Bogus wolves, Anna thought. Werewolves.
Not the species of legend that morphed from seersucker suits to snouts but man posing as a wolf, taking on the imagined properties of the wolf: stealth, strength, ruthlessness, viciousness, love of slaughter for its own sake. It didn’t take a trained psychiatrist to see the projection in that equation. Man gave the wolf all the dark bits of himself, then vilified the wolf.
Isle Royale’s wog might or might not exist. It was said DNA didn’t lie, but it had also been said pictures didn’t lie until computers put the lie to that. What lied was people and they lied all the time, and for every reason under the sun. People lied with words and pictures, and, if it were possible, they would lie with DNA. Katherine could have faked the results for a reason that died with her.
Anna couldn’t shake the certainty that why Katherine died was at the heart of the bizarre happenings, but the researcher had not been shot or stabbed or smothered. She’d been savaged by a pack of wolves. It would take more time and expertise than anyone on the island had at hand to fake that: tracks, scat, urine, wounds, fur and tooth marks.
Cause of death wasn’t in question and death by misadventure didn’t have a why. It had a cause: wrong place, wrong time, bad decisions, faulty machinery. Why needed motive and only humans had motives.
Anna turned her back on the crowding infinity of night above her and stared at the eternal nothing where Robin’s bed had been when she’d turned out the light.
The heart of the issue was, why Katherine died.
Katherine had died accidentally at the auspices of wolves.
There was no way Anna could work that equation that didn’t end up in the twilight zone.
Sensing herself headed in the same direction, she fumbled over the edges of the desk between the beds, found the light, switched it on and sat up, her sleeping bag tucked in her armpits. Reoriented in space, her mind back in her skull, she marshaled what she knew about Katherine.
Katherine met and fell in love with a wolf when she was three years old. Bob Menechinn was her graduate adviser. He had carried her up five flights of stairs when she was unconscious. Katherine had shown a desire to keep Robin away from Bob. She’d gone so far as to tell Anna to warn the pretty young biotech to stay away from him. Katherine was cowed by, in love with or frightened by her professor. She rarely stood up to Bob. The first time was in the camp between Windigo and Malone. The second was in the cabin at Malone Bay after Robin had gone to free the trapped wolf.
In the tent, wog or wolf snorting around outside, Bob had gone nuts, shouting and waving his headlamp. Katherine said: “Be quiet. You’ll scare him away.” Remembering the look on Robin’s face when Katherine hadn’t gibbered with terror – Katherine had been concerned about the monster – Anna smiled.
Did Katherine think it was her wolf lover come back for her after twenty-three years or more? In dog years, that would be one old lover. No, Katherine was not crazy; she didn’t strike Anna as even particularly fanciful. She knew wolves and she wasn’t afraid. Not then anyway. She’d told Bob to be quiet because she loved the wolf more than she did him.
Early on, Anna hadn’t given Bob and Katherine as Bob and Katherine more than a passing thought. Lovers, married lovers, ex-lovers, jaded lovers were ubiquitous in every profession. Unlike wolves, humans weren’t engineered to be monogamous. Considering it now, she didn’t think Katherine was in love with Bob. Anna had found it impossible to so much as like the man, despite the fact he saved her life, but women often loved wretched men. Men loved vile women. In the infamous words of Woody Allen: “The heart wants what it wants.”
During the Malone Bay adventure, Anna began to suspect that what she’d first taken for fear or jealousy on Katherine’s part was barely controlled fury, the acidic variety that the powerless suffer, the kind that eats away from the inside.
Katherine had hinted Bob was withholding her Ph.D. Was that sufficient motive to hate? Probably. People hated without much provocation.
The second time Katherine contradicted him was when he’d said the study must be shut down; she insisted the foreign DNA was sufficient reason to keep ISRO closed winters, keep the study intact.
Protecting wolves again? Protecting scientific study? Anna wondered if Katherine had a greater investment in the island’s wolf/moose research than she’d let on. Had she an interest that made it worth her while to fake the DNA results?
Katherine was all whispers and Bob all shouts, yet both of them were opaque, keeping their secrets.
The woodstove had been stoked later than usual and, though the door was closed, the bedroom was warm. Anna let her sleeping bag fall down around her waist. Pulling it back up to cover her nakedness, she realized that the window, curtainless and without blinds – a fact she’d never noticed before – was making her modest. No longer did she feel the safety of an uninhabited wilderness beyond the glass.
She switched off the bedside lamp and let the sleeping bag drop.
Drifting unanchored in the dark, she replayed Katherine. Bob introducing her the first night, Katherine ducking, hiding behind her hair. Bob asking her if they’d ever used ketamine, Katherine blushing and turning away. Katherine insisting on telling the others at Malone Bay that Bob was so strong, he carried her up five flights of stairs.
When she was unconscious. Anna turned the light back on.
Bob had carried Robin back from the V.C.
When she was unconscious.
Bob asked, “Have we ever used ketamine?” Robin lost one of the jab sticks loaded with ketamine and xylazine. Katherine fought with Bob after collecting the dead wolf’s blood. Anna’d had trouble with that. Because Katherine had treated them as such, Anna guessed the blood samples were important but couldn’t figure out why, given the work the researcher had done in the kitchen/lab before the wolf had thawed.
Anna had been assuming there were other samples from that wolf. There weren’t, she realized. Blood had not been collected earlier during the external exam; the wolf and his blood were frozen. There were no other blood samples but those in Katherine’s pocket. The dismembered wolf was blood dry and refrozen. Anna put the revelation that the samples were unique aside for later consideration and went back to Katherine.
Bob was with Robin in the V.C. before Anna arrived. Bob was with Katherine’s corpse in the carpenter’s shed, frisking – or fondling – the dead woman.
Anna wriggled free of her sleeping bag and, turning her back on the staring window, pulled on sweatpants and a turtleneck. She turned the light out again and, feeling her way from desk to door, opened it quietly, slipped through and into Katherine’s room. Making no sound, she closed that door and shoved something soft under it, a towel, she guessed, then turned on the light. The black staring of the uncovered window startled her. Night and wild had always been her friends. Now both made her jumpy.
Katherine’s laptop was on her desk, plugged into the wall to save its batteries. Once, when Anna wished to pry into the lives of dead or uncooperative individuals, she looked for paper: diaries, letters, notes; she listened to phone messages. Now she went straight for the laptop. Unless Katherine had a BlackBerry or an iPhone, the laptop would be where she housed her life when she wasn’t using it.
Having unplugged the laptop, she turned the light out again, dragged back the bathrobe she’d thought was a towel, returned to her own room and completed the operation one more time in reverse. Then she covered the window with Robin’s parka, shoving the sleeves into the grooves of the metal window frame to cover peepholes from the woods. There was probably no need for secrecy. There was probably no one out in the wee hours, peeking in frosty windows. But telling everyone everything hadn’t worked. Anna was switching back to telling no one nothing.