“I was locked in the V.C.,” she announced suddenly and loudly.
“Someone locked me in before kidnapping Robin.” Her bomb fizzled. The men looked at her, faces devoid of emotion. If one of them had thrown the dead bolt, Anna couldn’t have guessed it from their response – or lack of it.
“Or some thing,” Adam said.
Anna shot him a weary look. “Bullshit,” she said succinctly.
He shrugged.
Anna rose and began putting on parka and ski pants. If she didn’t take an action – any action – the concrete and claustrophobia were going to seal her tight in their cold, airless vault.
“Where do you think you are going?” Bob demanded, rousing himself from his lethargy. He sounded angry.
“Out. Want to come with me?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he snapped. He glanced at Adam and then away. Whatever had been communicated was lost on Anna.
She stared at him long and hard. Bob was scared and it was making him mad.
Scared of her? If he was, so much the better.
“I’ll go with you,” Jonah volunteered.
Anna hadn’t particularly wanted company. On ISRO, there clearly wasn’t any safety in numbers, but, of all of them, she distrusted the pilot the least.
“Bring a flashlight,” she said.
“I’ll bring two.”
They went out the front door and down the deck stairs. At the bottom of the steps, Anna stopped.
“What?” Jonah’s head came up like a dog seeking scent.
“Nothing.” Anna had stopped because she didn’t know where she was going or what she intended to do when she got there. “Let’s just breathe,” she said, and Jonah laughed. For several minutes, they stood quietly, flashlights off, and drew clean air into their lungs. Woodstoves were charming and functional but polluted the indoor air as surely as a band of two-pack-a-day smokers.
“Do we have a clue?” Jonah asked, and she appreciated the wisp of humor.
“I am clueless,” Anna admitted. “Start over, I guess.” She led the way around the bunkhouse to the window that let into her and Robin’s bedroom. Without the distraction of many big-footed men milling about, Anna could see and think more clearly. Jonah stood back as she crouched down several feet from the area directly beneath the window and shined her flashlight beam across the snow, mimicking a setting sun.
“What’s with Adam and Bob?” she asked, remembering the pregnant glance.
“Beats me,” Jonah said. “Adam’s a good guy. He’s worked Winter Study a couple times before. Canucks tend to see the best in people. But Menechinn? Sheesh.”
The moose that liked to scratch its back against the drainpipe had churned snow and earth into a mass of frozen clods and ice. With her light streaming almost laterally across the tiny field, Anna thought maybe she saw new prints. Maybe. Moose prints. She shined the light out in a circle from where she crouched. “Adam’s Canadian?”
“I think he’s an American citizen. He grew up in Canada, got married there and came to the States after his wife died.”
“That was the wife who killed herself?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Robin.”
Nothing showed but the tracks they had made and several moose trails leading into the trees.
“Adam doesn’t talk about it much. Evidently his wife had a miscarriage and went into a depression.”
“Was Adam investigated for the death?”
“Like for murdering his wife? What are you thinking?”
“Nothing. Everything. Yeah, for murder, I guess.”
“Probably. It’s always the husband first in a thing like that. Anyway, it is on TV. So he must have been investigated, but it didn’t amount to much. She’d left a note. She’d left a message on her therapist’s phone, apologizing. She made a video, begging Adam to forgive her.”
“‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’” Anna said.
“‘Rage, rage,’” Jonah said, startling her, then shaming her, with her own snobbery.
“We’re done here,” she said. Her knees cracked like rifle shots as she rose to her feet.
“Hah!” Jonah said. “Getting old is a bitch, isn’t it?”
Her shame subsided.
Anna moved slowly uphill, following moose prints. The tracks coming down were shallower than those leading back up the rise. The moose had grown significantly heavier while under the bedroom window.
“You see that?” Anna asked and pointed out the disparity. “What could account for that?”
“Maybe the moose ate Robin.”
Anna snorted, not a good idea when the air is below zero and the nose is chronically running.
“She could have ridden it,” Jonah suggested. He didn’t seem to be too concerned either way.
“What do you know?” Anna demanded, shining her light in his face.
“Cut that out, Dick Tracy,” he complained.
“What?” Anna kept the light where it was. The lenses of Jonah’s glasses flashed and the white of his beard glittered.
“I don’t know anything,” he said after a moment. “But you’ve got to figure Robin didn’t go hop-hop-hopping away in her sleeping bag like a kid in a sack race. And there’s more ways to make moose tracks than to be a moose.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Did you happen to notice if the wog prints were always accompanied by moose prints?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither. What do you want to bet?”
“I’m not a betting man.”
“Me neither.”
It was after midnight when Anna went to bed. She wanted to drag her sleeping bag into Katherine’s room and close and lock the door, but she stayed in the room she’d shared with Robin. Like Mrs. Darling, she wanted to be there if Peter Pan returned the children he’d stolen, but she doubted Robin had gone with an immortal boy. And she doubted she was anywhere as magical as Never-Never Land.
26
Adam was asleep on the sofa, or appeared to be. Bob had long since retired to his room and Ridley and Jonah to theirs. Sleeping was usually something Anna was good at under stress, that and eating. Years hiking trails in the backcountry had taught her to sleep and eat every chance she got, the way animals did. When one’s body was the only vehicle available to keep one’s soul from drifting into the ozone, it behooved the driver to keep the tanks topped off.
Tonight was a glaring exception.
Muscle and bone sank gratefully into the hard embrace of the mattress. Fatigue washed over her mind, warm and soporific. Then the delicious sense of drifting into oblivion morphed into sinking under the ice in Intermediate Lake, and she fought desperately back to wakefulness. The nightmare version was more terrifying than almost drowning had been. In the lake, there had been little time for anything but staying alive. In dreams, there was all the time in imagination.
For reasons probably relating more to her sleeping habits than her near-death experience, she was naked in the water. The crippling cold wasn’t a factor. Below her lay not the limitless new world she’d glimpsed at the time but the terrors children suffer in nightmares: being helpless and abandoned to a force so utterly evil, one never musters the courage to look at it; a force that would not have the mercy to grant the relief of death. Again and again Anna dragged her bare breasts and belly up an icy edge, serrated like a knife, kicking legs weak to the point of near paralysis, to fend off the black, sucking certainty of what lay below.
It didn’t take too many repetitions of this nocturnal entertainment before she decided staying awake was a spiffy alternative.
She lay on her back in the dark and stared upward at a ceiling that she presumed was still there. In a lightless environment, the nothing above her eyes could have been two inches deep or gone on to infinity. The bedside lamp could restore the ceiling to its proper place; Jonah had left the generator running. He said it was in case of emergency, but it was for comfort, the knowledge that they could have light if they heard the stealthy footfalls of boogeymen creeping about. Or boogey-wolves.