Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  Katherine jerked free and ran. In seconds, she was out of sight behind a curtain of snow and a scrim of trees.

  The little drama had been played out within ten yards of the kitchen door against the glamorous backdrop of the outhouse. Bob didn’t chase after Katherine; he turned and plowed toward the bunkhouse. Anna faded back into the trees and turned her back. The parka she’d bought off the Internet for this excursion was white, the ski pants black. Unless he was looking hard, Bob wouldn’t see her.

  Bob closed the door behind him. Anna continued to the shop. Mopping up blood and guts with a fistful of newspapers, Jonah was singing: “A spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down, the medicine go down.”

  The wind snatched the door from Anna and banged it open. “Is everyone on this island insane?” she asked.

  “All but for me and thee, and I have my doubts about thee,” Jonah replied. He had small, even teeth, and when he smiled the hairs of his cropped white beard bristled out like the whiskers of an interested cat. It was hard not to smile back but Anna managed.

  “What is going on around here?” she demanded.

  “Unless I observe things from two hundred feet aboveground, they don’t make much sense to me,” Jonah admitted cheerfully and shoved the mess into a garbage bag. “Katherine was doing her thing. Bob split for the house. ‘Wine time’ comes earlier in the north, I guess. Then Ms. Huff starts sniffling and snuffling. She jams half a dozen vials of blood-filled vacuum tubes in her pocket and runs out after him.”

  “Robin?”

  “She left between the two. Headed for the bunkhouse, I guess. Even our delightful, delicious bi-athlete wouldn’t want to go out in this weather.”

  Anna ignored the “delightful, delicious” and helped him with the cleaning up.

  DINNER, THE SACRED COOKING RITE presided over by the lead researcher, didn’t happen. Ridley took his laptop into the room he shared with Jonah. Robin climbed into her sleeping bag for a nap. Bob took a coffee cup of boxed red wine and two peanut butter sandwiches into the room he shared with Adam and closed the door.

  Being alone, or what passed for it in cabin fever country, hit Anna like a couple of Xanax on an empty stomach. Her shoulders dropped an inch, her lungs filled and she realized she’d been clenching her jaw most of the day. There were some for whom being with others of their kind was energizing. For Anna, it was as if her fellow human beings sucked the marrow from her bones if incarcerated with them too long. To a majority of felons serving time in the federal penitentiaries, the threat of going to prison did not – and, should they get out, would not – deter them from a life of crime. Even as a little girl, for Anna the mere thought of being locked in with people, having her life regulated by others, had been enough to keep her from pocketing so much as a penny candy at Idaho’s Grocery.

  In the unpeopled space, her mind unfolded like the wings of a bird kept too long in a small cage and her body relaxed into the fatigue left over from her dip in Intermediate Lake. She stretched out on the sofa nearest the fire and slept.

  When she awoke two hours later, she was still alone, and she felt better than she had in three days. She sat up straight, settled her shoulders and commenced to find at least a few answers.

  Ridley had a laptop, as did Katherine and Bob, but there was another computer, an old clunker that the biotechs who rotated through each winter had for their use. Anna got online and Googled Robert Menechinn. He was born in Canada and started his academic career in Manitoba. He’d gotten his B.A. at the University of Manitoba. He’d gotten an M.A. at the University of Winnipeg. Where the Ph.D. was obtained wasn’t mentioned. All three degrees were in education, nothing in the natural or zoological sciences. The first connection with wolves was at the University of Western Ontario. When he was a lecturer there, he had taught “Education in Green” to students working on a project studying wolves. The “Green,” Anna surmised, meant ecologically hip, how the neophyte researchers could teach others about their work.

  From Ontario, he’d gone to the University of Saskatchewan, from there to New York, then to Virginia and finally to Bethesda, Maryland, where he now taught “Education in the Sciences” along with several other classes that barely qualified him to lick the wolf scat off Ridley’s mukluks when it came to a wilderness study of actual animals.

  Anna could see how he might have gotten his name on one government list or another. He was a self-promoter. Every award or commendation he’d ever received was on every Web site that mentioned him. As a fish, he was too small to warrant such coverage. He’d had to provide the information unasked. More likely one of his graduate students did it for him. That could have impressed some government flunky sufficiently that Bob was put on the list for the ISRO evaluation, then Ridley recommended him. Someone recommended him, Anna amended. Ridley had simply taken their bad advice.

  She leaned back and stared at the screen without seeing it.

  Menechinn was forty-six; he’d gotten his B.A. at twenty-five. In a couple of decades, he’d worked in eight colleges and universities. Had this been a Park Service résumé, and the star of the piece not at least a deputy superintendent by the end of the story, she would have read it to mean Bob was a troublemaker or had severe adult-onset attention deficit disorder. It had the earmarks of an employee that nobody wants the trouble of firing so he is given rave reviews to get him passed up to be somebody else’s problem.

  Anna Googled Ridley Murray.

  Ridley was a golden boy, commendations from all and sundry, awards, and enough papers published to satisfy the greediest university.

  Jonah Schumann’s name came up twice, once in a newspaper article when he’d been hired by the wolf/moose study and once as a Web site, schumannairalaska.com. In summer, Jonah ferried hunters to camps on wilderness lakes in Alaska.

  Robin wandered into the common room. “What happened to dinner?” she asked sleepily.

  “I guess we’re on our own.” Anna closed down the Internet. She’d been sitting hunched over a hot computer so long her head had settled between her shoulders like a turkey vulture’s. She pulled her bones back into alignment. “Want to heat up the leftover casserole?” Robin looked dubious, as if she’d dine on bits and scraps rather than cook. “I’ll do it,” Anna said. “You can keep me company.” Robin’s company didn’t grate on Anna. There was a quiet center to her that people seldom achieved, and never before the age of forty. Maybe it was the unusual childhood, traveling the world, skiing and shooting in competition, before she was out of high school. Parts of her seemed arrested in an age of innocence, others world-weary yet without judgment.

  Chicken-and-pasta casserole heated, Anna spooned it into bowls, and they carried their makeshift supper back into the common room. Sitting side by side on the couch like strangers on a bench waiting for the same bus, they ate by the warmth of the fire. Anna’s ravenous appetite had returned. She marveled at how good the simple fare tasted and wondered if she could take seconds without being rude. The fierceness with which her body craved carbohydrates stunned her; when food was put before her, everything else faded away.

  Wolfing it down. She was eating as a wolf would eat.

  An image of the half-skinned animal on the table in the carpenter’s shop, the graphic lines of muscles and the coarse thick fur making the carcass look human and inhuman, wolfish and monstrous, flared behind her brow bone. Then Ridley’s hand, tight and bloodless on the hilt of the sausage knife, Katherine striking out at Bob, Jonah with his tiny, perfect teeth, singing as he slopped up viscera.

  They were all becoming werewolves.

  Perhaps after dinner she would go out and get in some first-rate howling. Short of a sauna and shampooing her hair, it would feel better than anything she could think of.

  “That’s weird,” Robin said.

  Anna looked up from her food, her mouth too full to speak.

  “I’ve never seen it do that before.”

  Anna swallowed. “What? Seen what do what?”

 
Robin set aside the dregs of her casserole, stood and walked to the picture window. Uncurtained and without blinds, at night it worked as a one-way mirror. All Anna could see was the reflection of the living room and Robin. Things were sufficiently off balance that had the biotech, like the classic undead, cast no reflection, Anna doubted she’d have been surprised.

  “The ice rime,” Robin said. “When it warms up enough to snow but is still below freezing because of the wind or whatever, ice rime builds up on the trees, sometimes does a kind of crystal thing on the glass of the windows. But this is like… I don’t know what it’s like.”

  Carrying her bowl, Anna rose and joined Robin at the window. Eye level, about halfway across the pane, precipitation was turning to ice on the glass but not all in one place. As they watched, the ice crystals formed a vertical line, then a horizontal, then, as if spread by the gusts of wind, many straight-line segments began to appear.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it either,” Anna said.

  “I better get Ridley. He’d kill me if he missed this.” Robin backed away from the window, and Anna heard her soft tread as she crossed the common room. More lines appeared, joined others to create angles. They were beautiful. So close to the glass, Anna could see the crystals as they formed, each a tiny shard of the universe.

  “Holy smoke!” came Robin’s soft whisper, followed by Ridley’s voice, angry and quiet.

  “If this is a joke, you are off this island as soon as it clears.”

  “It’s not a joke,” Anna said. “We were eating and the ice started to form in geometrical patterns. There must be a fault in the window glass or something.”

  “Step back,” Ridley said, his voice as flat and sharp as the blade of a knife.

  “I doubt it will break,” she said. “Not if it’s held all these winters.”

  “Step back, God dammit.”

  Anna stepped back.

  The ice lines had come together to form two words: “HELP ME.”

  15

  “Help me,” Robin whispered.

  “Anytime,” Jonah replied as he followed Ridley into the common room. “Who’s been writing on the glass?”

  “Nobody,” Robin said. “It just appeared.”

  Bob joined them. Jonah pointed to the window. “Writing,” he said.

  “It just appeared.”

  “By magic?” Bob sneered.

  Anna didn’t have a better explanation.

  “Help who?” Robin asked.

  “Me, obviously,” Bob said, sporting his signature wink.

  Adam was safely – if not comfortably – ensconced in the Feldtmann fire tower. Bob, Ridley, Jonah, Robin and Anna were in the bunkhouse.

  “Katherine,” Anna said. “Where’s Katherine?”

  Katherine Huff had been gone four hours. No one had noticed. Anna might have, but the door to Katherine’s room was shut and Anna’d assumed the researcher was sulking, sleeping or licking her wounds from her spat with Bob.

  Grabbing a flashlight, Anna went out onto the deck. Below the ghostly writing on the window, the snow had been trampled to ice rubble where Adam had been fetching armloads of wood for the stove. If there were new tracks, they blended with the old.

  Anna shined the beam on the steps. They had nothing to tell her. Whoever had crept up to write the eerie note had left no tracks. That didn’t mean the writer was a thing of air and mystery; it only meant he or she had been careful. The storm blocked the moon and stars. Far enough from cities to be free of light pollution, the night was blind black. Driving wind harried the snow until the flakes were small and mean, stinging skin and eyes. It wouldn’t take an Eagle Scout – or an Apache scout, for that matter – to come and go, unnoticed and untraceable.

  She, Anna thought.

  This had the earmarks of a woman scorned seeking revenge or attention. How the trick was played on the glass, Anna couldn’t guess, but surely a woman who played with DNA would know enough about chemistry to manage it. Mentally Anna brushed off her annoyance. She’d never stooped to such a trick, but she’d sure as hell fantasized about it a time or two.

  She returned to the window. The words were still there, limned in ice. Beyond the glass, she could see the dumb show of the three men talking, shaking their heads, gesticulating, walking short distances only to walk back. Without the pseudologic of words, they looked mad as hatters, each locked in his own world where he was king or jester or god.

  A crazy-making current was running through the island. That a wog had manifest, a windigo died at their feet and a wolf been slaughtered didn’t completely account for it. The unreasoning fear of children raised on fairy tales where wolves had an overweaning penchant for evil trickled under saner thoughts. David Mech, Rolf Peterson, Ridley and a dozen other wolf researchers had spent decades debunking this myth, but there was no rooting out the ogres of childhood.

  Fear was the yeast stirred into the mix of human dysfunctions, a catalyst that could spin them out of control. Fear was the difference between neurosis and insanity. Ridley detested Bob Menechinn for endangering his livelihood, his status and his study. He hated him for being ignorant and having power over the educated, being worthless but out to destroy the worth in other’s lives. Ridley tried to hide the worst of these emotions, but even the beard and the mustache and the startling intelligence couldn’t mask things all the time.

  Yet Ridley had been the one to bring Menechinn to the island, had, in effect, given him the power of life and death over careers and learning.

  Katherine was cowed by her mentor but had pounded his chest, however pathetically, and run away. Anna would have suspected a love triangle; it wasn’t cliché for no reason. NASA, trailer trash, Rhodes scholars: it didn’t matter, love – or what passed for love in the tabloids – made people dangerous. Katherine’s first love was a wolf; perhaps, like a Freudian version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” she was waiting to be devoured or rescued from a prolonged childhood by a handsome ax-toting woodsman.

  Jonah drifted untouched by the Sturm und Drang as he flew untouched by the earth for much of his life. He’d been Winter Study’s pilot for eighteen years; Anna’d seen a picture of him, slipped into the plastic cover of the daily log, when he was in his forties or early fifties. One assumed he had a life the other forty-six weeks of the year – Anna’d seen the Web site – but he never spoke of it. Never spoke of a wife or a home or kids or his other job. Never shared anything even remotely personal. He defended his internal landscape with jokes.

  In the dumb show being played out on the other side of the glass, Jonah was slightly apart from the fray, leaning in the doorway to the kitchen, his arms folded over his chest, a slightly bemused expression on his face.

  Robin had retreated to a low, narrow plank bench along the rear wall. Whether or not she brought anything but the TNT of youth and beauty to this stew, Anna didn’t know, but Robin was affected by the uneasy atmosphere; Anna saw glimpses of it on her face occasionally before she escaped into the icy embrace of winter with the ease of one born of the union of a snow leopard and a polar bear.

  Anna and her mother before her and her grandmother – a fighting Quaker Democrat and a flapper – were feminists. Much of her life, Anna had worked in a male-dominated world. She would defend the right of any woman to do the same, but she was realist enough to admit women made things more complicated, more volatile. Not because women were stupid or incompetent but because their presence often made men stupid and incompetent.

  Like Menechinn. Except she doubted he was stupid. Arrogance was a form of stupidity because it caused elective blindness. Bob Menechinn might be a fool, but there was nothing wrong with his brain. Anna hardly knew where to start thinking about him. He possessed too many degrees in education to actually know anything yet had the supreme confidence that he knew it all. When he smiled – which he did too much – he had a way of pulling his chin in and letting his cheeks rise to cover his eyes that suggested he was holding back, striking a pose the way a penny-ante
lawyer will when he thinks he’s got an ace up his sleeve. Menechinn believed himself to be a ladies’ man. The ladies, with the possible exception of Katherine, were unmoved.

  “HELP ME” was fading, dimming out the same way it had appeared, line by line, in reverse order. Before hypothermia drove Anna back into the confines of the bunkhouse, she touched one of the rapidly vanishing marks. Her fingers were so cold from gripping the flashlight without gloves, she couldn’t feel anything.

  Ectoplasm, she mocked and went inside.

  Bob either didn’t think his run-in with Katherine was important enough or, conversely, was too important to share.

  Anna played tattletale.

  “She was crying,” she finished. “She struck out at Bob, then ran. I don’t think she was in any shape mentally to plan an adventure.”

  “Katherine was fine,” Bob said blandly.

  “‘Fine’ is weeping and running off into a blizzard?” Anna asked.

  “Snow was making her contacts go nuts, is all. She wanted to get back to the bunkhouse in a hurry, is my guess. You’ve been watching too much daytime television.” And he winked.

  One day you’ll shoot your eye out with that thing, Anna thought.

  They made a perimeter search of the housing compound, Anna and Ridley going to the left from the bunkhouse, Robin and Jonah to the right. Bob stayed by the radio.

  And the fire. And the wine, Anna thought as she slogged through blind-black, bitter weather. A walk that should have taken ten minutes took twice that. The four met up at the bottom of the compound near the road down to the lake. Even with flashlights, they could scarcely see.