Winter Study (39 page)

In
summer, with the exception no doubt of employee housing — NPS people
were notoriously trusting — buildings would be locked at night against
visitors with larceny or vandalism in their souls. The major thieves on
the island in winter were the mice, and few locks deterred them.

Ignoring
the skepticism, Adam removed a single key from the ring and handed it
to Anna. “The door jams, so don’t let it fool you. When you turn the
key, it’s unlocked. After that, brute force is your best bet.”

For
the length of time it took her to walk through the common room to her
own room, Anna entertained the wisp of a fantasy that she could just
zip out to the V.C. and zip back; that she didn’t have to put on her
heavy socks, ski pants, fleece overshirt, balaclava, gloves and boots.
Like the Sun King’s Versailles, much of one’s time in the frozen north
was spent dressing and undressing.

Outside,
the temperature was minus seventeen. With the windchill, it was closer
to minus forty. A jaunt to the outhouse was scarcely bearable. Without
gear, the quarter mile to the V.C. could prove deadly.

THERE
WAS NO WINDCHILL. The wind had stopped, and the forest felt as if it
were holding its breath, the island in stasis, waiting. Despite the
fact she’d been steeping her brain in boogeymen and monsters of the id,
the waiting didn’t feel threatening, merely a stillness through which
Anna moved, a moment out of time in which her breath was stilled as
well. The good version of death without the annoying part where one
died.

This
frozen idyll was ended when she heard a shuffling in the dark beyond
her flashlight and, before the beam had rooted out the squirrelly
culprit, her mind had shown her a slavering, long-toothed, red-eyed wog
skulking in the night.

“Damn!”
she whispered. Being frightened of being alone in the woods pissed her
off. The woods, the wilderness, were where she hid from the monsters of
the populated world. To become prey, even in her mind, was intolerable.
Despite the prickling of her neck hairs and the cringing along her
spine, she forced herself to walk slowly and deliberately down the
trail.

By
the time she stood on the wooden porch of the V.C., stomping the snow
from her boots, she was cold to the bone. Clumsy in gloves, she
inserted the key, turned it counterclockwise, and exerted the
recommended brute force. The door came open so easily, she fell
backward, stumbling over her big feet and landing on her rump with a
grunt that would have done a wild boar proud. For a moment, she lay
there, staring into the blank sky. It crossed her mind that this was
the perfect opportunity to wave arms and legs feebly, experience the
worldview of a topsy-turvy beetle. That insight into the insect mind
might be the most enlightening experience she’d have on ISRO. Sloth,
not an innate sense of human dignity, decided her against it. She
rolled over, got to hands and knees, rose and started in the open door.

Halfway
across the lintel, a cry stopped her. Not a breath of wind, not a
decibel of sound pollution, the voice cut into her eardrums with the
force of a slap in the face.

“Is somebody there? Is somebody there? Help me! If somebody’s there, help me!”

Bob.

It was fucking Bob.

23

Bob
had left the door open and caused Anna to fall on her keister. Now he
wanted her help. God knows, with what, and Anna didn’t much care. Had
she been a lesser person, she might have turned and slipped into the
night from whence she had come. For the time it took for her heart to
beat twice, she considered that perhaps, as an act of humility, she
should become a lesser person for one evening.

Switching
off the flashlight, she stepped quietly into the Visitors Center. Stale
air, marinated in winter, harbored a chill that the outdoors, fierce
with life even at forty below, could not attain. Inside cold, like
inside dark, was harsher and scarier than anything under the moon.

Instinct
— or antipathy — dictated she keep her whereabouts in question. Without
moving, without making a sound, she waited for Bob to call again. Thick
and slow and glacial, silence flowed around her till she felt if she
didn’t move she would suffer the fate of the mastodons, encased in
living ice for millennia. Gliding as best she might in the clown-sized
boots, she moved from the door to the right, where an open, half-spiral
stairway led up to a viewing area.

The
main room of the Visitors Center was at least thirty by forty feet.
Tall picture windows gave onto a view of Washington Harbor. To the west
side of the windows was a skeleton of a mature moose, reassembled and
displayed in a glass box. Beside it, trapped in an eternal howl to a
mate long dead, was a wolf preserved by the art of taxidermy.

Anna’d
seen the displays the first day when she’d looked in the windows. That
she could see them now surprised her. Above the level of the trees, the
white of the harbor ice and the white of the sky cast a faint silvery
light.

“Is
anybody there?” Bob’s voice emanated from the offices on the opposite
side of the building. He didn’t sound particularly panicked for a man
who had been hollering for help moments before. Anna said nothing.
Dead, cold air settled more firmly around her.

A
minute passed, two: he didn’t call again and didn’t come out. She
started across the hardwood floor. Ski-pant legs whistled together, big
boots creaked and snuffled.

“Who’s there?” Bob called.

Yeti didn’t sneak,

she thought sourly as a beam of yellow light raked down the hall and shot by her.

Anna
switched on her light. “Anna Pigeon,” she said, and Bob’s beam blinded
her. “Get that damn light out of my eyes. What’s the problem? What are
you hollering about?”

The
instant he moved his light from her face, she aimed her flashlight at
his. His eyes were bright, virtually twinkling, and his skin had a rosy
glow. His balaclava was crunched down around his neck, but the hood of
his parka was up as if he’d dressed for the cold in a hurry. With those
jowls, it couldn’t have been comfortable.

“You look fine to me,” Anna said. A groan and a thump came from down the hall.

“It’s not me; it’s Robin,” Bob said.

Sick
fear washed through Anna on a wave of nausea. “Lead me to her,” she
said. Bob started to speak, but she cut him off: “Now.” The flashlight
beam on his back, she followed him down the short hallway. Years of
experience and training told her she should have listened to what he
had to say, but Bob managed to tap directly into a deep vein of
irritation.

“What happened?” she meant to ask, but it was a demand.

“Robin’s been pretty upset since Katherine’s accident,” Bob replied, his voice warm with concern.

“And?”

At
the end of the hallway, he turned right. Anna quickened her steps; she
didn’t want him out of her sight. He stopped in the last doorway, the
corner office with a view of the lake. A plastic name-plate, printed
with DISTRICT RANGER, was in a faux-brass holder to the right of the
doorframe.

Blocking
the entrance with his bulk, big on a bad day, bigger still with the
down coat, he said: “Not everybody can handle violence with your
aplomb, Anna.” He used his nice-fellow voice, but the intent to insult
was clear. Anna was not insulted. With guys like Menechinn in the
world, she was liking the idea of violence better and better.

“Robin,” she called. A retching sound trickled on a moan from the dark room.

“Step away from the door,” Anna said.

“She’s
been drinking pretty heavily,” Bob said. “I think she started sneaking
it not too long after you left for your ski outing.”

“Move away from the door.”

“Aren’t we the officious little woman,” he said, but he moved.

The
office reeked of wine. Robin was on the floor, her long legs curled up,
knees under her chin. She was hatless and her hair fanned out around
her head. Damp strands stuck to her face.

Half
her attention on the young woman, half on Bob’s hulking shadow,
glimpsed in stripes and washes as the beams of their lights moved, Anna
knelt. “Robin, it’s Anna. Can you talk to me?” she asked gently as she
pried open one eyelid, then the other, and shined her light in. Both
pupils reacted sluggishly. Dilation could have been caused by drugs or
darkness. Robin’s skin was cool to the touch and diaphoretic. Any
number of things could account for that.

“I
went out for a walk,” Bob said. “When I came by the V.C., I heard
noises and came up to see what was going on. I found her back here with
a box of the wine she’d taken from the bathroom fridge.” He played his
light to the box of merlot on the floor a few feet from Robin. A mason
jar was tipped over next to it, a stain spreading on the carpet. “I was
trying to get her up and take her back to the bunkhouse, so she
wouldn’t freeze to death, when I heard you come in.”

Anna
flicked her light to his face. He threw up an arm as if the beam was a
blow. With the cut of shadow, she couldn’t read his expression.

“Yeah, well, here’s your chance.”

Between
the two of them, they got Robin to her feet and out of the Visitors
Center. The trail from the bunkhouse to the V.C. and dock was swampy in
summer. A wooden walkway, two planks wide, had been built to keep foot
traffic from tearing up the muddy ground. Snow hid the planks,
rendering the path tricky in much the same way the downed trees made
traversing the cedar swamps tricky.

“Better let me carry her,” Bob said. “You walk ahead with the light.”

Anna
hated that idea. Hated the idea of Bob doing a good deed, hated the
idea of Bob touching Robin, hated the idea of being helped and hated
the idea that she didn’t have the strength to carry the girl herself.

“Thanks,”
she said, wondering what it was about Bob — or about having one’s life
saved — that was so irritating. “Watch your footing.”

Bob
picked Robin up easily. The biotech was tall, but slender as a blade of
grass. “Go on ahead. I can light your way better from behind,” Anna
told him. This was marginally true; with an effort, she could shine the
lights around him.

As
she followed in his tracks, the size of the man, the unconscious woman
in his arms, the flickering of the two flashlights, brought to mind a
dozen derivatives of King Kong and Frankenstein; the beast, lumbering
from the torchlight, the damsel clutched to his chest.

Anna
opened the door to the bunkhouse and Bob shouldered in with his burden.
At the computer on the rear wall of the common room, Adam glanced over
his shoulder. Then he was on his feet. Anna didn’t see him gather
himself and stand — one moment, he was sitting; the next, standing.