Fear was the difference between neurosis and insanity. Ridley detested Bob Menechinn for endangering his livelihood, his status and his study. He hated him for being ignorant and having power over the educated, being worthless but out to destroy the worth in other’s lives. Ridley tried to hide the worst of these emotions, but even the beard and the mustache and the startling intelligence couldn’t mask things all the time.
Yet Ridley had been the one to bring Menechinn to the island, had, in effect, given him the power of life and death over careers and learning.
Katherine was cowed by her mentor but had pounded his chest, however pathetically, and run away. Anna would have suspected a love triangle; it wasn’t cliche for no reason. NASA, trailer trash, Rhodes scholars: it didn’t matter, love – or what passed for love in the tabloids – made people dangerous. Katherine’s first love was a wolf; perhaps, like a Freudian version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” she was waiting to be devoured or rescued from a prolonged childhood by a handsome ax-toting woodsman.
Jonah drifted untouched by the Sturm und Drang as he flew untouched by the earth for much of his life. He’d been Winter Study’s pilot for eighteen years; Anna’d seen a picture of him, slipped into the plastic cover of the daily log, when he was in his forties or early fifties. One assumed he had a life the other forty-six weeks of the year – Anna’d seen the Web site – but he never spoke of it. Never spoke of a wife or a home or kids or his other job. Never shared anything even remotely personal. He defended his internal landscape with jokes.
In the dumb show being played out on the other side of the glass, Jonah was slightly apart from the fray, leaning in the doorway to the kitchen, his arms folded over his chest, a slightly bemused expression on his face.
Robin had retreated to a low, narrow plank bench along the rear wall. Whether or not she brought anything but the TNT of youth and beauty to this stew, Anna didn’t know, but Robin was affected by the uneasy atmosphere; Anna saw glimpses of it on her face occasionally before she escaped into the icy embrace of winter with the ease of one born of the union of a snow leopard and a polar bear.
Anna and her mother before her and her grandmother – a fighting Quaker Democrat and a flapper – were feminists. Much of her life, Anna had worked in a male-dominated world. She would defend the right of any woman to do the same, but she was realist enough to admit women made things more complicated, more volatile. Not because women were stupid or incompetent but because their presence often made men stupid and incompetent.
Like Menechinn. Except she doubted he was stupid. Arrogance was a form of stupidity because it caused elective blindness. Bob Menechinn might be a fool, but there was nothing wrong with his brain. Anna hardly knew where to start thinking about him. He possessed too many degrees in education to actually know anything yet had the supreme confidence that he knew it all. When he smiled – which he did too much – he had a way of pulling his chin in and letting his cheeks rise to cover his eyes that suggested he was holding back, striking a pose the way a penny-ante lawyer will when he thinks he’s got an ace up his sleeve. Menechinn believed himself to be a ladies’ man. The ladies, with the possible exception of Katherine, were unmoved.
“HELP ME” was fading, dimming out the same way it had appeared, line by line, in reverse order. Before hypothermia drove Anna back into the confines of the bunkhouse, she touched one of the rapidly vanishing marks. Her fingers were so cold from gripping the flashlight without gloves, she couldn’t feel anything.
Bob either didn’t think his run-in with Katherine was important enough or, conversely, was too important to share.
Anna played tattletale.
“She was crying,” she finished. “She struck out at Bob, then ran. I don’t think she was in any shape mentally to plan an adventure.”
“Katherine was fine,” Bob said blandly.
“‘Fine’ is weeping and running off into a blizzard?” Anna asked.
“Snow was making her contacts go nuts, is all. She wanted to get back to the bunkhouse in a hurry, is my guess. You’ve been watching too much daytime television.” And he winked.
They made a perimeter search of the housing compound, Anna and Ridley going to the left from the bunkhouse, Robin and Jonah to the right. Bob stayed by the radio.
“We’re not finding anybody tonight,” Anna said. “We’re liable to lose ourselves.” She told them of her thought that Katherine was hiding, playing games.
“If she is, it’s the last game she’ll ever play,” Ridley said grimly.
“She’ll freeze to death.” He was shouting. They were all shouting to be heard above the wind. Their puny noise did little to dent the immensity of the night and the storm.
“There’s three places she could survive,” Robin said. “If she broke into permanent housing, she might find blankets. Or, if she took some, she could make it in a shelter for a few hours.”
“Good,” Anna said. “Ridley, you guys take the permanent housing. Robin and I will do the lean-tos. Then we’re done for the night.”
Ridley started to protest but Anna overrode him. He wasn’t versed in search and rescue. Anna was. “We can’t search in this. Period. It’s too risky. We wait till daylight.”
“Okay,” Ridley said. “You’re right. Come on, Jonah. You two be careful.” Ridley was one of those rare leaders who only choose to lead when they are in their area of strength. Maybe this once Anna’s first impression had been right, maybe he was a terrific man.
“Lead on,” Anna said to Robin and, feeling trollish and lumpsome, stumped down the road beside Robin’s fairy-stepping form. At the orange fuel tanks, they turned onto a smaller trail leading toward Washington Creek campground. The ugly monument to fossil fuels was invisible in dark and snow, but Anna could feel it being hideous all the same.
Lean-tos – screened-in sheds for campers – were scattered along the bank of Washington Creek above the harbor, about a ten-minute walk from the housing area.
“It’s hard to believe a rational woman would spend the night freezing in an open shed when her toasty bed is so close,” Anna shouted.
“Thermal wimp,” Robin accused good-naturedly.
They shined their lights into every shelter. As the cold, dusty emptiness of one lean-to after another whispered of summers dead and winters lasting forever, hope dimmed. Had the missing woman been Robin, Anna would have been more optimistic. Robin was acclimatized, winter was her friend and she was accustomed to physical hardship. Robin wouldn’t panic.
Katherine was none of these things.
Katherine was also not in any of the employee housing.
ANNA SLEPT FITFULLY, wriggling like an uneasy larva in her down cocoon. The single bed was adequate most nights, but this night she kept waking to find she’d squashed herself against the wall or was perilously close to falling off.
Robin didn’t sleep much better. Anna could hear her thrashing about. Once she leaped from her bed, dug through her rucksack – at least that’s what Anna assumed; the dark was impenetrable – clunked a found object down on the desk at the bed’s foot and squirmed back into her sleeping bag. Or maybe Anna only dreamed she did.
Her dreams were thick and convoluted, dragging images from unrelated drawers and cobbling them together into stories Harlan Ellison couldn’t unravel. She woke, thinking she heard the howling of coyotes on her mother’s ranch. The call of a loon dragged her from sleep. She woke again to wretched disappointment, finding she was not in Paul’s arms but curled up like a sow bug on a strange bed.
The sun didn’t so much rise as the snow, still falling but with less vehemence, grew gray. There would be no search from the air. Breakfast was quick. Each person would take a radio and a different trail. Ridley attempted to call in to dispatch in Houghton, Michigan, to alert them to the situation, but radio contact, always sketchy, had been obliterated by the storm and the phone lines allowed more static than language. He e-mailed.
