Anna had hoped to plummet deep into the land of Morpheus as her roommate had done. Sitting, talking by candlelight, it had been all she could do to keep from falling asleep midword. Now her legs twitched and her mind raced and she couldn’t get comfortable.
To stop the racketing thoughts, she focused into the night, hoping its deep quiet would creep into her soul. The bunkhouse groaned and popped in a satisfied manner as it cooled. Robin snored softly, something she never did sober.
Now that Katherine slept in a black plastic shroud on the floor in the carpenter’s shop, the room across the hall was empty. Anna could move in. It would be a simple matter of dragging her sleeping bag and pillow fifteen feet to another single bed and another bare mattress, but her usual need for aloneness had given way to the comfort of safety in numbers. Even if that number was two, one of whom was semicomatose.
Jonah or Adam might take the room. Adam, probably. When he was in the bunkhouse and not on the couch, he shared a room with Bob. Anna couldn’t figure out that relationship. Adam seemed to want to be Bob Menechinn’s friend one moment and showed nothing but contempt for him the next.
Bob, as the axman from Homeland Security, wasn’t in much of a position to make friends. Anna doubted if he fared much better when he was elsewhere, then wondered what it was about him that set her teeth on edge. When a person – or a situation – brought out a strong sense of unease, she’d learned to pay attention to it. A thousand “tells” were broadcast every minute: a tic, a wince, a smell, a shadow, a draft, a flick of the hand, a door ajar. The human senses experienced them all. The human brain registered them. The human monkey mind, clamoring with the shouting littles of life, was lucky if it recognized one or two. The message from the gestalt trickled down in intuition, gut feelings, geese walking on one’s grave, déjà vu. There was a reason or reasons she didn’t trust Bob. She just didn’t know what they were yet.
A shivering ululation cut into her thoughts, reminding her that she had been seeking to quiet their flames, not fan them. A wolf’s howl embraced rare magic; sound transforming into pure emotion, the kind that exists beneath the level of language. Train whistles had it. They touched a chord in the human breast that echoed a longing for things unknown. For Anna, the sound of a cat purring or the tiny thunder of their paws racing over hardwood floors had the power to cause instant, unthinking delight, but that might not apply to everyone.
Train whistles and wolves howling seemed to be universal in their ability to pass through the paltry defenses of civilization to the more fundamental primitive heart of people. Anna loved the sound, loved the pleasurable shivers it sent up her spine. At least until she remembered the wog, the pack coming through the housing area, the attack on Katherine.
Giving up on the idea of sleep, she slid from her sleeping bag and into Levi’s and a sweatshirt. It occurred to her as she completed this abbreviated toilette that, should an unfortunate incident befall her, she would be found without underwear, clean or otherwise. She’d be careful not to get hit by a truck.
Lighting her way with a battery-powered headlamp secured around her brow with an elastic strap – the preferred headgear of the Winter Study team from ten p.m. till sunup – Anna found the kit Katherine had used to extract blood from the wolf. Two of the eight vacuum tubes remained. She took them both, returned to the bedroom and put the headlamp on the table, facing away from Robin.
The biotech was deeply asleep, but her breathing was even and twelve breaths per minute so Anna wasn’t unduly worried. In fact, she hoped the girl was far enough out she wouldn’t wake up when the needle plunged into a vein in her antecubital site. Robin did flinch, but she didn’t wake. Anna watched as first one vial, then the second, filled with rich, dark blood. She’d neglected to bring a bandage, so when she’d finished she folded Robin’s arm over the ruined sweater.
The blood should have been drawn hours before, but Anna had other things on her mind. Tomorrow morning, when she could get Robin’s permission, would be too late. She hoped it wasn’t too late already. Pocketing her purloined hemoglobin, she left the bedroom. The door locked only from the inside, and she locked it before she closed herself out. If need be, she’d bang until Robin woke to let her in.
In the faint glow from the fire, Anna donned the necessary layers of clothing and then laced up the Sorels. Her body felt heavy and tired, but she ignored it. Till she could shut down her mind, her body was going to have to lump it. Another wolf’s howl threaded beneath the doors and around the window glass, and she stopped to listen. This call sounded closer, and she wondered if she was a fool to be heading out into the woods alone. Even having seen Katherine’s body, Anna harbored a belief that the wolves would not attack her. She felt that way about mountain lions and bears as well – about most wild animals in parks where she’d worked. The major exception was the alligators of Mississippi. They, she was sure, would like nothing better than a bite of Pigeon meat.
Her sense of safety with other carnivores was based on nothing factual. It was a powerful and totally illogical feeling that they knew she loved them and would leave her untouched. Aware it was irrational, and probably born from watching too many animated Disney films as a kid, Anna was careful never to test this notion. She wasn’t testing it tonight. Given a choice, she would have waited till daylight, but she wasn’t sure how long the blood sample would be viable.
Trudging along in tracks – hers and half a dozen others, several of them being moose – she reached the head of the trail to the V.C. A shape shifted beyond the tree line; not a visual shape, a sound, the squeaking the snow made when crushed, the peculiar, dry Styrofoam sound.
Moose, she told herself. Moose, like deer, were curious and would come to see what was happening. Hunted only by the wolves, moose on ISRO had little fear of people and often wandered through housing areas, campgrounds and by the sundries store.
Anna walked into the woods. Trees, naked with winter, closed around her like a barbed-wire fence. The flashlight cut swaths through the black: tunnels of white tangled with twisted branches and gray-scaled tree trunks. The fear that had been with her earlier on her first ill-fated trip down this hill returned.
“Damn!” she whispered.
At each step, she began to think she heard the faint echo of snow being compressed in the trees alongside the path. She stopped. The echo stopped. Hard as she listened, as far as she tried to push her senses and her flashlight beam into the darkness, it was impossible to tell whether she was being stalked, followed or was hearing things. Panic stirred beneath her sternum, not the fear that motivates action or caution but the unreasoning whine of buzz saws in childhood nightmares.
Turning out the light, she let the fear have her, let the panic throb on violin strings out of tune, sirens and screeching tires on concrete. When the first wave had passed, leaving her feeling light-headed and breathless, she spoke to the darkness, within and without.
“Being scared is beginning to bore me. Do what you have to do and I’ll do the same.” Speaking aloud in the frigid darkness was oddly daring; a wild act of sanity enacted in a classically insane way. It reminded her many things were a choice. Fear, to a great extent, was a choice.
“I’m headed to the Visitors Center,” she said to her monstrous, malevolent or imaginary friend. “If you need to devour me, or whatever, I’ll be in the back offices.”
She thought she heard a snuffle or a smothered laugh trickle back through the thick underbrush. It was so faint and quickly aborted she couldn’t be sure it was anything more than the scrabble of a raven’s claw on a branch.
The building housing the V.C. and the ranger station was not locked. The key was on the chest of drawers that served her and Robin as bed table. Stopping before the double glass doors, she stomped the snow off her boots so the first seasonals to arrive in summer wouldn’t have too great a mess to clean up. Once inside, she closed the doors behind her. The mindless fear was gone, but if a wog did wander the island seeking human flesh there was no sense in tempting furry fate.
She went to the District Ranger’s office, stopped in the open door and automatically swept the light switch into the ON position. No illumination was forthcoming. In the second it had taken her hand to push the switch, she’d remembered it wouldn’t work. Finishing the sequence made no sense, due to lack of electricity, but she pushed the switch down again in the OFF position anyway.
Searching by flashlight had its advantages. Able only to see the three-foot-by-three-foot spotlighted area, the eye was not distracted. Occasionally Anna’d turned the lights out when there was electricity to burn and used a flashlight to concentrate her mind on details.
The box of merlot was on the floor where they’d left it, the overturned mason jar nearby. Anna shined her light on the bottom: number 4427. Adam’s. Robin did well in the largely male world of wolf research by keeping as much under the radar as a beautiful young woman can hope to. In the days Anna had known her, she was careful not to call attention to herself and did her best to fade into the woodwork when others did. Breaking the tradition of the mason jars was out of character. If she’d been sufficiently drunk, she might not have noticed she was taking Adam’s jar – or noticed but been beyond worrying about consequences. Robin might have taken Adam’s glass for spite. Had she been a silly young woman, Anna would have considered that she could have taken it for love, the island equivalent of wearing the boy’s letterman’s jacket, but Robin wasn’t silly.
Fingerprints could be lifted from the jar. Several were apparent in the beam of the flashlight. Robin’s would be on it; Bob’s, probably. Maybe Adam’s. The only print that would be telling would be the print of the human version of the wog; someone on Isle Royale who shouldn’t be. Anna bagged it. At the rate she was collecting evidence of crimes that might or might not have been committed, the crawl space under the carpenter’s shop would soon fill up.
Taking her time, she followed the yellow circle of light around the office. A few items had been left on the desktop when the island was closed to the public in October and the District Ranger went back to Houghton: a stapler, a plastic box with a magnetized opening half full of paper clips, an empty in-basket and a bright pink pad of Post-it notes. These were lined up neatly beside the many-buttoned phone.
Robin hadn’t done the bulk of her drinking in this room. Not even a naturally graceful bi-athlete could get that totally pissed without disarranging a few things, spilling a few drops.
The office chair was overturned; the five starfish legs, each with a wheel on the end, did their best to trip Anna as she moved around the desk. Chairs of that design weren’t easy to tip over. Robin must have collapsed into – or onto – it and carried it down when she went to the floor.
Tracing the three points she’d found of interest, Anna moved the light from the wine box to the mason jar to the overturned chair.
Robin had not been holding the merlot when she fell. Rectangles half full of liquid didn’t roll as far as the box was from the chair. The mason jar was a distance from both chair and wine box. Robin might have dropped them – jar, then box – then collapsed in the chair. Bob might have moved them.
Anna crouched down and shined her light along the fuzzy tops of the close-cropped carpet. A flat, square package an inch or so on a side was beneath the desk. Lying on her belly, she fished it out. A condom, the package unopened. Unless District Rangers in other parks led far more exciting lives than they did in Rocky Mountain, or a couple of enterprising seasonals, waiting for the last boat off the island, managed to find a key and take advantage of the office with the view, this belonged either to Robin or Bob. Either way, it suggested a rendezvous had been planned. If the condom was Robin’s, Anna doubted Bob was slated to be the wearer.
It was not beyond the possibility that, as Bob struggled to help Robin, a condom he’d not thought of in years but kept handy in his wallet at all times like an ever-optimistic high school jock tumbled out and was kicked beneath the desk, but it wasn’t a scenario Anna was going to put money on. Bob brought the condom because he knew Robin was drunk and an opportunity to take advantage might present itself. Or Robin had been intending to meet with a lover and Bob had spoiled it. Maybe Adam’s jar was on scene because Adam had been on scene.
Anna shook her head as if an invisible jury watched from the hall. Adam had been on the couch all evening, front and center in the common room, as if he wanted it to be seen that he was in the bunkhouse.
Anna sealed the package with its tidy ring in the center between two hot-pink Post-its and slipped it into her pocket. In movies, law enforcement fought dramatic, complex evils. In real life, that was seldom the case. Law enforcement was the endless slogging through the ooze and slime of run-of-the-mill evil, evil so ordinary, so interwoven with the threads of people’s lives, that to root it out tore the victim and the community apart while the monsters shrugged it off in true monstrous fashion. Molestation, wife beating, incest, date rape, statutory rape, gang bangs at frat parties – all the nasty, dirty crimes – damaged the victims again when “justice” was perpetrated.
Anna had testified a number of times in her career and been to quite a few depositions. Defense lawyers were there to keep their client, innocent or guilty, out of jail. At any cost.
Prosecutors were there to put the accused, innocent or guilty, in jail. At any cost. Defense attorneys routinely boasted over cocktails of getting rapists or murderers or child pornographers off. It was a testament to their abilities. The excuse they made for shelving their integrity was the law school cant: they were making the state toe the line, make its case.
Most simply wanted to win.
The sound of metal sliding into metal blasted her musings with the jarring force of a shotgun being racked. She switched off the flashlight and, trailing her fingers along the wall, moved rapidly to where the hall branched, leading into the Visitors Center’s main room.
Stealth being impossible in full winter regalia, Anna turned on her light and swept the room before she crossed to the doors. Empty. No light came from outside, no person stood on the decking in front of the doors. Hitting the crash bar, she shoved, but the doors didn’t give. She grabbed the handles and rattled. The dead bolt was engaged. The only way to lock it was with a key from the outside.
The only way to unlock it was with a key from the outside.
Switching off her light, Anna stepped away from the doors lest she make a target of herself. The one other door to the outside was at the opposite end of the hall from the District Ranger’s office. Navigating mostly by memory and the occasional flick of her flashlight, she found it quickly. The bolt on it had been thrown as well, probably when the island was closed in mid-October.
Putting her back against the door, she stared down the dark hallway. The V.C. was built in the modern style: the windows didn’t open. Climate was controlled even in the “wilderness,” the vagaries of weather and the human need for fresh air shut out by glass and technology. Minutes before, she’d wanted to be in the building. Now, because someone – not wog or weird but a human, someone with a key and opposable thumbs – decided to imprison her there, she wanted out.
Bob Menechinn was her first thought. Ridley’s key had been missing. Bob or Robin could have lifted it from his desk and unlocked the Visitors Center. Robin was in no shape to creep back down and lock Anna in. She was also in no shape to defend herself from visitors in the night. Anna comforted herself with the thought that breaking down the bedroom door would rouse Ridley and Adam. The comfort was countered with the thought that Robin might open the door to whoever rapped on it.
Flashlight on, stealth forgotten, Anna ran down the hall, checking offices, in hope that somewhere a window had been made that would open, that in a mental lapse the architect had overlooked one small portal to the real world. Otherwise she would be reduced to shattering glass.
In the ladies’ bathroom above the sinks she found a window that could be louvered out from the bottom, creating an opening ten inches high and thirty-six long. She shucked off her parka and boots, and the cold bit into her with sharp teeth. Standing on a sink, she dropped the clothes and flashlight and followed them out of the window, eeling through headfirst. The drop was more than man-high, but snow had drifted against the building.
Anna landed on her back in the drift. Pain would have been preferable to the blast of snow down her collar. Another minute was lost as she pawed through the snow in search of the flashlight and another while she pulled on boots and parka.
Running felt good. Tired muscles and weary soul complained, but her body’s need for heat and her mind’s for speed soon quieted them and she plowed through the winter-quiet woods like a freight train, puffing and loud.
The housing area was still, the bunkhouse dark. Slowing to a walk, she turned off her light and let her breath return to closer to normal. Entering by the side door to Katherine’s kitchen/lab, she stood a moment and listened. Peace prevailed.
Dressing in the snowdrift, Anna hadn’t bothered with lacing her boots. She heeled out of the Sorels and slipped down the hall to the room she shared with Robin. The door was still locked.
“Robin?” Anna called softly and put her ear against the wood. The door was colder than it should have been. Heat from the banked fire in the woodstove sufficed to keep the bunkhouse at a fairly comfortable temperature even through the night. Anna knocked again. “Robin?” She called a little louder this time and knocked with a purpose.
Fear that she had let the biotech sleep before she should have took over and Anna shouted and pounded on the door to rouse her.
“What the hell is going on?”
It was Adam. At least somebody was responding.
“Robin,” Anna answered succinctly and kicked hard beside the doorknob. No boots; the blow sent a stab of pain all the way up to her hip, but the door held.
“Here, let me.” Adam was beside her, wearing boxer shorts and wool socks. He slammed his shoulder into the door and the lock gave way. A blast of cold air met them. Anna trained her light into the room.
The window over Robin’s bed was wide open.
Robin was gone.