Winter Study (26 page)

“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.