Winter Study (27 page)

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.