Winter Study (29 page)

Traversing
a cedar swamp in the snow was just begging to have an ankle broken or a
knee sprained. Anna forced herself to slow down. Becoming a second
victim was too humiliating to contemplate. A gust of wind knocked snow
from branches down her collar, and something else that brought her to
an abrupt stop, head up, sniffing the air like an animal. She’d caught
a whiff of the odor she’d noticed the night they followed the wolf pack
down to the harbor. A death-and-worse smell she’d associated with the
stench of Algernon Blackwood’s windigo, the horrible odor that heralded
its coming. As before, the smell was snatched away before she could be
sure she hadn’t conjured it up from an overactive imagination.

Then the “find” was in front of her. A body.

Parts of a body.

The
reason Jonah had been able to spot anything from the air was due to
small creatures, probably foxes, which had worried and dug until they’d
uncovered the arm. Not Katherine’s body, just her arm, still in the
sleeve of her parka, her ungloved hand a stump of chewed fingers. At
least Anna assumed the arm was Katherine’s; it was wearing her coat.

The
sleeve of the parka wasn’t the only color in the naturally
black-and-white landscape. There was no blood on the ground — or, if
there was, the snow had covered it — but on the trunks of the trees
leading away from the severed arm was iridescent orange paint applied
with a spatter brush. The neon color was so screamingly out of place,
Anna had a moment of pure confusion as her brain tried desperately to
make sense of the phenomenon, flashing through traffic cones,
construction sawhorses, vandalism, police tape, confetti, graffiti,
trail blazes.

A
macabre vision of the severed arm blazing a trail to the body it was
snatched from played through her mind. She shook it off, the way a dog
shakes off a bath, and skirted the area where the arm lay, palm to the
sky, fingers gnawed to the knuckle bones. At the first of the
orange-daubed trees, she stopped. The neon dots were crystalline. She
pulled off her glove and pinched a bit of the stuff up, rubbing it
between thumb and forefinger. Body heat melted it, leaving a trace of
red on her skin.

She
didn’t sniff it or taste it. Blood was said to smell metallic, but she
could never smell anything unless there was a lot of it and it was
getting ripe. Still, she was sure it was blood. The spatter patterns
formed when Katherine had fought whatever had taken off her arm. For
some reason, the interaction of blood with the intense cold turned it
Halloween orange.

White
cedar trunks, bright Pollock-like paintings in blood orange, black of
the branches overhead sketching a white sky: the scene was stunningly
beautiful.

Until she saw Katherine.

The
body was facedown, head shoved partly under a log as if Katherine had
tried to burrow away from her attackers. The back of her parka was
torn, tufts of down leaking out rents that ran shoulder to hip where
claws had dug to get at the chewy center. Strands of light brown hair
mixed with the tatters of cloth and goose feathers. The fur that ringed
the hood of her coat was ripped away, as was half the hood. Blood, not
orange but black as tar, glued the mess together. From the waist down,
she was clad only in Levi’s. Her ski pants had been shucked off of her,
as a man might shuck an ear of corn, and for the same reason. The light
down trousers had then been torn to pieces, played with until there was
little recognizable as clothing but the suspender buckles. The Levi’s
were surprisingly intact but for the bottom of the left leg. That had
been chewed to a mess of string and blood. The foot was gone.

Anna
had to fight a bizarre urge to run. Mostly she liked the dead: they
were quiet, undemanding and never complained if they were dropped on a
carryout. Because the teeth of hungry little creatures had busily
uncoiled the mortal coil had never bothered her. Human bodies were as
dried leaves, acorn husks, snake skins: a thing of no import any longer
left behind.

Katherine bothered her.

She concentrated on breathing in and breathing out and making excuses:

The
light was unsettling — dim and slanting and yellow-gray — cold carped
on the bones, undermined body and spirit, the natural world behaving
unnaturally, claustrophobic living conditions, discord in the human
pack.

The
list of reasons did little to stop liquid fear coursing through her
veins because reason wasn’t the root of it. Ghosts, yetis, skin
walkers, vampires, zombies, gremlins, wogs and windigos — six million
years of campfire stories — were undermining the rationale of everyone
on the island.

“Get
a grip,” she growled and looked around the rest of the clearing.
Focusing past the mutilated arm, she began to see other disturbances in
the snow. Over an area about five feet in diameter, animals had been
digging. Where they’d dug were bright orange stains. She saw the foot,
boot torn off and bones showing where the flesh had been eaten away. In
another depression in the snow was a hank of light brown hair clotted
with black. Mostly whatever had stained the snow — fingers, flesh, a
toe — had been carted off and eaten elsewhere.

Little guys, foxes and ravens and rodents, had feasted. But the little guys had not torn a full-sized woman to pieces.

“Anna!”

She
twitched so hard it hurt her neck. Being startled pissed her off and
being pissed off was a lot better than being tired and scared.

“It’s
about damn time you got here,” she hollered. “Where the hell have you
been? What in God’s name could have held you up on this godforsaken
island?”

Ridley,
following her blasphemies, came through the tangle of downed trees with
more grace than she had managed. Behind him was Robin and, beside her,
Bob. That was what had held them up. Anna realized she was about to get
out of line and scaled back her anger.

She
thought to warn them, to say: “It’s bad” or “Pretty grim scene” or
“Take the women and kids back to the house,” but instead she just
waited till Robin and Ridley noticed the digging, the arm. Then, like a
tour guide from hell, she pointed out the various pieces.

Bob waded in and started brushing snow away from the arm. “Leave it,” Anna snapped. “I don’t want the scene compromised.”

“Wolves killed her,” Bob said. He started in with the brushing again, and it bothered her that he was uncovering the arm.

The arm, for chrissake.

It was cut off. It was hamburger. Anybody who wasn’t Bob would have brushed the snow from Katherine’s face.

“Wolves
may have torn her apart,” Anna said in a tone she considered
reasonable. “We don’t know what killed her. I need you to stop that.”

He looked up at her desperate or dangerous or scared. Anna didn’t think it was grief.

He was digging up her

arm. Her fucking arm.

Anna was having trouble getting past that.

“Another front is coming in,” Ridley said. “We’re going to lose the light in an hour or so.”

Another
dark and stormy night. Anna was getting that
clock-striking-midnight-as-the-power-goes-out feeling again. “Whatever
we miss won’t be here tomorrow,” she said. “It’ll be somebody’s dinner.”

Robin
took up photographic duties. The constant flash became a freakish
punctuation to the finds, the pieces of what had once been a young
woman.

A
young woman murdered by her first love, the wolf; when the snow was
swept from the body, it became clear she had been killed by a wolf or
wolves. Her throat was torn out, her head connected to her body only by
her spine. The damage was fierce but incomplete. The body had not been
eviscerated, the face was intact, the coat, though badly torn, was not
stripped from the meat.

“Odd,” Anna said, and: “Wolf.”

“Wog,” Ridley said.

“It was a pack of wolves,” Bob said, his voice as plummy and certain as if he were reporting the six o’clock news.

“If
it was wolves — natural wolves, pure wolves — it’s the first time in
recorded history it’s happened in America,” Ridley said. “What’s your
take on this, Menechinn? If it was wolves, do you get to open the
island year-round so Homeland Security can arm all the parkies and,
between creel checks and wake-in-no-wake-zone citations, Ranger Rick
can save us from the Canadians?”

Ridley asked as if it were a real question, as if he cared about Bob’s answer.

“Homeland
Security can shut down your little pissant operation anytime,” Bob
replied with the same big tucked-in smile he bestowed on everything,
and Anna wondered if he liked making Ridley miserable or was simply
incapable of empathy.

“Not
if this is a wolf kill,” she said. “Led by a wog or not, every wildlife
biologist in the world will be lobbying to keep the study going.
Scientists can’t stand an anomaly.”

“Doggone
it, where is Adam?” Ridley demanded. Apropos of nothing that Anna could
follow, he transferred his anger from Menechinn to Adam Johansen.
“Radio him again,” he ordered Robin and, turning his back on Anna and
Bob, took the camera from the biotech and began photographing the scene.

Bit by bit, as it was recorded by the camera, they brought together what was left of Katherine Huff.

As
they had at the necropsy, they worked as a team. This time Robin and
Anna handled the corpse, carefully brushing away the snow, and Ridley
photographed it in situ. Anna didn’t know what Bob Menechinn was doing
other than wandering around, staring at the ground, digging here and
there.

“Wolves
don’t do this,” Ridley said when the body parts were uncovered and
accounted for. “They just don’t. We were talking about this the other
day. There’s upward of two thousand wolves in Minnesota. They eat moose
and deer and sheep, when they can get them. They don’t hunt down and
kill humans.”

Anna
was studying the scene in an attempt to reconstruct the incident.
“Look.” She took one of the flashlights Ridley brought. The sun must
have been close to setting. The light was fading and sky, air and earth
were a uniform gray. Holding the flashlight at ground level, she sent
the beam across the surface of the snow. Ridley squatted on his heels
and followed the line with his eyes.

“You
can see where she crawled, trying to get away.” Anna played the beam
across a faint but discernible trough that had been cut through old
snow, then filled with new. “And there she tried to pull herself up on
a tree; tried to save herself. Then she goes down again there.”

“Wolves don’t behave this way,” Ridley said doggedly.