Winter Study (50 page)

“Rid,
I’d never hurt Robin. You know that. If I could bring her back right
now, I’d do it. Let me go, Rid.” The last was said almost sadly, and
Anna remembered that the two men had been friends for years, a fact
that had been easy to forget from the interactions she’d observed on
the island.

Ridley
lowered Adam carefully back into the kitchen chair. “Sorry,” he said
and went back to stirring the oatmeal. If he didn’t pay attention, it
was going to be the consistency of library paste, but Anna knew better
than to offer to take over for him. Age-old customs were not suspended
merely because hard times came. People needing reassurance tended to
cling to them with ever-more tenacity.

They
ate quickly. Though no one but Adam seemed anxious to start the search
for Robin, it was tacitly agreed that it would be wrong not to seem
anxious. Anna didn’t want to search because she didn’t believe she
would find a living woman, and the photographs on Katherine’s cell
phone had put her more in the mood for revenge than body recovery. By
the way Ridley’s once-lovely skin sagged around his eyes and pulled so
tight across his mouth that dints of white showed on either side of his
nose, Anna suspected he was holding on to control with his fingernails.
A man of order, this chaos was unhinging him.

Ridley would search,

Anna
thought. He’d do everything he had to until he was too tired to lift a
foot for another step, but she doubted he was thinking clearly. Without
the thinking, the physical work of searching would not bear fruit
unless he got luckier than seemed likely. For all his flirting with
Robin, Ridley was Jonah’s love; he was like an old woman with an only
son. Until his boy was out of the woods, the wolves could have
everybody else.

Bob was scared.

Adam took the bowls from the table and dumped them in the sink.

“What do you want us to do?” Ridley asked Anna.

“We
have to search,” she said and tried to keep the pointlessness out of
her voice. Adam was right; they could do with more optimism.

“Since
she was taken in her sleeping bag — a winter bag, probably good to five
or ten below — there’s a good chance she survived.” She drummed her
fingers on the table and thought. “One of us took her, you guys know
that, don’t you? Or there’s someone else on the island who has been
screwing with our minds.”

That
sat in the air for a while. Ridley stared at Adam and Bob in turn. Adam
played with a spoon. Bob’s eyes were skittering around the room, as if
he followed the path of a butterfly on Benzedrine.

“Which one of you found Katherine’s cell phone?” he blurted out finally.

He’d seen the missed call from Anna.

“Are you still on that cell phone kick?” she snapped. “Just pay the two dollars.”

“What…” Confusion passed over his face, then cleared. “It’s more than two dollars. Somebody found it.”

“Leave it alone,” Ridley said wearily.

“Maybe
Katherine took it with her,” Adam said. Had he used sepulchral tones,
it would have been mocking at best and bad taste at worst, but he said
it the way a grocer would say “four dollars a pound.” Bob’s face
quivered like a pudding when the door slams.

Anna made a mental note to call Bob again soon.

“What do we do first?” Ridley cut across the others.

There
was a story problem Anna’d had a hard time with in fourth grade. A
farmer with a rowboat wanted to get his fox, his goose and his bag of
grain across the river but could take only one at a time in his tiny
boat. If he leaves the goose with the grain, she’ll eat it. If he
leaves the fox with the goose, the fox will eat her.

Who
would try to find Robin, if she did happen to still be living, and who
would sabotage the search? Who was the fox, who the goose?

The
matter was taken out of her hands. “Bob and I will head up the
Greenstone,” Adam said. “Get your stuff, Bob. These guys are going to
dither half the morning.”

Since
Anna couldn’t think of any better arrangement she didn’t argue. The
five of them couldn’t cover enough country to find a hidden woman. Or a
hidden corpse. The only way they were going to locate Robin was if the
kidnapper wanted them to or if Robin was alive and helped them find
her. Much as Anna wanted the latter to be true, she didn’t let herself
get too attached to the idea.

Adam
and Bob left to get their gear together and suddenly the kitchen felt
bigger. There was more air to breathe and the walls moved back.

“Can you ski, Jonah?”

“I got the silver medal in skiing in the 1908 Olympics,” he said.

“I
knew that,” Anna said and smiled to make sure she still could. To
Ridley she said: “Why don’t you and Jonah do Feldtmann. We’ve got
nothing to go on except that she was carried out in a sleeping bag.
That suggests whoever carried her had to travel on improved trails or
he wouldn’t get far. There’s only a couple places on the island she
could have been taken and kept alive: Feldtmann fire tower, Malone Bay
ranger station or the cabin at Daisy Farm. Daisy Farm and Malone are
reaches. They’re too far.”

“Why
would anybody take Robin to Feldtmann?” Ridley asked. He wasn’t asking
Anna; he was asking the ether. Neither of them answered.

“What are you going to do?” Jonah asked.

Anna looked hard into the pale blue eyes behind the round lenses.

“Why? Are you worried about me?”

“It seems the animals separated from the herd aren’t living to a ripe old age this winter.

Riper

old age,” he amended with a ghost of his old raillery.

“I’ll recheck the housing areas and the lean-tos,” Anna told him.

“Anywhere else and we’re just looking for a body.”

“Keep your radio on, and keep it on you,” Ridley said.

“Make sure your batteries are charged,” Jonah added. “Adam’s been having a heck of a time with his. A heck of a time.”

Then
Anna was alone in the bunkhouse. Every pair of cross-country skis was
in use. The snow was eighteen inches deep where it drifted and nearly a
foot where it didn’t. Snowshoes hung on the wall, but with a foot to a
foot and a half it was a toss-up whether they were more or less trouble
than slogging through in boots. Had Anna meant to search, as she’d
said, this might have bothered her.

What
she meant to do was take the bunkhouse apart till she found out what
the hell was going on. In the process, she dearly hoped to find out who
took Robin. “Who” might tell her where the young woman had been stashed.

In time to find her alive

was the thought Anna wouldn’t let herself add.

30

Anna
found exactly nothing. Bob’s laptop was password protected, as was
Ridley’s. Neither Jonah nor Adam had a PC. Drawers and duffel bags
produced the expected long underwear and dirty socks. Sitting on the
floor of Bob’s room, his duffel bag between her knees, Anna was swamped
with helpless rage. Snatching up the emptied satchel, she flung it. It
bounced off the side of the bunk and smacked her in the face, a
stinging cut high on her left cheek where the luggage tag struck.

The
bag was old and worn; the leather around the tag had grown stiff and
cracked. Anna looked at the offending object: PROFESSOR MENECHINN,
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN. Bob was so lazy that in ten years he’d
never bothered to change the address. “University of Saskatchewan,”
Anna said aloud. The name struck a chord, and she sat in silence
waiting for the rest of the music to surface.

“They’re both Canucks,” Jonah had said of Bob and Adam.

“Cynthia
Johansen, a graduate student at the University of Saskatchewan, lived
with her husband, Adam Johansen, a freelance carpenter.”

Not
only were Adam and Bob Canadians, they had both lived in Saskatchewan
and at the same time. Bob taught at the university where Adam’s wife,
Cynthia, went to graduate school. It wasn’t a great leap to put Cynthia
into one of Professor Menechinn’s graduate courses. It was an even
shorter leap to imagine him assaulting her.

Then Cynthia committed suicide.

Adam never recovered from her death.

Adam told Ridley to recommend Bob for the Homeland Security review.

Adam had been excited at breakfast, happy.

“Holy shit!” Anna said. Adam was going to kill Bob. He was going to do it today.

Without
skis, she’d never catch them. She took the snowmobile. Hammering up the
Greenstone, icy wind lashing her cheeks and scraping her skin, Anna
more than once considered turning around, letting Adam do mankind a
favor. A world without the Bobs was a tempting idea. Rehabilitation
didn’t work with guys like Menechinn. What he did wasn’t just a crime;
it was a character flaw, a rottenness within.

Still,
she didn’t leave Adam to his work. For one thing, she liked to think of
herself as a half-decent human being. Not to mention if the two killed
each other, she might never find out what happened to Robin.

The
Greenstone climbed gently at first, then rose precipitously with
switchbacks that threatened to push the snowmobile into the trees to a
rocky escarpment thrusting above the tree line. The slope on the
western side of the island was forested. On the east, the ridge fell
away precipitously, a sheer sixty-foot drop, to a flat narrow boulder
field skirting the edge of a meadow.

Forcing
the snowmobile to its limit, she built up sufficient speed that when
she reached the ridge the machine leapt a foot into the air, banged
down in a spume of snow and rushed toward the drop. Squawking, she
jerked to the left. The front of the snowmobile jackknifed. The machine
rose up on one ski in alarmingly slow motion, toppled over and
shuddered to a stop as the engine died.

Ahead
of her, through the veil of falling snow, stood two shrouded figures.
Skis and poles were jammed into the snow like battlefield grave
markers. This was where Menechinn was to meet with the fatal accident
that had been awaiting him since he’d been brought to the island.