Winter Study

out how to go about it. There was no place to incarcerate him. Should he decide he didn’t wish to be arrested, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it without backup and Adam, Jonah and Ridley could not be trusted. One, some or all were perpetrating a fraud on the federal government – which she wasn’t sure was a bad thing – and were willing to kill innocent women and female park rangers to do it – which she was sure was a bad thing.

“Hey,” she said amiably as she banged the snow off her boots on the lintel. “Any coffee left?”

“Hey yourself,” Adam said. “On the counter. Good and hot.” No one else acknowledged her words or entrance.

Ridley bent over the stove, stirring the inevitable oatmeal, his shoulders rounded as a crone’s, his long fingers looking thinner than they had twenty-four hours before, the knuckles outsized, as if arthritis had taken him overnight. Jonah was droning on about disrobing “Mrs. Brown” as he took the cozy off the sugar bowl and began spooning brown sugar into an empty bowl. There was no ribaldry or playfulness in the Mrs. Brown story this morning. The old pilot spoke in a monotone, an actor who’s forgotten his character and lost his audience. Bob had taken his preferred chair in the corner against the wall. The first time Anna had seen him there, she’d thought of him as enthroned. Now “cornered” was a better description.

Adam was a stark contrast to his fellows. He burned again but with a new fever. Not rage, Anna decided as she poured herself a cup of coffee. Excitement. Adam couldn’t sit still; he positively bounced in his seat the way a little boy will when an adventure is in the offing. A wonderful adventure. Adam was having a problem keeping joy from busting out all over.

“What are you so happy about?” she asked as she took her place at the end of the table, the de facto “Mom” spot. “Are we going to find Robin?”

Ridley turned from the stove. “Does he know where Robin is?” he demanded sharply. “Adam, do you know where she is?”

“I just have a good feeling, is all,” Adam said. “We could do with a little optimism around here for a change. I, for one, would rather believe she’s alive somewhere than dead in a snowdrift.”

Anna cocked her head to one side, trying to hear through the tension that thrummed in the sinews of the room.

“Chipper,” she said. “Adam, you sound downright chipper.”

Ridley stepped across the small space between the four-burner stove and the Formica-topped table where the rest of them sat over empty bowls like Goldilocks’s ursine victims. The thin, bony hands grabbed the front of Adam’s shirt and Ridley hauled him half out of his chair and held him suspended with wiry strength. “Do you know where Robin is?” he whispered, a hissing of steam from overheated pipes.

Anna lifted her coffee cup off the table to protect the precious liquid from the inevitable scuffle to follow. She needn’t have bothered. Adam didn’t rise to Ridley’s anger.

“Rid, I’d never hurt Robin. You know that. If I could bring her back right now, I’d do it. Let me go, Rid.” The last was said almost sadly, and Anna remembered that the two men had been friends for years, a fact that had been easy to forget from the interactions she’d observed on the island.

Ridley lowered Adam carefully back into the kitchen chair. “Sorry,” he said and went back to stirring the oatmeal. If he didn’t pay attention, it was going to be the consistency of library paste, but Anna knew better than to offer to take over for him. Age-old customs were not suspended merely because hard times came. People needing reassurance tended to cling to them with ever-more tenacity.

They ate quickly. Though no one but Adam seemed anxious to start the search for Robin, it was tacitly agreed that it would be wrong not to seem anxious. Anna didn’t want to search because she didn’t believe she would find a living woman, and the photographs on Katherine’s cell phone had put her more in the mood for revenge than body recovery. By the way Ridley’s once-lovely skin sagged around his eyes and pulled so tight across his mouth that dints of white showed on either side of his nose, Anna suspected he was holding on to control with his fingernails. A man of order, this chaos was unhinging him. Ridley would search, Anna thought. He’d do everything he had to until he was too tired to lift a foot for another step, but she doubted he was thinking clearly. Without the thinking, the physical work of searching would not bear fruit unless he got luckier than seemed likely. For all his flirting with Robin, Ridley was Jonah’s love; he was like an old woman with an only son. Until his boy was out of the woods, the wolves could have everybody else.

Bob was scared.

Adam took the bowls from the table and dumped them in the sink.

“What do you want us to do?” Ridley asked Anna.

“We have to search,” she said and tried to keep the pointlessness out of her voice. Adam was right; they could do with more optimism.

“Since she was taken in her sleeping bag – a winter bag, probably good to five or ten below – there’s a good chance she survived.” She drummed her fingers on the table and thought. “One of us took her, you guys know that, don’t you? Or there’s someone else on the island who has been screwing with our minds.”

That sat in the air for a while. Ridley stared at Adam and Bob in turn. Adam played with a spoon. Bob’s eyes were skittering around the room, as if he followed the path of a butterfly on Benzedrine.

“Which one of you found Katherine’s cell phone?” he blurted out finally.

He’d seen the missed call from Anna.

“Are you still on that cell phone kick?” she snapped. “Just pay the two dollars.”

“What…” Confusion passed over his face, then cleared. “It’s more than two dollars. Somebody found it.”

“Leave it alone,” Ridley said wearily.

“Maybe Katherine took it with her,” Adam said. Had he used sepulchral tones, it would have been mocking at best and bad taste at worst, but he said it the way a grocer would say “four dollars a pound.” Bob’s face quivered like a pudding when the door slams.

Anna made a mental note to call Bob again soon.

“What do we do first?” Ridley cut across the others.

There was a story problem Anna’d had a hard time with in fourth grade. A farmer with a rowboat wanted to get his fox, his goose and his bag of grain across the river but could take only one at a time in his tiny boat. If he leaves the goose with the grain, she’ll eat it. If he leaves the fox with the goose, the fox will eat her.

Who would try to find Robin, if she did happen to still be living, and who would sabotage the search? Who was the fox, who the goose?

The matter was taken out of her hands. “Bob and I will head up the Greenstone,” Adam said. “Get your stuff, Bob. These guys are going to dither half the morning.”

Since Anna couldn’t think of any better arrangement she didn’t argue. The five of them couldn’t cover enough country to find a hidden woman. Or a hidden corpse. The only way they were going to locate Robin was if the kidnapper wanted them to or if Robin was alive and helped them find her. Much as Anna wanted the latter to be true, she didn’t let herself get too attached to the idea.

Adam and Bob left to get their gear together and suddenly the kitchen felt bigger. There was more air to breathe and the walls moved back.

“Can you ski, Jonah?”

“I got the silver medal in skiing in the 1908 Olympics,” he said.

“I knew that,” Anna said and smiled to make sure she still could. To Ridley she said: “Why don’t you and Jonah do Feldtmann. We’ve got nothing to go on except that she was carried out in a sleeping bag. That suggests whoever carried her had to travel on improved trails or he wouldn’t get far. There’s only a couple places on the island she could have been taken and kept alive: Feldtmann fire tower, Malone Bay ranger station or the cabin at Daisy Farm. Daisy Farm and Malone are reaches. They’re too far.”

“Why would anybody take Robin to Feldtmann?” Ridley asked. He wasn’t asking Anna; he was asking the ether. Neither of them answered.

“What are you going to do?” Jonah asked.

Anna looked hard into the pale blue eyes behind the round lenses.

“Why? Are you worried about me?”

“It seems the animals separated from the herd aren’t living to a ripe old age this winter. Riper old age,” he amended with a ghost of his old raillery.

“I’ll recheck the housing areas and the lean-tos,” Anna told him.

“Anywhere else and we’re just looking for a body.”