Gray light, a world without three of the primary colors, clothes that swaddled and bundled out of doors, bodies and smells that swaddled and bundled indoors: winter wrapped a web around Anna. Without the rising of the sun and the rotation of the stars, time had taken her prisoner, and everything seemed endless, as if she’d done it a thousand times before and, like Sisyphus, was doomed to go on doing it for all eternity.
Pushing through new drifts between the outhouse and the sauna, she wondered how the prisoners sent to work camps in Siberia survived. She had warmth, good clothing, plenty to eat, a place to sleep – Winter Study was not a place of privation; it was a place of simplicity. Yet the suffocating timelessness disoriented her all the same. She reminded herself never to do anything to annoy the Kremlin.
The door to the carpenter’s shop was closed. Fresh tracks marked up the snow. Great big tracks: Bob.
She opened the door and remnants of the stench she’d thought she’d dreamed were there to greet her. Katherine’s body hadn’t been put back into the garbage bags; they were smoothed neatly over her where she lay in the Sked. The severed foot was wrapped in plastic the way it had come from the scene. Bob had not seen fit to expose it in his worshipful frenzy. The hollowed-out remains of the wolf and its bagged organs were on the table in the center of the room.
The story of the wolf who had invited Katherine to go with him into the snowy woods came back to Anna. The wistful look of longing as Katherine told the story of the meeting. The final scene from Wuthering Heights, the version starring Laurence Olivier, unfolded in Anna’s mind: Heathcliff and Cathy walking together into a snowy distance. In Anna’s version, Heathcliff was played by a wolf.
Shaking the vision off, she lifted the bags off the body. For reasons known only to wolves – perhaps the way Katherine had wedged herself beneath a downed cedar before she died – but for one gash on her forehead her face was largely unmarked, yet it was not pretty in death. Freezing temperatures and rigor had set it in a mask of agony, a scream sculpted in flesh. The parka had been zipped.
Bob had returned early this morning and tidied things up. Or finished what had been interrupted the previous night, then covered his tracks.
Anna unzipped it, then sat back on her heels.
Looking for a cell phone.
What a crock.
Cell phones didn’t work on the island. There wasn’t a tower within hitting distance. Cell phones hadn’t existed when Anna was a ranger on ISRO, but now the fact they didn’t work would be a huge plus in her opinion. No hikers or boaters chattering away with their pals in the office while the glory that was Isle Royale rolled by them unnoticed.
Bob was looking for something, though. He’d been searching for it at the scene while the rest of them were packaging the remains. He’d left them, speeding off with the flashlight, because he’d found whatever it was and wanted to hide it before they returned, he’d not found it and wanted to search Katherine’s room or he was a lazy piece of shit and decided it was “wine time.”
He might have been searching the body as he’d said. If he’d had a flashlight with him, it hadn’t been on when Anna arrived in all her naked glory, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t used it earlier.
Staring at the dead woman’s face but without seeing it, Anna put herself back in the sauna and retraced her steps to the carpenter’s shop. Memories of the night before weren’t sharp. There’d been too many things dulling her brain.
She left the sauna. She flew with the wind. She heard a clanking sound – probably the Sked banging into the metal legs of the workbench under the window. She opened the door and turned on the overhead light.
Without the wind raking her back and Bob’s eyes her front, Anna was able to see more clearly in memory than she had at the time. Bob Menechinn had been on his knees. His butt had been in the air and his head down, hiding that of the corpse. That’s why Anna had the sudden thought he was eating it.
The time for rescue breathing was long past. Had he been kissing Katherine? Love lost and good-bye and rest in peace with Baby Jesus, like Bob claimed?
Or did he like making love to dead women?
That was a gruesome thought. Though, should Anna ever have to have sex with the likes of Menechinn, it would be preferable to be dead at the time.
Shuddering out of that mental place, Anna turned her attention to cause of death. Wolf, certainly, but wolves weren’t what had taken Katherine to the cedar swamp in the first place, nor, did Anna believe, had they taken the researcher down. The tracks at the scene, those that hadn’t been totally obscured by snow, told the tale of a meal, not a hunt.
Anna got a pair of latex gloves from the box Ridley had left on the counter from the wolf necropsy and turned back the stiffened edge of the shredded trouser leg. A splintered femur thrust through the tattered flesh – broken, snapped, not gnawed through. A considerate beast of some sort had licked the bone clean.
Katherine had probably stepped in one of the swamp’s natural traps and broken her ankle. Maybe the pack was hounding her, but it seemed more likely she’d broken her ankle and the pack had come upon her. Wolves could have smelled the blood from the compound fracture. There were vials of the dead wolf’s blood in her pocket. She might have smashed them against a stone or the bole of a downed tree.
If they were in the area, the wolves would have smelled it. But wolves smelled blood all the time: crippled moose, injured pack members. Every meal was served up with the smell of blood. All summer long, they smelled the blood of tourists, scraping and blistering and cutting themselves with cooking utensils. It wasn’t like chumming in shark-infested waters; at the scent of blood, wolves didn’t go into a feeding frenzy. The odor of humans was enough to send them running.
The only thing that made much sense was a confluence of events: Katherine breaks her leg, wolves come upon her, she reeks of fresh blood – hers and theirs – and they kill her.
Reeks.
The breath of the windigo.
Smell, the most primitive of the senses, flooded Anna but brought with it no memory, only the knowledge that something was unutterably wrong.
21
Anna returned to the bunkhouse, let herself in the unused kitchen door, took Katherine’s sample-gathering paraphernalia and carried it back to the carpenter’s shop. There she began the painstaking process of collecting and preserving trace evidence.
She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. A smoking gun maybe, though the murder weapon was clearly tooth and claw. Could be she was bored or paranoid or suffering from the madness of the Far North, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Katherine’s death was not accidental, not entirely. Nor could she shake the feeling that Bob had something to do with it. But, then, she seemed pretty anxious to pin something on the Homeland Security guy and couldn’t be trusted to be objective.
She swabbed and preserved and noted. What struck her most forcibly was how little trauma there was. Researchers hypothesized the size of a wolf pack was determined by how many animals could fit around a kill. When wolves brought down an animal, they surrounded it and ate it warm, often alive – for a while. Canis lupus were designed to eat en famile and efficiently; an adult wolf’s jaws exerted fifteen hundred pounds per square inch, about twice that of a German shepherd and five times that of a human being. A mature wolf could gnaw through a femur in six or seven bites. Speed was also in their nature. They might be the most ferocious of predators, but they weren’t nearly as focused as ravens when it came to scavenging. A single raven could carry away as much as four pounds in a day, meat cached in the branches of a nearby tree for later consumption.