“‘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.
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.”