Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“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.”

“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.

Grabbing a flashlight, Anna went out onto the deck. Below the ghostly writing on the window, the snow had been trampled to ice rubble where Adam had been fetching armloads of wood for the stove. If there were new tracks, they blended with the old.

Anna shined the beam on the steps. They had nothing to tell her. Whoever had crept up to write the eerie note had left no tracks. That didn’t mean the writer was a thing of air and mystery; it only meant he or she had been careful. The storm blocked the moon and stars. Far enough from cities to be free of light pollution, the night was blind black. Driving wind harried the snow until the flakes were small and mean, stinging skin and eyes. It wouldn’t take an Eagle Scout – or an Apache scout, for that matter – to come and go, unnoticed and untraceable.

She, Anna thought.

This had the earmarks of a woman scorned seeking revenge or attention. How the trick was played on the glass, Anna couldn’t guess, but surely a woman who played with DNA would know enough about chemistry to manage it. Mentally Anna brushed off her annoyance. She’d never stooped to such a trick, but she’d sure as hell fantasized about it a time or two.

She returned to the window. The words were still there, limned in ice. Beyond the glass, she could see the dumb show of the three men talking, shaking their heads, gesticulating, walking short distances only to walk back. Without the pseudologic of words, they looked mad as hatters, each locked in his own world where he was king or jester or god.

A crazy-making current was running through the island. That a wog had manifest, a windigo died at their feet and a wolf been slaughtered didn’t completely account for it. The unreasoning fear of children raised on fairy tales where wolves had an overweaning penchant for evil trickled under saner thoughts. David Mech, Rolf Peterson, Ridley and a dozen other wolf researchers had spent decades debunking this myth, but there was no rooting out the ogres of childhood.

Fear was the yeast stirred into the mix of human dysfunctions, a catalyst that could spin them out of control. Fear was the difference between neurosis and insanity. Ridley detested Bob Menechinn for endangering his livelihood, his status and his study. He hated him for being ignorant and having power over the educated, being worthless but out to destroy the worth in other’s lives. Ridley tried to hide the worst of these emotions, but even the beard and the mustache and the startling intelligence couldn’t mask things all the time.

Yet Ridley had been the one to bring Menechinn to the island, had, in effect, given him the power of life and death over careers and learning.

Katherine was cowed by her mentor but had pounded his chest, however pathetically, and run away. Anna would have suspected a love triangle; it wasn’t cliché for no reason. NASA, trailer trash, Rhodes scholars: it didn’t matter, love – or what passed for love in the tabloids – made people dangerous. Katherine’s first love was a wolf; perhaps, like a Freudian version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” she was waiting to be devoured or rescued from a prolonged childhood by a handsome ax-toting woodsman.

Jonah drifted untouched by the Sturm und Drang as he flew untouched by the earth for much of his life. He’d been Winter Study’s pilot for eighteen years; Anna’d seen a picture of him, slipped into the plastic cover of the daily log, when he was in his forties or early fifties. One assumed he had a life the other forty-six weeks of the year – Anna’d seen the Web site – but he never spoke of it. Never spoke of a wife or a home or kids or his other job. Never shared anything even remotely personal. He defended his internal landscape with jokes.

In the dumb show being played out on the other side of the glass, Jonah was slightly apart from the fray, leaning in the doorway to the kitchen, his arms folded over his chest, a slightly bemused expression on his face.

Robin had retreated to a low, narrow plank bench along the rear wall. Whether or not she brought anything but the TNT of youth and beauty to this stew, Anna didn’t know, but Robin was affected by the uneasy atmosphere; Anna saw glimpses of it on her face occasionally before she escaped into the icy embrace of winter with the ease of one born of the union of a snow leopard and a polar bear.

Anna and her mother before her and her grandmother – a fighting Quaker Democrat and a flapper – were feminists. Much of her life, Anna had worked in a male-dominated world. She would defend the right of any woman to do the same, but she was realist enough to admit women made things more complicated, more volatile. Not because women were stupid or incompetent but because their presence often made men stupid and incompetent.

Like Menechinn. Except she doubted he was stupid. Arrogance was a form of stupidity because it caused elective blindness. Bob Menechinn might be a fool, but there was nothing wrong with his brain. Anna hardly knew where to start thinking about him. He possessed too many degrees in education to actually know anything yet had the supreme confidence that he knew it all. When he smiled – which he did too much – he had a way of pulling his chin in and letting his cheeks rise to cover his eyes that suggested he was holding back, striking a pose the way a penny-ante lawyer will when he thinks he’s got an ace up his sleeve. Menechinn believed himself to be a ladies’ man. The ladies, with the possible exception of Katherine, were unmoved.

“HELP ME” was fading, dimming out the same way it had appeared, line by line, in reverse order. Before hypothermia drove Anna back into the confines of the bunkhouse, she touched one of the rapidly vanishing marks. Her fingers were so cold from gripping the flashlight without gloves, she couldn’t feel anything.

Ectoplasm, she mocked and went inside.