Anna laughed, surprising herself with the noise. Evildoers deciding to do evil in Lake Superior in January were a self-culling gene pool. Based out of a city, Homeland Security personnel might not know that. Provincialism wasn’t just for the provinces anymore.
The facts were: Katherine had left Windigo, then intentionally or accidentally gotten lost. She’d gotten caught in the cedar swamp. Wolves found her. Contrary to natural behavior patterns, they decided to devour her. At some point, she remembered her cell phone and tried to call out. She fought to free her foot and her ankle snapped. That might also have been when the vials were broken. Blood from the compound fracture, blood from a dead wolf, frenetic noise and preylike thrashings: hard for any self-respecting wolf to resist. The foot comes free. Katherine drags herself or is dragged by wolves to the killing ground.
Then her ghost flits to Windigo and writes “HELP ME” on the window glass.
“I guess we solved this one,” Anna said to a red squirrel, who, thinking her a bump on a log, had settled nearby to munch on a ration of fall’s harvest. The little rodent squawked, scurried up the nearest tree and disappeared around the bole. Two seconds later, it reappeared on the other side and scolded Anna for her impertinence.
“I’m sorry I scared you. I thought you knew it was me. Hey, thanks.” Looking at the squirrel, she noticed a set of tracks coming in at an angle on the far side of the tree. They looked like boot prints. Had she not been half expecting them, Anna would have written them off to the vagaries of tracking and weather. Overlapping moose prints often resembled a human track. Wolf tracks scoured out with the wind fooled the eye in the same way.
Most of the tracks had been obliterated. All she could tell was, they came from the west, the direction of the bunkhouse, which meant nothing. In rough country, only the crows fly as the crow flies. Creeping and climbing and scooting on her butt, she worked her way through the swamp in concentric circles out from the existing prints.
Nearer where the body was found, at the foot of an evergreen tree, branches full of needles and keeping out much of the snow, the tracks ended. The owner of the boots had stood, back to the tree, and watched the slaying or the body or both.
It was the watcher who had frightened the wolves from their kill.
22
Anna skied home in the last of the afternoon. By the time she’d stowed the items she’d collected beneath the shop floor, the last of the light had gone. The cell phone she kept. If the battery warmed, it might have enough power to at least let her see to whom Katherine made her last call.
Though it was after dark when she returned to the bunkhouse, no one had radioed to see if she were alive or dead. No one seemed to have the spirit to care. Cabin fever had become epidemic. Ridley worked at his desk in the room he and Jonah shared. Adam lay on the sofa, sleeping or pretending to. Bob’s door was closed, and Jonah, for once uninterested in company, sat in the dim light of the common room’s overhead light, dividing his time between watching Adam, as if trying to guess his weight, and staring at a well-thumbed Newsweek. On the table by the magazine was a mason jar with an inch of red wine in it. Number 2787, Anna knew. Ridley, Jonah and, before he retired, Rolf Peterson drank their evening libation – served by Jonah – from mason jars. Each knew which was his personal jar from the number stamped in the glass. Wolves were not the only creatures whose evolution was affected by isolation.
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.