“Ovaltine is on,” he called. “We’ll get you warmed up. I fired up the sauna. Food, heat, hot drinks. We’ll make new women of you. Not that I’m complaining about the old women, not to suggest you are old, Ranger Pigeon. I doubt you are much older than I am.” While he chattered, he helped take the bungee cords from around the three of them. Ridley let him. He wasn’t as spent as Anna and he hadn’t been hit emotionally as Robin had, but the man had skied over thirty miles among other things and he didn’t seem anxious to take on any unnecessary tasks.
Anna tried to get off so Robin could move and managed to only flap her arms feebly. Jonah put his arm around her and lifted till, between the two of them, she was standing, if unsteadily, on her own.
“Give Ridley a hand,” Jonah said, just as if Anna was capable of doing so. Because he treated her like she was able, she found she almost was. As she tottered to the front of the machine, Bob Menechinn emerged from the bunkhouse, hat and gloves on, coat zipped up.
“I had the snowmobile warmed up and was about to come looking myself,” he said as he clomped down the snow-covered steps from the deck. “Then Ridley beat me to it. Supper will be ready when you’re ready to eat it. I made beef stew. That ought to stick to your ribs.” He hustled down and elbowed Jonah out of the way to tend to Robin.
“Honey made it,” Ridley said.
“Whatever,” Bob said. “It’s hot and ready.”
“You heated it up. My wife, Honey, made the stew.” Ridley lurched from the machine without any help from Anna and faced Menechinn. Bob had both arms under Robin’s armpits and his hands on the front of her coat.
Copping a feel. Anna shook that off. As many layers as they all wore, all anybody would feel would be fleece and goose down.
“Well, let’s get in and eat it before it gets cold,” Jonah said.
Ridley stepped in front of Menechinn and the difference in their size was apparent. Bob outweighed the lead researcher by a hundred pounds, if not more. Still, Anna would have put her money on Ridley, if this had been a betting match. Ridley pulled off his thick glove, and, for a second, Anna thought he was going to slap the other man’s face with it in classic challenge fashion. Instead he poked Menechinn hard with a slender forefinger.
“Honey made the stew,” he said. Ridley didn’t yell or curse or threaten, but there wasn’t any doubt, at least not in Anna’s mind, that he was dangerous.
Bob must have sensed it too. He backed down, and Anna doubted it was out of consideration for the feelings of the other man.
“I just heated it up,” he said. Anna heard the fear in his words and saw it in his face. So did Ridley. Bob tried for his smile but his face wouldn’t cooperate. Then he saw the scorn in the faces around him. It was a replay of the night in the tent when he’d freaked out. Anna wondered who he’d use to build back his self-esteem now that Katherine was dead.
“Robin, you must be about frozen to death,” he said and, curling himself around the biotech, he led her into the bunkhouse.
“Tell Robin to stay away from Bob.” Katherine had said that the day before she died. Anna wondered if ghosts felt jealousy.
Or if the warning had nothing to do with affairs of the heart.
19
Anna found the strength to eat two large bowls of Honey’s stew. Usually Robin ate with a healthy appetite, replacing the calories her work burned by the thousands. Tonight she stared at the bowl as if it were a crystal ball too muddy to show the future. When Anna would remind her to eat, she would take a bite. Bob decided to assume mothering duties and all but spoon-fed her, till she stood abruptly and left the room.
He started to follow.
“Sit down,” Anna ordered. “You haven’t had dessert yet.”
Menechinn reared back, pushing out his chest and pulling in his chin, and glared around the table, searching for support. The message was in Jonah’s eyes and the rigid way Ridley held his butter knife:
Eat cake or die.
Anna took another mouthful of stew. A woman had to keep her strength up.
Adam made it back as the cake and ice cream with chocolate sauce was being dished up. “What took you so long?” Ridley asked when Adam came into the kitchen. The question was not friendly. Adam’s coming to the rescue was canceled out by the fact that, had he been there in the first place, no one would have needed rescuing.
“I went back for the Sked,” Adam said mildly. “It wasn’t all that far. Maybe three hundred yards from the trail.” He dished up what was left of the stew, took a spoon from the deep-fat fryer with the clean flatware and settled in the chair Robin had vacated.
Three hundred yards. Every cell in Anna’s body would have sworn it was closer to six or seven miles. So strong was the feeling, she might have argued the point, had she not been distracted with more important matters: watching to be sure Jonah put enough chocolate syrup on her ice cream.
“I put her in the carpenter’s shop with the wolf,” Adam said as he slathered a piece of bread with peanut butter.
“She would have liked that,” Bob said gravely, and all of them stared at him for a moment.
“That she will, Bob. I know how much she meant to you.” Adam spoke in the same mild way he had when Ridley snapped at him. It was impossible to tell if he mocked Bob or sympathized with him. Anna chose mocked. Bob chose sympathized.
“She did, Adam. Thank you. There’s been a distinct lack of feeling around here. Robin’s the only one who seems to care and she’s being left to isolate herself.”
Jonah clunked a full plate of cake and ice cream in front of Bob.
“GENTLEMEN AND GENTLE LADY, it is time to get naked,” Jonah announced. He rose from the table and returned shortly with a plastic bucket, which he ceremoniously gave Anna.
“I’ll see if poor little Robin wants to sauna,” Bob said, pushing his chair back from the table. “Lord knows, it would do her good.”
“Allow me,” Anna said sourly. “It so happens I’m going that way, being it’s my bedroom and all.”
Bob did his pulled-back smile.
Sauna was a tradition in the north. On Isle Royale, during Winter Study, it took on its early importance; it was the most efficient way to get clean in a cold climate where there was no running water. Anna’d thought she was too tired to do more than fall on the bed, but the promise of deep heat and a shampoo revived her sufficiently that she could return to the room to get her towel and soap.
Robin was sitting on her bed, staring at her hands.
Anna sat on the bed opposite, no more than five feet between them.
“What happened?” she asked simply. Normally the shock of seeing a chewed-up corpse might account for a young woman’s imploding, but Robin had not gone catatonic at the sight of the dismembered body. It had been later, while the body was being packaged, or shortly thereafter.
“We-” Robin began, then stopped. The decision to keep a painful secret was clear on her young face. Robin wasn’t a practiced liar.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to work some things out.”
Anna waited, giving her time to talk if she changed her mind. That she was speaking at all was a giant step forward. “Okay,” Anna said. “Come sauna.”
“No.” Robin tipped her head farther down and her hair fell around her face.
“You smell like Ridley’s feet,” Anna said untruthfully. “Take your clothes off. I’ll wait for you.”
Robin stood obediently and stripped, as did Anna. Wrapped in towels, Robin in her mukluks and Anna in her clogs, each with a plastic pail, they left the room. Naked as the day he was born, Jonah was in the common room.
“Pure sex,” he said and slapped a wiry thigh frosted with white hair. “You girls control yourselves.”