Nevada Barr - Winter Study

For a moment, Anna wondered if Bob had been the instigator of the mysterious “HELP ME” that had appeared on the window. The loon call of the cell phone had been after that by hours, but it was possible Katherine had phoned earlier, or he had phoned her.

If he knew she was in trouble, why wouldn’t he have said so, led the rescue effort? When there was no physical danger to himself, Bob liked playing the white knight. If he didn’t know, why wouldn’t he have shared the message after the fact? Afraid they’d think he’d dropped the ball? Or was the message so vitriolic or damning, he didn’t want them to hear it?

Reflexively, Anna looked over her shoulder, checking to see that the parka still covered the window. It did.

Not being a devotee of the cell, Anna’d not given it enough thought. But cell phones took pictures. They text-messaged, and did far more things than anything smaller than the Pentagon should be able to do. A person’s cell phone was almost as rich an information trove as his or her computer. Anna hit MENU and began methodically deciphering icons, reading tiny print and punching buttons.

Katherine had not taken any snapshots of the wolves. Being crippled, then eaten, was evidently sufficiently entertaining that there was no need to record it. Anna couldn’t tell if she had text-messaged anyone. She kept pushing arrows and buttons and hitting SELECT.

“Ish.”

The phone also received photographs. The pictures Katherine had taken were of the same ski vacation as the photographs on the laptop, just different shots and poses. The photographs that had been sent to her had been unopened till Anna’d pressed buttons and pried her way into where they waited like evil beings in a dead-end alley.

There were five of them, but Anna suspected there’d been more. Katherine probably looked at the first few sent, then deleted the rest unopened. She died before she could delete these.

Katherine, nude, had been arranged on a bed. Her legs were splayed toward the camera. In the first photograph, there was a cucumber in her vagina and a carrot inserted in her rectum. The second picture changed only the objects used to rape her: a baseball bat and a green wine bottle. In the third, the photographer had gone to the effort of propping her head up and arranging her hands so she looked as if she had inserted the baseball bat herself.

“Jesus!” Anna breathed and closed her eyes. She had to swallow the sickness in her throat before she could open them again. Then it was another half minute before she could bring herself to look back at the tiny screen.

The fourth shot was a crooked close-up of her face with a man’s erect penis shoved in her mouth. Her head was back, eyes closed and jaw slack. In the last shot, the baseball bat had been replaced by a man’s fist pushed in up to the forearm. The man’s face was not shown.

Katherine’s was, every time.

“God damn!” Anna closed the phone and sat staring at it. “God damn!” she said again, shaking her head. Most of her adult life had been spent trying to put a stop to man’s inhumanity to everything he could get his hands on. The news showed burned babies, mothers running screaming from bullets, dogs eating fallen men, bombs shattering homes and vehicles. In real time, snuff films every night in every living room in America played out in the name of Current Events.

Yet Anna could not get used to it. Paul had told her the day she got used to it was the day she lost her soul.

She opened the phone and pushed ten numbers in rapid succession. A ring, and two, three. It was very late or very early. Sane people in real places slept at this time of the night. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”

“Yes?”

“Paul,” Anna cried. “Paul, it’s me,” and she began to cry.

Ketamine stayed in the blood a relatively long time, as far as testing was concerned. Robin’s blood would show traces of the drug for seven to fourteen days. One of those days was gone, and Anna didn’t know how many more they would be weathered in on the island.

Skipping breakfast, she went, yet again, to the Visitors Center. The door was still unlocked. She wished there was a way to make sure it stayed that way while she was inside, but there wasn’t. Indoors, it was so cold she couldn’t see her breath. Frigid, superdry air would not fog.

The vials of blood – Robin’s and the wolf’s – were in her coat pocket. Though the man blackmailing Katherine had been careful to keep his face out of the pictures, Anna didn’t doubt that it was Bob Menechinn. Katherine’s warnings, the comments about using ketamine, being carried upstairs unconscious – it made sense. Ketamine was not only a cat tranquilizer and a club drug; it was also becoming the date rape drug of choice. The aftereffects often included amnesia, disorientation and paranoia. Three symptoms that made it extremely difficult for victims to successfully prosecute their attackers.

Bob – and Anna was sure it was Bob – had drugged Katherine, then photographed her in crude and mocking poses. These were the pictures that he’d threatened to put up on the Internet, the pictures that she didn’t want her mother to see, the pictures that had made her want to die.

He intended to do the same thing to Robin. Robin wasn’t drunk; she was drugged. When Anna had come upon him in the carpenter’s shop, hunkered over the dead body of his graduate student, he had probably been looking for the cell phone. He also could have been indulging himself in a woman the way he preferred them: helpless and degraded.

Anger was racking up Anna’s respiration rate. Inside her mittens, she clenched and unclenched her fists. Halfway through the main room of the Visitors Center she turned abruptly and walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Washington Harbor. The sun had not yet risen above the hills. When it did, there would be no blue sky to greet it. Clouds touched the tops of the trees on Beaver Island, black and mysterious across the wide expanse of ice. As she watched the scene – devoid of movement, devoid of sound, of shadows – and slowed her breath and heart rate, letting the blinding anger clear from her vision, she began to see colors. The ice, slate and pearl, hinted of blues and lavenders so delicate they were wisped with imagination. Ink spikes of the trees on the shore harbored dark-dark greens, greens so close to black they shimmered in and out of vision like the hide of a whale deep in the ocean. Far out, where the ice stopped past Beaver and the open water began, were the barest touches of pink, iridescent and ephemeral.

In the night, the iris of the eye expanded to take in what available light it could to help clawless, blunt-toothed human beings live until morning. Perhaps in winter there was similar evolution, allowing the eyes to adjust to let in every scrap of color, so the fragile, neurotic creatures could stay sane to see another spring.

As Anna let the anger go, she knew she was terrified. She was scared to the bone that Robin was cached somewhere, drugged insensible again and posed for pictures like those on the cell phone in Anna’s pocket. There were few places she could be hidden, unless death by hypothermia was part of the plan. Dead, a victim couldn’t accuse the rapist. Katherine wouldn’t be testifying anytime soon. Was that why Bob had said nothing when she’d called? Had she outlived her usefulness, and, when she got into trouble the night she ran off and called him for help, he just quietly turned over and went back to sleep?

Gutless, Anna thought in disgust, but the theory worked with what she knew of Menechinn. So did the date rape scenario. Bob had the means and opportunity for drugging Robin and raping her. Robin’s jab stick, loaded with ketamine, had gone missing from Malone Bay cabin. He had the means to remove her bodily from the bunkhouse. He had carried Anna two miles and Katherine up five flights of stairs. Anna didn’t think he had the means to stash her anywhere on the island and still keep her alive. Therefore, he didn’t kidnap her. Or he didn’t mean for her to live.