Soft, small-boned, Katherine would have been torn to pieces in minutes. Yet the corpse was relatively undamaged: a foot torn off, throat slashed, arm severed and hands eaten. The rest was superficial damage. In a starvation winter, when moose were scarce, the wolves would not have left fresh meat of their own volition. They had to have been frightened off the kill.
Something had scared the wolves away, then didn’t eat the body itself. The noneating, scary thing vanished before the snow stopped falling. Either that or it traveled in such a manner it left no tracks.
Anna rose to her feet and stomped to get the circulation moving. The stiff-soled Sorels were not made for kneeling. Or walking. Or fashion. They were simply designed to keep feet dry and toes from turning black. Dead wolf parts to one side, dead woman to the other, clapping and stomping in true zombie-jamboree fashion, Anna cast back to the night Katherine had been killed.
She couldn’t even be sure Katherine left the shop intending to confront Bob. Nature might have called; Anna did come upon her near the outhouse. Bob might have waylaid her for some reason and they’d gotten into a fight. She might have run into Bob accidentally and taken the rare moment of privacy to unload on him about something that had been on her mind for a while.
Again Anna knelt and began searching Katherine’s clothing. In the right front trouser pocket was a tube of Chap Stick. In the pocket of her parka was a handkerchief; not the great square of cotton of the present day but a smaller square of linen edged with crocheted silk. Anna had carried one very like it down the aisle when she’d married Paul, the “something borrowed.” Her sister, Molly, inherited a box of them when her husband’s mother died. They weren’t the sort of thing one carried into the wilds to mop the frozen mucus from one’s nose and eyes.
Hoping the delicate handkerchief had given Katherine comfort, Anna tucked it into a paper evidence bag. If there was organic matter on it, paper would preserve it better than plastic. That done, she did a thorough frisk of the body. A lump in the lining of the parka brought on the familiar rush any cop – green or blue – got when they were onto something.
Excitement dwindled as she discovered it hadn’t been covertly sewn into the lining like smuggled jewels but fallen through a rip in the pocket. She worked it up the fabric to the light of day. Blood; one vial of wolf’s blood had not been smashed.
Had Bob been looking for the cell phone like he’d said or was this what he was after? That made little sense when there was enough wolf meat in bags on the tool bench to glean any number of samples. Anna slipped the tube into an envelope, dated and sealed and initialed it. In every case, the chain of evidence had to be preserved: who collected it and anyone else who accessed it had to be recorded. One link in the chain broken, one unauthorized moment out of the chain, and an attorney would say the evidence could have been tampered with and was inadmissible.
Anna wasn’t sure there’d been a crime. She wasn’t even acting under color of law. Her jurisdiction was in Rocky Mountains in Colorado. It did not extend to a park in Michigan. Still, she worked with precision and strict adherence to the rules.
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.