Winter Study (38 page)

“When
do they think the weather will break?” Anna tried to keep the note of
longing from her voice, but getting off the island was looking like a
reprieve from a life sentence in a refrigerated lunatic asylum.

“Another
front’s coming down from Canada. Three days, maybe a week. We’ve been
here as much as two weeks without the Beaver getting in to bring us
provisions,” Jonah said. “Too dangerous to fly in this stuff.”

Adam
opened his eyes. “Three days?” he said. There was a note of alarm in
his voice, as if three days was either not enough or too much to bear.

To Anna, seventy-two hours seemed an eternity. A week, a death sentence.

Adam closed his eyes again.

Silence
descended again, punctuated by sneaky pops and hisses as fire consumed
wood. Jonah went back to reading and watching Adam. The easy
camaraderie was breaking down. Ridley didn’t laugh at Jonah’s antics
and Jonah seldom indulged in them. Ridley distanced himself from Adam;
Jonah watched him, and Adam took every chance he could to go off by
himself.

Another
week of this and Anna was going to get seriously cranky. In the
twenty-first century, people assumed that nothing could stop rescuers,
but, as advanced as technology had become, weather could shut it down.
She thought of the climbers who died on Mount Hood in 2006. Storms were
too severe for the search-and-rescue teams to do their work.

Mother
Nature had sold them out and Old Man Winter held them hostage. No risks
would be taken for a body recovery of a woman killed in an accident.

Anna wished she were in Natchez, Mississippi, cutting back the roses in Paul’s front yard.

Paul’s front yard.

Anna
had been on her own so long she wondered if she would ever lose the
mental habit of thinking of “Paul’s” and “hers,” never “ours.” When she
referred to “his” house, he would invariably take her in his arms and
say “our house.” When they married, Paul truly did give “all that he
had and all that he was” to her. Much as she would have liked to do the
same, Anna was not made that way. A core of her remained unshared, a
fortress she retreated to when she needed to marshal her internal
forces.

The
outer shell of her parka was dry to the touch. She lifted it off the
rack. Turning the coat inside out to dry the lining, she felt a lump in
the pocket. The vial of wolf’s blood; she’d forgotten to put it in the
toolbox evidence locker. By now, it would have thawed. Stowing it
beneath the carpenter’s shop would only serve to refreeze it and what
little value it might have would be lost. She left it where it was.

The
blood samples Katherine had carried with her to the cedar swamp stuck
in Anna’s brain: burrs under her saddle, stones in her shoe. Crimes —
or accidents — told a story. The protagonist did something for a reason
and the result was the incident. When an action occurred that didn’t
fit in the logical unfolding of the story, Anna couldn’t leave it
alone. People who lied were invariably caught eventually because the
lie never completely worked with the rest of the story.

It
was possible that the blood samples didn’t fit into the story because
they had no relevance. Katherine might have pocketed them with the
intention of doing tests when she returned to her kitchen/ lab.

Katherine
had fiddled with wolf parts nonstop for the better part of two days.
The kitchen was filled with racks of vials containing samples of
tissue, blood, bone, stomach contents, hair, ticks, mites and other
marvelous things. What tests could be left to do? Why not use the blood
she’d taken before the wolf was moved to the carpenter’s shop?

Leaving
the heat of the stove and the oppressive peopled emptiness of the
common room, Anna went to Katherine’s makeshift DNA lab. With its
single bed shoved in a corner and the haphazard piles of a storeroom
used by many and organized by none, the kitchen was bleak.

The
PCR was in its travel case on the counter, the record book beside it.
Anna opened the log and read what she could understand of Katherine’s
notes. The researcher had not written anything she’d not discussed with
the rest of them, no illuminating secrets.

As Anna closed the log,

The Shining

unreeled
behind her frontal lobe, the scenes where Jack Nicholson grinned his
I-am-one-crazy-bastard grin. Was she growing paranoid and delusional in
a snow-bound building? No secrets, no plots, no ulterior motives or
sinister intent, just a mix of strange bedfellows trapped in a very
strange bed with one claustrophobic hypervigilant law enforcement
ranger?

Anna
put the book back precisely the way she’d found it. The log’s owner
would never be back to notice; she did it from habit. Methodically she
checked each of the various samples in their vials and packets. No
seals were broken, no envelopes slit open, no papers in disarray.

Wog
DNA wasn’t what triggered Katherine. For a scientist, a find at that
level of idiosyncratic bizarreness was tantamount to a cat finding a
real live mouse full of catnip. Something she’d discovered during the
necropsy precipitated her mad dash into the woods. Anna walked to the
window and stared past her reflection in the dark glass, trying to see
around the corners of memory to that precise moment.

Ridley’s
hand was cut and bleeding. Anna handed Katherine the chunk of meat from
the wolf’s throat. Katherine mewled like a newborn kitten lost in its
mother’s fur. Shortly thereafter, according to Jonah, the researcher
pocketed the blood samples and ran out of the shop.

Jonah

said

she’d pocketed the samples and run out.

Feeling
anxious but not knowing why till she realized she was half expecting
another message to appear on the window glass in spectral words, Anna
wondered what Jonah had to gain by the lie. He could have slipped the
vials into Katherine’s pocket; he could have said she’d run out when
she’d merely strolled, but Anna couldn’t come up with one moderately
rational reason why he would do so.

The
old pilot was as attached to Ridley as a father to a beloved son.
Lately he had been watching Adam the way he’d watch a dog bitten by a
rabid skunk. Jonah had no use whatsoever for Bob but didn’t appear to
harbor the hatred of him Ridley did or the schizophrenic anger and
obsequiousness Adam displayed toward the man.

Anna
gave up. She took the tube of blood from her pocket and stared at it.
It was just a sample from a dead wolf, and there were plenty more where
this came from.

Maybe.

Maybe
the importance of the vials was in the fact that there weren’t more.
Would Jonah have reason to tamper with vials of blood, then switch the
doctored versions for the real samples when Katherine wasn’t paying
attention?

“You’re
reaching,” Anna chided herself. Even a diabolical, dyed-in-the-wool,
honest-to-comic-book professional nemesis had to have means, motive and
opportunity. Unless Jonah was the great professor he played at being
when on a roll, such a convoluted methodology was uncharacteristic.

Anna
decided to quit stirring in her brain and Katherine’s lab before she
began making up crimes just to keep herself amused. What she needed was
a good book.

“Hey,
Ridley.” Anna leaned in the doorway of his room. His back was to her,
his long, delicate fingers poised on the keyboard of his laptop, hair
loose and shining around his shoulders. He looked the very image of
Christ Jesus without the halo and the white nightgown.

When
he turned, the renaissance artists’ vision of Jesus vanished. Rings of
purple beneath his eyes had deepened since breakfast and his
winter-white skin looked coarse and loose. “Hey,” he replied. Weariness
flattened his voice. Anna snuck a look past his shoulder to see what he
was working on. Unoffended, he followed her gaze. “Yeah,” he said. “Yet
one more defense of the study. Fifty years we’ve been at it. Fifty
years of watching and what we know is, we don’t even begin to know what
we don’t know about wolves and their relationship to their prey. Yet
every bozo with a dog and a high school diploma knows it all. David
Mech says one thing, Rolf Peterson agrees; I back it, and some NPS
brass says: ‘But the girl who sits next to me in homeroom thinks…’”

“‘You’ve got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.’” Anna quoted Butch Cassidy.

Ridley’s
eyes went hard, and it occurred to her he would have been five or six
years old when the movie came out. Chances were good he’d never seen
it. And he certainly hadn’t memorized the good parts, as a percentage
of her generation had. As far as he was concerned, he’d offered her a
glimpse of himself and she’d mocked him. Anna wished it wasn’t so but
knew if she tried to explain herself it would make things worse. It
always did.

“I need the key to the ranger station,” she said instead.

“Sure. The lights aren’t on. The generator serves only the housing area. What do you need?”

“A
book,” Anna replied. “The Visitors Center must have a library of some
kind.” The Visitors Center and the rangers’ offices were located in the
same building, the beautiful new facility overlooking Washington Harbor.

“Not
much of one,” Ridley said as he rummaged through the top drawer of his
desk. It was full of pens, paper clips and other detritus that Anna
thought would have taken more than a couple weeks to amass. “Reference
stuff, is about all there is there.”

“I’ve finished the

Newsweek,

” she said drily.

Ridley
laughed, and she was glad he chose not to carry a cross moment further
than necessary. “The key is somewhere in this mess, but I don’t know
where. Adam!” he hollered.

Looking
like a man who’s been awaiting a call rather than someone roused from
sleep, Adam appeared soundlessly in the doorway beside Anna. So
soundlessly, she started when he spoke.

“Yeah?”

“Give Anna the key to the V.C. She says she’s read the

Newsweek.

”

“Already?”
Adam cocked one eyebrow in a way that made Anna think of her high
school principal, Sister Mary Corinne. “You’ve only been here a week.”

“Speed-reader,” Anna said.

Adam
reached into the front pocket of his jeans and took out a small ring of
governmental-looking keys. It was Ridley’s turn to cock an eyebrow,
but, not being gifted in that department, he managed a mere wrinkling
of the forehead. Years in the wilderness or small isolated communities
to inform her, Anna knew Ridley thought it peculiar that Adam carried
keys. Nothing — or nothing they needed — on the island was kept locked.
When he’d first arrived, Ridley unlocked the buildings they would be
using and left them that way. There was no one to lock them against.
The V.C. was only locked because it was unnecessary to the study.