Winter Study (45 page)

Bob
was with Robin in the V.C. before Anna arrived. Bob was with
Katherine’s corpse in the carpenter’s shed, frisking — or fondling —
the dead woman.

Anna
wriggled free of her sleeping bag and, turning her back on the staring
window, pulled on sweatpants and a turtleneck. She turned the light out
again and, feeling her way from desk to door, opened it quietly,
slipped through and into Katherine’s room. Making no sound, she closed
that door and shoved something soft under it, a towel, she guessed,
then turned on the light. The black staring of the uncovered window
startled her. Night and wild had always been her friends. Now both made
her jumpy.

Katherine’s
laptop was on her desk, plugged into the wall to save its batteries.
Once, when Anna wished to pry into the lives of dead or uncooperative
individuals, she looked for paper: diaries, letters, notes; she
listened to phone messages. Now she went straight for the laptop.
Unless Katherine had a BlackBerry or an iPhone, the laptop would be
where she housed her life when she wasn’t using it.

Having
unplugged the laptop, she turned the light out again, dragged back the
bathrobe she’d thought was a towel, returned to her own room and
completed the operation one more time in reverse. Then she covered the
window with Robin’s parka, shoving the sleeves into the grooves of the
metal window frame to cover peepholes from the woods. There was
probably no need for secrecy. There was probably no one out in the wee
hours, peeking in frosty windows. But telling everyone everything
hadn’t worked. Anna was switching back to telling no one nothing.

The
laptop wasn’t password protected. The screen saver that came up was a
photograph of Katherine and an older woman who looked so much like her,
she couldn’t be anyone but her mother or an aunt. The two women were
laughing, the camera obviously held in front of them in Katherine’s
hand, as they yelled “Cheese!”

Anna
clicked the START button and began methodically slogging through the
files. Unlike paper files, computer files were snooper-friendly. There
weren’t mountains of paper to hide the molehills of information.
Katherine’s life was laid out and dissected as neatly as the wolf on
the table in the carpenter’s shop had been.

Number-oriented,
Katherine kept spreadsheets of her personal finances. She earned barely
enough to live on but was subsidized by a monthly stipend. From her
mother, Anna guessed by the notes Katherine had typed beside two of the
entries. She paid her bills by computer. The usual cost of living was
there: gas, water, electricity, food, insurance. Not surprisingly,
Katherine spent about three times as much on books as she did on
clothing and got her hair cut at a walk-in shop at the mall for ten
dollars a visit.

She
had been on the antidepressant Effexor for eighteen months. Half of
America was on antidepressants, but Katherine had been given a hefty
dose, 250 milligrams daily, plus .75 milligrams of Trazodone, an
antidepressant and sleep aid. There were weekly payments to a Dr.
Lewis. A psychologist, Anna assumed, from the regularity and frequency.
Dr. Lewis’s name had appeared at about the time of the prescription
payments for the antidepressants. The month prior to the advent of the
mental health expenditures was an entry to another doctor with the note
“D&C” alongside it. Other entries in the medical expenses were
marked “co-pay.” This one wasn’t.

Maybe an abortion.

Then depression.

Under the file named “Black Ops,” Katherine had saved sixteen articles from newspapers and periodicals as ridiculous as

The Star

and as sublime as

The Journal of the American Medical Association

on the subjects of amnesia, traumatic amnesia, fugue states, repressed memory and multiple personalities.

The
folder “Possibilities” contained short synopses of what Anna assumed
were personal profiles from a matchmaking Web site. After each was
written a number and a letter. Shorthand, possibly for the number of
times they’d contacted and the letter grade Katherine had used to rate
the contacts. There were considerably more F’s and D’s than A’s or B’s.
The last entry had been two months before the “D&C” entered into
the medical bills. One of the A’s or B’s might have been the father of
the D&C. Or Katherine might have stopped dating — or shopping — at
the time she became pregnant. What, if anything, this had to do with
her death by wild animal attack a year and a half later Anna couldn’t
fathom.

Under
the file name “The Great Escape” were fragments of sentences, as if
Katherine had been jotting down ideas or keeping a list.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS NEGATIVES ANYMORE.

IF MOTHER WAS DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE?

MURDER OR SUICIDE.

IF I WERE DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE?

MOTHER.

MURDER’S A DONE DEAL.

EVERYBODY’S ON THE NET.

WHO WOULD HIRE ME?

I WOULD DIE.

“Well,
that’s just cryptic as hell,” Anna muttered. The list gave the
impression Katherine was thinking of killing her mother or herself or
her mother, then herself. The mother that gave her money every month.
The mother she was hugging and laughing with on her screen saver.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS NEGATIVES ANYMORE.

The list that followed was nothing but negatives. “Everybody’s on the Net,” Anna read aloud. “Who would hire me? I would die.”

She
minimized that screen and clicked on a file named “Pictures” from the
main menu. Given the propensity to save everything when space is
measured in gigabytes, Katherine hadn’t saved many photographs. Most
were of animals, wild and domestic, that had been taken with more love
than skill. There were a half dozen of Katherine taken with the woman
on the screen saver, winter shots with mufflers and skis, both women
smiling and laughing.

There’s no such thing as negatives anymore.

Because few people used film.

Katherine
had been talking about digital photography. Anna returned to the list
saved in “The Great Escape” folder. Viewed from the perspective of
photography, it made sense.

There’s
no such things as negatives — in the classic stories of blackmail,
victims had to buy back the negatives of incriminating photographs.

If Mother was dead, who would care?

If
Katherine was referencing compromising photographs this suggested, not
that no one would miss Mother but that Mother was the person Katherine
was most concerned about seeing the photographs.

What
one didn’t want Mother to see was usually sexual in nature. Though born
from Mother’s womb and because of her sexual congress with Father,
girls — women — did not want Mom to see them in bed with some guy.

Or some girl,

Anna reminded herself.

MURDER OR SUICIDE.

Anna
doubted the murder referred to Katherine’s mother. More likely it
referred to the man who had impregnated her. Given the list of graded
Internet “Matches,” it didn’t appear that Katherine had any steady
boyfriend. She might not have had a flesh-and-blood beau at all. The
men in “Possibilities” could have been fantasies, a virtual love life.

IF I WERE DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE? MOTHER.

Suicide
was ruled out because of the devastating effect it would have on her
mother. Katherine was thinking clearly enough to realize whatever the
digital photographs contained, they would not damage her mother as much
as the death of her daughter would.

MURDER’S A DONE DEAL.

The
powerful emotion evoked by the concept of murder, with the other choice
being self-annihilation, gave Anna the gut feeling that this line
referred to the D&C, the death of an unborn child. Abortion was the
word Anna would use. If Katherine used the word

murder

and
still went through with the D&C to end her pregnancy, she had to
have had a powerful motivation. The obvious one was that the child was
terribly disabled or was a product of rape.

EVERYBODY’S ON THE NET.

WHO WOULD HIRE ME?

I WOULD DIE.

The rapist had sexually explicit photographs or videos of Katherine that he was threatening to put on the Web if she didn’t…

What?

Anna wondered. Katherine had no money. A graduate assistant, it was unlikely she had any power.

If she reported the assault? If she pressed charges? If she didn’t continue to allow herself to be raped?

“Jeez, other people’s lives,” Anna whispered and shook her head, feeling suddenly sad.

Though
prying eyes — should any be braving the night — had been shut outside,
she closed the laptop partway and leaned her back against the wall.

The
inferences she’d made from the list didn’t seem connectable to
Katherine’s death. Blackmailers didn’t normally kill their victims; it
was the other way around. There was also the annoying but inescapable
fact that Katherine had not been coshed on the head and tossed into a
Dumpster. She’d been brought down by Middle pack or Chippewa Harbor
pack. There was no way to be certain since the only one on the island
who could have run DNA from scat was dead.

It was an accidental death.

Anna
announced this in her brain. The feeling that the death was key to the
sickness of the island did not abate. Anna stretched her legs in front
of her, flexing her feet in their thick wool socks, cracking her ankle
bones. Till this moment, she’d not thought of Isle Royale as sick, but
the word fit. Wolves, moose, researchers, all were suffering an illness
not unlike the disease that must have swept through Salem before the
witches were burned. Hatred and insanity were virulent and highly
contagious. The infected lynched their fellows, gang-raped women,
burned down buildings, saw the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches
and were beamed up to alien spaceships to have their innards probed.