Half an hour later, Jonah found something. Color, he said. Like a piece of clothing thrown off, and a disturbed area in a cedar swamp between the Greenstone and the Feldtmann. He couldn’t see much, just that there was color on the snow where there shouldn’t be, and it was the same gold and barn red as the old parka Katherine had been wearing at the necropsy.
No place to land that was any closer than the supercub’s tie-down on Washington Harbor, Jonah circled low and slow to see if he could get a rise out of anything in the trees around the scrap of gold and red.
Anna radioed Ridley. “When you get to the bunkhouse, bring the Sked, a body bag and flashlights. Where’s Robin?”
“Two miles out,” Robin’s voice came back over the air.
“Head down the Feldtmann,” Anna told her. “I’ll mark where I go off trail.”
Jonah circled till he spotted Anna, then waggled his wings and led off trail toward the scraps of color. She followed like a baby trumpeter swan following an ultralight.
The find. Scraps of color. Anna suspected they no longer went to rescue a victim but to recover a body.
She’d never have said it aloud. Bad juju.
16
Following Jonah’s lead, Anna made it to the cedar swamp in forty minutes. At every moment, she expected to be overtaken by the skiers but was still solo when Jonah made his last transmission: “See that rise ahead of you? Got a big nose of rock sticking out of it and trees like nose hairs?”
“I got it,” Anna radioed back.
“The body is right beyond that. Trees’ll clear out and there’ll be a rock about the size of a refrigerator, then you turn left. Can’t miss it. Wind’s coming up. I’ve got to head back.”
Jonah had said “body” out loud. Out loud and over the radio. The breach of tradition gave Anna a shiver akin to that of an actor when the Scottish play is mentioned by name or peacock feathers are worn on stage. Till they knew for sure Katherine was dead – and that this was Katherine – time had to be considered of the essence. Close on quarter till four, wind rising, and fatigue dragging her steps, Anna had no choice but to keep on, but she was not averse to a little company at this point.
“Where is everybody?” She didn’t whine, but she felt like it.
“They’re coming,” Jonah promised. “They got held up leaving the bunkhouse.”
Anna wondered what in the hell could have held them up. Cell phones didn’t work on the island, the radio was out, the island was socked in so seaplanes couldn’t come and go.
Maybe somebody dropped by. Given recent events, that thought bordered on the sinister.
She topped the rise by the nose, spotted the refrigerator, half slid down and turned left as she’d been directed. Jonah said, “You can’t miss it,” and he was old enough and wily enough not to say that unless it was true.
In swampy areas, cedar trees fell like jackstraws, one over the other, the living with the dead, branches entangled. During the growing season, the swamps were water filled and choked with under-growth. In winter, they were navigable, but just barely. Fresh snow cloaked the branches of the upright trees and filled tiny ledges in the bark. Downed trees, fallen willy-nilly, made a lumpy quilt, protecting the living trees’ roots. Snow hid where one deadfall crossed another, and maybe three more below that, till walking through was like negotiating an icebound jungle filled with Lilliputian tiger traps.
Traversing a cedar swamp in the snow was just begging to have an ankle broken or a knee sprained. Anna forced herself to slow down. Becoming a second victim was too humiliating to contemplate. A gust of wind knocked snow from branches down her collar, and something else that brought her to an abrupt stop, head up, sniffing the air like an animal. She’d caught a whiff of the odor she’d noticed the night they followed the wolf pack down to the harbor. A death-and-worse smell she’d associated with the stench of Algernon Blackwood’s windigo, the horrible odor that heralded its coming. As before, the smell was snatched away before she could be sure she hadn’t conjured it up from an overactive imagination.
Then the “find” was in front of her. A body.
Parts of a body.
The reason Jonah had been able to spot anything from the air was due to small creatures, probably foxes, which had worried and dug until they’d uncovered the arm. Not Katherine’s body, just her arm, still in the sleeve of her parka, her ungloved hand a stump of chewed fingers. At least Anna assumed the arm was Katherine’s; it was wearing her coat.
The sleeve of the parka wasn’t the only color in the naturally black-and-white landscape. There was no blood on the ground – or, if there was, the snow had covered it – but on the trunks of the trees leading away from the severed arm was iridescent orange paint applied with a spatter brush. The neon color was so screamingly out of place, Anna had a moment of pure confusion as her brain tried desperately to make sense of the phenomenon, flashing through traffic cones, construction sawhorses, vandalism, police tape, confetti, graffiti, trail blazes.
A macabre vision of the severed arm blazing a trail to the body it was snatched from played through her mind. She shook it off, the way a dog shakes off a bath, and skirted the area where the arm lay, palm to the sky, fingers gnawed to the knuckle bones. At the first of the orange-daubed trees, she stopped. The neon dots were crystalline. She pulled off her glove and pinched a bit of the stuff up, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger. Body heat melted it, leaving a trace of red on her skin.
She didn’t sniff it or taste it. Blood was said to smell metallic, but she could never smell anything unless there was a lot of it and it was getting ripe. Still, she was sure it was blood. The spatter patterns formed when Katherine had fought whatever had taken off her arm. For some reason, the interaction of blood with the intense cold turned it Halloween orange.
White cedar trunks, bright Pollock-like paintings in blood orange, black of the branches overhead sketching a white sky: the scene was stunningly beautiful.
Until she saw Katherine.
The body was facedown, head shoved partly under a log as if Katherine had tried to burrow away from her attackers. The back of her parka was torn, tufts of down leaking out rents that ran shoulder to hip where claws had dug to get at the chewy center. Strands of light brown hair mixed with the tatters of cloth and goose feathers. The fur that ringed the hood of her coat was ripped away, as was half the hood. Blood, not orange but black as tar, glued the mess together. From the waist down, she was clad only in Levi’s. Her ski pants had been shucked off of her, as a man might shuck an ear of corn, and for the same reason. The light down trousers had then been torn to pieces, played with until there was little recognizable as clothing but the suspender buckles. The Levi’s were surprisingly intact but for the bottom of the left leg. That had been chewed to a mess of string and blood. The foot was gone.
Anna had to fight a bizarre urge to run. Mostly she liked the dead: they were quiet, undemanding and never complained if they were dropped on a carryout. Because the teeth of hungry little creatures had busily uncoiled the mortal coil had never bothered her. Human bodies were as dried leaves, acorn husks, snake skins: a thing of no import any longer left behind.
Katherine bothered her.
She concentrated on breathing in and breathing out and making excuses: The light was unsettling – dim and slanting and yellow-gray – cold carped on the bones, undermined body and spirit, the natural world behaving unnaturally, claustrophobic living conditions, discord in the human pack. The list of reasons did little to stop liquid fear coursing through her veins because reason wasn’t the root of it. Ghosts, yetis, skin walkers, vampires, zombies, gremlins, wogs and windigos – six million years of campfire stories – were undermining the rationale of everyone on the island.