Winter Study

It was a satellite phone. Katherine did have cell service. If she had it, Bob had it. Bob had been anxious to retrieve this phone. He’d said he’d have to replace it out of his own pocket if it wasn’t found. At the time, A

Why wouldn’t he want anyone to know that? Afraid they’d all make pests of themselves asking to borrow it? It wasn’t as if they didn’t know why he was on the island. A

Without thinking why, she did it; A

A loon. The call of a loon in January.

The night Katherine had gone missing, A

A

Maybe he’d slept through that one too. There was no way A

For a moment, A

If he knew she was in trouble, why wouldn’t he have said so, led the rescue effort? When there was no physical danger to himself, Bob liked playing the white knight. If he didn’t know, why wouldn’t he have shared the message after the fact? Afraid they’d think he’d dropped the ball? Or was the message so vitriolic or damning, he didn’t want them to hear it?

Reflexively, A

Not being a devotee of the cell, A

Katherine had not taken any snapshots of the wolves. Being crippled, then eaten, was evidently sufficiently entertaining that there was no need to record it. A

“Ish.”

The phone also received photographs. The pictures Katherine had taken were of the same ski vacation as the photographs on the laptop, just different shots and poses. The photographs that had been sent to her had been unopened till A

There were five of them, but A

Katherine, nude, had been arranged on a bed. Her legs were splayed toward the camera. In the first photograph, there was a cucumber in her vagina and a carrot inserted in her rectum. The second picture changed only the objects used to rape her: a baseball bat and a green wine bottle. In the third, the photographer had gone to the effort of propping her head up and arranging her hands so she looked as if she had inserted the baseball bat herself.

“Jesus!” A

The fourth shot was a crooked close-up of her face with a man’s erect penis shoved in her mouth. Her head was back, eyes closed and jaw slack. In the last shot, the baseball bat had been replaced by a man’s fist pushed in up to the forearm. The man’s face was not shown.

Katherine’s was, every time.

“God damn!” A

Yet A

She opened the phone and pushed ten numbers in rapid succession. A ring, and two, three. It was very late or very early. Sane people in real places slept at this time of the night. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”

“Yes?”

“Paul,” A

28

Ketamine stayed in the blood a relatively long time, as far as testing was concerned. Robin’s blood would show traces of the drug for seven to fourteen days. One of those days was gone, and A

Skipping breakfast, she went, yet again, to the Visitors Center. The door was still unlocked. She wished there was a way to make sure it stayed that way while she was inside, but there wasn’t. Indoors, it was so cold she couldn’t see her breath. Frigid, superdry air would not fog.

The vials of blood – Robin’s and the wolf’s – were in her coat pocket. Though the man blackmailing Katherine had been careful to keep his face out of the pictures, A

Bob – and A

He intended to do the same thing to Robin. Robin wasn’t drunk; she was drugged. When A

Anger was racking up A