“It was your stepmom, son. She’s gone,” Les said, having recovered his voice. His pale blue eyes filled with tears that ran unnoticed over soft and sagging cheeks, catching in the stubble of two days’ growth of beard.
Light winked out of Rory’s eyes, apparently extinguished by his father’s tears. The emotions that followed passed beneath the distorted glass of civilization so quickly Anna was not sure she interpreted them correctly. It looked like a draft of disappointment with a disgust chaser.
Rory noticed Anna watching him and his face firmed. Another lesson in deceit learned. Next time the mask would have an added layer of opacity. If he grieved, it was deep inside. Openly ignoring the weeping Lester, Rory spoke to Harry Ruick.
“Do you know who killed her?”
“No,” Ruick said honestly. “We’re hoping the forensic evidence sent to the lab will give us a clue. Till that comes back we’re going to need to ask you and your dad a lot of questions, get to know everything we can about your stepmom. We might get a lead from that.”
Rory nodded, looking considerably older than his years. Perhaps because nature abhors a vacuum, Les had taken on the role of the child, at least outwardly, and snuffled into a crumpled handkerchief. “I feel so lost,” he said, and sounded it.
As they climbed
into the sedan, Les asked Rory to join him at the motel where he was staying but the boy declined, preferring the grubby, spartan NPS researchers’ dorm to greater comfort bought at the price of his father’s company.
Lester took the rebuff with resignation. This was not the first time his son had slammed a door in his face. Compassion hit Joan so hard she grimaced as though she’d sustained a punch to the stomach. Anna wondered if she was merely imagining the hurt or if her sons, Luke and John, had dealt such a blow themselves.
Rory’s adult façade was crumbling and Lester Van Slyke was frankly gray with exhaustion. Of necessity and not generosity, Ruick postponed the taking of statements and the interview process until the following afternoon.
Five of them squished into a sedan for twenty minutes, breathing each other’s fear, anger and sweat was pressing heavily on Anna. She rolled down her window, pushed her face into the onrush of air and closed her ears. Rory, sitting in the backseat between her and Joan, jostled her at every turn in the twisted mountain road. At each nudge Anna suffered the burn of childhood fury when
her
side of the backseat was encroached upon.
By the time they reached the employee housing area and Ruick pulled the car into Joan’s drive, Anna had her hand on the door handle. She pulled up on it before the car rolled to a full stop and got out with a harried sense of escaping. It was all she could do to remain in their company long enough to unload her pack from the trunk. Ruick was still throwing verbal instructions at her back as she headed toward the front door.
Once inside Joan made an incredibly generous offer. “Do you want to shower first?”
Anna managed a nod of bare civility before shutting herself into the blessed sanctity of the bath.
Neither Joan nor
Anna had the desire, much less the energy, to talk shop that night. Clad in her teddy-bear print, goin’-visitin’ pajamas, Anna lay on the couch watching whatever network was on, alternately blessing and cursing her hostess for being a teetotaler. Had there been alcohol in the house, given her present mental and physical condition, Anna would have dearly loved to imbibe. When the angels perched on her shoulder, she was grateful that temptation in the form of the cunning, baffling and powerful was not set before her. When demons in the form of rigorously edited memories of drug-induced bliss shrieked at her, she longed for that same temptation so she could give into it forthwith.
Joan chose to dull her brain not with television or booze but with her personal drug of choice: work. She sat surrounded by several days’ worth of bear incident management system reports and a pile of faxes, e-mails and 10-343 law enforcement reports that she had, in the addict’s age-old habit of stockpiling drugs, radioed ahead and asked her assistant to leave on her dining table.
“E-mail first,” Joan said as she opened her laptop. “Ah, three from my map boy wanting to know where the bears will seek food this week.”
“How do you know where they’ll be?” Anna said.
“I don’t. I just know where the food will be. What’s ripe. Like that.”
Anna left her to it.
She was amusing herself by cataloguing the gross errors committed by law enforcement on some cop show when Joan broke the long and peaceful silence.
“Four bear sightings since we’ve been in the high country,” she said.
“Mmmm.” Anna made a noise to excuse herself from being out-and-out rude but which she hoped would discourage any further intercourse.
“One’s pretty funny,” Joan said.
Anna refused to ask how so. Several seconds ticked by. She could almost feel Joan’s need to talk.
Joan cracked. “Seems this one was dancing.”
“Next they’ll be riding bicycles and lobbying for the vote,” Anna said.
Contact was made. Joan rubbed her eyes, her glasses riding up on the backs of her hands. “Do you think Rory’ll be okay?” she asked. “I mean he
seemed
okay. Way too okay if you ask me.”
“It’s quiet,
too
quiet . . . ,” Anna intoned.
“Yeah, like that. Didn’t it seem to you that he kind of went away inside himself when his dad and Harry flew out to ID the body? He had to know it was his stepmom. The rest of us figured it was.”
Anna thought of the water bottles and wondered if Rory had not merely thought it was Carolyn but known for a fact it was.
“He’ll be okay,” Anna said, then remembered it was Joan she was talking to. Not someone she wanted to blow off. She sat up, folded her legs under her tailor-fashion and muted the television.
“I don’t know,” she amended. She told Joan of Rory’s vagueness about what had transpired during the thirty-six hours he’d been missing, about her fears his cowardice in abandoning them to
Ursus horibilis
would permanently scar his psyche. She told Joan about Carolyn Van Slyke’s missing water bottle and Rory turning up out of the woods with a spare. The recitation done, Anna felt much relieved. She couldn’t say the same for Joan.
Owl-eyed behind the oversized spectacles, Joan studied her as if she was a scat specimen. “How do you walk around like a normal person with such creepy thoughts in your head?” she asked finally. “It must be like being Stephen King but without the money.”
“I guess,” Anna admitted, feeling guilty for casting her shadow side over Joan’s naturally sunny self. “I think good thoughts, too.” She was remembering Joan’s lecture on rainbows, roses and whiskers on kittens.
“Name one,” Joan challenged.
Anna drew a blank and Joan laughed her wonderful laugh, joy and appreciation of the absurdity of the human condition running up and down the musical scale. Relenting, she said. “I know you do. It was unfair to spring the question on you at this time of night.”
Anna accepted the reprieve but her failure bothered her and she finally came up with one: “Kittens. Not just the whiskers, the whole ball of wax.”
Again the laughter. When it had subsided, somberness reclaimed Joan, and Anna waited for the inevitable. It wasn’t long in coming.
“Do you think Rory did it?” Joan asked.
Anna wanted to say no for the sake of her friend but chose not to defraud her with a half-truth. “I don’t see how he could have,” she said instead. That, at least, was honest.
They were saved from wandering too far down that darkling road by a knock on the door.
“I’ll get it,” Anna said as Joan yelled, “Come in.” Both, it seemed, welcomed the distraction.
Ron, the bear-team guy who’d given them a lift to the bottom of Flattop Trail four nights before, let himself in the front door. Those four nights had stretched into years in Anna’s mind and she didn’t remember Ron’s name till Joan called out a greeting.
Big and bearish himself, Ron was well-suited to his profession. Descended from some sturdy sun-drenched people, he was of middling height with thick black hair, a glossy close-cut black beard and rambunctious black chest hair that sprang out of the vee of his uniform shirt.
“Joan has all the fun,” he said seriously as he flopped his two hundred pounds into an aging Barcalounger with childlike disregard for the load limits of its infrastructure. “Then I was off when the search team was called out so I didn’t even get in on that.
“Let’s see. What did you guys miss down here at Adventure Central? Tom up at Polebridge ranger station”—Ron named the station on the northwest boundary of the park—“got to tow a gutted horse trailer from where it’d been illegally parked. Lord knows what they were hauling. The drug dogs didn’t like it much but didn’t hit on anything.
“On the east side Alicia had a lady she thought had symptoms of a heart attack—shortness of breath, bad color—and had her taken out by helicopter. Turns out the lady wasn’t having a coronary. She was eighty-three years old and tired. Poor old gal will keel over when she gets the bill.
“And while you guys were out finding bodies, right here in the megalopolis of West Glacier, crime capital of the world, yours truly was called on to risk life and honor shooing a chipmunk out of some lady from Virginia’s tent.”
More laughter from Joan; too much for the nominally amusing chipmunk incident. Joan laughed a lot. It was how she let the pressures that built up inside her skull escape since her innate kindness and empathy forbade darker, more violent expressions. Anna was coming to know the nuances of her laughter. This was sharp with the relief a change of subject provided.
The change was short-lived.
“Tell me everything,” Ron said. “I’m on till midnight so take your time.”
Trading the conversation back and forth effortlessly Anna and Joan wove a picture of their four days in the high country. Joan’s instincts were excellent and neither she nor Anna shared anything about the water bottles, the precise location of the body, the contents of the pack that had been found or any other detail Ruick might wish kept secret for investigative purposes.
“Wow,” Ron said when they’d finished. “Could be anybody. But why would anybody do it?”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” Anna said.
Dead ends summarily reached, the conversation limped on for a while, Ron dragging his visit out as long as he could. The four-to-midnight shift could be deadly dull. Anna and Joan managed to yawn him out the door a little past ten. Shortly after that they both headed for the unparalleled luxury of a mattress covered with clean sheets and dry blankets, and under a roof.
At eight a.m.
both women were in a conference room down the hall from Harry Ruick’s office. Anna was filling out a statement encapsulating what she had experienced and observed regarding Carolyn Van Slyke’s murder. Joan was filling out reports on the bear attack on their camp and her involvement with the search for Rory. Joan could easily—probably more easily—have done her work in the relative comfort of her own office. The resource management building was an older structure with fewer conveniences but had loads more personality than the bricks of headquarters.
She’d come with Anna to keep her company, she said. Anna suspected she also wanted to pick up any new information there might be about Rory’s involvement, or lack thereof, in his stepmother’s death. Ruick had no news on that score but, good as her intentions, Joan stayed with Anna till they’d finished and Anna left to meet with Ruick.
The chief ranger’s office was several doors down on the right. His window opened onto an uninspiring view of the back parking lot.
As in Joan’s house, Anna felt at home. The walls held cheaply framed posters of parks Harry’d worked and photographs of him, younger and thinner, grinning from the tops of mountains with like-minded men wearing fleece and wool and wind-chilled smiles. The tops of the ubiquitous metal filing cabinets held marksmanship trophies and strange pieces of rock and bone.
Ruick was behind a gray metal desk working through the pile of papers that had accumulated in his In box during his excursion to the field. His door was open. Anna tapped on the doorframe.
“Come in,” he said as he glanced up to see who it was. When he noted it was her he stopped what he was doing and gave her his undivided attention. Since getting the full bore of his administrative persona was rare, Anna was flattered and mildly alarmed. She took her place in the armless metal visitor’s chair and waited to be enlightened.
“I’ve got a little problem I’m hoping you can help me out with. I’m short-handed at the moment. As you know, two of my district rangers and four other law enforcement rangers are out in California on the Miranda fire.”
Anna’d been out of the loop for a while and hadn’t heard of this particular conflagration but was unsurprised. Great swaths of California burned most Augusts. High desert and dry, forest fires burned fast and hot and too often near heavily populated areas.
Ruick was looking at her. Dutifully she said yes to whatever it was he was expecting her to agree with.
“Thing is the fire was contained, burning itself out. The crew the Glacier rangers were on was to be demobed. I expected them today or tomorrow at the latest. Yesterday, while I was on Flattop with the Van Slyke thing, Miranda blew up, jumped the lines and took in another eighty-five hundred acres.” There was just a hint of self-condemnation in his tone that led Anna to suspect Ruick felt Miranda wouldn’t have dared misbehave so grossly had his attention not been taken up elsewhere.
“Looks like they’ll be out another week or ten days. The FBI hasn’t got any interest in this murder-in-the-outback kind of thing when it’s got no drugs or gun overtones. We’ll keep it single jurisdiction. The long and short of it is, I’d like you to work with me on this. Sort of Girl Friday.”