Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  The bag was old and worn; the leather around the tag had grown stiff and cracked. Anna looked at the offending object: PROFESSOR MENECHINN, UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN. Bob was so lazy that in ten years he’d never bothered to change the address. “University of Saskatchewan,” Anna said aloud. The name struck a chord, and she sat in silence waiting for the rest of the music to surface.

  “They’re both Canucks,” Jonah had said of Bob and Adam.

  “Cynthia Johansen, a graduate student at the University of Saskatchewan, lived with her husband, Adam Johansen, a freelance carpenter.”

  Not only were Adam and Bob Canadians, they had both lived in Saskatchewan and at the same time. Bob taught at the university where Adam’s wife, Cynthia, went to graduate school. It wasn’t a great leap to put Cynthia into one of Professor Menechinn’s graduate courses. It was an even shorter leap to imagine him assaulting her.

  Then Cynthia committed suicide.

  Adam never recovered from her death.

  Adam told Ridley to recommend Bob for the Homeland Security review.

  Adam had been excited at breakfast, happy.

  “Holy shit!” Anna said. Adam was going to kill Bob. He was going to do it today.

  Without skis, she’d never catch them. She took the snowmobile. Hammering up the Greenstone, icy wind lashing her cheeks and scraping her skin, Anna more than once considered turning around, letting Adam do mankind a favor. A world without the Bobs was a tempting idea. Rehabilitation didn’t work with guys like Menechinn. What he did wasn’t just a crime; it was a character flaw, a rottenness within.

  Still, she didn’t leave Adam to his work. For one thing, she liked to think of herself as a half-decent human being. Not to mention if the two killed each other, she might never find out what happened to Robin.

  The Greenstone climbed gently at first, then rose precipitously with switchbacks that threatened to push the snowmobile into the trees to a rocky escarpment thrusting above the tree line. The slope on the western side of the island was forested. On the east, the ridge fell away precipitously, a sheer sixty-foot drop, to a flat narrow boulder field skirting the edge of a meadow.

  Forcing the snowmobile to its limit, she built up sufficient speed that when she reached the ridge the machine leapt a foot into the air, banged down in a spume of snow and rushed toward the drop. Squawking, she jerked to the left. The front of the snowmobile jackknifed. The machine rose up on one ski in alarmingly slow motion, toppled over and shuddered to a stop as the engine died.

  Ahead of her, through the veil of falling snow, stood two shrouded figures. Skis and poles were jammed into the snow like battlefield grave markers. This was where Menechinn was to meet with the fatal accident that had been awaiting him since he’d been brought to the island.

  “Adam!” Anna yelled. “Adam, wait!”

  “Go back,” Adam called.

  Anna wriggled off the machine, rose and stumbled a few steps as her numbed legs refused to carry her. Blood began to flow and she stomped her feet, but she didn’t go any nearer to the men at the edge of the fall.

  “Go back,” Adam said again. Without the roar of the small engine, his words were clear, ringing in her ears like the tolling of a bell.

  “Lord knows, I want to,” Anna called back. “But I can’t. You come with me, Adam. Bob can make his own way home. We’ve got to talk. You need to help me find Robin.”

  “Robin’s better off where she is,” Adam said. “Bob made sure of that.”

  In his uniquely dreadful winter gear, goose down poking out and the duct tape taking up more area than the nylon, Adam looked like Robinson Crusoe: The Northern Saga. He also looked crazy as a loon.

  Anna moved closer. Menechinn was a yard or two from Adam, saying nothing and standing in a heap of clothes and flesh as if his bones had softened and could barely keep him upright. Hoods and balaclava hid his face.

  “Bob!” Anna said sharply. He raised his head with the slow swaying of a bull too old and too blind to know where danger is coming from.

  “Bob,” he echoed, and his pulled-back grin creased his face above the folds of his neck scarf. With a hand the size of a club, he pawed off his hood, baring his head to the elements. His face was the color of new brick.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Anna asked.

  “Tasting his own medicine,” Adam said. “Go back. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Ketamine?”

  “His drug of choice,” Adam said.

  “You are doing this for Cynthia?”

  “Cynthia is dead,” Adam said. “This is just for me.”

  “For revenge?” Anna asked. “To even the scales? To get some of your own back? Like you said, Adam, Cynthia is dead. She’s going to stay dead. Give me one good reason to go through with this.”

  “For fun.” There was no expression on his face. It was as blank as if the executioner’s hood was already drawn over his features.

  “Okay,” Anna admitted. “That is as good a reason for doing it as any, I guess.”

  “Doing what? What are we doing?” Bob asked, alarm creeping into the smear of happiness Lady K had put on his mouth.

  “As much a fan as I am of fun, it’s short-lived for the most part,” Anna said. “With a first-degree murder rap, prison lasts forever.”

  “Go back,” Adam said.

  “Let me arrest him,” Anna said.

  “And then what? Cynthia can’t testify. Robin can’t. Katherine can’t.”

  Adam’s words were heavy, falling in flat chunks through the snowy air. Anna wanted to argue, tout the fierce and powerful justice of the law, but he was right. Bob would get off. Robin’s blood would prove positive for ketamine if Anna could get it to a lab in time and if its freezing hadn’t changed the chemical properties, but who was to say Robin hadn’t taken it herself? The pictures on Katherine’s cell phone were damning only to Katherine. They could be traced to Bob, but who was to say it wasn’t consensual? Rape was hard to prove at the most obvious of times.

  Institutions hated rape charges. This would be swept under the table by three powerful bodies: Homeland Security, the National Park Service and American University; well-meaning people wanting to keep the mud off their organization, wanting to keep their positions.

  “Arresting him would be fun,” Anna said finally, and a smile ghosted across his face.

  “You drilled the ice,” she said to keep his attention.

  “I drilled the ice,” Adam said.

  “I nearly died.”

  “I know. Bob here always has to strut out front. I thought he’d be first on the ice. It’s hard to grasp how complete a coward he is.” Adam’s attention left Anna and focused like a laser on Bob Menechinn.

  “Go, Anna.” He took Bob’s arm. Menechinn tried to jerk away, but his movements were slow and clumsy. The drug had made him forget where his arms and legs were. He overbalanced and fell. He lay moving feebly, making a fat snow angel.

  Anna took a deep breath and was immediately sorry as the cold burned her lungs. “You’ll spend the next forty years of your life in a penitentiary. You’ll get up when you’re told and go to bed and eat and see the sun when you’re told,” she said. “You’ve lived your whole life out of doors, Adam. Let me take Bob back.”

  Adam’s face didn’t change. “I’ve spent the last ten years in prison,” he said, watching Bob paddle at the snow. “Get up,” he said to Menechinn.

  Anna needed him to connect with her sufficiently so he could hear past his pain. “You said Katherine would never testify. You knew about Katherine?”

  “I’d seen the look before. On the face of my wife before she died. The wolves saved Katherine the trouble of killing herself.”

  “Or you did.”

  “I had nothing to do with her death. Not one damn thing. I don’t kill women.”

  “How about wolves?”

  “The giant bite marks?” He smiled. “People will believe what they want to believe. I just helped it along.”


  “So you darted the wolf and stabbed it to death,” Anna said coldly.

  “An animal. The pound puts thousands to death every year. Fluffy and Bootsie and Socks. Don’t get onto me about an animal.”

  Adam straddled Bob, took hold of his wrists and pulled him to a sitting position.

  “You drugged me,” Bob said without bitterness, a sense of wonder in his voice.

  “How do you like it?” Adam asked, standing over him, hands still clamped around the bigger man’s wrists.

  “I don’t…” Bob rolled his head over and squinted to bring Anna into focus. “Ranger Danger,” he said and smiled. “You were going to kill me and now we’ll kill you.”

  “I’m not going to kill you,” Anna said. “I don’t want to wait in line that long. Since you are going to kill me anyway, you might as well tell me: did you drug Robin?”

  Bob leered. Snow was catching on his wiry hair and the fat of his cheeks where they pushed out beneath his eyes. “Adam said you were trying to frame me, Miss Ranger. Too bad you’re a fool.” His head rolled till Adam came into his line of vision. He had to let it flop back on his neck to look up at him. “Wearing a wire,” he said conspiratorially.

  “How much did you give him?” Anna asked.

  “Enough,” Adam said.

  “You told him I was going to kill him or set him up?”

  “Divide and conquer,” Adam said. “Upsy-daisy, Bob.” Using himself as a lever, he rocked back and pulled Bob to his feet. They were no more than two yards from the edge of the basalt shelf, yet the drop was practically invisible, the white of the snow melding seamlessly with the white of sky and ice. Anna knew it was there from her time on ISRO and the hike they’d made to Malone Bay. She doubted Bob had any idea he stood on a precipice. Adam turned Menechinn so he faced to the east over the cliff.

  “Don’t,” Anna said. She didn’t move any closer. If a tussle started, it wasn’t going to be her who was nudged to her death.

  “Bob, see there?” Adam pointed into the void where the white on white of weather created a blank canvas for the ketamine to paint on.

  “Robin wants to meet you there.”

  “Don’t,” Anna said again. “Bob, there is no there there. Adam means to kill you. You’re on the edge of a cliff; step back.”

  Adam spun around. The dead look was gone from his face replaced by the fury she’d felt the night she’d seen the photograph of him and his dead wife. “Get the fuck out of here,” he hissed, a whisper metastasized into a shout.

  “Bob, do it, go. Anna will kill you. Run!” Adam shouted in Menechinn’s ear. Bob began to lumber forward toward imagined sex and safety.

  In the eternal second of the mind, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, huge and shapeless in ill-fitting clothes, running into the arctic wilderness, played in Anna’s mind, overlaid by Peter Boyle’s singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz”; monsters pieced together from the dead and given life by the insane. Bob was a monster; that she didn’t doubt. She would never know what had made him or if there was true evil in the world and he had chosen his own monstrousness. Anna wouldn’t have chosen to save him. She wouldn’t have said she particularly wanted him saved. Her mind reacted to what he was with a cringing loathing she didn’t care to examine.

  Her body reacted from years of training. She threw herself forward in a flying tackle aimed at the backs of Bob Menechinn’s knees. Big men had bad knees; the joints couldn’t cope with the bulk, and most of them had played football at one time or another. Knee injuries were a small ranger’s friend. Her right shoulder and side of her head smashed into him and the knees gave. Falling back and to the side, he crushed her right arm into the snow. Pain exploded in her elbow.

  “It’s a cliff, it’s a fucking cliff, I was going off a cliff,” Bob began yelling. Mad with the sudden realization of physical danger, he scrabbled backward. His knee ground over Anna’s wrist and she cried out. A flailing hand struck her on the side of her head so hard her ear burned and roared.

  “You’re welcome, God dammit,” she shouted as she tried to roll out of his thrashing way. On hands and knees, Bob scuttled through the deep snow, moaning and bellowing like a mad boar. He didn’t stop till he’d reached the trees. There he pulled himself upright, using the bole of a tree, and screamed: “He tried to kill me. He tried to kill me.” The litany didn’t stop there, but Anna tuned the rest of it out and got to her feet. Snow and down padding had saved her serious injury. Her wrist still rotated, and, other than the misery of ice down her collar and up her sleeves, the dive didn’t seem to have done any appreciable damage.

  Adam was still standing near the cliff’s edge, his feet inches from where the rock fell away.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked softly.

  “I don’t know,” Anna said. For a minute, they stood, listening to the scissor cut of the wind in the trees and Bob’s lament. Snow came at them in spinning gusts, air currents made wild and playful where the earth dropped away to water.

  “You know what he is?”

  “Some of it. I think he drugged Robin. I think he did the same to Katherine, then raped her and took pictures to blackmail her into silence. I’m guessing he did something like that to your wife.”

  “Cynthia,” Adam said.

  “Cynthia,” Anna gave Adam’s memory the honor of a name.

  “She was like Robin. Not raised like her or athletic like her, but with that innocence that doesn’t wear off at thirteen like it does for most of us.” Adam’s gaze moved from Anna’s face to where Bob clung to his tree, his moaning and cursing settled into a murmuring chant low enough they could sense the tenor but no longer had to hear the words.

  “Cynthia had never been out of school – went straight from kindergarten through to her Ph.D. program. Her dad raised her by himself; only kid. Her mother died of appendicitis when she was barely walking.”

  Anna didn’t know what to say and figured nothing was best. The talking was taking the action out of Adam for the moment.

  His attention returned from the trees where Bob had run. “Cynthia thought men were nice,” he said. “She thought they took care of women and children, saved kittens from trees and helped old ladies carry groceries to the car.” A hint of warmth touched his voice and it no longer sounded of frozen harp strings.

  “I hadn’t thought of that in a while,” he said to Anna and shook his head. “How could I have forgotten that?”

  “Too busy hating?” she hazarded.

  “It was something to do,” he said, and most of the chill was back in the strings.

  “Bob was her teacher?” Anna asked.

  “‘Outdoors Education.’ Two semesters.”

  Anna waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. He drifted, his eyes moving slowly over her head as if he was reading a complex story in the gray of the sky above the basalt. Finally his gaze returned to Earth, to Bob, sitting now, his back to the tree he’d been hugging, his head back and his mouth open.

  “Bob drugged her. He did it more than once. She didn’t tell me till she got pregnant. She was ashamed. She was afraid she’d lose me, that either I’d never feel the same way about her or that I’d go berserk and tear his head off and spend the rest of our lives in jail. She couldn’t tell anyone else. There were the pictures, and she knew what they’d do to her dad and me. Then she found out she was going to have a baby. I’d been on a six-week job in Manitoba when the baby was conceived. So she told me. Three days later, she got into the bath and cut her wrists.

  “I wasn’t with her when she died,” Adam said, and, for the first time, Anna could hear tears in his voice. “I had to answer the phone. Guess who was calling.”

  “God damn,” Anna said, the oxygen gone from the air.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve got to take him back,” Anna said. “I’m sorry,” she added.

  “I could kill you,” Adam said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Getting killed for the likes of Menechinn’s crazy.” Adam laughed, and
there seemed to be genuine humor in it. “Shoot, getting a hang-nail for the likes of Menechinn is crazy.”

  Anna said nothing.

  “I guess wasting time trying to kill him is crazy too,” Adam said. The thought or the laugh had gentled his voice, and he shook his head as he spoke.

  “Maybe,” Anna said.

  “No maybe about it.”

  Slowly he raised his arms out to his sides, a man crucified on white. He cocked his head, smiled and stepped back into nothing.

  31

  Anna fell flat on the brink of the drop, arms outstretched. The fingers of her right hand caught Adam’s sleeve above the elbow and closed convulsively over the fabric. Then his weight struck her, and shoulder and collarbone smashed into the stone beneath the snow. The noise in her head was the cacophony of pain. A loud, sucking pop, and her ulna was torn from the socket. Crack of a dry twig: the collarbone snapping. She would have screamed, but cheese-thick agony blocked her throat.

  “Don’t let go,” she managed in little more than a whisper.

  A ripping sound sawed her eyes open. Her face was hanging over the cliff, her body spread-eagled on the edge. Her right arm, weirdly elongated, wrist showing between glove and sleeve, drew a straight line to Adam’s arm, drawn rigidly above his head. Anna had not held on. No one could have stopped the plummet of one hundred sixty pounds with four gloved fingers and a thumb. Not even Anna. In a freak accident, her hand had jammed through the nylon of his ripped coat and her wrist was in a noose of duct tape he’d wound round the sleeve to keep it together. Had she wanted to, she couldn’t have let him go.

  “I’m pulling you up,” she gasped. Breathing hurt where her collarbone had broken, but the pain in the dislocated shoulder made it seem like nothing and she snorted a laugh that turned to snot and mixed with the snow caked on her face.