return to closer to normal. Entering by the side door to Katherine’s kitchen/lab, she stood a moment and listened. Peace prevailed.
Dressing in the snowdrift, Anna hadn’t bothered with lacing her boots. She heeled out of the Sorels and slipped down the hall to the room she shared with Robin. The door was still locked.
“Robin?” Anna called softly and put her ear against the wood. The door was colder than it should have been. Heat from the banked fire in the woodstove sufficed to keep the bunkhouse at a fairly comfortable temperature even through the night. Anna knocked again. “Robin?” She called a little louder this time and knocked with a purpose.
Fear that she had let the biotech sleep before she should have took over and Anna shouted and pounded on the door to rouse her.
“What the hell is going on?”
It was Adam. At least somebody was responding.
“Robin,” Anna answered succinctly and kicked hard beside the doorknob. No boots; the blow sent a stab of pain all the way up to her hip, but the door held.
“Here, let me.” Adam was beside her, wearing boxer shorts and wool socks. He slammed his shoulder into the door and the lock gave way. A blast of cold air met them. Anna trained her light into the room.
The window over Robin’s bed was wide open.
Robin was gone.
25
Anna turned her light onto the floor. Robin’s parka, ski pants, socks – all her winter garments – were where she had let them fall when she undressed for bed. Anna spun, taking in a rush of the room. Closet door open, clothes as she remembered, Robin’s rucksack on the table at the foot of her bed, her house moccasins peeked from under the bed, her pillow crushed between bed and bureau.
“Robin!” Anna shouted, crossed the room in two steps and leapt onto the bed. Cruel temperatures and black on black of forest and night met her like a wall. Her flashlight beam poked feebly into the scratch of branches, grabbing the white of snow and making shadows of it.
“Robin!” Anna yelled.
Ridley and Jonah crowded into the room, Jonah blinking behind wire-rimmed glasses and Ridley, hair loose and clad only in long-john bottoms. Both wore headlamps. They were so accustomed to the electric curfew, they donned them automatically. Anna suffered an unsettling sense of being trapped in a coal mine adventure with two of the seven dwarves.
“Where’s Bob?” she demanded. Jonah and Ridley looked at each other in almost-comic confusion. “Adam, was Bob in his bed when you got up?” Anna insisted.
“I fell asleep on the couch,” he replied. “But he should be. After the third time you told him to go away, he went to bed.”
“Check and see if he’s there.”
“I’m going to fire up the generator,” Jonah announced and disappeared into the darkness of the hall.
“Yeah, thanks,” Ridley said vaguely.
Anna echoed the thought if not the words. Fear of the dark had never been one of her neuroses, but she was thinking of adding it to the list. She was growing tired of peering down narrow beams of light like a virgin in a cheap horror flick.
“Where’s Robin? What’s the deal?” Ridley asked. Anger focused his words and, Anna hoped, his brain.
She gave him an overview of what she’d found in the V.C., up to and including the condom. She did not mention that she’d been incarcerated there. Instinct told her to save that revelation for another time.
“And you think the condom was Bob’s,” Ridley said.
“It wasn’t mine.”
Lights came on, startling her so badly she dropped her flashlight. Adam was standing in the doorway, his headlamp turned off. Anna wasn’t sure how long he’d been there, but it didn’t matter. The information wasn’t a secret she’d intended to keep. Since she didn’t trust anybody, she had two choices: tell no one anything or tell everyone everything. She’d opted for the latter, so should anyone on the island besides herself turn out to be moderately sane and nonviolent he or she could help her watch the rest.
“Bob was in his bed,” Adam said.
“You hear the bit about the condom?” Ridley asked.
“I heard. I doubt it was Bob’s. The guy’s not so bad when you get to know him.” This was delivered in a voice so totally devoid of emotion Anna flashed on a group of POWs in the Iraq war who’d been tortured, then filmed mouthing anti-American sentiments by their captors shortly before they were beheaded.
“Get dressed,” Ridley told Adam. “Tell Bob to get up and get dressed. We’re going to need to get a jump on this… on whatever this is. Robin was stewed to the gills. She may have just gotten a sudden desire to go walkabout.”
Anna hoped that was the case, but she doubted it. The men left, and she retrieved her flashlight. The window showed no signs of having been forced. Outside, near the bunkhouse, was a morass of tracks left by a moose that liked to scratch its back on the drainpipe from the gutters. No tracks left by bipeds; nothing that looked human.
Closing the window, she remained standing on Robin’s bed. No track, no sign: that was not indicative of drunken meandering by a naked girl carrying a sleeping bag. Robin had not left; she had been taken, spirited away, vanished into the night. There would have been a sort of poetic satisfaction if Anna could have gotten one more shiver out of Algernon Blackwood – the windigo was known for swooping down and snatching its victims bodily from their tents – but she couldn’t quite picture the starved monster, lusting after human flesh, swiping a key and locking her in the V.C. so it might enjoy its midnight snack in peace.
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?”
Finally marooned and she had none of the above.
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
