Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  Bob might have decided to quietly follow their trail back to the snug kitchen at Malone Bay.

  Or maybe he was watching her from the fringe of boulders, waiting for the ice to swallow her. Cautiously she pivoted her head and peered back the way she’d come.

  Fat Christmas card flakes she’d so admired earlier in the day drifted in a veil of lace, blurring the shore. A shape hunkered near the water – not particularly informative, given the finger of earth was littered by boulders of all shapes and sizes.

  “Bob!”

  A shadow big enough to be Menechinn broke away from the others. Anna couldn’t tell if he’d been standing, watching, or had that moment emerged from between the rocks.

  “Help me!” she hollered, and he moved out onto the lake. Neck aching under the strain, she turned back to stare at the far shore. What was it about Menechinn that made her think him capable of any evil? Of standing by, watching another human being die? Before she’d climbed out of the Beaver onto Washington Harbor, she’d never heard of him. Since then, he’d proven annoying, a little sexist, a little mean-spirited and a little cowardly, but Anna had friends that were meaner, more macho scaredy-cats, and she enjoyed them despite it. Occasionally they annoyed her, but she never seriously considered them capable of acts of craven cruelty.

  She risked another look back. Bob was halfway. “Stop there,” she said, relieved not to have to shout, to move too much air between her and another solid object.

  He stopped. He didn’t say anything. Snow leached what drab colors there were woven into his scarf and mittens. The lower half of his face was covered and his eyes were shadowed by the fur of his hood.

  “I’m on a chunk of ice broken free from the lake,” Anna said, trying to be as clear and concise as possible. “The whole thing is loose. I can’t move without tipping it over and spilling myself in the drink.”

  Still, Bob said nothing, not: “How did it happen? Are you okay? Why did you do an idiot thing like that?” Nothing.

  Anna had to turn and face forward before her skull broke free of her spine. The fear boiling beneath her breastbone solidified into a jagged piece of ice colder than the lake. “I need you to kneel there, directly behind me.” She pitched her voice to carry. “Put both hands wide on the ice – the piece I busted loose – and don’t let it come up when I move forward. Don’t push it down; just don’t let it come up. Got that?”

  Wind sang across the parka’s hood over her ears. Beneath her, broken edges of ice grated against one another, the sound of teeth grinding in a nightmare.

  “Bob?” She was afraid to try to look over her shoulder. She was afraid he wouldn’t be there.

  “Answer me, God dammit!” she snapped.

  “You broke through?” he asked. Relief that he responded at all, that he’d not left her, was so great, irritation at his slowness almost vanished.

  “Yeah. You need to stabilize the floating ice so I can get off.”

  “Why don’t you jump?”

  “Jesus!” Anna started to turn; her world tipped, the low edge sinking farther, water rushing up to touch the side of her boot. “Fuck! Jesus. God.” Anna got religion all of a sudden. “That’s why,” she snapped. “Hurry up.”

  There was no reassuring sound of size-thirteen boots crunching closer.

  “I weigh twice as much as you do. If you broke it, I’ll go through,” he said.

  “No you won’t. I think it busted along a fault line, or whatever ice gets. It’s not thinner here than anywhere else. The whole thing just broke loose when I stepped on it.”

  Jumped on it, she reminded herself. Should she die, she wanted to be sure she knew who’d been responsible. “I jumped on it,” she amended, hoping the confession would give him courage. “If you lie down and slither on your belly, your weight will be distributed over a greater surface area. It’ll hold you. You probably don’t even need to do that, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Lay down and…” She was starting to babble, as if by keeping a rope of words spinning out she could drag him closer, talk him down like the clichéd stewardess-cum-pilot in old disaster movies.

  “That’s not a good idea,” Bob said. “We’ll both go in if I get any closer. Let me call Ridley.” He sounded mature, reasonable; he sounded as if she should believe him.

  “What the fuck is Ridley going to do?” she said, suddenly more angry than afraid. “He’s on the other side of the island in a snowstorm. My legs can’t hold out much longer.”

  Till she said it, she’d not allowed herself to think it, to notice that her muscles, tired from two days’ hard walking with a heavy pack on her back, were starting to twitch as she stressed them in her ongoing balancing act. Tiny muscles, seldom used, were being called into play as the infinitesimal weight shifts were executed. They weren’t strong. They wouldn’t last. When a knee buckled or a leg cramped up, she was going to lose her delicate balance.

  “I’ll call Robin,” Bob said, and she heard him busying himself with his radio. “Hey, Robin,” he said. Winter Study didn’t bother with radio protocol. With so few people, it wasn’t necessary, and their natural contrariness when it came to NPS regulations demanded they eschew it. “Anna broke through the ice. It won’t hold me, I’m too heavy, and somebody’s got to get closer to her than I can. Where are you?”

  “Lake Richie.”

  While Anna and Bob had set a single trap, she and Katherine had completed their side of Intermediate and moved on to Richie, the next lake in the short chain. They were an hour’s walk away.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and start toward us,” Bob said authoritatively. “They’re coming,” he added unnecessarily.

  “I heard.”

  Bob wasn’t going to do as she asked. He had it set in his mind that the ice wouldn’t hold him. Or he was afraid that it might not, which amounted to the same thing. Anna fought down the urge to scream and shriek imprecations and obscenities. Sharp, hot tears sprang into her eyes and promptly froze like the Ice Queen’s splinter.

  Arguing a person out of being afraid – particularly when they wouldn’t admit to being frightened – seldom worked, and Anna didn’t try to do it now. A tic started in her left thigh muscle above the knee, a flick of the skin the way a horse’s hide will flick to shake off flies.

  “I suppose I could just balance here till the ice refreezes along the seams,” she said sarcastically.

  “How long do you think that would take?” he asked seriously.

  Anna was going to die and there would be no one but an oversized clown to witness her demise. “Come around to where I can see you, would you?”

  “The ice won’t-”

  “Big circle, Bob, big circle, stay as far out as you need to just-” She stopped to let off the steam building in her brain. She’d been about to say “just move your fat ass,” etc., etc., expletive not deleted, but, from what she’d observed of Bob Menechinn, he wouldn’t respond well to that approach. “Keep well back from me,” she said instead. “The ice is solid there.”

  For a moment, he didn’t speak or move, then she heard his boots squeaking over the snow to her left. He loomed into her peripheral vision then, finally, to where she could see him without straining. Pissed off as she was, the sight of him relieved her. He didn’t look like he was about to run off and leave her to perish. She had that going for her.

  “I need you to go to the shore and get a tree limb, a long one, as long as you can manage.”

  Bob looked toward the shoreline. Though less than half a football field away, it was murky, dark and out of focus behind falling snow. “Visibility is getting bad,” he said. “I’d be afraid I wouldn’t be able to get back to you. I don’t want to leave you alone out here.”

  Anna cocked her head the way a Jack Russell terrier will when it’s trying to figure out what its master is saying. The visibility was bad, and she knew, as close as they were to the shore, connected by radios, if he went into the trees he could still get turned around and be unable to find where he’d come in of
f the lake.

  “Don’t go into the trees,” she said. “There’ll be something along the shore. Something is better than nothing.”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone,” he said. “It would take too long.”

  His words sounded fine, his voice was even and strong. Still, she suspected his sudden devotedness had more to do with not wishing to go into the spooky old woods alone.

  Blinking past the snow and the shards of tears frozen in the inner corners of her eyes, she tried to see who he was, a key to move him. Mockery wouldn’t do it. His ego was too fragile. In a way, he reminded her of the psychotics she’d worked with in the lockdown ward where she did her brief mental health internship when she was getting her EMT. Men and women shared a common room, with a television set between the men’s ward and the women’s ward. Anna’d spent her time there, too ignorant to be of much help to the nurses and too small to be of much assistance to the orderlies, who looked more like bouncers or second-string football players than upstanding members of the medical profession.

  It had been a number of years ago, back when “crazy” was as much a medical diagnosis as an insult. The ward wasn’t for neurotics; the people who ended up there were desperately ill. Most had lost so much of their world to mental illness and the drugs administered to control it that they didn’t care what was said to them. It had little to do with what they heard. Those who could still interact tended to respond instantly, and sometimes violently, if their delusions were challenged. Anna’d always thought it was because somewhere inside they still knew the difference between the reality around them and the one that they forged for themselves, and they believed when the illusion they had of themselves died they would die too.

  Sane people weren’t a whole lot different; they just didn’t drool as much.

  Bob Menechinn had a vision of himself. The squeaky, scared man in the tent attacked that vision. That’s why he’d had to work so hard the following day to rebuild it. The cowardly Bob, who panicked at the snort of a wolf, wasn’t a man he could live with.

  At the moment, Anna could muster no pity for him, but she knew she would get nowhere trying to shame him into doing right. Shame would attack the illusion.

  The tic in her thigh graduated to a twitch. Soon the muscle would cramp.

  “Get the traps out of your pack,” she said. Bob was as formless and shadowed in the snow as tabloid pictures of Bigfoot. He went down on one knee and slung the backpack to the ice. As he fumbled with the buckles, Anna went on: “Put the end of the kinkless chains in the jaws of the traps. Don’t make a circle; make a line. We’ve got twenty-four feet, if you link it together.”

  “I was just thinking that,” he said.

  Anna watched without speaking as he spread the traps out on the ice and connected them, jaws to tails. She moved her left foot fractionally to ease her thigh muscles. The ice did not shift alarmingly. Maybe the seam was refreezing. It wouldn’t take much, she thought hopefully. The urge to jump was almost overwhelming. Body and mind craved action. They also serve who only stand and wait was an understatement. Waiting was a purgatory a nonbeliever could not pray her way out of. Trusting in the kindness of strangers was another.

  “How’s it going?” she asked to take her body’s mind off just yelling “Fuck it!” and leaping for the good ice.

  He looked up, his hood thick with snow, his shoulders white with it. “Good,” he said. “Another minute. Hang on.”

  The work of his hands had driven thoughts of the oversized wolf from his mind. The linking of the three chains had relieved him of the necessity of getting near where the ice had broken. He sounded manly, strong, stand-up. It was hard to believe not too many minutes ago he was poised to leave her to her fate or, worse, watch while it visited itself upon her. He wasn’t afraid now, Anna realized, and that made him brave. Except brave didn’t count if one wasn’t afraid. Without fear to burn away the dross and transform it from baser metal, bravery was merely stupidity or poor impulse control.

  “They should hold,” he said and held up the three chains attached to each other by the steel-jawed traps.

  It would work, Anna told herself. All Bob had to do was lay one end of the chain to one side of her, then walk the other end around the break and pull till the chain gently eased over her island. She’d pick it up; on the count of three, he’d jerk as she leapt. It would work.

  The dull pull of a muscle trying to cramp moved out from the twitch above her knee. If she waited any longer, she would not be able to execute the straight-backed deep knee bend and rise without tottering after she picked up the chain. Inside the Sorels, she flexed toes grown numb from lack of movement. “Let’s get going,” she said. “My legs are starting to cramp.”

  Bob hurled a trap at her.

  “No!” she heard herself shout. Ten pounds of metal struck her in the chest. Clamping her arms across it, she fought for balance. The ice tilted. Her boots began to slide. White lake and sky rushed past as she fell backward. Her head struck lake ice. Her brain slid forward inside her skull. Her chin smashed into her chest, slamming her teeth down on her tongue.

  For an instant, she carried the burden of her life in the balance, trying to decide whether to hold tight to the trap or throw her hands back over her head, get as much of her on the solid surface as she could. The physical world did not slow down while she made up her mind.

  The backpack pulled her down.

  The ice island tilted.

  Water so cold, she felt it only as a blow slammed into the side of her face.

  12

  The ice did not flip, dumping her like a man in a ducking booth, the way Anna had seen it in her mind’s eye. The lake chose to savor her rather than swallow her whole. The ice slab fell away with terrifying slowness, a grinning maw opening at her heels.

  She thrust the metal trap from her and threw her arms wide, trying to catch the beast’s throat. The island of ice was too wide, and only one mittened hand reached the serrated edge. On her back, a beetle with a backpack as a carapace, helpless to save herself, she was sliding, sliding down, under the ice, pulled by her own weight and the hunger of the lake. Then the lake couldn’t wait. The slab under her gave all at once.

  Light flashed past, a white streak four inches wide; the edge of the break. Fighting the drag of her pack, she kicked and pawed her way upright and clutched at the surface ice. In sodden mittens, her hands were pulpy, worthless.

  Clutching at straws.

  A burst of energy that drove a scream from her lips lifted her enough that she managed to get her right arm as far as the elbow onto the surface. Balling her mittened hand into a fist, she drove it hard into the shallow snow and pressed her sodden sleeve against the ice.

  Freeze, God dammit. If her sleeve, her glove – any part of her – would adhere to the ice, she might be able to pull herself out. Grabbing the end of the other mitten with her teeth, she pulled. Freezing water crashed against her teeth with the subtlety of brass knuckles. Biting down, she pulled her hand free of the mitten and reached through the fractured water to press it to the ice by her elbow. Flesh might freeze faster than fabric.

  “Bob!” she screamed. “Where the fuck are you?”

  Hell would freeze over.

  The sleeve of her coat was sticking, freezing to the good ice.

  Carefully she dragged on the arm. She could see herself moving infinitesimally closer to the edge but was losing feeling. Cold was killing her body while her mind watched. A quarter of an inch; an eternity.

  Ice canted steeply toward a white sky. Flakes of snow, scarcely differentiated from the universe they fell through, showed clear for an instant, like magic, like the pictures in the mall that flashed from two dimensions to three with a flash of the mind. Then the sky grew too steep. Her hand was not in front but above her. She hadn’t grabbed the solid ice; she’d grabbed onto the edge of the floating island and it was rotating with her weight. Through frost-rimed eyelashes, she watched each thread of her sleeve as it pulled f
ree of the ice. Her pack was battened on her back, dragging her down, hungry like the lake was hungry. Sentient and indifferent.

  Frantically she wrenched her gloved hand from its last tenuous connection with the ice and pounded on the buckle of her chest strap. The push-button release opened and the strap came free. The pack lifted, drifted from her.

  She had won; she would make it.

  Straps followed the pack toward the bottom of the lake, tugging down her arms, pinioning her elbows to her side, prying the end of her sleeve from its tenuous marriage with the ice, her hand from where it battered ineffectually at the buckle of her hip belt. Water closed over her. The narrow margin of sky receded as she sank. She forced her eyes wide to keep the light in them. Cold burned her sclera like acid.

  Kicking with more force than she’d believed she had in her, she moved upward. Half a foot, a foot, the light grew stronger.

  The Sorel boots filled with water. Her feet moved as if through freezing mud. Then she couldn’t move them at all. Wriggling eel-like, she tried to struggle out of the bondage of the shoulder straps, but her coat had swelled with water, the fabric stuck to the webbing. Desperately she pummeled at the release on her hip. Anna fought till her last gasp of air put the last of its oxygen into her blood and her lungs began to push against her rib cage, shoving the panic of their need through her bones and into her heart.

  The hip belt released, and she used the last of her air to kick for the surface. Then she stopped. Fell back and down and back. The drag on her hips gone, but the pack still holding her fast to her upper arms, pulling her headfirst toward the bottom of the lake.

  The light grew watery and faint. Anna watched as her feet floated up past her eyes.

  The cold that had hammered into her face and neck soaked through the layers of clothing. At first, it seared her flesh, then it didn’t. Icy fingers crept up her legs, down the neck of her parka. Her feet were gone to it already, she couldn’t feel them.