The window over Robin’s bed was wide open.
Robin was gone.
25
Anna turned her light onto the floor. Robin’s parka, ski pants, socks – all her winter garments – were where she had let them fall when she undressed for bed. Anna spun, taking in a rush of the room. Closet door open, clothes as she remembered, Robin’s rucksack on the table at the foot of her bed, her house moccasins peeked from under the bed, her pillow crushed between bed and bureau.
“Robin!” Anna shouted, crossed the room in two steps and leapt onto the bed. Cruel temperatures and black on black of forest and night met her like a wall. Her flashlight beam poked feebly into the scratch of branches, grabbing the white of snow and making shadows of it.
“Robin!” Anna yelled.
Ridley and Jonah crowded into the room, Jonah blinking behind wire-rimmed glasses and Ridley, hair loose and clad only in long-john bottoms. Both wore headlamps. They were so accustomed to the electric curfew, they donned them automatically. Anna suffered an unsettling sense of being trapped in a coal mine adventure with two of the seven dwarves.
“Where’s Bob?” she demanded. Jonah and Ridley looked at each other in almost-comic confusion. “Adam, was Bob in his bed when you got up?” Anna insisted.
“I fell asleep on the couch,” he replied. “But he should be. After the third time you told him to go away, he went to bed.”
“Check and see if he’s there.”
“I’m going to fire up the generator,” Jonah announced and disappeared into the darkness of the hall.
“Yeah, thanks,” Ridley said vaguely.
Anna echoed the thought if not the words. Fear of the dark had never been one of her neuroses, but she was thinking of adding it to the list. She was growing tired of peering down narrow beams of light like a virgin in a cheap horror flick.
“Where’s Robin? What’s the deal?” Ridley asked. Anger focused his words and, Anna hoped, his brain.
She gave him an overview of what she’d found in the V.C., up to and including the condom. She did not mention that she’d been incarcerated there. Instinct told her to save that revelation for another time.
“And you think the condom was Bob’s,” Ridley said.
“It wasn’t mine.”
Lights came on, startling her so badly she dropped her flashlight. Adam was standing in the doorway, his headlamp turned off. Anna wasn’t sure how long he’d been there, but it didn’t matter. The information wasn’t a secret she’d intended to keep. Since she didn’t trust anybody, she had two choices: tell no one anything or tell everyone everything. She’d opted for the latter, so should anyone on the island besides herself turn out to be moderately sane and nonviolent he or she could help her watch the rest.
“Bob was in his bed,” Adam said.
“You hear the bit about the condom?” Ridley asked.
“I heard. I doubt it was Bob’s. The guy’s not so bad when you get to know him.” This was delivered in a voice so totally devoid of emotion Anna flashed on a group of POWs in the Iraq war who’d been tortured, then filmed mouthing anti-American sentiments by their captors shortly before they were beheaded.
“Get dressed,” Ridley told Adam. “Tell Bob to get up and get dressed. We’re going to need to get a jump on this… on whatever this is. Robin was stewed to the gills. She may have just gotten a sudden desire to go walkabout.”
Anna hoped that was the case, but she doubted it. The men left, and she retrieved her flashlight. The window showed no signs of having been forced. Outside, near the bunkhouse, was a morass of tracks left by a moose that liked to scratch its back on the drainpipe from the gutters. No tracks left by bipeds; nothing that looked human.
Closing the window, she remained standing on Robin’s bed. No track, no sign: that was not indicative of drunken meandering by a naked girl carrying a sleeping bag. Robin had not left; she had been taken, spirited away, vanished into the night. There would have been a sort of poetic satisfaction if Anna could have gotten one more shiver out of Algernon Blackwood – the windigo was known for swooping down and snatching its victims bodily from their tents – but she couldn’t quite picture the starved monster, lusting after human flesh, swiping a key and locking her in the V.C. so it might enjoy its midnight snack in peace.
Ridley called, radioed and e-mailed the mainland, begging for help as soon as they could send it. The radio failed. The phone was almost unintelligible. E-mail got through. ISRO’s Superintendent promised Coast Guard, Forest Service, NPS search and rescue and law enforcement as soon as the weather allowed an invasion from the mainland.
That done, he and Anna divided the public area into three sections. Ridley chose to go alone. Anna would go with Jonah. Adam volunteered to go with Bob Menechinn. Anna suspected it was so they wouldn’t have to go through the wretched moment when nobody picked Bob for their team.
As had been the case when Katherine went missing, they found no track or sign to indicate which direction Robin had been taken. Again they searched the perimeter. Again they searched the permanent-employee housing area. Again they searched Washington Creek campground. Again they found nothing.
Ridley radioed the order to return to the bunkhouse. Layers of cold-weather gear peeled off and dumped, they sat in the living room on the three sofas, like a family at a deathwatch.
No one was anxious to go to bed.
Leaning her elbows on her knees, Anna looked at the men with whom she’d been marooned.
She couldn’t count the number of banal conversations she participated in where she was asked: “If you were marooned on a desert island, which book, man, song, tool would you want with you?” The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Paul Davidson, “Amazing Grace” and a real sharp knife.
Finally marooned and she had none of the above.
Another opportunity squandered.
Ridley and Jonah looked much as they had for the past few days, only more so. The pilot’s seamed face had lost its pixyish expression. Age dragged down his cheeks and dulled his eyes. Ridley was taking on the look of a lost soul. At each downward turn of events, he had stayed strong. Anna wasn’t sure he could do it this time. Only Adam showed signs of life and hope. His face was no more animated than the others, but there was a focus and intensity where before there’d been raw energy. Like a seasoned soldier, he seemed relieved to finally be going into battle rather than waiting for it.
Bob Menechinn was the most changed. Robin’s disappearance seemed to have gotten to him as nothing else had: not Ridley’s hostility, not Katherine’s death, not the wog or the windigo, not Anna’s walking in on him – twice – being no better than he should be with a dead woman and a woman dead to the world.
Menechinn was a bit of a sociopath, she guessed. In Bob’s mind, there was no Bob but Bob; other people were mere shadows, there to please him or be used by him or gotten around. An excellent government tool.
Following this train of thought, Anna realized Robin’s disappearance, in and of itself, was not what was turning Bob’s skin pasty or thinning his breath. Something had happened in the past few hours that had caused him to believe he was threatened. Adam might have told him Anna found a condom. She rejected that idea; Bob would just deny it was his. Even fingerprints wouldn’t do it. There were a number of reasons he might have touched the package.
As the night wore on, she quit worrying about Ridley’s ability to cope and began to worry about hers. Night closed tightly around the bunkhouse, the poor lighting in the common room inadequate to push it back past the mirror of the windows. Claustrophobia grew up through the cement suffocating her brain till she could picture herself running screaming into the night.