Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“I’m not going to kill you,” Anna said. “I don’t want to wait in line that long. Since you are going to kill me anyway, you might as well tell me: did you drug Robin?”

Bob leered. Snow was catching on his wiry hair and the fat of his cheeks where they pushed out beneath his eyes. “Adam said you were trying to frame me, Miss Ranger. Too bad you’re a fool.” His head rolled till Adam came into his line of vision. He had to let it flop back on his neck to look up at him. “Wearing a wire,” he said conspiratorially.

“How much did you give him?” Anna asked.

“Enough,” Adam said.

“You told him I was going to kill him or set him up?”

“Divide and conquer,” Adam said. “Upsy-daisy, Bob.” Using himself as a lever, he rocked back and pulled Bob to his feet. They were no more than two yards from the edge of the basalt shelf, yet the drop was practically invisible, the white of the snow melding seamlessly with the white of sky and ice. Anna knew it was there from her time on ISRO and the hike they’d made to Malone Bay. She doubted Bob had any idea he stood on a precipice. Adam turned Menechinn so he faced to the east over the cliff.

“Don’t,” Anna said. She didn’t move any closer. If a tussle started, it wasn’t going to be her who was nudged to her death.

“Bob, see there?” Adam pointed into the void where the white on white of weather created a blank canvas for the ketamine to paint on.

“Robin wants to meet you there.”

“Don’t,” Anna said again. “Bob, there is no there there. Adam means to kill you. You’re on the edge of a cliff; step back.”

Adam spun around. The dead look was gone from his face replaced by the fury she’d felt the night she’d seen the photograph of him and his dead wife. “Get the fuck out of here,” he hissed, a whisper metastasized into a shout.

“Bob, do it, go. Anna will kill you. Run!” Adam shouted in Menechinn’s ear. Bob began to lumber forward toward imagined sex and safety.

In the eternal second of the mind, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, huge and shapeless in ill-fitting clothes, running into the arctic wilderness, played in Anna’s mind, overlaid by Peter Boyle’s singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz”; monsters pieced together from the dead and given life by the insane. Bob was a monster; that she didn’t doubt. She would never know what had made him or if there was true evil in the world and he had chosen his own monstrousness. Anna wouldn’t have chosen to save him. She wouldn’t have said she particularly wanted him saved. Her mind reacted to what he was with a cringing loathing she didn’t care to examine.

Her body reacted from years of training. She threw herself forward in a flying tackle aimed at the backs of Bob Menechinn’s knees. Big men had bad knees; the joints couldn’t cope with the bulk, and most of them had played football at one time or another. Knee injuries were a small ranger’s friend. Her right shoulder and side of her head smashed into him and the knees gave. Falling back and to the side, he crushed her right arm into the snow. Pain exploded in her elbow.

“It’s a cliff, it’s a fucking cliff, I was going off a cliff,” Bob began yelling. Mad with the sudden realization of physical danger, he scrabbled backward. His knee ground over Anna’s wrist and she cried out. A flailing hand struck her on the side of her head so hard her ear burned and roared.

“You’re welcome, God dammit,” she shouted as she tried to roll out of his thrashing way. On hands and knees, Bob scuttled through the deep snow, moaning and bellowing like a mad boar. He didn’t stop till he’d reached the trees. There he pulled himself upright, using the bole of a tree, and screamed: “He tried to kill me. He tried to kill me.” The litany didn’t stop there, but Anna tuned the rest of it out and got to her feet. Snow and down padding had saved her serious injury. Her wrist still rotated, and, other than the misery of ice down her collar and up her sleeves, the dive didn’t seem to have done any appreciable damage.

Adam was still standing near the cliff’s edge, his feet inches from where the rock fell away.

“Why did you do that?” he asked softly.

“I don’t know,” Anna said. For a minute, they stood, listening to the scissor cut of the wind in the trees and Bob’s lament. Snow came at them in spinning gusts, air currents made wild and playful where the earth dropped away to water.

“You know what he is?”

“Some of it. I think he drugged Robin. I think he did the same to Katherine, then raped her and took pictures to blackmail her into silence. I’m guessing he did something like that to your wife.”

“Cynthia,” Adam said.

“Cynthia,” Anna gave Adam’s memory the honor of a name.

“She was like Robin. Not raised like her or athletic like her, but with that innocence that doesn’t wear off at thirteen like it does for most of us.” Adam’s gaze moved from Anna’s face to where Bob clung to his tree, his moaning and cursing settled into a murmuring chant low enough they could sense the tenor but no longer had to hear the words.

“Cynthia had never been out of school – went straight from kindergarten through to her Ph.D. program. Her dad raised her by himself; only kid. Her mother died of appendicitis when she was barely walking.”

Anna didn’t know what to say and figured nothing was best. The talking was taking the action out of Adam for the moment.

His attention returned from the trees where Bob had run. “Cynthia thought men were nice,” he said. “She thought they took care of women and children, saved kittens from trees and helped old ladies carry groceries to the car.” A hint of warmth touched his voice and it no longer sounded of frozen harp strings.

“I hadn’t thought of that in a while,” he said to Anna and shook his head. “How could I have forgotten that?”

“Too busy hating?” she hazarded.

“It was something to do,” he said, and most of the chill was back in the strings.

“Bob was her teacher?” Anna asked.

“‘Outdoors Education.’ Two semesters.”

Anna waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. He drifted, his eyes moving slowly over her head as if he was reading a complex story in the gray of the sky above the basalt. Finally his gaze returned to Earth, to Bob, sitting now, his back to the tree he’d been hugging, his head back and his mouth open.

“Bob drugged her. He did it more than once. She didn’t tell me till she got pregnant. She was ashamed. She was afraid she’d lose me, that either I’d never feel the same way about her or that I’d go berserk and tear his head off and spend the rest of our lives in jail. She couldn’t tell anyone else. There were the pictures, and she knew what they’d do to her dad and me. Then she found out she was going to have a baby. I’d been on a six-week job in Manitoba when the baby was conceived. So she told me. Three days later, she got into the bath and cut her wrists.

“I wasn’t with her when she died,” Adam said, and, for the first time, Anna could hear tears in his voice. “I had to answer the phone. Guess who was calling.”

“God damn,” Anna said, the oxygen gone from the air.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got to take him back,” Anna said. “I’m sorry,” she added.

“I could kill you,” Adam said.

“Maybe.”

“Getting killed for the likes of Menechinn’s crazy.” Adam laughed, and there seemed to be genuine humor in it. “Shoot, getting a hang-nail for the likes of Menechinn is crazy.”

Anna said nothing.

“I guess wasting time trying to kill him is crazy too,” Adam said. The thought or the laugh had gentled his voice, and he shook his head as he spoke.