“You’re a piece of work, you know that?” he said and, rather than leaving, pulled up another straight-backed chair to sit next to her, scooting it up till his knees were less than a foot from hers. He put his long forearms down on his long thighs and leaned in till their faces were close enough, Anna could see the tiny red rivers of blood from broken vessels in his eyes. “Do you think I took Robin? Is that it?”
His breath was hot, residual fire from the fury, and smelled sweet, as if he’d chewed a mint leaf. Anna couldn’t back away from him without tipping her chair over.
“Adam,” she said wearily. “You’re crowding me. People crowd to intimidate. Could you either back off or do it in a more interesting way?”
Another cough of laughter. Anna considered whether or not she should go on the comedy circuit in the Catskills.
“Sorry,” he said, sat up straight and smiled. It was a good smile, full of healthy teeth, and it went all the way to his eyes crinkling the corners. Anna believed he was sorry, that he’d not meant to scare her. It didn’t mean he was a nice guy.
“Did you make Robin disappear?” she asked.
“Robin didn’t need to be here this winter. She should have stayed home or waited tables in St. Paul.” He rubbed his face. Both hands continued up until his fingers pushed his hair out in thick tresses. “We’ll start the search at first light?”
The question took Anna off guard. “Yeah, I guess. Will we find her?” she asked pointedly.
He smiled again. This time, it didn’t reach his eyes. “Who knows?” He rose and walked from the common room. A second later, Anna heard the door to his and Bob’s room opening and closing again.
She couldn’t tell if she’d just had an up-close-and-personal conversation with a backwoods John Wayne Gacy or not.
“Ted Bundy,” she corrected herself.
In the minutes spent drinking the essence of Adam from the air as he stood over her half dressed and burning, she’d not tasted the sour warp of a psychopath. But, then, one didn’t. That was why they got away with it.
Anna logged off. She wanted to rest, to sleep, but seemed to have lost the knack. She wanted to go outside, but she’d freeze to death in the dark. January’s paltry eight hours of daylight depressed her. It was just enough to remind a person they weren’t blind before it abandoned them for another winter’s night. Because she could think of nothing more productive to do, she went back into Katherine Huff’s room and stood staring at the simple dorm furniture. Two mediumsized duffel bags; all the personal gear any of them had been allowed to bring. There wasn’t a lot to dig through, but Anna did it. Dirty socks and underpants were her reward. Since she’d taken the laptop, the desk was empty but for the cell phone charger plugged into the same outlet the computer had been.
Everything was so ordinary, so expected, at first she didn’t realize what she was looking at. Modern conveniences had become as air; only when they weren’t there were they noticed.
Why would Katherine have a cell phone charger out and plugged in when there was no cell reception on the island? Anna unplugged the charger and carried it back to her room, locking the door behind her. Katherine’s cell phone was still in her day pack. She’d kept it, not as evidence but out of spite for Bob. Not particularly flattering but, as it happened, useful. Having plugged the charger into the wall, she connected the phone. A red light behind a dark blue plastic oval lit up. The oval had a star on it. Around the star, an elliptical circle was traced in silver.
It was a satellite phone. Katherine did have cell service. If she had it, Bob had it. Bob had been anxious to retrieve this phone. He’d said he’d have to replace it out of his own pocket if it wasn’t found. At the time, Anna’d merely been impressed with his callousness. Now she wondered if he’d wanted the phone so no one would notice it was a satellite phone, know they had access to the outside world and one another.
Why wouldn’t he want anyone to know that? Afraid they’d all make pests of themselves asking to borrow it? It wasn’t as if they didn’t know why he was on the island. Anna hit the CONTACTS button and scrolled down the list of names. None of them were familiar but Ridley’s, with his work number at Michigan Tech, the Park Service office in Houghton and Bob Menechinn.
Without thinking why, she did it; Anna clicked on Menechinn and hit SEND. The warble of a loon called through the house. Quickly she pushed END. If Bob woke, if he looked, if he checked for missed calls, he would know the phone had been found. For several minutes, she sat still as stone and listened. There was no sound of doors or feet. Bob must have slept through the ringing.
A loon. The call of a loon in January.
The night Katherine had gone missing, Anna was awakened by the call of a loon. Since there wouldn’t be any loons on the island for months, she’d thought it a dream, like the dream she’d had of coyotes on her mother’s ranch. The coyotes frolicked in dreamscape, but the loon had been of this world. Bob had been called the night Katherine died. Katherine had died with the satellite phone in her hand.
Anna found RECENT CALLS and opened it. The last call was to Bob Menechinn.
Maybe he’d slept through that one too. There was no way Anna could tell if the call had gone through or how long it had been but, even if Bob had missed it, presumably Katherine would have left him a message. Her last words. Bob never mentioned a message.
For a moment, Anna wondered if Bob had been the instigator of the mysterious “HELP ME” that had appeared on the window. The loon call of the cell phone had been after that by hours, but it was possible Katherine had phoned earlier, or he had phoned her.
If he knew she was in trouble, why wouldn’t he have said so, led the rescue effort? When there was no physical danger to himself, Bob liked playing the white knight. If he didn’t know, why wouldn’t he have shared the message after the fact? Afraid they’d think he’d dropped the ball? Or was the message so vitriolic or damning, he didn’t want them to hear it?
Reflexively, Anna looked over her shoulder, checking to see that the parka still covered the window. It did.
Not being a devotee of the cell, Anna’d not given it enough thought. But cell phones took pictures. They text- messaged, and did far more things than anything smaller than the Pentagon should be able to do. A person’s cell phone was almost as rich an information trove as his or her computer. Anna hit MENU and began methodically deciphering icons, reading tiny print and punching buttons.
Katherine had not taken any snapshots of the wolves. Being crippled, then eaten, was evidently sufficiently entertaining that there was no need to record it. Anna couldn’t tell if she had text-messaged anyone. She kept pushing arrows and buttons and hitting SELECT.
“Ish.”
The phone also received photographs. The pictures Katherine had taken were of the same ski vacation as the photographs on the laptop, just different shots and poses. The photographs that had been sent to her had been unopened till Anna’d pressed buttons and pried her way into where they waited like evil beings in a dead-end alley.
There were five of them, but Anna suspected there’d been more. Katherine probably looked at the first few sent, then deleted the rest unopened. She died before she could delete these.
Katherine, nude, had been arranged on a bed. Her legs were splayed toward the camera. In the first photograph, there was a cucumber in her vagina and a carrot inserted in her rectum. The second picture changed only the objects used to rape her: a baseball bat and a green wine bottle. In the third, the photographer had gone to the effort of propping her head up and arranging her hands so she looked as if she had inserted the baseball bat herself.
“Jesus!” Anna breathed and closed her eyes. She had to swallow the sickness in her throat before she could open them again. Then it was another half minute before she could bring herself to look back at the tiny screen.
The fourth shot was a crooked close-up of her face with a man’s erect penis shoved in her mouth. Her head was back, eyes closed and jaw slack. In the last shot, the baseball bat had been replaced by a man’s fist pushed in up to the forearm. The man’s face was not shown.
Katherine’s was, every time.
“God damn!” Anna closed the phone and sat staring at it. “God damn!” she said again, shaking her head. Most of her adult life had been spent trying to put a stop to man’s inhumanity to everything he could get his hands on. The news showed burned babies, mothers running screaming from bullets, dogs eating fallen men, bombs shattering homes and vehicles. In real time, snuff films every night in every living room in America played out in the name of Current Events.
