Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“Rid, I’d never hurt Robin. You know that. If I could bring her back right now, I’d do it. Let me go, Rid.” The last was said almost sadly, and Anna remembered that the two men had been friends for years, a fact that had been easy to forget from the interactions she’d observed on the island.

Ridley lowered Adam carefully back into the kitchen chair. “Sorry,” he said and went back to stirring the oatmeal. If he didn’t pay attention, it was going to be the consistency of library paste, but Anna knew better than to offer to take over for him. Age-old customs were not suspended merely because hard times came. People needing reassurance tended to cling to them with ever-more tenacity.

They ate quickly. Though no one but Adam seemed anxious to start the search for Robin, it was tacitly agreed that it would be wrong not to seem anxious. Anna didn’t want to search because she didn’t believe she would find a living woman, and the photographs on Katherine’s cell phone had put her more in the mood for revenge than body recovery. By the way Ridley’s once-lovely skin sagged around his eyes and pulled so tight across his mouth that dints of white showed on either side of his nose, Anna suspected he was holding on to control with his fingernails. A man of order, this chaos was unhinging him. Ridley would search, Anna thought. He’d do everything he had to until he was too tired to lift a foot for another step, but she doubted he was thinking clearly. Without the thinking, the physical work of searching would not bear fruit unless he got luckier than seemed likely. For all his flirting with Robin, Ridley was Jonah’s love; he was like an old woman with an only son. Until his boy was out of the woods, the wolves could have everybody else.

Bob was scared.

Adam took the bowls from the table and dumped them in the sink.

“What do you want us to do?” Ridley asked Anna.

“We have to search,” she said and tried to keep the pointlessness out of her voice. Adam was right; they could do with more optimism.

“Since she was taken in her sleeping bag – a winter bag, probably good to five or ten below – there’s a good chance she survived.” She drummed her fingers on the table and thought. “One of us took her, you guys know that, don’t you? Or there’s someone else on the island who has been screwing with our minds.”

That sat in the air for a while. Ridley stared at Adam and Bob in turn. Adam played with a spoon. Bob’s eyes were skittering around the room, as if he followed the path of a butterfly on Benzedrine.

“Which one of you found Katherine’s cell phone?” he blurted out finally.

He’d seen the missed call from Anna.

“Are you still on that cell phone kick?” she snapped. “Just pay the two dollars.”

“What…” Confusion passed over his face, then cleared. “It’s more than two dollars. Somebody found it.”

“Leave it alone,” Ridley said wearily.

“Maybe Katherine took it with her,” Adam said. Had he used sepulchral tones, it would have been mocking at best and bad taste at worst, but he said it the way a grocer would say “four dollars a pound.” Bob’s face quivered like a pudding when the door slams.

Anna made a mental note to call Bob again soon.

“What do we do first?” Ridley cut across the others.

There was a story problem Anna’d had a hard time with in fourth grade. A farmer with a rowboat wanted to get his fox, his goose and his bag of grain across the river but could take only one at a time in his tiny boat. If he leaves the goose with the grain, she’ll eat it. If he leaves the fox with the goose, the fox will eat her.

Who would try to find Robin, if she did happen to still be living, and who would sabotage the search? Who was the fox, who the goose?

The matter was taken out of her hands. “Bob and I will head up the Greenstone,” Adam said. “Get your stuff, Bob. These guys are going to dither half the morning.”

Since Anna couldn’t think of any better arrangement she didn’t argue. The five of them couldn’t cover enough country to find a hidden woman. Or a hidden corpse. The only way they were going to locate Robin was if the kidnapper wanted them to or if Robin was alive and helped them find her. Much as Anna wanted the latter to be true, she didn’t let herself get too attached to the idea.

Adam and Bob left to get their gear together and suddenly the kitchen felt bigger. There was more air to breathe and the walls moved back.

“Can you ski, Jonah?”

“I got the silver medal in skiing in the 1908 Olympics,” he said.

“I knew that,” Anna said and smiled to make sure she still could. To Ridley she said: “Why don’t you and Jonah do Feldtmann. We’ve got nothing to go on except that she was carried out in a sleeping bag. That suggests whoever carried her had to travel on improved trails or he wouldn’t get far. There’s only a couple places on the island she could have been taken and kept alive: Feldtmann fire tower, Malone Bay ranger station or the cabin at Daisy Farm. Daisy Farm and Malone are reaches. They’re too far.”

“Why would anybody take Robin to Feldtmann?” Ridley asked. He wasn’t asking Anna; he was asking the ether. Neither of them answered.

“What are you going to do?” Jonah asked.

Anna looked hard into the pale blue eyes behind the round lenses.

“Why? Are you worried about me?”

“It seems the animals separated from the herd aren’t living to a ripe old age this winter. Riper old age,” he amended with a ghost of his old raillery.

“I’ll recheck the housing areas and the lean-tos,” Anna told him.

“Anywhere else and we’re just looking for a body.”

“Keep your radio on, and keep it on you,” Ridley said.

“Make sure your batteries are charged,” Jonah added. “Adam’s been having a heck of a time with his. A heck of a time.”

Then Anna was alone in the bunkhouse. Every pair of cross-country skis was in use. The snow was eighteen inches deep where it drifted and nearly a foot where it didn’t. Snowshoes hung on the wall, but with a foot to a foot and a half it was a toss-up whether they were more or less trouble than slogging through in boots. Had Anna meant to search, as she’d said, this might have bothered her.

What she meant to do was take the bunkhouse apart till she found out what the hell was going on. In the process, she dearly hoped to find out who took Robin. “Who” might tell her where the young woman had been stashed.

In time to find her alive was the thought Anna wouldn’t let herself add.

Anna found exactly nothing. Bob’s laptop was password protected, as was Ridley’s. Neither Jonah nor Adam had a PC. Drawers and duffel bags produced the expected long underwear and dirty socks. Sitting on the floor of Bob’s room, his duffel bag between her knees, Anna was swamped with helpless rage. Snatching up the emptied satchel, she flung it. It bounced off the side of the bunk and smacked her in the face, a stinging cut high on her left cheek where the luggage tag struck.

The bag was old and worn; the leather around the tag had grown stiff and cracked. Anna looked at the offending object: PROFESSOR MENECHINN, UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN. Bob was so lazy that in ten years he’d never bothered to change the address. “University of Saskatchewan,” Anna said aloud. The name struck a chord, and she sat in silence waiting for the rest of the music to surface.

“They’re both Canucks,” Jonah had said of Bob and Adam.

“Cynthia Johansen, a graduate student at the University of Saskatchewan, lived with her husband, Adam Johansen, a freelance carpenter.”

Not only were Adam and Bob Canadians, they had both lived in Saskatchewan and at the same time. Bob taught at the university where Adam’s wife, Cynthia, went to graduate school. It wasn’t a great leap to put Cynthia into one of Professor Menechinn’s graduate courses. It was an even shorter leap to imagine him assaulting her.