Nevada Barr - Winter Study

Ridley kept his head down, his eyes on the blood welling in his glove.

Face averted in the growing dimness, hidden behind beard and mustache, he could have been thinking of anything from killing to Captain Kangaroo and Anna wouldn’t have been able to see it. “Ridley, are you okay?”

He nodded without looking up and held out his hand. The gesture put Anna in mind of the pen-and-ink drawing in her childhood book of Androcles and the lion, the great beast’s paw held up so that the thorn might be removed.

Anna handed the chunk of wolf neck to Katherine, peeled off the surgical gloves and pulled on a clean pair, then bent to examine the damage to Ridley’s hand. A squeak, a tiny sound like that of a newborn kitten fighting for a nipple or the last sound of a mouse meeting a trap, distracted her. Hands dripping gore in front of her like a zombie in a B movie, Katherine looked the cliché of someone who’s seen a ghost: her skin had paled and her lips gone slack. Behind the oversized lenses, her gentle eyes were so wide that white showed beneath the irises.

Having spent the afternoon elbow-deep in flesh and bone, Anna had a hard time believing Katherine was going faint at the sight of a little fresh blood. She wasn’t. She was looking past Ridley, his wound beginning to drip human DNA into the carcass of the wolf, at Bob Menechinn. His heavy face had gone from flab to granite.

Frozen meat, Anna thought. The image jarred her.

Whatever was communicated with that stare was over in a heartbeat. Bob was all amiability again; Katherine’s head was bent industriously over her collection equipment. Jonah started a long involved joke about the Sisters of St. Regis’s Convent and House of Prostitution. Anna looked down at Ridley’s hand in hers. An odd feeling of being once removed from the world came over her, the way it did when she had a bad cold, and, though she could hear perfectly well, she felt deaf; the way she felt in dreams when she needed to cross a busy street and her legs were lead.

“May I?” she said and carefully took the German knife from Ridley’s hand. Despite the wound, he’d not let it fall. Using it, she cut his glove away. He’d gashed his palm, a bad cut, but blood had welled into the gash and she couldn’t tell how bad; she couldn’t see clearly.

The way she felt when the optometrist put belladonna in her eyes.

The room hadn’t filled with fog; it was four o’clock and the sun was almost down. The white that had blinded the window when they arrived had turned to gray. The work light over the table created more shadows than illumination.

“We need to go inside,” she said. “I need more light.”

“We’re about done anyway.” Ridley finally raised his head. His skin wasn’t pale but flushed, and, rather than having the vague alarm of shock, his eyes were so alive he looked feverish or half mad.

“Jonah, would you help Katherine finish up?” he asked. The control in his voice was so at odds with the heat in his eyes that Anna put a hand on the back of his neck. It was not cold or diaphoretic; if anything, it was a degree too warm.

“What are you doing!” he demanded as he pulled away from her.

“Checking your skin temp,” she said. “Ready to go?”

As they left, they could hear Jonah: “Fakes an injury to get out of mopping up the really disgusting parts. I thought I’d taught that boy better…”

Anna half filled one of the metal basins from the water on the woodstove and washed and disinfected Ridley’s hand in the kitchen sink. “So what’s with you and Bob?” she asked, since she held him captive. She’d cooled the water from the stove with the drinking water in the second bathroom. Using the dipper, she ladled it over the cut.

He flinched.

“Sorry. Did I hurt you?”

“Not too bad.”

The cut was deep but not long. “You don’t seem to much like Bob,” she prodded.

“He’s not a real likable guy,” Ridley said.

“Why did you want him to do the study evaluation?” She closed the gash with butterflies and patted his hand dry with paper towels.

Ridley took his hand back though she’d not yet bandaged it. “He came highly recommended,” he said curtly.

The conversation was over but Anna’d found out a great deal. Aggressively avoiding a topic broadcasts just how emotionally charged that topic is. Why was a mystery, but if the snow kept up she was going to need something to do to pass the time for the next five weeks. And it would keep her mind off whatever it was with very big teeth and very big feet that was stalking the island.

She retrieved his hand and wrapped his palm with narrow gauze to keep it clean, then released him into the wild, wondering if, like Androcles, she’d made a friend. He went to his room and closed the door. Anna put her coat back on and headed for the carpenter’s shed. The play being enacted in the shop might have a plot closer to Saw III than Hamlet, but it was the only show in town.

It wasn’t the only soap opera, however.

Muffled in the saber rattle of winter branches and the fierce drive of the wind, and cloaked in the growing dusk, Anna was nearly on top of Bob and his graduate student before she saw them. They didn’t see her. Anna didn’t hide exactly or eavesdrop exactly; she just didn’t call attention to herself.

Katherine was crying. “He was such a beautiful wolf.”

Anna heard the words wailed on the wind, then the storm took the rest. After hours of slicing and dicing, pickling and bagging, all of a sudden Katherine was mourning her wolf. Bob said something, then Katherine hit him. She didn’t slap or punch; she hit his well-padded, parka-clad chest with her fists the way helpless heroines in old movies did.

Bob had seen the movies too. He caught both of her wrists. He wore heavy gloves; Katherine was bare-handed. Anna tensed, waiting to see if she would have to intervene. Observing the escalation of violence was drummed into park rangers. Katherine could hit Bob all she wanted – she wasn’t doing him any damage – but should he, with his height and weight advantage, strike back, he had to be taken down. Anna had no idea how she would do that. It would be like taking down the Pillsbury Doughboy on steroids.

Katherine jerked free and ran. In seconds, she was out of sight behind a curtain of snow and a scrim of trees.

The little drama had been played out within ten yards of the kitchen door against the glamorous backdrop of the outhouse. Bob didn’t chase after Katherine; he turned and plowed toward the bunkhouse. Anna faded back into the trees and turned her back. The parka she’d bought off the Internet for this excursion was white, the ski pants black. Unless he was looking hard, Bob wouldn’t see her.

Bob closed the door behind him. Anna continued to the shop. Mopping up blood and guts with a fistful of newspapers, Jonah was singing: “A spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down, the medicine go down.”

The wind snatched the door from Anna and banged it open. “Is everyone on this island insane?” she asked.

“All but for me and thee, and I have my doubts about thee,” Jonah replied. He had small, even teeth, and when he smiled the hairs of his cropped white beard bristled out like the whiskers of an interested cat. It was hard not to smile back but Anna managed.

“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.”