Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“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.

In summer, with the exception no doubt of employee housing – NPS people were notoriously trusting – buildings would be locked at night against visitors with larceny or vandalism in their souls. The major thieves on the island in winter were the mice, and few locks deterred them.

Ignoring the skepticism, Adam removed a single key from the ring and handed it to Anna. “The door jams, so don’t let it fool you. When you turn the key, it’s unlocked. After that, brute force is your best bet.”

For the length of time it took her to walk through the common room to her own room, Anna entertained the wisp of a fantasy that she could just zip out to the V.C. and zip back; that she didn’t have to put on her heavy socks, ski pants, fleece overshirt, balaclava, gloves and boots. Like the Sun King’s Versailles, much of one’s time in the frozen north was spent dressing and undressing.

Outside, the temperature was minus seventeen. With the windchill, it was closer to minus forty. A jaunt to the outhouse was scarcely bearable. Without gear, the quarter mile to the V.C. could prove deadly.

THERE WAS NO WINDCHILL. The wind had stopped, and the forest felt as if it were holding its breath, the island in stasis, waiting. Despite the fact she’d been steeping her brain in boogeymen and monsters of the id, the waiting didn’t feel threatening, merely a stillness through which Anna moved, a moment out of time in which her breath was stilled as well. The good version of death without the annoying part where one died.

This frozen idyll was ended when she heard a shuffling in the dark beyond her flashlight and, before the beam had rooted out the squirrelly culprit, her mind had shown her a slavering, long-toothed, red-eyed wog skulking in the night.

“Damn!” she whispered. Being frightened of being alone in the woods pissed her off. The woods, the wilderness, were where she hid from the monsters of the populated world. To become prey, even in her mind, was intolerable. Despite the prickling of her neck hairs and the cringing along her spine, she forced herself to walk slowly and deliberately down the trail.

By the time she stood on the wooden porch of the V.C., stomping the snow from her boots, she was cold to the bone. Clumsy in gloves, she inserted the key, turned it counterclockwise, and exerted the recommended brute force. The door came open so easily, she fell backward, stumbling over her big feet and landing on her rump with a grunt that would have done a wild boar proud. For a moment, she lay there, staring into the blank sky. It crossed her mind that this was the perfect opportunity to wave arms and legs feebly, experience the worldview of a topsy-turvy beetle. That insight into the insect mind might be the most enlightening experience she’d have on ISRO. Sloth, not an innate sense of human dignity, decided her against it. She rolled over, got to hands and knees, rose and started in the open door.

Halfway across the lintel, a cry stopped her. Not a breath of wind, not a decibel of sound pollution, the voice cut into her eardrums with the force of a slap in the face.

“Is somebody there? Is somebody there? Help me! If somebody’s there, help me!”

Bob.

It was fucking Bob.

Bob had left the door open and caused Anna to fall on her keister. Now he wanted her help. God knows, with what, and Anna didn’t much care. Had she been a lesser person, she might have turned and slipped into the night from whence she had come. For the time it took for her heart to beat twice, she considered that perhaps, as an act of humility, she should become a lesser person for one evening.

Switching off the flashlight, she stepped quietly into the Visitors Center. Stale air, marinated in winter, harbored a chill that the outdoors, fierce with life even at forty below, could not attain. Inside cold, like inside dark, was harsher and scarier than anything under the moon.

Instinct – or antipathy – dictated she keep her whereabouts in question. Without moving, without making a sound, she waited for Bob to call again. Thick and slow and glacial, silence flowed around her till she felt if she didn’t move she would suffer the fate of the mastodons, encased in living ice for millennia. Gliding as best she might in the clown-sized boots, she moved from the door to the right, where an open, half-spiral stairway led up to a viewing area.

The main room of the Visitors Center was at least thirty by forty feet. Tall picture windows gave onto a view of Washington Harbor. To the west side of the windows was a skeleton of a mature moose, reassembled and displayed in a glass box. Beside it, trapped in an eternal howl to a mate long dead, was a wolf preserved by the art of taxidermy.

Anna’d seen the displays the first day when she’d looked in the windows. That she could see them now surprised her. Above the level of the trees, the white of the harbor ice and the white of the sky cast a faint silvery light.

“Is anybody there?” Bob’s voice emanated from the offices on the opposite side of the building. He didn’t sound particularly panicked for a man who had been hollering for help moments before. Anna said nothing. Dead, cold air settled more firmly around her.

A minute passed, two: he didn’t call again and didn’t come out. She started across the hardwood floor. Ski-pant legs whistled together, big boots creaked and snuffled.

“Who’s there?” Bob called.

Yeti didn’t sneak, she thought sourly as a beam of yellow light raked down the hall and shot by her.

Anna switched on her light. “Anna Pigeon,” she said, and Bob’s beam blinded her. “Get that damn light out of my eyes. What’s the problem? What are you hollering about?”

The instant he moved his light from her face, she aimed her flashlight at his. His eyes were bright, virtually twinkling, and his skin had a rosy glow. His balaclava was crunched down around his neck, but the hood of his parka was up as if he’d dressed for the cold in a hurry. With those jowls, it couldn’t have been comfortable.

“You look fine to me,” Anna said. A groan and a thump came from down the hall.

“It’s not me; it’s Robin,” Bob said.

Sick fear washed through Anna on a wave of nausea. “Lead me to her,” she said. Bob started to speak, but she cut him off: “Now.” The flashlight beam on his back, she followed him down the short hallway. Years of experience and training told her she should have listened to what he had to say, but Bob managed to tap directly into a deep vein of irritation.