When she’d finished, she wondered what the hell she was going to do with her neatly labeled packets. There was no place to lock up the stuff. In the Visitors Center-cum-ranger station there would be an evidence locker, but the NPS wouldn’t have given Ridley a key. Besides, Anna wasn’t sure she trusted Ridley. At this point, she hardly trusted herself.
There was the storeroom off the common room between her bedroom and Bob and Adam’s, a narrow, windowless room full of cobwebs and outdated backcountry gear. She dismissed it. Little used as it was, it was accessible to anyone who was interested. Besides, under normal circumstances, freezing organic matter would render it worthless. Since this had already been frozen, it would do more damage to thaw it and subject it to the possibility of refreezing.
A few minutes of rummaging about and in the rear of the shop, at floor level beneath a workbench, Anna found a partially rotted board; she could see the shallow crawl space beneath the shop. An old toolbox, rusted but still mouseproof, was pressed into duty as an evidence locker. She placed the box in the hole, then covered the opening with paint cans.
There was a bit of Nancy Drew about the entire episode that appealed to her. How serious could a situation be if the lead investigator was hiding metal boxes under the floorboards in old sheds?
Lunch was being consumed when she returned to the bunkhouse. Dinner was the only planned meal. Lunch was peanut butter and jelly on toast – or on biscuits, if there were any left from the night before. Adam wasn’t in attendance. Ridley was but wasn’t particularly chatty. The weather – or the threat of losing his vocation and avocation at the whim and will of Bob Menechinn – had left bruise-colored smudges under his eyes.
Anna pulled out a chair and sat down. Ridley nodded politely and passed the bread and peanut butter. She was hungry, but not with the insatiable, almost desperate hunger of the first days.
Katherine is butchered and you are sated. The thought jarred her. The ravenous nature of the island jarred her.
Bob sat in his usual place, looking larger than he had the day before.
A tick filling up.
Given to black humor and a certain dark turn of mind, Anna was accustomed to thoughts better not expressed in groups, but, what with eating and being eaten – the whole food chain thing spelled out in gobs of flesh and strawberry jam – the words, rising unbidden, had a sinister cast, as if she were going mad. Or the world was.
Not superstitious by nature, she considered taking it up, as she chewed, staring at the table. There was no harm in protecting oneself against things that didn’t exist. What could it hurt to carry a rabbit’s foot? Other than the rabbit.
“I’m going to practice my cross-country skiing,” she announced as she dusted the crumbs from the table.
“Take a radio,” Ridley said.
Bob smiled, a half smile that said: I saw you naked.
I Know What You Did Last Summer fluttered out of a box in Anna’s brain and she smiled back, not at Bob, at the silliness of the teen-scream B movie. A touch of the gory knife and the dripping hatchet must have shown. Bob stopped smiling and concentrated on eating.
TEN YEARS OR MORE had passed since Anna’d been on skis and she hadn’t been much good then. Over rough patches where Robin would fly and Ridley power through, she would have to take her skis off and carry them; still, it would still be quicker than hiking. The only boots she had with her were the Sorels. There was no way the fat toes would fit into the bindings. Having learned from Robin’s ingenuity at Malone, she grabbed a butter knife and popped off the bindings and affixed the toe of each boot firmly around the ski with duct tape, leaving her heels free. Not ideal, but it would suffice. The remainder of the roll of tape she shoved in her pack.
The gentle, curving slope where the road led down to the water gave her time to establish a relationship between feet and skis, hands and poles. By the time she passed the pier, she was moving with a modicum of confidence.
Following the Feldtmann Trail to where she’d cut cross-country was easy. Snowmobile tracks cut deep. The trail from the Feldtmann to where Katherine had fallen was harder, but the drag of the Sked and the holes left by Anna’s boots had yet to be completely eroded by wind or filled by new snow. Ski tracks were mostly gone. Occasionally she’d see the stripe in the snow or a pock where a pole was driven in, but she would have been hard-pressed to stay on course if they’d been her only map.
Adam had said it wasn’t too far to where she’d abandoned the Sked. It wasn’t. Unburdened, rested, on skis and in the light of day, the trip took less than an hour. The cheekiness of time irked, then disoriented, her. Déjà vu telescoped, collapsed into two dimensions, as if she’d walked out of the living room in her house in Rocky and into the bath, the connecting hall suddenly not there.
The nose hill, the nose-hair tree, the refrigerator rock: Anna shed her skis and waded into the cedar swamp.
The neon orange patches where animals had unearthed tasty bites of researcher were erased by snowfall, but the trees were still startling in their neon spatter. Anna pulled her balaclava off and stood quietly, sending her senses out to taste the forest. Wind blustered through the tops of the trees but without malice; a teasing shake of bare branches, a rattle of dead leaves that had refused to fall in autumn. The air smelled clean and new; there was no lingering odor of the windigo, to speak of unspeakable things. She felt only the amiable curiosity of red squirrels.
Following the trail blazed so conveniently in blood, she worked her way out from the clearing.
She’d learned to track in the desert. A land of snow was very like a desert, and she found she could read sign tolerably well. Working slowly, she followed the spatters and the now-almost-obliterated mark where Katherine had crawled – or been dragged – from the swamp. She found the hole she and Robin dug, excavating the backpack. The bottom had filled in till it was just a large dimple in the snow. Anna pulled a pasta server she’d lifted from a kitchen drawer out of her backpack and used it to rake around the area. Gloved hands packed snow rather than lifting it, and it was too cold to use bare fingers.
Sieving turned up bits of blue canvas, one soaked with what Anna presumed was either wolf blood from the broken vials or human blood from the researcher. On fabric, there was none of the cheery traffic-cone orange; the blood had gone dark and hard. Anna had no idea of the chemistry involved, but, no doubt, one day an enterprising researcher would get a hundred-thousand-dollar grant to study the phenomenon.
Near ground level, she found a blue canvas strap. One end was intact, the buckle still in place. The end that had originally attached to the backpack was ripped. Either it had been torn from Katherine’s back or been ripped in a game of tug-of-war between woman and wolf or wolf and wolf.
Or woman and scary noneating thing.
Anna rose to her feet and looked for the next spatter of orange. Snow humped over downed wood, and the swamp resembled a rumpled giant’s bed. Half the trees were alive, erect above the snow, and half in a deadly tangle beneath it. Contours and cave-ins could be the mark of human intervention or snow cover interacting with gravity, temperature and the various levels of piled trees.
Anna had been hoping for a bit more blood. She’d seen the wolves taking down a moose. There had been a lot of blood. Wolves and moose hearts pumping at top capacity, wolves slashing, moose fighting back with hooves and antlers. Blood had flown in every direction.
Here there was little for a tracker to go by. Maybe because Katherine hadn’t the physical strength to fight a predator that didn’t weigh much less than she did and her clothing soaked up fluids from her wounds.