The Winter Over

by Iden, Matthew

  The speaker snapped off once more, leaving the lounge in silence again. Anne looked around. This time, however, none of them had anything to say, and eventually they left the room, one by one.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Cass composed herself, trying to keep her face blank, but the man’s fingers and thumbs were pressing deep into the flesh of her ankle and the back of her calf like he was trying to separate the layers of muscle and tissue into their individual strands. The skin from her lower leg to the top of her foot was already a multi-shaded purple-green around the joint and, while there wasn’t any single spot that hurt more than another, the whole thing was throbbing to a beat that made her suspended foot swing rhythmically in place.

  “I’m glad I caught you when I did,” Dr. Ayres said mildly, kneeling at her feet like a suitor. Only a small hint of reproach colored his voice as he continued to roll and probe her bare ankle like it was a piece of meat. “If I hadn’t seen you limping down the stairs over by the greenhouse, you might’ve gone on to do some real damage here.”

  Cass grimaced. After losing the mystery figure in the tunnel and finding the VMF empty, she’d gone back to work rescuing the stranded Alpine. The pain in her twisted ankle had grown, however, until she’d been forced to hobble up the Beer Can steps in search of the stash of Advil she kept in her berth. But one unlucky encounter in the hall later and she was in triage, getting her ankle wrapped and praying Ayres wouldn’t think her injury bad enough to find her a seat on the last flight of the season.

  More lightly than she felt, Cass joked, “I figured I’d wait so you’d have more of a challenge.”

  He gave her a small smile. “You’re the one with the challenge. I see some impressive runner’s calluses here. I bet you haven’t skipped a day in years. Except for that plantar fasciitis, I think I see here. What did you do then?”

  “I switched to century rides. You can bike when you can’t run,” she said, then hissed as the doctor’s thumbs hit a spot that she didn’t think she’d had. Pain lanced from the sole of her foot to her heel. He held on gently as she pulled away.

  “Take it easy. I’m all done. With the inspection, at least.”

  He stood and rummaged around in a side cabinet. Ayres was a slender man in his fifties, sandy hair cropped close, but prematurely bald. Some people called him the Bartender because his mild manner and sympathetic ear had Shackleton staff coming to him as much for advice as twisted ankles. But Cass had also heard that Ayres had gotten his medical training in the Marines, and earned his stethoscope on the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, and a half-dozen other hot spots around the world.

  “What got you into running in the first place?” With his head buried in the cabinet, Ayres’s voice was muffled.

  Escape? Distraction? Survival? “Just a fitness nut, I guess. I ran in high school and college.”

  “Competitively?”

  “In high school, yes. In college, no. Club. I wasn’t even close to making the team.”

  “Sounds like my love life.”

  Cass smiled. “Am I going to live, Doc?”

  “I think so. You have a mid-level sprain. A Grade One that was probably eight degrees’ torque away from a Grade Two. Nice work, actually. It should take you, oh, a month to get your normal mobility back. A bit more than that before you can train for the Ironman, so take it easy in the gym.”

  Cass swallowed. “So, I get to . . . stay?”

  “Stay?” He smiled quizzically. “For Pete’s sake. Was that why you tried to slink away when I found you? Cass, you’d have to cut your foot clean off to get eighty-sixed this late in the season. You’re staying.”

  “Oh, God.” A wave of relief washed over her. “Thank you.”

  Ayres grunted and stepped back from the cabinet with two boxes of bright purple medical wrap. He pulled a stool over to the table where she sat, took his place back at her feet, and began gently winding the spongy fabric around her ankle, starting at the joint and working his way up to her calf, then back down to encompass half of her foot.

  Biting her lip, Cass watched, expecting the pain to blossom and swell, but the rigidity and extra support actually reduced the consistent hammering down to a dull throb. Ayres’s hands were sure and gentle and he had her entire foot wrapped in a few minutes.

  He handed her the other box of medical wrap. “Swap the wrap every few days. Try not to get it wet or they’ll smell you coming from down the hall. Not too tight or you’ll be back in here for gangrene. Stay off your feet—”

  She snorted.

  He gave her a look. “—as much as possible. Which I know is unlikely. But do what you can to give that ankle a chance to heal or you’ll limp for the rest of the winter. Everyone down here winds up with a nickname eventually. You don’t want yours to be Gimpy.”

  “Okay.” Cass leaned over and put her socks back on with difficulty. Ayres watched her struggle for a minute, then took pity on her and helped her get the sock over the wrapped foot.

  “Do you have any painkillers?” he asked, then caught himself. “I mean, like aspirin. I don’t want to know if you’ve got anything stronger than that.”

  “I brought a few bottles of over-the-counter stuff for bumps and bruises.” She smiled. “Nothing stronger, unless you count mint Irish cream liqueur.”

  “I said painkillers, not rat poison.”

  He fished a ring of keys out of his pocket, unlocked a steel cabinet in the corner of the room, and rummaged around for a moment before pulling out four or five square envelopes. “I’m going to give you some Percocet if you need it to help you sleep at night. And only at night, okay? Normally I’d say don’t operate any heavy machinery, but that’s what you do. So, take your OTCs to get through your shift and before you go to bed. Rip an envelope open if the pain gets too much to rest. Got it?”

  She nodded, then hesitated. “Can I ask you something?”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Please don’t tell me you’re pregnant.”

  Cass flushed. “Of course not.”

  “In that case, shoot.”

  She paused, trying to put the words together. “When we brought Sheryl in. Did you . . . did you perform. I mean, did you—”

  “Are you asking if I did an autopsy on Sheryl?”

  She swallowed. “Yes.”

  Ayres walked to a sink on the far side of the examination room, pulling off the latex gloves as he did so and chucking them into a biomed bin. Then, taking his time, he turned the water on, adjusting the hot and the cold just so, and began gently but thoroughly washing his hands.

  Cass cleared her throat. “I’m not sure why I want to know, but I suppose it’s because no one’s really talked about it. Hanratty made that announcement, but other than that, everyone’s acting as if it didn’t happen. I don’t know if they’re in shock, but part of me doesn’t think it’s right to brush it under the rug. On the other hand, it wouldn’t do anyone any good if the entire base was freaking out about it, either . . .”

  Ayres shut the water off and turned around as he patted his hands dry on a towel. “First of all, time was tight. I’ve done them and I’m fast, but you need at least twenty-four hours, sometimes more, to prep the body, perform the autopsy, make sure you have tissue samples for toxicology, then put everything back in place for safe transport back to McMurdo and eventually the States. Sorry if that’s a little graphic, but that’s the way it is. There’s no halfway with it. I had just enough time, but very little wiggle room.”

  Cass was silent.

  Ayres leaned back against the sink and tucked his hands into his pockets. “On the other hand, you get the best information on cause of death and the like right after the event that caused the death. So, even if an autopsy can’t be performed for some reason, it’s still a good idea to do an exam.”

  He stopped talking and simply watched Cass’s face. When he didn’t go on, she raised her eyebrows. “And . . . what did you find when you examined her?”

  Ayres continued to look back at her
impassively.

  “Did you examine Sheryl?”

  He pursed his lips.

  “Stomp your foot once for yes, twice for no.”

  That got a slight grin that quickly melted away. Ayres pushed off from the sink and stuck his head out of the room to check the hall, then took his place against the sink again. “Did you ever play Twenty Questions as a kid?”

  “We were more into I Never, but I know the concept.”

  “Why don’t we try my game. Even if you never played, the concept is pretty simple. Ask me yes or no questions. If you don’t get your answer in twenty, you lose.”

  Voices rose in the hall outside the office and they both froze, but the voices passed on and faded quickly. Cass licked her lips. “Did you examine Sheryl after Taylor brought her back to base?”

  Ayres crossed his arms over his chest. “No.”

  “Did you get a chance to examine her later, before she . . . before her body was loaded onto the plane?”

  “No.”

  “Did you try to examine her?”

  He shifted his weight. “Yes.”

  “And you couldn’t,” Cass said. When Ayres didn’t answer: “You weren’t allowed?”

  “No.”

  “No, you weren’t allowed or no, I’m asking the wrong question?”

  “No, I wasn’t permitted to look at her.”

  Cass paused. Hanratty had made a point of saying he’d be talking to Ayres about examining Sheryl . “Can you elaborate?”

  Ayres leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling. “I was told that what was done was done. Shackleton personnel were upset already, and since McMurdo had better facilities, the autopsy would be done there, so there was no need for me to do an examination. Taylor made some kind of joke that it’s not hard to keep a body cold, so what was the harm in waiting?”

  “Do you find that strange?”

  Ayres hesitated for the first time. “Yes. And no. From one perspective, it makes sense. A quick examination wouldn’t tell us much, certainly not as much as a full autopsy. And there’s no doubt that morale would have taken a beating if I’d done the autopsy or an exam, even if nothing extraordinary was found. People don’t actually want to know causes of death when it hits so close to home. Hell, I didn’t want to do it, not really. I . . . I had lunch with the woman, I played poker with her in B1, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t want to take a knife to her.”

  “But?”

  “But what if she’d wandered out on the ice because she was hypoxic from a bad air circulator? Or had gotten a bad dose of meds or recreational drugs and was hallucinating? Or was simply weak and dizzy from food poisoning? Any one of those scenarios could decimate the population of Shackleton. Half of them could be revealed with a visual exam. The rest would come out with a simple blood panel or toxicology test.”

  “So, the negative consequences of doing an exam don’t even compare with the upside.”

  “It’s not even close.”

  “Who told you not to do the exam?”

  Ayres huffed a laugh and pushed himself away from the sink. “You don’t make it twenty years as a corpsman by shitting where you eat, Cass. I’m sure you can figure out how many people at Shackleton can tell me not to do something and I’ve got to pay attention.”

  “But—”

  He held up a hand. “Sorry. I’ve already said too much. It’s water under the bridge. Whatever happened to Sheryl was terrible, but we’re not going to let it happen again. Right? So, wrap that ankle, take your pills, and you’ll be better in no time.”

  Cass could see the subject was closed. “Take two Percocet and call you in the morning?”

  “Yes, except don’t bother calling. There’s nothing more I can do for you.”

  “With advice like that, I’m glad I didn’t gash my leg open.” She slipped off the table, hissing a little as her bad foot took some of the weight.

  “Well, as they said in med school, the bleeding stops eventually.” Ayres stepped forward and helped her to the door. As she reached out to open the latch, he put a hand firmly on the door, holding it shut. She looked up at him.

  “Cass,” he said. The smile was gone. Pleasant wrinkles around the eyes and laugh lines around the mouth were now trenches of experience. The kind mask of the healer—the sympathetic ear of the Bartender—was gone, revealing the warrior beneath. “What we talked about here. Let’s keep it our little secret, okay?” When she didn’t reply, he continued, “I don’t like it any more than you, but I’ve learned over the years that crusades don’t help anyone. We’ll find out soon enough what happened to Sheryl.”

  “Thanks,” she said, which wasn’t agreeing. His smile returned and he held the door for her as she left the room and hobbled into the hall.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  For Cass, rebuilding a motor or flushing brake lines had always been the best form of therapy. Methodical, mechanical, hands-on tasks had a way of pushing her anxieties aside, giving her time and space to grapple with the thornier problems in her life. Over the course of her lifetime she’d left a trail of repaired engines, gearboxes, and motors in her wake, a testament to how well the tactic worked . . . and how many troubles she’d faced.

  And the trick had worked this time, too. After leaving Ayres and once more navigating the Beer Can steps, she settled into the garage and dove into an inspection of the derelict Alpine, checking off items on a mental list before getting her hands greasy in an attempt to settle her mind. Plumb the engine with a bore scope. Doodle with the combustion chamber and piston skirts. Lube up the grease zerks. Familiar work turned the growl into a happy hum as she started wrenching away on the busted snowmobile.

  As machines went, however, the Alpine wasn’t all that complicated and soon her hands were on autopilot, running over the engine with a will of their own, the tasks so routine that her mind returned to the strange still life of Hanratty, Taylor, and Keene staring back at her in surprise and dismay.

  The fourth person had been with them, they must’ve, but how was she supposed to pin down the station boss, his security chief, and the base psychologist about just what the hell had been going on? All three had the authority to be in the VMF any time they wanted, so she’d have to accuse them of something really out of bounds if she wanted more than excuses or blank stares . . . and, even then, they were under no compunction to answer her. Demand answers from Keene about the mad dasher she’d chased and he’d simply shrug and say, who?

  Which was a very good question. Cass’s movements slowed, then stopped. She leaned against the Alpine’s frame and closed her eyes, calling forth the image of a silhouette framed against the white ice, fading into darkness. The form had been slender, insofar as anyone in cold weather gear could be called “slender.” Which meant Cass had thought of the form as slenderer— was that a word? —than other parka-clad people around the station. Had it been a woman? She compared her mental picture to the height of the tunnel, relative to the pipes and cabling that ran along near the top of the wall. The runner’s head hadn’t come close to the lowest pipe. Short, then, or at least shorter than she was. Only a few men on base met that mark, but more than half the women did.

  Something else nagged at her, plucking at the edges. Something about the way the woman moved or how she’d run . . . her mind snatched at the image, tried to pin it down, but it curled away and evaporated. Cass shook her head, frustrated. She’d watched the figure for, what, three seconds? Not many clues you can pick up in the space of a few heartbeats.

  The garage phone rang, its electronic chime jarring her out of her thoughts and surprising her, as well. No one ever bothered to call down from the station since the little beeping noise always lost to the VMF’s routine combination of heavy machinery, protective headphones, and loud music. Cass limped over to the phone.

  A familiar lilting voice responded on the other end. “Love, did you really think you could hide down in that cave and I wouldn’t find you? You only go there and your room, you know.”
/>
  “Oh, shit, Biddi. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to blow you off. That snowmobile was in lousy shape and I started in on it and totally forgot about you guys topside. And you wouldn’t believe what was going on down here when I opened the door—”

  “You can tell me later,” Biddi interrupted. “Drop what you’re doing and get up here. You’re in luck. Sikes’s flight was delayed for a good hour or more, but it’s almost ready to leave now. That cute man Dave promised to lead the group in singing a special good-bye song to the senator and his bloody brownnosers.”

  “Biddi . . .”

  “And Peter hinted the kitchen made a cake for everyone to share later while we watch the trifecta.” Biddi paused. “I don’t even know what trifecta he’s talking about, but I know I like cake.”

  “It’s a tradition,” Cass said. “The winter-over crew is supposed to watch a bunch of bad horror movies to celebrate the start of the winter season.”

  “As long as there’s cake. Now, no excuses. Get up here. Or I won’t speak to you all winter. And that’s a very long time, chickie.” Click .

  Cass hung the receiver on its cradle and limped back to the tray, where she wiped her hands, shrugged on her parka, and headed for the door to the tunnel. Twenty painful minutes later, with a fat ankle that pushed against the sides of her boot in a way that couldn’t be normal, she walked down the corridor to the ob deck and threw open the door.

  She was just in time. Fifteen or twenty parka-clad bodies—half the winter crew—were crowded onto the small platform, all of them facing the Hercules as it barreled down the skiway. Biddi’s short form turned as Cass came onto the deck, shaking her fist at her, but at least she couldn’t hear her friend bitch at her: Dave Boychuck was belting out the verses to “So Long, Farewell.” The entire group pitched in at the end, their voices rising in muffled falsetto and their arms waving in exaggerated sweeps as the Hercules lifted off and lumbered into the sky.

  A tattered cheer went up as the plane, rather than just taking off into the distance, banked and came back for a farewell waggle of the wings before swinging over the station again and setting a course for McMurdo. Voices around her died off as they strained to catch the fading roar of the plane’s engine over the swishing of their parkas and the sigh of a light wind. After there was nothing left to hear, the little group still watched as the Hercules became a block, then a line, then a tiny dot in the sky. When it finally disappeared, Cass sighed. The last flight of the year had departed.