Divested of her many layers and dressed in dry, if not clean, clothes, Anna stood in front of the woodstove amid racks of drying underpants and socks. The fever was upon her as well; she didn’t know what to do with herself. She wished she could call Paul, but she’d have to do it from the public phone in the common room and, since the storm moved in, the connection was so bad it was exhausting to try and converse. E-mail was a possibility, but Internet connection was patchy at best.
“Did Ridley get through to report Katherine’s death?” she asked of the room in general.
Jonah answered. “E-mailed. Got one back. As soon as it clears, the Forest Service will be here with the Beaver. Everybody goes.”
Bob had gotten his way, to a degree. That was the reason for the spiritual collapse of the Winter Study team. This season’s work was over unless Ridley could talk the Superintendent into relenting. Given the manner of Katherine’s death, it would be easy for the NPS to simply never reinstate the study. The high-profile nature of the research cut both ways. An ISRO researcher’s death by wolf would be big news.
“When do they think the weather will break?” Anna tried to keep the note of longing from her voice, but getting off the island was looking like a reprieve from a life sentence in a refrigerated lunatic asylum.
“Another front’s coming down from Canada. Three days, maybe a week. We’ve been here as much as two weeks without the Beaver getting in to bring us provisions,” Jonah said. “Too dangerous to fly in this stuff.”
Adam opened his eyes. “Three days?” he said. There was a note of alarm in his voice, as if three days was either not enough or too much to bear.
To Anna, seventy-two hours seemed an eternity. A week, a death sentence.
Adam closed his eyes again.
Silence descended again, punctuated by sneaky pops and hisses as fire consumed wood. Jonah went back to reading and watching Adam. The easy camaraderie was breaking down. Ridley didn’t laugh at Jonah’s antics and Jonah seldom indulged in them. Ridley distanced himself from Adam; Jonah watched him, and Adam took every chance he could to go off by himself.
Another week of this and Anna was going to get seriously cranky. In the twenty-first century, people assumed that nothing could stop rescuers, but, as advanced as technology had become, weather could shut it down. She thought of the climbers who died on Mount Hood in 2006. Storms were too severe for the search-and-rescue teams to do their work.
Mother Nature had sold them out and Old Man Winter held them hostage. No risks would be taken for a body recovery of a woman killed in an accident.
Anna wished she were in Natchez, Mississippi, cutting back the roses in Paul’s front yard.
Paul’s front yard. Anna had been on her own so long she wondered if she would ever lose the mental habit of thinking of “Paul’s” and “hers,” never “ours.” When she referred to “his” house, he would invariably take her in his arms and say “our house.” When they married, Paul truly did give “all that he had and all that he was” to her. Much as she would have liked to do the same, Anna was not made that way. A core of her remained unshared, a fortress she retreated to when she needed to marshal her internal forces.
The outer shell of her parka was dry to the touch. She lifted it off the rack. Turning the coat inside out to dry the lining, she felt a lump in the pocket. The vial of wolf’s blood; she’d forgotten to put it in the toolbox evidence locker. By now, it would have thawed. Stowing it beneath the carpenter’s shop would only serve to refreeze it and what little value it might have would be lost. She left it where it was.
The blood samples Katherine had carried with her to the cedar swamp stuck in Anna’s brain: burrs under her saddle, stones in her shoe. Crimes – or accidents – told a story. The protagonist did something for a reason and the result was the incident. When an action occurred that didn’t fit in the logical unfolding of the story, Anna couldn’t leave it alone. People who lied were invariably caught eventually because the lie never completely worked with the rest of the story.
It was possible that the blood samples didn’t fit into the story because they had no relevance. Katherine might have pocketed them with the intention of doing tests when she returned to her kitchen/ lab.
Katherine had fiddled with wolf parts nonstop for the better part of two days. The kitchen was filled with racks of vials containing samples of tissue, blood, bone, stomach contents, hair, ticks, mites and other marvelous things. What tests could be left to do? Why not use the blood she’d taken before the wolf was moved to the carpenter’s shop?
Leaving the heat of the stove and the oppressive peopled emptiness of the common room, Anna went to Katherine’s makeshift DNA lab. With its single bed shoved in a corner and the haphazard piles of a storeroom used by many and organized by none, the kitchen was bleak.
The PCR was in its travel case on the counter, the record book beside it. Anna opened the log and read what she could understand of Katherine’s notes. The researcher had not written anything she’d not discussed with the rest of them, no illuminating secrets.
As Anna closed the log, The Shining unreeled behind her frontal lobe, the scenes where Jack Nicholson grinned his I-am-one-crazy-bastard grin. Was she growing paranoid and delusional in a snow-bound building? No secrets, no plots, no ulterior motives or sinister intent, just a mix of strange bedfellows trapped in a very strange bed with one claustrophobic hypervigilant law enforcement ranger?
Anna put the book back precisely the way she’d found it. The log’s owner would never be back to notice; she did it from habit. Methodically she checked each of the various samples in their vials and packets. No seals were broken, no envelopes slit open, no papers in disarray.
Wog DNA wasn’t what triggered Katherine. For a scientist, a find at that level of idiosyncratic bizarreness was tantamount to a cat finding a real live mouse full of catnip. Something she’d discovered during the necropsy precipitated her mad dash into the woods. Anna walked to the window and stared past her reflection in the dark glass, trying to see around the corners of memory to that precise moment.
Ridley’s hand was cut and bleeding. Anna handed Katherine the chunk of meat from the wolf’s throat. Katherine mewled like a newborn kitten lost in its mother’s fur. Shortly thereafter, according to Jonah, the researcher pocketed the blood samples and ran out of the shop.
Jonah said she’d pocketed the samples and run out.
Feeling anxious but not knowing why till she realized she was half expecting another message to appear on the window glass in spectral words, Anna wondered what Jonah had to gain by the lie. He could have slipped the vials into Katherine’s pocket; he could have said she’d run out when she’d merely strolled, but Anna couldn’t come up with one moderately rational reason why he would do so.
The old pilot was as attached to Ridley as a father to a beloved son. Lately he had been watching Adam the way he’d watch a dog bitten by a rabid skunk. Jonah had no use whatsoever for Bob but didn’t appear to harbor the hatred of him Ridley did or the schizophrenic anger and obsequiousness Adam displayed toward the man.
Anna gave up. She took the tube of blood from her pocket and stared at it. It was just a sample from a dead wolf, and there were plenty more where this came from.
Maybe.
Maybe the importance of the vials was in the fact that there weren’t more. Would Jonah have reason to tamper with vials of blood, then switch the doctored versions for the real samples when Katherine wasn’t paying attention?