Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“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.

“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.

Ridley was the only one still inside. The sauna was cooling as the fire was no longer stoked, but up near the ceiling there was still plenty of heat Anna could store in her bones.

Ridley opened his eyes. His long dark lashes were covered in tiny beads of moisture that rivaled the glitter of a Vegas showgirl, till he sat forward and lost the light.

“What?” he asked with the intuition of a man used to trouble.

Anna told him.

“Jesus!” He leaned back again but the angle was wrong and the magic of the eyes didn’t manifest. “You know he’s here to shut the study down, don’t you?”

“Can he do that with the wolf’s behavior so off?” Paradoxically, now that she was getting warm, she was beginning to shiver.

“He’s an idiot but he can probably do what he wants. Or what he’s told,” Ridley said. “He wouldn’t know one end of the wolf from the other if it bit him on the rump.”

Rump .

Anna’s brain caught at the word, a nice, round friendly word. Paul said things like that, his language never degenerating into cursing or obscenity. One day, she would have to clean up her vocabulary…

“Adam must have been out of his mind.”

“Out of his mind,” Anna echoed. She had no idea what Ridley referred to and no energy to pursue it.

“Seemed to think he was God’s gift to science. Some of the people on the list were real scientists. None of them were any good – government hacks – but at least they’d seen a microscope at one time in their lives.”

Ridley wasn’t really talking to her; he simply needed her there that he wouldn’t be crazy enough to be talking to himself. Anna lay down on the top bench and stretched out; something there’d not been room to do before.

“Bob’s your basic prostitute; he screws whoever the man with the paycheck tells him to screw. Homeland Security wants the border parks open year-round. Bingo! Bob discovers the longest-running, most highly respected and – get this – popular study in the country is a piece of garbage.”