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.
“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.