Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“You’re okay,” Anna said. “When you want help with your clothes, you tell me. Till then, I’m going to sit right here and make sure nobody bothers you.”

“How’s our girl?”

Fucking Bob. “Go away.”

With a jolt of guilt, Anna remembered Katherine had told her to keep Robin away from him. At the time, she’d written it off as the hissing of a jealous woman. Now she heard it as a warning. Bob had been eyeing Robin since he’d hit the island. Would he be evil enough to rape a young woman, mentally unstable from shock, who had gotten drunk?

Not raped, Anna thought. Had rape occurred signs would have been evident. A wave of relief, startling in its intensity, buoyed her up. Robin was, in some indefinable way, the essence of innocence. Not the coy, shy innocence the Victorians peddled but the fearless innocence of young wild things.

Robin’s hands, palms up to either side of her thighs on the mattress ticking, twitched like cats’ paws do when they dream. They stilled, and Anna saw not Robin but Katherine, the stumps of her gnawed fingers, the torn mess of her palms.

Anna had walked in on Bob, in the dark, on his hands and knees, over the corpse. Katherine’s parka was unzipped. The thought Bob had been sexually involved with the body had crossed Anna’s mind in a stampede of cloven hooves.

Katherine dead, Robin dead drunk. There were men who liked women to be objectified in this ultimate way.

Anna shook her head the way a dog with a sore ear will shake trying to rid itself of a pain it cannot stop or touch. America had changed radically from when she was a girl. Women – girls – had gone from the underrepresented in numbers and inferior in ratings to the majority and the best rated in a huge number of areas: college, graduate school, medicine, law. A woman had been Secretary of State, a woman Speaker of the House, a presidential candidate. Women were mayors, governors and university deans. No longer was it said that girls weren’t as smart as boys; now the focus was on how the system had failed the nation’s sons.

That’s what had changed.

Rape was what hadn’t changed.

Women were in the military and they were raped by their fellow soldiers. Girls were in college and they were raped by their fellow students. Rape crisis centers had sprung up and rape counselors. Yet it was still ignored in the most essential way: people in power didn’t want to touch it lest they get their hands dirty.

This was true in the armed forces, corporate America, universities. And in the National Park Service. A friend of Anna’s had been raped; she’d been working seasonally as a fire technician. She’d been struck down and raped by an NPS employee, a permanent, someone close to the Assistant Superintendent. Anna and the woman’s parents convinced her to report it.

The rape was never turned over to law enforcement. Higher-ups in the park talked to the victim, offered to set up “mediations” between her and her rapist that they might learn to work and play well together. The rapist was not fired. The crime was treated as a spat between roommates rather than as a felony assault. NPS employees raping seasonals wouldn’t be good PR.

And maybe she was lying. Maybe she was exaggerating. Maybe she had it coming.

That was the unsaid, the way otherwise-decent men and women could refuse to help and still think themselves good people.

“Arthritis.”

Still limp as a rag doll, Robin was staring at Anna. “Arthritis,” she said in an eerie monotone a thread above a whisper.

Anna’d been cracking her knuckles and clenching her jaw.

“Thanks.” She shook out her hands and let them hang loosely between her knees. Bone and muscle ached. “Drink some coffee.”

Anna helped with holding the cup and raising it to Robin’s lips. “Not bad,” she said when only a tablespoon or two slopped on the ruined sweater.

“My mom made this,” Robin said.

The sweater was a classic pattern, deep chocolate with a band of white reindeer marching single file across the chest and the back. “It’s beautiful,” Anna said. It had been, before the wine stained the reindeer the creepy color of cheap stage blood.

Robin bent at the waist to take off her knee-high mukluks and fell over sideways on the bed. Anna made no move to help her till the young woman asked for assistance. Having set her back up in her Raggedy Ann pose, Anna unlaced the soft boots and worked them off.

“There.” Robin pointed at her sock-clad feet.

“What?” Anna didn’t see any damage. The socks weren’t wet and the skin beneath radiated body heat.

“Mom knitted my socks for my feet. They fit better than any other socks.”

“Wow,” was all Anna could say. “Beats baking cookies all to hell.”

“All to hell.”

Anna helped her to another sip of coffee, then took a drink herself. The long day was beginning to wear on her.

A tap at the door was followed by the pilot’s grizzled face. “More coffee?”

“Food?” Anna asked.

“Coming up.” The door snicked shut.

Another tap quickly followed. “Robin?”

Bob.

“Go away.”

Jonah brought them each a bowl of beef-and-pasta casserole and more coffee. The food fortified Anna, and the few bites she could be induced to take seemed to help Robin some. Finally she asked Anna to help her remove the wine-soaked sweater.

As the fire was banked and others went to bed, the bunkhouse stilled and cooled. At ten, the lights went out; Jonah had shut down the generator for the night. Had Anna been sure Robin was loaded on booze, and only booze, she would have let her sleep it off and been grateful to do so. As it was, she lit a candle and propped herself next to the biotech where she could nudge her awake for at least another hour or two till her system wasn’t so depressed.

To keep them both from falling asleep, Anna began asking questions. In the next ninety minutes, she learned that Jonah was seventy-three years old, Ridley’s wife was probably a bona fide genius, Gavin, Robin’s sweetheart, loved Proust and classical guitar and the early works of Andrew Wyeth, had wonderful hands and thought Isle Royale was America’s last chance at saving Eden, that Adam had been married but his wife had committed suicide, slit her wrists and bled to death in the bath while he fixed the sink in the dressing room not ten feet away, and that Rolf Peterson had great legs.

By eleven-thirty, the candle was burned to a stub, and Robin was waxing fairly coherent. Anna watched her get undressed and slip into her sleeping bag. Her clothes didn’t look as if they’d been messed with and there was no bruising visible on arms, back or thighs. Reassured, Anna blew out the candle.

Before she crawled into her own sleeping bag, she turned the lock on the bedroom door. Without the heat from the stove, the room would be cold, but at least she would know no one was watching them as they slept.

Anna had hoped to plummet deep into the land of Morpheus as her roommate had done. Sitting, talking by candlelight, it had been all she could do to keep from falling asleep midword. Now her legs twitched and her mind raced and she couldn’t get comfortable.

To stop the racketing thoughts, she focused into the night, hoping its deep quiet would creep into her soul. The bunkhouse groaned and popped in a satisfied manner as it cooled. Robin snored softly, something she never did sober.

Now that Katherine slept in a black plastic shroud on the floor in the carpenter’s shop, the room across the hall was empty. Anna could move in. It would be a simple matter of dragging her sleeping bag and pillow fifteen feet to another single bed and another bare mattress, but her usual need for aloneness had given way to the comfort of safety in numbers. Even if that number was two, one of whom was semicomatose.