Winter Study (52 page)

Adam was still standing near the cliff’s edge, his feet inches from where the rock fell away.

“Why did you do that?” he asked softly.

“I
don’t know,” Anna said. For a minute, they stood, listening to the
scissor cut of the wind in the trees and Bob’s lament. Snow came at
them in spinning gusts, air currents made wild and playful where the
earth dropped away to water.

“You know what he is?”

“Some
of it. I think he drugged Robin. I think he did the same to Katherine,
then raped her and took pictures to blackmail her into silence. I’m
guessing he did something like that to your wife.”

“Cynthia,” Adam said.

“Cynthia,” Anna gave Adam’s memory the honor of a name.

“She
was like Robin. Not raised like her or athletic like her, but with that
innocence that doesn’t wear off at thirteen like it does for most of
us.” Adam’s gaze moved from Anna’s face to where Bob clung to his tree,
his moaning and cursing settled into a murmuring chant low enough they
could sense the tenor but no longer had to hear the words.

“Cynthia
had never been out of school — went straight from kindergarten through
to her Ph.D. program. Her dad raised her by himself; only kid. Her
mother died of appendicitis when she was barely walking.”

Anna didn’t know what to say and figured nothing was best. The talking was taking the action out of Adam for the moment.

His
attention returned from the trees where Bob had run. “Cynthia thought
men were nice,” he said. “She thought they took care of women and
children, saved kittens from trees and helped old ladies carry
groceries to the car.” A hint of warmth touched his voice and it no
longer sounded of frozen harp strings.

“I hadn’t thought of that in a while,” he said to Anna and shook his head. “How could I have forgotten that?”

“Too busy hating?” she hazarded.

“It was something to do,” he said, and most of the chill was back in the strings.

“Bob was her teacher?” Anna asked.

“‘Outdoors Education.’ Two semesters.”

Anna
waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. He drifted, his eyes moving
slowly over her head as if he was reading a complex story in the gray
of the sky above the basalt. Finally his gaze returned to Earth, to
Bob, sitting now, his back to the tree he’d been hugging, his head back
and his mouth open.

“Bob
drugged her. He did it more than once. She didn’t tell me till she got
pregnant. She was ashamed. She was afraid she’d lose me, that either
I’d never feel the same way about her or that I’d go berserk and tear
his head off and spend the rest of our lives in jail. She couldn’t tell
anyone else. There were the pictures, and she knew what they’d do to
her dad and me. Then she found out she was going to have a baby. I’d
been on a six-week job in Manitoba when the baby was conceived. So she
told me. Three days later, she got into the bath and cut her wrists.

“I
wasn’t with her when she died,” Adam said, and, for the first time,
Anna could hear tears in his voice. “I had to answer the phone. Guess
who was calling.”

“God damn,” Anna said, the oxygen gone from the air.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got to take him back,” Anna said. “I’m sorry,” she added.

“I could kill you,” Adam said.

“Maybe.”

“Getting
killed for the likes of Menechinn’s crazy.” Adam laughed, and there
seemed to be genuine humor in it. “Shoot, getting a hang-nail for the
likes of Menechinn is crazy.”

Anna said nothing.

“I
guess wasting time trying to kill him is crazy too,” Adam said. The
thought or the laugh had gentled his voice, and he shook his head as he
spoke.

“Maybe,” Anna said.

“No maybe about it.”

Slowly he raised his arms out to his sides, a man crucified on white. He cocked his head, smiled and stepped back into nothing.

31

Anna
fell flat on the brink of the drop, arms outstretched. The fingers of
her right hand caught Adam’s sleeve above the elbow and closed
convulsively over the fabric. Then his weight struck her, and shoulder
and collarbone smashed into the stone beneath the snow. The noise in
her head was the cacophony of pain. A loud, sucking pop, and her ulna
was torn from the socket. Crack of a dry twig: the collarbone snapping.
She would have screamed, but cheese-thick agony blocked her throat.

“Don’t let go,” she managed in little more than a whisper.

A
ripping sound sawed her eyes open. Her face was hanging over the cliff,
her body spread-eagled on the edge. Her right arm, weirdly elongated,
wrist showing between glove and sleeve, drew a straight line to Adam’s
arm, drawn rigidly above his head. Anna had not held on. No one could
have stopped the plummet of one hundred sixty pounds with four gloved
fingers and a thumb. Not even Anna. In a freak accident, her hand had
jammed through the nylon of his ripped coat and her wrist was in a
noose of duct tape he’d wound round the sleeve to keep it together. Had
she wanted to, she couldn’t have let him go.

“I’m
pulling you up,” she gasped. Breathing hurt where her collarbone had
broken, but the pain in the dislocated shoulder made it seem like
nothing and she snorted a laugh that turned to snot and mixed with the
snow caked on her face.

“Damn
you, Anna,” Adam said. She couldn’t see his face; it was gone below the
tatters of his sleeve and her arm. For a moment, a moment that was made
into a nascent eternity by the vicious firing of nerve impulses in the
right side of her body, Adam said nothing.

Finally words floated up their conjoined arms: “Let me go.”

“I’m
pulling you up,” Anna said. She doubted she could pull up a
four-week-old kitten at this point, but there wasn’t much else to hope
for.

“You haven’t the right. Let me go.” He didn’t sound afraid, only tired — so tired he could barely find the strength to speak.

Anna might have done it. People had a right to die if they wanted to. People had a right to die the way they wanted to.

“I can’t,” she admitted. “My glove caught in the duct tape.”

“You are a piece of work,” Adam said.

“Bob!”
Anna yelled, an echo of when she’d called for him on the breaking ice.
It yielded the same result. There wasn’t enough expansion room in her
lungs to try again, and she laid her cheek on the sleeve of her parka,
the bare rock of the cliff edge where Adam’s fall had scraped the snow
away an inch from her eyes.

It
was moving. Tiny increments of rock no bigger than sand pebbles were
creeping past. Adam’s weight was dragging her over. Kicking hard, she
tried to drive her toes into the snow to anchor herself. The
duck-billed Sorels pummeled down to the basalt but found no purchase.
The effort accelerated the slip.

“Uh, Adam?” she said.

The grating sound that had opened her eyes after her shoulder tore sounded again.

“Adam? I was wondering if you could grab onto anything. I’m sort of sliding up here.”

More grating. She slid another inch. Her nose was ripping across the basalt. Tears and snot and snow and fabric blinded her.

“You know, just anything. Maybe a branch or something?” she tried.

“Once you’ve saved me and I’ve saved you, you can always jump again.

“Bob!” The guy was a pervert and a rapist and stoned out of his mind, but he was strong as the proverbial ox. “Bob!”

She
slid farther, the skin of her chin peeling off against the sharp rock.
Her eyes cleared enough, she could see down her arm to where her wrist
bent, the duct tape wound around like a manacle.

Wedging
her free hand heel first into the snow beneath her chin, she pushed
till the bones in her good shoulder cracked. Muscles wrenched at the
collarbone, forcing the shattered ends farther apart, and she screamed.
The slipping stopped.

“Adam? Let’s die later. Give me a hand here, okay?”

Grating.
Metal, it sounded like, and Anna dared hope he was doing something
constructive, maybe driving a fingernail file into the basalt like a
piton or carving a foothold with his belt buckle.

“Anna?”

“I’m here,” she said. “Where the hell else would I be?”

“On a three count, you pull. Got that?”

Anna nodded, feeling the ice and stone cut her face. “Got it,” she managed.

“Anna?”

“I got it, for chrissake! Count already.”

Adam laughed.

“I’m glad you’re having fun,” she snarled.

“One…
two… three.” There was a tearing sound as Anna pulled, digging her
knees in the snow and pushing with the heel of her hand. Adam flew up
over the cliff, sailing into the air, as she fell back on her butt and
heels.

Not Adam. His ripped-up old parka. He had unzipped it and slid into the arms of his wife. Or the devil.

Anna
flung herself back in a belly flop on the top of the escarpment.
“Where’s Robin!” she yelled into the white void. There wasn’t even an
echo. Adam lay shattered at the bottom of the rock face, coatless, his
red flannel shirt a scrap of color in the landscape.

Life isn’t for everybody.

Robin
Williams had said that. Life wasn’t for Adam. When his wife had died,
he had his hatred to sustain him. Had Anna let him kill Bob Menechinn,
she knew he would still have stepped off the cliff. Without Bob, Adam
was lost.