Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  Anna didn’t leave a message.

  She stopped, just stopped. She didn’t move or replace her glove or close the phone or pray or curse or plan. She barely even hurt. At best, the plan had been frail, absurd; she’d known that when she blew the last of her reserves on it. Like Adam’s hate, it was something to do when the alternative was unthinkable.

  There wasn’t another plan.

  Try and stay alive till Ridley decided to answer his radio. That could qualify as a plan, but to stay alive till the cavalry came one had to keep one’s body temperature above eighty-six degrees so the organs didn’t start shutting down. To do that, one had to move, and Anna couldn’t, not enough. Isometrics might give her a little time; they generated a modicum of heat. But the trauma to muscles, grating over splintered bone as she tensed and relaxed, would undo any benefit the exercise might have.

  Coward. Anna tried to goad herself into action, but there was no action to take. The peace she’d glimpsed at the bottom of the lake would have been nice, but it had apparently been induced by oxygen deprivation. All she felt now was frigid depression tinged with a sour note of self-pity and a terrible guilt at the misery her death would cause her husband and her sister. Dying because a pervert banged one on the ankle with a wrench and absconded with the snowmobile wasn’t the sort of death that comforted the living. Defusing a nuclear bomb about to explode in a nursery school full of crippled kids – that would be a good death. Saving a busload of nuns from a fiendish death at the hands of ninja assassins would be a decent death. Stepping on a land mine while carrying the last man in the battalion out of enemy territory would be a nifty death.

  This one was going to suck for everyone concerned.

  It was time to call Paul.

  Anna stared at the tiny miracle of the phone.

  A wolf howled.

  Maybe I’ll get eaten, she thought and was somewhat cheered by the prospect of not dying alone.

  The wolf howled again, and she realized the sound was coming from the phone in her hand. Bob’s ring tone was the call of a loon and Katherine’s was the howling of a wolf. What else? Anna squinted through the rime that had built up on her eyelashes at the screen. Bob. He must have heard his cell, stopped the snowmobile, and seen Katherine’s number.

  The plan was back in place; frail, absurd, but up and running.

  “Hallelujah!” Anna whispered and pushed the button lighting up with green. “Bob.” She blew the name out on a soft, long breath, the cliché of the call from the great beyond. Paranoia, guilt and ketamine were on her side. She heard a sharp intake of breath from the other end.

  “Katherine?” came a choked voice.

  Anna’s lips made it all the way to a smile this time. “Cynthia,” she breathed in the same long, hollow tone. “Cynthia.”

  “Bullshit,” Bob said, but his voice was shaky and uncertain. Anna said nothing, just breathed gently into the mouthpiece. A whining sound interrupted, and she realized he was turning the ignition key to start the snowmobile again. She wasn’t going to get the chance to lure him to the cliff top with apparitions.

  “Dickhead,” she said sharply, “I’m not dead. I’ve got Katherine’s phone, pictures, notes on the blackmail and your name’s all over it. I’m calling everybody I can think of to tell them the good news. Give my regards to the boys at San Quentin when you get there.”

  She hung up. The phone howled again. Bob. She ignored it. Having replaced her glove, she scooped snow over her boots and lap as best she could with one hand and a shoulder that attacked its host every time she moved.

  Zach, her first husband, had been an actor. One of the things he loved most in the theater was waiting in the wings to go on. Quiet, in the living dark of backstage, he said he knew he was where he was supposed to be, in a space only he could occupy; he knew who he was and who he could be. He could be as brilliant as Laurence Olivier, as graceful as Nureyev. The audience might come to its feet in wild applause when he finished his monologue. In the wings, all things were possible.

  The shriek of the Bearcat came into the edge of her hearing. Bob hadn’t gotten far. As high as he was, he probably could barely keep the machine on the trail. Anna pulled her white hood down over her eyes. She wedged her good hand underneath the branch between her knees, bent forward and, showing the trail the top of her head, she waited.

  33

  The growl of the snowmobile grew reassuringly louder. Anna focused on the noise to keep her mind from drifting. There would be just the one chance and it was slim. If she failed, she would be joining Adam at the bottom of the cliff. Closing her mind to the distractions of her body, she used the racket to marshal the energies remaining to her. The roar filled her head, and she directed it down her spine and into her good leg, down her uninjured arm and into the working hand until she thrummed with vibrating energy.

  The engine pitch changed. Bob was making the last hairpin turns, climbing the switchback to the ridge. Anna repositioned her fingers beneath the branch and pushed her butt against the offshoot running up her back.

  There was a final burst of horsepower and the snowmobile came into view. Bob hunkered over the handlebars, thick shoulders rounded down, face raw with cold and wind. He was still bareheaded.

  His ears will be frozen off, Anna thought with grim satisfaction. Win or lose, Bob would have something to remember her by every time he looked in the mirror.

  He reached the short, steep climb before the trail opened onto the basalt shelf.

  The snowmobile ate up the last ten feet with startling speed. Every cell in her body screaming in protest, Anna threw herself back against the upright branch, simultaneously pulling on the one between her knees. Her back slammed against the limb. She felt it give, her weight forcing it back. As she went over, she saw a line of gray bark rearing up from its lair in the snow, the butt caked in white, a shaky pole levered up over the trail.

  Her back struck the stone. The tree branch across the trail wrenched violently to the left. The limb jerked from her hand, tearing her glove half off. Her body hurled to the ground beside the rock. Torrents of hurt poured through her, and she wished she had state secrets that she might shout them from enemy rooftops, anything to stop the vicious knives inside her skin. Vision dimmed at the edges. She fought to stay conscious. To pass out now would be to waste all the trudging and weeping this sojourn into physics had cost.

  Like a turtle peeking out of its shell, she craned her neck and lifted her head.

  Idling unevenly, the riderless machine nosed into a copse of balsam firs munched by hungry moose till they were the size of bonsai trees. She couldn’t see Bob, but he had to be close by. Her wish was that he was dead or dying, but she’d used up the standard three just getting him to answer the phone, bring back the snowmobile and let himself get knocked off of it with a stick. Dead was too much to hope for. The lever had been long enough to take his head off, but she didn’t think she’d managed that. It might have caught him in the shoulder or the chest. If it hadn’t and had only fouled the skis of the snowmobile enough to dump him, he was probably unhurt.

  In which case, Anna was dead.

  “Not dead. I’m rising, rising, rising,” she whispered to herself, and she pushed up with one arm till she was on hand and knees. The repetition of words swam through her brain with Ellen DeGeneres’s voice and the face of the blue fish she brought to life in Finding Nemo. Comforted by the nonsense, Anna kept on. Standing didn’t strike her as possible at the moment. Leaning back, she lifted the broken ankle and stacked it on top of the other, toes down. “Ouching, ouching, ouching!” she whispered as she settled the splinted boot across the back of the other. Feet crossed, a travois of bone and sinew, she dragged the bad foot along behind as she inched forward one knee at a time, one hand for balance. “Creeping, creeping. I’m creeping creeping, creeping.”

  The changing mantra in the spirit of a gay blue fish kept her moving. The snowmobile was less than four yards from where the limb had swept her off her rock. Four
yards wasn’t a great distance. One hundred forty-four inches was. When she had reached “Whining, whining, whining,” and was less than a body length from the Holy Grail of vinyl, plastic and horsepower, she saw Bob Menechinn.

  He was on his side across a downed trunk a foot in diameter. Legs and butt were on the side away from Anna – a small blessing but worth counting – one arm was outstretched and his head was pillowed on it as if, as he’d lifted a foot over the log, he’d fallen asleep midstep. The down of his parka was ripped out in a puff of white that Anna first mistook for snow. The branch had caught him in the shoulder. The down was tinged with red; not as much as she would have liked but enough to indicate damage. Bob had been thrown off as she had been thrown from her rock. His body spun in the air, and he landed with his head pointed toward the Bearcat.

  Anna dearly hoped this meant he suffered great injuries. Good sense and personal preference dictated she crawl over and bash in his skull with a hard object while he was safely unconscious. Unfortunately her injuries would not allow her the additional fifty feet that dictate would require.

  Menechinn groaned. Or maybe it was Anna who groaned. She didn’t wait to figure it out. “Moving, moving, moving,” she whispered and dragged herself the last three feet to the idling snowmobile. The seat was no higher than her sternum when she raised herself onto her knees, but it seemed an impossible distance and for a moment she knelt before it as if in prayer, her mind in confusion. In order to travel, she’d stacked her useless limbs in a pretzel-like configuration, and the logistics of getting herself into the saddle baffled her. She began at the bottom, lifting the broken foot from the opposing ankle, then pulling her knee up. Using the seat for leverage, she managed a standing position, turned and sat on the snowmobile. Another few precious seconds were taken straddling the Bearcat, feet on the running boards, hand on the throttle. The only way to go was forward. She needed the open space on the rocky outcropping to turn around.

  Gingerly she eased the throttle open. The engine revved, but the machine didn’t move. She rotated it farther back; the skis broke loose and the snowmobile lurched, nearly unseating her. Then she was on the flat and moving slowly. Bob still lay across the downed trunk, his bare head on the snow.

  Maybe he was dead. The thought cheered her as she maneuvered the heavy Bearcat in an awkward circle on the cliff top. A chore that was a moment’s work to the able-bodied took Anna a painful forever.

  By the time she got herself pointed back in the right direction, Bob Menechinn was standing at the head of the Greenstone.

  The side of his face was a mask of blood and snow. His arms hung at his sides, the huge hands clublike. His eyes were almost lost in the flesh of his face, but the heat and hatred in them bored through the masking beef until they took up most of the space in the world. Moving with the creaking strength of rusted iron, he staggered into the middle of the trail.

  Anna had neither the time nor the inclination for negotiating. She opened full throttle and, bent over the handlebars, engine and woman screaming, the snowmobile leapt forward. Banshees of flesh and metal, they shrieked toward Menechinn. The nose of the Bearcat struck him. With a crunch Anna hoped was bone, he fell. The Bearcat’s skis jerked over his leg, jolting the snowmobile. Agony smashed into Anna’s brain, and she clenched her hand on the throttle to stay upright. The Bearcat bucked free of the obstacle and stalled.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Anna muttered in language no self-respecting Disney fish would use and pawed at the key with gloved and frozen fingers. An animal roar rose from Menechinn. In the tiny rearview mirror, Anna saw the hulk of him rising. Biting the ends of the glove’s fingers, she ripped it off and turned the key. The engine came to life and she blessed Arctic Cat.

  Then she was moving. The Greenstone took her. She was going to make it.

  Without warning, the Bearcat slued to the left, the engine crying like a dying calf, as Bob grabbed onto the back, his weight forcing it to the left into the trees. Anna jerked the handlebars wildly, fishtailing down the steep incline, a moose – a dying moose – trying to bash the wolf from its flanks. The Bearcat sideswiped a tree. Gripping with her knees, as if riding an unbroken horse, she yanked the handlebars the other way and veered across the trail, gaining speed on the downhill run, and banged the other side into a chunk of rock. Bob let out a guttural shriek, and the snowmobile surged ahead, crazy with speed and freedom, hurtling down the narrow trail.

  Vision blurred. Black trunks snapped at her face, white strobed till she couldn’t tell where movement left off and hysteria began. Her injured arm fell from where she’d zipped it in a makeshift sling in the front of her parka and the dislocated shoulder tore at the muscles. She started screaming – or kept screaming – her noise melded with that of the laboring engine.

  The trail switched back on itself in a hairpin turn, and Anna cranked the handlebars as far as she could. The Bearcat raised up on two skis, the nose fighting for purchase as it was jackknifed to the right. With a slam that brought the black of the trees and the glare of the snow into the tiny pinpoint of an old television going off the air for the night, the snowmobile righted itself. Anna forced her frozen fingers to back off the throttle.

  The snowmobile slowed.

  Then it stopped. For a long moment, Anna sat on the cooling machine, trying to find the energy to peel her bare hand from the throttle and turn the key. With the cessation of the cries of flesh and blood and the roaring of metal and fuel explosions, the silence was eerie, ringing. Anna listened to the echo of quiet fading into the inexorable softness of falling snow. True silence whispered in where the ringing had been. She drew it into her mind and into her lungs, let it touch the ruined parts of her body. The pain didn’t lessen with the kiss of the quiet, but she ceased to mind as much.

  She didn’t want to move. Ever. Had she not been in love with Paul, she might not have bothered turning the ignition key.

  Except to the Catholic God, it wouldn’t have mattered either way.

  The snowmobile was out of gas.

  34

  Anna did not get off the Bearcat. It would be no warmer, no more comfortable, lying in the middle of the trail, and she knew that was as far as she would get. She dug for the cell phone but it was gone, fallen from her pocket somewhere between being knocked from one rock and scraping Bob off with another.

  No last, last, really last calls for the six o’clock news. No telling dispatch that if Ridley didn’t answer his fucking radio, he should be shot on sight.

  Bob might be dead, might be too injured to walk or he might be coming after her. Mayhem paraded through her mind: making a Molotov cocktail with her water bottle and the gasoline from the fuel tank, tipping the Cat over and using it as a bulwark for throwing rocks – or snowballs – peeling the decorative chrome-colored stripping from the chassis and planting the sharp metal strips beneath the snow.

  As the engine cooled and she listened to the pings and clicks of metal assuming new shapes, her brain cooled with it. Thoughts of attack turned to thoughts of retreat, of crawling to a snowbank, sweeping her drag tracks out with a branch and burrowing deep into a personal igloo, of working the skis free of the snowmobile and fashioning a sled that would carry her downhill.

  She listened past the pings, listened up the hill through the fog of snow. Bob wasn’t moving. Had he been, she would have heard him. He had no stealth, only strength.

  Cold, a living thing, a being as bodiless as gas, as all-pervasive as air, as cunning at finding every crevice and pore as water, insinuated itself past the fur around her hood, trickling beneath her sweat-drenched hair, then filtered through her fleece collar to slip an icy hand around her neck. Squirming like rats, it squeezed into her pockets and under the cuffs of the parka, up the legs of her ski pants and down into her boots. Winter’s teeth gnawed on the flesh of her feet and tore at her chin and nose.

  To take her mind off her troubles, she imagined the rats chewing up Bob Menechinn. Then she imagined the rats dead from consuming the p
oisons in his psyche.

  After a while, the teeth weren’t teeth anymore, the rats weren’t rats. Winter had gone soft, touching her with kittens’ paws, claws sheathed. A hearth fire started in her stomach and warmth radiated out as the soft pad of winter crept inward. Freezing to death was supposed to be a very nice way to die. But, then, she’d heard that about drowning and that had been a bust.

  Not the drowning itself, she thought, mildly surprised that she could think philosophical thoughts while seated on a snowmobile. It was the not drowning that was so miserable, the choking and vomiting and scraping and coughing. Still, that first suck of water into the lungs had to be hard. Certainly the last few seconds before the first suck would be tough. There’d be that impulse to fight, to not breathe in.

  Freezing to death had it all over drowning. Winter didn’t want you to fight; she wanted you to curl down snug and warm in her bosom and die.

  What a bitch, Anna thought. I’d rather drown.

  Moving so slowly molasses would have beaten her in an uphill heat, she pulled up the leg Menechinn had attacked with the wrench and dragged it to the downhill side of the Cat. The key was still in the ignition. Having the sled stolen wasn’t one of her worst fears. She tried to pull it out, but her frozen fingers couldn’t execute the complex movements required. She cannibalized her right hand for its gear and put the glove clumsily backward on the five Popsicles she had, until the race downhill, considered her “good” hand. With the still-mobile fingers of her right hand, she teased the key out and managed to thread it into the lock between her knees below the seat. Maneuvering till she got her butt off the vinyl, she turned the key and the seat popped up. In the small storage space beneath was a plastic tarp, two flares, an old first-aid kit, the kind she used to carry in her backpack, and an army blanket.