Winter Study (34 page)

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 parka 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.

Finished, Bob turned to them and, pulling on his gloves, said, “Katherine and I were closer than just teacher and student.”

Anna
felt a shiver down her spine and realized it had nothing to do with her
nervous system. The muscles in Adam’s chest and abdomen flinched, as if
he’d taken a rabbit punch.

“We’re
sorry for your loss,” Adam said, his words like splintering wood in
Anna’s ear. The cliché, made famous by a thousand TV shows, struck her
as thinly veiled mockery, but Bob took it as his due.

“Thank
you again, Adam. Ms. Pigeon seemed to think I was practicing
cannibalism. Or black magic.” Bob smiled briefly. “It’s okay, Anna.
You’ve been through a lot in the past few days. More than the rest of
us. You’re excused a bit of overreaction. I’m glad you cared enough for
Katherine to be upset.”

“I’m
freezing to death,” Anna announced without too great a degree of
hyperbole, slithered around Adam and hurried back toward the sauna. The
heat of its dry fire had been sucked away. The sense of safety she’d
enjoyed in her corner of the womb was gone. What remained was fatigue
so deep and cold so sharp, she could scarcely walk. Mostly she wanted
to crawl into her sleeping bag and slide into delicious
unconsciousness, but, with her reserves burned away, she knew she would
never be able to warm herself. If she didn’t take the sauna’s heat to
bed with her, she’d be cold all night.