Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  Anna wished she’d changed the subject before he’d gotten to the “fat fuck” part. Choking on the insult, his throat puffed the way a frog’s will before it sings. In a second, he would realize he’d told Anna about it and thus been twice shamed.

  “Not literally,” Anna said, drenching her voice with scorn. “Figuratively. Literally you hung up on her. Literally you did nothing. Literally you showed what a spineless, pathetic excuse for a man you are.” The impromptu cowl fell from her shoulders, sliding down to pool behind her and in her lap. She made no attempt to stop it or retrieve it this time. “You don’t rape women. That’s way too scary for little Bobby, isn’t it? You rape unconscious women. Whole different thing, Bobsie. Whole different thing.”

  Anna was finding it extraordinarily easy to go off on Menechinn. She didn’t have to waste a moment’s time thinking up horrible words to say, words she hoped would cut all the deeper for being true. Bob’s face shook minutely, the way she’d seen it do each time a woman had the unmitigated gall to awaken him from his happy coma of Bobness. The miniature tsunami made him look young for a brief second – very young; the face of a toddler the first time Mommy punches him or Daddy burns him with his cigarette – and, for an even shorter second, Anna felt pity for him.

  Not him, she told herself. That little boy.

  To Bob she said: “Since we’ve been doing business together, I’ve been meaning to tell you what a pompous ass you are, with your pouffed hair and oily smile. Women have to be drugged to keep from laughing in your face. And a hypocrite! Sheesh! It would be scary, if it wasn’t so obvious. Expert. Lord! You’re a whore, Menechinn, a prostitute; you screw whoever hands you a dollar. This time, Homeland Security; next time… well, anybody with a buck and a quarter. You’re not even a good whore. You can’t get it up personally or professionally. You’re a limp dick.

  “Your raping is like your killing: no balls in it. You rape women who are not there, and you’re not there when you kill. You don’t literally kill anybody, do you, Bobby boy? You literally do nothing. If you’re going to kill me, you many-chinned fat fuck, you’re going to have to do it personally, because, unless you do, I won’t die.

  “I. Won’t. Die.”

  That was her best shot. She had been as vicious and mean and ugly as it was possible to be without using a thesaurus. Smiling in what she hoped was a damning and disdainful manner, she settled the last of her strength in her wrists and waited.

  Through the curtain of spruce needles, she watched him, trying to read her future in his stance, the way his eyes seemed to grow larger as his face relaxed and the cheek flab melted in a grim facsimile of the melting of one of Madame Tussauds wax madmen.

  She realized she was seeing his eyes for the first time. Her revulsion and his grin-narrowed gaze had kept her out till now. His irises were dark, but the color was indistinct: blue or brown or hazel, or all three mixed together. He wasn’t more than five feet away, yet Anna couldn’t have reported the color with any more accuracy than that. They were the color of old water moccasins, the thick, unpretty snakes that took on the greenish brown shades of the muddy water of the Mississippi ditches where they thrived. Like the moccasin’s eyes, Menechinn’s had a flatness. In the snake, Anna knew it to be myopia and dullness of mind. In Menechinn, she wasn’t sure what it indicated but doubted it boded well for her continued good health.

  Time wasn’t in its petty-paced persona. It had ceased to be linear, and Anna watched Menechinn’s face for a moment, then an hour, then a heartbeat. She waited for the look of sly craftiness to take it the way it had before he’d gone into a berserker rage and stomped the life out of the National Park Service’s tarp. She waited for it to grow still and raw-beef red as it had when he’d walked over to slap her on the cliff top. She waited for the gleam of joy and triumph to come into his eyes as it had when he hefted the wrench to smash her ankle.

  She was growing old waiting and yet scarcely more than fifteen seconds passed before the waiting was over.

  Bob Menechinn’s face crumpled and tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes. They froze before they’d traveled halfway down his face. His jaws yawned wide, rows of teeth bleached too white by the dentist’s art appearing false in the black of his mouth. He ducked his head and brought his forearms up to hide his face like a child ashamed of its tears but too broken to keep them from falling. Maybe he had regressed to a childhood state, when he’d been abused. Maybe he’d had a psychotic break and thought Anna was his dead puppy, Spot or Toughie or whatever.

  A better person might have felt sorry for him, but, as far as Anna was concerned, whatever hell he was going through was way too good for him.

  Then he charged, head down, mucus and tears streaming, and he crashed through the ephemeral defenses of her spruce bower and was on her. Though she’d been watching, waiting for it, the onslaught took her by surprise. Not even slowed by the tree branches, he came down in an avalanche of snow and rage, in the reckless flying tackle of a high school football player too young to know how frail the human body is.

  Anna went over like a stone, Bob’s weight pinning her knees to her chest, her hands trapped between thighs and breasts. Air gusted from her lungs and she couldn’t get it back. Bob’s hands scrabbled at her head, trying to work under the layers to her throat to strangle her. Hot blood or snot or spittle hit her face. Moans and grunts, expelled on breath like sulfur, burned her nostrils. Like a trapped animal, Anna howled. Then she bit. Catching his nose between her teeth, she clamped down and hung on. Bob roared and thrashed, his fists pummeling her head. But for the hood, she would have been knocked senseless. Salty liquid filled her mouth, streamed down her throat, but she didn’t unlock her jaws. With a jerk, Bob freed himself. A chunk of his nose was still in her mouth. She spit it into his face. He reared back and her knees were free; her hands were free.

  The flares were still clutched in her fingers. Striking one against the other, she heard the hiss of red fire and pushed them up into Bob’s gut. The down of his coat took the flames, then he screamed high and wild as the fire cut into his body. Anna pushed them deeper. He rolled away, pawing at his middle. Then he was up and running. Crazed with the fire in his belly, he crashed into the trunk of a tree several yards away, then fell. Screams turned to cries and cries turned to silence. Finally the only sound was the hissing of the flares, ships’ flares designed to burn underwater, under blood and flesh.

  The smell of it sickened her. For a long time, she lay where she was, curled up like a sow bug, the taste of Bob Menechinn in her mouth and her mind. It was hard to remember why she lay like this, where she was and who she had killed. Presumably killed. Her eyes drifted closed and she began to fall. Through the rush of the canyon walls flashing by in her brain, she heard a growl. Bob had come to his feet, a human torch; he staggered toward her, arms outstretched, fire streaming from his hands.

  With a lurch that triggered the pain in her shoulder, Anna came awake. Bob was where he had fallen. She’d gone to sleep. If she fell asleep again, she would freeze to death. More out of the habit of surviving than a force of will, she bunched her legs under her and, using the tree trunk, climbed to her feet.

  Menechinn was dead. There’d be no last-minute rising from the jaws of death to make one last stand for the final scene. “Thankyoubabyjesus,” Anna muttered. He lay on his side, his hands hidden in the melted, blackened ruin of his coat where they’d clawed at the fire consuming his insides. The front and back of his parka were tarry messes of bodily fluids and goose down and synthetic fabric.

  For a while, Anna stayed, looking at the wreck that had been, at least nominally, human. The sight of the damage she’d done didn’t please or displease her. It had taken time and pain to hobble the few yards to where he’d finally collapsed, and she hadn’t the energy to move away. She spit and spit again, not from disrespect – once one killed a man, there was little point in lesser forms of malice – she wanted the taste of him out of her mouth.

  She also wanted h
is coat to keep herself warm, but hadn’t the strength to wrestle the garment off the body. Much of it would be melted to his skin. Its value wasn’t worth the calories it would take to harvest it. A story she’d read when she was a teenager flitted into her mind. To keep from freezing to death in a blizzard, a man had killed his horse, cut it open and crawled inside.

  “Gross!” she said. She left coat and corpse unmolested. His radio had been melted, the leather case burned away, the buttons a mass of plastic still hot to the touch. Anna made her way painfully back to the Bearcat. Beyond hurting or thinking or much caring, she rolled herself in the army blanket, then the blue plastic tarp, leaned back against the snowmobile and let the winter coalesce around her.

  36

  “I told you not to breathe into your sleeping bag.”

  Robin’s voice drifted into Anna’s cloudy brain and she smiled. Her face might not have moved, but, in her mind, she welcomed the young woman. It was good to have her company again.

  A soft warmth crept under the bundling around Anna’s throat, and she wondered if, unlike the depictions in literature and lore, Death did not have a cold and bony hand but one warm and open, a kind and relieving touch welcoming saints and sinners alike, taking away the pain of the suffering, the cravings of the addict, the sorrow of the bereft.

  “She’s not dead.” The warmth receded, and Anna knew she’d flunked the test. Her bell wasn’t tolling. Death had not come for her.

  A new blessing came in its stead. The warmth that touched so briefly at her throat spread over her face. “Anna, you’re not dead,” Robin’s voice told her. “Since you’re not dead, you have to wake up or you will be dead. Come on, wake up.”

  Anna opened her eyes. Robin’s hands were on her cheeks, her face only inches away, so close it was hard to bring into focus. “You’re not dead either?” Anna asked.

  “Just hungover,” Robin said.

  It took Anna’s cold brain a minute to put two thoughts together.

  “Ketamine.”

  “Yeah. Adam freaked. He was afraid what happened to his wife was going to happen to me. He got hold of Gavin and Gavin came and took me to Feldtmann tower.”

  “She only looks light,” said a voice. Robin’s face moved away, and Anna saw the speaker, a tall, slender, Byronesque man with the deep-set green eyes of a poet offset by the square jaw of a pugilist.

  “The wog,” Anna croaked.

  “I am the wog,” Gavin said and smiled, a sweet blink of teeth and good nature. “Robin and me and Adam.”

  “Adam’s dead,” Anna said. The words should have meant more to her than they did. By the shock she saw in the faces of Robin and Gavin, she knew she had told them a horrible truth. To her, it seemed so long ago, hundreds of years. One didn’t cry over history, didn’t break down when telling the third-grade class that George Washington was dead, Napoleon lost at Waterloo or Atlanta was put to the torch.

  “Bob Menechinn’s dead,” Anna said, to see if the news felt any different. “I killed him.”

  Robin and Gavin did not react with shock this time, just a minute freezing of the facial muscles. Robin put her deliciously warm hands back on Anna’s face. “You poor thing,” she said as Gavin said:

  “Did you kill Adam too?”

  Anna tried to remember all those thousands of years ago. “I don’t think so,” she said finally.

  “I killed Katherine,” Gavin said.

  “You did not!” Robin cried.

  “You thought I did.”

  Robin reached up a hand toward Gavin and he took it, his glove swallowing the slender fingers and palm.

  “Put your gloves on,” Anna said.

  “I’ll try Ridley again,” Robin said and rose to her feet. “Dispatch has been trying to raise him for half an hour,” she told Anna. “Gavin and I were out skiing. We called in as soon as we heard.”

  “Blew your cover,” Anna said. She was too fog-brained to count how many laws and park regulations the two of them had broken, but it was enough to land them in jail or the poorhouse if the judge levied the full penalties and fines.

  “You were in trouble,” Robin said simply.

  “Gloves,” Anna said so she wouldn’t cry and watched as the biotech obediently put her gloves back on before using the radio.

  Gavin squatted beside Anna. He was graceful, the towering length of him folding neatly, effortlessly. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “Dislocated shoulder and broken or badly bruised ankle,” Anna replied. Said succinctly, it didn’t sound all that bad, not like it should have. She decided she’d keep the limping and weeping and whining parts to herself. Why not? The witnesses were all dead.

  Gavin began a proficient physical check, starting with her pulse and body temp.

  “EMT?” Anna asked.

  He shook his head. “Eldest of seven,” he said.

  Robin interrupted: “Do you think you can survive a ride out on the Bearcat?”

  “Out of gas,” Anna said, and Robin went back to the radio.

  “Hot packs. Tell him we need hot packs,” Gavin said. As with Robin, his winter gear was worn and idiosyncratic. In place of a hood, he wore the same woolen tasseled hat Robin sported. They were probably the only two people in the world – other than the Lapps – who didn’t look silly with reindeer on their earflaps and pointy tufts on their heads. “Who is the president of the United States?” Gavin asked, to see if Anna was oriented in time and space.

  “The blue rucksack,” Anna said suddenly. The old canvas day pack they’d found shredded at the scene of Katherine’s death had bothered Anna. Like Anna, both Bob and Katherine had all-new gear. It was out of character for Katherine to carry a beat-up canvas bag. The affectation fit with Robin’s boyfriend. “It was yours. You had scent lure, didn’t you? To make the wolves go where you wanted them to.”

  “It was mine,” Gavin admitted. “I forgot I had the canisters of lure in it when I left it with Katherine. I only meant her to have food and water while she waited for help.”

  “‘HELP ME,’” Anna said. “On the window.”

  “Ski wax,” Gavin said. “It grows opaque as it cools.”

  Anna said nothing. If scribbling a magic message on the glass and vanishing into the night was his idea of rescue, he wasn’t worth accusing.

  Gavin read the thoughts she chose not to express in words. “Katherine said she’d phoned Bob and he was arranging the rescue. She promised to keep our secret. She wanted Bob to look the fool, be discredited. I didn’t think anyone was still at the bunkhouse. It seemed a good time to further the hoax,” he said.

  Anna closed her eyes so she needn’t see the misery on his face. She’d had sufficient misery to last at least a few days if she was careful and didn’t blow it all in one breakdown. Gavin’s confession exonerated the wolves. Covered in scent lure, bleeding, running, flopping about in true helpless-prey fashion, no self-respecting predator could have resisted Katherine. Not and held its head up at the next carnivore convention. The poet in Gavin would have him suffer the guilt of Katherine’s death. Had she more energy, Anna would have reassured him it was an accident, that Katherine had broken open the canisters in a fall or opened one not knowing what it was. Instead, she just sat with her eyes closed and listened to the crabbing of the radio as Robin clicked and talked and then, finally, Ridley Murray answered.

  Anna roused herself to shout: “Ask him why in the hell he wasn’t answering his radio!” That, at least, had been her intention. Instead, she heard herself whisper “Why didn’t he come?” in the voice of a little girl, the one Bob Menechinn said nobody cared about, nobody would rescue. That little girl embarrassed Anna and she hoped her whisper went unnoticed.

  “Ask Ridley what’s kept him,” Gavin said.

  Gavin heard Anna’s little-girl plea. Him, she didn’t mind so much. He had the same feel as Robin did, as if the two of them were not quite of this world, raised in bubbles, maybe, or from another dimension where good always won out, the cream rose t
o the top and the poor were not always with you.

  Undamaged, Anna thought and wondered how damaged she was.

  “Ridley and Jonah are just leaving Feldtmann. I’ll go back to Windigo and get gas. Enough to get you home,” Robin said to Anna.

  “I’ll go,” Gavin said.

  “I’m faster,” Robin said.

  To Anna, Gavin said: “She is. Like the wind.” He seemed proud of her, and Anna liked him for that too.

  “It’s too far,” Anna said, thinking of how far Robin had already come that day.

  Robin smiled. Ten miles on easy trails had probably not been “too far” since she was nine years old. “I won’t be long,” she said and pushed off with the sudden grace of a bird taking flight.

  “I’m guessing an hour or a little more. Downhill with no pack, she’ll make good time. Coming back with the gas can will take longer, but she doesn’t need to bring more than a gallon at the most. Eight pounds. That’s nothing for Robin,” Gavin said reassuringly.

  The blanket and tarp Anna had wrapped around herself for warmth were beginning to feel like a shroud and one that was shrinking noticeably. They had done their job, she was found alive, now she wanted out. “Unwrap me,” Anna said.

  Gavin looked alarmed, and she knew he was remembering the tales of finding people naked and dead of the cold. A rare but not too rare hypothermic reaction was to feel hot. In late stages, victims would sometimes take off their clothes and lie naked in the snow.

  “I’m okay,” Anna said. “No running naked for me. I’ve got to move. I’m getting crazy. Crazier. Can you reduce a dislocated shoulder?”

  “I’ve never done it,” Gavin admitted.

  “Me neither. I learned it in EMT training. It looked easy enough. Align the arm, pull, snick back into place. One… two… three.”

  “Two sounds like it would be pretty painful,” Gavin said.

  “We’ll numb the shoulder with ice first,” Anna said, then: “Oh, hey, that’s already taken care of.”