Stopping, Anna looked down at his recumbent form for a minute or more. Adam played possum; she’d figured that out. There was no way of telling if he played possum now. It didn’t much matter, and, if he was playing possum, she had the satisfaction of knowing the visitation of a bedraggled middle-aged specter in the still of the night had to be giving him the willies.
She moved the chair in front of the computer at an angle so she could watch both the screen and Adam and clicked on the blue E. The island’s Internet server popped up. They lived in a bunkhouse warmed by a woodstove, electrified by an old gasoline-powered generator, water brought up from the lake and an outhouse, and they were on the Internet. As she clicked on Google, it occurred to her that the odd thing was she didn’t find it odd. As a kid, she didn’t have television. It was all done with towers then, and she’d lived in a tiny town in a mountain valley where the reception was lousy. Now she took instant global communication from a remote island for granted.
She typed in “Katherine Huff.”
Katherine had published in seven scientific journals, articles on DNA research in mammals, and sixteen magazines and periodicals, on the subject of wilderness education. On the latter, Bob Menechinn’s name was listed first, with her as his graduate assistant.
The articles on DNA were painfully technical, written for other scientists and virtually incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Anna slumped against the back of the chair, feet thrust far under the table, chin nearly on her chest. She wasn’t sure what it was she had leapt out of bed to seek in cyberspace. The mystery of who Katherine Huff was, why she’d been savaged by wolves, wasn’t in journals. There wasn’t anything else, no newspaper articles reporting murder or mayhem connected to her, no MySpace revelations or vanity Web site with pictures of her dog and a diary of her summer vacation in Europe.
According to Hollywood, savvy Internet users could find out everything right down to the subject’s bra size and favorite food. Maybe in real life they could, too, but Anna wasn’t on that level. Google and Wikipedia maxed out her cyberspace cunning.
Adam snorted from a snore into deeper sleep, his breathing more a vibration against Anna’s mind than her eardrums. The light from the banked embers painted the angular planes of his face dull orange, his fancy mustache black as an ink drawing against it. The warm glow erased years from his face, the shadowed room the gray from his hair, and he looked no more than twenty. Supposedly he was an old hand at Winter Study, a friend of Ridley’s, a Park Service renegade who traveled with ease between researchers and NPS staff. So Jonah had intimated. Anna had seen little of it. Adam had let Ridley and the rest of them down as often as not. When they needed him, he was nowhere to be found, and the batteries in his radio died and came back so often they could have had regular roles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
He shirked his work, then skied out in the dark when the body recovery went sour. Behind Bob’s back, Adam praised, excused and mocked him. To Bob’s face, Adam was obsequious and scornful by turns, the way a kid will be when forced to curry favor with a person he or she loathes.
Why would Adam need to curry favor with Bob Menechinn?
Anna typed “Adam Johansen” into the box on Google’s home page. Seventeen hits. The front page of an old Lassen County Times had a photograph of him standing with three other men. They were dressed in fire-retardant Nomex and leaning on shovels. They’d been with the wildland firefighters credited with saving the tiny town of Janesville, California, from being burned. The rest were from local papers in Saskatoon. These were archival and covered the suicide of Cynthia Jean Johansen.
The first reported only the barest of facts. Cynthia Johansen, nee Batiste, a twenty-two-year-old senior at the University of Saskatchewan, had been in the bathroom of the apartment she shared with her husband of eleven months, Adam Johansen. The bath was separate from the sink area and she had closed the door. Her husband, a thirty-one-year-old freelance carpenter, had been cleaning the trap under one of the sinks. When he realized she had stopped speaking, he tried to get her to open the door. By the time he broke it down, Cynthia had bled to death from three deep cuts made by a man’s straight razor, two to the left wrist and one to the right.
According to the school newspaper, Cynthia’s best friend, Lena Gibbs, said Cynthia had miscarried two months prior to the incident and had gone into a severe depression. Gibbs said Cynthia had never talked about killing herself, but she had talked about being a bad person and suffered crippling guilt over the loss of the baby.
Twenty-two.
Anna slid farther down in the chair, the picture of a lowrider sans muscle car. Anna’s older sister, Molly, had been born when their mother was twenty-three. This was not abnormal. The body wanted to reproduce at a young age, when the chances of conceiving and the mother living through the birth to care for her offspring were greatest. From Anna’s vantage point, twenty-two seemed impossibly young to be dealing with college, marriage, pregnancy and miscarriage, yet women managed it without killing themselves – or anybody else. Often, younger women dealt with miscarriages better than their older sisters. Youth was resilient in body and mind. The future still held the possibility of many live births.
Anna wondered if Cynthia Jean’s guilt was brought on or exacerbated by other factors. Drugs, maybe, or intentionally rash actions designed to end an unwanted pregnancy. An abusive husband had brought on more than one miscarriage. Because Adam’s wife’s death was ruled suicide didn’t mean he didn’t kill her; it only meant that if he did, he’d gotten away with it.
The next article, written the following day and on page two of the paper instead of page six, reported that Adam had been removing the sink trap because his wife said she’d lost her engagement ring down the drain. He told police that while he worked, Cynthia had talked with him through the door about how much she loved him and how glad she was he had given her a home and that the eleven months they’d been married were the happiest of her life.
The phone rang and he went to answer it. He said his wife asked him to stay and talk to her, but he said he’d be right back. The call was from one of Cynthia’s teachers, and he brought the cordless phone into the sink area from the kitchen.
Cynthia wouldn’t respond when he spoke, and the door to the bath was locked. He told the police and, later, the newspaper reporter that he thought his wife was mad at him for answering the phone when she’d asked him not to so he ignored her and went back to working on the sink, occasionally making remarks. He said he got angry, then worried, and that was when he broke through the door and found her.
Anna saw her husband, Paul, in her mind, felt him in her heart and couldn’t imagine the kind of pain Adam must have suffered. That is, if he was telling the truth.
The only story she’d heard that was more tragic was the accidental death of a three-year-old who’d sneaked out and crawled behind his mother’s Camaro to surprise her when she left for the grocery store.
Paul Davidson was a Christian, an Episcopal priest, he believed in a loving God. Paul was also Sheriff of a poor county in Mississippi. He saw suffering of the worst kinds, cruelty and ignorance, predator and prey on the human scale, and it was far more vicious than anything between wolves and moose. Anna’s husband didn’t believe in the magical thinking of God granting wishes, but he did believe in the importance of prayer. He didn’t believe in pearly gates or Saint Peter or crossing the river Jordan. He didn’t believe in any other hell than the ones found on Earth. He didn’t believe in angels or ghosts or miraculous answers to prayers. Yet he believed he would be at one with his God when he died.