As she walked behind them it occurred to her that Rory had not asked if his parents were worried. Harry had told him up front that somebody had been sent to tell them he’d been found. Even so, it seemed peculiar. Had Anna been missing in the wilderness for thirty-six hours at his age, one of her chief concerns would have been how much hot water she was going to be in when she got home and her parents’ intense relief had time to transform into anger the way it invariably did.
Fifty Mountain Camp
was on the northernmost edge of the old burn scar. Trees were charred snags and tents were pitched on black soil. Forty yards further on, the fire had finally exhausted itself. Beyond were green rolling hills, meadows painted with wildflowers. Rich as velvet, the meadows lay between stones the size of houses and cars that had tumbled down from the ridge; a strange Stonehenge rolling away seemingly to the edge of the world.
Fifty Mountain had five sites, all of them full. Orange, blue and green bubbles of tents poked up between the coal black spires like poisonous toadstools. Backpacks leaned against stumps, and the inevitable laundry of backpackers, socks and old towels, hung limply from spindly branches.
As part of its bear management plan, Glacier’s campgrounds were laid out differently from those in other national parks. A single area was set away from the tents and designated for cooking and consuming food. It served two purposes: to confine the excessive foot traffic food areas invariably suffered and to keep this most bear-attractive of activities separate from where the campers slept.
At Fifty Mountain the cooking area was between a creek winding a life of green and silver through the burn and the developed tent sites further up a gentle slope toward the edge of the fire scar.
Hiking up from the creek, Anna thought it looked as if a town meeting was being held in the food preparation area. The rough log benches were filled with behinds and half a dozen people stood around talking in low voices. Anna recognized Joan, Gary and Vic. With them was a tall, ruddy blond with the stringy good looks of a man who spends his days walking. He wore an NPS summer uniform, shorts, no gun. Anna guessed this was Buck, the backcountry ranger Harry’d called on to carry the bad news and then the good to Rory’s parents.
The group spotted them, there was a moment of frozen tableau as new information was processed, then Joan shouted, “Back from the dead. That’s my boy,” and things began to happen.
A nondescript man, slightly stooped, wisps of thinning hair lifting in the breeze, stood, shaded his eyes, then smiled. The smile, accompanied by that illumination from within, identified him to Anna: Les, Rory’s father. Joy made their faces alike. Les took a couple of steps around the edge of the log then the joy-light died. The dislike he’d seen in his son’s face doused it. Anna watched Lester Van Slyke as she traversed the last few yards up from the creek. Rory, already being absorbed by the amoeba of people, had said only a couple of words to him before being enclosed by the crowd.
Les was left on the outskirts. Twice he sort of pushed himself up straighter, raised his chin and peered over shoulders as if steeling himself to the task of breaking through the ranks to his child. Hopelessness or cowardice stopped him both times. Finally he turned and busied himself with a day pack on one of the benches. Anna knew what he was doing. He was engaged in the occupation of being occupied, proving he had things to do, places to go, people to meet. Fooling himself or hoping to fool others into thinking that he hadn’t been shut out. Or if he had, was too busy to notice the slight. Carolyn Van Slyke, the stepmother, Anna didn’t see. Odds were good she was at the nucleus of the amoeba with Rory.
Though disinclined to like Lester Van Slyke for the simple reason that his son didn’t, Anna nevertheless felt pity for him. “You must be Rory’s father,” she said and stuck out her hand. Les very nearly flinched, then recovered himself and shook hands with her. His fingers were soft and warm, his grip almost nonexistent. It was like shaking hands with a cat’s tail or a draft from the furnace.
“I bet you’re glad to get your boy back,” Anna said, just to be saying something. Les acted a bit foggy, as if he had trouble thinking. He looked from Anna to the wall of backs to the pack he’d been fiddling with. His face was remarkably unguarded for a man his age, around sixty. Anna could almost read the choices being sorted. Continuing with the pack was rejected; trying to pry into the inner circle to present Anna was abandoned.
At length he got himself squared away. The fog lifted and Anna was treated to another one of those Van Slyke boy smiles. “Glad’s not the half of it,” he said. “I have been out of my mind with worry. Anything could happen to a boy out here. Just anything. You name it. And helpless? My! I wanted to go with the searchers but I guess I’ve let myself get out of shape some and . . . well . . .” He drifted off apologetically, spreading his arms in a half-shrug to show her his concave chest and rounded potbelly.
He was out of shape. Had Anna been in Buck’s place she would have kept Mr. Van Slyke close to camp as well. He carried twenty extra pounds, all of it in the gut. The muscle tone in his arms was nil and his legs were white and spindly above the tops of brand-new hiking boots. Obviously not a seasoned backwoodsman. His forearms were grayish with old bruising and there were marks on the few inches of thigh Anna could see below his hiking shorts. Some old and a couple fresh and angry looking. She wondered if he had one of those skin or circulation disorders where the slightest bump will leave a bruise for weeks.
“Then there was the thing with Carolyn,” he finished.
Anna wriggled out of her day pack, sat down by the one he’d been rummaging through and began unlacing her boots. They were old and, given they were great heavy lug-soled boots, comfortable enough, but her feet yearned for cool air and her toes for unfettered freedom.
“His stepmom pretty anxious?” she asked to be polite.
“I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure she would have been. Didn’t they tell you? Carolyn’s been gone since yesterday morning.”
That got Anna’s attention. She looked up from her bootlaces. “Gone?”
“I woke up and she’d gone. She does that. I didn’t think anything of it, but she hasn’t come back yet.”
An emotion flickered behind Mr. Van Slyke’s pale clear eyes. It looked like relief for an instant then was clouded over with concern. A faint line, an old cleanly healed scar, traced white across his brow and down the side of his nose as his face muscles tensed.
“Usually she’s not gone so long. Not overnight. At least not in a place like this. I mean, where would she go?”
“Have you reported it?” Anna asked cautiously.
“This noon when she still wasn’t back, I got worried. I told that young fellow, that ranger, when he came with the news you found Rory. I kind of thought maybe she was with you guys.”
“Not with us,” Anna said, then realized that might not be strictly true. She replaced her boot. She needed to talk to Harry Ruick.
7
Anna crept off
to be alone. It seemed like months since she’d been free of human chatter, the pressure of words on her brain, eyes on her skin. Even in times of no trauma she felt the need to escape, to decompress after a day in the society of her fellows. Distracted as she’d been by the many threads of human drama woven over the summit of Flattop, she’d not noticed how heavy the strands had become till she’d crawled out from under them.
Now, safe in a secluded crook of the creek’s wandering arm, boulders as high as a horse’s withers forming haphazard fortress walls between her and the squalid hubbub of Fifty Mountain Camp, she found herself imbibing huge drafts of air, sucking and sighing like a woman too long underwater. Hyperventilation brought tears. Not healing tears that flow freely and wash away grief, but the niggardly hot tears that merely sting the corners of the eyes. Peevish, self-willed tears for her own weariness and because the woman’s butchered face still clung to the back of her retinas. Perhaps if she’d cried for others, the tears would have been more generous.
Joan had cried when Rory came back from the gastrointestinal tract of the bear unchewed and unclawed. Cried for joy from her warm mother’s heart. Anna envied that in some unidentifiable way, envied Joan’s deep connection with the human race. She was a member of the club. Anna was half convinced she’d been begotten by a passing alien life-form on a human woman. It was as good an explanation as any for the sense she had of being an outsider.
“I need my head examined,” she muttered and wished she could call Molly. Instead, she forced herself to sit up, to rinse the self-pity from her face with the icy milk flowing down from the glaciers. Face free of dust, mind loosed from self-involved thoughts, she lay back again on the stone, felt the sun on her skin and began to draw strength from the earth. But for the quiet laughter of the stream, the high country was wrapped in its peculiar silence. Birds did not twitter. Squirrels did not scuffle. Even the insects did not hum.
Into this bone-deep peace, images—scenes that had made little or no sense at the time—began to resurface.
After Anna had told the chief ranger of the disappearance of Lester Van Slyke’s wife, Harry took him and his son away from the others. Rory was old enough he, too, was to be burdened with the news that the body they found was very probably that of his missing stepmother. To her relief, Anna had not been asked to participate in this interaction. Fifteen feet away, leaning comfortably against a snag, she watched the three men with interest. Ruick had his back to her but she could see Rory and his father clearly.
Over the years Anna had broken enough bad news to park visitors that she knew the stages of acceptance. Predictable as sunrise, she saw them flow across Les and Rory’s faces. First was blank stupidity, the brain refusing to understand, then the dawning of fear as a tide of it rushed in from the darkest oceans of the mind. Third was either disintegration or coping. Both Rory and Les coped, but before the fear had been stemmed by courage—or hope—there came a moment that didn’t fit the pattern.
Shock had momentarily rendered their faces free of artifice, and the look they exchanged had been naked emotion. What emotion, was the question that troubled Anna. She could make a few assumptions as to what it was not. But she had to take them separately, father and son, because though the look had come from both at the same instant, there was no conspiracy in it and no empathy, merely two different unmasked thoughts broadcast simultaneously.
Les had not turned to his son with love or with concern. Near as she could tell, he had not been seeking to give or receive comfort. The closest she could get to deciphering the sudden dark flash of energy she’d witnessed was a flare of horror turning to shame. The vision was fleeting, quickly reverting to the blank of denial. Then Les appeared, if possible, even more downtrodden and ineffectual than he had before.
Rory’s glance had been even more puzzling. Maybe anger. Maybe respect. Anna was just guessing. Reading faces was an art, not a science. Sometimes the muse was on one’s side. Sometimes she merely toyed with one.
Given that the first suspect in a murder case is invariably the spouse of the victim, Anna found the exchange noteworthy. It was hard to picture self-effacing Mr. Van Slyke creeping out of his tent in the dead of night—presuming the missus had been offed in the traditional dead of night—in his brand-spanking-new boots, following or luring his wife several miles from camp, then killing her and mutilating her face. Facial mutilation usually bespoke great rage, great hatred toward the victim in particular or, less often, the gender in general. Only close friends and near enemies cared enough to rip one’s face off. Lester Van Slyke didn’t seem capable of that kind of emotion, but looks were consistently deceiving.
In the midst of these ephemeral and possibly imaginary weirdnesses—Anna knew she was quite capable of seeing ne’er-do-wells where only solid citizens existed—was a very real anomaly. Lester Van Slyke’s wife had been missing in the wilderness between twenty-four and thirty-six hours before he bothered to report it. That in and of itself was highly irregular.
If she was right about the horror and shame on Lester’s face, could it be horror at what he’d done? Or horror at what he thought Rory might have done?
Rory. Anna let her mind float over the boy for a while. He was an enigma. People of his age were such cauldrons of emotion, hormones, burgeoning pride and inherited misinformation that assigning motives to their actions was nearly impossible. Half the time even they did not knew why they did a thing. From what little she knew of Rory, he was devoted to—or at least greatly admired—his stepmother. And he’d not gone out in the night intentionally; he’d fled half-dressed from the predations of a bear.
Half-dressed; something about that bothered Anna. She stretched in the sun like a lazy cat and opened her mind to pictures of Rory in dishabille.
The mysteriously missing shirt he avoided discussing was odd but not earthshaking. That was not the pea under Anna’s metaphorical mattresses that bruised her thoughts each time they turned over. The sweatpants, the slippers, the sunburn, the cut foot: these things were as they should be. Anna stopped making lists and merely let the chips of memory run movies in her head: Rory talking, sitting on his stump, laughing, drinking water.
Drinking water; he’d been drinking out of his fancy filter-it-anywhere, special-order, latest-gimmick-on-the-market water bottle.
Why would someone with diarrhea, rushing into the wood to relieve himself, bring along his water bottle? According to Rory, after the bear had come on the scene, such had been his haste to “go for help” that he’d pulled up his trousers and dashed off without slowing down enough even to take his flashlight.
The water bottle could indicate nothing. Rory might have been dehydrated and thought he’d be in the woods with his loose bowels long enough he’d need a drink. Reflex might have dictated he snatch up the bottle when he fled the bear. Or it could indicate that before he left his tent, he knew he had someplace to go a long enough hike away that he’d need to bring along water. With the grim bulk of suspicion squeezing out generous thought, it came to Anna that Rory might not have wished to discuss his missing shirt because he’d purposely left it behind, hidden it so no one would see that it was covered in blood.