Winter Study

Anna would use. If Katherine used the word murder and still went through with the D &C to end her pregnancy, she had to have had a powerful motivation. The obvious one was that the child was terribly disabled or was a product of rape.

EVERYBODY’S ON THE NET.

WHO WOULD HIRE ME?

I WOULD DIE.

The rapist had sexually explicit photographs or videos of Katherine that he was threatening to put on the Web if she didn’t…

What? Anna wondered. Katherine had no money. A graduate assistant, it was unlikely she had any power.

If she reported the assault? If she pressed charges? If she didn’t continue to allow herself to be raped?

“Jeez, other people’s lives,” Anna whispered and shook her head, feeling suddenly sad.

Though prying eyes – should any be braving the night – had been shut outside, she closed the laptop partway and leaned her back against the wall.

The inferences she’d made from the list didn’t seem connectable to Katherine’s death. Blackmailers didn’t normally kill their victims; it was the other way around. There was also the annoying but inescapable fact that Katherine had not been coshed on the head and tossed into a Dumpster. She’d been brought down by Middle pack or Chippewa Harbor pack. There was no way to be certain since the only one on the island who could have run DNA from scat was dead.

It was an accidental death. Anna announced this in her brain. The feeling that the death was key to the sickness of the island did not abate. Anna stretched her legs in front of her, flexing her feet in their thick wool socks, cracking her ankle bones. Till this moment, she’d not thought of Isle Royale as sick, but the word fit. Wolves, moose, researchers, all were suffering an illness not unlike the disease that must have swept through Salem before the witches were burned. Hatred and insanity were virulent and highly contagious. The infected lynched their fellows, gang-raped women, burned down buildings, saw the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches and were beamed up to alien spaceships to have their innards probed.

The virus needed certain conditions in which to grow; its victims had to be willing to believe; they had to want, on some level, maybe even unbeknownst to themselves, to do what the virus would tell them to do. And they had to be greedy: for profit, for importance, for revenge, for entertainment, for adventure. Only the greedy could be effectively conned. One never read of Zen masters being taken in by scams. They didn’t crave anything, and, therefore, con artists couldn’t set the hook.

Ridley wanted to keep the park closed winters so the wolf/moose study could continue.

Bob wanted to open Isle Royale to the public in winter because he’d been paid to find a way to do that, if not in cash, then in future work. Travel writers and professional “experts” had to find what the client paid them to find. Honesty might be the best policy, but it didn’t pay as well or get one invited back.

Katherine had seemed to want to keep the island open but was more concerned that Bob accept her thesis and pass it on to her graduate committee. At least until they’d come to a parting of the ways after the necropsy and Katherine had run off.

Robin wanted to keep ISRO closed in winter and the study up and running. She’d also seemed to want to be scared, the way teenagers love to terrify themselves with tales of the homicidal escapee from the insane asylum, Jason, Hannibal the Cannibal and countless assorted purveyors of horror.

Anna didn’t know what Adam wanted. His vanishing acts seemed to indicate he wanted to be by himself, his words that he wanted to be of help to the team, his actions that he disliked Bob one day and wanted to be his best friend the next. Had a crush on Robin one day and was indifferent to her the next. Maybe Adam didn’t know what he wanted either. Maybe he hadn’t known since his wife died.

The wolves, the ice, the windigo, the weather, the very blood and bone of the island seemed to want them dead or confused or insane or gone. Wolves came so close, it was as if they wished to be near humans, wished to be seen. Wolves killed Katherine. Ice three inches thick, thick enough to ride horses across, broke in a mouth- shaped hole at the weight of one small woman. Snow blocked vision and wind tore at nerves and cold ate away at hearts.

If the wolves, wog led or otherwise, wanted the island to themselves winters, they’d probably get what they wanted: the unusual behavior patterns, the alien DNA and the oversized track sightings were sufficiently unique and exciting that the National Park Service and Michigan Tech would fight to keep ISRO closed to the public from October to June and the study ongoing.

Ridley would get what he wanted for the same reasons.

Bob would not, but it wouldn’t be through his annoying his employers with excessive truthfulness, so, in a way, he would. Anna doubted he cared about the study, the island, the wolves or anything but himself.

Robin was undoubtedly getting to be as scared as ever she’d dreamed.

Katherine would never get her dissertation published.

That left Adam, a widower or a murderer or both, a man who moved out of sync with the moods of the others.

ANNA CREPT INTO THE COMMON ROOM. The old computer, plugged into the wall for the use of seasonals, shined a single green, beady eye. The wood in the stove had been banked and a line of embers showed between two logs, casting enough light she could make her way without bumping into the furniture. Adam’s outline darkened the couch, where he snored softly.

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