Reference stuff, is about all there is there.”
“I’ve finished the Newsweek,” she said drily.
Ridley laughed, and she was glad he chose not to carry a cross moment further than necessary. “The key is somewhere in this mess, but I don’t know where. Adam!” he hollered.
Looking like a man who’s been awaiting a call rather than someone roused from sleep, Adam appeared soundlessly in the doorway beside Anna. So soundlessly, she started when he spoke.
“Yeah?”
“Give Anna the key to the V.C. She says she’s read the Newsweek.”
“Already?” Adam cocked one eyebrow in a way that made Anna think of her high school principal, Sister Mary Corinne. “You’ve only been here a week.”
“Speed-reader,” Anna said.
Adam reached into the front pocket of his jeans and took out a small ring of governmental-looking keys. It was Ridley’s turn to cock an eyebrow, but, not being gifted in that department, he managed a mere wrinkling of the forehead. Years in the wilderness or small isolated communities to inform her, Anna knew Ridley thought it peculiar that Adam carried keys. Nothing – or nothing they needed – on the island was kept locked. When he’d first arrived, Ridley unlocked the buildings they would be using and left them that way. There was no one to lock them against. The V.C. was only locked because it was unnecessary to the study.
In summer, with the exception no doubt of employee housing – NPS people were notoriously trusting – buildings would be locked at night against visitors with larceny or vandalism in their souls. The major thieves on the island in winter were the mice, and few locks deterred them.
Ignoring the skepticism, Adam removed a single key from the ring and handed it to Anna. “The door jams, so don’t let it fool you. When you turn the key, it’s unlocked. After that, brute force is your best bet.”
For the length of time it took her to walk through the common room to her own room, Anna entertained the wisp of a fantasy that she could just zip out to the V.C. and zip back; that she didn’t have to put on her heavy socks, ski pants, fleece overshirt, balaclava, gloves and boots. Like the Sun King’s Versailles, much of one’s time in the frozen north was spent dressing and undressing.
Outside, the temperature was minus seventeen. With the windchill, it was closer to minus forty. A jaunt to the outhouse was scarcely bearable. Without gear, the quarter mile to the V.C. could prove deadly.
THERE WAS NO WINDCHILL. The wind had stopped, and the forest felt as if it were holding its breath, the island in stasis, waiting. Despite the fact she’d been steeping her brain in boogeymen and monsters of the id, the waiting didn’t feel threatening, merely a stillness through which Anna moved, a moment out of time in which her breath was stilled as well. The good version of death without the annoying part where one died.
This frozen idyll was ended when she heard a shuffling in the dark beyond her flashlight and, before the beam had rooted out the squirrelly culprit, her mind had shown her a slavering, long-toothed, red-eyed wog skulking in the night.
“Damn!” she whispered. Being frightened of being alone in the woods pissed her off. The woods, the wilderness, were where she hid from the monsters of the populated world. To become prey, even in her mind, was intolerable. Despite the prickling of her neck hairs and the cringing along her spine, she forced herself to walk slowly and deliberately down the trail.
By the time she stood on the wooden porch of the V.C., stomping the snow from her boots, she was cold to the bone. Clumsy in gloves, she inserted the key, turned it counterclockwise, and exerted the recommended brute force. The door came open so easily, she fell backward, stumbling over her big feet and landing on her rump with a grunt that would have done a wild boar proud. For a moment, she lay there, staring into the blank sky. It crossed her mind that this was the perfect opportunity to wave arms and legs feebly, experience the worldview of a topsy-turvy beetle. That insight into the insect mind might be the most enlightening experience she’d have on ISRO. Sloth, not an innate sense of human dignity, decided her against it. She rolled over, got to hands and knees, rose and started in the open door.
Halfway across the lintel, a cry stopped her. Not a breath of wind, not a decibel of sound pollution, the voice cut into her eardrums with the force of a slap in the face.
“Is somebody there? Is somebody there? Help me! If somebody’s there, help me!”
Bob.
It was fucking Bob.