Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  Neither Katherine nor the bit of deceased wolf spoke.

  What Anna was looking for wouldn’t be in the bite marks. Those had been probed and examined by Ridley and photographed by Robin. It was what they missed that gave Katherine the squeaky pallor. Bending close over the rock-hard neck muscle, Anna turned it slowly between her gloved hands, examining every inch of the flayed neck. On the back, near what would have been the wolf’s left side, halfway between ear and shoulder, was a tiny dot of silver metal, the broken-off end of a needle.

  “Got it,” Anna said to Katherine. She found needle-nose pliers in a drawer beneath the counter and pulled the metal from the neck. It wasn’t a needle; it was the dart used when an animal is shot with a tranquilizer gun. Katherine had stood up to Bob after the necropsy for the same reasons she’d found the courage to do it the other two times. He was endangering her beloved wolves.

  “Darted it, then opened its throat and it bled out. The wounds made to look like a huge bite pattern,” Anna said. “The wolf was murdered.” Lost in thought, she turned the splinter of metal in the gray light. Bob had said to Katherine: “We’ve used ketamine before.” Bob had found the animal and he had stomped around it so much there was no hope of finding any tracks. Then he’d claimed the body for “research.”

  “You thought Bob did it, didn’t you? Killed the wolf so the big game hunter could have the head and pelt for his wall. You knew Bob used ketamine; you knew because he’d used it on you.”

  29

  Having cached the broken tip of the tranquilizer dart with the rest of her Nancy Drew collection in the rusted toolbox under the floorboards, Anna walked back toward the bunkhouse. Stillness was absolute. Air and cold melded to form a quantifiable mass, a solid that could be moved through without disturbing a single atom, a vacuum that held matter inside. Anna’s steps grew shorter until finally she, too, was still: a rock, a tree, a single mote of ice.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. The words fell into the motionless universe, leaving no ripple. “Katherine, if Bob killed the wolf, why would he make the neck wound interesting? ‘Interesting’ doesn’t get the study shut down. It goes against his interests. Bob never goes against his interests.” Momentary sadness drifted across Anna’s mind; she wished she hadn’t voiced her doubts out loud, intimated Katherine had run to her death for nothing. Except that Bob had made her life intolerable.

  “Talking to dead people,” she said to the gray that knitted branches together above her head. “At least I’m not seeing dead people.” Still, she didn’t move.

  Whoever had shot the wolf had made the bite marks so it would appear as if it was killed by a giant beast. It was possible that the animal was tranquilized by one person, then another person happened along in the dark with a pointed object and thought, “Boy, wouldn’t it be funny if…” But Anna doubted it.

  Flying back from Intermediate Lake the day she and Jonah saw Chippewa Harbor pack kill the old bull, she had seen a wolfish shape in black, a neat circling of nose to tail, as if a monstrous dog slept in the snow beneath the boughs of an evergreen, just the shape viewed from the air. She thought of the great deception in World War II when the British had salted England with cutouts of Spitfires and barracks without walls so that, seen from the air by German planes, they would look to be an army amassing for an invasion at Calais, while the Allies moved ahead with plans to land on the beaches of Normandy.

  Huge paw prints in all the right places, never perfectly clear and always accompanied by moose prints, as if Bullwinkle had been adopted along with Romulus and Remus. A hard object shaped like the hoof of a moose and affixed to the bottom of snowshoes would work. Each step would leave the mark of the hoof; no sign of the human above it. Giant paw prints were easy enough, pawlike shapes on the end of ski poles. With the wind and the drifting snow, even an experienced tracker wouldn’t be able to tell they weren’t made by a genuine wolf.

  Anna hadn’t been able to.

  The marauding animal that had terrorized their camp up by Lake Desor had snuffled like a bear, pawed at the nylon walls like a dog and left no paw prints. When Katherine hadn’t been scared, Robin had snorted – almost a laugh. Because she had known the “wolf” wasn’t a wolf? It was Robin who sent Anna and Bob to the side of Intermediate Lake, where there were giant paw prints neatly laid in to lure the unwary trappers to the center of the weird ring in the ice where Anna had fallen through. Then Robin had apologized repeatedly. “I’m so sorry,” she’d said. “It shouldn’t have happened.”

  Anna’s dream of the night before came back; her naked chest scraping over the serrated-ice edge. She remembered, as she’d slid under the lake, how the ice had been striated vertical marks of white against the gray of older ice, and she remembered grabbing Adam’s day pack before he ran for the supercub to leave Malone Bay with Jonah, how heavy it was.

  “What’s in this?” she’d asked.

  “Books,” Adam said.

  Not books. A drill and spare battery packs and bits. The ring in the ice had been made by a drill, holes weakening the layer, water oozing up through them creating the ridge.

  The trapline torn up by an animal so powerful, the metal of the foothold trap was bent; Robin had reported seeing that. She’d gone to check the line by herself and she hadn’t brought the trap back with her.

  The wog was a hoax. The hoax had turned deadly. First Anna had gone through the ice, then Katherine had been killed.

  As always, that was where Anna came to a wall: Katherine had not been killed by a human being; she’d been savaged by a pack of wolves.

  “Damn,” Anna said and mentally set aside the researcher’s death.

  Robin with her love of the island – what was it her boyfriend had said? The last hope for the soul of civilization? Ridley with the most to lose: vocation, avocation and summer cabin at one blow; Jonah, with his loyalty to Ridley; Adam, for whatever reason, maybe just the hell of it – were all of them in on it? Would one of them kill a wolf, a ranger and a researcher to make the island sufficiently interesting that the Park Service and the Michigan Tech would fight Homeland Security over the issue of opening it in the winter months? Anyone in Winter Study could have darted the wolf. The pack was on the ice for several days, and everyone was proficient with the use of tranquilizer guns.

  Robin had been in the tent the night of the marauder, but Adam or Ridley or, possibly, Jonah could have followed them. Without the heavy packs that slowed the Malone Bay adventurers, it could have been done, round-trip, home by midnight.

  If they were willing to kill, why didn’t they just kill Bob and be done with it? That’s what Anna would have done. With pleasure, she thought, remembering the pictures on the cell phone.

  Maybe they had tried to kill Bob, but he had answered the call of nature, and Anna toddled out onto the ice alone. If so, they – whoever they were – were awfully cavalier about collateral damage.

  If the point of the hoax was to make the study indispensable, killing Bob wasn’t the wisest course. There was nothing so easily replaced as a government flunky. Kill one and ten popped up in his place. And accidental death by drowning wouldn’t make Homeland Security any more likely to leave ISRO alone. Katherine had a personal reason to want Bob dead, but Anna couldn’t see how she could have seduced Adam – or anyone else – into drilling the ice in the short time she’d been with Winter Study.

  “Move,” Anna told herself and began trudging toward the bunkhouse again.

  The men – all men; the women were vanishing at an alarming rate – were seated around the table in the kitchen.

  Over the years, Anna had arrested quite a few people, taken them in for everything from annoying chipmunks to kidnapping and murder. She had arrested men and women and, once, just to make a point, a child. There were a few gaps in her repertoire. She’d never arrested an Asian and, as far as she knew, she’d never arrested a Jew or a Quaker.

  It had been her intention to arrest Bob Menechinn, but, as she took in the Break
fast Club, she couldn’t figure out how to go about it. There was no place to incarcerate him. Should he decide he didn’t wish to be arrested, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it without backup and Adam, Jonah and Ridley could not be trusted. One, some or all were perpetrating a fraud on the federal government – which she wasn’t sure was a bad thing – and were willing to kill innocent women and female park rangers to do it – which she was sure was a bad thing.

  “Hey,” she said amiably as she banged the snow off her boots on the lintel. “Any coffee left?”

  “Hey yourself,” Adam said. “On the counter. Good and hot.” No one else acknowledged her words or entrance.

  Ridley bent over the stove, stirring the inevitable oatmeal, his shoulders rounded as a crone’s, his long fingers looking thinner than they had twenty-four hours before, the knuckles outsized, as if arthritis had taken him overnight. Jonah was droning on about disrobing “Mrs. Brown” as he took the cozy off the sugar bowl and began spooning brown sugar into an empty bowl. There was no ribaldry or playfulness in the Mrs. Brown story this morning. The old pilot spoke in a monotone, an actor who’s forgotten his character and lost his audience. Bob had taken his preferred chair in the corner against the wall. The first time Anna had seen him there, she’d thought of him as enthroned. Now “cornered” was a better description.

  Adam was a stark contrast to his fellows. He burned again but with a new fever. Not rage, Anna decided as she poured herself a cup of coffee. Excitement. Adam couldn’t sit still; he positively bounced in his seat the way a little boy will when an adventure is in the offing. A wonderful adventure. Adam was having a problem keeping joy from busting out all over.

  “What are you so happy about?” she asked as she took her place at the end of the table, the de facto “Mom” spot. “Are we going to find Robin?”

  Ridley turned from the stove. “Does he know where Robin is?” he demanded sharply. “Adam, do you know where she is?”

  “I just have a good feeling, is all,” Adam said. “We could do with a little optimism around here for a change. I, for one, would rather believe she’s alive somewhere than dead in a snowdrift.”

  Anna cocked her head to one side, trying to hear through the tension that thrummed in the sinews of the room.

  “Chipper,” she said. “Adam, you sound downright chipper.”

  Ridley stepped across the small space between the four-burner stove and the Formica-topped table where the rest of them sat over empty bowls like Goldilocks’s ursine victims. The thin, bony hands grabbed the front of Adam’s shirt and Ridley hauled him half out of his chair and held him suspended with wiry strength. “Do you know where Robin is?” he whispered, a hissing of steam from overheated pipes.

  Anna lifted her coffee cup off the table to protect the precious liquid from the inevitable scuffle to follow. She needn’t have bothered. Adam didn’t rise to Ridley’s anger.

  “Rid, I’d never hurt Robin. You know that. If I could bring her back right now, I’d do it. Let me go, Rid.” The last was said almost sadly, and Anna remembered that the two men had been friends for years, a fact that had been easy to forget from the interactions she’d observed on the island.

  Ridley lowered Adam carefully back into the kitchen chair. “Sorry,” he said and went back to stirring the oatmeal. If he didn’t pay attention, it was going to be the consistency of library paste, but Anna knew better than to offer to take over for him. Age-old customs were not suspended merely because hard times came. People needing reassurance tended to cling to them with ever-more tenacity.

  They ate quickly. Though no one but Adam seemed anxious to start the search for Robin, it was tacitly agreed that it would be wrong not to seem anxious. Anna didn’t want to search because she didn’t believe she would find a living woman, and the photographs on Katherine’s cell phone had put her more in the mood for revenge than body recovery. By the way Ridley’s once-lovely skin sagged around his eyes and pulled so tight across his mouth that dints of white showed on either side of his nose, Anna suspected he was holding on to control with his fingernails. A man of order, this chaos was unhinging him. Ridley would search, Anna thought. He’d do everything he had to until he was too tired to lift a foot for another step, but she doubted he was thinking clearly. Without the thinking, the physical work of searching would not bear fruit unless he got luckier than seemed likely. For all his flirting with Robin, Ridley was Jonah’s love; he was like an old woman with an only son. Until his boy was out of the woods, the wolves could have everybody else.

  Bob was scared.

  Adam took the bowls from the table and dumped them in the sink.

  “What do you want us to do?” Ridley asked Anna.

  “We have to search,” she said and tried to keep the pointlessness out of her voice. Adam was right; they could do with more optimism.

  “Since she was taken in her sleeping bag – a winter bag, probably good to five or ten below – there’s a good chance she survived.” She drummed her fingers on the table and thought. “One of us took her, you guys know that, don’t you? Or there’s someone else on the island who has been screwing with our minds.”

  That sat in the air for a while. Ridley stared at Adam and Bob in turn. Adam played with a spoon. Bob’s eyes were skittering around the room, as if he followed the path of a butterfly on Benzedrine.

  “Which one of you found Katherine’s cell phone?” he blurted out finally.

  He’d seen the missed call from Anna.

  “Are you still on that cell phone kick?” she snapped. “Just pay the two dollars.”

  “What…” Confusion passed over his face, then cleared. “It’s more than two dollars. Somebody found it.”

  “Leave it alone,” Ridley said wearily.

  “Maybe Katherine took it with her,” Adam said. Had he used sepulchral tones, it would have been mocking at best and bad taste at worst, but he said it the way a grocer would say “four dollars a pound.” Bob’s face quivered like a pudding when the door slams.

  Anna made a mental note to call Bob again soon.

  “What do we do first?” Ridley cut across the others.

  There was a story problem Anna’d had a hard time with in fourth grade. A farmer with a rowboat wanted to get his fox, his goose and his bag of grain across the river but could take only one at a time in his tiny boat. If he leaves the goose with the grain, she’ll eat it. If he leaves the fox with the goose, the fox will eat her.

  Who would try to find Robin, if she did happen to still be living, and who would sabotage the search? Who was the fox, who the goose?

  The matter was taken out of her hands. “Bob and I will head up the Greenstone,” Adam said. “Get your stuff, Bob. These guys are going to dither half the morning.”

  Since Anna couldn’t think of any better arrangement she didn’t argue. The five of them couldn’t cover enough country to find a hidden woman. Or a hidden corpse. The only way they were going to locate Robin was if the kidnapper wanted them to or if Robin was alive and helped them find her. Much as Anna wanted the latter to be true, she didn’t let herself get too attached to the idea.

  Adam and Bob left to get their gear together and suddenly the kitchen felt bigger. There was more air to breathe and the walls moved back.

  “Can you ski, Jonah?”

  “I got the silver medal in skiing in the 1908 Olympics,” he said.

  “I knew that,” Anna said and smiled to make sure she still could. To Ridley she said: “Why don’t you and Jonah do Feldtmann. We’ve got nothing to go on except that she was carried out in a sleeping bag. That suggests whoever carried her had to travel on improved trails or he wouldn’t get far. There’s only a couple places on the island she could have been taken and kept alive: Feldtmann fire tower, Malone Bay ranger station or the cabin at Daisy Farm. Daisy Farm and Malone are reaches. They’re too far.”

  “Why would anybody take Robin to Feldtmann?” Ridley asked. He wasn’t asking Anna; he was asking the ether. Neither o
f them answered.

  “What are you going to do?” Jonah asked.

  Anna looked hard into the pale blue eyes behind the round lenses.

  “Why? Are you worried about me?”

  “It seems the animals separated from the herd aren’t living to a ripe old age this winter. Riper old age,” he amended with a ghost of his old raillery.

  “I’ll recheck the housing areas and the lean-tos,” Anna told him.

  “Anywhere else and we’re just looking for a body.”

  “Keep your radio on, and keep it on you,” Ridley said.

  “Make sure your batteries are charged,” Jonah added. “Adam’s been having a heck of a time with his. A heck of a time.”

  Then Anna was alone in the bunkhouse. Every pair of cross-country skis was in use. The snow was eighteen inches deep where it drifted and nearly a foot where it didn’t. Snowshoes hung on the wall, but with a foot to a foot and a half it was a toss-up whether they were more or less trouble than slogging through in boots. Had Anna meant to search, as she’d said, this might have bothered her.

  What she meant to do was take the bunkhouse apart till she found out what the hell was going on. In the process, she dearly hoped to find out who took Robin. “Who” might tell her where the young woman had been stashed.

  In time to find her alive was the thought Anna wouldn’t let herself add.

  30

  Anna found exactly nothing. Bob’s laptop was password protected, as was Ridley’s. Neither Jonah nor Adam had a PC. Drawers and duffel bags produced the expected long underwear and dirty socks. Sitting on the floor of Bob’s room, his duffel bag between her knees, Anna was swamped with helpless rage. Snatching up the emptied satchel, she flung it. It bounced off the side of the bunk and smacked her in the face, a stinging cut high on her left cheek where the luggage tag struck.