Winter Study (44 page)

“You see that?” Anna asked and pointed out the disparity. “What could account for that?”

“Maybe the moose ate Robin.”

Anna snorted, not a good idea when the air is below zero and the nose is chronically running.

“She could have ridden it,” Jonah suggested. He didn’t seem to be too concerned either way.

“What do you know?” Anna demanded, shining her light in his face.

“Cut that out, Dick Tracy,” he complained.

“What?” Anna kept the light where it was. The lenses of Jonah’s glasses flashed and the white of his beard glittered.

“I
don’t know anything,” he said after a moment. “But you’ve got to figure
Robin didn’t go hop-hop-hopping away in her sleeping bag like a kid in
a sack race. And there’s more ways to make moose tracks than to be a
moose.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. Did you happen to notice if the wog prints were always accompanied by moose prints?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither. What do you want to bet?”

“I’m not a betting man.”

“Me neither.”

It
was after midnight when Anna went to bed. She wanted to drag her
sleeping bag into Katherine’s room and close and lock the door, but she
stayed in the room she’d shared with Robin. Like Mrs. Darling, she
wanted to be there if Peter Pan returned the children he’d stolen, but
she doubted Robin had gone with an immortal boy. And she doubted she
was anywhere as magical as Never-Never Land.

26

Adam
was asleep on the sofa, or appeared to be. Bob had long since retired
to his room and Ridley and Jonah to theirs. Sleeping was usually
something Anna was good at under stress, that and eating. Years hiking
trails in the backcountry had taught her to sleep and eat every chance
she got, the way animals did. When one’s body was the only vehicle
available to keep one’s soul from drifting into the ozone, it behooved
the driver to keep the tanks topped off.

Tonight was a glaring exception.

Muscle
and bone sank gratefully into the hard embrace of the mattress. Fatigue
washed over her mind, warm and soporific. Then the delicious sense of
drifting into oblivion morphed into sinking under the ice in
Intermediate Lake, and she fought desperately back to wakefulness. The
nightmare version was more terrifying than almost drowning had been. In
the lake, there had been little time for anything but staying alive. In
dreams, there was all the time in imagination.

For
reasons probably relating more to her sleeping habits than her
near-death experience, she was naked in the water. The crippling cold
wasn’t a factor. Below her lay not the limitless new world she’d
glimpsed at the time but the terrors children suffer in nightmares:
being helpless and abandoned to a force so utterly evil, one never
musters the courage to look at it; a force that would not have the
mercy to grant the relief of death. Again and again Anna dragged her
bare breasts and belly up an icy edge, serrated like a knife, kicking
legs weak to the point of near paralysis, to fend off the black,
sucking certainty of what lay below.

It didn’t take too many repetitions of this nocturnal entertainment before she decided staying awake was a spiffy alternative.

She
lay on her back in the dark and stared upward at a ceiling that she
presumed was still there. In a lightless environment, the nothing above
her eyes could have been two inches deep or gone on to infinity. The
bedside lamp could restore the ceiling to its proper place; Jonah had
left the generator running. He said it was in case of emergency, but it
was for comfort, the knowledge that they could have light if they heard
the stealthy footfalls of boogeymen creeping about. Or boogey-wolves.

Bogus wolves,

Anna thought.

Werewolves.

Not
the species of legend that morphed from seersucker suits to snouts but
man posing as a wolf, taking on the imagined properties of the wolf:
stealth, strength, ruthlessness, viciousness, love of slaughter for its
own sake. It didn’t take a trained psychiatrist to see the projection
in that equation. Man gave the wolf all the dark bits of himself, then
vilified the wolf.

Isle
Royale’s wog might or might not exist. It was said DNA didn’t lie, but
it had also been said pictures didn’t lie until computers put the lie
to that. What lied was people and they lied all the time, and for every
reason under the sun. People lied with words and pictures, and, if it
were possible, they would lie with DNA. Katherine could have faked the
results for a reason that died with her.

Anna
couldn’t shake the certainty that why Katherine died was at the heart
of the bizarre happenings, but the researcher had not been shot or
stabbed or smothered. She’d been savaged by a pack of wolves. It would
take more time and expertise than anyone on the island had at hand to
fake that: tracks, scat, urine, wounds, fur and tooth marks.

Cause of death wasn’t in question and death by misadventure didn’t have a

why.

It had a cause: wrong place, wrong time, bad decisions, faulty machinery.

Why

needed motive and only humans had motives.

Anna
turned her back on the crowding infinity of night above her and stared
at the eternal nothing where Robin’s bed had been when she’d turned out
the light.

The heart of the issue was, why Katherine died.

Katherine had died accidentally at the auspices of wolves.

There was no way Anna could work that equation that didn’t end up in the twilight zone.

Sensing
herself headed in the same direction, she fumbled over the edges of the
desk between the beds, found the light, switched it on and sat up, her
sleeping bag tucked in her armpits. Reoriented in space, her mind back
in her skull, she marshaled what she knew about Katherine.

Katherine
met and fell in love with a wolf when she was three years old. Bob
Menechinn was her graduate adviser. He had carried her up five flights
of stairs when she was unconscious. Katherine had shown a desire to
keep Robin away from Bob. She’d gone so far as to tell Anna to warn the
pretty young biotech to stay away from him. Katherine was cowed by, in
love with or frightened by her professor. She rarely stood up to Bob.
The first time was in the camp between Windigo and Malone. The second
was in the cabin at Malone Bay after Robin had gone to free the trapped
wolf.

In
the tent, wog or wolf snorting around outside, Bob had gone nuts,
shouting and waving his headlamp. Katherine said: “Be quiet. You’ll
scare him away.” Remembering the look on Robin’s face when Katherine
hadn’t gibbered with terror — Katherine had been concerned about the
monster — Anna smiled.

Did
Katherine think it was her wolf lover come back for her after
twenty-three years or more? In dog years, that would be one old lover.
No, Katherine was not crazy; she didn’t strike Anna as even
particularly fanciful. She knew wolves and she wasn’t afraid. Not then
anyway. She’d told Bob to be quiet because she loved the wolf more than
she did him.

Early on, Anna hadn’t given Bob and Katherine as Bob

and

Katherine
more than a passing thought. Lovers, married lovers, ex-lovers, jaded
lovers were ubiquitous in every profession. Unlike wolves, humans
weren’t engineered to be monogamous. Considering it now, she didn’t
think Katherine was in love with Bob. Anna had found it impossible to
so much as like the man, despite the fact he saved her life, but women
often loved wretched men. Men loved vile women. In the infamous words
of Woody Allen: “The heart wants what it wants.”

During
the Malone Bay adventure, Anna began to suspect that what she’d first
taken for fear or jealousy on Katherine’s part was barely controlled
fury, the acidic variety that the powerless suffer, the kind that eats
away from the inside.

Katherine
had hinted Bob was withholding her Ph.D. Was that sufficient motive to
hate? Probably. People hated without much provocation.

The
second time Katherine contradicted him was when he’d said the study
must be shut down; she insisted the foreign DNA was sufficient reason
to keep ISRO closed winters, keep the study intact.

Protecting
wolves again? Protecting scientific study? Anna wondered if Katherine
had a greater investment in the island’s wolf/moose research than she’d
let on. Had she an interest that made it worth her while to fake the
DNA results?

Katherine was all whispers and Bob all shouts, yet both of them were opaque, keeping their secrets.

The
woodstove had been stoked later than usual and, though the door was
closed, the bedroom was warm. Anna let her sleeping bag fall down
around her waist. Pulling it back up to cover her nakedness, she
realized that the window, curtainless and without blinds — a fact she’d
never noticed before — was making her modest. No longer did she feel
the safety of an uninhabited wilderness beyond the glass.

She switched off the bedside lamp and let the sleeping bag drop.

Drifting
unanchored in the dark, she replayed Katherine. Bob introducing her the
first night, Katherine ducking, hiding behind her hair. Bob asking her
if they’d ever used ketamine, Katherine blushing and turning away.
Katherine insisting on telling the others at Malone Bay that Bob was so
strong, he carried her up five flights of stairs.

When she was unconscious.

Anna turned the light back on.

Bob had carried Robin back from the V.C.

When she was unconscious.

Bob
asked, “Have we ever used ketamine?” Robin lost one of the jab sticks
loaded with ketamine and xylazine. Katherine fought with Bob after
collecting the dead wolf’s blood. Anna’d had trouble with that. Because
Katherine had treated them as such, Anna guessed the blood samples were
important but couldn’t figure out why, given the work the researcher
had done in the kitchen/lab before the wolf had thawed.

Anna
had been assuming there were other samples from that wolf. There
weren’t, she realized. Blood had not been collected earlier during the
external exam; the wolf and his blood were frozen. There were no other
blood samples but those in Katherine’s pocket. The dismembered wolf was
blood dry and refrozen. Anna put the revelation that the samples were
unique aside for later consideration and went back to Katherine.