Nevada Barr - Winter Study

Bob did his pulled-back smile.

Sauna was a tradition in the north. On Isle Royale, during Winter Study, it took on its early importance; it was the most efficient way to get clean in a cold climate where there was no running water. Anna’d thought she was too tired to do more than fall on the bed, but the promise of deep heat and a shampoo revived her sufficiently that she could return to the room to get her towel and soap.

Robin was sitting on her bed, staring at her hands.

Anna sat on the bed opposite, no more than five feet between them.

“What happened?” she asked simply. Normally the shock of seeing a chewed-up corpse might account for a young woman’s imploding, but Robin had not gone catatonic at the sight of the dismembered body. It had been later, while the body was being packaged, or shortly thereafter.

“We-” Robin began, then stopped. The decision to keep a painful secret was clear on her young face. Robin wasn’t a practiced liar.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to work some things out.”

Anna waited, giving her time to talk if she changed her mind. That she was speaking at all was a giant step forward. “Okay,” Anna said. “Come sauna.”

“No.” Robin tipped her head farther down and her hair fell around her face.

“You smell like Ridley’s feet,” Anna said untruthfully. “Take your clothes off. I’ll wait for you.”

Robin stood obediently and stripped, as did Anna. Wrapped in towels, Robin in her mukluks and Anna in her clogs, each with a plastic pail, they left the room. Naked as the day he was born, Jonah was in the common room.

“Pure sex,” he said and slapped a wiry thigh frosted with white hair. “You girls control yourselves.”

Robin actually smiled.

“Even worn down as we are, it’ll be tough,” Anna said.

Jonah dashed out ahead of them.

They left through the door of the working kitchen. Snow fell into Anna’s clogs as they hurried through the narrow band of trees between the outhouse and the building next to the carpenter’s shop that housed the sauna. Wind snatched at their towels and whipped Robin’s hair with such fury that strands of it stung across Anna’s cheeks and she let the younger woman go ahead of her. They ran the last ten yards.

In the small anteroom was a single bench and a row of pegs. Three towels already hung there. Anna and Robin added theirs to the line, put their footwear on the bench and, pails in hand like children going to the beach, went inside.

The sauna was built of fragrant cedar and heated by a cast-iron potbellied stove. Benches rose in tiers on two of the walls. The stove and a woodpile took up part of the third. On top of the stove was an iron tank filled with water heated to just short of boiling. To the left of the door was another tank with cold water. A single candle placed on the lower bench near the cold water lit the room.

Candlelight made the walls golden brown, the corners fading into darkness. Jonah and Adam sat side by side on the top bench, arguing good-naturedly about whether Matt Damon or Leonardo DiCaprio was the greatest actor of the twenty-first century. Ridley was standing by the cold-water tank filling his bucket.

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.