Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  Anna tried to get off so Robin could move and managed to only flap her arms feebly. Jonah put his arm around her and lifted till, between the two of them, she was standing, if unsteadily, on her own.

  “Give Ridley a hand,” Jonah said, just as if Anna was capable of doing so. Because he treated her like she was able, she found she almost was. As she tottered to the front of the machine, Bob Menechinn emerged from the bunkhouse, hat and gloves on, coat zipped up.

  “I had the snowmobile warmed up and was about to come looking myself,” he said as he clomped down the snow-covered steps from the deck. “Then Ridley beat me to it. Supper will be ready when you’re ready to eat it. I made beef stew. That ought to stick to your ribs.” He hustled down and elbowed Jonah out of the way to tend to Robin.

  “Honey made it,” Ridley said.

  “Whatever,” Bob said. “It’s hot and ready.”

  “You heated it up. My wife, Honey, made the stew.” Ridley lurched from the machine without any help from Anna and faced Menechinn. Bob had both arms under Robin’s armpits and his hands on the front of her coat.

  Copping a feel. Anna shook that off. As many layers as they all wore, all anybody would feel would be fleece and goose down.

  “Well, let’s get in and eat it before it gets cold,” Jonah said.

  Ridley stepped in front of Menechinn and the difference in their size was apparent. Bob outweighed the lead researcher by a hundred pounds, if not more. Still, Anna would have put her money on Ridley, if this had been a betting match. Ridley pulled off his thick glove, and, for a second, Anna thought he was going to slap the other man’s face with it in classic challenge fashion. Instead he poked Menechinn hard with a slender forefinger.

  “Honey made the stew,” he said. Ridley didn’t yell or curse or threaten, but there wasn’t any doubt, at least not in Anna’s mind, that he was dangerous.

  Bob must have sensed it too. He backed down, and Anna doubted it was out of consideration for the feelings of the other man.

  “I just heated it up,” he said. Anna heard the fear in his words and saw it in his face. So did Ridley. Bob tried for his smile but his face wouldn’t cooperate. Then he saw the scorn in the faces around him. It was a replay of the night in the tent when he’d freaked out. Anna wondered who he’d use to build back his self-esteem now that Katherine was dead.

  “Robin, you must be about frozen to death,” he said and, curling himself around the biotech, he led her into the bunkhouse.

  “Tell Robin to stay away from Bob.” Katherine had said that the day before she died. Anna wondered if ghosts felt jealousy.

  Or if the warning had nothing to do with affairs of the heart.

  19

  Anna found the strength to eat two large bowls of Honey’s stew. Usually Robin ate with a healthy appetite, replacing the calories her work burned by the thousands. Tonight she stared at the bowl as if it were a crystal ball too muddy to show the future. When Anna would remind her to eat, she would take a bite. Bob decided to assume mothering duties and all but spoon-fed her, till she stood abruptly and left the room.

  He started to follow.

  “Sit down,” Anna ordered. “You haven’t had dessert yet.”

  Menechinn reared back, pushing out his chest and pulling in his chin, and glared around the table, searching for support. The message was in Jonah’s eyes and the rigid way Ridley held his butter knife:

  Eat cake or die.

  Anna took another mouthful of stew. A woman had to keep her strength up.

  Adam made it back as the cake and ice cream with chocolate sauce was being dished up. “What took you so long?” Ridley asked when Adam came into the kitchen. The question was not friendly. Adam’s coming to the rescue was canceled out by the fact that, had he been there in the first place, no one would have needed rescuing.

  “I went back for the Sked,” Adam said mildly. “It wasn’t all that far. Maybe three hundred yards from the trail.” He dished up what was left of the stew, took a spoon from the deep-fat fryer with the clean flatware and settled in the chair Robin had vacated.

  Three hundred yards. Every cell in Anna’s body would have sworn it was closer to six or seven miles. So strong was the feeling, she might have argued the point, had she not been distracted with more important matters: watching to be sure Jonah put enough chocolate syrup on her ice cream.

  “I put her in the carpenter’s shop with the wolf,” Adam said as he slathered a piece of bread with peanut butter.

  “She would have liked that,” Bob said gravely, and all of them stared at him for a moment.

  “That she will, Bob. I know how much she meant to you.” Adam spoke in the same mild way he had when Ridley snapped at him. It was impossible to tell if he mocked Bob or sympathized with him. Anna chose mocked. Bob chose sympathized.

  “She did, Adam. Thank you. There’s been a distinct lack of feeling around here. Robin’s the only one who seems to care and she’s being left to isolate herself.”

  Jonah clunked a full plate of cake and ice cream in front of Bob.

  “GENTLEMEN AND GENTLE LADY, it is time to get naked,” Jonah announced. He rose from the table and returned shortly with a plastic bucket, which he ceremoniously gave Anna.

  “I’ll see if poor little Robin wants to sauna,” Bob said, pushing his chair back from the table. “Lord knows, it would do her good.”

  “Allow me,” Anna said sourly. “It so happens I’m going that way, being it’s my bedroom and all.”

  Bob did his pulled-back smile.

  Sauna was a tradition in the north. On Isle Royale, during Winter Study, it took on its early importance; it was the most efficient way to get clean in a cold climate where there was no running water. Anna’d thought she was too tired to do more than fall on the bed, but the promise of deep heat and a shampoo revived her sufficiently that she could return to the room to get her towel and soap.

  Robin was sitting on her bed, staring at her hands.

  Anna sat on the bed opposite, no more than five feet between them.

  “What happened?” she asked simply. Normally the shock of seeing a chewed-up corpse might account for a young woman’s imploding, but Robin had not gone catatonic at the sight of the dismembered body. It had been later, while the body was being packaged, or shortly thereafter.

  “We-” Robin began, then stopped. The decision to keep a painful secret was clear on her young face. Robin wasn’t a practiced liar.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to work some things out.”

  Anna waited, giving her time to talk if she changed her mind. That she was speaking at all was a giant step forward. “Okay,” Anna said. “Come sauna.”

  “No.” Robin tipped her head farther down and her hair fell around her face.

  “You smell like Ridley’s feet,” Anna said untruthfully. “Take your clothes off. I’ll wait for you.”

  Robin stood obediently and stripped, as did Anna. Wrapped in towels, Robin in her mukluks and Anna in her clogs, each with a plastic pail, they left the room. Naked as the day he was born, Jonah was in the common room.

  “Pure sex,” he said and slapped a wiry thigh frosted with white hair. “You girls control yourselves.”

  Robin actually smiled.

  “Even worn down as we are, it’ll be tough,” Anna said.

  Jonah dashed out ahead of them.

  They left through the door of the working kitchen. Snow fell into Anna’s clogs as they hurried through the narrow band of trees between the outhouse and the building next to the carpenter’s shop that housed the sauna. Wind snatched at their towels and whipped Robin’s hair with such fury that strands of it stung across Anna’s cheeks and she let the younger woman go ahead of her. They ran the last ten yards.

  In the small anteroom was a single bench and a row of pegs. Three towels already hung there. Anna and Robin added theirs to the line, put their footwear on the bench and, pails in hand like children going to the beach, went inside.

&nb
sp; The sauna was built of fragrant cedar and heated by a cast-iron potbellied stove. Benches rose in tiers on two of the walls. The stove and a woodpile took up part of the third. On top of the stove was an iron tank filled with water heated to just short of boiling. To the left of the door was another tank with cold water. A single candle placed on the lower bench near the cold water lit the room.

  Candlelight made the walls golden brown, the corners fading into darkness. Jonah and Adam sat side by side on the top bench, arguing good-naturedly about whether Matt Damon or Leonardo DiCaprio was the greatest actor of the twenty-first century. Ridley was standing by the cold-water tank filling his bucket.

  Oddly enough, the sauna, close and dark and hot, never struck Anna as claustrophobic. A small, dark room filled with naked male strangers, yet it had never felt threatening.

  A sauna was the closest thing to a womb a person could find. In the north, where the tradition was untainted with the fear of nudity that most of the U.S. labored under, men and women took saunas together. And for the length of the sauna, they were fraternal twins, or, in this case, quintuplets. Jonah made no sexual jokes. No one exchanged loaded glances.

  Anna climbed to her favorite place, the corner nearest the stove and closest to the ceiling. In its dark embrace, she pulled one leg up, hugged it and put her chin on her knee. Haloed in candlelight, Ridley stood, working shampoo through his hair. Unbraided, it was past his shoulders and dark brown untouched by gray. His body was beautiful, shoulders wide and legs strong, the muscles corded from use, nothing artificially bulked from the gym. The graceful, delicate hands were echoed in his small feet.

  Anna watched him without thought, the way she might rest her eyes on a cat stretching in the sun simply because it was beautiful. Adam scooted down and Ridley filled his bucket for him. Between Anna and the light, Adam was limned in gold that ran in ripples through the muscles of his arms and stomach. Long and stringy, he coiled himself like a spring, washing the bottoms of his feet. When Ridley returned to the bench, sliding in beside Anna and dropping his head back against the cedar, Jonah joined Adam, dippered water into his bucket from the hot and the cold till it suited him, then poured it over his head. The old pilot was hewn down to bone and gristle. White beard and body hair glistened in the candle’s flame till he seemed shrouded in a thin fog. Anna drifted for a moment, dreaming of feisty silver dragonflies with rimless spectacles on their multi-faceted eyes.

  “There’s only one thing missing,” said the dragonfly. Anna blinked and focused. Jonah, clean and scrubbed from white to pink, was addressing those on the bench.

  “Bob?” Ridley asked.

  “What makes that the most ridiculous thing Ridley has said in his entire career under my tutelage?” Jonah asked his audience.

  “Nobody misses Bob?” Adam suggested.

  “Gold star to the man on the top shelf,” Jonah said. “I shall provide what’s missing. It is always left to the pilot.” He opened the door to the antechamber widely enough to stick his arm through, then pulled something into the sauna. “Voilà!” he said and held up a six-pack of Leinenkugel beer.

  Anna found the energy to raise her head. “You are the handsomest man on the island,” she said sincerely and was rewarded with the first bottle.

  Heaven is constructed of small things, and Anna was grateful to have a bit of it that night.

  Nobody did miss Bob and Anna chose not to wonder where he was, why he would miss a chance to clean up.

  Why he would give up an opportunity to see Robin naked.

  Robin washed her hair and body. The girl had as close to a perfect figure as Anna could imagine, and she loved the way the brown hair, heavy with water, slithered familiarly over the square shoulders as Medusa’s pet snakes might have. Unless the men with whom they shared the sauna moved in rarer circles than Anna thought they did, they probably hadn’t seen a woman’s body that exquisitely made either. Perhaps because of this, or because of Robin’s youth and their genuine affection for her, or perhaps because the sauna demanded it, they never infringed on her privacy by the smallest notice or attention. Between sips of beer, Jonah lathered his head again. Ridley poured water slowly over it so the pilot could rinse effectively. They chatted about the weather and when they might get in the air next and the need to haul more fuel up for the generator.

  Bob Menechinn would have poisoned the very air and water.

  Not to mention that Anna never ever wanted to see him naked. On the ice, she had felt him to be capable of watching her die without lifting a finger. Yet he had saved her life. She felt he was indifferent – or pleased – that Katherine Huff was dead. Yet he had expressed sorrow. Half a dozen times, she had felt he was passively stalking Robin. Yet he had never done – or even said – anything improper, or at least nowhere as improper as Jonah. She finished her beer. Her chin was back on her knee, her eyes were half closed.

  “Would you like me to wash your hair?”

  Robin was looking up from below, the gentle glow from the candle stealing fifteen years from her face and touching her cheeks with clear amber. Molly, Anna’s older sister and a psychiatrist in New York City, had once told Anna there were only two things mental health professionals could agree on for the cure of depression: exercise and helping others.

  “Thanks,” Anna said, unsure whether she accepted the offer for Robin’s good or because she had doubts about whether she could hold her arms in the air long enough to work up any suds. Where the harness of the Sked had weighed heaviest, her shoulders felt like melted wax. Come morning, they would hurt like hell.

  She sat on the lower bench and did nothing while her head was doused and rubbed and soaped and rinsed. Had she been a cat – a water-loving cat – she would have purred.

  “Hey!” A hand caught her arm. She’d fallen asleep under Robin’s kind ministrations and would have tipped over had Adam not caught her.

  “I think I’m fully baked,” she said. “I’m heading back.”

  “Do you want somebody to walk you to the bunkhouse?” Adam asked.

  Anna did not. Being sleepy after stew, beer, sauna and playing in the snow for fourteen hours did not constitute frailty. She left them sweating on the wooden benches and slipped into the anteroom. Steam rose off her body in lazy wisps and curls. Under the light of the forty-watt bulb, her skin glowed pink. She slipped her feet into her clogs, wrapped her towel around her and opened the door to the world.

  The wind had grown neither fiercer nor kinder but continued to fret the island with snow-filled gusts. Snowflakes whirled and dashed through the light, but whether they were new from heaven or snatched up from the nearest roof for this occasion Anna couldn’t tell. Bitingly clean air entered her lungs, and she no longer felt quite so tired. With windchill, the temperature couldn’t have been more than a degree or two above zero yet she was not cold. This was a phenomenon of the sauna she’d not experienced to such an extent before. A feeling akin to invulnerability came over her. For the fun of feeling it completely, she walked a few yards from the light. In the darkness, near the carpenter’s shop, she dropped her towel and turned her face into the wind. For a minute, it was close to flying.

  Then it was cold.

  She was turning to run for the bunkhouse when she heard a metallic clunk. Nature made a myriad of noises and could mimic most sounds men made. Metal on metal wasn’t one of them. Rewrap-ping herself in her pitiful scrap of terry cloth, she held her hand over her eyes in hopes of blocking the sting of the snow. The shop was the only building at this end of the housing area.

  Forgetting she wasn’t in uniform, wasn’t armed and did not have to check out things that went bump in the night, she walked the three yards to the carpenter’s shop, opened the door and switched on the light.

  The fetid reek of the windigo’s breath hit her. Bob Menechinn was hunkered over the Sked. The garbage bags that had served as Katherine’s shroud had been removed. Not torn or cut off, neatly removed and set to one side. On top of them were Bob’s gloves. The par
ka Katherine had died in was unzipped and folded open.

  The image of a werewolf eating human flesh smashed into the view of man and corpse and Anna’s tired mind reeled. A gust of wind snatched the towel from her. The icy tongue of the windigo slid over her butt and up her spine.

  20

  “Doing a little corpse desecrating in your spare time?” Anna asked.

  “I was saying good-bye.”

  “You couldn’t say good-bye with her parka zipped?”

  “I was looking for the cell phone.” Bob rocked back on his heels, and Anna could see the first shock of her appearance wearing off.

  “You were looking for the cell phone in the dark,” Anna said.

  Menechinn raked her with his eyes, trying to use her nakedness against her. She chose not to notice. She couldn’t help but notice what Mother Nature was doing to her backside. The wind was as a cat-o’-nine-tails against her bare flesh.

  “What’s with the light?” was called across the wind. Adam. He had left the sauna and noticed the shop light on. In seconds, he was behind Anna, serving as a windbreak. He retrieved her towel and handed it to her. Anna wrapped it around her body and was surprised what the addition of this paltry protection did for her courage.

  “Hey, Bob,” Adam said.

  Bob stood and dusted imaginary snow or dust from his coat front. Moving deliberately, he took up his gloves, looked piously down on what had once been his graduate student and moved his lips as if in prayer.

  Adam stepped so close, Anna could feel his bare chest against her back. The gesture wasn’t sexual and she wasn’t offended. The body heat was welcome.