Winter Study by Nevada Barr Page B

the nose and the delicately squared chin, the eyebrows, soft brown
and perfectly shaped where they showed above her glasses. A flush
touched her cheeks. Not the raw pink the wind scoured up or the dull
brick of her blushes but a fresh rose hue.
“You’re
in love with the wolves,” Anna blurted half accusingly. She suffered a
totally illogical stab of jealousy, as if she alone had the privilege
of intimate connection with wild things.
Katherine
looked up shyly. A strand of hair escaped from her hood and curved
around the swell of her cheek. “I saw one when I was little — three or
four,” she said. “We had a cabin on a lake just north of the Boundary
Waters.” She laughed. It was the first time Anna had heard it. “You
know Minnesotans, they can live on Lake Superior, but they still have
to have a ‘cabin on the lake’ somewhere.
“We
were there one winter, and Momma bundled me out to play.” Katherine
rocked back till she sat on her heels like an Arab, arms clasped around
her knees, and looked through Anna. “The snow was a couple feet deep,
but I was so light I could walk on top of it. I felt like I was flying,
swooping along above the ground. Then there was this wolf.” She laughed
again. It wasn’t musical but a series of puffs blown out through her
nose with the barest of sound, as if she’d learned to laugh in a
library with a bat-eared librarian.
“He
was doing the same thing. Flying. That’s what I thought then. He was
taller than me and couldn’t have been more than ten feet away. We just
stared at each other for a long time. His ears twitched and he blinked.
I blinked and tried to make my ears twitch under my hood. Then he
turned and walked toward the woods. At the edge of the trees, he looked
back over his shoulder, and I started to cry.” She sounded wistful
enough to cry these many years later.
“I thought he was asking me to go with him and I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” Anna asked, caught up in the story.
Katherine smiled and went back to her scat gathering. “Momma told me not to leave the yard.”
Anna
shifted from foot to foot. Her toes were getting numb. “No wolves in
D.C. At least not the kind that will refrain from devouring children,”
she said. Bob was a professor at American University in Bethesda, where
Katherine worked on her doctorate.
Wistful
beauty burned away in a flash, and, for a second, Anna thought
Katherine was going to wrinkle back her upper lip and growl. Whatever
soured the young woman nearly to the point of spitting might have been
sufficiently interesting to take Anna’s mind off freezing to death for
another few minutes, but they were interrupted by the squeaky
munch-munch-munch
of boots on frozen snow announcing Bob’s return. Katherine’s face went blank, her eyes back to her collecting and packaging.
Menechinn
emerged from the trees. “Better get Ridley,” he said without preamble.
“Looks like Stephen King is doing a wilderness version of
Pet Sematary
up here.”
“What have you got?” Anna asked.
“Let’s
wait for Ridley,” Bob said and planted his feet as if the sheer force
of his will would draw the lead researcher across the ice. Menechinn
was either in shock or suffering an attack of melodrama.
“Would you like me to radio Ridley?” she asked politely.
When he answered the call, Ridley echoed Anna almost word for word: “What’s he got?”
Anna looked at Bob.
“It’s not far in,” Menechinn said.
“It’s
not far in,” Anna repeated into the mike. She could hear Ridley sigh
all the way from the well and wasn’t sure it was over the radio.
“I’ll be there when we’re finished.”
Anna
put the radio back in her parka; with mittens, it was more a process of
shoving and squashing than pocketing. For a half a minute, she stood
with Bob, cooling heels already numb from so long on the ice. Katherine
kept her head down, staying busy with her collecting.
Finally
Anna headed off toward the woods where Bob’s tracks tore up the