Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“Me neither. What do you want to bet?”

“I’m not a betting man.”

“Me neither.”

It was after midnight when Anna went to bed. She wanted to drag her sleeping bag into Katherine’s room and close and lock the door, but she stayed in the room she’d shared with Robin. Like Mrs. Darling, she wanted to be there if Peter Pan returned the children he’d stolen, but she doubted Robin had gone with an immortal boy. And she doubted she was anywhere as magical as Never-Never Land.

Adam was asleep on the sofa, or appeared to be. Bob had long since retired to his room and Ridley and Jonah to theirs. Sleeping was usually something Anna was good at under stress, that and eating. Years hiking trails in the backcountry had taught her to sleep and eat every chance she got, the way animals did. When one’s body was the only vehicle available to keep one’s soul from drifting into the ozone, it behooved the driver to keep the tanks topped off.

Tonight was a glaring exception.

Muscle and bone sank gratefully into the hard embrace of the mattress. Fatigue washed over her mind, warm and soporific. Then the delicious sense of drifting into oblivion morphed into sinking under the ice in Intermediate Lake, and she fought desperately back to wakefulness. The nightmare version was more terrifying than almost drowning had been. In the lake, there had been little time for anything but staying alive. In dreams, there was all the time in imagination.

For reasons probably relating more to her sleeping habits than her near-death experience, she was naked in the water. The crippling cold wasn’t a factor. Below her lay not the limitless new world she’d glimpsed at the time but the terrors children suffer in nightmares: being helpless and abandoned to a force so utterly evil, one never musters the courage to look at it; a force that would not have the mercy to grant the relief of death. Again and again Anna dragged her bare breasts and belly up an icy edge, serrated like a knife, kicking legs weak to the point of near paralysis, to fend off the black, sucking certainty of what lay below.

It didn’t take too many repetitions of this nocturnal entertainment before she decided staying awake was a spiffy alternative.

She lay on her back in the dark and stared upward at a ceiling that she presumed was still there. In a lightless environment, the nothing above her eyes could have been two inches deep or gone on to infinity. The bedside lamp could restore the ceiling to its proper place; Jonah had left the generator running. He said it was in case of emergency, but it was for comfort, the knowledge that they could have light if they heard the stealthy footfalls of boogeymen creeping about. Or boogey-wolves.

Bogus wolves, Anna thought. Werewolves.

Not the species of legend that morphed from seersucker suits to snouts but man posing as a wolf, taking on the imagined properties of the wolf: stealth, strength, ruthlessness, viciousness, love of slaughter for its own sake. It didn’t take a trained psychiatrist to see the projection in that equation. Man gave the wolf all the dark bits of himself, then vilified the wolf.

Isle Royale’s wog might or might not exist. It was said DNA didn’t lie, but it had also been said pictures didn’t lie until computers put the lie to that. What lied was people and they lied all the time, and for every reason under the sun. People lied with words and pictures, and, if it were possible, they would lie with DNA. Katherine could have faked the results for a reason that died with her.

Anna couldn’t shake the certainty that why Katherine died was at the heart of the bizarre happenings, but the researcher had not been shot or stabbed or smothered. She’d been savaged by a pack of wolves. It would take more time and expertise than anyone on the island had at hand to fake that: tracks, scat, urine, wounds, fur and tooth marks.

Cause of death wasn’t in question and death by misadventure didn’t have a why. It had a cause: wrong place, wrong time, bad decisions, faulty machinery. Why needed motive and only humans had motives.

Anna turned her back on the crowding infinity of night above her and stared at the eternal nothing where Robin’s bed had been when she’d turned out the light.

The heart of the issue was, why Katherine died.

Katherine had died accidentally at the auspices of wolves.

There was no way Anna could work that equation that didn’t end up in the twilight zone.

Sensing herself headed in the same direction, she fumbled over the edges of the desk between the beds, found the light, switched it on and sat up, her sleeping bag tucked in her armpits. Reoriented in space, her mind back in her skull, she marshaled what she knew about Katherine.

Katherine met and fell in love with a wolf when she was three years old. Bob Menechinn was her graduate adviser. He had carried her up five flights of stairs when she was unconscious. Katherine had shown a desire to keep Robin away from Bob. She’d gone so far as to tell Anna to warn the pretty young biotech to stay away from him. Katherine was cowed by, in love with or frightened by her professor. She rarely stood up to Bob. The first time was in the camp between Windigo and Malone. The second was in the cabin at Malone Bay after Robin had gone to free the trapped wolf.

In the tent, wog or wolf snorting around outside, Bob had gone nuts, shouting and waving his headlamp. Katherine said: “Be quiet. You’ll scare him away.” Remembering the look on Robin’s face when Katherine hadn’t gibbered with terror – Katherine had been concerned about the monster – Anna smiled.

Did Katherine think it was her wolf lover come back for her after twenty-three years or more? In dog years, that would be one old lover. No, Katherine was not crazy; she didn’t strike Anna as even particularly fanciful. She knew wolves and she wasn’t afraid. Not then anyway. She’d told Bob to be quiet because she loved the wolf more than she did him.

Early on, Anna hadn’t given Bob and Katherine as Bob and Katherine more than a passing thought. Lovers, married lovers, ex-lovers, jaded lovers were ubiquitous in every profession. Unlike wolves, humans weren’t engineered to be monogamous. Considering it now, she didn’t think Katherine was in love with Bob. Anna had found it impossible to so much as like the man, despite the fact he saved her life, but women often loved wretched men. Men loved vile women. In the infamous words of Woody Allen: “The heart wants what it wants.”

During the Malone Bay adventure, Anna began to suspect that what she’d first taken for fear or jealousy on Katherine’s part was barely controlled fury, the acidic variety that the powerless suffer, the kind that eats away from the inside.

Katherine had hinted Bob was withholding her Ph.D. Was that sufficient motive to hate? Probably. People hated without much provocation.

The second time Katherine contradicted him was when he’d said the study must be shut down; she insisted the foreign DNA was sufficient reason to keep ISRO closed winters, keep the study intact.

Protecting wolves again? Protecting scientific study? Anna wondered if Katherine had a greater investment in the island’s wolf/moose research than she’d let on. Had she an interest that made it worth her while to fake the DNA results?

Katherine was all whispers and Bob all shouts, yet both of them were opaque, keeping their secrets.

The woodstove had been stoked later than usual and, though the door was closed, the bedroom was warm. Anna let her sleeping bag fall down around her waist. Pulling it back up to cover her nakedness, she realized that the window, curtainless and without blinds – a fact she’d never noticed before – was making her modest. No longer did she feel the safety of an uninhabited wilderness beyond the glass.