Winter Study

“I think he’s an American citizen. He grew up in Canada, got married there and came to the States after his wife died.”

“That was the wife who killed herself?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Robin.”

Nothing showed but the tracks they had made and several moose trails leading into the trees.

“Adam doesn’t talk about it much. Evidently his wife had a miscarriage and went into a depression.”

“Was Adam investigated for the death?”

“Like for murdering his wife? What are you thinking?”

“Nothing. Everything. Yeah, for murder, I guess.”

“Probably. It’s always the husband first in a thing like that. Anyway, it is on TV. So he must have been investigated, but it didn’t amount to much. She’d left a note. She’d left a message on her therapist’s phone, apologizing. She made a video, begging Adam to forgive her.”

“‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’” A

“‘Rage, rage,’” Jonah said, startling her, then shaming her, with her own snobbery.

“We’re done here,” she said. Her knees cracked like rifle shots as she rose to her feet.

“Hah!” Jonah said. “Getting old is a bitch, isn’t it?”

Her shame subsided.

A

“You see that?” A

“Maybe the moose ate Robin.”

A

“She could have ridden it,” Jonah suggested. He didn’t seem to be too concerned either way.

“What do you know?” A

“Cut that out, Dick Tracy,” he complained.

“What?” A

“I don’t know anything,” he said after a moment. “But you’ve got to figure Robin didn’t go hop-hop-hopping away in her sleeping bag like a kid in a sack race. And there’s more ways to make moose tracks than to be a moose.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. Did you happen to notice if the wog prints were always accompanied by moose prints?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither. What do you want to bet?”

“I’m not a betting man.”

“Me neither.”

It was after midnight when A

26

Adam was asleep on the sofa, or appeared to be. Bob had long since retired to his room and Ridley and Jonah to theirs. Sleeping was usually something A

Tonight was a glaring exception.

Muscle and bone sank gratefully into the hard embrace of the mattress. Fatigue washed over her mind, warm and soporific. Then the delicious sense of drifting into oblivion morphed into sinking under the ice in Intermediate Lake, and she fought desperately back to wakefulness. The nightmare version was more terrifying than almost drowning had been. In the lake, there had been little time for anything but staying alive. In dreams, there was all the time in imagination.

For reasons probably relating more to her sleeping habits than her near-death experience, she was naked in the water. The crippling cold wasn’t a factor. Below her lay not the limitless new world she’d glimpsed at the time but the terrors children suffer in nightmares: being helpless and abandoned to a force so utterly evil, one never musters the courage to look at it; a force that would not have the mercy to grant the relief of death. Again and again A

It didn’t take too many repetitions of this nocturnal entertainment before she decided staying awake was a spiffy alternative.

She lay on her back in the dark and stared upward at a ceiling that she presumed was still there. In a lightless environment, the nothing above her eyes could have been two inches deep or gone on to infinity. The bedside lamp could restore the ceiling to its proper place; Jonah had left the generator ru

Bogus wolves, A

Not the species of legend that morphed from seersucker suits to snouts but man posing as a wolf, taking on the imagined properties of the wolf: stealth, strength, ruthlessness, viciousness, love of slaughter for its own sake. It didn’t take a trained psychiatrist to see the projection in that equation. Man gave the wolf all the dark bits of himself, then vilified the wolf.

Isle Royale’s wog might or might not exist. It was said DNA didn’t lie, but it had also been said pictures didn’t lie until computers put the lie to that. What lied was people and they lied all the time, and for every reason under the sun. People lied with words and pictures, and, if it were possible, they would lie with DNA. Katherine could have faked the results for a reason that died with her.

A

Cause of death wasn’t in question and death by misadventure didn’t have a why. It had a cause: wrong place, wrong time, bad decisions, faulty machinery. Why needed motive and only humans had motives.

A

The heart of the issue was, why Katherine died.

Katherine had died accidentally at the auspices of wolves.

There was no way A

Sensing herself headed in the same direction, she fumbled over the edges of the desk between the beds, found the light, switched it on and sat up, her sleeping bag tucked in her armpits. Reoriented in space, her mind back in her skull, she marshaled what she knew about Katherine.

Katherine met and fell in love with a wolf when she was three years old. Bob Menechi

In the tent, wog or wolf snorting around outside, Bob had gone nuts, shouting and waving his headlamp. Katherine said: “Be quiet. You’ll scare him away.” Remembering the look on Robin’s face when Katherine hadn’t gibbered with terror – Katherine had been concerned about the monster – A