Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  “Damn you, Anna,” Adam said. She couldn’t see his face; it was gone below the tatters of his sleeve and her arm. For a moment, a moment that was made into a nascent eternity by the vicious firing of nerve impulses in the right side of her body, Adam said nothing.

  Finally words floated up their conjoined arms: “Let me go.”

  “I’m pulling you up,” Anna said. She doubted she could pull up a four-week-old kitten at this point, but there wasn’t much else to hope for.

  “You haven’t the right. Let me go.” He didn’t sound afraid, only tired – so tired he could barely find the strength to speak.

  Anna might have done it. People had a right to die if they wanted to. People had a right to die the way they wanted to.

  “I can’t,” she admitted. “My glove caught in the duct tape.”

  “You are a piece of work,” Adam said.

  “Bob!” Anna yelled, an echo of when she’d called for him on the breaking ice. It yielded the same result. There wasn’t enough expansion room in her lungs to try again, and she laid her cheek on the sleeve of her parka, the bare rock of the cliff edge where Adam’s fall had scraped the snow away an inch from her eyes.

  It was moving. Tiny increments of rock no bigger than sand pebbles were creeping past. Adam’s weight was dragging her over. Kicking hard, she tried to drive her toes into the snow to anchor herself. The duck-billed Sorels pummeled down to the basalt but found no purchase. The effort accelerated the slip.

  “Uh, Adam?” she said.

  The grating sound that had opened her eyes after her shoulder tore sounded again.

  “Adam? I was wondering if you could grab onto anything. I’m sort of sliding up here.”

  More grating. She slid another inch. Her nose was ripping across the basalt. Tears and snot and snow and fabric blinded her.

  “You know, just anything. Maybe a branch or something?” she tried.

  “Once you’ve saved me and I’ve saved you, you can always jump again.

  “Bob!” The guy was a pervert and a rapist and stoned out of his mind, but he was strong as the proverbial ox. “Bob!”

  She slid farther, the skin of her chin peeling off against the sharp rock. Her eyes cleared enough, she could see down her arm to where her wrist bent, the duct tape wound around like a manacle.

  Wedging her free hand heel first into the snow beneath her chin, she pushed till the bones in her good shoulder cracked. Muscles wrenched at the collarbone, forcing the shattered ends farther apart, and she screamed. The slipping stopped.

  “Adam? Let’s die later. Give me a hand here, okay?”

  Grating. Metal, it sounded like, and Anna dared hope he was doing something constructive, maybe driving a fingernail file into the basalt like a piton or carving a foothold with his belt buckle.

  “Anna?”

  “I’m here,” she said. “Where the hell else would I be?”

  “On a three count, you pull. Got that?”

  Anna nodded, feeling the ice and stone cut her face. “Got it,” she managed.

  “Anna?”

  “I got it, for chrissake! Count already.”

  Adam laughed.

  “I’m glad you’re having fun,” she snarled.

  “One… two… three.” There was a tearing sound as Anna pulled, digging her knees in the snow and pushing with the heel of her hand. Adam flew up over the cliff, sailing into the air, as she fell back on her butt and heels.

  Not Adam. His ripped-up old parka. He had unzipped it and slid into the arms of his wife. Or the devil.

  Anna flung herself back in a belly flop on the top of the escarpment. “Where’s Robin!” she yelled into the white void. There wasn’t even an echo. Adam lay shattered at the bottom of the rock face, coatless, his red flannel shirt a scrap of color in the landscape.

  Life isn’t for everybody. Robin Williams had said that. Life wasn’t for Adam. When his wife had died, he had his hatred to sustain him. Had Anna let him kill Bob Menechinn, she knew he would still have stepped off the cliff. Without Bob, Adam was lost.

  “Damn you,” she whispered sadly.

  Bob.

  Presumably he was still tripping at the foot of the tree. Rolling onto her side, good arm beneath her taking the weight, Anna curled her legs into the fetal position. There wasn’t as much pain as there had been; the cold was numbing her. She’d been still too long, and an injury burned heat. Using her elbow as a lever, she pried herself up till she was kowtowing to the east, forehead on the ground, injured arm throbbing. For all the motion her arm had, her right sleeve might as well have been empty. She sat up on her heels, the bones in her shoulder and chest dragging like knives across the soft tissues inside her body. For half a minute or more, she could do nothing else. She hadn’t even the strength to breathe. When breath came, it was in a cutting gust of icy air that set her to coughing. The coughing threatened to tear her collarbone from its damaged moorings.

  Finally the coughing wore itself out, and she took careful sips of oxygen. When she could bear to move again, she unwound her neck scarf and laid it over her knees. Catching up the cuff of her right sleeve with her left hand, she lifted it, as a mother cat lifts a kitten by its scruff, and laid it over the scarf. With her left hand and her teeth, she managed a rough sling, and the pain lessened slightly.

  “What in hell did you think you were doing?” she muttered. “Let people die. World’s overpopulated as it is. Christ.”

  This last comment was in reference to the snowmobile. In the flurry of shared confidences, bone breaking and premature death, she’d forgotten she’d tipped it over. Whole, healthy, she could have wrestled it back onto its skis. In her present condition, even finding a lever big enough to shift this part of the world was going to be a Herculean task.

  Bob.

  He was still sitting, head atilt, mouth agape, a mute old hound trying to bay at the moon. Anna attempted to lift her butt off her heels and get one of the platypus Sorels out in front of her so she could stand. All she managed was a rocking motion that set the nerves in her shoulder and arm jangling. Pain was a good motivator. Death was better. If she stayed where she was, she’d die of hypothermia. Bob would die as well, but that wasn’t a particularly motivating factor. Her grunt of effort turned into a shout as she forced herself up to one knee.

  Her shout roused Bob. He rolled onto all fours and swayed back and forth, his eyes never leaving her. For an instant, she thought he was going to charge like a grizzly, and the fear of being torn apart by teeth made for grinding corn sent a jolt of fear through her that brought the bile to her throat. His eyes focused, and he pulled himself to a standing position, using the tree he’d been taking advantage of since he’d fled the cliff’s edge. Upright, he looked no less like a grizzly and no more like a man.

  Blinking the image away, Anna tried to rise. She failed.

  Bob Menechinn walked toward her. He was unsteady on his feet, but she thought his eyes were clearer. If Adam administered the ketamine awhile before Anna arrived on scene, the stuff might be wearing off – or at least wearing thin.

  “Give me a hand up, if you would, Bob,” Anna said, hoping normalcy would beget normalcy. She stuck out her good hand. Bob reached down and grasped it firmly. Apparently without effort, he drew her to her feet.

  Anna started to thank him, but he kept right on drawing her, pulling her into his chest and belly.

  “Easy, easy, Bob,” Anna said. “Enough. Enough. Back off, God dammit.” Her face mashed into his parka and his arm crushed her bad shoulder into him. He held her like a lover, his other hand groping down her side, under her arm.

  Fighting a revulsion that made the pain pale by comparison, Anna jerked a knee toward his groin, stomped his instep and scraped his shin with the side of her boot. It was like struggling in a dream. Thick-layered clothing swathed them both, and she fluttered like a moth in the soft and killing folds of a spiderweb.

  His big hands crawled over her body, pulling at her clothes. Then he stepped ba
ck and shoved her hard in the chest. Anna landed on her rear end so hard that, without the padding she’d just been cursing, she would have broken her tailbone.

  He held up a rectangle of black and waggled it back and forth. He’d been frisking her for her radio. As she watched, he carried it to the cliff edge and threw it over.

  She didn’t ask what he was doing. She had a bad feeling; she knew. He plucked the skis out of the snow one by one, then the poles. They followed the radio over the escarpment.

  Displaying the same ease with which he’d lifted her, Bob set the snowmobile to rights. The key was still in the ignition.

  “You scared?” he asked.

  “Pardon?” Anna asked politely, hoping to get him to come closer to her. What she would do, should she succeed, she had no idea, but there was nothing she could do from thirty feet away, and she knew, if she could rise again, it was going to take a while.

  “You heard me,” he said. He threw a leg over the seat of the snow-mobile and reached for the ignition key.

  “Yeah,” Anna said to stop him leaving. “Sure, I’m scared. What kind of an idiot wouldn’t be scared.”

  He sat back and smiled. She couldn’t remember seeing a smile uncoil as slowly as Bob’s did. It came over the lower half of his face, then rose to his eyes in the malicious sunrise of the day of Armageddon.

  “You and Robin thought it was pretty funny when Ridley’s pet monster was pawing at our tent, didn’t you? Smirking like teenage cunts at a sleepover. Let’s see you smirk now. Come on, one little smirk. What’s the matter, ice got your tongue?”

  Anna stared at him. Adam was dead, Katherine killed, Robin missing and this was what Bob was thinking of: that two women had seen him panic.

  “Smirk,” Anna said.

  “I think it’s pretty funny,” Bob said, his smile still in place.

  Anna’s legs were hurting. Soon they would stop hurting. They would be completely numb. Then standing would be a bitch. “Okay,” she said. “I can smirk. What’s it worth to you?”

  “Maybe a ride back to the bunkhouse. Maybe nothing.”

  “Deal,” she said. “I’m only going to do it once. Get your fat ass over where you can get a good look,” she said nastily. The insult moved him off the machine. Anna’s left hand was shoved in her pocket. She worked it out of its glove.

  “Women want balls now, that it? Fast-tracked into jobs you can’t handle. Scraping babies out of your cunts because you fuck everything that moves and don’t want to be mamas. You don’t want to wear the pants. No, that’s not good enough for you, is it? You want to have the cock. No more pretend. No more strapping it on and fucking your girlfriends. A real cock. You think you can take it right off a man, don’t you?”

  Bob was working up a good head of steam. The euphoria of the cat tranquilizer was double-edged, and the dark side was rising. He stopped eight or ten feet from her.

  Too far.

  “Well, I wouldn’t take yours,” Anna said scornfully. “Size does matter.”

  Bob stepped into her, almost straddling her. He grabbed her hood and jerked her head up. His fist went back.

  And Anna’s went up. Bare-knuckled and hammer-hard, she punched up into his crotch. Her fist buried itself in cloth and soft flesh. Bob screamed and fell, crashing down on his side, his gloved hands between his legs. Scooping up snow, Anna flung it in his face, curled her fingers into claws and launched herself at his eyes. Her shoulder cracked again as she bounced into his chest, and she knew she’d broken the floating end of the collarbone. Her vision blacked at the periphery.

  Bob backhanded her. As easily as a grown man would throw a cat off, Bob knocked her off him. One hand still on his privates, he crawled away. Confused by the ketamine and the sudden assault, he took a minute or more to get his bearings. Then he stood and went back to the snowmobile. From beneath the seat, he took out a spanner used to tighten the tractor treads and started back to where Anna lay on her back, holding her arm across her chest.

  “Bob, you’re not guilty of murder, but you kill me and you will be,” Anna said rationally – or as rationally as she could from a supine position. Maybe I should have tried the rational approach before he’d gone for the spanner, she thought, but that was blood under the bridge now.

  “I’m not going to kill you. You’re going to have an accident.” He grabbed her right boot, jerked it off and pulled her sock down. Holding the bare foot against the snow-covered rock, he smashed her ankle bone with the wrench.

  Through the haze of misery that followed, Anna heard the snow-mobile motoring down the Greenstone.

  Winter was going to do Bob’s dirty work for him.

  32

  For a while, there was nothing but the blinding pain and the knowledge that she could not save herself; that she couldn’t walk out. Had the thought of losing to an idiot like Bob not been anathema, Anna might have given up. Instead she opened her eyes; she sat up. With her uninjured hand, she hooked the boot Bob had jerked off and put it back on her foot. If one was going to die, it was important to die with one’s boots on. Soon the ankle would begin to swell. Then even the bulbous Sorel wouldn’t fit over it.

  Put ice on it, Anna thought and almost smiled.

  The glove she’d removed, the better to bust Bob’s balls, was still in her coat pocket. Wriggling her fingers like so many eels, she worked her hand into it. Then she sat, exhausted by the pain, wishing she believed in God that she might convince Him to get back into the smiting business. Without a radio, there was no one else she could call upon.

  For what seemed an eternity, she sat in her broken bones and cooling blood and thought about Paul. It had been so good to talk with him.

  On Katherine’s satellite phone.

  “Thank you, Paul,” she said. The phone was in her pocket. She’d been carrying the wretched thing since she’d found it. Fumbling, twice dropping it, she got it out and again exposed her fingers to the cold. In CONTACTS, Katherine had the number for the Park Service offices in Houghton, Michigan. Anna pushed the SEND button and mashed the phone to her ear.

  “Our offices are open from eight-thirty to five, Monday through Friday.”

  It was Saturday. Anna jabbed 411, and, sitting crippled in the snow, made her way through the ether, into space, through a satellite and down to the National Park dispatch office. As clearly as she could, she told the dispatcher her situation. “Radio Ridley Murray,” she said. “Tell him what I told you. Tell him he needs to bring the Sked. I’ll hold.”

  A scratchy muttering startled her, till she realized it was her radio, and Adam’s bleating from the bottom of the cliff. Three more times, they bleated.

  “He’s not answering,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll keep trying.”

  Anna closed the phone and stowed it back in her pocket. In a bit, when she was sure she had no more time, she would call Paul and say good-bye. How weird will that be, she thought, and heard her pathetic last words to her husband being replayed on the six o’clock news all over the country.

  She could call Bob, tell him all was forgiven, she was in a serious smirking mood and would he come fetch her home.

  That thought festered for a minute.

  “Bob, you bastard, you are coming back for me,” she muttered suddenly. Action gave her hope and hope gave her courage and courage gave her the strength to lift her crippled leg and lay the damaged ankle on top of the sound ankle. Using her own body as a Sked, she inched herself backward with her good arm till she’d reached the side of the outcropping where the Greenstone descended into the trees. A dead branch provided her with twigs she could break free with one hand. Having snapped them into suitable lengths, she shoved them into her boot between the sock and the thick felt lining.

  The ankle stabilized, Anna could stand. The branch that had kindly given her its twigs was as big around as her arm and no more than eight or ten feet long. A lesser branch, perpendicular to the main growth, sprouted from near the end. The whole didn’t weigh more than thirty pounds –
forty, at most – yet shifting it with one hand, her weight on one leg, was a circus act that might have been amusing to an audience of sadists.

  Whimpering and grinding her teeth because she couldn’t seem to stop herself, she dragged the longest, sturdiest part of the branch across the Greenstone Trail where it came into the open on the basalt ridge. Wind, carving up over the escarpment, had taken much of the snow from the rock. Where Anna laid her branch, it was scarcely six inches deep and powdery. Using the feathery end of a pine bough, she whisked the powder over the wood.

  It was a lousy job. She moved with tedious slowness; her tools were crude and wielded with one weakening arm. A Boy Scout, a rank green Cub Scout, could see the branch and the attempts to cover it, if they were paying attention. Anna kept on. It was better than sitting and freezing to death, and if her Rube Goldberg, jury-rigged, half-baked plan failed, as it probably would, at least the sweat she worked up would hasten her freezing to death adventure when the time came.

  The blueprint of her plan was simple and finished in five minutes: the branch lay across the head of the trail, its tip buried in the snow, the end where the smaller branch grew out at a right angle from the main branch, resting on a flat stone a foot and a half high. The bough she’d used for a broom leaned against the wood where it angled up out of the snow.

  “It’s good to have a plan,” she said and wondered if she was getting hypothermic. One of the first symptoms was mental confusion. She remembered that from her white-water rescue training in the Russian River in California. It had been winter; the water rushing down from the Sierra was cold. The instructor had also said a person with hypothermia could not raise their arms over their head.

  Anna raised her good arm over her head.

  “Hope you weren’t full of shit,” she said to the bygone instructor. Straddling the main part of the branch that crossed the path, she sat on the rock. She rotated the L-shaped offshoot upward till it was vertical and running parallel to her spine like a skinny chairback.

  Having gotten as comfortable as she could with broken bones and a four-inch branch under her behind, Anna dug the cell phone from her pocket, pulled off her glove with her teeth, found Bob Menechinn’s number in CONTACTS and pushed SEND. It rang four times, then went to voice mail.